Speaker 1: And now you get back to drinking. It's it's evening
Speaker 1: for me over here.
Speaker 2: And I wasn't gonna drink, but I did anyway, So
Speaker 2: I'm half in the bag.
Speaker 1: I'm not really half in the bag.
Speaker 3: But you should definitely always drink.
Speaker 4: Yes, ask not what your country can do for you,
Speaker 4: Ask what you can do for your country.
Speaker 1: Mister Gorbachhaw tear down this wall.
Speaker 5: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and
Speaker 5: Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lills. Today we're going to talk
Speaker 5: to urbanism with Joel Kotkin lets a podcast.
Speaker 6: I probably took a bullet to the head because of
Speaker 6: the things that they say about me. They talk about democracy.
Speaker 6: I'm a threat to democracy. They're the threat to democracy.
Speaker 6: Rather fake Russia Russia Russia investigation.
Speaker 1: That went nowhere. We have a lot to get to Lindsay.
Speaker 5: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricchet Podcast, number seven hundred and eight.
Speaker 5: And if you add seven and eight you get fifteen.
Speaker 5: If you divided fifty by the number of hosts here,
Speaker 5: you well know, if you take fifteen and you add
Speaker 5: the numbers to get six, you divide that by the
Speaker 5: number of hosts.
Speaker 1: Three come up with.
Speaker 5: Two who were the number of people who were on
Speaker 5: the stage and the debate which we're going to talk
Speaker 5: about with Charles E. W.
Speaker 1: Cook and Stephen Hayward And I'm James Lalyx. I met it.
Speaker 5: I'm sitting at a long conference table here and downtown Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: Steven's on a ship.
Speaker 5: Charles is Florida, which has not been yet sawed off
Speaker 5: by bugs Bunny left to float into the Caribbean. And Stephen,
Speaker 5: you're in. You're taking the Norway cruise. Have you been
Speaker 5: to Stoppinger yet and seeing the Herring Museum.
Speaker 1: No, I haven't been there.
Speaker 2: I've been to Bergen and had a ton of salmon,
Speaker 2: and right now I have no idea what fjord I'm
Speaker 2: sailing along, but I'm keeping my eyes open for Michael
Speaker 2: Paluin's Norwegian blue parrot and having lots of aquafat. So I'm,
Speaker 2: you know, and happy that the debate because it was
Speaker 2: at three am local time, I did not watch, although
Speaker 2: it everything I've read went exactly.
Speaker 1: As I predicted it would. Unfortunately, Charles, well.
Speaker 3: I'm not near any fields, although I could be given up.
Speaker 3: How much rain we've had in the last ten days.
Speaker 3: Is now I live in a place apparently that just
Speaker 3: rains constantly all the time, one hundred percent of the time,
Speaker 3: all day, all night, whatever the time is, whatever the
Speaker 3: moment it rains. So I am sort of surrounded by
Speaker 3: honorary feuds like waterlged lawns and cracks and crevices that
Speaker 3: are full of water. You meant the debate, didn't you?
Speaker 7: You weren't. We're looking for a water update.
Speaker 1: Well, no, an aquavied and then a debate update.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, I mean I think that everything in the
Speaker 3: debate proceeded as people imagine that it would, in that
Speaker 3: Trump's behavior was in keeping with his previous behavior, and
Speaker 3: he responded to every single provocation that Harris threw at him,
Speaker 3: as she had telegraphed she was going to for three weeks.
Speaker 3: She said nothing of consequence, because she never does. She's
Speaker 3: flatly incapable of taking a position, thinking through a position,
Speaker 3: expressing a position, and the media is a national disgrace
Speaker 3: which should not again be trusted to mediate any sort
Speaker 3: of important conversation about the future of the United States.
Speaker 3: So what happened was precisely what I had imagined would happen,
Speaker 3: and I don't think it's going to have an enormous
Speaker 3: effect as the result.
Speaker 1: No, I don't think so either.
Speaker 5: I think the people who a lot of the people
Speaker 5: are going to be voting for Trump not because of
Speaker 5: what they think he will do, but because what they
Speaker 5: assume he won't, and that is the whole panoply of
Speaker 5: expansion of the state that they would expect to happen
Speaker 5: under either Harris the New or Harris the Old. She's
Speaker 5: of the party, she's of the blob, she's of the state.
Speaker 5: Air four don't want to vote for her. So they
Speaker 5: vote for Trump because they know he will not increase immigration,
Speaker 5: he will not raise your taxes, he will not enable
Speaker 5: the regulatory state, et cetera, et cetera. So it doesn't
Speaker 5: matter what he gets up there and says. It is
Speaker 5: just what people are just assume. I know what he's
Speaker 5: not gonna do. But there are those who are convinced
Speaker 5: that he will bring about, in his second opportunity, authoritarianism galore.
Speaker 5: And to that point, well, from the Hitler playbook, of course,
Speaker 5: you have to find another to demonize. You have to
Speaker 5: have some sort of xenophobic rant, and that's what we got.
Speaker 5: I guess two of the takeaways seem to be first
Speaker 5: they're eating cats and dogs. Now I have a take
Speaker 5: on this in that no, they're not.
Speaker 1: They're not.
Speaker 5: The Ohio woman who ate a cat was probably mentally ill,
Speaker 5: and she was not from Springfield. And the dog thing
Speaker 5: may or may not be apocryphal, but it doesn't matter
Speaker 5: because that's become sort of a stand in for the
Speaker 5: issues that suddenly have been thrust the foe by the
Speaker 5: Springfield Haitian situation. So I'd like you guys take on this.
Speaker 5: Do you think that everybody on the right is absolutely
Speaker 5: fulminating and fizzing and going effervescently crazy over something that
Speaker 5: is not happening and is not a problem and if
Speaker 5: it was, it'd be fine, or is you know, Stephen,
Speaker 5: what do you think from your distance?
Speaker 1: What do you think? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Well, so, first of all, the real headline here is
Speaker 2: I think what the real grabber is. Wait a minute,
Speaker 2: This little town of what sixty five thousand people took
Speaker 2: in or had imposed on a twenty thousand Haitian immigrants
Speaker 2: in a short period of time that nobody knew this,
Speaker 2: I think, right?
Speaker 1: And you know, I am tempted to go with jokes
Speaker 1: because I like to.
Speaker 2: I kept thinking, well, there has to be a Simpsons
Speaker 2: episode that predicted this for Springfield, because the Simpsons always
Speaker 2: seem to be ahead of what was happening in the future.
