Speaker 1: And you're joined by Charles C. W. Cook and Stephen
Hayward or at least or so I believe here. Let
me let me check. Is am I right? Steven? Okay?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 1: So we have Oh, it's just me and Charlie m
m all right, redoing it all coming down three to one.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 2: Mister Gurbu, you'll tear down this wall.
Speaker 1: It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lollacks and we've got
Charles C. W. Cook with us as well. We're going
to be talking to Dennis Neil, host of the What's
Bugging Me Podcast, to talk about his new book on
e Lawn Musk. So let's ever So it's a podcast.
Speaker 3: Prior to the collision, the flight paths that were being
flown from the military and from American that was not
unusual for what happens in the DC air space. And
as this investigation moves forward, we will be able to
provide more information to you about the details of that statement.
Speaker 1: Welcome friends. It's the Ricochet Podcast and it is number
seven hundred and twenty six. If you're making hash marks
on your cell wall, I'm James Lylyx here in Minneapolis,
sitting across from a beautiful thirty one story skyscraper, which
is the tallest building built in the year two thousand
in the United States of America. It sold a few
years ago for two hundred million dollars. It was sold
yesterday for six million dollars. Such as the state of
things here in Florida, we have Charles C. W. Cook, Charlie,
how you doing.
Speaker 4: I'm doing well. Is the downtown Minneapolis really that troubled well?
Speaker 1: Kind of? Sort of? Yeah, it is. And what it's causing,
of course, is massive increases in property taxes for the homeowners.
So everybody got to go work from home, and that
was absolutely fantastic. And who needs a city anyway? I
hate to commute, and the end result is an empty downtown.
So it's remarkable because I passed through this building every
day and I'm thinking it may be torn down. It
may be at the thirty one story skyscraper demolished because
it costs ten to twenty five million dollars a year
to eat and cool the thing, and they're just simply
no money to be hand in it. Or everybody says,
let's turn it into housing is if you can wave
a wand and all of a sudden, pipes and windows
are manifested everywhere. It doesn't work that way. We'll see anyway.
It's been an interesting week. It's been ups and downs,
it's been calamitous. Let us start with, well, there was
a freeze and then there wasn't. You can talk about
the metrics, the performance, how it looked, the optics, the idea,
whether or not it was good or bad, or where
the rest of it. I think the kerfluffle surrounding it
will be forgotten. But you hope that the enthusiasm for
a line by line examination of these programs and grants
is not That's the important thing to take away, isn't it.
Speaker 4: Yes, there may be some legal obstacles, but in many
cases this power has been delegated to the president and
to the various agencies which work for the president, and
so a freeze is permissible. There will be exceptions. I'm
sure there will be litigation, and that's fine. But the
White House has been tasked by Congress with an enormous
amount of the legwork in determining where these funds go,
fact finding and so forth. It seems a little odd
to say, you're not allowed to pause before you make
your next decision, You're not allowed to audit, you're not
allowed to reconsider based on your political reevaluation of the landscape.
So I do expect in the long run, this project
will be continued.
Speaker 1: Right York Times had a list of two thousand, six
hundred grants which were in danger and one could peruse them,
and that was a nice public service. I'm glad they
did that. I kept scrolling down and scrolling down on
my browser, struggled to keep up with the number of
programs that it was loading constantly until I got to
the bottom. And you can look through some of them
and say, well, I think that's a legitimate expenditure for government.
But then you can look at others and say, I
have no idea whatsoever why we are doing this other
than we did it last year and ergo must do
it next. Somebody online and I can't remember the name
of the person alas I'll try to find it for
the comments Twitter user small r Republican. I think is
what it is is a data crunch or extraordinary and
built a database into which you can plug any keyword
and it will tell you the government programs that are
perhaps spending money on that. Somebody put in yarn and
came up with a whole variety of programs that the
government is funding to encourage knitting in underserved communities. I
put in coffee, and I've found a six hundred thousand
dollars grant to another country to encourage sustainable farming on
some plot in some indigenous land in the back of
the country of whatever. It's remarkable how much we pump
out in terms of large ass and how little we
seem to be able to know how to get our
hands around it. Do you think, however, that Doge and
I just love the fact that it's named after a
mispronunciation of an animal and a coin is actually going
to be able to do something of this. Because the
reason that I was saying the freeze is good, I
think the freeze was done wrong. I think and across
the board freezes they did announcing it and then having
to explain it and say no, these things are exempt.
I think it's easier to just say to come out
and say here is a trench of programs that we
are freezing, and we're going to look, but there has
nothing to do with anything else that the government does.
These are twenty six hundred non essential or perhaps essential things.
We're going to look at these and then go through
them line and freeze them line by line, because we
all know when we have these blue ribbon panels and
commissions that issue a white paper about what to do,
nothing is ever done ever. So this seemed to be
a good way to do it. But do you think
then that after we do have the freeze and evaluation,
do you actually think there's going to be an appetite
to knock them off? Because I don't think it's performative.
I think they actually are serious about doing this.
Speaker 4: I think they are. I think this is the one
area where DOGE will be useful. So the way that
this has been sold is typical of the Republicans in
that it is exclusive of the real drivers of our
debt and deficits, which are entitlements and interest on the debt.
Can't touch those because the public doesn't want to, the
President doesn't want to, and Congress doesn't want to. Because
you can't touch those, you can't reduce the debt, and
you can't not pay your debts because otherwise you default.
You cause all sorts of other problems, so we aren't
serious about cutting spending. But there are two areas that
were identified in that initial DOGE report that you really
can do something about. One of them is this, which
is discretionary grants determined by the executive branch. And the
other is fraud. And there is a lot of fraud
in Medicare, and there's a lot of fraud in Medicaid.
