The Ricochet Podcast - A World of Willful Wierdos

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

It's just James and Charles to recollect and swap rants about the goings-on of the land of the free and the home of oddball. The cast of characters includes the world's first billionaire, an Angeleno who lost an election for common sense, a lunatic posing as a model working man, and the deeply flawed judgment of Democratic voters about guys like these. Lileks and Cooke also delight in watching Europeans share their newfound love for America, and embrace Trump's can-doism vis-à-vis public beautification.Sound this week: CNBC announces the world’s first trillionaire, Jimmy Kimmel recoils, and Graham Platner continues to gaffe.

We're back, Elon Musk, becoming the world's first trillionaire just moments ago. As SpaceX goes public, Robert Frank, joins us now with more. Hey, Robert. Scott, good to see. Well, I've been covering wealth for over 20 years. This is one of those major moments to talk about because Elon Musk, just becoming the world's first trillionaire. This obscenely wealthy weirdo has the ability and means to blow up the moon if he chooses, and also to put a lot of other people's money in his pocket.

It's the Rikishachy Podcast. I'm James Lillick with Charles C.W. Cook And today we're going to try to figure out what is the matter with the people who hate Elon Musk. Oh, and so much more. So let's have a household podcast. Families who are saddled with children trying, sorry, with cost of childcare, not saddled with children. We're blessed with children. Welcome, everybody.

It's the Rickettsieh podcast number 793. I'm James Lillickson, a beautiful, clear, clean day in Minnesota, Minneapolis. Well, Edina. and Charles C.W. Cook, Charlie, as we like to call him, is in Florida. And Stephen Hayward, we don't know where he is, somewhere in the world, giving a speech on a ship, whatever. Couldn't be bothered. Couldn't be arced, as they say, and blighty. And we'll be talking about, well, the troubles, the new troubles in Ireland in just a second. But first I have to ask, Charles, how are you today? I'm doing well, James. How are you? All things considered. I've learned many interesting things about what happens when you call FedEx and tell them that you want something shipped to a different address and it's already in transit. Nothing can be done. Nothing can be done. The item is a thousand miles away in a warehouse, but it's apparently it's on a trajectory that cannot be broke.

It's like slim pickings riding the bomb down to a Ruski military base. Nothing can be done. Other than that, I'm absolutely perfectly fine. And ready to discuss the perils and potentialities of the world. So what do we learn? What do we know after what? happened with Mr. Platner. Again, it's just sort of, it's so clear and clean that you have to elect the Nazi in order to prevent the Nazis from gaining power. And as we're being told,

if you're a Trump supporter, of course, that means you're supporting a rapist and a pedophile and a felon. So you have absolutely no moral standing whatsoever to criticize Mr. Platiner. But I just sort of enjoy the way in which the hypocrisy is just nobody cares. It's just no, no, he's just no, he our guy, this is tribal. It's like the election in California. We're going to find the ballots no matter what, and you're going to like it. And all the masks are off, it would seem. Let's start with Platinum first. What do you think? Well, I think it ought to be said once again that the most startling part of this story is that the excuses that you just adambrated are being made in the pursuit of defeating Susan Collins. Right. Evil. The most moderate memory.

of the Senate. And the only charge that people have against Susan Collins is that she voted for Trump's Supreme Court justices, which I think is a good thing because they've been exceptional. But even if you don't, intellect honesty requires you to acknowledge that she also voted for Oliver Obama's nominees. She votes for the nominees, irrespective of whether they've been put there by a Republican or a Democrat. So it's not even that she's a moderate. She's a ecumenical bipartisan type who defers to the incumbent president, which isn't my preferred way of doing it, but makes her more moderate than me. So I think that's the bit that I can't get my head around is even if you were for some reason to take the view that it's blue no matter who,

against Susan Collins, she's your bogeyman. She was described, I think, online by a commentator of some weight and heft as being evil. Evil. Because if you're on the other side, you can be a Unitarian politically, but if you're on just that other side, you are the Westboro Baptist Church. There are no distinctions to be made anymore.

And I find that incredibly depressing and not a very good sign for our republic going forward. So yeah, we'll see what we get out of Platner. But I can easily say that he's a man of a reprehensible character and behavior and the rest of it.

and I don't have to qualify it by saying, oh, and I also am appalled by this and by that and by this and by that. I shouldn't have to provide a list of moral bona fides, you know, a prelude to condemnation when it just simply ought to be obvious that some people are odious and that's all you have to say about it. Well, we'll see. The oyster farmer himself, you know, with still the tang of the salt air clinging to his weathered leathery New England's skin. James, can I tee off that and do my rant on this, which I just did on the editors. I would absolutely love it. I just want to say this to as many audiences as I can. So one of the things about this race, forget for a second all of the politics that is irritating me.