Speaker 2: And a few people sent me suggestions, I want to
Speaker 2: make jokes about voodoo economics, you know, I always thought
Speaker 2: was the problem with Haiti right in their economy. Then
Speaker 2: we didn't. We're supposed to be against that, right. But finally,
Speaker 2: and you know, a gat more halfway serious, I think
Speaker 2: you're right that this is at the very least has
Speaker 2: to be greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, the explosion
Speaker 2: of the memes tells us something I think we know
Speaker 2: here and in Europe that and you see the neglection
Speaker 2: results that there's huge resentment by a broadcross section of Americans,
Speaker 2: of Europeans, of the open immigration that's been pushed upon
Speaker 2: US diversities, our strength and all the ideology that goes
Speaker 2: with us and the media and our political class, and
Speaker 2: for large part in both parties have simply ignored it,
Speaker 2: repressed it, won't acknowledge it's happening, won't acknowledge any reasonable
Speaker 2: concerns about it. And so it doesn't surprise me that
Speaker 2: you have a explosion of memes, and you know, they're
Speaker 2: just it's unbelievable how this is all spun out this week,
Speaker 2: And that's very postmodern in a certain way. Right the
Speaker 2: postmodernists say, truth in quotation marks is what's created by
Speaker 2: our images and all the rest of that. So in
Speaker 2: a certain way, this is the right wing's own postmodernist
Speaker 2: revenge on the left.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The specifics don't matter.
Speaker 5: The picture of a cat Ai generated kitty with an
Speaker 5: AK forty seven stands in for a series of legitimate
Speaker 5: arguments and conversations about immigrants.
Speaker 1: It just does it.
Speaker 5: Just that's how the brain wires. So even when he
Speaker 5: says they're eating cats and dogs. You may not believe it,
Speaker 5: you may not know what, it may not be true.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter.
Speaker 5: It connects something to an argument that I don't know
Speaker 5: if we're gonna have that conversation.
Speaker 1: We'll see.
Speaker 5: But Charles, what did you think of the.
Speaker 3: I think that unfortunately, what you've just described works the
Speaker 3: other way around, which is why, among many other reasons,
Speaker 3: I'm not a postmodernist. That is to say that directionally,
Speaker 3: the right in the United States and the Republican Party
Speaker 3: and Donald Trump are correct about immigration. They're correct about
Speaker 3: the problem at the border. They're correct about what all
Speaker 3: of these illegal immigrants due to communities that are not
Speaker 3: willing or able to absorb them. And if rather than
Speaker 3: make that case, which is I think irrefutable, you promulgate
Speaker 3: myths or at least unproven claims, you give the people
Speaker 3: on the other side of the aisle this unfortunate opportunity
Speaker 3: to say that's not true. And because it's not true,
Speaker 3: it's a stand in for all the other stuff that
Speaker 3: you're saying. You are a peddler of myths and all
Speaker 3: your politics are based on lies, which is not true.
Speaker 3: So I think that while I have been wildly amused
Speaker 3: as well by the memes, and while I agree entirely
Speaker 3: with Steve that the fact that they exist does tell
Speaker 3: you something that people are frustrated, I think it was
Speaker 3: a mistake for the candidate Donald Trump to say that
Speaker 3: on stage, because now every headline has been Trump promulgated
Speaker 3: a falsehood, and of course that the un lying message
Speaker 3: that he's conveying here is correct, and it's one that
Speaker 3: is shared by close to a supermajority in the United States.
Speaker 3: I mean, we talked about this last week. We now
Speaker 3: have this is astonishing given where we were in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: A majority of Americans sixty percent, who want mass deportations.
Speaker 3: That is how fed up they are with the Biden
Speaker 3: Harris administration's abdication of responsibility. So I would not, if
Speaker 3: I were Donald Trump, have given them any opening whatsoever.
Speaker 3: I would have listed things that are far, far worse
Speaker 3: than eating cats and dogs, like children being murdered by
Speaker 3: people who haven't been vetted, like social services being overrun.
Speaker 3: And the bottom line of it is three million people
Speaker 3: violating the laws that our Congress passed. I think it
Speaker 3: was a mistake, much as I do agree that it
Speaker 3: does tell us something about latent feelings toward the border.
Speaker 1: I agree with you.
Speaker 5: The thing is is that if Trump, I believe he
Speaker 5: had enumerated all of those things in a precise, logical
Speaker 5: and empirical manner, then the conversation would have shifted to
Speaker 5: a it's not a problem and be its xenophobic, because
Speaker 5: we know that there's actually no legitimate reason for these
Speaker 5: people to believe. Yes, it all comes from a deep
Speaker 5: place of xenophobia. I don't think that if Trump had
Speaker 5: put it better, we'd be having the conversation. I think
Speaker 5: that Trump saying something like that would automatically delegitimize it,
Speaker 5: even though we want to have that conversation.
Speaker 7: I don't agree.
Speaker 1: I don't agree.
Speaker 3: I think that if you say that people who are
Speaker 3: angry about illegal immigration and xenophobes, then they say, fine,
Speaker 3: I'm a xenophobe. I mean, if I could say something
Speaker 3: moderately Boordy here, I have been told not personally, but
Speaker 3: as part of the political movement to which I belong,
Speaker 3: that if I, as a straight man, I'm not willing
Speaker 3: to have sex with a trans person, i'm transphobic. Could
Speaker 3: you know what my response to that is, James, Then
Speaker 3: I'm transphobic.
Speaker 7: Yes, I'm not going to go do it.
Speaker 3: You're not going to bully me into doing something that
Speaker 3: I don't want to do. And I think I think
Speaker 3: the same is true increasingly of immigration. Is they say, well,
Speaker 3: look at all these racists who are upset about illegal immigration,
Speaker 3: and those people say, well, if that makes me a racist,
Speaker 3: then I'm a racist. The problem with this is that
Speaker 3: no one wants to say I'm a liar, and so
Speaker 3: Trump has shifted the ground from something which is quite useful,
Speaker 3: which is actually, no, I'm not to Okay, that isn't true, Butt,
Speaker 3: and I just I just think it was a mistake
Speaker 3: for him to say it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, part of the problem, I will give you all.
Speaker 5: Let's Ephen get into your sing. I just want to
Speaker 5: say I was talking with somebody who's a little bit
Speaker 5: liberal on these issues about the wisdom of importing large
Speaker 5: amounts of people from a drastically different culture into the
Speaker 5: middle of America, and the response was about, Haiti, Well,
Speaker 5: they just had an earthquake, which is to say that
Speaker 5: because disaster had struck this country, therefore the sensible and
Speaker 5: humane thing was, of course to gather.
Speaker 1: Them up and drop them in the middle of the country.
Speaker 5: That it would be cruel not to do so. And
Speaker 5: there's no getting around that. I don't think Steven, you're
Speaker 5: gonna say.
Speaker 1: Well, I was.
Speaker 2: I think we're pretty much in agreement here. But then
Speaker 2: there's a couple of fault lines that are interesting. First
Speaker 2: of all, just for the record, Charles, although I don't
Speaker 2: think any of to tell you this, I'm very anti postmodern.
Speaker 2: I just used that illustration because, okay, but I think
Speaker 2: I'm a little closer to shames on this for this reason.
Speaker 2: And then I think can draw out to a general
Speaker 2: evaluation of the debate.
Speaker 1: It's look, let me put it this way.