I could be wrong. I think the number in the
report was two hundred billion dollars. Now relative to the
overall budget, that's not going to fix our issues, but
it would still be good to have that two hundred
billion dollars in the treasury or.
Speaker 1: Two hundred billion here, at two hundred billion there. Eventually
you're talking a lot of.
Speaker 4: Money exactly, So, providing they get the right people in yeah,
I think this would be useful. I also think as
a rule that it is really good for any organization,
especially those that take money from the public by force,
to reevaluate every few years.
Speaker 1: What is doing.
Speaker 4: I do it with my finances. I look through my
credit card bell and think do I need that? Do
I need this? Was that a good use of money?
I was fifteen years ago dating this girl whose grandparents
lived in a really nice part of Michigan that is
full of enormous houses. And I was absolutely astonished at
the time by their house and their many cars and
clothes and so on. And one morning the grandmother drove
sixteen miles to find gas that was thirty cents cheaper.
And I thought, hang on a minute. You have champagne
at dinner, you have this massive house, you have this
Lincoln cars, and you're doing that. But then it occurred
to me, well, that's a habit, and that habit is
one of the reasons they have all of that stuff
is that they have gone through and looked at where
to save money as a matter of course, for probably
fifty years. And the federal government is the opposite of that.
It hasn't done this for probably fifty years. There are
probably line items in there that started at some point
and may have completely transmuted themselves from the original intent.
I don't want to be too harsh on the New
York Times. I'm sure that resource is usedful, but it's
also probable that whatever The New York Times is explaining
a given programmers doing may not be exactly what it
does in practice, or if it does do it, it
perhaps doesn't do it efficiently or on the way that
we would want. And the only way that you could
find that acts to conduct an audit. So I think
this is really really good, providing that we don't kid
ourselves that it is going to solve our issue, which
is that every year, deliberately and with the blessing of
the American public, we spend about a trillion or more
dollars more than we take in.
Speaker 1: Right, well, I mean yes, if they put that in
the sense that we're going to do an audit and
figure out, you know, we're paying both for Acorn streaming
service and britt Box, we can probably get just one
and people would you know, put those in at least
it would be explainable to the people who are addicted
to British crime shows, of which I happen to happen
to be one of them watching something and watching something
now called Cormorant Strike, which is apparently a very famous
Private Eye series, and JK. Rowlings is the executive producer.
So I'm amazed at gut on the air without a
people protesting outside Netflix headquarters. But the second thing is this,
when you mentioned entitlements, is it not the time perhaps
for somebody with Trump's megaphone and bowl in the China
shop here, and I'm breaking reputation to say, hey, we're
not going to touch anything from anybody for anybody who
is below this age. But if you are above this age.
But if you are below this age, we're going to
give you option to quit, to opt out of it,
to put your money into some you know, I mean
various ways to do it. Say you have to invest
in the stock market, you have to have a four
oh one k, or you have to have something to
supplement Medigaid or Medicare or Social Security. But just you don't.
If you don't want to, you don't have to be Now.
I know that the system depends on younger people coming
up the chain and paying into it. That's the Ponzi
scheme nature of it. But we're going to be stuck
paying this entirely forever unless we figure out a different
way to run Social Security. Or is that just too
much of the plate for the moment.
Speaker 4: It's time for Trump to do that if he wants
his approval writing to be twenty five percent. I completely
agree with you. I think Paul Ryan was correct about this.
I say this, but I'm allowed to be, perhaps even
enthusiastic about being unpopular. Trump is not Obama writer. I
can this. I do spend a lot of my time
saying things that I know that people reading me won't like,
because I think they're true, and I think I owe
it to the few people who do read me to
tell them what I think is true. And if they
don't want to read anymore, that's fine. But I'm certainly
not going to bend a public opinion because I'm not
a politician, but Trump is, and that's a more complicated
relationship without going into Edmund Burke and all of the
debates over whether you're supposed to lead or follow as
a politician in a democratic society. Donald Trump understands and
is correct in his assumption that the American public does
not want to do entitlement reform, and he knows that
if he touches this, and I should say I don't
think he wants to. I don't think this is Trump's
political view, but he knows that if he touches this,
he will be demogogued in every direction. It will get
in the the way of all the other things he
wants to do. In his brief time, probably two years
before he loses the House, certainly four years before he's
unable to be president anymore. Well, he knows it will
destroy his presidency. And I don't like the fact that
both parties have alighted on this view and that this
is where we got to. It's a country, And I
don't like the fact that we were willing to talk
about it at least sixteen years ago in a way
we're not now. But I also do understand that from Republicans,
and I ultimately blame the left side of the Aisle
for the total unwillingness to even discuss this that leads
to Republicans having to essentially give up on it because
when we did talk like adults, we were crushed for it.
So what have they done. They've decided that they'd rather
get all the other things on their list done and
this will just have to collapse of its own volition.
Speaker 1: Quite right, Panhead or phillipswear screwed. But you, of course,
are part of the National Review monolith that does nothing
but praise Trump. According to mattter Lass, who I guess
isn't it hasn't scrolled down below the the site or
opened up the magazine in some time. Nevertheless, I can
imagine that somebody at NR or NRO doing a little
research over the freeze and the programs and the rest
of it might have thought, I wonder what the OMB
website is saying about this? And this has been a
bugaboo of mine for the last week, and nobody seems
to care. Nobody seems to care that there isn't a
website for the OMB. There used to be that is
that true? Not anymore? Because my wife, who works in
healthcare and finance and the rest of it, when this
all dropped, everybody was, you know, chickens, heads on fire,
whatever metaphors you want to construct. Frankenstein like was going
to the OMB website for guidance. And if you type
in oh, you know OMB dot whatever permutation you do,
it goes right to White House dot gov, right to
a picture a President Trump filling the whole screen pointing
at somebody, and there is no OMB. Try it. Maybe
they fixed it now. In the past OMB opposite Management
and Budget dot gov has always defaulted to the white page.
