The Ricochet Podcast - Forever in Blue Jeans

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Another workweek, another outrage, another Casual Friday. Lileks, Hayward, and Cooke remain (reasonably) laid back in the face of madman theory in action, tariff tranches, deadly predators, and pun-heavy advertisements.- Sound from this week's open: Sydney Sweeny promoting American Apparel jeans and Donald Trump explains how to escape from alligators.  

There's, James, it sounds like he has the shower running behind him or something. That's for the special subscriber edition that we release later for the experiment. We're making a few seconds and I'm going to go upstairs to my office and plug in and will be good to go. Only fan studio. Yeah. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that one. Well, we were saying it sounded as if you were in the shower, so I said you were going to go upstairs to your only fan studio. Well, I am retired.

I've got to make money wherever I can. Oh, you got retired. Yeah, not really. Get my dongle, so to speak. Can't do only fans without a dongle. 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 Rikersay podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen A.ward and James Lolleckson. Did they? Alligators. Med to the Dem. Nazi jeans. Oh, my. Let's, uh, let's have ourselves a podcast. Jeans are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even I color. My jeans are blue. You know, snakes are fast, but alligators are, but we're going to teach them how to run away from an alligator, okay, if they escape prison. How to run away. Don't run in a straight line. like this. And you know what? Your chances go up about 1%. Welcome, everybody. This is the R ricochet podcast number 751.

Join us at Rurkishay.com, where you two can prepare yourself for the next 749 until we hit 1,500 for some reason, and there will be fireworks, I guess. But anyway, you should go to RICOCHAY.com and sign up. You can read the front page, and it's great. It's awesome. You can listen to the podcast, but there's a member feed where all sorts of interesting things happen. It's the place you've been looking for in the internet, all your many, many years. I'm James Lilloch from Minneapolis at the moment, and I am joined by Charles C.W. Cook in Florida and Stephen Hayward, who I presume is in his, I was going to say, Italia or abattoir, or wherever you have to be in California. Gentlemen, how are you?

Making it three. Well, good. What, what's, are you, you, you, you sound a little stressed as though you are still processing the, the horrible message of the Sydney Sweeney commercial. I, I, I, I didn't regarded it as a horrible message. And just to make sure, James, that it wasn't a horrible message, I watched it 106 times. I did too. I was looking for a little nuances here. What I love is the fact that this is an opportunity

in opening for Hugo Boss, I thought, to come out with their own line jeans and have somebody standing there in a long black leather jacket saying, when you put on your jeans in the morning, do you find it difficult? Is it my struggle to put them on? Do you want

the pants to have more evens around in the back. I mean, if they did that and somebody said, you know, that's kind of Nazi. You'd say, you know, you said that about this. You said that about the... They have no room left for Nazi anymore. Sidney's Sweeney, their inner thing talking making a stupid wordplay about jeans

as Nazi, yes. But go ahead, go ahead, if that is the hill on which you wish to die, we will be there with the grave triggers, the shroud, and the tombstone. Elsewhere in the world, we have a tariff steal, or do we not? Apparently something with the EU, something with Japan. From what I understand,

Chuck Schumer got up on the floor of the Senate, the well of the Senate, and said, no, it's all bogus, none of it is real. So what is going on? What happened? I hear everything from, man, he took him to the cleaners to absolutely nothing's going to happen whatsoever. Well, who can say? I mean, it's still, in my mind, a mystery of whether Trump really believes in tariffs, and, you know, he's been saying for years, tariff is a beautiful word, I love tariffs, or whether this is and or, it could be both, the second possibility is this is all his real estate negotiating practices of the last 40 years applied to

international trade. And I have some sympathy with the view that Trump has articulated since the 80s that we've been patsies on trade. You know, we've been going for years to these international negotiations and saying, pretty please, could you lower your tariffs? And occasionally making a little bit of progress or getting some concessions. And I think Trump's decided to blow the whole thing up because he's been saying that, as we say, as we know, since the early 80s. In any case, I think the really big question is whether his legal authority to do all this improvising is going to survive the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Supreme Court, because it sounds like the argument before the court this week went very poorly

from all the news accounts I read. Well, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for tariffs or the means by which they've been implemented. And those are two separate things, of course. I don't think we need more protectionism. We're a rich country. We do better than everyone else. I agree some other countries can often be silly, but it's usually to our advantage. But if we're going to have tariffs, if there's a good reason for it. And there is, in a military context, for example,

often a strong argument for making sure that we keep control of supplies that are necessary to our survival. we certainly should not be doing it via presidential edict. Now, Steve, you said you didn't know whether or not this was true, whether Chuck Schumer was right. And that's because we don't have a debate in Congress that we should have over what is in the same position in the Constitution as taxes. But the whole thing is being made up by Donald Trump on the fly. And even if you love tariffs, which is fine. I don't, but that's fine. That's a problem because it creates instability, it creates uncertainty.