Speaker 2: If Trump were the candidate who mastered facts and figures
Speaker 2: and weaved in better arguments and did things more conventionally,
Speaker 2: he wouldn't be Donald Trump. He'd be Ronda Santis and
Speaker 2: much if I might prefer Ron de Santa, says the candidate,
Speaker 2: and for his ability to debate and make policy walk
Speaker 2: arguments that we think are strong. I'm not sure that
Speaker 2: you know, even if the cats and dogs be eaten
Speaker 2: is completely ridiculous, which it probably is. I think it
Speaker 2: reaches people who say, I don't know if it's true
Speaker 2: or not, but there's something really badly wrong, and that
Speaker 2: makes the point more powerfully then a list.
Speaker 1: Of facts and figures.
Speaker 2: Although you're right, I think you should use the real
Speaker 2: cases of people who are killed who shouldn't have been
Speaker 2: and all the other things. He could do that, but
Speaker 2: he's Donald Trump. He's not ever gonna do it. I
Speaker 2: keep I get frustrated with all the articles I see
Speaker 2: every day saying Trump must do this. He's not gonna
Speaker 2: do anything we suggest, Right, He's Trump, That's just the
Speaker 2: way he is. And I think, as we said of
Speaker 2: Ronald Reagan. We just have to let Trump be Trump,
Speaker 2: and he's gonna win or loses Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just loses. Donald Trump. Is one of the problems that.
Speaker 1: Yeah says, Yeah, I don't understood.
Speaker 5: Just don't do the thing for the next debate, and
Speaker 5: there won't be one where you do the drinking right
Speaker 5: because the drinking game where every time Trump says this,
Speaker 5: you take a shotter every time here it says this,
Speaker 5: you take a shot, you end up actually corecked the
Speaker 5: next day, unless unless, unless.
Speaker 1: Maybe you don't want to do drinking games at all. Huh,
Speaker 1: but let's say you do.
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Speaker 5: James Lollx. Here in Minneapolis, I live in a dense city.
Speaker 5: My neighborhood is not It was laid out as a suburb.
Speaker 5: At the end of the previous the beginning of the
Speaker 5: previous century. It's a very walkable neighborhood. You might even
Speaker 5: call it a fifteen minute city. And I have pushedback
Speaker 5: sometimes with a lot of my friends who are who
Speaker 5: are very concerned about the idea, and I understand why.
Speaker 1: But a I like the idea of a fifteen.
Speaker 5: Minute city where everything that I can find is walkable
Speaker 5: and it's nice, and it's got trees and coffee shops
Speaker 5: and cafes.
Speaker 1: But it really does stand in for something else.
Speaker 5: In the minds of the people who are pushing this
Speaker 5: as a future model, doesn't it. There's a lot more
Speaker 5: control and observation there walk us through because this is
Speaker 5: one of the new urban models that the urbanists are
Speaker 5: telling us about. Tell us about the perils and pitfalls
Speaker 5: and perhaps advantages of the dreaded fifteen minute city.
Speaker 8: Well, there's nothing wrong with the idea of per se
Speaker 8: and actually there's some relevance in the sense there's more
Speaker 8: people working at home. It's a fifteen minute city because
Speaker 8: you don't have to commute at all. I mean, in
Speaker 8: many of the neighborhoods I've lived in in particularly when
Speaker 8: I lived in Hollywood for many years, almost everybody worked
Speaker 8: at home the same thing. Where I live in Orange County.
Speaker 8: I think there's one person on the cul de Sac
Speaker 8: who actually commutes. So I do live in a fifteen
Speaker 8: minute city. The university is an eight minute drive, a
Speaker 8: twenty minute bike ride. I mean, there are lots of
Speaker 8: ways of doing it. I think what the problem is
Speaker 8: that the people who are pushing it are the same
Speaker 8: people who push density above everything, want to go into
Speaker 8: single family neighborhoods which actually might be reasonably walkable, and
Speaker 8: impose a model which the vast majority of people don't want.
Speaker 8: I mean, if you take a look at the at
Speaker 8: the data, people are moving from high density to low
Speaker 8: density by enormous amounts. That's been the case basically for
Speaker 8: the better part of at least fifty years, but it's
Speaker 8: accelerated in the last five. So the question is what
Speaker 8: comes with it? And the question we also have to
Speaker 8: ask ourselves is these are the same people who told us, well,
Speaker 8: if we build transit in Los Angeles, so we spent
Speaker 8: the hunting on it, you know, everybody would be commuting around.
Speaker 8: And of course, you know there are now fewer people
Speaker 8: writing transit in LA than there was in nineteen eighty
Speaker 8: so you know, so I think the it's really the
Speaker 8: agenda of the fifteen minute city. Let's face it, the
Speaker 8: new urban iss have gotten, you know, a bitter blow
Speaker 8: with the growth of online work. The whole thesis is
Speaker 8: how do you get into the downtown or the central district.
Speaker 8: But now the central district is much less important than
Speaker 8: it was five years ago, and infinitely important than it
Speaker 8: was twenty years ago.
Speaker 5: There are two elements of this fifty minute city that
Speaker 5: I think give people the hebes and or the jeebs.
Speaker 5: One of them is the density thing that you met
Speaker 5: that you mentioned along transit corridors, long busy streets. It
Speaker 5: makes absolute perfect sense to build apartment buildings. They're already dense,
Speaker 5: and the energy that you get from these corridors, you know,
Speaker 5: compounds and you have interesting places. But when you say
Speaker 5: it is necessary to put a four place into a
Speaker 5: residential neighborhood, what you're saying is we don't like this
Speaker 5: paradigm of individuality that the single family home represents. All
Speaker 5: of the hatred that they bring to sprawl, they bring
Speaker 5: to your neighborhood and say you can't have that, you
Speaker 5: shouldn't have it. It's two resources and intense, it's not
Speaker 5: communal enough.
Speaker 1: We don't like it.
Speaker 5: So part of the fifteen minute city is to break
Speaker 5: up the individual homes. And the second part is, well,
Speaker 5: if you don't need to be outside of your fifteen
Speaker 5: minute city, you shouldn't be.
Speaker 1: Therefore congestion pricing. Therefore little cameras that will charge you
Speaker 1: if you actually leave during certain amounts of hours.
Speaker 5: That's the sort of status, top down control that a
Speaker 5: lot of people say no, no, thank you.
Speaker 8: Right well, and that's that's precisely what they want. I mean,
Speaker 8: and I've seen it because I spend a lot of
Speaker 8: time in other countries. If you go, for instance, in Sydney,
Speaker 8: neighborhoods that were beautiful, single family neighborhoods, easily accessible into
Speaker 8: the downtown, walkable, they now they now build, you know,
Speaker 8: for you know, four story apartment complexes, completely destroys the
Speaker 8: nature of the neighborhood. Terrible for the bird life and
Speaker 8: and and the other animals that live in these areas.
Speaker 8: It's terrible for the climate because concrete actually makes things hotter.