It's this line that you hear from professional Democrats, most of whom are in the middle class, that if you want to have a working class representative in Congress, you just have to accept that he'll be like Graham Platner. Yeah. And I think this is a slander of working class people. Add in the accompanying claim, which is that, well, of course, he's like this, he's a veteran. It gets even worse. And yes, I feel this personally because I am the son of a working class veteran

and the grandson of a working-class veteran, too, different people. The charge that everyone who is working class and or a veteran cheats on their wife, sends sexts, joins social networks for the procurement of underage nudes, is unstable in relationships, is a pathological liar, and has an SS tattoo is so false and so offensive that those who are proposing it really ought to be drummed out of polite society. I find this grotesque. And I haven't heard too many people push back against it and just say,

sorry, excuse me, no, that is not. the intrinsic nature of all working class people, that's not some admission fee that we have to pay if we want to elect people who didn't go to Yale. Actually, there are millions of totally normal people in the working class and who are veterans who don't behave like that. Now, it's even worse given that Graham Platner does not actually seem to be either working class in the way that we usually use the term. Or some veteran who was sent off to a foreign war and came back, Scott, he wanted to go. He wanted to go kill people. And when he came back, he then joined Blackwater. But even if he were that thing, it's an outrageous lie and it ought to be called out.

You're right to do so. I'm glad you re-ranted. My father was working class in as much as he drove truck, eventually owned his own business and did well, but he worked hard. He drove truck. he went to war at the age of 15. He came back deaf in one ear with tinnitus and the other from shelling. He was in there for a long time. He saw more action than I believe than Mr. Plattner did. And the idea that somehow those characteristics are unique or rare or just confined to his generation is ridiculous.

They're saying these things, Charles, because the conception of working class comes from some sort of notion that they have of the vast hordes, the orcs that populate the middle of the country. They can't quite figure out with them. those people do there and why they're not swaning around in Washington or New York or Boston or some metropolitan place going to the museum and having a latte and the rest of it. No, they're out there doing working class thing with their horny hands and their tattoos and the rest of it. They don't know any of them. So they just sort of assume that they're morally beastial creatures. You're absolutely

right. It's a gross slander. But what's more the idea somehow that there's none to be found out there. there's no one to be found out there that doesn't have a character, that doesn't have a remarkable character in the working class, just shows that perhaps their side of the equation is filled with people with curious morals. I couldn't agree with you more. Pratt in California. That was disappointing. Not unexpected. But the late surge of found ballots is one of those things that makes you cock and eyebrows, spockwise, and say, I don't believe this is. legit. Do you believe it's legit? I do believe it's legit, but I think it's an indictment of

the system in California, which is absurd and has no redeeming features. And therefore, it's not worth the likelihood that people will believe that it's corrupt. Why do you think it's, why do you think that this, that they actually found ballots for that woman who didn't even win her own district and all of them surged in her. direction. Well, I think that the problem here is ballot harvesting. It's not that there was some illegitimate printing of ballots or that people were sitting and calculating how many they would need. I've seen no evidence for that whatsoever. I've seen a progressive movement that waited to the last minute to work out what was required of it and then delivered the votes both from actual

progressives who vote and are engaged in politics. And then probably quite a lot of homeless people. Yes, absolutely. Here's five bucks. Sign your name. I mean, you're saying that it's legitimately illegitimate. Yeah, I'm saying that the problem is the rules. It's a disgrace.

I mean, California has a system that is designed, at least this is the steel man argument, to make sure that everyone possible can vote. So they sacrificed timeliness and trust and efficiency on the altar of access. And that means that they take 30 days to count the votes because there's an enormous administrative exercise afterwards where the presumption is tilted in favor of people who couldn't be bothered to vote on time. It also creates an incentive to wait and then play games. Again, I don't think the games are criminal. I think the games are imagined by the system which was put into play. by the people that serves the Democrats who have no incentive to change it because they keep winning

and getting whatever they want. So I think it is a legal scandal, but I don't think that people who have imagined that there is a printer at the back of the room and they're just running off. It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be. You just have to have somebody who knows that if they go to this apartment building, that they can walk in and knock on all the doors and distribute some walking around money, as we used to say, and people way. I mean, surely that's illegal. surely going and giving somebody money and saying if you vote for this per put your ex here and then walking out of the apartment building with 50 votes or 100 surely that is illegal that can't be considered that can't be winked at in the notion of access for all the exchange of money the promise

of goods in exchange for a vote that's that's it's it's well that is illegal right so ballot harvesting no but that hasn't been alleged if there are examples of that that is illegal and should be prosecuted The problem is more this, and Republicans can't replicate this because their voters live in different places and are more spread out. The problem is this. The left has the groups, and the groups are well organized, often with taxpayer funds, and they know where there are lots of people who are not otherwise engaged in the political process. and they assume in a very paternalistic way that those people all agree with them or rely upon them. And they, as a result, are able to gain the votes under a ballot harvesting system of tens of thousands of people

who are probably not in any normal way engaged in politics and are not exercising their agency in a way that you and I would recognize. I think that should be illegal. Now, if money changed hands it is. I think that should be illegal. But in California it's not. You can in California go up to a homeless person say that the registered address of that person is the homeless charity that you run,

even if they're not there at that point, register them and then fill in a ballot with them and deliver it. That's legal. And then if it gets challenged because the signature is a smiley face or because it was delivered at 12.3 a.m. on the day after the election, you look at the rules you've passed in other areas and you say, no, no, no, that person can't be disenfranchised. What is this?

