The Ricochet Podcast - Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

It's finally here: 2025! And your favorite podcast is finally back in order to maintain some continuity in these tempestuous times. James, Charles and Steve cover raging fires in Los Angeles and the jaw-dropping incompetence of the Golden State's leadership. On a cheerier note, they enjoy the changes taking place in Canada and at Meta, Inc.Plus, Dan MacLaughlin joins today to discuss Jimmy Carter's legacy, and, given Dan's title as the baseball crank, the gang has at a few questions on the great American game. New times, end times, and national pastimes. What more can you ask for?- Soundbite from the open: Embarrassing exchange between anchors and reporter at KTTV Fox 11 in Los Angeles

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on children's television in the morning. And there was one thing that they did that just sticks with me now because it was just so funny where they would go into a supermarket and they would open cereal box and they would start eating the cereal in the supermarket. And eventually a supervisor would come over and say, what are you doing?

And then they would point to the box, which said at the top 20% extra and say, we're just eating the free bit. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lilacs and today we're going to talk about fires, Carter,

and baseball crankery with Dan McLaughlin. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Despite what you have heard from Caruso, no firefighters have told us that they are running out of water. And let's go out to Gigi Graciette. She is live in Pacific Palisades. I know your signal's not the best, but Gigi, what can you tell us? Well, firefighters have told me they have no water on this block, and you may be able to make out the ember storm that we're in the middle of right now. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, the first of the year of 2025,

a quarter of the way through this century. A quarter of the way through the... My, Tempest, Fugitive, et cetera. Times, Wicked, Chariot, and all that. What number is it? Well, it's 722, it seems. And we look forward to giving you 50 more this year. I'm joined by Charles C.W. Cook.

And who's this other guy we got here? You can tell by the hearty chuckle it's Stephen Hayward. Gentlemen, welcome. Happy New Year. Although that sentiment is a bit old by this point. We're into it, but again, we've all been enjoying our lives away from the microphone here. However, world affairs demand that we comment, don't they just? Not just world affairs, but national.

There's something that is different, it seems, about this particular set of California fires. We get used to them every year, at least I do. News, horrible fires, scenes of immense conflagration, people fleeing, all the rest of it, but there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of houses and wood and stuff out there, so we're kind of used to it. This is different. Why is it different? Well, I guess having grown up in Southern California and seen a lot of fires up close over the years, this one's just so much bigger. And there's the Hollywood factor. Let's face it.

When Malibu and Pacific Palisades burned down, we're getting the list of all the celebrities whose homes have been lost. And the cost to insurers is going to, and the state is going to be enormous. By contrast, now I was only two years old or whatever, but the Bel Air fire of 1961, which might be as comparable. When Bel Air burns down, that's also a lot of rich people who lose their homes. There's a great picture, by the way, James, of Richard Nixon standing on his roof with a hose. Hosing it down. Hosing it down, right. In his shiny shoes.

Right. It's a classic Nixon picture. His beach shoes, yeah. Right. So that was about 500 homes were lost. I think we're now up to 5,000 structures or more in the Eaton Canyon area. It may be of some interest to Ricochet listeners that I think I have recorded three episodes of this podcast from one of my best friend's homes right on the edge of Eaton Canyon with a spectacular view of the mountains. His home survived in part because he's been

aggressive about brush clearing on his perimeter, but a lot in his neighborhood are gone. And he tells me his house smells terribly of smoke, so it's going to be a while before it's inhabited, even once they get the power back on. But you know, the old saying is California has two seasons, fire season and mudslide season. And all we need is a big heavy rain in the next, well, really any time this winter. And we're going to have massive mudslides along Pacific Coast Highway and elsewhere. So this is what's the old Churchill line. This isn't the beginning of the end. It's just the end of the beginning. We're in for some rough times ahead. The great thing about all that rain, of course, are the capacious reservoirs that California has built to contain them to get into the dry times.

Charles, does this seem like just it's different because it's bigger, or is it different because something that we've been talking about for the last five years, which is the revelation that our betters and our leaders may not actually be as competent as we believe, and that the investments in the institutions in which we have invested so much faith and trust turned out to be hollow and just simply mechanisms for people who don't deserve the position to get uh to get ahead in life is that part of it or am i just reading some cranky political take into it well i don't know and i'd like to ask steve about this as the Californian on the panel. I have seen absurd attempts to blame this on Trump. Yes. Often promulgated by people who are simultaneously telling others not to politicize the disaster. That seems obviously silly. Then I've seen a lot of arguments that California,

although this is a natural disaster and is no one's fault in a legal sense, has not prepared well for this. Now, here's what I do know, Stephen, and you could tell me to what extent you think the governor or the mayor or anyone else is to blame here. I have over the years written probably 15,000 words in National Review magazine on California's water woes, especially in the Central Valley. The protection of the Delta smells at the expense of agriculture, the pushing of millions of tons of water every year out into the sea, the failure to build new reservoirs, despite Californians telling their government build new reservoirs, and so on and so forth. So I am predisposed here to think that California has screwed this up.