Speaker 8: There's something that has been essentially air brushed out of
Speaker 8: the climate debate, which is the heat Island, which many
Speaker 8: people my particularly my colleague Ali Maderis, has worked on,
Speaker 8: which is basically you end up with much hotter conditions
Speaker 8: because it's all concrete. Somehow, I don't understand where where
Speaker 8: green goes with concrete from one end to the other.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 8: The other thing that's absurd is this idea that you
Speaker 8: have to go break down the last middle class and
Speaker 8: working class stable neighborhoods and cities. When we have empty
Speaker 8: office buildings and empty shopping malls and empty factories which
Speaker 8: could be converted. And as you mentioned earlier, you've got
Speaker 8: the transit corridor, you have the roads, you have the electricity.
Speaker 8: Why would you have to go into people's neighborhood? And
Speaker 8: I agree there is a certainly a element in the
Speaker 8: new urban is thinking, which is basically, you know, we
Speaker 8: don't like this way of life, you know. And of course,
Speaker 8: very often these are people who are quite wealthy. They
Speaker 8: may live, let's say in Manhattan or in an apartment
Speaker 8: of San Francisco, and they almost always have country houses
Speaker 8: or at least one extra house. I mean, I love
Speaker 8: getting you know. I've gotten lectures on proper lifestyle from
Speaker 8: British aristocrats and I asked them, well, how do you live,
Speaker 8: and you know it's it's it's basically an attack on
Speaker 8: sort of middle class home ownership. Now I'm not necessarily
Speaker 8: a conservative per se, but I'm more in the sense
Speaker 8: of it being a, if you will, a kind of
Speaker 8: social democrat. I think the more people are able to
Speaker 8: buy a house and have an asset and be independent,
Speaker 8: that's what I think a good social democratic regime would
Speaker 8: want to do. But I would go back to Truman
Speaker 8: in some ways in this area, this idea that we're
Speaker 8: going to move into a society where everybody's a renter
Speaker 8: for life. We even rent our furniture. It's it's this
Speaker 8: weird sort of symbiosis, if you will, between the investment
Speaker 8: class at Wall Street basically and and the green urbanists.
Speaker 8: They actually have a very common agenda, which is basically,
Speaker 8: screw the middle class.
Speaker 2: So, Joel, it's Steve Hayward over in Europe this week, actually,
Speaker 2: and you know, it strikes me, to build on what
Speaker 2: you've just said, it strikes me that one of the
Speaker 2: sleeper issues in this campaign that neither campaign is talking
Speaker 2: about is high housing costs and rent. It's being swept
Speaker 2: up in an inflation story, which is fine, but I
Speaker 2: have a synoptic or potted history.
Speaker 1: I can state briefly, and I want to see what
Speaker 1: you make of it.
Speaker 2: I think, as you know, and you lived in LA
Speaker 2: for a long time, I always like to say that
Speaker 2: the sort of no growth or growth control or highly
Speaker 2: regulatory framemank for housing began on the coasts fifty years ago,
Speaker 2: start in California, starting the East coast, and it has
Speaker 2: over the decades spread inland and now infects Indianapolis, Saint Louis, everywhere.
Speaker 1: And there's some empirical data for this.
Speaker 2: I think about the increasing costs of the regulatory process
Speaker 2: to build housing, and I think that's a huge driver.
Speaker 1: Of the housing costs problem in the country. Am I
Speaker 1: generally right about that?
Speaker 2: Or what would you add or modify if I don't
Speaker 2: have the story quite in focus?
Speaker 8: Well, As my colleague Wendel Cox says, the housing crisis
Speaker 8: is not universal in the United States. I mean, yes,
Speaker 8: you have you know, some of these same regulations to
Speaker 8: some extent being enforced. But you know, housing prices in
Speaker 8: the if you want to live in the outer rings
Speaker 8: of Houston are still very very reasonable. Much of the
Speaker 8: Midwest is still relatively affordable where it's really hit hard
Speaker 8: is in the northeast and on the west coast, and
Speaker 8: in those areas everything from there are some cases where
Speaker 8: just the fees alone could be two hundred and fifty
Speaker 8: thousand dollars. If you talk to anybody in the in
Speaker 8: the development business, the amount of time that you spend,
Speaker 8: you know, going through the regulatory process, it's that all
Speaker 8: gets baked into the housing. Of course, the problem we
Speaker 8: have with this election, because I do think it's an
Speaker 8: important issue and I'm actually about to write an article
Speaker 8: about it, the real problem is is that that you've
Speaker 8: got one candidate, Kamala Harris. For her to talk about
Speaker 8: housing affordability is such a joke, given the fact that
Speaker 8: as Attorney General in California, she enforced laws that made
Speaker 8: it very difficult to develop a suburban housing she uh,
Speaker 8: you know, talk to anybody who is an official in
Speaker 8: Sam Bernardino, the whole bunch of other places. So the
Speaker 8: idea that California, which has about the lowest affordability, lowest
Speaker 8: home ownership, highest prices, that's the model. Give me a break.
Speaker 8: The problem that the the Republicans have is that their
Speaker 8: candidate is basically either an ignoramus or or losing his
Speaker 8: marbles because right, he has no he has no way
Speaker 8: of He should be able to talk about these things,
Speaker 8: but he doesn't know how to put together a co
Speaker 8: here in sentence, you know, I mean it's it's just
Speaker 8: one person is a complete phony and the other one
Speaker 8: is in articulate.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I remembered Trump from years ago wanting
Speaker 2: to use the power of eminent domain to you know,
Speaker 2: kick out old ladies out of their houses in Atlantic
Speaker 2: City and so forth.
Speaker 1: And he lost me there back then.
Speaker 2: But a second question, and then I'll kick it over
Speaker 2: to Charles Cook to see if he wants to defend
Speaker 2: British aristocrats or not from your observation a moment ago. So, Joel,
Speaker 2: you know I've known you on and often seen you
Speaker 2: many times over the years, and I always describe you
Speaker 2: to people as a small py common sense progressive, small
Speaker 2: p progressive, a common sense progressivism, right, And I took
Speaker 2: the heart of criticism. You made this more than twenty
Speaker 2: years ago at a conference and you may not remember it,
Speaker 2: but you were criticizing conservatives like me, and I think
Speaker 2: rightly so saying, you know, you go a little too
Speaker 2: far trying to make an idiology out of progressivism, you
Speaker 2: know too much Woodrow, Wilson and Hagel and all this
Speaker 2: sort of you know, stuff that I do think people
Speaker 2: take too far. I took that very much to heart,
Speaker 2: and I think you were right about that. But then
Speaker 2: I saw your article here from a month or two go.
Speaker 2: What happened to my party? What happened to common sense progressivism?
Speaker 2: Was it overcome by you know, the ideologically hardcore? Or
Speaker 2: where do you land? You just said in a moment,
Speaker 2: you're still a social democrat, which I think that's a
Speaker 2: great thing for us to have.
Speaker 1: But there don't see me very many of you.
