Speaker 1: We'd like to thank Cozy Earth. No, we wouldn't let
me start that over. We would like to think bam
bamp three two one. Ask not what your country can
do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Mister gorbach Off, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet
Podcast and our guest is you the members who pose
questions to myself James Lylyx and Charles C. W. Cook.
So let's have us of the podcast. Oh and tariffs do.
Speaker 2: Well the all first questions for the blood hand this
evening is what's great a parent of Cartesian dualism. Resist
the reduction of zs ideological phenomena to physical states.
Speaker 1: President Trump, I really don't know what he said at
the end of this, and I don't think he knows
what he said either. Listener mail welcome everybody. This is
the Ricochet Podcast, number seven thirty six from James Lylyax
in Minneapolis, Spring not yet here. Slake gray Sky's bit
of a chill to the air. The other day the
tornado sirens went off and wailed for about four minutes,
to the extreme distress of all dogs and some people.
But nice to know that soon the twisters will be
scribbling their way across the landscape to lift us either
into OZ or elsewhere. But in the other version of
American paradise OZ, like green, verdant, lush, humid, is Florida,
where we presume Charles is at the moment Charles see
w Cook, welcome, thank you.
Speaker 2: Did the Hawaiian shirt give it away?
Speaker 1: Yes? Whenever I see Hawaiian shirt, I naturally think of Florida.
I suppose Stephen isn't with us, By the way, Stephen
is right now somewhere off with Peter Robinson and rob
Long telling you stories about me and Charlie. So I
suppose before we get to the member questions, because we're
just sort of winging it today, we're just having fun.
We're just, you know, taking having a lark. Is it
necessary to have the obligatory segment about terras, which will
immediately be rendered You're meaningless by some other twister turn
in the next forty eight hours or forty eight minutes.
Would you like to say something, would you like to vent,
would you like to spleen dumb? Would you like to
open a vein on everybody? Or are you just sort
of tired and beaten down by it all? And waiting
for the next week to change things again.
Speaker 2: I'm never too beaten down to vent my spleen. James,
all right, well, it's silly, isn't it. It's counterproductive economically,
it's counterproductive politically. And here's the bit that I don't understand.
You don't need to hear me go on and on
again about the economics, but the politics of it fascinate me.
We just had a report that consumer confidence is the
worst it's been for years, that people are worried about
inflation in a way that they haven't been since Joe
Biden was alive.
Speaker 1: What were the lace of the last inflation numbers, by
the way.
Speaker 2: Very good, But this is the politics. Inflation went down
people expected to be seven percent? Why? Because of tariffs?
And my question is, even if you feel obliged to
defend Trump in this particular, don't you want the rest
of his agenda? Don't you want the rest of his
presidency to work?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: I don't understand the gamble here.
Speaker 1: I know. I think the gamble is is that all
of this will be short term, and that everyone will
come to the table and that'll be good news, and
that it won't have an inflationary effect and that it
will all be forgotten in a month, which is entirely
possible given the speed at which these things pass these days.
But they ought to do a better job of touting
what they are doing. Had a post up on Ricochet yesterday.
This morning, there's a cabinet meeting. When they aired the cabinet,
it's all on TikTok and it's all on YouTube, and
everybody sits down and gives the report about what they're doing,
and it's like a wish list of the basic conservative ideas,
with the exception of a couple of things. And it's
really remarkable because when you look at it, as I
wrote on the Ricochet dot com, which you should join people,
nearly every single one of them is something that people
on the right would say, good glad we're getting on that.
And you realize if there was a Harris administration that
none of that would have happened. In fact, we'd have
the absolute inversion of every single one of those ideas,
all of them. And so yeah, they really a probably
are doing a bad job of communicating these things, or
they contend to communicate them in the usual means modern
means now, which is memes and social media. And two, yes,
this is bad for the future agenda because if you
do indeed have the dislocations, the economic dislocations that people
are worrying about, then the midterms are shot. But we'll see,
we'll see. It's a zesty farago, is it not.
Speaker 2: You were going to say, well, the best case scenario
you just outlined is it's forgotten in a month. That's
the best case.
Speaker 1: I well, no, politically, that's the best case. I'm not
saying economically, culturally, socially, etcetera. It's the best case, right.
Speaker 2: But my point is that even if you were going
to do this, which I oppose, not least because I
think it's unconstitutional to delegate the tariff power, I agree,
But if you were going to do this, you do
it later. Because presidencies, and this is to us extensively
because we have created a pope like presidency and become
very superstitious about it. But it's nevertheless true that presidencies
rise and fall on the economy. And Trump last time
around did a pretty good job on the economy. The
twenty nineteen economy was not there because of Trump, the
Great and Wise Trump, but he did things that helped
create the circumstances of twenty nineteen that people really liked,
the tax bill that he signed, the deregulation in which
he engaged. These were good things that created stability and
optimism and investment, and because of that he should have
been able to then move on to other things. Now
he wasn't because he was very unlucky with COVID. I'm
pretty defensive of Trump over COVID. I think that Trump
dealt with it, okay, I think no other president would
have done better. We were all in very, very strange place.
And he also had a lot of his early presidential
months years even taken up with absurd lawfare and Russia Gate.