But it's the subdirectory OMB, and therein you will find
all kinds of stuff. I went back into archive dot
org's wayback machine and was able to find countless screen
grabs of a discrete site that the OMB had with
a variety of links to programs and resources. They're not
there anymore, and they stopped being there on an inauguration day. Now,
I was reading the Hill because the Hill was talking
about the Trump administration taking down all these sites, okay,
and I thought, well, that's interesting. I can understand this.
I can understand that. And the Hill said that the
Trump administration had taken down a site about the Constitution
which was up during Joe Biden's years. Now, what would
you take away from that, Charles, What was that? What
impression would you get from that? Why?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: What did the site say? Well, that's just it. It
was about the Constitution. It explained what the Bill of
Rights were, explained the ratification process. It didn't have an
actual copy of the Constitution, but it did have the
Bill of Rights, et cetera. But the idea was was,
you know, during Joe Biden's administration, Whitehouse, dot Gov talk
about the Constitution. Trump comes in and he takes it away. Well, actually, no,
what happened was there was a sub section of the
site called our founding Documents or something like that, and
they nuked that, and the Constitution side happened to be
one of them. The Constitution and the founding document sites
were actually put up during the Trump administration, and then
we're just sitting there during the Biden administration. So the
impression that the Hill gives you is that, well, Biden
was keen on putting the Constitution up there and Trump
took it down. It's not true. The Constitution could be
founded at the National Archives, it could be fund at
the Senate pages anyway. So I know that somebody came
in and just nuked a whole bunch of subdirectories, and
OMB was one of them. But we don't have a
of all times not to have an OMB resource. This
would seem to be one that you want to be
able to go to that page and you can't. And
I called them up, and I called their chatbots and
I asked where the page was, and all they could
tell me is the OMB website is not available at
this time. He seems to care about this, and I
think it's a really strange thing. I mean, never ascribe
to malice what you can do in competence, but it's
like I've spent my week trying to get people to say,
did you know there's actually no website anymore for the
OMB during a time when we're talking about I don't know,
management and budget, it seems, but that's just.
Speaker 4: Me probable this will get fixed because Trump's OMB guy
is pretty good. He's the same guy had last time,
and he's one of his best appointments. I think he's
already got through the Senate. If not, he's going to
sell through the Senate.
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our guest, Dennis Neil, Award winning journalist who's worked as
a Fox News anchor, managing editor of Forbes, a senior
editor at The Wall Street Journal before starting the Dennis
Neil Media. He's the host of What's Bugging Me? A
podcast available writer or maybe not so aggressively, What's bugging Me?
We'll have him tell you. It's a podcast available right
here in the Ricochet Audio Network, and he is the
author of the just published The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk.
Speaker 5: Dennis, welcome, Thanks so much, and it's so great to
see you because I hear your voice James on my
podcast What's Bugging Me, a house ad that runs in
virtually every episode. So I've had this person pictured in
mind this and man, I wish I had your voice.
Speaker 2: It's a great voice, and it's great.
Speaker 1: Do I match the vision because I'm on you know,
I'm Napoleonic in my statue, which is to say, not
particularly tall.
Speaker 5: And your voice, your voice is twelve feet tall. It
is so rich and sonorous and the entire time. In
my mind, I'm seeing Stephen Hayward. Actually that's kind of
who I'm thinking.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm here in my autumnal colors, in my special
color coordinated glasses. If you got me on another day,
i'd be in a suit and tie with the white
glasses or the horn rims. I'm a chameleon. Actually, I'm
an absolute Cameleian. So whatever vision you have in your head,
wipe it away, up end at your schedule. It'll be
different tomorrow. But we've got you here now. We love
your podcast, of course. And Elon Musk has gone from
being the darling of the left because he's the guy.
He's an immigrant, he came here, he's high tech. He
envisioned what the future of electric cars can be. God
blessed this guy. And now he's a Nazi. And I
was going back and trying to figure out the point
of which things began to turn on him. And I
actually think that the progressives began to turn on Elon
Musk the moment that he launched a convertible sports car
into space. I think that was the first moment that
they realized that there was an American vibe to this guy,
that they didn't like, but of course he's a Nazi.
Speaker 5: It was surprising that he even started out with their
support because the left, and by the way, we always
refer to the far right, but the left is only
just the left. But the left so hate wealth creation,
they so resent the very wealthy same donors that they
then go to the back door to get money from.
And so I'm surprised that he did have that support.
But then, of course once he came out for Trump,
and it cannot have been an easy decision.
Speaker 2: I think he really.
Speaker 5: Genuinely feared for America's future and his being an adopted
US citizen, he has the zeal of a convert, and
he cares a hell of a lot more about many
American issues than most Americans do, and I think the
First Amendment is paramount among them.
Speaker 1: Well, that brings us to X or Twitter, and I've
given up calling it Twitter, I just have. I'm sorry,
I lost, I give in. It's X. So he buys X,
which everybody regards as an absolute folly, Musk's folly. I'm
surprised they didn't call it. And it's like a rich man,
It's like Jeff Bezos writing, you know, buying a newspaper,
except you get the feeling that Bezos does not spend
every day obsessively reading every single article in it and
responding to it, whereas you really get the feeling that
Musk is camped on this thing and actually using it
to shape a national narrative, which is what appalls people
on the left and gladdens some people on the right.
I'll let Charlie get in here for a second, but
is that your feeling about it, that his stewardship or
his destruction and turning it into a right wing Nazi cabal,
that X and Musk have been instrumental in shifting a
national vibe.