It means that even people who follow politics aren't quite sure what is happening. It's also very odd because not only has Trump introduced these new tariffs, but he has walked away from a whole bunch of trade deals that were negotiated through Congress. These have superseded congressional law. And that means that if you in the future are negotiating with the United States, you're reasonably going to ask the question, well, is this going to last, or is the next president, whoever that is, going to just get rid of it on the fly? And the last thing I would say is, again, if you like tariffs, that's fine if you want to make the case for them.

I know a lot of smart people do. But the idea that what we are doing here is the exercise of an emergency power. It's just ridiculous. you don't invoke emergency powers bit by bit on and off over six months in response to what you claim has been a problem for 40 years. That's nobody's definition of emergency. So I'm not a tariff guy. I'm absolutely happy to debate it with people.

It's a normal political question. It's been in there since the founding. But the mechanism here just makes it so difficult. And by the time that this podcast goes up, even if it's up in 14 minutes, it's possible that the whole thing could have been changed or delayed or revoked, which is bizarre. So it goes. Well, here's the counter argument then, and I don't like tariffs either, mostly because I learned way back in junior high that Smoot-Hawley made everything very bad for a long time.

So, I mean, that's the sort of deep historical analysis that I'm dealing with. But a lot of people would say that, okay, we conduct a trade deal with China. Everybody sits down, negotiates. Our side is probably corrupt because they're probably beholden whatever to China. these interests for whatever reason. And even if we do sign something, China's going to break it at every possible opportunity because they're not good faith players. They steal.

So what's the point then? We can crack these treaties, make better ones with people that we like and promise to do good. But just the very idea that while we talked to them, we all sat down, we negotiated, we had a treaty doesn't necessarily mean it's something that accrues to America's interest. Would be the other argument. I'm just saying that I kind of understand that as well. Simplistic as it may be.

But, yeah, so it's, I'm trying to think it was a big hurrah that China was losing some of its manufacturing to India. Look, Apple's moving some of their production from China to India. That's great. And then a month later, 25% tariff on things coming from India. That seems to be a little counterproductive as well. But to the point that you made before about strategic tariffs, about making sure that we actually have the capability to build. build the things we build. I'm not sure that a lot of people would say, you know, I may end up paying more for athletes foot cream and antibiotic, but it's going to be coming from America,

and I'm going to be reasonably sure that it's a, it's a genuine product. I mean, I bought a antibiotic from Amazon that came from China. I'm convinced it's just Vaseline. I have no idea. I've no trust in any of the products whatsoever again. So that's, that's, that's my question. True, but you wouldn't mind if the antibiotic could come from Germany. No. The Sydney-Sweeney's face on it, no doubt. No, because I would trust precision German engineering and their sense of honor and duty and the rest of it to put out a quality antibiotic.

But China, I just, no, it's probably got, you know, it's got a hantavirus eggs in it from all I know. I just think that that is a totally fair objection, but my preference would be if we don't think that other countries are making products that are what they say they are, then we should ban them. We should put tariffs on them, right? It's such a strange response to say, well, I don't think this antibiotic cream is actually antibiotic cream. I think it is ground-up beetles.

But if you pay an extra 15% to the US government, you can have it. You can have something made in the United States under United States inspection, is all I'm saying. I mean, I would rather, if I had my druthers, I just had to buy. air fryer because the old one with the Italian name, which was made in China, fell apart. I had to buy another one. The choice of domestic manufacturers is bad. Now, you can say, it's great that we don't as a country have to make air friars anymore. It's assembly line work. It's miserable. It's demeaning. It's the rest of it. I don't agree. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be able to buy an air friar. They came out of Akron, Ohio, that was made by guys

who had a pretty good wage and a pretty good life. While that is, I understand the old model before computers and the Internet and the Information Society and all that stuff broke everything, I don't think it's something that is we should just completely abandoned attempting to duplicate or revive when plausible, when feasible. Would I spend $10 more in one if it had come from America? You'd damn right, I would have. Well, part of the problem is not fake product necessarily, ground up Beatles or whatever. it's actual real products or that are counterfeit.

And there's two kinds of this. I used to know someone who 15 years ago was tracing the problem of counterfeit pharmaceuticals from overseas. And what he discovered was in some cases, like in Mexico, for example, you'd have a plant that was contracted out by one of our pharmaceutical manufacturers and the day shift to make, whatever they were making, would close down. And then an hour later, a night shift would open off the books, producing legitimate product, but under a generic label, you know, to sort of get around our patents and so forth.