It's the Jim Crow South. And you probably get the administrative or judicial authority to agree with you. I think that that's a disgrace, James. And I think it's another reason why we shouldn't have national vote compacts or nationalize our elections further because I don't want that to affect me as a Floridian, which it would. But I think that the rhetoric on the right has sometimes strayed from that point and it's moved into a conspiracy theory, which is that the government of California just moved numbers around on a screen. I don't think that's what happened either. I don't think that's what has to happen because they have these other mechanisms that they can assure to get the results that they want. Because God forbid that we get this guy who's outside of the political process who's saying these inflammatory things like, wouldn't it be great if there wasn't poop? on the street. I mean, things like, I mean, the next thing, you know, we're talking about trains moving on time, you know, Spencer Pratt has said to you that it is unacceptable for needles to be found

in playgrounds. What's next? Unnexing the Sudatenland? The idea that this guy was so far out of the mainstream that had to be defeated by whatever cost is just, it's remarkable. But again, again, it's what we see. When you, when you rattle these cages, then the people whose livelihood on getting money to solve the homeless problem and then of course never solving it you've threatened their livelihood uh we saw that with doge we saw that with us a id and it seems to be a blob that cannot be done away with so california enjoy enjoy your choice between the communist and the communist all right so we have uh let's let's go from our fractious ill-gitimate political system to uh tribalism in the judicial system and other wonderful

topics of the day. We have the Carmelo and Dini case and oh, again, I try not to mistake Twitter for the real world, but there has been this efflorescence of anger over the guilty verdict. And the idea that this was, what he did in stabbing that young man was simply what he had to do, what he should have done. He was disrespected. He was the victim of bullying. He was fearing for his life. And so, you know, one of the women in the video says, what do I tell my sons when it comes to the verdict? And people chimed in to say, don't bring a knife to a sporting event. Don't stab someone in the heart when they tell you that you're someplace you ought not to be.

And people have been pointing this and connecting it to O.J. Simpson saying absolutely nothing has changed. As with politics, it is simply a tribal matter. and there's no bridging that divide. I would like to think that there is, but I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing it, since the loudest voices and the angry's voices are presumed to be the most authentic, right? Yes, but I'm less depressed about this than you

because the jury did its job and did so admirably, as it seems to do in pretty much every criminal trial that makes the news across the country every time. I think it's one of the best institutions we have and it's working well. We can dispute whether or not there should be more cases that go to trial. I know there are some people who have big issues with the amount of plea bargains we do. But when we get these trials, juries seem to take the cases very seriously. And this one did.

Well, you say that as a white man with all the attendant privilege. The people will point out that it was an all-white jury, so he didn't have a chance. But it wasn't an all-white jury. You see, this is a big mistake that they've made. They say it's an all-white jury. What they mean is that there were no African-Americans on the jury, which is true. It wasn't an all-right jury. There were Hispanics and Middle Easterners on the jury.

It might as well be if there weren't any blacks on the animal is what they're saying. My ex-wife did jury duty in D.C. when we lived there. And it was straight-up jury nullification when it came down to it. They had the guy. They had the witnesses who said, I was selling crack in the neighborhood. The police had chased him into somebody's house. He'd run through their house.

They caught him in the backyard. Nobody was disputing any of that, but the jury let him go because they didn't want to send another black man to jail. So, okay, fine. Well, it's your community that he's going to be running through and selling drugs to your community. Great. Great, I guess. But when you say every trial that we see gets it right, I tend to agree with you. But there are so many under the radar that we don't hear about that just simply don't.

I'm sure that's true, but on balance, I think it works pretty well. And I'm very upset by the people who are playing games and saying that this was racist. But they are not winning this fight. I agree with you. If there's anything to be worried about, it's the cases that don't get to trial because they're pled out or for one of the reason or the, you know, the Soros backed. There I go with that conspiracy theory again. And prosecutors just say, no, no, in the interest of justice and disparate impact, we're not going to charge him with all that. We're going to let him go.

And then, you know, he pops up six months later on a bus having stamped somebody. Wonderful. Well, I'm glad that you're optimistic about it. And that's a good sign. But, of course, we would expect that from you living down there in your paradise, which is disconnected from all the trials and tribulations of the world in which the rest of us live. Hmm. But then again, Florida is a land of the free, right? Which brings me, actually, to wondering whether or not freedom has a future. Well, it does, but it's not the sort of thing that you just sort of think about and content yourself with about. You need to think about these things. You need to listen about these things. You need to learn about these things. And most political shows tell you what to think. We don't hear. We just tell you what we think. And if you believe differently, well, that's what the comment section is for. The Future of Freedom Podcast. Trusts you to think for yourself. Every episode features two guests who share a commitment to liberty and limited government,

but disagree on one major issue. This is so ricochet. And instead of debating each other, they make their case one at a time, clearly, thoughtfully, and without the usual political theater. It's a refreshing change from the outrage-driven media that we're all used to. You can hear multiple signs of an argument and make up your own mind. What a great idea. search for Future of Freedom, wherever you listen to your podcasts.