Speaker 5: You know, it's so sad that when one immigrant to
America and the world's richest man decides to favor free
speech and just let it go. Man, go ahead on
the platform, and we'll let you say as much as
possible that that ends up being looked at in the
way you just described it as such a terrible negative thing,
that it's a conservative agenda. I was in college in
the decades ago. The liberals were the ones who wanted
to live and let live. Hey, man, you live your
life the way you want, and you know, free speech,
and gosh, now several decades later, it's totally flip flopped
around and the liberals do you know that something like
I forget this?
Speaker 2: Do I think?
Speaker 5: It's one third of Americans and this isn't a twentieth
poll taken over twenty five years for our sentiments on
the First Amendment. One third of Americans say it is
more important to prevent hate speech than it is to
protect free speech. And that's just horrifying. And then another
one third or so say, man, I don't know, Well,
that's really bad that you guys don't know. Along comes
are adopted US citizen who says lesson six.
Speaker 2: You know, my book offers eleven lessons.
Speaker 5: Of ela on. Lesson six is free speech is everything?
Stand up and be heard. And he's done so at
great expense to his own personal pocket of once your
worth four hundred billion. Who cares? I mean, he lost
forty percent and so did his investors. On Twitter turned X.
After that first year, all we saw James was story
after story and the liblet lamestream media saying he's ruined
to Twitter, He's breaking Twitter, He's destroyed Twitter. Today X
is the single most powerful, influential platform in the world,
and he made it that way by freeing it, not
by pursuing an agenda. But yeah, he comes out and
he takes sites. Now that's a bad idea when you're
a CEO. He wants to sell cars to one hundred
percent of the audience, He's just turned off half the audience.
Speaker 2: Why would he do that.
Speaker 5: He did it because he loves America and he loves
the First Amendment. I truly believe his intent is good,
which is why I'm so offended to see this stupid
dim wit media backlasher. It's it's a Nazi salute. It's
see Kyle, give me a break. This man wore a
medallion in honor of the Hamas taken hostages around his
neck for a year when he was given that by
the parents of a hostage he is.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just ridiculous. First was Trump, and.
Speaker 5: Then we had a huge backlash by voters and viewers saying,
you know, a liberal media, he's not Hitler. What are
you talking about. I'm now seeing he's not Hitler. First
we had that, and then now they've kind of transported
over to Musk and it's such a tired card to play.
Speaker 2: It's really sad.
Speaker 4: So is he crazy? And I say that affectionately because
my worry about the illiberalism you're mentioning, aside from the
fact that it's just not how the United States works
or should work, is that when you start pressuring people,
when you create a conformist culture, what you do is
you push out the sort of people who are eccentric
or odd, but who are brilliant and who will push
your society forward. And worse than that, you prevent others
from flowering. And I've written about this before. I've talked
about it a lot. If you look back at some
of the great figures in American history, some of them
were crazy, literally crazy. Same in Britain. Some of them
were also evil, which I don't think Musk is. But
Henry Ford was a terrible, terrible person. He was also
a great genius who invented the curR industry. Is Musk
someone that we should look at and say, all right,
he's a weirdo who is off the charts brilliant and
the greatest industrialist in a century? Or is that more
calculs related? What was your conception of him when you
were looking into him and writing the book.
Speaker 5: I would say, I would say that there's a ninety
percent is the real part and the genius, and it's
this mix of what the Edison Einstein jobs in P. T. Barnum,
there's this ten percent sliver on top that is insane,
that's out of his mind, out of this world. And
even though it's only ten percent, it's required to unlock
the full value of the ninety percent. This ability, you know,
it's a this ability to dream huge dreams. And to
think of going to Mars on a private enterprise approach
instead of just going to government waiting to do it
for the next twenty or thirty or forty years is
truly insane to even think of that. I mean, you know,
Walter Isaacson, in his six hundred and eighty eight page
tome Elon Musk, tells the story of twenty years ago
him going to Russia to buy an engine and tell
him I want to go to Mars, and this engineer,
a famous engineer in Russia, spits on his shoes.
Speaker 2: I had devote a whole chapter.
Speaker 5: To that, with a guy who was there with him,
who's introducing him to the Russians of James Cantrell. So yeah,
there is that incredible dream and then he's But the
other thing, though, is he is willing to spend decades
pursuing it. Look at what he just did. There's an
announcement this week FISA. Hey man, we're going to be
the backbone for X money, so you can send your
friend on X or your vendor or plumber money over X.
This is something that Elon wanted to do with PayPal.
When Elon twenty years ago invented x dot com, the
everything app, PayPal board said no, ceo said no, boom.
Elon left PayPal, kept X dot com for seventeen years
or something, and then like twenty twenty one or so,
I think it was Elon buys back X dot com
for a million dollars. This is two years before he
would moved by Twitter. So the guy was thinking all along,
I'm gonna do that one day. He never gave it up.
And so look at Mars and then I read about this.
I didn't know this. I thought, Okay, he'll make it
to Mars and yay. No, he thinks in thirty years,
twenty years, we'll have a million people or more on Mars.
But then he's thinking, but then we've got to figure
out a way to make it to the moon of
Jupiter farther out, and from there we should be looking
at that asteroid belt. And it's an amazing, bold, grandiose vision.
And as much as he loves optimism, because he says
it's the what do you call that, the epigram at
the start of the book that I'd rather be optimistic
and wrong than pessimistic and right, as optimistic as as
all is, the weird thing is it comes back to
a fundamentally bleak view where we are going to expire
as a species if we stay only on this plant
because we're going to blow it up. We can't even
go to the Moon because that's too close to the Earth,
and when the Earth blows up, the Moon's going to
get bleussed. We've got to get to Mars. So it's
kind of a pessimistic, bleak view that's motivating this incredibly
buoyant vision.