So there's that problem. And then the other problem with China, which now goes back at least 20 years or more, as I've talked to a couple patent lawyers about this, and this has been in the press. Their copies of things like Irme's handbags or Gucci handbags are so good that the manufacturers can't tell without practically using an electron microscope. I think they've now included some tracers and authentic bags and they can, find it. But to the, even the trained eye, you can't tell. The knockoffs are so good. And that's just straight out piracy. And that's a big problem. I don't know if Harris is a way to fix that. I don't think so. But the spectrum of the problem is even worse than you think. I think my criticism of some of these arguments is not that I disagree with them, but that

whenever Trump does this everyone who favors what he's doing or at least he's sympathetic to it talks about China and I agree with the criticisms of China

I had Tom Cotton on my podcast a few months ago I read a great book about China really eye-opening an alarming book about China but Trump didn't just put tariffs on China I mean if Trump had come out and said I'm dealing with the China problem

three months ago I'd probably have said fine. But we've got tariffs now on India and Indonesia and Vietnam, which are countries that we've tried to move manufacturing to get out of China. And we've also got tariffs on France and Italy and Germany and Britain and Brazil and Canada. And this is the bit that I just find astonishing, is that insofar as these tariffs make a great deal of sense, it is with countries like China, communist dictatorships that steal our stuff, make subpar products, flood our market. I think sometimes flooding the market is fine because then it gives us the chance to buy cheap things. But sometimes it's not because the aim is to destroy our industry. They want to make

sure that our factories close. But Germany doesn't do that. Britain don't do that. You know, Brazil doesn't do that. India doesn't do that. So this is the sort of, what's that, what's that weapon, a blunderbuss. The blunderbuss attitude is alarming to me. Well, I think then we all know where we are on this and need not to be deliberate anymore. Charles mentioned the UK and I wanted to get to that. There's a lot of attention focused right now in the Scepter Dial, probably outsized given its importance and the rest of it. But the place from which

freedom, supposedly, one of the well springs of, is going through this shuddering contraction of what appears to be online rights and access thanks to their online safety act. It made very difficult for people to go to sites that have adult content. And by that I mean anything

that would be interesting to somebody over the age of eight. I mean movies that are a scene from a description of a scene from a movie that sounds a little violent. Naturally, everybody who was opposed to this is being called a pedophile or a pedophile

in a native. which is always great coming from the BBC. Jimmy who? Jimmy who? Great coming from them. But it fits in with the two-tier policing idea, with the Bobby's knocking at your door

because you wrote something mean and nasty on Facebook or Twitter, the general idea that anybody who shows up to protest a whole bunch of guys who just landed on a boat being given a mobile phone and a set of clothes and being stashed off in the local luxury hotel, that all of these things

are now outside of the boundaries of civilized discussion. We can't have them, and they've got to be, something has to be done about them. And it all seems rather sudden, maybe so because the Online Safety Act is finally hitting, and the repercussions are being known, and other countries are looking at it. But it seems as if there's this sort of excel, and Charles tell me if I'm wrong, an accelerating deliberation of the UK that comes as something of a surprise. even for those of us who've been seeing certain things happen in the last few years. Well, I think you're absolutely right.

I don't know how surprised I am. When I was at Oxford, I was there at the time that a fellow student was put in a jail cell overnight for telling a police officer that his horse was gay. Yes. We've talked about this before, I think. So I'm not sure how surprising it is. What I find infuriating is exactly the response that you adam rated, which is, oh, well, I suppose you're in fact.

of. This reminds me of a law that California passed, which was enjoined by the Ninth Circuit, which said that if you in any way wrote about or advertised firearms in a way that could be appealing to a minor, it could be fined $25,000. And the problem with this in practice was immediately high school clay sports teams shut down and magazines were unable to write anything that could be plausibly deemed to be addressed to somebody under 18 and so on. In other words, you can't do, leave aside the First Amendment questions, Britain doesn't have one, you can't do things like this without affecting everybody. And so to turn around when people complain and say, oh, and I suppose you want small children to watch pornography then, it's just

extremely annoying. The problem is, James, is that while there are people who are complaining about this, the sort of reaction that you have instinctively had to this simply does not exist in Britain. They are just much more comfortable with this sort of thing. And it's going to take some really stupid prosecutions to make them realize that they've got it wrong. Last thing I'll say, there was a law that has been amended but not repealed called Section 5. I think it's Section 5 of the Public Order Act. And this law was put into place in the 1980s. I think Margaret Thatcher was on board with it.

She was quite bad on speech sometimes. And it eventually met its demise or diminishment when comedians, most notably Rowan Atkinson, started complaining that it was being used to shut up people who were making jokes, who were being funny about, say, Islam or different racial characteristics or Christianity or atheism. And there was a campaign. And at that point, the British got it, because they saw the way that it was being used. But I do worry that there's no reflexive hostility in the way you would encounter in the United States to this sort of thing. They have to see it practically fail. I have talked about this with my friends in England, and I intend to do so more.

I'm a little bit hesitant to say anything in the radio now. The next time I go through, I get scanned by the Interpol computer, and they say, hmm, this fellow, this fellow said some problematic things. I mean, I hear what you're saying, but I don't think that the docility that you have described before remains in the same percentage. I think that, I mean, was it a telegraph columnist who was brought up by charge? brought up on charges recently for tweeting out something like this. I think there are more and more instances.