So I have a great deal of time for the
idea that Trump was screwed over in his first term
quite frequently. But the lesson from the first term is
if you create an economic environment that works for people,
which twenty nineteen did via the usual conservative policies, people
like you, and when people like you, they have a
lot of time for the rest of your agenda. Now,
Trump is doing very well on the border, with the
exception of some due process questions that I object to,
but as a rule, he's doing very very well on
the border, and people are responding to it. His approval
rating in that area is very high. I just think
that the smart political player would have been to come
in do what he's done on the border, do what
he did in twenty seventeen, renew the tax cuts, pro
growth policies, do some cuts which he doesn't seem to
want to do, deregulate which he is doing, and then
go about the difficult bits. Now that's not to say
I'm not going to suddenly endorse all of this tariff stuff,
both because I think it's unconstitutional for the president to
do and I think that it is just absurdly over
the top. It's one thing to have a China policy.
It's another to put ten percent tariffs on people who
don't have tariffs on us, with whom we have a
trade surplus, to talk to our allies as we do,
and all the rest of it. But some of the
things Trump wants to do are quite difficult to get done.
They require persuasion, and they are not necessarily sixty forty
seventy to thirty propositions. And I really worry that the
rest of those things have now been set back by
the chaos that has been unleased in the last two weeks.
So that's why I think it's politically bizarre. Anyway, we
can move on side questions now that I.
Speaker 1: Get that and I agree. The only thing that I
will say, and I'm not saying that I agree with it,
that I understand the argument is that you are not
going to get China's attention otherwise, and you're not going
to get China to do anything otherwise because, as we know,
everyone sits down around a table and talks for two
years and comes up with something that eventually, supposedly down
the road and twenty twenty nine, we'll begin to address
the problem of possible finds for IP stealing in the
rest of them, and everything goes on as usual, and
everything that you buy on Amazon continues to be Timu
junk and etc. Etc. And this rankles Trunk in a
way that just apparently is just a corrosive, acid soaked
popcorn hull and his goal in his gums. And we've
been hearing it for years. But you're right, let's get
onto questions. Because members of Ricochet, of which there are many,
and they are a wonderful bunch with great opinions may
put some questions on Ricochet for Charles and to address,
and the first comes from Michael Minette. Question, what do
you see as the pros and cons of the current
global Packs Americana. Do you think there's a practical way
to pay for it without beggaring the American people?
Speaker 2: Charles, Oh, I have many thoughts. Thore's are two separate questions.
I think the Packs Americana is a wonderful thing and
that it would be an absolute disaster if we traded
it for a Pax something else. The Packs of Americana followed
the Pax Britannica. The Pax Britannica was broadly begun in
eighteen oh five on the water and in eighteen fifteen
on the land, with the battles of Fifaga and Waterloo, respectively.
In nineteen forty five, at the end of the Second
World Warish Empire was exhausted and depleted and broke, and
we handed over control of the seas to the United States.
That sounds like said we did it out of the kindness.
Speaker 1: Of our heart.
Speaker 2: We had to, but we passed the bat on to
another English speaking nation with the rule of law. And
this is a wonderful thing. This is why the world
looks as it does, is that America is in charge
because the alternatives are all awful. China, Russia, France. We
don't want those people.
Speaker 1: You can take the British citizenry out of the man
but you but you can't take the British desire to
just take a little swipey if possible. Yes, I don't
think there'll be a Friendshire pack.
Speaker 2: But that's the first part. So we should want this
because there is no alternative. How do we pay for it? Look,
this does cost us, but not that much. In nineteen
sixty that would have been much more difficult to interrogate
because fifty percent of the federal budget was spent on defense. Now,
the amount we spend on defense, I believe is eight percent,
and that is less than we're paying on interest on
the debt. We do not, relative to other things, spend
very much on our military or on the packs. Americana.
Relative to other nations in both absolute terms and when
compared to our GDP, we spend quite a lot, but
we do not spend much on defense compared to say,
social Security or Medicare, or interest on the debt. And
because of that, I think that the packs of Americana
is a bargain. So if you were looking at the
budget and the question were and ought to be given
our predicament, where do we cut? That's the last thing
I would cut, because that is, in my estimation, the
reason we have a federal government. The federal government, whether
it's a good idea or not, does not exist to
provide social security or Medicare, or the Department of Education
or farm subsidies, or to borrow money every year. The
federal government exists primarily for international relations and within that
for defense, and I am open to the idea that
across the board cuts would involve some reductions in defense spending,
although I think there are solid arguments against that too.
But to start with that, or to make that the
focal point of any inquiry into our expenditures, seems to
me backwards.