Speaker 1: Well, any solar events such as a supernova, the rest
of it would pretty much fry Mars as well. Maybe
he's talking about an extinction level event where a big
rock hits the Earth and we better have a backup.
But he's right, if we don't get off this rock.
Then that's it. Then the only expression of humanity will
be this small little craft that's going out there with
a laser disc of Beethoven and Chuck Berry. And that's
not enough. I mean, it's more probably than most species get.
And it's great. But it's a science fiction imagination that
he has. It's a star trek imagination that he has.
It says, looks these things are actually plausible. These things
actually there's a reason. There's an underlying reason for that.
If I may go on and Charles, did that answer
a question or not?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Absolutely, okay, but.
Speaker 5: There's an underlying reason. Okay, My book has these eleven lessons,
one per chapter. It's eleven lessons that I argue fuel
Elon's enormous success on so many different fronts. And what
can we borrow from that to build a better life
for ourselves Because a lot of us are living lives
of quiet desperation. We are underachieving, we are not taking
on risk, we are not loving out loud and living
out loud. How does Elon do it? It's not just because
he's rich. He's always done it. And I believe that
the first lesson, and the publisher told me dude mentioned
this last Okay, it's just too weird. The first lesson
is all of this may be fake, so just go
for it. He believes that we live inside a computer simulation.
He believes the chances are billions to one in favor
of this idea. And while it might have started out
as a thought experiment, he came to embrace it. And
once you believe that, And what I argue in the
in the leadership genius of Elon Musk is well, let's
say you did. Let's see if it were real. Well, now,
wouldn't you take bigger risks in your life? Wouldn't you
speak out? Wouldn't you live a bigger life? Because is
the game, You've got to make it as entertaining as possible.
And I think that drives a lot of what Elon does.
It frees him to take on extraordinary thoughts and projects.
Look at the brain chip. You know, he's helped two quadriplegics.
I think it is, you know, get some kind of
control of computer streams through this brain chip. But his
real vision there, guys, is in thirty years, millions of
people will have a brain chip to help them communicate
with AI faster, because right now, talking with AI, because
AI can operate in trillions per second of floating point
operations or something. So talking to AIAI feels like it's
talking to a tree. It asks it something of you,
but it's taking forever in its time for you to answer.
And he says, eventually we'll have these chips ourselves. I mean,
the guys just so amazingly beyond anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 4: So why did he become a Republican? What happened to
move him from being that guy who you said has
always been like this in his disposition about who was
all in for Obama to becoming a guy who stood
on stage with Trump. And if you look at the
absurd accusation that he did a Nazi Salid, it was
exuberance over Trump's win, which was a shift for him
given his position fifteen years ago. What happened there?
Speaker 5: So two things happened to him. Democrats and live with media.
I mean the Democrats. And I have been a registered
Democrat all my life. I still am because if you're
in New York primary Democrat primary determines who's getting into office.
Although now in recent years I have not voted because
I just think I'm not voting for any Democrat ever again,
because they left me. They went so woke and so
stupidly liberal. And this whole race identity, that you are,
what your skin color is, not what you have achieved,
not what you're striving for. This whole shift toward we
want equity and equal outcomes for everyone, regardless of the
amount of effort they put into it. That's equity instead
of equality and equal opportunity to make the most of yourself.
All right, sometimes there's not enough opportunity in some sectors
and some among some people are at work on that.
But what they did, my God, and look at it.
Speaker 1: They swept in one word seamlessly with another, because they
seem like they're the same. Equity, equality, what's the difference?
Since everybody wants equality or believes in it fundamentally is
a cornerstone of American identity, all of these equity just
gets swapped in there when it's a totally different concept.
Speaker 5: It was just adopted by New York City voters election
or two ago, where equity is put into our New
York Charter, that we seek equity and everything, and it's
just awful and it's antithetical to what Elon believes. So
you look at how the Democrats went crazy and were
allowed to because of the media. And I was a reporter, editor,
on air anchor for CNBC and Fox Business for a
total of over thirty years, and I don't recognize a
lot of the media today. And by the way, it
might add to self important to even think of it,
but might add to you know, some media not doing
stories on this book, when they did plenty of stories
on Breaking Twitter, that book that came out and the
character limited another by three New York Times reporters, you know,
going after Elon and attacking him. But when the media
abandoned their role as watchdog of both sides, and they
were always kind of more left, and when I worked
at the Wall Street Journal and at Forbes, I was
always more conservative than most of my colleagues. And still
once they abandoned even trying to hide the liberalism and
the bias they had in the media, well then there's
nothing stopping the Democrats, and they weren't stopping themselves. And
I think Elon just felt like, oh my god, we've
got to do something because the Republicans are just not
very good at it. Okay, they're just not very good
at marshaling. You know, they fight so much among themselves,
the Republicans. It's really kind of touching to me that
they don't even manage to marshal a good force a
FAILANX going after the opposition. They're too busy fighting amongst themselves. Look,
they can barely even get cabinet approvals for Trump. You
got Republicans voting against him when he just won the
way he won. So I think Elon stepped in and
it was a multiplier effect as a matter of fact.
And I'm stealing this from someone else. It's just on
the wise guys. John Tobacco on Newsmax, he's this, you know,
Staten Island guy Italian. He plays up the whole angle
and it's just a wonderful time to go on there
and talk with him. And someone else there said, well,
it's not just that what Elon said, it's that he
freed the X platform to let everyone else say whatever
they were going to say. That was the bigger factor
when we had Twitter, Facebook, all of those guys in
with government, letting literally dozens of agencies Department of Defense, CIA, FBI,
the White House request hey, muzzle these accounts play up
these other accounts. It was all a liberal agenda. They
were silencing literally thousands of conservative voices that millions of
people had the right to listen to, and the media
did not even cover that scandal. I did more columns
and more podcasts on the Twitter files revelations. Then the
entire staff of the New York Times and the Washington
Post combined. I did a story count and looked at it.