And again, you may have the telegraph audience self-segregating on that one and not spilling over into the Times audience. But the other portion of it was, if I'm trying to remember here, was the banter laws. Stephen, do you know what the banter laws are? I do not. Okay. Well, in addition to the Online Safety Act and the two-tier policing

and the government actually being caught trying to do something with social media about getting rid of or de-platforming people who talk about to it to your policing, there was a law that's passed, it being called the banter law because it criminalizes pub talk essentially. Now, that, of course,

is nonsense. There's no one's going to criminal... Well, what it does is, it says that the owners of a pub are responsible for maintaining a non-threatening, inclusive, friendly work environment. So if it's possible, that your server who's coming over to give you your ale

hears you making a joke that offends them, then the pub owner I believe is responsible for not policing the banter or making it known that certain things are not to be discussed. And that's met with derision from every quarter, except of course those

who say, oh, so you want to sit in the corner of the snug then and make jokes about Islam? Maybe they do. Maybe they do. It seems to me that soccer hooligans in the pub are now Britain's best hope for recovery Yeah, well, you know, you

me and Julia, looking out the windows, saying the proles will be our hope. That's what they thought in 1984 as well. I'll tell you what it's going to take. I've said this before and I'll say it again. I think that Brexit happened when everybody opened up their paper and saw a story that the EU was going to impose new green

requirements on tea kettles and that the EU was going to dictate that they boiled a lot, took a lot longer to boil in order to save the planet. And I think that's what everybody said. I've had it right up to here. Yeah, just a very, very quick point on this. You're exactly right.

And the thing that always baffled me about that, James, is people who hated the EU, myself included, would always point out how stupid their regulations were, straight bananas and so forth. And then those who like the EU would say, why'd you always bring that up? That's not important. And I would think, why doesn't the EU stop it then?

Uh-huh, right. Well, no, absolutely. Because there is somebody whose job depends on making a yearly report, on the average diameter of Swiss cheese bubbles. Right. It simply is. And he makes $140,000 a year doing this to ensure uniformity and conformity to the Swiss standards. Of course, that's why.

Yeah. All right. Well, enough of that. Speaking of pubs or whatever the Russian equivalent is, Medvedev caught off and said something the other day. Did he? Did you hear this? Well, this is a really crazy thing to say, isn't it?

maybe we'll just go over to America and nuke you. Yeah. Well, he says an awful lot of stupid and crazy things. And so what do you do in response to that? You shrug it off and you say he's drinking again? Or do you say, you know, fine, we'll move a couple of subs around. Take your best shot. What interests me about this is that I am actually a devotee with Trump of the madman theory,

which is to say that I think one of Trump's greatest characteristics, and I mean this very genuinely. This sounds like I'm being silly. I'm not. One of his greatest characteristics is he says crazy stuff and people aren't quite sure if it's true. And he did it with Kim Jong-in

and he does it with Putin and he does it with Iran and so on. And it works. I think there is a genuine confusion and alarm in the world when Trump talks that works to the benefit of the United States in most circumstances.

I thought when I heard this that it doesn't work for Medvedev. No. Because I didn't look at this and think, oh, no. I sort of thought, oh, no. They're not going to do that. You shouldn't say that unless you're actually going to scare people. And it didn't. Maybe I'm too desensitized to it.

But this just made me think, you're a silly. backwards petro state losing a war and you're trying to talk in a way that would have been scary but to come out of the mouth of Joseph Stalin but is not now so the madman theory i thought only works for some it's all about getting everybody at the table to negotiate something about ukraine which i can't imagine anybody doing but let me offer this suggestion i think the best way to get russia to the table is to tell Russia that the entire world community recognizes as legitimate its occupancy of the eastern portion of Ukraine. Just the same way it worked as Europe and England and France

recognizing a Palestinian state, which is we all knew brought Hamas right to the table, happy to help. Yeah, I mean, I thought you were serious for a second than I was. I did too. It's trying to read your eyes. Right. I did too, Charlie. Well, so back up half a step.

So, Charlie, you said a minute ago, I think you said this, that Russia is losing the war. And I'm not quite sure that's right, or if you mean it sort of literally and comprehensively. They are grinding out gains. Yeah. At great cost. They've just lost so many people. Yes. No, at great quad.

And you have to think, how long can they sustain that? And maybe they're playing for advantage. You want to grab as much territory as we can until we have to end this because it's too costly or if there's sufficient new pressure from the West. Yeah, true. But I also think that Putin has made a, what you're talking about the crazy man theory. The other thing is, you know, Putin ought to be smart enough to know that one way to get along with Donald Trump is to give him a little something, flatter him. And Putin has given Trump nothing.

And so, look, this is not rocket science or deep psychology. Trump has been offended that, you know, Trump says these crazy things a month ago. I'll end the war on day one. And he's been in a certain way humiliated by Putin. And Trump doesn't like that. And so Trump said, okay, I said 60 days to reach a deal. What, a few days ago, he said, I'm going to make it 12 days, right? We're going to shorten the timeline. And that may have been part of what provoked Medvedev to say, well, we'll just send some submarines over like the Red October or something. And it seems to me it would have been easy for the Russians to have thrown some kind of bone to Trump to put him off for another month or two. But they've done nothing. I mean, they talk nice on the phone, apparently. But, you know, no even, even a 10. day ceasefire would probably be to Russia's advantage militarily because they'd move people around and whatnot, right? But instead it's nothing. And I don't quite understand that, except that they think they're going to win this war or that Ukraine is on the break of collapse. The other thing