And we thank them for sponsoring this, the Rickochet podcast. It's a great idea, Charles. And one of the things that I like about studying the other side, you have to be able to model the argument of the other side. And I think the right is better at this than the left. Tell me what you think. Oh, I think that's indisputable. In part because we live in a society where,

A lot of our elite institutions have been captured by progressives. That sounds a little bit conspiratorial too, but you only have to go back to the Port Huron statement, students for a democratic society, to see that they quite literally telegraphed their intention to do it and explained why in the 1960s. And then they did it. Yeah.

And the upshot of that has been that they can, control Hollywood and HR and academia and the media. And because of that, we all learn what they think, whether we are interested or not. There isn't an obvious equivalent of that on the right, or at least those areas where we dominate, you can escape. and so we learn every day what progressives think because they never shut up about it. We go through schools that they run. We go to movie theaters that they own.

And I think we glean their arguments as if by osmosis, whereas they often seem completely unable to model ours. I find it quite interesting sometimes talking to people on the left about conservatism, because I learn about this worldview that has nothing to do with what I think. They'll say, oh, well, so I suppose you're for low taxes and markets. Yes, I am. Because you hate people. No, quite the opposite, actually.

I think that they're the best means by which to live poor people out of poverty and invent new things and move forward. The Second Amendment's a great example of this. Yeah, I mean, so you think that, you know, if you just see someone like graffiti, We should just be able to shoot them. No, no, I don't. I do go on. You would dissent on that one.

But it's really interesting. And I do think that there are downstream consequences of this that do favor us. It's very bad in many, many ways. But one of the downstream consequences of this is that the left has completely lost its ability to argue legally. if you look at what's happened at the Supreme Court, it's not just that Republican presidents have appointed six of the nine justices. It's that originalism has prevailed as a jurisprudential worldview, and it has no equivalent.

They gave up. They got so used to just being able to say to the court, hey, can you just do the thing we want? And then the court would say yes, that they don't have the skills anymore. They're completely outmatched. And that's because we knew precisely what they believed jurisprudentially. Every law student knew what they believed.

And they ignored us. And now they're losing. So sometimes it hurts them. The moment you said originalism, that's all I needed to hear from you, because what you were doing is defending a dead white document written by dead white patriarchal men who were slave owners. And that's what you want to go back to. That's what you want to go back to. So don't spare me this high-blown rhetoric.

I mean, you're right, but you can't have, it's difficult to have arguments sometimes with progressive people because there's a lack of common terms. And there's a lack of common ideas that they, it's difficult, for example, to discuss immigration because the minute you say that we should discuss immigration, they immediately switch to a bad faith assumption about what you're doing and say that you're racist, you're xenophobic. You want to do all these things that you perhaps don't want to do. and there's no reason to talk to you because you're evil. And so getting to the point where you break down the purpose of immigration, where it's from, how much what it does to a community, historically how assimilation works,

historically how this culture did. I mean, you can't have that discussion because they see red the minute that you start to say, perhaps it's bad to change the demographic of a town by dumping 50,000,000 people from another culture into a town of 20,000 people. Perhaps that doesn't work. you can't have the argument. You can't have the argument about guns because,

what, you're in favor then of somebody shooting up a school grounds? No. You can't have the argument about taxes because you are in favor then of billionaires. We see this today with the globe. Which I am, by the way. I am too. And it's not because I think I'm going to be one someday. It's not like I think they're going to be nice to me.

It's just that a system that allows that to happen is preferable to a system that confiscates it when they have $5. and permits nobody from ever having 10. So there's an article in the Globe and Mail today, opinion piece about the proper way to hate Elon Musk. And as somebody quite correctly pointed out on Twitter, that would be you. How many trillionaires does Canada have exactly? How many billionaires for that matter? And the proper way to hate him is to hate him, I guess, for being a trillionaire, which is wrong.

And for USAID, which of course, you know, killed people in Africa without that. money. Africa would not be suffering the population crash it is tonight. Today, I guess, Ebola. Ebola, you can put directly at the feet of Elon Musk. And it's remarkable because you would think that this is the sort of individual that the left would celebrate. Here's somebody who's helping people with with brain problems to speak and walk and use their arms again. But then again, of course, I suppose, that's sort of says there's something wrong with having disabilities. That's right. He's, he's penalizing the people. He's othering the people with disabilities. He wants electric cars, which I thought they loved.

He has the boring company, which takes cars off the streets, which I thought they liked. He has constructed the equivalent of the library of Alexandria, more or less, by putting all of these little reflective things up in the sky that can beam back the entirety of human knowledge to you if you're sitting in Donali with a laptop. You would think that this man would be regarded as remarkable. Plus, he's got lots of kids by different mothers of sorts. And he takes ketamine. You know, so he's, he's, you know, he takes drugs. He's, he's a baby daddy all over the place.

He likes electric cars. And yet you hate him. Is it just the amount of money or is there, is it, is it when he seemed to throw his lot in with a magaside of it, that was just too much. And he must be demonized for the entirety, perpetuity of human history. Oh, yes. That's exactly what it is. You don't see many people contemming. Tom Steyer.