But in the media, when did they stop believing in
and defending free speech? It was up to an immigrant,
it was up to a US adopted citizen, Elon Musk,
to free that platform and then forgive the filibuster guys.
But what happened next? Mark flipp and Zuckerber comes out
and says, the government pressured us. We were wronged to
bow to that. I want to he literally said the words,
restore free expression to Facebook, Instagram threads.
Speaker 2: The member of threads was the Twitter killer.
Speaker 5: Oh yes, and today it's at less than half of
x but even and he says that, I'm not going
to rely on mainstream media for fact checking, and I'm
firing the fact checking agencies. I know a guy who
knows the guy they're going to lose half their employees
because they were making millions on this this censorship industrial complex.
That's not because they think we're in trouble. It's because
they want to make millions. Okay, that's the profit motive,
but my gosh, the whole thing is just out of control.
And Elon and freeing X allowed us to fight back,
and not enough of us are speaking up. I think
this is that same survey shows like forty percent of
people have never posted online because they fear getting called
out or canceled. Well, it's time more of us did
stand up and make ourselves heard because because the liberals
went way too far and there was too much silence
from the other side. Afraid of being somehow racist or
sexist or hitlarian.
Speaker 1: Or canceled or called up and having yourself doxed and
squatted because somebody doesn't like what you say and as
a bug in their bonnet about you. Now you're right there,
I mean, the previous commitment to free speech and free
expression was thrown out the window the minute it seemed
as if the other side would would would take advantage
of it to challenge the prevailing narrative and what the
prevailing narrative was COVID was an absolute came out of
a wet market when a panglein farted, and Trump was
unquestionably a Russian agent. When those things were the truth,
that any pushback against them was seen not only just
as disinformation but a social evil that had to be oppressed.
It doesn't matter whether or not years later people find
out that's not the case. We'll just shrug and go
as usual. No, we're not going to shrug and go
on as usual, because we saw how the instruments of
the state were brought to bear against the instruments of
information dissemination, and it's not going to happen again. And
the people who just want to blindly pretend that it
didn't are It's remarkable how they've just memory hold. I've
said this before, is that nineteen eighty four turns out
to have been a volunteer project. We ourselves a memory
hold the necessary information. We put the listening devices in
our own home. Willingly, too many people have volunteered for that,
and must doesn't have that spirit. We'll let you go
with this. One of the things that I really enjoy
about the guy, and he's weird, he's strange, I think,
like Charlie says, he's crazy in many ways, and he says,
and it is susceptible to things and may have a
attention span of a gnat on a hot plate. But
also he's made those cars. Also, he's made a company
that bores holes in the ground where the cars can go,
and even named it the Boring Company, which I think
is delightful. He's made the Neuralink, which is going to
be a fascinating I'm not a transhumanist, but we'll see
where this goes. And what he's done in space has
revitalized the American imagination, or at least it should have
the idea somehow that after all those years of boring
shuttle flights and nothing really happening, and space just sort
of becoming nothing but the International Space Station up there,
which probably smells like old diapers and has a bunch
of guys who are doing experiments on whether or not
aggar can form bubbles and zero G. I mean, I
don't know. We have rockets going up all the time
and landing like the rockets of your like the ones
of the science fiction movies that we saw as a kid,
or caught by the by the little pinches that come
out and gently take it to the earth. The imaginative,
illustrative potential of this is so invigorating that how anybody
can watch this and see there must have released a
wonderful time lapse photography of rockets of x rockets going
off over the years, and it's just like, what a
remarkable civilization we are that this we can do. And
to scatter the skies with satellites that can give Internet
to the whole world. Where a sclerotic government spends seventy
three billion dollars to wire a broadband at the barn
somewhere and can't get it done, and this guy has
a constellation of objects up there which can provide infra.
I'll leave with this. There was a guy on Twitter
who said, I, you know, I like the old days
when the billionaires would build like a library in small
towns instead of trying to go to Mars. And I thought,
you idiot. The Carnegie Libraries were great for the time,
of course, but every single one of those starlingk panels
is itself a Carnegie Library times a million. So let's
say it isn't Mars. Could it possibly be that a global, interconnected,
non governmental, free information society that Starlink enables may in
the end run be the greatest thing that he did.
Speaker 2: I certainly hope.
Speaker 5: So at the same time, let's remember that the Internet
began as ann instrument of freedom, and government's helped fund
it start, and then governments quickly turned the Internet and
online commentary is their way of surveilling all of their people.
And now we have our allies in the UK jailing
people because of what they post on the Internet, which
was supposed to free us. Let's remember also that Republicans
will be every bit as willing to try to censor
voices they don't like as the Democrats. I really believe
that during the Trump administration they requested fifty five hundred
accounts on Twitter be silence, and so it's up to
the people to stand up. But if they have a
platform like x, if they have a satellite uplink, access
of the way Musk is providing we can get around government.
I mean, I don't think Musk trusts the Republicans all
that much more than he trusts Democrat because Musk doesn't
trust government. So I appreciate what you just said about Musk.
I mean, you're taking all the stuff I would have said,
make me sound less, so less kind of like, you know,
adoring it.
Speaker 1: I'm just talking. You wrote the book.
Speaker 5: I'm just you know, so the question is, I mean,
you're right there. He gives us vision and excitement. He
believes that all of life, this is less than eleven.
That the most ironic outcome, the opposite of what expected,
or the most entertaining outcome, is the most likely outcome.
Because he does believe in that simulation, you wouldn't run
a simulation and boring outcomes. Well, his going for those
most entertaining, incredible opposite outcomes. That gives us hope, That
gives us the ability to dream big, huge dreams. So
apply some of his techniques to your own life, build
a better life, or feel better about the life you have.