is we don't get much good reporting on this, I don't think, but I think that there may be at the point of collapse politically and economically and otherwise, but I'm not sure. Go into that a little bit more, because we all know, I mean, it's been years. It grinds on. The map on the line goes back and forth. Drones go this way. Drones go that way. The one thing that we can take away from this is that the notion, the image is the reputation of the Red Army, and again, who cares what it is? If they can get the job done on the end, nobody cares about their rep. But just the whole notion of the Russian military strength, which those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, the Russian army consisted exclusively of either drunks who would go out there

and get slaughtered, or Yvon Drago characters who would be standing dispassionately in their crisp uniforms over a glittering computer console. It's revealed now the incompetence of their organization. It's reliance on brute force and horrific discipline, if you even want to use that word. It's lack of equipment, it's lack of material. The way that their whole system is dependent on Western interaction for things like, oh, I don't know, roller bearings. The way that now an enemy can be seen to fly missiles far afield and destroy the whole. their prized bombers and the rest of it. They look pathetic. They just absolutely do. But it doesn't mean that they can't force Ukraine to the table. Anexed all of that land that they have, which is

at this point parched, useless, demilitarized, claim a victory and go home. But that requires Ukraine to say, all right, this is, we'll cede this to you and now we are going to stop the war. Nobody believes, however, that if they did do that and sat down and said to Russia, Right. All right. You got these. It's yours. Get out of here. That they wouldn't be back 10 years later attempting to take Kiev and bring little Russia back into the fold. Nobody in Ukraine believes that. So what are they to do? I have no idea. That's, you know, that's $64 billion question, at least. It is wild, though, the casualties. That's why I say they're losing.

You're absolutely right, Steve. Your characterization is absolutely right. But I just finished watching the World at War, the 26-part series on World War II. And something I had, for some reason, not internalized is that World War I was far more deadly for the British than World War II. The British numbers of dead in World War II are about 350,000, excluding the empire. And the casualties are about 350,000, too. So you've got 700,000 and 800,000 British casualties. the Russian casualties in the Ukraine war are a million, with a quarter of a million

dead. That is if you think about that, that is astonishing. How many Americans died in World War II? 300,000, I think. I think it's four something, three or four, something like that, yeah. It is just it is ridiculous, but the Russian

attitude toward war has always been Jay Leno's toward Doritos, you know, puncho you like, we'll make more. Right. But what's interesting in this respect is before you had all the peasants and the serfs coming off the farm to grab a broomstick and go fight for the czar. Now, what you have

is this indiscriminate use of talented people, specialists, just throwing them into meat waves and mute assaults. So it's like, what do you do? Well, I actually designed, build, operate highly sophisticated drones. Great. Okay, here's your whole. Go

join the assault. At least, of course, if what I'm reading is correct, and I read a lot of sources about this. So maybe yes, they've lost a tremendous. amount of people, but it's also the kind of people that they have lost that puts them in a bad shape. But do you think that anybody is, here's two things, to end the Ukraine question, do you think A, anybody is going to, in the West, in Europe, is going to want to get back to the old

naturalized ways of companies interacting and they get our brands and we buy from them and we're going to pretend that we're kind of same on the same civilizational plane? Do you think that there's going to be an appetite for that? or will the native European avarice and selfishness return and they will strike deals with the terroristic gangster gas station? I bet on the latter, if only because the European economies are so weak compared to ours. I mean, they really do have a big problem with economic growth. And as much as they all like to say, we're all good members of the EU,

I think they are going to look out for their own advantage at some point each country. And I think it'll be easy for Russia to pick off in China. as well. Charles, you agree? I totally agree, and especially on energy, because the EU is full of hypocrites who, on the one hand, say, we're saving the world with our green policies. No, you can't create any energy here in Germany or what you will. And on the other hand, turn around and buy it from Russia. And they need to keep doing that, because otherwise they're going to end up unable to power their countries. Second question, how about if at the conclusion of the

agreement, whatever, is reached between Ukraine and Russia, that we say, and just to make sure that Russia conforms and lives up to its end of the bargain, we're going to give Ukraine two nice, beautiful, shiny nuclear weapons. Or, you know, we'll just give you back the ones that we took from you 30 years ago, which I think have probably been destroyed, but never mind. We can still say something like that, yes. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think we will.

