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