Speaker 1: The cons woul seem to be that we feel obligated
to get involved in conflicts which manifestly on the surface,
do not seem to be issues you care about. And
that's why people on the right are indifferent to Ukraine
or what the off effect would be if Russia just
had taken over and rolled it up, and they're indifferent
in a large part. And I see you get a
lot of this from Vance to Europe in general. And
I was trying to explain this to somebody the other
day who is European and was baffled by what they
see as antipathy to Europe amongst people on the conservative site,
not all, but some. And I think it has to
do twofold. Part of it is maybe, look, we've been
you know, we've been paying for your defense, which allows
you to essentially perform the government equivalent of taking a
long vacation. You know, you get to spend the money
as you wish on the things that you like because
you know that we're going to be there to back
you up, and you don't have to spend any money,
and you can't project power, and your armies consists basically
of bureaucrats, and you know your guns are rusty, and
that we find that contemptuous. Why wouldn't you want to
be able to defend yourself. But the other part of
it is is that I think people on the right,
correctly or not, believe that there is a general lack
of faith in the European idea at all, and that
there's sort of been a combination of a hand waving,
techno utopian, transnationalist belief that all individual national identities can
be subsumed into this wonderful European project, coupled with a
sort of you know, strange, subconscious desire for cultural suicide
that requires the changing of the national character by importation
of people who are antithetical to it. And so we
look at this and say, you know, the reason perhaps
that America is not interested in Europe anymore is that
Europe doesn't seem to be interested in being Europe. Is
that you want to be a collection of quaint little
tourist places, dense little cities with nice old churches and
twisty streets and cafes and the rest of it. And
beyond that, you know, we'll visit and we'll see you
art and your art, and then get our stamped the
passport and go. But Americans don't feel that same sort
of connection as they used it. And part of it
may be again because we're a couple of more generations
distant from the immigrant project, with so many people from
your came over. You know, you know, now we have
the grandchildren of DPS. We don't have the children of
DPS and so just all those connections get severed. And
I hate it, frankly, because you know, the history of Europe,
bloody and awful and remarkable and storied as it is,
is a unique story in the elevation of the human
spirit and individual liberty, and I hate to find us
disconnected on an emotive as well as intellectual level from it,
says I. But then again, I'm not European. Let's go
to Henry henriqu castein this is this is great. I'm
getting out my twelve foot pole because I'm not going
to touch this with a ten. Don't leave it to
Would we be better off if we got rid of
universal suffrage? I'm sorry, I almost went daffy duck on you.
Storage would we be better off if we got rid
of universal suffrage? Because that's what's going That's what's going
to happen now with the new voting requirements, right, and
I'm won't be able to vote unless they show up
in a handmade tale outfit or provide some documents or
something like that. Would would be better? Charles? And what
is the argument? What is he saying though? What basically,
what's the underlying point that he's making because I think
we know what it is. Well.
Speaker 2: Look, the United States is a republic, and it was
founded by people who are openly skeptical of democracy as
they had seen it operate in various places around the
world for the two thousand years prior to the founding.
We still have a great deal of skepticism towards democracy
in the United States. That's what the Constitution is, especially
the Bill of Rights. The notion that the public is
always right is a silly one, but there really is
no better mechanism to correct the behavior of those in
power than elections. If you look at even the last
ten to fifteen years, it's been necessary over and over
again for the public to step in, especially with a
secret ballot that is inoculated against the pressures of public life,
and make their preferences clear. I don't want to see
that go away. I think that's an integral part of
the system. I think that our problem is not so
much in the balance of what we allow to be
voted on and what we don't, or in the balance
of who we allowed to vote, women, eighteen year old immigrants,
or what you are. I think our problem is that
we have put far too much authority in the hands
of the national government and then subject that national government
to the democratic will, and that's why we're all angry
with one another. I hear very few complaints about democracy
from people at the state level. Now, yes, I live
in Florida, and Florida has been a success story, but
I don't hear from those in other places Iowa, Wyoming, Massachusetts.
I'm really worried about this or that election, But nationally,
whenever we have an election, everyone panics because there's so
much riding on it. So I don't think our issue
is with the franchise. I think our issue is with
the vertical allocation of power, which is massively out of
whack in favor of the federal government. America is a
pretty diverse place. I say diverse in the useful sense
of that word, not in the dei sense, which really
means getting people who have differently mutable characteristics but all
agree and putting them in the same room. I mean
that it is a good thing that Minnesota is different
than Florida, because Minnesotans are different than Floridians. But if
you ask them to channel all of their political preferences
and energies through Washington, d C. They are going to
come to blost. That's the issue. As far as I
see it, I wouldn't change the eligibility for voting.
Speaker 1: Well, you're right, and that is why it is baffling
to well, it isn't. But it is baffling why people
insist that we are presently under the increasing pressure of
the jack boot of fascism on our next because of
getting rid of the Department of Education. If you had
an administration that said we are now going to subsume
all educational requirements in Washington under the Department of Education,
if Trump had done this and said that we are
now going this is the uniform National pro America curriculum
that's going to be instituted, and people would scream that
this was that this was fascism. But if a liberal
government did, a leftist government comes in and says, the
Department of Education is now going to be given double
its budget because we're past the horrible days of Trump
and we're going to sweep out all these old ideas
and institute this new thing, which we guarantee, if you
look at the stats and figures, are going to teach
our children well and all, by the way, tell them,
give them all the ideological tools that they need to
be good citizens, good planetary citizens, good climate citizens, and
the rest of it. That's to me, an idiot that
I am, seems closer to fascism than saying we're getting
rid of the national Department and devolving everything down to
the states. The more you devolve down to the individual,
down to the smaller units of government, the less I
don't know fascism you seem to have, so that I
don't get And I'm all in favor of doing this
because it's more responsive, it's more immediate. I've got a
better chance of going to my local city council. Well, no,
my city council is hopeless, but I've got a better
chance of influencing something at a local level than I
do possibly being my one vote is you know, a
tincture of iodine into this great ocean of blue. So, yes,
you're right, You're absolutely right. It's the concentration of power
in the hands of the government. And if there's nothing else,
I hope that the left looks at the last one
hundred hundred and twenty days and says, you know, these
executive voter things here, let's rethink exactly how this works
in a democracy, because I'm not crazy about them, and
I wish that there was an instinctive revulsion on both
parts to ram stuff through using that. I prefer the
legislative process, That's what it was set up for. But
here's the thing. I think Henry's playing with us. I
think what Henry really means is didn't all of our
troubles start when women got the vote? And I think
the reason he thinks that, or he's just playing with us,
And because it's something that you hear people actually say,
you know that that wasn't the best idea. I mean,
I suppose we had to. What they're ascribing to the
female vote or half of it is a sort of
out group empathy amongst liberal women who have you know,
the childless cat ladies that shad Evans was talking about,
who regarded as a as a for a badge of
moral superiority, that they have great empathy and uh and
well desire to help people who are completely outside of
their own social group, their own social norm, their own cohort,
their own tribe, whatever, and that this meaningless consequence free
desire to spread money and gifts and the rest of
it to populations for whom they have a strange, disconnected
empathy and sympathy has actually been injurious to the to
the government, and to the and to society. That that,
I think is the point that he's trying to make
us say. And that's something that I hear from somebody.