You know, in a nonproliferation age, I can't anybody saying, you know what? You don't have them. You want some? Well, I mean, this is my criticism of the way Biden approached this whole business from the very beginning, with three years ago now, is it was a repeat in some ways of our Vietnam strategy. You gave Ukraine just enough force to not lose, but not enough to seriously threaten Russia with any real damage or to make them really worry that they might face some real damage. And so it was always start-stop, you know, where Ukraine would say, gosh, we'd like some

tanks. We'd like some F-16s. We'd like this missile system. And we'd say, no, you can't have that. And then three or four months later, say, okay, you can have them. And whether they're the right weapons or not, I don't know. I'm not sure the M1 Abrams tanks have ever been used in the field, or if they have, whether they've been very effective. People say the age of the tank is over now that we have these drone swarms and so forth. But nonetheless, there's a clear signal there that the United States is committed to Ukraine not losing, and that meant if we stick it out, like the North Vietnamese, eventually will win. And so Trump, to go back to the previous point, Charlie made, Trump is the ideal person to upend that assumption that the Russians

have made. You know, he just might give them more serious weapons. Maybe not nukes, but, you know, he might give them. And I think Trump has said a couple times, maybe we will give them missiles that can strike deep into Russia. So, you know, who knows? Switching gears to domestic events. Charles, I know that as somebody who's had young children in the house for a while, you no doubt are deeply steeped in all the wonderful lore of Sesame Street and Elmo and all those are the things that the Republicans hate. I mention that only because the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced on Friday

that shutting down. The news story says the CBP is a private nonprofit. But somehow, I guess when the government takes their money away, this private nonprofit just blows up and dries away. dries up and blows away. Do you think that it would be possible for people in rural areas to find out what the heck

is going on? Because this is what I've been, there are people who are sitting around their wireless sets and they're old. And they barely have the strength anymore to wind the thing up to, you know, to get the current so they can listen to it. And then they just move that little dial

until they can find the only one spot in the dial that tells them out in Bump, North Dakota, what's going on in the rest of the world. So this means a veil of ignorance, Ralsian sort of a dark night falls over rural lands as the station's shutter and fall silent. How are you dealing with this knowing that this is what you voted for? Well, no, that's the key, isn't it? It's that this is what you voted for argument.

This is why I hate this argument, because rather than just to make the case for themselves, the left always has to do this. They always have to end up with, and that's why getting what you want is going to be bad for you and your voters. they always do it well you say you want tax cuts but if you do them it'll be bad for you and your voters no it won't well if you reform

entitlements then it will be bad for you and your voters no it won't well if you get rid of NPR it'll be bad for guys no it will be bad for you that's why you are unhappy about it the argument about the only

source of weather forecasting for rural people being NPR is so stupid that it just doesn't even need dwelling on. The Sesame Street one is slightly more complicated, but it is the case that for a long time now, 10, 15 years, Sesame Street has been primarily accessible through HBO or Netflix or add-on packages that you get if you have a TV service or Amazon Prime. My kids have never liked Sesame Street, but they do like some PBS programs as a show called Wildcrats about these brothers who go out and look at animals. Well, you can, if you time it just right, get a few Wildcrats episode on the local

free TV station in Jacksonville that broadcasts, broadcast did. But if you want to actually watch them outside of weird times or watch more than one every month, then you just have to get the $4 bolt on to Amazon Prime, which gives you PBS kids. It must have been the case for a very long time. Also, there's a lot of them on YouTube. So I just think these talking points are rooted in people's conception of how television works in the 80s, as well as being deeply cynical. You're absolutely correct, Charles, and most of these people do have internet access.

We're not living at a time when there's one copper wire that extends out to these distant rural communities, actually. There was a big push back in the day to get fiber to the barn, as they called it, huge infrastructure. They would run the fiber optic cable. everywhere into rural areas superseded by things like Starlink. So now, if all these people who are worried so much about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, meaning no information

goes to people in rural areas, take that money, raise it yourself, and offer to buy Starling packages, dishes, receivers for the people in these places who need them. There's a great charity that they could set up. Are they doing it? Nope. Because that's supposed to be the government's job. Stephen? Well, I mean, their lies get

more and more pathetic. I mean, for 30 years, the main lie would be, well, you know, really the federal money's not that. It's a tiny portion of the budget for PBS and the Corporation Republic Broadcasting. It's really for our stations out and, you know, across America. There may be an element of truth to that. And so they'd say, why bother it? And you'd say back, well, if it's so little, why not, what's the problem of giving it up?

And they'd say, oh, they'd come up with something. And so now they're saying this ludicrous idea that people in rural areas won't get, it won't get any news anymore, crop reports. The other thing that's always bothered me is that PBS and NPR for that matter, but especially PBS, has been a vehicle for some people to get very rich, like Bill Moyers, became a multi-millionaire through a PBS show that he could then piggyback and get corporate sponsors for his own foundation and whatnot, book deals.

Ken Burns, the same way. And Sesame Street, that was, you know, Children's Television Workshop. my next-door neighbor who's passed away, but he was the head writer for Children's Television Workshop and later the Muppet Show would come over and have a martinis with my dad before jetting off to London in the late 70s, which is where they filmed the Muppet Show.

They were making good money doing that and selling it to PBS. And so this sort of artisanal we're just a bunch of, gosh, we're like, we're at the level of associate professors at a little university. It's just ridiculous. And it's driven me crazy for years. and we've gotten nowhere until you've got enough mean Republicans finally in office to do something about it.

Because, I mean, I remember last comment. I remember in the 90s, you know, the Reagan people tried this and failed. Newt Gingrich and Republican Congress wanted to defund it. And that's what they were saying, you want to kill Big Bird. And Newt would say, Big Bird makes money. What do they need to our money for? And, you know, but still, Republicans were always too timorous to pull the trigger and do it. But now they have, so.