And then I see that now viral Fox News, local Fox News segment, in which the host says, well, despite what was just said, there's no evidence that firefighters don't have any water to work with. And then they cut and the lady on the scene says, firefighters tell me they have no water to work with, and you just couldn't write it. But of course, I want to think this, because while I love California very dearly, it's the most beautiful state, I'm a very pro-California person, I grew up going to California, I really think it is astonishing and wonderful. I also think it is horribly, disastrously mismanaged. So to what extent is this a fault of the government? Very largely. It's not so much that the water isn't available in the quantities necessary for something this large. It's the

fact that we have not been taking steps for years to reduce the risk from this kind of conflagration. You know, there's lots of people have written about this, about the delays and obstacles to just clearing brush, clearing trees, doing controlled burns. The environmentalists sue and block and lengthen every proposal of the Forest Service or the State Board of Resources to manage this problem. And so we have this dry tinderbox. I think, by the way, I mean, I really do have to say that there has to be not just naivete and ideology, but actually some malice among some environmentalists. I think they want these disasters because for them, they think it's more fuel, so to

speak, for their climate change mania. Of course, this is all being blamed on climate change, right? So I could point you to lots of great analyses, but one of the best from three, four years ago, from all unlikely places, was ProPublica. That very left-wing news outfit, and their headline of their long report was, we know how to reduce wildfire risks. Why aren't we doing it? They wouldn't identify the real culprit, but they had the exact, the right, the correct take on the subject.

And, you know, there you go. We're just because we're morons. That's why. Well, it's inexplicable to the rest of us that the part of government that is responsible for forest management says, well, we need to manage the forests. Forest management is what we do. So let us do management of the forests. I assume that the people who are empowered to do so have some expertise in the matter. But yet when they're confounded by people who stand up and say, no, you can't do that, it's inexplicable to the rest of us that they can delay and delay.

We don't understand why they would say, no, you cannot get rid of the dry tinder. Now, to ascribe, as you did, the motives to them that they want the fires because it gives them more fuel, so to speak, fire away, as Joe Biden said, for their climate change. It seems too Machiavellian and smart and cackling and the rest of it. There has to be something else. They can't. I mean, what argument do they use? They don't get up in court when they're making their argument and say, no, no, you can't take that brush away because that will deprive us of a very photogenic opportunity to advance

our agenda. What do they say? What are their reasons? Well, the superficial reason is, well, this really represents, and by the way, this goes back to the horrible Yellowstone National Park fires of 1988. What they said was, gosh, we overdid fire suppression for decades. There's a little something to that. There's actually a decent abstract argument that we should let forest fires run their course.

But then you do a 180-degree turn, and you do no brush clearing, no clearing of downed trees for several decades. First, you turn Yellowstone into a tinderbox. That happened now, what, 35 years ago, whatever it was. And now we're doing it to all of California and many parts of the West. This is true in other states, like Colorado, which occasionally has terrible fires in the mountains there. And so I think it's, again, a superficiality of an awful lot of environmental dogma. Charles, would you agree that it's sort of like saying, well, you know, we must let nature take its course. We cannot intercede too much because that destroys the delicate balance of nature therefore we should not develop a ballistic missile shield against meteors that are coming to uh you know to crash into the ocean and and demolish our civilization anyway you're gonna say yeah and it's in some

sense indirect in that although they would never say this and i don't think they actively want people to die but the fundamental position of those who take that view is that the houses shouldn't be there in the first place i think it really does matter where you start again i don't think this is a literal debate between people who want fires and people who don't but i do think that if you like me think that we should build in the united states and that the earth is here for us to use so that we can increase our standard of living and bring people out of poverty and generally have a good time rather than that we are a cancer on it and it will be better if we weren't here and we probably stole the land anyway, then you come to different conclusions. And I think Steve's onto something with that,

that they don't care as much as I do about this destruction. Well, maybe the proof to this, James, is I know that you're a fan, quote-unquote, of the 15-minute city. I guarantee you that two things are going to happen that will be the next scandal. One, it's going to take people three, four years to get building permits to rebuild their houses on the same footprint where they existed. They're going to do all the permit reviews and new building standards. Some of that makes sense. Building standards do. But along the way, you're going to hear the visionaries say, you know, this is really an opportunity. It's like the old Paul Krugman argument that

hurricanes stimulate the economy, right? I know Charles remembers that. And they're going to say, gosh, you know, I mean, it is true that you have a lot of old neighborhoods with old construction up near Altadena that completely wiped out block after block. And they're going to say, gosh, we just redesigned that whole urban area. And that's a great place for us to plan a 15-minute city. I guarantee that op-ed is probably in the hopper at the Los Angeles Times right now. I have seen tweets already saying about Malibu, well, gosh, you know, all those houses right on the beach, maybe we shouldn't allow people to rebuild there

because of climate change and rising sea levels and this and that. And at least they proposed to buy out people there, although that would be expensive. You know, I'm shocked seeing these pictures because I drive up and down that road when I'm down at Pepperdine. And, you know, even the most humble old shack starts around $3-4 million, right? And it goes up from there. So that would be a big price tag to tell people they can't rebuild there. But I expect that's going to be a great difficulty getting those houses rebuilt, too. Well, when you talk about rising ocean levels, this is the position. We must do something about global warming to avoid rising ocean levels. Also, we're going to dump the runoff water into the ocean. Right. And of course, they would say it's a matter of scale, to which I would say,

