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