That's what these eleven lessons could do. That's what I'm selling, baby,
I really believe in it. I feel so grateful that
I've been allowed to publish this book. Thank you to
HarperCollins and Eric Nelson, the editor who came up with
the idea. Wasn't my idea, but then when I ran
with it, it just fit. All these eleven lessons and you'll
be amazed at how they ter Locke and feed off
of each other. And I really hope that people can
get something out of it.
Speaker 1: The leadership genius of Elon Musk by Dennis Neil and
of course Dennis can be found in his own podcast
here where you can find out exactly what is bugging
him here at the ricochet Atio Network. Dennis, it's been great.
It's a great subject. And your book I look forward.
I mean, smart guy. He always gave us a couple
two or three of the eleven. Folks got to buy
the book to get all eleven points and see how
they apply to their own life. Thanks a lot. We'll
talk to you later, Dennis. Have a glorious day you two.
You know when you get to Mars though, And that's
the thing. It's just it's amusing to me that the
people who used to be excited about the the humanity
is spreading out. Like back in the sixties when we
had good liberals like Geene Roddenberg, you would come up
with this whole big narrative about we're going into space
from doing wonderful things out there, We're going to bring
the best of American human values out there. Now of course,
that's seen as I'm sure colonization and extractive. So it's right.
You can't go to act in an extractive fashion because
that's the wrong thing. And besides, it's silly because it's
very cold and people will die. Well. I think that
probably takes some warm blankets there. And you know, the
thing of it is, is warm blankets here at this
time of the year. I gotta tell you, I live
in a place where the temperature today is fifty five
degrees what it was a month or a week ago.
Because it gets cold here, it gets cold fast. And
when it does, that's one of my hat that's when
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Speaker 4: I like them a great deal. The fortunate part of
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couple of things before we go here. Deep Seek supposedly
stocks tanked, hair was pulled, sweat was exuded. People wondered
whether or not it was over for American AI Stargate
in trouble because the Chinese apparently were able to run
a far superior AI on. I think they're running it
on the CPU from a TIMEX watch from nineteen seventy
nine or something like that. They're very proud of it.
How do you take all this? I've got an opinion,
But what do you think.
Speaker 4: I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical of these claims and I'm skeptical
of the response. Let me give you a few reasons
I'm skeptical. One, I think they've got a bunch of
really high powered and video chips that they smuggled in
through Singapore. Two, the Chinese Communist Party is full of
lying liars who lie, and the claims that they make
or to be taken with that understanding. Three, the scale
of Chinese industrial espionage is such that if indeed they
stole a lot of this, and goodness me, they steal everything,
then sure they will have been able to cut some
of the development time. But they're not ahead of us.
They're behind us, and they're merely echoing what we've done.
And the fourth reason I'm skeptical is that when everyone
started using this product, they very quickly said, oh, now,
no one else can sign up. This is only to
be used by people who have Chinese phone numbers, which
is the sort of thing do if you look at
your metrics and realizing you're hitting server capacity, but don't
want to say that, because your entire claim rests upon
the idea that you can scale this up for a
fraction of the cost. Now, it doesn't mean nothing was
done here. They have the second move of advantage, of course,
but I am skeptical of this. And my last thought
on this is, don't install it on your phone. Seriously, no,
not install it on your phone.
Speaker 1: It's a keyboard ladder.
Speaker 4: It is absolutely amazing to me that we've just been
through this TikTok saga. There is a Supreme Court case
you can read. It was nine to nothing, and it
includes a whole bunch of information that even I hadn't
read as someone who's interested in this about the extent
to which TikTok was Chinese spyware. And a few weeks
after this happened, the American public voluntarily said, shure, why
not download the latest Chinese spy app. It records your
key strokes, it records your IP address, It can tap
into the geolocation services on your phone, and it says,
literally in the terms and services, this is not a secret,
this is not subterfuge. It literally says on the bit
you have to press with your finger that the data
that it collects and it lists all of the elements,
will be stored in China and could be accessed by
the Chinese Communist Party. So here's my thing. In addition
to my skepticism, it is not going to miss on
me that having lost the last mass surveillance tool that
the Chinese managed to inject into the American market, they
suddenly came up with another one. And Americans for some
reason said, oh, where do I get that? Don't do it? Please,
don't do it.
Speaker 1: I have nothing more to add to that, masterfully said,
And no, I won't, and I don't. I don't like
AI at all. I use it all the time. I
find it. We've had this conversation before, and I used Gemini,
the spoken back and forth interactive one that Google put out.
And I always find it interesting that when it says
something that I know to be untrue, which is interesting
because it will go off and scurry and get its
stuff from its sources and come back and say something
and I know that that's wrong, and I will tell it.
It will just blithely say you're right, I was mistaken,
and proceed at full steam with the same amount of
confidence that it had before. CNN, CNN, AI, DEI, the
acronyms of the day. There's nothing much to say about
the dreadful accident in Washington, d C in the airs
other than to regret, deplore and to all the things
you do in this international tragedy like this. The secondary
conversation that is being had about that is the is
the reaction of people to it. And when I got this,
I was on the treadmill when this happened, and I
was looking at this and I was convinced that when
I went to Twitter, I'm sorry two X, that everybody
would have gone into two camps. And I knew that
there were going to be people who said, well, this
is DEI in action. And I knew that there are
going to be people who said, well, this is because
of Trump, that Trump fired the FAA director, and Trump
is going to cut the butty that this is true.
And I was astonished to find it. But the ratio,
interestingly enough, on X, which is supposedly, of course the
Nazi platform, was like seven to one blaming Trump. Again,
that may be my algorithm. I've sort of liked to
culture disparate dissident voices on ex at least in regards
to what I think. So I'm not in a bubble.