You know, the other thing that was funny about this was that they hit on this idea that they would say, but we put George Will on PBS. But George Will has been in favor of defunding NPR on PBS for 20 years. When this came up with Romney, George Will wrote a column, say, if you can't get rid of that funding, you can't get rid of anything. So the person that they were using as the avatar of why their balance wants to get rid of it too. Right. Yes, indeed.

Well, maybe we should end with this because when I saw this new story the other day, I knew exactly how he was going to be played, but it also brought back a deeply conflicted memory of my youth. Washington Post is reporting that Trump, Trump is reviving the presidential fitness test. Now, when you add this to the Sydney-Sweeney, brouhaha, or curfuffle, or whatever you want to call it,

what we have here is of course strength through joy cue the old nose reels from the 30s of young Aryans with their close-cropped hair smiling in the sunshine as they perform calisthenics but this is going to be seen as an example of that it will be seen as quasi-fascist if not outright

so and it will also be seen as absurd because Donald Trump is also a fabulously unhealthy man it started under Ike this thing I thought it was a Kennedy thing sorry so did I But when I researched it, it was Ike who started the thing.

And you can imagine why it was part of that whole sort of mid-50s panic about youth, which plays into the juvenile delinquency, which plays into all that stuff. It must have just mystified the people coming back from the war, looking at these kids sitting around being complaining and sneering with their switchplays. Like, what's the problem? But we're worried about them not being able to read. We are worried about them not having science because we're being lapped by Sputnik. And we were worried about them becoming sort of physically degenerous and soft.

So Ike comes up with this thing where you're going to have to figure out how to do some pull-ups. You're going to have to do some sit-ups. Now, Kennedy, I think, may have surfaced it more and come out with a medal for this, that, and the other thing, because he was all about the Vigat, even though we know that he was fabulously unhealthy himself, too, with the backs and the pills and the rest of it. But I grew up during this period, when we were made to do these things, when we were humiliated on the stage of the grade school gymnasium

my gym teacher was a man named Ed Gorilla Mr. Gorilla I wasn't spelled that way, it was spelled with an A and he had a brother named Harold so there actually was in Fargo a hairy gorilla but Mr. Gorilla who sort of in my mind is now

sort of like this Ed Sullivan with a coach's whistle that's how I imagine him was tremendously disappointed in me and my inability to do the most basic of things and convinced that I would break my neck if I shimmy to the top of the pole and touch this. I mean, it's just Jim was a nightmare. But the one thing that will never, ever, ever go away

is the commanding voice of Robert Preston singing chicken fat. Charles, you know not of what I speak. Stephen, you may. Oh, yeah, very much so. I remember the presidential fitness test from the first grade, and I vaguely recall, you know, folders or literature that had the presidential seal on it. And it was one of my early humiliations as a late-blooming athlete.

I mean, very late-blooming. But we had to do the 50-yard dash timed. I wasn't scared of that. It was the 600 that killed me. But go on. Oh, yeah. I don't remember. Well, all I remember is that.

I still remember my humiliating time in the 50-yard dash in the first grade. It was 8.5 seconds, which is really slow. Even in the first grade. I mean, the best athletes in my class, they were doing it in 6.5 seconds. And they became, you know, wide receivers in high school football and what. not. And anyway, but no, I remember that. That was a very big deal. And

plus, I've always been a Robert Preston fan from the music man and other great films of that era. But, yeah. Ah, that song, done, da-dun-dun-dun-done. Touch your toes 10 times every morning. Every morning,

and not just now and then. Go, you chicken fat. None of us could actually figure out what chicken fat was. Because when you look at the chicken, it seems to be pretty much tightly packed with the things the chicken needs and that we would later subsequently eat. But chicken fat, I guess, was just it. So, I mean, if that was a, that somehow is now seen as this wonderful new frontier Kennedy-asked Camelot thing where everybody happily doing their calisthenics in the morning because

that's what JFK wanted us to. But now I guarantee you it's going to be seen as strength of joy and not our camps. And, you know, step one is setting up the camps, right? The camps have already been set up where Charles is, right? Yeah, how close are you to Alligator Alcatraz. Oh, quite a long way. It's in southern Florida, right in the middle, near Alligator Alley. Okay. I'm up north near Georgia.

There have been no confirmed eatings of prisoners yet. No, they obviously took Trump's advice when he explained how to run away from an alligator. Oh, did he? I didn't hear that. That was so funny. What did he say? Well, he went into an extended disposition about how the old, conventional wisdom used to be that you should zigzag and if you zigzag it tries to follow you and

its tail is heavy and so it can't catch up with you but now people have realized that you should just run a straight line away from it so he was explaining how to do it if someone escapes. I missed that part. I just like the idea of the tail going back and forth and becoming unbalanced centrifugal centrifically as it zags so that the tail exact you know moves so fast in an oscillating fashion it makes it impossible for the alligator to move forward. Does this work with crocodiles? though. You know the distinction. So does that work with Crocs as well? Well, I don't think it works with Alligators was the point. Trump has realized, apparently, at this point in his life, that this is a myth. It's a thing that is, so the number of people who have died in Florida from alligator

attacks in the last 70 years is 50. And they're all the same. They're all the same when you read about them. They're sad, but they're also avoidable. Here is how you do. in an alligator attack in Florida. Step one, you have a small dog. Step two, you walk that small dog near, too near, a body of water that has alligators in it. Three, an alligator comes up, sees the small dog, thinks it looks tasty, and bites it.