I don't know who he is. Tom Steyer fascinates me just as a sidebar here, because Tom Steyer's thesis is that if you're a billionaire, you can buy politics. And he's now spent half a billion dollars trying to do it and failed. And he still says...

I know. But Musk is one of the great men in history. And I think that to expect him to be normal as a fool's errand. This is a constant theme of mine, James. So forgive me if I've said this before, even on this show. But whatever it is that makes Elon Musk the sort of person who's going to help invent online banking and then create electric cars

and then build reusable rockets and NeuroLink and all of that stuff, whatever it is that makes him different. than most people, such that he's able to do those things, guarantees he's going to be a weirdo. Mm-hmm. There's very few people in the history of the world who have been great inventors and entrepreneurs who have genuinely changed things, who were normal.

And the question, therefore, ought to be, and this doesn't let him off everything he's done, but to some extent it requires that we are indulgent. The question, therefore, not a question, even ought to be, but is, would you rather have that stuff and have him be a weirdo or not have that stuff and have him satisfy Mary at HR? And I would rather have the stuff. I'm just willing to say, okay, he's a weirdo. But I don't really care that he's a weirdo because the important thing about him is not that he's a weirdo, or at least if it is that he's a widow, it's the

stuff that he does because he's a weirdo. The same is true of him. Henry Ford, who was a pretty unpleasant guy. Yes. But I'm glad Henry Ford did the stuff that he did. Yes. Think of all of those famous eccentric English aristocratic scientists and biologists who went home at night and rubbed toothpaste into their hair to keep the ghosts away. But during the day, you know, classified the entirety of the history of evolution or discovered

dinosaurs or I do you really think that you can put people in in these little bubbles and make them behave in the way that progressives want and say all the right things

and never do anything unusual and have them invent Apple you just can't do that I have this book it's up on my shelf it's called One Summer by Bill Bryson and it's about the summer of 1927 in the United States and it's about baseball and the lead up to the

Great Depression and the flights across the Atlantic from Charles Lindberg. I was just going to say there's another man who had another crazy man. Great. And this book is not about crazy people, but it kind of is about crazy people because half the people in this book who are doing incredible things in America in 1927 are off their trolley and or very unpleasant. There's one guy in there who invented some technique for restoring the eyesight of children, who was an actual white supremacist sort of proto-Nazi. So, okay, you don't like

his views. I don't either. You read them and go, that's a horrible thing to believe, and you should be ashamed of yourself. But also, I'm kind of glad that you saved the vision of 50,000 children in America in 1927. And I just think we've lost sight of this because we believe that it is an accident that we have the most wealthy and innovative country in the world. We think it springs from the ground. And the only question is what you do with the money. How should you redistribute it? We think that you could change any government policy, tax at any rate, impose any regulation that you want, and we'd have the same country with the same level of innovation. And we've come to think the same thing on the social side. That you could just make everyone,

very boring and everyone conform to whatever it is that the progressives think is the right way to behave at any given moment. And all of those people will by definition just invent things like SpaceX and Tesla and Amazon. And it's just not true. No. You're absolutely correct. Brilliant rant. I feel the same way. They believe that actually this would be, you know, America would have happened. But the only reason, the reason that America is different is because everything was created by slavery. And while that is responsible for everything from our technological sophistication to our great wealth, it's also a sin for which we must apologize constantly every day. And it also means that we are morally tainted from the get-go. So that while this may look from the outside like

an exceptional nation that's better than an awful lot of rest, it has at its core a sin that means that is uniquely evil. So yeah, it kind of would have happened anyway, but whatever it is, you can't be proud of it. And it's presentism as well. They have to retroactively apply the standards of today, the morals of today, the beliefs to absolutely everybody who existed before. And if they don't match up, then they are a bad person who must be driven out of history, or there must be an asterisk appended to their name at every single point. So we know that they're not morally pure and perfect people by the standards of today. Third, there is envy. At the base of this is all of those people in high school and in college,

we all knew them, who were very smart. They were very smart people, but they couldn't get their bleep together. And they never really accomplished anything. They weren't good at art. They weren't good at sport. They weren't good at science. They weren't good at anything, but they could talk. And they were smart. And they knew things. And they could hold forth in the dorm and the rest of it. But they could never achieve what maybe the jock did and the weirdo did and the boring guy in the business school did. And while they thought there was always be time enough for them to do what needed to be done, it never really happened. So they ended up going into something where their mediocre skill set would eventually flourish, and that would be politics. That would be something where they had

some sort of faculty influence or control of other people, something where, you know, the life of the mind dominates and such. And so the most gaseous, noxious, ridiculous ideas are seen as the most authentic. And in those things, they flourished. But they were never rich enough. They were never successful enough and they would look at people like Musk or other people in business with envy. Why are they doing so well and I am doing so little? And finally, they're just banal people. It's not that they're, you know, envious. It's just there's a banality to it and a wish for everybody to be as depressed as they are.