Speaker 8: Left where where we're we're moving towards extinction? I suppose, yeah,
Speaker 8: although I think that actually the large part of the
Speaker 8: public is there they you know. For instance, one of
Speaker 8: my arguments to conservatives is some you know, particularly you know,
Speaker 8: some of the libertarians will say, well, the market is efficient,
Speaker 8: let's get rid of all zoning. So what they do
Speaker 8: is they go along with wiping out single families owning
Speaker 8: and then don't say anything when when construction on the
Speaker 8: sub in the suburban periphery is blocked. And I always
Speaker 8: ask conservatives what kind of conservatism is going to survive
Speaker 8: if the if we become a country where only twenty
Speaker 8: five percent of the people own their own home, you
Speaker 8: have no chance. Everything will be Ultimately, of course, the
Speaker 8: ultimate thing will be people will be renters. They're going
Speaker 8: to want rent control. And why not if I can
Speaker 8: never This is what I would say to younger people.
Speaker 8: If I have no chance of owning a home, no
Speaker 8: chance of starting a business, no chance of really ever
Speaker 8: being independent, I'm going to vote for Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1: Why not? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Can I ask, yeah, I won't be defending British aristocrats.
Speaker 3: I have jud British aristocracy when I became a citizen
Speaker 3: in twenty eighteen, can ask a very basic, from the
Speaker 3: ground up question here.
Speaker 7: I'm originally from England.
Speaker 3: As you can presumably here, and in England, in Britain,
Speaker 3: i think about nine percent of the land is built on.
Speaker 7: And in america's two right.
Speaker 8: Right, In Australia is even yeah, right.
Speaker 3: So when I'm here in the United States, as I
Speaker 3: have been for the last thirteen years, space doesn't really
Speaker 3: figure in my imagination because it's almost a limitless.
Speaker 7: Amount of it.
Speaker 3: Everything you've described, and I know you've written a bunch
Speaker 3: of US at National Review, where I write it is fascinating.
Speaker 3: But what I can never understand, perhaps you can explain
Speaker 3: to me, is why why are there people who are
Speaker 3: desperate to stop building on.
Speaker 7: Land to avoid sprawl?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 7: It's just what does it come from? What's the origin
Speaker 7: of that there's so much space?
Speaker 8: Well, first of all, the origins of the argument against
Speaker 8: it really started in the UK. The UK is really
Speaker 8: the found of idiotic planning ideas, although elegantly presented, but
Speaker 8: the reality is the first it started off, it was
Speaker 8: kind of an aesthetic thing. If you read let's say
Speaker 8: Mumford for instance, or Caro, A lot of it is
Speaker 8: clearly like these cookie cutter houses with you know, with
Speaker 8: with young families with tricycles in front. They just were
Speaker 8: offensive to the intelligentsia. I mean that sort of where
Speaker 8: it started. Then as the environmental movement got started, they
Speaker 8: started saying, well, those people, you know, they drive more,
Speaker 8: they eat up more energy, you know, they're gobbling up
Speaker 8: the farmland. Now, obviously, the United States, as you suggest,
Speaker 8: has no shortage of farmland. Actually we retire much more
Speaker 8: farmland from being redundant than we do taking it over
Speaker 8: to build houses. So but but you know, logic doesn't matter.
Speaker 8: And then the other thing is that you have a
Speaker 8: lot of people who have decided that the way to
Speaker 8: save the planet is to force everybody to live like crap.
Speaker 8: I mean that's you know, because you know, people say, oh, well,
Speaker 8: you could live in the city.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: You know what if I could go to New York
Speaker 8: City and buy one of those you know, four bedroom
Speaker 8: apartments on Central Park West or in Vienna in the Ringstrasa,
Speaker 8: I'd be okay with living in an urban area, but
Speaker 8: I couldn't afford it. And I have a nice house
Speaker 8: in a very expensive area, and if I did that
Speaker 8: and converted it into anything in New York City, I'd
Speaker 8: be lucky to get one bedroom. So you know, the
Speaker 8: reality is they don't understand that there's a class element,
Speaker 8: which is people who are not super rich cannot afford
Speaker 8: to live decently in urban areas. The other issue, which
Speaker 8: of course is affects this is even if you live
Speaker 8: in a nice neighborhood in the city, as I did
Speaker 8: Los Angeles, you can't send your kids to public school,
Speaker 8: so you end up having to pay not only high
Speaker 8: taxes and all every kind of fee that you could
Speaker 8: possibly have and with the threat of densification. But you're
Speaker 8: also in a situation where you know, you're basically forced
Speaker 8: to pay forty fifty thousand dollars a year to educate
Speaker 8: your kids. By the way, the reason why I'm talking
Speaker 8: to you not from my long term home in Los Angeles,
Speaker 8: where I lived for forty years, but in Orange County
Speaker 8: because when my youngest daughter was going at the sixth grade,
Speaker 8: we took a look and we said, you know what,
Speaker 8: if we moved to Orange County, she can still go
Speaker 8: to public school. And she did and it worked out great.
Speaker 8: It saved us about well somewhere around three hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 8: Most people can't afford this, so that one of the
Speaker 8: reasons that people moved to the suburbs. It's not just
Speaker 8: because they want more space, which is part of it,
Speaker 8: is they want to be in the place where they
Speaker 8: could afford to live and send their kids to decent schools.
Speaker 8: You know, I if I moved from Los Angeles to Dallas,
Speaker 8: I could live in the district with great schools. I
Speaker 8: couldn't do that in LA Once you went into places
Speaker 8: like which I have good schools, the price is double. Yeah,
Speaker 8: the same thing with Calabasas outside of you know, I
Speaker 8: mean basically, the urban America has a reverse Midas touch,
Speaker 8: and it drives middle class people out, particularly if they
Speaker 8: want to buy something, and particularly if they're married, and
Speaker 8: even more so if they have children.
Speaker 3: My second question is your criticism of Donald Trump was
Speaker 3: effectively that he's ineloquent, which is of course, But suppose
Speaker 3: that I managed to put a chip into his brain
Speaker 3: and he suddenly became Demosthenes. Would he have the right ideas?
Speaker 3: And is the problem with the Republican Party that it
Speaker 3: is headed up by somebody who can't convey or doesn't
Speaker 3: think about this, or is it as well wrong?
Speaker 8: I would say this, and you know, I was talking
Speaker 8: to my wife about it the other day. On almost
Speaker 8: every issue but abortion, the Republicans are ahead. Even if
Speaker 8: you take a look in California, if you take a
Speaker 8: look at the positions that are taken by Republicans, they
Speaker 8: actually are fairly popular. Even in the place like California,
Speaker 8: particularly in the suburban areas. They seem to sometimes have
Speaker 8: a problem articulating this. Now, part of it is there
Speaker 8: is a wing of the Republican Party that's libertarian, you know,
Speaker 8: uber Alis and you know, they they would never even
Speaker 8: engage this kind of issue. And actually, I mean I've
Speaker 8: had let's say, very fierce arguments with you know, libertarians
Speaker 8: on this issue. Even though I'm sympathetic to a lot
Speaker 8: of libertarian positions. I think that the problem is the
Speaker 8: Republican Party doesn't know how to how to make its case.
Speaker 8: I mean, but on issues like crime, issues like the border,
Speaker 8: they're they're clearly energy, they're clearly ahead of the game.