all right, well, if it's a matter of scale, then let's talk about Britain going carbon zero to bankrupt it. Yeah, exactly. Versus China doing exactly whatever it's a matter of scale, then let's talk about Britain going carbon zero to bankrupt. Yeah, exactly. Versus China doing exactly whatever it wishes to do. Stephen, you may be right. I mean, some of these communities were already 15-minute communities. California doesn't abound with them, but I was looking at Pacific Palisades and some of the little commercial nodes. That's what people talk about. The idea that you ought to be able to walk or stroll or bike or whatever to get what you need on a daily, regular, weekly basis is a 15-minute city and having a sense of place. And, you know,

urban philia is one of the terms that they use. I get all that and I approve of that. And that's what it was. And if it comes back as that, great. The problem with the 15-minute city is designing it explicitly so that it depresses the ability and desire to leave it. That's a whole different set of social engineering we can talk about elsewhere. But you may be right. Part of the problem, I think, with this is that a lot of these houses demonstrate a level of inequality. And if you have inequity in the system, that is proof that the system has no moral standing and therefore should be dismantled. So it'll be interesting, yes, to see how they would like to revitalize these things. It really does. I tell you, it is what it is. But on the other hand, I've got to tell you this. This being 2025, as I said before, a lot of people have already cast

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It says, well, you know, you burn a lot of carbs, so you can have 40, 50 carbs today. And I just say, great. That means an extra pizza crust. That means a bowl of ice cream. Now, I know that most people don't pitch these things and saying, you can indulge more, but really, frankly, knowing precisely what's going on lets me table the little indulgences in life. Take the next step to improving your health. Go to lumen.me slash ricochet to get 20% off your Lumen. That's L-U-M-E-N dot M-E slash ricochet for 20% off your purchase. And we thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Dan, Dan McLaughlin, senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at the National Review Institute.

You can find him hanging around Twitter X. He's baseball crank. You know the avatar. You love it. It's the flying baseball with a peevish expression yelling about something or other. That's right. Dan's the crank. But he's a great guy and a sensible fellow, too.

You really get down to it. Dan, welcome. Thank you. So we have many things to talk about, but everyone's been toting up the accomplishments of Jimmy Carter. History's greatest monster, as The Simpsons called him. You provided a not uncharitable evaluation of the fellow, and you titled it, Conservatism's Debt to Jimmy Carter.

And this is not because it's like he was so bad that we had to go for Reagan. Remind us some good words to say about Jimmy Carter. Yeah, I mean, one hates to talk about Carter's accomplishments without air quotes, but there are some. I mean, and as I said, yes, it is one of those, obviously, is just the argument that, you know, he gave us Reagan. But he, in some ways, prepared the ground for Reagan. He started some things

that I don't think that Carter necessarily would have had the guts and the backbone to take as far as Reagan did, but he should get some credit for starting them. He started the defense build-up. Now, that was a reversal. He had tried to cut the defense budget his first year in office. He definitely did take a harder line on the Soviet Union, if perhaps misguided in some of its applications in his final year in office. You know, he, I mean, also was big on using like the 1975 Helsinki Accords to begin the process of building a case against the Soviet Union as an abuser of human rights, which was key not only to U.S. propaganda abroad, propaganda in the positive

sense, but also to building more liberal support at home for an aggressive stance in the Cold War. You know, on inflation, Carter was completely unable to handle inflation while he was in office, but he did midway through his term appoint Paul Volcker to head the Fed. And it was really Volcker who did. You know, Volcker was absolutely essential working later in tandem with Reagan, but he started the work under Carter to stopping inflation. inflation um you know and uh i i think the biggest accomplishment that carter can take pure credit for that's a really conservative accomplishment is deregulation um he signed quite a lot of uh bills deregulating trucking air travel um you know uh trains and uh you know perhaps nearest and dearest to many hearts, beer. You know, he did a lot to deregulate brewing in the United States.

There were only 44 breweries when he took over. Billy Beer, of course, became the icon for those of us old enough to remember that era. Yes. The beer put out by Jimmy's ne'er-do-well redneck brother, which I suppose we should be nostalgic for the days when the president's near-do-well relatives simply sold embarrassing beer rather than, you know, selling out to China. But, you know, Carter's deregulation did a lot of good in a lot of directions, and that he should get unqualified credit for doing that. Well, I know the guys want to leap in, but I just want to ask this. Why? I mean, why did Carter towards the end, was he actually affected by the results of his previous policies and had a Saul on the road Damascus moment?