I know that that's not the case in your household.
Speaker 2: Charley, Well, my wife thinks simon a left wing squish,
So imagine if that is where Henry's driving, then he
would make an exception for her. Yes, my wife is
somewhere to the rights of Attila the hun.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, I can imagine a fun weekend at the
cook household where she's burrating you for your trigger discipline.
That is just great. Well, good for you, Good for you,
good for you. Hey, something else I want to mention, though,
what is you? Without giving too many details away, what
does your wife do?
Speaker 2: She's is, uh, stay at her mum and has been
since our first child was born.
Speaker 1: Well, good for her. I was a stay at home
dad for a while and years and it was the
best thing I could have possibly done. I do not
understand anybody who just sort of looks down their nose
at stay at home parents, because that time doesn't come back,
and you get to be there at every single moment.
The bad part about it is that your whole life
is flowers for Algernon, because they grow up and they
don't remember any of the things that you keenly recall.
I mean, I recall when my child was too when
we were sitting on the floor and we're reading a
book and we're playing with this toy, and I can
summon up the slant of the light. I can tell
you what dog it was, and what his expression was,
and what was on the television set on Disney Playhouse
and the rest of it. I'm the only one who's
got that stuff. My daughter, who had a great time,
doesn't remember any of it, any of it. And that's
just life. That's just normal. So I don't know it's
better than hiring a nannie, That's all I can say.
I don't even know how you begin to hire a
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we have a question from let me see here. I
love this one. Don g Well, AI make the thesaurus obsolete?
That is is nuance in writing dead dash m dash
only be replaced by the brutalism of bullet points. Well,
first of all, no, it's not going to make the
saurus elite. One of my favorite favorite the Thoris stories
is actually I bought a Rogees. It was a public
domain copy at some point roges in some iteration went
into public domain and I bought it. And I was
looking for something to replace the word idiot. And one
of the phrases used by the US was he who
did not invent gunpowder, which cracked me up because it's
the equivalent he's not a rocket scientist, you know. Then
look at it. Some drooling fool down there. I he
didn't invent gunpowder. The problem is the the sort, the sorry,
I had enough coffee, I've had too much, I've had
too much plywood did this morning. It's full of archaic
words that you can't slip into conversations anymore. And if
you asked AI to actually go back and find old
Thesaurus words, it would look fake. It would look wrong,
just like they're saying. Now, you can tell something as
AI written if it's got an M dash. So no,
I don't think so, But Charles, the general effect of
AI on writing? Can you tell it when you see it?
And do you think that the problem is it's going
to get better and we won't be able to tell
it when it's uh, when it's obvious.
Speaker 2: I think I can tell it. I don't think that
it getting better is necessarily a problem. It might be
if you are a beat reporter whose soul responsibility is
to use facts gathered by other people and rewrite them
in a mundane manner. I think that probably is not
going to survive AI as a role. But you can't
write like George will if you're a computer. And I
know that when I say that, people raise their eyebrows
and say, are you sure. No, I'm not sure. But
let me give you an example of why I think this.
There is, at least for now, no soul in generative AI.
It is necessarily derivative. I have played with musical AI,
and I've asked it, for example, to compose a piece
in the style of a eight Beethoven symphony or an
Italian Mozart opera or a Tchaikowsky ballet, and it's very
very good at it. It's so good at it, in fact,
that it is possible that we will in a few
years have lots more quote unquote Mozart operas. But they
are nevertheless or copies or adaptations of Mozart's operas. They
are not innovative, they are not new. So AI might
be able to ape certain people quite well, but it's
not going to be able to do what George Will
does unless you want every writer to be George Will,
or you want every new writer again in quotation marks
to be a facsimile of a writer who has already existed.
And I don't think we do, which is to say
I don't think we care if your average blunt styleless
news story is written by a computer. But I do
think we care if the opinion page of the newspaper
is set in amber is always for the rest of
time presented by the same people, and the same goes
for novels and plays and TV shows and so forth.
I think we are going to demand that individuals fill
that role. So I'm not so worried about it replacing
genuine creativity. But the drudge work, yeah, that's going to happen.
Speaker 1: I think you're right what I I mean when you
talk about derivative works. Yes, it's all derivative, but you
can say that for many posers who start out who
are influenced by the work that came before, that they
are derivative of their predecessors. And you certainifind that in
pop music, I mean, if you asked if you asked
AI to come up with a highly polished, multi instrument
string backed pop group that takes extensive use of Beatles harmonics,
you would get electric light orchestra, because definitely it was
very derivative of the Beatles. In a lot of spots
you can find you know, you can find beatless carmonies,
an early cheap trick. That's not a bad thing. They're
taking their learning, they're changing it, or they're dropping it
in as a reference, or all of those things. So yeah,
I mean, is it a bad world in which we
actually have twenty Beethoven symphonies and it's gotten so good
that actually two of them have evolved in ways that
Beethoven might have.