Speaker 8: The problem is they don't really know how to talk
Speaker 8: to regular people. And then of course part of the
Speaker 8: problem is also this this problem with the primaries where
Speaker 8: you know, the you know, the most unreconstructed twenty five
Speaker 8: thirty percent of the population is going to vote for
Speaker 8: Trump even though most people don't want them. So what
Speaker 8: we end up with, and I'm already starting to work
Speaker 8: on what is it going to be, you know, living
Speaker 8: on the Kamala Harrison of course, being a long time
Speaker 8: California and I think I have an idea of what
Speaker 8: it's going to look like.
Speaker 5: Joe, you had said before something was exactly correct, that
Speaker 5: the objection to sprawl in the suburbs began as sort
Speaker 5: of a culturally aesthetic revulsion, and then onto it was
Speaker 5: grafted environmentalism and other things, and it was fueled by
Speaker 5: the ungrateful baby boomers who grew up in Levittown and
Speaker 5: thought that it was just full of ticky TACKI boxes
Speaker 5: and romanticized all the cold water walk up Flos, New York.
Speaker 5: As soon as we're done with that generation, which is mine,
Speaker 5: the better, But in a sense, some of what the
Speaker 5: new urbanists want is correct. It made me realize that
Speaker 5: perhaps the last urbanist movement of which I approved was
Speaker 5: the city Beautiful movement that came out of the eighteen
Speaker 5: ninety three Columbia acquisition, and that itself was just trying
Speaker 5: to graft onto America the houseman Parisian, you know, the
Speaker 5: leveling of old Paris and the reconstituting it into the
Speaker 5: houseman's vision, which again I like, but I don't think
Speaker 5: they've gotten anything right. Since I think Moses was wrong.
Speaker 5: I think that the people who wanted to tear down
Speaker 5: blight in the sixties made the mistake of going too
Speaker 5: far instead of rehabilitating places, and we ended up with
Speaker 5: these empty plausas and these wind swept places that nobody likes.
Speaker 5: And now we have new urbanism, which has elements of
Speaker 5: it again that I like, but also elements that seem
Speaker 5: a little too controlling, a little too vengeful and petty,
Speaker 5: and the rest of it was the last what was
Speaker 5: the last new urban urban movement that actually you think
Speaker 5: is the one that we should be looking to, that
Speaker 5: has the best ideas for everybody, Because you quote Frank
Speaker 5: Lloyd to writing your book that people are going to
Speaker 5: go where I'm paraphrasing, people are going to go.
Speaker 1: The city goes where the people go.
Speaker 5: And one of the things that people hate about the
Speaker 5: suburbs is that they seem to be an expression of
Speaker 5: individual desire.
Speaker 1: People left the city after the Wars, not because all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, Oh there's a highway in a car,
Speaker 1: I have to move. No, they wanted to go there.
Speaker 1: It was a better place to go.
Speaker 8: I can my own family. My mother grew up in Brownsville,
Speaker 8: which hopefully I won't offend your audience by this as
Speaker 8: but I have to quote her accurately. It was a
Speaker 8: shitty neighborhood then in the shitty neighborhood now. When she
Speaker 8: got a chance to move to Long Island and have
Speaker 8: a little backyard and be in the place where she
Speaker 8: didn't worry about crime, and where the public schools were good.
Speaker 8: She went nobody took a gun to her head.
Speaker 5: No, no, So I guess I'm not asking a question
Speaker 5: so much as giving a speech and a sermon myself.
Speaker 5: But yes, I mean, so shouldn't we Perhaps we should
Speaker 5: pick and choose from all of these various strains of
Speaker 5: urban thought that have gone through the culture in the
Speaker 5: last hundred years or so. There is something to be
Speaker 5: said for beautiful dens cities, There is something to be
Speaker 5: said for preservation. There is something to be said for
Speaker 5: building something new that contrasts and compares and the rest
Speaker 5: of it. But it just seems as if has it
Speaker 5: ever been non ideological? I'll ask you that urban design,
Speaker 5: urban theory in the last hundred years, has it always been.
Speaker 8: Well, there's been an element of it. But you know
Speaker 8: what's really interesting is there are some very good models.
Speaker 8: You know, my friend Aaron Wren wrote a piece about
Speaker 8: where he lives now in Carmel, Indiana. Republican administration in
Speaker 8: some senses, some new urbanist ideas, but still single family
Speaker 8: homes that's doing well. You want to see some of
Speaker 8: the most amazing evolutions, I'll give you two very different cases.
Speaker 8: One what I see in eparticularly outside of Houston, because
Speaker 8: I've spent so much time there. These new towns Woodlands,
Speaker 8: Sinco Ranch that they have. You know, the case of
Speaker 8: the Woodlands, they have a nice downtown, there are lots
Speaker 8: of jobs there. They have you know, they have water
Speaker 8: features going all through. You could take a boat around.
Speaker 8: There's great bike paths. In a lot of ways. They've
Speaker 8: achieved the good part of the new urbaness regime for
Speaker 8: reasons of they know that people like it, and they
Speaker 8: make money if they provide what people want. So that's one.
Speaker 8: The other alternative, which is what I'm working on right now.
Speaker 8: One of the projects I'm on is some of the
Speaker 8: old cities in Los Angeles we call the Southeast LA.
Speaker 1: Places that you've.
Speaker 8: Probably never heard of, like down E, Paramount, Well Lakewood
Speaker 8: you've heard of. I was just there with a friend
Speaker 8: who is a former head of the computer science department
Speaker 8: at Chapman, and he said, it looks better than it
Speaker 8: ever did. So you go into these small towns which
Speaker 8: tend to have their own school districts, their own police forces.
Speaker 8: These towns are ninety percent Hispanic. We went there, no vacancies,
Speaker 8: no graffiti, no homeless people. You realize that you know
Speaker 8: a local area can do it too. I think a
Speaker 8: lot of the problems is a we have to get
Speaker 8: away from the idea that once one size fits all,
Speaker 8: people have different things. The other thing is the more
Speaker 8: you have is a town where the people have a
Speaker 8: stake in it, and that's what's happening in places like
Speaker 8: parts of south of East LA, whereas in the city
Speaker 8: of Los Angeles you can't affect anything. I lived in
Speaker 8: LA when we ever had a problem, you couldn't get
Speaker 8: the city to do anything because you know, I didn't
Speaker 8: have I wasn't a source of campaign contributions, and I
Speaker 8: didn't work for a government union. So you know nothing
Speaker 8: that we said in our neighborhood matter.
Speaker 1: Well, Joe, I've got the build on that.
Speaker 2: I've got one last California question because I haven't been
Speaker 2: to Lakewood and Downey. I know those places are, but
Speaker 2: I haven't been in a long time. It's your adopt
Speaker 2: at home state. I know you moved from Brooklyn decades ago,
Speaker 2: and I'm a native Californian and every time I see
Speaker 2: a story like the one two weeks ago that Chevron
Speaker 2: a company that grew in California in the eighth nineteenth
Speaker 2: century is leaving entirely for Houston, following how many companies
Speaker 2: are now major companies that have left the state. And
Speaker 2: as you know, we are one tech procession away from
Speaker 2: California's fiscal situation going off a.