I mean, I think on the Soviet Union, yes, he was mugged by reality. And again, I don't know that Carter ever fully, you know, he never went sort of the full evil empire route that Reagan started off with. But I think he realized that his policies towards the Soviet Union had failed and that we were entering into a new era of confrontation in which negotiation alone was not going to get us anywhere. Yeah, Dan, Steve Hayward out in California, as you may know, I wrote a very critical book about Carter 20 years ago about mostly his ex-presidency, where I think he was disgraceful. I agree with you about his domestic record and his foreign policy accomplishments,

like the Camp David Accords, were a genuine accomplishment, for which I think, by the way, he should have shared a Nobel Prize with Begin and Sadat, and they didn't give it to him until, what, 2002, when it was used to kick George W. Bush in the rear end. I think to answer James' question quickly is I think that there is one difference between Carter and Biden that people are comparing them a lot right now is there was a growing consensus for deregulating the economy back in the 70s. I mean, one of the sponsors of deregulating the trucking industry was Ted Kennedy. And by the way, the staff member who did the work on that was a guy named Stephen Breyer, later known, of course, as Justice Breyer. And so Carter was sort of swimming with the mainstream.

And of course, you can't point to a single thing that the Biden administration has wanted to deregulate or ease up on. Quite the opposite. They're back to the old 60s style, regulate everything. And so there's the problem is, at the end of They're back to the old 60s style, regulate everything. And so there's the problem is, at the end of the day, one of Carter's problems was he was, aside from the regulation story, he was out of step with his own party. You know, he was actually kind of a tightwad on spending when the Democratic Party then wanted to spend like crazy. He wanted to reform welfare, and they didn't want to do that, and so he gave up on it.

He had a lot of crazy energy policy ideas that he also later reversed um but the biggest problem with carter is that he was kind of an odd duck in the democratic party in the 70s wasn't he yeah yeah and he was always an odd duck generally i mean another distinction between him and joe biden is that you know in in uh you know before 1977, Jimmy Carter hadn't served in Washington and Joe Biden had already been there for five years.

But, yeah, I mean, Carter... Carter... And by the way, I was at the Federalist Society convention back in November and they had Breyer there chit-chatting with Neil Gorsuch. And knowing his audience, Breyer played up his deregulatory brief moment of his life. But, yeah, I mean, I think that, and, you know, Carter was also a,

because, you know, following sort of the principle that everyone is most conservative about that, which he knows best. Carter was actually a proponent of nuclear energy. That was sort of one of his things that he was kind of right on about about energy. But, yeah, I mean, his post-presidency and, you know, my editor, Phil Klein, did a tremendous demolition of Carter's post-presidency. Particularly the, you know, sort of the foreign policy aspects of that. I mean, I think Carter, you know, on the issue of one thing I touched on, on the issue of like election integrity and whatnot. On the positive side, we have Carter participating in the Carter-Baker Commission in 2005 with James Baker, supporting things like voter ID and other common sense election security things. And some of that goes back to Carter's own 2000 election of Bush and the 2016 election of Trump as illegitimate and stolen elections.

And I think that that, you know, we don't really have to go into a hypothetical scenario to imagine what sort of slippery slope that might lead us to by 2020. Right. Yeah. Right, yeah. Yeah, you're right. I think it was his very first election in Georgia in, I want to say, 1962 or something, where he had to go to court to get some obviously phony ballots tossed out, and he succeeded at that, I think, as I recall. So that memory did stick with him, that you can steal elections, especially things like House races and state legislative offices stuff like that it is funny that that report that you reference uh quite

correctly it's a very good report still very much worth reading they didn't update i think a couple of years ago some of the staff of it essentially said we were right all along it it just disappears from the mainstream media discourse about elections and election security. It's like a non-report thrown down the Orwellian memory hole. I will mention that a couple more things about his post-presidency. You know, he loved Yasser Arafat. He cozied up to Hafez Assad in Syria. At the same time, our country was calling him a state sponsor of terrorism in the 80s. And it finally led to your guy's fearless leader, lowry saying he's the former president of which country i mean he took the side of all of our enemies uh as as relentlessly as say ramsey clark used to do back in the 70s and 80s uh yeah and and and i would say that

carter's carter's skepticism of stolen elections definitely stopped at the water's edge yeah ah yes that's right why did he win was it watergate was it 76 yeah his own party wanted someone else there was the abc movement anyone but carter the republicans closed that election quite well. I'm tremendously glad he did win. I sometimes think about how different the world would be if instead of conceding with that great speech in 1976 at the RNC, Ronald Reagan had been accepting the nomination. And worse still, if all of the things that led up to that hadn't happened it's a blessing in disguise but ford lost just about and carter won why yeah i mean certainly there's i mean when i you know i did i've done some studies over the years on sort of the the powerful historical snapback that you get after a you know at the end of a basically a two-term

presidency when you've gotten a president re-elected, right? So it was inevitable the country was going to move back towards in the democratic direction after 72, although 72 was such a huge landslide that, you know, it's certainly not inconceivable that had Nixon's second term gone better, that what you get in, you know, in 76 could look like 1988 or like, you know, 1940 or 44 or 48, where you've got a largeities, two national, other than FDR, they won two national popular majorities between 1852 and 2008, right? Carter was one and LBJ was the other. And I think both of those were kind of reactions, in a sense, to exogenous events. And the fact that Carter just, he just postured himself differently as like this uniquely honest man. And also, you know, he was the first, I wouldn't say Carter was the first evangelical Christian president, because I think that gets into some real definitional issues about what kind