Speaker 2: Don't know, but that's the part you see that I
don't think you can do. And to hit my not
with a sledgehammer once again sounds painful. I think that
your analogy is spot on, but that it stops chronologically.
So if you look at, say the early Beatles records,
please please me. It was supposed to be a Roy
Orbison song. It was supposed to be slow, and George
Martin said, no, you need to speed it up.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: You could see all the tags hanging off that Tomorrow
never knows was like nothing that had ever been done.
Or if we're looking at Beethoven, a lot of early
Beethoven sounded like Mozart because Mozart's Betove was here. But
then when you get to the fifth you go, oh
my god, this is essentially heavy metal in classical music.
I don't think AI can take that step. I don't
think it would have stopped at being Mozart, or it
would have stopped at being Roy Orbison.
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right, and I wanted to make that point too. Example,
you could train you know, the the AI on the
first five on the first four symphonies of Maler, and
it would kick those out, but it would not be
capable of coming up with the seventh through the eighth.
It certainly wouldn't be able to come up with the tenth,
the first movement of the tenth because Marler, for all
of his tonality and all of his Viennese antecedents and
the rest of it, comes about two notes short of
a twelve tone row. And I don't say that like,
you know, he's a few cards, you know, having mail short.
I mean, although I hate serial music, so there is
a point to be made that two tones short of
a twelve tone row is a good thing or a
bad thing. But he does there's a dissonant chord that
appears in this that that AI would have. I don't
think AI would have been able to say, well, I
think Maler's going in this direction. I think he is
anticipating or following Alban bergen work. Check. I think he is.
I think he is realizing that the tonal tradition is
dead and he's adapting to it. Or more likely Maler
was just ef and depressed because his family, you know,
his home life was bad, and this was this expression
of great despair. I think he actually, if it wasn't
the maybe the ninth. I think it was in the tenth.
He actually just wrote his wife's name just over this
this these measures because he was just freaking out. I
think she was. I don't know if she was Bang
in France, verfal or the architect or what. But I mean,
an AI is not going to have an emotional reaction
and scream out of dissonance court in the middle of
the tenth Symphony because his wife, because the AI's wife
is having a problem. It can only extrapolate from histories
and say a number of composers who had domestic problems
that therefore came up with this and therefore and can work.
Now that isn't to say that there isn't some super
intelligence that can't evolve from this. I've read enough, Star Trek,
I've seen enough all of these things to know that
I'm not leaving anything out. But you're right about the
soul lessness of the derivative work as far as other
art forms, though it's entirely possible. In the world of gaming,
the ability of computers to sell enough things on the
fly is going to revolutionize what computer gaming is is
if it hasn't already. And secondly, when the tools of
cinematic creation are as good as I think they're going
to get, it is going to put into the hands.
It's going to put a tool in the hands of
people who otherwise would not have been able to really
create what they do. It is great that us Anderson
has the money in the budget to be able to
dress as set as he does, but a lot of
people aren't, and they're going to be able to do
it with Ai the other But I don't know if
you saw this. Elon Musk, I know the hip We're
loving Musk came up tweeted out something the other day.
It was the landscape of Mars a video of it,
and said, you know, hoping to go there in twenty
twenty five, and then he added something with Optimus Robots.
I had not heard about this before. Have you heard this?
Speaker 2: I did see the tweet, but I'd never heard of
it before either.
Speaker 1: Sending Optimus robots and a Mars missure, which makes perfect sense.
I mean, I've seen these guys were in cowboy hats,
playing bar me you know, being bartenders, and you know,
doing various interesting things, which I assume is a result
of somebody, you know, working the strings behind the But
if he's sending Optimist robots to robots to Lauri's, first
of all, it means probably there's going to be some
human being back of the control room who is in
essence going to be the first person on Mars because
his sensibility, his intellect, all of these things will be
controlling the robots. Second, if there's a bunch of them,
they're going to be doing stuff on Mars, that's fantasm.
They're going to be They're gonna be line dancing like
four Optimist robots, are going to be doing humorous things
up there. We're going to have like the Marx Brothers
on the on the Mars. If it's it changes the
whole thing from a little you know, wall e robots
rolling around and picking up rocks to humanoids reacting as
the behanced to the personalities of the creators of their
controllers back on Earth.
Speaker 2: I think is fascinating all right, as long as we
don't have to rescue Matt Damon.
Speaker 1: And I can't we spend entirely too much money on that.
The third time, I think, I think Matt is Matt
Damon and the new Hail Mary movie, which is no,
he can't be because he was in the other one.
Don asked another question here and I got to put
it in because it's just too great. James and Charles
have done many guest interviews over the years. Do they
have a favorite?
Speaker 2: Charles Well, I did enjoy having Mike Rowe on my
podcast a couple of years ago. Talked about something which
is very dear to my heart and also to Mike Roseheart.
That is the over credentialization of our society and how
we can reverse a horrible tendency of looking down on
people who have good jobs and skill jobs, but didn't
go to college and don't have a piece of paper
that reflects some educational achievement. I thought that was a
good one. I enjoyed talking to Andrew Roberts about his
book on Winston Churchill, Walking with Destiny. He also made
the case of a Napoleon, which is a brit I
find very difficult to swallow. Yeah, he's a Napoleon defender.