Speaker 1: Cliff that will so deep it'll never come back.
Speaker 2: I keep thinking, never mind, Republicans, we can meet in
Speaker 2: a phone booth now in California. I keep thinking that
Speaker 2: at some point, isn't this going to wake up Democrats?
Speaker 2: Isn't Gavin Newsome going to is the privately? Doesn't he
Speaker 2: have to be privately saying something's wrong when all these
Speaker 2: businesses are leaving the state?
Speaker 1: That might be too optimistic. There is a just hopeless.
Speaker 2: So what are we going to say by Lakewood and
Speaker 2: Hispanic politicians who say enough is enough?
Speaker 8: Well, the report we just did at Chapman called the
Speaker 8: El Fertudo s Latino. We go into all that stuff,
Speaker 8: and basically the only hope for California is Latinos and
Speaker 8: Asians beginning to move to the center. If that happens,
Speaker 8: then we've got a chance. Because these are people who
Speaker 8: want to buy houses. They tend to have kids. They
Speaker 8: should be a constituency that the party should fight for.
Speaker 8: And one of the things that I've been talking a
Speaker 8: lot with Latinos about is you got to you got
Speaker 8: to make people work for your vote. You know, I mean,
Speaker 8: what the what what's happened to the African Americans. They've
Speaker 8: become They've become so predictably Democrats that the Democrats really
Speaker 8: don't have to do anything for them. All they got
Speaker 8: to do is say a few words and pander a bit. Meanwhile,
Speaker 8: the condition of Black America continues to deteriorate, particularly relative
Speaker 8: to other groups. So, you know, the the the problem
Speaker 8: we have in California is that we have a very
Speaker 8: powerful group of people. And this is where why I
Speaker 8: think Newsom doesn't get it. He lives in this Silicon
Speaker 8: Valley bubble.
Speaker 5: This.
Speaker 8: You know, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris are the same person. Essentially,
Speaker 8: their backers are the same, their views are the same,
Speaker 8: and what they'll do is they will back up when
Speaker 8: things get bad. So, for instance, Newsom's been vetoing some
Speaker 8: of the more absurd laws that are being pushed because
Speaker 8: he knows that there's a problem. But what's interesting to
Speaker 8: me is when companies leave. And to me, the most
Speaker 8: important loss by far is X because Space was I
Speaker 8: think our ticket in California. Big written a lot about Space,
Speaker 8: including for a national review. When you lose these companies,
Speaker 8: you know, it's it's very, very difficult. But the problem
Speaker 8: is that you've got this group of companies who don't
Speaker 8: manufacture anything, who are what my friend Mike Lincoles told
Speaker 8: booth companies you know, like Apple, like Microsoft, you know
Speaker 8: where they make money no matter what, they're just being there.
Speaker 8: They make money. There's no incentive from them, and they're
Speaker 8: the big backers of the Democrats. There's no incentive to
Speaker 8: address the loss of these these jobs. I mean, you know,
Speaker 8: he made many mistakes, but when Pete Wilson was governor,
Speaker 8: I have to give him credit. Every time there was
Speaker 8: a company that was talking about leaving, they put a
Speaker 8: team out there. Sometimes they talked them out of it,
Speaker 8: sometimes they didn't. Doesn't seem to be any attempt. I
Speaker 8: was meeting with a bunch of executives at Toyota. They
Speaker 8: have a few things left here in southern California. You
Speaker 8: talk about a company that should be here, and they said,
Speaker 8: you know what, nobody cared we left. I think the
Speaker 8: mayor of Florence was upset. I think that's about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Have you heard word one about SpaceX leaving SpaceX, which
Speaker 8: I think may be the most important company in the
Speaker 8: country in the long term. Not a word, not a word.
Speaker 5: Well, that's another podcast and we'll have that too, because
Speaker 5: California matters, and it absolutely is a lesson, once a
Speaker 5: shining beacon of hope and opportunity and orange juice and
Speaker 5: all the rest of it's and now a dire lesson.
Speaker 5: Joel Cotkin, the author of The Human City, Urbanism for
Speaker 5: the Rest of Us and Becoming of Neo Feudalism Awarding
Speaker 5: for the Global middle Class.
Speaker 1: Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 5: I could have talked about urbanism for another hour or so,
Speaker 5: but got to run and have a great weekend you.
Speaker 8: Too, and look forward to seeing the podcast, and feel
Speaker 8: free to contact me in the future. I do have
Speaker 8: a piece, by the way, coming out that Andrew Stutterford
Speaker 8: is editing on immigration, which might be of some issul.
Speaker 1: Well, there we go. Look for that in National Review,
Speaker 1: I assume.
Speaker 8: In National Review.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, good, all right, Joe, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 5: You know, talking about California and what it used to represent.
Speaker 5: I can't think of a style, a mood, a vibe
Speaker 5: that's come out of California in a long time. What
Speaker 5: most people think of is a long dead, fifty sixty
Speaker 5: seven year old paradigm of Googi architecture, of Neon, of
Speaker 5: all the car culture things that sort of erupted in
Speaker 5: the mid century. That's what people think of when they
Speaker 5: think of California. California urban culture not anymore. The other alternative,
Speaker 5: of course, is to go to We mentioned Frankloyd right before.
Speaker 5: I'm working on a piece now for the newspaper where
Speaker 5: I have been reduced to being the urbanist writer there.
Speaker 5: Frankloyd Wright did a gas station in a small town
Speaker 5: of Minnesota in nineteen fifty seven, you don't know how
Speaker 5: for the guy who you know, had some gas stations
Speaker 5: and he said, hey, you know what, why don't you
Speaker 5: build me a station? And Frank Lloyd Wright usted up
Speaker 5: some plans from nineteen twenty seven for a broad acre
Speaker 5: city and put in this city, this little small town,
Speaker 5: this absurd futuristic building that was already thirty years old
Speaker 5: when he put it up, and was pointing to a
Speaker 5: future that never actually happened. And when people look at
Speaker 5: it and say, why didn't we build more things like that? Well,
Speaker 5: because it was weird. It's a weird looking thing. It
Speaker 5: doesn't fit. People weren't crazy about it. It's a novelty.
Speaker 1: It's not a way we wanted to go.
Speaker 5: And as much as I love some of the particulars
Speaker 5: of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, building an entire city run
Speaker 5: those ideas and styles I think was bad. And that's
Speaker 5: one of the objections I have to all of these
Speaker 5: new Orbinist ideas is they tend to impose a paradigm
Speaker 5: as opposed to letting things grow organically and jostle for competition.
Speaker 1: That's all I have to say about that. Well, I'll
Speaker 1: just say here here. I mean, you know, I thought
Speaker 1: I think maybe you said James Is.
Speaker 2: The new urbanists had a lot of good ideas, but
Speaker 2: they wanted to impose it on everyone by fiat right.
Speaker 1: I used to say, look, if you want a fifteen.
Speaker 2: Minute city, you want new urbanism or whatever, just allow
Speaker 2: it to happen.
Speaker 1: Let's scale back.