of religion was practiced by a lot of our 19th century presidents. But he was the first kind of modern president to speak the language of the modern, you know, born-again Christian, as he put it at the time, movement. And that definitely had a big influence. There's a reason, like, people like Pat Robertson. Right. People forget that Pat Robertson and a lot of fundamentalist Christians supported Carter, because that was a big moment in the 70s for the evangelical revival. My reading on that is complementary, which is, the irony is, by the way,

is, which you may know, is Carter panted after being George McGovern's rubbing mate in 72. He really wanted to be on the ticket because he was ambitious to run, and it was lucky for him that he wasn't, I think, because what he represented by 76 was the anti-McGovern inside the Democratic Party. And it was his genius, I think, to see two things. One is, after Nixon and LBJ and the Nixon pardon under Ford, America wanted somebody who taught Sunday school in the Oval Office. And second, he understood, the first to understand, how the new rules of the presidential nomination process favored someone who was going to aggressively run everywhere. As his campaign manager put it, it's like running for sheriff in 50 states. And he just outflanked everybody in campaign organization, and he was able to claim every Tuesday that he won somewhere.

So he'd always say, I won this week, even though he might have only won one out of three primaries or caucuses or something. And so it really was a work of political genius, but it all seemed to evaporate when he got into office. Yeah, I think the other thing that maybe is almost seems surreal today in today's world, but mattered a lot in 1976

was the sense that the South was being legitimized again. That particularly after two decades of civil rights fights in which the Deep South in particular seemed to be at odds with the rest of the country in a lot of ways and was kind of cast out of polite society. And, of course, there's nothing that makes you more polite society than electing not only your own president, but a Democrat,

who is, you know, beloved by the national media and all of the liberal cognoscenti, at least as he was in the fall of 76. And so I think there was a real, very real sense that Carter was bringing the South back into respectable America. Yeah, and then, I mean, one of the great jokes, which I'm sure everyone knows, is at least Carter only lusted after women in his heart,

unlike Bill Clinton, who put the South back into disgrace. Okay. I know we could talk about Carter all day. Charles, do you have another Carter question or something else? Because I want to ask Dan some sports questions. No, go for it. Sports it is. Yeah, so since your Twitter handle is Baseball Crank. So, Dan, I grew up in the L.A. area, so I'm used to two things.

Lots of fires, like we're going through right now, and listening to your uncle every day call Dodger baseball. I mean, that was a ritual in my house. And, Amanda, you writ some nice tributes to your Uncle Vin Scully when he died. None of us knew this, right? I think you could have kept that private information. And I don't know. Say something about that.

Because, I mean, I was chastised for once calling him the Homer of baseball announcers. Because you're not supposed to say Homer in broadcasting. But say to me he was a poet. Yeah, yeah. Well, yes, a Homer in the Homeric sense and not in the, while being the opposite of sort of the stereotypical Homer, the announcer who is all in for his, you know, a as a new york giants fan uh in a city divided between three teams and then going to broadcast for their arch rivals uh and knowing that that you know everywhere in town people were listening to you who were not fans of your team so which is good great training for a national audience so um but uh yeah and i mean he you know he lived for many years in pacific palisades which is a place that is very much under siege from the Far East. Right.

So I'm told that you're now a Dodgers fan in New York in the 60s and whatnot, because technologically you just couldn't get the games very much. So my mom became a Mets fan, and so inherited all of us as Mets fans. So I've been a lifelong

Mets fan. Who's this guy? Soto? Was that the guy they just paid a billion dollars for or something to try and rid themselves of the stigma of the Bobby Bonilla day? Is that the way to think about it? Yeah, well, of course, they're still paying Bonilla for more than half of the Soto contract. They'll still be paying Bonilla through 2035.

And yeah, I i mean there is actually a long history of the mets bringing in um some of these sluggers who have a lot of difficulty adjusting in at least in their first year to new york bonilla carlos beltran uh george foster but you know one advantage of bringing in a guy who's just coming straight from the yankees is he doesn't have to adjust to the city he knows the, he loves the city, and Soto is a guy who brings a tremendous intensity of focus to the game that I don't think is going to be distracted by moving from Yankee Stadium to Citi Field. Dan, was that a good trade? So I'm a Yankees fan, and I loved Soto last year. He was instrumental in getting us to the World Series. He was not the reason that we lost the World Series.

He's infectious. He can rally the team. He's obviously unbelievably talented, patient, a student of the game and I wanted him to stay. I'm also open to the idea that he ended up getting paid too much for what he is and that choosing to spend all of those resources on one person would have been a bad move for the Yankees. Was it a good move for the Mets? I think it was a good move for the Mets.