That was very interesting, and he defended King George, iid
the real Devil's advocate.
Speaker 1: Hey, I'm just asking questions. Yeah right, you know.
Speaker 2: Another good one was with our own Peter Robinson, who
came on and talked about his time in the Reagan
White House and writing the speech. I didn't know any
of the story. I asked him to come on and
tell it, not because I wanted to share it with
the world having been thrilled by it, but because I
knew he'd written the speech, but I didn't know how
he'd got there in the first place, or the details
of its composition, or that he'd been over to West
Germany and seen the war. That was a really solid
oral history of a particular moment in time. Those come
to mind, but there are so many of them you.
Speaker 1: For me, first is the most recent would be Michael Palin.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: Just a delightful man and a smart man, and a
cultured man and a good man. You get the feeling.
And we talked at length about his book, and I
was just sitting there saying, I'm not going to bring
up Python. I'm not going to bring it up there
everybody brings up Python, and he brings up Python. So
I took that as a as a hint that I
could go down that road. But mostly we spoke about
his family and his great uncle who died in World
War One in the book he'd just written about it.
And then we talked about art. He's a keen fan
of a certain style of painting a period of painting,
and I have sympatico with that. So it was just
a great, great conversation. And then he came to a
show that I did in London a year later, and
I just felt like, oh, my good new friend, Michael
Palin's here. Would you like to meet the wife and child?
So I treasure that Donald Rumsfeld and the Ricochet podcast
was fun. As usual for those days. I got to
say virtually nothing, but I did get to ask him
if he thought that debathification was a mistake, that it
might have been better for post war stability to just
include these guys and you know, and roll along, because
it's I don't think that anybody really was a committed
bathhist in their heart. It was just simply a state
ideology to which you had to pay ritual obedience. And
he said you know, that's a really good idea and
we don't know, a really good question, and we don't know,
and he said some other things, And I enjoy that
moment only simply because whenever the Iraq War comes up,
I can say, well, you know, I talked to Donald
Barun's bill about that once. And the other finally would
be because it's one of those meet your heroes. But
aren't you glad you did? Was William Shatner, who he
interviewed a couple of years ago, who's notoriously prickly. They
say in some interviews can be great and gracious depending
on the topic at the time of the mood. But
I caught him on the notoriously prickly side. And I
didn't ask him any Star Trek questions whatsoever. And he
just he wanted to talk about his new show with
Henry Winkler, and we did. But I also wanted to
talk about some old, you know, some bad guy roles
that he had played in some movies. He played this
racist Southern preacher who comes into town and stirs up discord.
He's just great, he's just fantastic. I didn't want to
talk about it. It just, you know, and then finally,
at the end of the conversation, I was asking him
how he felt about being in the most recent Star
Trek movie, and he was confused and he didn't know
what I meant. He hadn't seen it. And I explained
to him and that at the end of the Star
Trek movie, yeah, they take out a picture and it's
a picture of the old Enterprise Bridge crew, you know,
you and everybody else. And he didn't know that, and
he was a bit stunned to find out that. And
I thought, I just spoiled a Star Trek movie for
Captain Kirk, and it was my way of paying him
back for being such a pretty prickly guy. But I
still enjoy talking to him. It was still great. In
a related point, used to See Scrubbs says it's popular culture, film,
TV music at an all time low, and if so
ken it will it recover.
Speaker 2: Charles, I think TV is not at an all time low.
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of really good stuff on TV.
I can't sound wildly impressed with movies at the moment, although,
as I've confessed before, I think, to you, James, I
am a movie idiot.
Speaker 1: But he who did not invent celluloid, I.
Speaker 2: Think, But I do remember most of the forty years
I've been alive, and it seems to me that there
are fewer and fewer movies that I see advertised or
hear about from other people and conclude that I must watch.
Hopefully that will change. Music I think is generally awful
at the moment, with the exception of country music, which
my wife likes, which although it's very different country music
that I like, Patsy Klein era country music in particular
does seem to be quite good and does seem to
be better than it was fifteen twenty years ago. But
generally speaking, music I think is quite poor and derivative
and over the top at the moment. So yeah, I
don't think we're in a good place. And this has
disappointed me slightly because I thought a couple of years ago,
when we were in the midst of the worst inflation
for forty years and Joe Biden was president and all
these terrible economic theories for coming back, but at least,
if we were going to have to live through the
nineteen seventies, could we get the music and the movies,
maybe not the TV.
Speaker 1: And we didn't well, if you've gotten the TV. You
would have gotten a lot of Norman Lear sitcoms, which,
for all their various flaws, at least were consistently funny
and consistently dependable. And you had new sitcoms which kind
of played around the edges of some of the old tropes.
And mean, you could say the Mary Tyler Moore show
was was quite different from the you know, from the
nineteen fifties housewife shows or the fantasy shows of the
sixties where the women were wrinkling their nose to create
magic or doing the genie thing. So somehow it faulted right.
But you also you had a greedy noess to nineteen
seventies television which befit the world. Kojak is no place
in which I would want to live. And you know,
if you look at some of the ones set in
Los Angeles and California, you can see the rot You
can see the rotten nineteen sixty seven dragnet. So I
wouldn't mind the television bag was working within certain constraints,
but it's still at the same time it was frothy,
trivial nonsense with battle the network stars and you know,
a lot of variety gruesome variety shows where the Brady
Bunch come out and do dance routines. But you know, yeah,
all of a piece. It was an interesting time film
wise the seventies. Again, Hollywood system was broken. You had
the out tours come up and they were being gritty
and the rest of it. But everybody died at the end.