Because depression and being miserable about the world and looking about and seeing nothing but what's wrong and what was done wrong before is the sign of enlightenment. The optimist, the person who projects his optimism forward and backward, is. an idiot is somebody who just doesn't get it. So the proper thing is to be mentally got got the time and to look down on those people who've got cheer. And for nothing else, Elon Musk has got cheer. So yeah, to your brand, I add mine. And I say it's all spinach into hell with it. This is an optimistic nation at its core. And that's what I love about it. That's to take it back to the Europeans who are coming here for the World Cup, what I love to see about these people

on Twitter, discovering that you can go to an enormous grocery store at two o'clock in the morning and have barbecue and sit there and eat barbecue and coal slide. Trivial as it sounds. And while some people may say, I would much rather go to a Paris brasserie and have a fine, you know, casserole ironically or something like that. No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't. Because first of all, the French people are going to treat you like crap.

I remember in all the French restaurants that I went to. you know, we were the last to be waited upon. We always got the sort of eye rolling from disdain from the waiters. Not so much Rome. Rome is different. But no, you're a German or Italian or a Frenchman or whatever. You walk into a convenience store at 2 o'clock in the morning or someplace, a waffle house and the rest of it, and you will get a genuine smile.

And if they learn you're from Europe, they will be absolutely delighted to tell you to get the hashbroughts. Germans who are walking in and saying, I cannot believe this is real. There are a whole bunch of Europeans afoot in America for this World Cup thing, and some of them on Twitter are just absolutely delightful to follow because they're not going to the blue cities. They're not going to the places that you have masses of bodies strewn on the street doing a fentanyl nod. They're going to the hinterlands and finding out that Buckees and Dick's sporting goods and outdoor places that have indoor climbing walls and shooting galleries and the rest of it. And they're absolutely delighted to find the real America. I think this is great.

Have you been seeing any of these tweets of the European? discovering in America, and it does raise the question. I'm sorry, begs the question. No, it doesn't. Raised the question of when you first had your experience with America and how you got your head turned. Oh, I still feel like that, James. I still feel like they do,

at least in my wonder and gratitude. I'm perhaps less surprised now, but I'm no less grateful. the one thing I noticed that I was astonished by when I first started coming to America regularly is the amount of choice. It's not just the size, it's the amount of choice. They were goggling at the menu. How can I possibly order from this?

Because in Europe you don't get that much choice. That can be genuinely overwhelming. Yes. It is a feature of American life. Bernie Sanders agrees with you that it, why do we have 30 kinds of deodorant? Yeah, he thinks it's bad. I don't. I think it's wonderful.

But those guys are having a ball. And I think that it's not just that America is amazing and they're noticing it, but it is at odds with what they will have been told. which will, in the most part, have been negative, especially now Donald Trump is president. I've noticed this in England, a lot of the conceptions of America get filtered through whoever the president happens to be at any given point.

Now, that's, of course, true here too, to a lesser extent. But in England, Germany, France, the press will enclose, in every piece about America, all these snide aside, that if you didn't know any better or you'd never been there, you'd probably come to believe. I was reading this piece in the London Telegraph about the World Cup and about the ticket prices for the games, which is quite high.

And it had what was in effect a long and correct condemnation of FIFA, which it explained at length was to blame for this. Next to all of these insinuations that weren't quite fleshed out about America that made it seem if you weren't paying attention that it was really America's fault. And I was annoyed by this, so I started looking into it. So one of the things it just casually said was that the price of living in America is high, which isn't really true. The second thing it said is that it's very expensive in America to go and see live sports.

But the only example it gave was a Super Bowl. Now, of course, the Super Bowl is the aberration. It's true that it's expensive to go to the Super Bowl. But it's not expensive that it's, true that it's expensive to go see live sports in America. In fact, the average ticket price for a baseball game is $30. The average ticket price for an NFL game is 100, but there are only 17 and only nine home games. the average ticket price for the hockey and basketball sectors is about $70. That's not much different than, say, Premier League in England or La Liga in Spain.

Now, it doesn't really matter that the Telegraph kept throwing these little side notes in. But if you lived in England and you'd never been to America and perhaps you were predisposed to think it wasn't great, and you just read this every day, you'd build up this concept. of the place that was false. And I think it's not just that America is objectively great, but I think these German guys are like, wait, what the hell? You know, it's a bit like when people from the Soviet Union first came to America, and they were like, oh, there's this museum I went to where they had this interview on the wall,

the transcript of the interview with a woman who was from the Soviet Union, and she moved to the United States to New York City. And she said that she needed directions, and so she went up to a police officer and asked him directions, and he smiled at her and gave them. And she said that we'd been told that the police officers would hit you in America. They would just wander around in America and just strike people randomly. And I'm sure the Germans don't believe that,

but I'm sure they believe a little bit of that. And so they're coming to a country where everything's great, and it's not wildly expensive, and they're allowed to drive anywhere, and the music's fun, and people are good to them. and they're going, ah. Mm-hmm. My former French brother-in-law

had the usual French attitudes about America. He came here, and a year later, we were at the wine country in France. He rented a convertible and bought some raybans. And just turned into an American cliche instantly because the power of it was so great. It's not just the size of it and the friendliness. Oftentimes, it's the newness of it,