I think it was a great move for the Mets. I have no question that the Mets probably overpaid a little bit. You know, they paid a premium over what is probably his best market value at this point. But I'm a big believer particularly in baseball, you know, and I think this is maybe not true in football because you have so many such large rosters, but certainly in baseball and to the extent that it's also, you know, applicable in basketball, you'd always much rather overpay for premium talent at the top of the market than overpay a bunch of people at the middle of the market, because some of those people,

if they don't quite live up to expectations, you end up wasting the money, right? Whereas here, maybe you've wasted some of the money, but you're going to get a lot of value out of Soto. I mean, you look at the Yankees' contract with A-Rod, which they signed when he was about the same age, which is another guy who was very unusual in going on the market, you know, before he was in his late 20s. There's no question that first contract that the Rangers and later the Yankees signed with A-Rod, that he was worth every penny of that. You know, and people thought it was a ridiculous amount of money at the time. But, you know, as baseball continued to, you know, values went up across the board,

you know, by the end of the deal, it looked like a bargain. Yeah, I think I read that Ted Turner bought the Atlanta Braves in the early 70s for, I think the figure was $12 million, which nowadays that's a minor league contract for one player. I have one general question about the game, Dan. You know, I was very skeptical and maybe even opposed to the rules changes. You know, the pitch clock, limiting the number of throws to first base,

putting the runner on second and extra innings. And it looks like I was wrong about that. The games are much quicker. Attendance is up. Interest seems to be higher. I guess maybe, I don't know how you measure whether the games are better or not, but what did you think of the rules changes, and do you think it's worked right, or are there any additional rules changes that you think ought to be considered? I would draw some real distinctions. I'm very much a traditionalist, but also a I like more

baseball in my baseball game guy, and not a I like more baseball in my baseball game guy, and I want less baseball in my baseball game. So the pitch clock, it seems to me, is pretty good. It is somewhat of a restoration of tradition because the game used to have a clock called the sun, right? And so there was a certain restoration there of speeding up the pace of play. I was in favor, I was writing 25 years ago about why they should require the relief pitchers to face more than one batter. So I think that's reasonable. I'm a little bit agnostic on some of the base running changes, but I'm very opposed to the whole,

the ghost base runner and extra innings. I think that's designed to shorten the games. Extra inning games are great. They're more baseball. They're bonus baseball. You know, if you got to work tomorrow, you can go to bed. But if it's a really, you know,

if it's a game worth your time, they can be tremendously rewarding and often the most memorable games that you ever see. And I think the golden at bat idea that they were proposing this year is just absolutely heresy. Yeah, that was my next question. For listeners, that's the idea that once a game, a manager can send up any player to bat. So theoretically, you could have Soto or Shohei Otani bat twice in a row.

That's crazy. They passed a rule in... I'm not sure exactly when it was formalized as a rule, but they basically changed the rules in the around 1886 or so to prevent this kind of thing because

up until that time, weren't required just to admit your batting order before the game um and so what would happen uh and a lot of teams followed a standing standard batting order at the beginning of the game anyway but what would happen on some teams if you had like a single slugger who was your your best hitter cap anson would do this because he was the the big slugger and the manager. A good combination to have if you want to rack up a lot of RBIs.

And Anson would wait and see as the first inning developed to see if the Cubs got a couple of men on base and decide when he would send himself up to hit. Now, once the batting order was set, it was set for the rest of the game.

But, I mean, Anson led the league in RBIs like six times in seven years. It drove in like 147 runs in like 125 games one year. And they put a stop to that after that. Yeah.

Dan, who's going to win the World Series next year? You know, nobody knows. As a Mets fan, I know better than to trust my own hopes. So, I mean, obviously, you start with the presumption that the Dodgers are the favorites, though. Yeah, I think so, too. Do you think the Yankees getting there was a one-off, or do you think they have a chance to be good again?

I mean, we won't know until their roster is fully set. But I think it really is hard to replace the production they got last year from Judge and Soto. I don't know that you get quite the same year. I don't think you're going to get a year like that at a Judge every year. You might get another one in the course of this contract, but that's not his baseline level of ordinary production. It was a good year for him. I hate to jump in with something completely irrelevant here, but Obama and Trump, what were they talking about at the funeral? Oh, right.

Is this not proof that it's just all one big unistate and that this idea of divisions between them is simply a fairy tale that they feel to us like sugared porridge when actually you know i mean you would you would think uh perhaps that there might be some cold friction between them but there didn't seem to be so were they discussing the necessity of of coming clean about the orbs dan is it the orbs because that's what a lot of people online are saying and not the uh not the martians um well no the martians are a cover story yeah it's the news i mean first of all obviously trump is not you know trump trump is not a guy who has like never in his life hung out and socialized with you know democrats uh

obviously he's a little more bitter these days but uh, you know, he has that ethos. I mean, some of this obviously is just the kind of civility we ought to have. I always love to tell a story about the Hampton Roads Peace Conference in 1865. And Lincoln sort of warmly embraced some of his old friends from Congress. And then as he explained to them his position on, you know, what he felt the South was doing. At one point, one of them was like, so you're basically saying you would have the right to hang us as traitors. And Lincoln's like, yes. You know, they were still his old friends, but he was absolutely willing to tell them to their faces that he was willing to hang them. So, but, you know, maybe they were just talking about something they have in common, like, you know,

Joe Biden's limitless capacity to F things up. Indeed possible. Indeed. Charlie, anything before we leave? Because we know we have Dennis to go and we have to skedaddle and other things. No, I think I've been exhausted by this excellent podcast. Good. As well you should be. And we hope the readers feel the same way, but yet revitalized to hear the next one. Dan, thanks for stopping by today.