There was no heroism. There's no joy in any of it.
Star Wars changed all that and it was happy and
they got metals at the end, and it was a
great story. And that started the downfall of the whole thing,
I think, frankly, because when you say there aren't any
movies really that you want to watch. We reached a
point over the last five six years, thankfully thanks to
Marvel and their insistence on this multiverse Phase four whatever stuff,
where movies just simply ceased to engage. They became meaningless
slop of endless CGI that nobody could get invested in
because we all knew it wasn't true. None of this mattered,
and none of it was real. It was just a
bunch of people standing around in green rooms talking to
each other and what was You know what worked great
with Captain America, the first one by the time you
got around to the last slew of marvels. Who cares?
Who cares what this complex Corrodied cosmology is. I don't
so no movies, Yeah, didn't do that. Music don't get
me started. Part of this is is that I was
lucky enough to have the switch off occur at a
point where music became just, you know, empirically objectively worse
than it was before. When I hit the point where like,
I'm old and I don't get it. The stuff that
I wasn't getting wasn't as good as the stuff that
I had before. You don't have people playing instruments like
you did before. You don't have songwriters. If you do
have a songwriter, they've thrown out the bridge, they've thrown
out the chorus. They are taking an old riff, they're
running it through a compressor and they're pretending that it's new,
or maybe they have tip it, or it's all machine noise.
That said, underneath that are a million subgenres in which
people are doing interesting work. My daughter once a week
will send me a story, it will send me a song.
It's amazing that it is stunningly good, and it's one
guy in his basement like Prince used to be. But
it's really good and it busts all the genres and
it plays with things and it's you know, and I
will find her something you know from Club de Belugas,
which is a German neo jazz group that put out
something that could have lit up the charts in fifty seven.
So yeah, there's stuff under there and it's good. So
will it recover as useless ads. I think it already
has and they think it already hasn't. And it's just
a question of keeping your eyes out for the good stuff.
As always more stuff now, which means more bad stuff,
but more good stuff. On a similar thing, Django Django says,
I know nothing about recent movie. So last I watched,
actually rewatched, is tonch of Evil. A couple of videos
on YouTube later that movie where a particular interest. One
was an old interview with Orson Wells and included some
comments from Charlton Heston and Wells made it sound as
though the studio was embarrassed by the movie. The second
video discussed a long quote tracking shot, not the opening sequence,
but rather a longer shot sent in an apartment. Any
thoughts on the movie and Wells's career. All throw that
to you, Charles.
Speaker 2: First, Wow, I haven't seen it. Okay, Well then you
ought to take this one Wells.
Speaker 1: Then he says, it's been a while since. It's a
great movie. Wells is fat and bristly and sweaty. And
I loved the movie, and I love Orson Wells. I
think he's an absolutely tremendous, uniquely American talent, and I
wish we had more of him. But Wells came up
recently in a discussion with my daughter because we were
talking about Star Trek movies and I noticed I noted
to her that the director of the very first Star
Trek movie was Robert Weiss, who directed Sound of Music
and West Side Story. And you usually just don't think of,
you know, a Star Trek movie directed by the guy
with the same sensibility that gave this West Side Story
and Sound of Music. But it's true, and Weiss is
really good. He also did The Andromeda Strain, which is
not exactly a musical. But Robert Weiss was the film
editor on Citizen Kane, which is the greatest American movie
ever made. It's not you know, I'm sorry, it's the
greatest American film. The greatest American movie is Casa Blanket.
So what do I think about Well's work? You know,
I love everything practically that he does. Whether or not
it's a misfire or a mistake, or it's over indulgent
or the rest of it, I just love it. I
mean his his Shakespeare movie is amazing. Citizen Kane, even
though it's a collaborative work, is an astonishing piece of art.
The tracking camera, though, the only reason I want to
stick with this one because I could actually do this
on a diner for thirty five minutes. The tracking shot.
The tracking shot was the distinctive element that first got
people's attention in Adolescence. Have you seen Adolescence? Charles Nope? Okay,
Well this is the problem then, because you are now
completely out of the conversation, and you are you're not
worthy to participate in discussions of youth and in cell culture,
the manisphere and the rest of it, because you haven't
seen the most important movie of television show of our time, Adolescence.
That's actually what they told a guy in the BBC
the other day when we were talking about knife crime.
He said, well, I don't He said, I don't need
to see and he named some long running British BBC
hospital or ITV hospital casualties. I don't need to see
casualties in order to talk about the problems of the NHS.
And they were pulled by that. You mean you haven't
seen adolescents and I saw it before it became a
necessity and a cause celeb in the rest. But the
fascinating thing about the movie the show is that it's
one shot and it's not done Jimmy Stewart rope style
where Hitchcock goes behind somebody's back and that's when they're
swapping the reels out, and it's not done Brian de
Palma style, where there's like a couple of moments where yeah,
they're going behind a pillar and oh, they did one shot,
and by the fourth episode of the series you don't
even notice anymore. You may think, oh, we got from
the inside of the house and now we're in the
lorry and we're going down the road. That's right, but
you're more interested in what's happening. If it's a gimmick,
it's a great gimmick. Brian de Palmer's tracking shot at
the beginning of that Nicholas cage movie. I can't remember
what it was, Snake Eyes, something like that. It's interminable,
but I love it. The tracking shot that begins and
Goodfellas maybe the best in the business, the one an
adolescent sets the scene and the stage and the tone
and the rest of it. I love them. They're very
good wonders and.