the bright newness of it. Because when I go to Europe, I don't like to go to new places in particular because the architecture can be, horrible. I like to steep myself in the historical places and to sort of imagine when. You go to the Louvre. You go to the great castles and the rest of it. And there's just

so many of them. The places that are new that have the grocery stores and the shopping malls and the rest of it are kind of, they feel a little dingy and down market. Nothing as grand as the American versions. All the cars are small and weird. Now, I like to go to the places where you know

that 500 years ago, you know, it's charming, you're having a scone, but there was probably somebody drawn and quartered in this room at some point. There was, when we were in Italy, we were going to the top of this hill and it had been built, of course, because the people wanted to defend themselves against other people

who wanted to come and take their gold and silver. And so it was this long, winding road that it went up the hill at a steep angle, which made it difficult to fight. And I thought the blood used to run down here, the screams of the dying, echoing, bouncing off these, what people would tumble down and, you know, after

they'd been killed in some massacre or something, falling and pressing the rest of them down the hill and now, hello, it's a yogurt shop. And so all of that blood and activity and strife and strain has been drained out of the place. And what's left is just this sort of museum piece, which is very nice for those of us who think that America is, you know, we are a new country. We are a fresh country. But it's nice to see something that's five, six hundred years old and learn from that. That said, the people who say that America has no history and no culture and the rest of it are idiots, we do. And one of the things that we have is a fine

tradition of Bozart's statuary and sculpture that goes back to the early part of the 20th century. And a lot of that was pulled down during BLM in 2020 and the rest of it. But they didn't manage to ruin the sculpture, the statue, the fountain in front of Union Station in D.C., the one of Columbus. Now, there's a lot of talk about the reflecting pool and whether or not it's an aesthetic nightmare. It isn't. People are also pointing out, however, that the Trump administration, and it's part of it to make America a beautiful thing, I don't remember the specific name of the initiative, fixed up the statue, the fountain. It works again.

It works for the first time since 2007. And I did a piece on this for NRO, which subscribers can get every Saturday. Take a look. There's me writing weekly at NRO. And it turns out that in 2016, the Park Service said, we have $2 million here. We would like 15 of our historical sites in need of repair to make the case why they should get some of this money. And they had this battle royale where all these historical sites had to compete with each other to beg for crumbs to fix. And Columbus's fountain was one of them.

And the government said, no, we're going to give the money to this superintendent's office in Alaska somewhere, which they did. But the administration just waves a wand and says, you know, okay, everything is going to get fixed. Turns out you can just do things. Now, like you, Charles, I prefer there would be congressional authorization of a bill that specifically allotted money for that purpose. rather than an executive order that said, just make it happen. But when the fountain is spraying and people are standing there in a hot day and they're getting the mist over them,

they don't care about the means by which this was achieved. They just remember that this thing had been completely defaced by activists and protesters back in the day with the usual nonsense. Free Gaza, it used to say, spray-painted. Interestingly enough, Gaza was not free. From Hamas, I mean. It's done. The other thing that struck me, in addition to Columbus Circle,

or in addition to the Columbus fountain into the reflecting pool, is that Trump was at Madison Square Garden, which itself is about to get a renovation. Have you seen this? I have seen. What do you think? I think it's an improvement, but if I had my way, they would rebuild Penn Station.

Right. Which they could. They probably couldn't have done that 10, 15 years ago. They would have gotten every single craftsman capable of carving. out, but it turns out now that if we wanted to, couldn't we just 3D print all the ornamentation, all of the frosting? Right. I mean, that was an extraordinary building and a little decrepit by the end of it and there was, you know, financial collapses that led to its demise. I, too, would prefer to have it done to have a waiting room like it did. It was based on the

baths of curriculum from what I understand and was the finest example of Roman architecture, I think, what I loved about it was that the colonel out in front was later echoed by the Hotel Pennsylvania, which of course we all knew the phone number across the street. You had this echoing, this talking back and forth. And then Penn went down and the hotel, the columns were talking to nobody in particular. So that conversation was lost. And then Penn went and then the Hotel Pennsylvania has been demolished. And so now what they were proposing to replace for Madison Square Garden,

there have been a number of proposals and they've all been bad. The latest one, which like they did overnight, like in the course of a week, they changed it, is now back to a call and odd. It's a bit 60s in its bluntness and its in its lack of ornamentation, but it's a very impressive facade that has been nothing since the 1960s. I mean, I think it was the great architecture critic of the New York Times said you used to walk into New York, used to enter New York like a king. Now you scuttle in like a rat. They have saved the post office across the street, which is classical as well, and turned that into the Moynihan waiting room so you can get a little bit of what it was like back in the day.