Speaker 2: The zoning regulations that prohibit these kinds of forms of
Speaker 2: neighborhoods and cities from being built and let a thousand
Speaker 2: flowers bloom. But that's not good enough for Really, this
Speaker 2: is another species of utopianism. I think you know, you
Speaker 2: mentioned transit and so forth, and you and I could go.
Speaker 1: On all day about this, James and tear his hair out.
Speaker 5: There is an element of utopianism that is underneath all
Speaker 5: of these urban place It really is.
Speaker 1: No matter what you look for for the garden.
Speaker 5: City models, for the Robert Moses imposed grids, with with
Speaker 5: the awful, dreadful concrete pretty you know, the word doesn't
Speaker 5: prove igno, that's it. The standing in the middle of
Speaker 5: wincept empty pauses, all those things have an element of utopianism,
Speaker 5: utopianism to it, and that's why I say it's managing
Speaker 5: to hell with it all? Right, before we go, a
Speaker 5: couple of things. One meetups coming up Saint Louis October
Speaker 5: third through the sixth. That's right, people at Ricochet get
Speaker 5: together in person and drink and eat and have fun.
Speaker 5: And you'd be surprised a little politics they actually talk about.
Speaker 5: Panama City, Florida, December sixth through the eighth. I don't
Speaker 5: know the geography of but Charlie is Panama City close
Speaker 5: to where you happen to be or are you just
Speaker 5: going to be you know, mister undisclosed location and.
Speaker 7: Leave us No, I live in Jacksonville.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, it's three and a half hours, four hours
Speaker 3: away from me, Florida's big state. Not so much a
Speaker 3: cross although that isn't a cross journey, but down. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it takes it takes you as long to get from
Speaker 3: the Keys to Tallahassee as from Tallahassee to Washington, d C.
Speaker 5: I'm not surprised I wouldn't use the keys as you're
Speaker 5: starting a ending point, because that does really seem to
Speaker 5: be tacking it on just a bit, and you could
Speaker 5: never get me across that bridge in a million years.
Speaker 7: I shove it down.
Speaker 1: I met well.
Speaker 5: I like the keys, I just not the bridge. I
Speaker 5: prefer to come to it from a watery angle. So
Speaker 5: I go to ricochet dot com, check.
Speaker 1: Out the meetups page and you will see you know.
Speaker 5: And if you're not a member, well was Rob Long
Speaker 5: whoever wherever he's been likes to say join and then
Speaker 5: just put out the call and wherever you are, there's
Speaker 5: a fighting chance at Ricochet people will come to you.
Speaker 5: In the flash, last thing we had another nine to
Speaker 5: eleven anniversary. Every year, it fades a bit more every year,
Speaker 5: the the tributes are a bit more muted. The anguish
Speaker 5: still seems for some to be particularly raw. But it's
Speaker 5: been a long time. And what are your thoughts on
Speaker 5: this day? Did you? I usually think the day before, oh,
Speaker 5: tomorrow is that day. And this may be one of
Speaker 5: the years in which I didn't think that I knew
Speaker 5: it as soon as I woke up, because the just
Speaker 5: you know, you look at your watch, you look at
Speaker 5: the date. It's just it's it's stamped, it's But I
Speaker 5: didn't think about it the day before. What did you
Speaker 5: get to do?
Speaker 7: I always do.
Speaker 3: Also, I was flying on both September tenth and September eleventh,
Speaker 3: so perhaps that focus in my mind. I think that
Speaker 3: quite inadvertently, I mean not completely intervertently. I did book
Speaker 3: the flights, but not because I wanted to, but because
Speaker 3: I had agreed to do an event somewhere. I have
Speaker 3: flown on about six of the last thirteen September eleventh
Speaker 3: since I lived in the United States. That is a
Speaker 3: strange feeling. It's just odd looking at your plane ticket
Speaker 3: and it says September eleventh on it, it will never
Speaker 3: not be strange.
Speaker 5: Well, when you do that again and the ticket actually
Speaker 5: has a power ball at the end of the flight.
Speaker 1: Number, that's when I would be a little oh boy.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I was.
Speaker 2: Well, I was in Washington that morning, staying at the
Speaker 2: University Club, just a few locked from the White House.
Speaker 2: So I'm watching it on TV. But then hearing the
Speaker 2: sirens start running a lot of them, and I thought, well,
Speaker 2: something must be happening here. And as before the news
Speaker 2: of the plane hitting the Pentagon and the White House
Speaker 2: being evacuated, I was kind of close to an awful
Speaker 2: lot of the noise anyway. E factually friends of mine saying,
Speaker 2: oh my goodness, this is the first year, maybe a
Speaker 2: second year, that I have students coming into college who.
Speaker 1: Were born after nine to eleven. So I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I grew up with World War
Speaker 2: Two parents and always talked about Pearl Harbor, right, that
Speaker 2: was something that lasted forever, And you know, I sort
Speaker 2: of was rmbed with that myself and still think of
Speaker 2: Pearl Harbor day when it comes.
Speaker 1: But I don't know.
Speaker 2: I got to think the current generation who was probably
Speaker 2: doesn't think much about Pearl harbor.
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be even.
Speaker 2: Worse another generation from now, James, sadly, because it shouldn't be.
Speaker 1: I think you're right. As far as the planes go.
Speaker 5: I live under the approach to the airport in Minneapolis,
Speaker 5: and on nine to eleven there was a great calamity
Speaker 5: as they brought all the planes down. They emptied the
Speaker 5: skies right, and then for a very unusual afternoon and evening,
Speaker 5: there was no noise above except for those the high
Speaker 5: whine of a jet way overhead making circles figure eights
Speaker 5: and so on. On a normal seven nine to eleven
Speaker 5: like we had this week, I hear the tremendous roar
Speaker 5: of the engines overhead. Is one plane after the other
Speaker 5: makes it's leisurely descent, and I'm glad that it's normal,
Speaker 5: and I remember the day that it wasn't. I won't forget,
Speaker 5: but you're right, there are those coming up. I mean,
Speaker 5: my daughter, it doesn't have a particular meaning to me,
Speaker 5: even though for me one of the things I will
Speaker 5: never forget is standing there watching all this happen on
Speaker 5: the television while my daughter, toddler is playing on the floor,
Speaker 5: and she picked up a small, little Fisher Price phone
Speaker 5: that said hello Hello, and she's holding.
Speaker 1: It out to me.
Speaker 5: She has this delightful smile on her face as the
Speaker 5: phone says hello Hello, like it's the future calling. I
Speaker 5: will ever forget that anyway. There, we thank everyone for
Speaker 5: listening to the podcast today. We advise you to do
Speaker 5: yourself a favor and by all means tries biotics and
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Speaker 1: That would be a horrible thing to do.
Speaker 5: I'll be using that old reverse psychologically there stuff, you know.
Speaker 1: Thanks Charlie, thank you, Steven. Enjoy that.
Speaker 5: I give my regards to Norway, of course, in my
Speaker 5: regards to swampy Damp Florida. And we'll see everybody in
Speaker 5: the comments.
Speaker 1: At Rigachet four point zero. Well next week. Ag