Speaker 2: One nineteen seventeen, really did you see that? The Sam
Mendez Oh, yes.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes I did. I did, I did?
Speaker 2: I mean I think maybe there's The whole movie is
two continuous tracking shots and as a moment in the
middle where he gets knocked out and it goes dark
and then they start the next one.
Speaker 1: Right. So, while it's easier today with drones and smaller cameras,
in the rest of it, my hat is off to
Orson Wells who had to put these things on cranes
and take them from up there and put them down
the street and into people's rooms and the rest of it.
It's just great. And the day that we forget the
artistry and the contribution of Orson Wells is a sad
day in America. Here's one for you, Charles, in commemoration
is from the honorable mister Fancy pants in commemoration of
the Florida Gators winning both the NCAA championship. Here's a
movie sports related question in Charles's opinion and mine too,
what is your favorite sports movie and why?
Speaker 2: It's a lot of great sports movies. I do like
the trilogy of Kevin Costner baseball movies, and I think
the last one in I won't call it a series,
but the trio for the Love of the Game is
much better than people think it is. The other two
coals are famous, the Bull Durham and my Goodness, difficult
in the name of it. If you build it, they
will come. Field of Dreams, Field of Dreams. Chariots of
Fire is a really great sports movie, although it's about running,
which is not something I spend too.
Speaker 1: Much time too. Yes, yes, it is. Anything else come
to mind.
Speaker 2: I think it might be Chariots of Fire.
Speaker 1: Okay, I think that means rollerball, perhaps, I think because
I'm just a child of that era. And then there's
a Burt Reynolds sports movie. I don't remember anything about it. It
was based on a famous book that told that ripped
the mask off professional football, and the only reason I
think I went to see it as a teenager, even
though you know you went to the movies to see movies, right,
you didn't necessarily want to see this one, but you
went to the movies and this was your choice. Was
because I think one of the product demonstrators from The
Price Is Right was supposed to be topless in the
first five minutes of it. And you never had a
kind of crossover like that in your life. You never
had the presenter from The Price Is Right being toolis
in a movie. You just didn't, but you did, and
then we were. It was remarkable, and I think it
was Janus. I think it may indeed been Janus. All
I remember about the movie that's it, which means maybe
a function of age. I'm not exactly sure. You get
to my age and you think, did I forget that
simply because people forget things and it wasn't worth noting
in the first place? Or am by aging? Well, I
know I'm aging doing my best to forestall it. Though
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the Ricochet Podcast. There's so much more that we can do.
We've got great questions, and I would love to go
for another hour, but Charles has to be somewhere and
I have to have lunch, So I think we'll end
with something like Frothy from Yurobe, who asks what which
great opponent of Cartesian dualism resists the reduction of psychological
phenomenon to a physical state and insists there is no
point of contact between the extended and the unextended? Is
it REGINALD Maudlin, Yes, that's absolutely correct, it is indeed,
reginal Maudlin. Whin I'm from one more Gary McVay says,
how's the lawfair situation going? Is Ricochet currently okay against frivolous, stupid,
cash hungry, idiologically motivated attacks dealing with photographs? Maybe? If so,
how can we help defend it? Interesting?
Speaker 2: Well, we took action against this was a serious problem.
We have for now forestalled the worst offenders. I know
that as a result, there are a lot of posts
that were promoted that are no longer accessible. This will
be resolved in Ricochet five is built in to the system.
It has been built into the system. That work is complete.
We can't do it before then for a bunch of
technical reasons. If we do, it'll be very hard to
go back. This is a problem on the broader Internet.
This hasn't just affected Ricochet. I am involved, in one
way or another with a bunch of other organizations that
have been targeted in exactly the same way, some of
them in even more cynical ways than we have. But
the good news is that as of now, touch would
we have fought off those attacks. I think in the
long run, Congress I hear you laughing already is going
to have to act to change the rules around this
because the intention of the nineteen seventy eight. I think
perhaps seventy six Copyright Act and various court decisions across
the country was clearly not to create a situation in
which anyone who posts a picture, including on Twitter or Facebook,
for which they don't own the copyright, is liable to
be harassed by horrible ambulance chasing lawyers from California. The
long run, we're going to need a legisla to fix.
But until we have that, especially given the arena in
which we operate, we are going to have to be careful.
Speaker 1: Agreed, there are the questions that we're posed by the members,
and I'm going to go back into the thread and
to answer the ones that we didn't have the time for.
Great questions as usual from a smart bunch of people.
And if you're the sort of person who's enjoyed this
podcast and the others that proceeded the seven hundred and
thirty five, and you're not a member yet, then I
don't know what we got to do. Frankly, it's probably hopeless.
We can't reach you. But if you're one of those
persons on the fence on the CUSP, you know you
can go to Ricochet and there's a whole members feed
where the communities and the other topics, and the non
political stuff and the fun stuff and the politically and
correct stuff, and the memes of the day, and the
radio shows and the songs and the rest of it.
The full panoply of American culture, forward and backward is
there and it can be yours for just you know,
pennies a day. As we like to say, we'd like
to thank of Bamboo HR and Quality of Synalytics for
sponsoring the show. We'd like to thank you for giving
us good ratings wherever you happen to find it. I'd
like to thank you Charles for being with me here today.
It's been a great pleasure. And we'll see everybody in
the comments at Ricochet four point zero. Bye bye,