And people say, why does it matter? I don't go to D.C. Why does it matter whether or not the fountains work? Why does it matter whether or not Madison Square Garden is beautiful? I don't care. I don't go there. It does matter. It matters a lot because these places play, A, you know, an important role.

and the history of civic nature of the country, but B, you want America to be a beautiful place. You do. And also, other people notice, if you go around the world and you visit any restaurant or bar that is supposed to be themed like America, they pick up the best of America

and put it on display in miniature. They pick up the statutes. of Liberty. They pick up the Empire State building or the Chrysler building or Grand Central Terminal, the Golden Gate Bridge. And this is often in countries that have their own great architectural traditions. And I think that is not just good for America inside America. Of course, I agree with you. But that's really good for America abroad. It's a very cheap and useful thing we can do is create beautiful things that people like and then they think better of you. On the reflecting pool, I have found this whole criticism of Donald Trump on this to be insane. I agree with you

that Congress ought to write bills that are more specific. That is to say, I would be happy if Congress said, here is a bill to enable the restoration of the reflecting pool. But it didn't. Instead, it says, here's a bunch of money working. how are you going to spend it? Well, Trump's president. What I cannot abide is the substitution of that preference, which I endorse, for the preference of rule by third parties that hate the president. Because that's really what the complaint is here.

Trump wanted to fix the reflecting pool in time for the 250th anniversary. And a whole bunch of self-appointed arbiters of taste who don't like Trump wanted to be involved in the process. They wanted to be asked. They wanted there to be a review committee. They wanted to sit in meetings and slow it down. They probably wanted to re-interrogate the meaning of a reflecting pool in the year 2026 so that there's some plaque next to it full of absolute crap.

Look, it's a large swimming pool, basically. I know people said that disparagingly about Trump, but he's right. That's what it is. It has the same problems as swimming pools. It gets filled with algae and, the chemical makeup is controlled. It has the same problem with leaking. You have to control the basin of it.

It is a large swimming pool. And Trump, and this is the thing I like the most about him, is an old-fashioned gruff New York real estate developer who just went, let's get the poor guys in from Oklahoma. They didn't need to go through tons of George Plimptons sitting there explaining what was wrong with the blue color. They didn't need some organization. that has existed since 1913 to make things worse.

They didn't need progressives to talk about the racial history of the reflecting poor. They just needed to fix the basin, get rid of the algae, and make it reflect the Washington Monument. That's it. And the insane response to this has been a good example that people are just as capable of criticizing Trump for the things he does right, as many of his fans are incapable of criticizing him for the things he does wrong. on. Precisely. And if you defend any of these things, people get their backup because you're defending Trump.

And as I've always said, it's just, it's never mind the man. Just put aside that. Just look at the consequences of his inhabitation of the office. What happens? Is that a good thing that happened? Is it a bad thing that has happened? Things work and are more beautiful in the statuary sense. That is a good thing.

And you're right. There would have been a plaque. There would have a plaque that said, I remember going to the Tate in London, and they were having an exhibit, and they handed over to all the interns, I guess, what to write for their little descriptions of the paintings. And they had appended little things that noted that while this was a nice little still life of a maiden of such and such that the wood in the footstool in the picture had actually probably come from a colonial enterprise. and you had to be aware of that is that teak somehow morally suspect and you had to be very sad that there was teak in the picture. So yes, that precisely would have happened with the basin and you would have been expected to be sad. And people who weren't sad because they didn't realize would be the idiots, the happy idiots that again, as I said before, the people who can't be happy ever who have political, emotional, artistic, and Hedonia. with Scowlid. Well, we're not that sort. What we are are movers and builders and improvers.

And Charles is such an improver. And he's here to tell you about ricochet 5.0, which I believe is undergoing beta testing at the moment. Absolutely. We're in the tricky stage, which is making sure it works on all devices, at all widths. It makes it look, making it look the same everywhere, essentially, so that it works just as well. And I phone as an iPad as a MacBook Pro and their PC equivalents and their Android equivalence. And if you have some weird and wonderful phone that only a few people have, that it works on there as well. So we're at that stage, which is both exciting because we're past most of the development. But it's also frustrating because this is a very nitpickety thing. Why can't that thing

just move to the left on the iPhone? Right. Oh, I understand. Believe me, I understand. Well, I have a home group phone that I use that has the guts of a Commodore. So I don't know, and I've put Linux on it. So it better work on that. It had better work on that. In the meantime, folks, you can also go to RICOchet 4-point whatever as it exists now and find out exactly what we've been talking about all these years. If you've never gone there, I've mystified if you haven't.

But it's okay if you have not gone and checked out the member feed. There's lots of fun there. There's a community that has risen up over the years and would love to invite you because whether you've been there for 10 years or 10 minutes, A RICOchet is a place where all are welcome. I'm thinking of one poster in particular. 99.9% of them everybody is welcome. We also would like to thank the future of Freedom Podcast,

and why don't you go check that out and add it to your list? As a matter of fact, when you go to RICOchet, you will find that there are so many podcasts. And my own, the diner, is coming back in just a few weeks. And as long as we're talking podcasts, somewhere there's a place where you can leave us a review, and we would love to get five stars. If you think this one deserves two or three,

we'll come back next week and listen to Stephen when he's there, and maybe that'll be a five or a six. Who knows? Whatever, your reviews count and they help. But most of all, we just appreciate you subscribing and listening. That's all we do. I'm James Lylex here in Minneapolis, Charles, in Florida. Goodbye.

We'll talk to you next week, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Rickashay 4.0. Bye-bye.