And as ever, National Review and on Twitter, Baseball Crank. You can find all sorts of interesting, fun, piquant things to read there. I appreciate it. We'll see you again. Well, one of the things we haven't talked about for a long time is Canada, because it's just kind of up there. It's just sitting up there. You know, it's got some people, some of them speak French and the rest of it. And I don't know about you, but I have watched Canada turn into something of concern, shall we say. And I find myself at a Mexican resort about twice a year talking to a lot of Canadians because for some reason, a lot of Canadians go to Cancun. And they are of a certain demographic slice, I'll admit.

And they're loathe to criticize their government because they're Canadians. But when you wind them up and get them going, oy, I tell you. Justin Trudeau is out. And it took a while, but there you go. And it looks as if you're not going to be the 51st state. That's going to be Greenland. But it looks like they're going to have a new leadership and there may be a new day dawning on the horizon for our friends to the north, for our maple scented, pine scented friends to the north. What do you think?

Hope? Part of a global wave of sensible populism and nationalism coming back? Or just the usual ebb and flow of politics? Both. Thank you. Steve? Well, I was hoping our authentic Commonwealthman Charles would say more about that. No, I'm happy to please do wow the liberal party there has been in power for a long time so there's a certain degree of ebbing and flowing but trudeau has been a disaster in pretty much every aspect and his presumed replacement the leader of the conservative party how do i say this pierre polyev is his name is really impressive yes and has impressed me for

years in fact i remember first seeing him two three four years ago he made an address on youtube when he became the leader of the conservative party. And I texted Rich Lowry and said, this guy is amazing. Now, often when you do that, you realize that they're actually not. The first time you see them, they're on their best behavior. And then over time, they disappoint you. They are politicians after all, but this guy has just put up a series of solid performances, the most famous of which I think is when he ate an apple. An apple.

But he's eating it. He's talking to a reporter. Destroyed this journalist. But it seems that this is one of those rare occasions on which at the same time a country is going to get rid of someone who is genuinely per se terrible and bring in someone who is genuinely per se fantastic it's out with carter in with reagan's situation not just the turning over of the years is it too late for canada steven uh well i mean look i would have said that about argentina uh until millet came, and suddenly the place is turning around really fast.

By the way, they just had somebody, I think it was Dan Mitchell, the economist, reminded us that something like 110 economists around the world signed some statement saying Millet is going to crash the Argentinian economy. Reminds me of all the economists in 1981 who said Thatcher was going to crush England's economy. Wrong in both counts. So it is true, though, that the Canadian economy relative to the U.S. has stagnated badly for the entire time Trudeau has been in office. And I haven't followed closely what the policies are that drive that, but it has to be something. I do think, though, that there's an odd confluence here.

People say, oh, Trudeau is a casualty of Trump. I think that is true in one sense. But I think really what's happened here is Trump gave the Liberal Party the excuse to give Trudeau the boot because it's the only chance they have of not getting wiped out of the next election. So I think there's a confluence of opportunism here on both sides of the border. Well, we will see. I am hopeful. But just talking to Canadians, there is a sense of, oh, how to put this? I don't want to use the word malaise because, of course. Am I correct in assuming that I heard

that they played John Lennon's Imagine at Jimmy Carter's funeral? Did I get that right? Have you heard that, played John Lennon's Imagine at Jimmy Carter's funeral. Did I get that right? Have you heard that, guys? They did. Yeah. They did do it. You know that bit in Hard Day's Night when they're on the train?

Mm-hmm, yeah. And the old guy is talking about how he fought in the war for the Beatles, and Lennon says, I bet you wish you'd lost. I thought of that when they played Imagine at Jimmy Carter's funeral and thought, I bet he's pleased he's dead. He was the luckiest man in that room. Yeah. It is an utterly meretricious song on just every possible, it is so philosophically bankrupt.

And as a matter of fact, the spiritual nihilism of it is dreadful. Anybody who subscribes to that as some sort of anthemic embodiment of a particular era and way of thought is revealing themselves. Imagine there's no religion. I don't think that Jimmy Carter, actually known famously as a man of a certain spiritual persuasion, would agree to that. Well, beyond the immediate offense of it that you both point out, it seems like it's an old term. I mean, shouldn't the song we're waiting for now from Taylor Swift or somebody be reimagined? That's the current phrase of the progressive left. We're going to reimagine this and reimagine that.

So why haven't we got reimagined yet as a top 10 pop song well that said james imagine no possessions is a good tribute to the cartiers yes yes yes indeed because you couldn't afford them or because the ones that were being offered was sheathed in a in a uh an avocado green or a harvest gold color or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do remember that. I remember that when Lennon was shot and that song was played and everybody wept to it that we had lost such a thinker and such a deep philosophical poetic embodiment of our age.