Four, rather than running away and thinking, well, it's very sad that was a nice dog, I'll get another one. You think, I'll fight the alligator, and get Fido back. And that's the point of which you die from alligators in Florida. Read any story in 70 years, and they're all that. There's this conception out there somewhere that people just minding their own business,

having a martini in Florida, turn around to be fought by an alligator, and it's just not true. So it's walking along with a bonbon and a leash. I get it. Isn't there some sort of basic alligator repellent that you could wash your dog in that would make it unpalatable. That's a great question. But did you know about alligators?

The reason that they're so dangerous, but also easy if you're Steve Owen to fight, is that the muscles that they bite down with are incredibly strong, 3,000 pounds worth of pressure. But the muscles that they used to open their mouth are tiny. They're always non-existent. That's why you can stop an alligator opening its mouth

with your finger and your thumb. But once it bites down on your, say, your left, for example, you're done. There's no way you could ever get it off. It's like being stuck in a hydraulic mechanism. So the good part then is that you can clamp its mouth shut with your hands. Yes. The bad part would appear to be what follows after that. That's about right. Yeah. So people in Florida then carry bungee cords that they can just wrap around the snout and clip it to. If you, the alligator guys, and we see them sometimes because they come out here because people see alligators and call them in. And you're not allowed to

kill them unless you're really in danger. Steve, and I have to ask you, go on, I'm sorry. No, you call them in and then they end up in a restaurant, but people use electrical tape. That's how weak the alligators, one wrap round of electrical tape on an alligator's snout and it can't open it. Well, Stephen, in California, I don't think there's any equivalent to this. As a matter of fact, I think that Florida... Oh, yes, there is.

Some Cambrian era holdover that ought to have gone extinct an awful long time. Well, it's not a lizard, but... So out here in California, where I live in a remote area and a... Central Coast. I'm very close to a public ranch land with trails through the forest that was closed yesterday by the fire department because of a mountain lion sighting. And I've always been told that if a mountain lion attacks you, you will not know it until it's over because they're quiet. They, you know, jump at you from out of the bushes or trees or something. So my normal walking or jogging route is close to me right now. So not quite an alligator, but still something to

worry about. They at least seem to evolve a little bit beyond the pond dwelling, scummy, reptilian nightmares that are alligators and crocodiles. But in everybody's mind, they only exist in Florida. No other state has them. I'm not sure how far they go, but at least they're there. We know where they are. They're well-contained.

Gentlemen, anything else before we go? I can't think of what. Oh, yeah, Pentagon's going to try the Golden Dome sometime this week. Yeah, and get back to me on that. Remember being told that Nisle defense was absolutely pointless? Do you remember in the 80s when SDI was going on? The very idea was technologically impossible and also highly, highly provocative to do.

Oh, yeah. I love Trump on this stuff. Yeah. This is the kind of stuff that Trump does that no one else does that I admire. The Space Force in the first term was a terrific idea that got mocked because of its name or for a lack of imagination, but it's a really good idea. And Golden Dome, this is what I want the federal government to do. Like, if we're going to have a federal government, I have to pay for it, this is what I

wanted to do. I agree. Do you know what the most anti-ballistic missile defense movie ever made might be, if I recall correctly? Raise the Titanic. Oh, I haven't seen it. You've never seen raise the Titanic? You've probably seen the ship go down a few times. You owe it upon yourself to see it come back up. It's a very interesting movie. He broke the studio. It was extremely expensive, rather inert in parts and has one of those long attenuated John Barry scores. Oh, but I repeat myself. But I've always had a soft spot my heart for it, except for the ending, because the whole point of the thing is, my God, we can't have strategic defense initiative and we can't have ballistic defense. That would be the worst thing in the world. It's a strangely, oddly

deflating way, but it's of a time of the 70s and the 80s, with the sort of, that what are you going to do, nihilism, pessimism, and civilizational exhaustion that you saw at the times, which I'm happy to say, does not seem to be animating the right side of the creative world at this time. There seems to be actual interest, passion, and support Western 7. If the other guys want to be at and moan about it, go ahead and make that case to the public. We have made our own case for Ricochet to the public for the last hour and now are declining to do anything, but thank you, Charles. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, the listeners for listening. Go to ricochet.com, sign up. Do not, do not go to Apple Podcast and give us five-star reviews. I will be so angry if

you do. But what I can tell you is that if you're a man, you get to tell us how full of bleep we are by logging in because you have to be a member to post a comment. That's why it's one of the best comments sections on the internet. You'll find ricochet.com. Head there. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure as ever. We'll see everybody in the comments at Rookishay 4.0 and goodbye.