But when I rent to Reddit, and you know, it's
virtually the same thing there. The problem is is that
when Trump comes out and says without any evidence, you
know whatsoever, it starts to put that a different way.
The message that people had gotten is that Trump came
out and blamed DEI and they don't know what the
backstory to that is. Do you think Charles that were
going to that there will be a fuller because I
don't think that had anything to do with what happened.
I really I don't. I may be wrong, but I don't.
But there is a conversation to be had about how
the previous administrative I believe it was under Obama, changed
what they were doing in order to reconfigure the demographic
population of the FAA, and I assume the air traffic controllers.
Is this a conversation all ready to have?
Speaker 4: I think two things simultaneously. I think having DII in
any organization is immoral, and I also think that it
is a problem because you are, by definition eschewing meritocracy.
The second thing I think is that it is unlikely
that it is the proximate cause of this particular incident,
and I think those who are making the second claim wrong.
It's a little bit like and forgive me if you've
heard me say this on another show elsewhere, but it's
a little bit like gas prices, where you can make
the sophisticated case, the correct case, I think, which is
that it's a country. We should have a drill baby
drill approach. We should open up lands, we should encourage investment,
we should create as much cheap energy as we can
and end up with cheap energy. That's a correct argument.
What it's usually not correct is that the transient change
in gas prices is the product of whoever happens to
be president at that moment.
Speaker 1: No, I mean no, it's not going to go up
ten cents or fifteen cents. Here is more likely to
be the effect of supplies of the California switching over
to a different blend or something like that. But you
have to but the aggregate effect over the years is
the result of executive actions like striking down a pipeline
or exactly.
Speaker 4: And so what I think is probably true is that
our air traffic control system is not as good as
it could be because of decisions that were made by
Obama and Biden. I don't think that this accident and
happened because of DEI, and I think it's a mistake
to make that claim. Certain if you don't know anything concrete,
I would just say that flying is unbelievably safe, and
this is a horrible accident. It's the first accident is
two thousand and nine. The sum total of deaths in
commercial aviation accidents in the United States in the last
fifteen years is sixty seven, and they all died two
days ago. There was sixty passengers, four crew on the plane,
and three soldiers in the helicopter. That is horrendous. I
feel very sad about it. I also know that in
the same period, since two thousand and nine, one thousand
Americans have been killed by wasps. There are so many
flights in a year that it boggles the mind. Eight
hundred million Americans fly every year, or eight hundred million
passengers in the United States. There are around fifteen billion
passengers in the last twenty years in the United States,
and we have had very very few accidents, let alone
fatal accidents that the safety record is fabulous. An occasionally
you're going to get a freak accident like this, and
to try and blame it on a proposed hiring freeze
that hadn't affected anything yet, that was submitted eight days
prior to the crash is just rank stupidity. To try
and blame it on this president or that president, or
this policy or that president without evidence is ranked stupidity.
The statistical likelihood is that once in a while this
is going to happen, and we will learn from this,
and we will, as we have in the past, make
it less likely next time, and probably air travel will
get safe for as a result of this, as it
did after the two thousand and nine crash in Buffalo,
as it did after the post nine to eleven in
Queen's and asaid did after nine to eleven. But I
just think that we have reached a point, James, which
far too many people are so obsessed with politics and
parties and politics at that and in particular who is
the president, that they have come to treat presidents as
talismans who are responsible for every single thing that happens,
and have thus concluded that when something awful like this happens,
when a military helicopter hits a passenger jet and sixty
seven people die, that it must be because of what
the person sitting in the White House did. And I
don't think it's a very good model for evaluating aviation safety.
Speaker 1: No, it isn't. No. I spend a lot of time
in old newspapers, and if you go back to the
early days of commercial aviation, the number of planes that
regularly fell out of the sky was just astonishing. I mean,
I'm surprised they didn't have a standing illustration that they
could just slap on these things. You know, some cartoon
plane with a question mark and exclamation point coming in.
They went down all the time, and people still got
up on them and made it and a got better,
and it's the miracle that it is today. I love
to fly. I love to look out the window. I
love to leave the earth and join the you know,
the great beyond on the other side of the clouds.
It is a you are, you are vouchsafed, and a
vision which has escaped humanity its entire life. And there
you are, like a god piercing through these pillowy white landscapes.
It's extraordinary. And yes, we will keep going. But yeah,
let's take a look at how we're hiring. Let's take
where we're hiring. Let's and we'll learn and on we go.
We've learned a lot from this podcast, and we will
go on. We didn't get to the uh to the
point about they've they've found a new painting by Vincent
van go The only thing that I want to say
about this, Charles is we're running out of time and
I got eight lunch. Would you say van go or
Van Gough?
Speaker 4: I would say van Goff, you would Okay? It plays
for the Detroit lions.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, I'll say Van go there and speak for
minut America, the true heartbeat of the country. We were
growing up. By God, we grew up with Van Go
and Pee King and we're gonna stick with it. Hey, folks,
thank you for listening, and of course we would love
to thank Cozy Earth and Bamboo Hr for sponsoring this
the podcast. We'd love to thank you for going and
giving us good reviews in any possible place that you could.
And we'd love for you to join the Ricochet at
ricochet dot com, where you can have access not only
to the wonderful podcast, but more podcasts and great stuff
and a member community and chat. That really is the
place you've been looking for. Are you tired of arguing
with idiots on Facebook? Come and argue with idiots and Ricochet. No,
let me put that a different way. Trust me. It's
a community that discusses everything in the face of the
earth and you'll find friends there too. So I'm James
Lolac Charles. Thanks for joining me. We'll see everybody in
the comments, said Ricochet four point zero.
Speaker 2: Ricochet, Join the conversation