And I don't know who chose that i think that it's almost i mean it's it's like the leftist version of born in the usa in a way because you will you will find people at you know in the conservative rallies who love that song and you want you want to tell them uh uh check the lyrics on that, if you would, please, because this really is not the sort of anthemic hoorah for the U.S. sort of thing that we should talk about. Let's see one more thing before we go, perhaps. who, of course, is, if not a lizardoid overlord from the center of the world, at least as their humanoid ambassador, intermediary, said that all those fact checkers that we were using, I fired them all. And it turns out there were like 40,000 of them. And they're going to go with community notes. They're going to go with community notes, which is like Twitter X,

where people, anybody, can append to a statement something to the contrary, additional information, the rest of it. Fact checkers, in other words, an army of fact checkers, an army of Davids, as Glenn Reynolds would have called it. This is good, is it not? Or does this just mean that one more plywood strut keeping the whole thing from falling down into a debris-strewn mass of disinformation has left us and we are again to swim in lies and Russian-inspired disinformation? uh well look i think this is a big deal uh now maybe it's zuckerberg has uh realized he needs to make accommodation with the zeitgeist as buckley used to like to say i do know a lot of people close to the facebook world in silicon valley and i'm hearing lots of incredible reports that there's lots of rending of garments going on behind the scenes a lot of people the unmashing of teeth all the rest the sturm und drang if we want to use the german phrase uh a lot of people are very upset about this i have to say the most satisfying part of it was seeing the new york times headline the greatest one ever

that said uh facebook says fact checkers were the problem fact checkers say it's not true they wrote that headline without any sense of irony or self-awareness. I know. Made my day. Yeah. Charles, I know that you're an avid Facebook user. So how do you expect this to affect your experience? I don't use Facebook. I do have a Facebook page, which I put my writing on, but I don't use it day to day

because after Brexit, which I supported, I just didn't want to see all of my friends from school screaming at each other that's the problem with facebook relative to twitter the people who scream at each other are not generally in your family but i think it is good because although it is not real life facebook and instagram are closer to real life than twitter is and they're more widely used there are 3 billion people on Facebook. There are 190 to 250 million Americans on Facebook, depending on how you count it. And that's the reason that the left so relentlessly and ruthlessly went after this. They wanted to control that information. And this is a good development. And even if it is true that

Zuckerberg is being cynical, I'm less convinced of this, but I don't know. The outcome is still good, and maybe it will lead to a habit that then assists. I'm perfectly fine with a happy outcome if it comes from cynical motives. I'll take it. The problem with Facebook, of course, is that it is aging out. The people who are there, who are camped on it all the time, yelling at each other, are generally boomers around that area. And the young people could have nothing to do. They couldn't care less about it. The gram is where it's at.

And so Meta, as they have so wonderfully called themselves after their immensely expensive and, as far as I can tell, utterly unsuccessful move to move us all to the Metaverse. Remember that? By now, we are all supposed to be strapped and have Vision Quest goggles strapped on our faces like uh remoras or something from the alien face hugger movies in which we'd be moving around floating in spaces torsos without legs talking to each other talk having a meeting with a giraffe who was actually the avatar for our boss while the rhino you know madness and nobody wanted it and nobody's there. But Meta is still their name anyway. Meta said that they're going to be introducing AI models into the stream so that some people will be conversing with and getting posts from utterly constructed individuals, people who do

not actually exist, but embody an AI generated set of ideas. So eventually, it'll be robots talking to robots. Just as so, I mean, I was on YouTube the other day, and I came across, I was reading the comments on YouTube, and I know that sounds like I have absolutely no life and too much time. But I was keen because I spotted two comments that said virtually the same thing with very little variance in the language. I mean, literally, it was copy and paste, but tweaked as if you told AI to do, you know, just say it again. And I was wondering exactly why this was, who made these comments?

They're bot accounts. They have no followers. They've been around for a while. They exist to do what? To prove engagement, to create a personality that's been around for a while, that can be sold or leveraged. What? I don't understand. And when you find these websites that consist of nothing but reposition stories, AI written, that have a million links to another sites that are identical, the same, you have the idea of just this vast Matrix of bots chattering to each other That's not dead internet theory But it's close and I get the feeling that Facebook is gonna end up the same way that eventually it will be nothing but

Ricochet that is real in the world because ricochet is full of real people you can meet with them You can drink with them you can argue with them You can go to the member space, which you should, and talk to them and realize that these are real, actual human beings, except for Kay Davis. I think he's a bot. Anyway, you should go there. Go there and sign up. He's going to love that. Well, he's programmed to do so. Go there, sign up, and enjoy it. We'd like to thank Lumen for sponsoring this show. We'd like to thank Lumen for sponsoring this show.

We'd like to thank you, of course, for listening to us. And we'd love it if you would go to one of the podcast places and rave about us because that surfaces the podcast, gets more readers, gets more listeners, and Ricochet thrives and thrives into another quarter century after all. One quarter of the century down, next one coming up. I'm James Lytleks. This has been Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. And we thank you, all of us, for listening to this, the Ricochet podcast. And we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, guys.

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