The Ricochet Podcast - Heavy Questions

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

It's Question Time with Lileks and Cooke. They jump into the guest chairs and let Ricochet's very own members steer the ship this week. Tune in to hear their thoughts on lots of stuff: the Pax Americana, universal suffrage, wordsmithing in the age of AI, their favorite interview subjects, and more — all with plenty of pop culture sprinkled in.- Sound from this week's open: John Cleese in the "Take Your Pick" sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus.Take control of your cellular health today. Go to qualialife.com/ricochet and save 15% to experience the science of feeling younger.

We'd like to thank Cozy Earth. No, we wouldn't. Let me start that over. We would like to thank Bam Bam. Three, two, one. 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 Vickershae Podcast and our guest is you, the members who pose questions to myself, James Lilacs and Charles CW Cook. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Oh, and Tarev Stupe. Well, your first question for the blow on the head this evening is, what great opponent of Cartesian dualism resists the reduction of psychological phenomena to physical states? President Trump? I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he said either. Listener Mail! Welcome everybody, this is the Ricochet Podcast number 710 to 36.

I'm James Lodlick from Minneapolis. Spring not yet here, slate grey skies, bit of a chill to the air. The other day the tornado sirens went off and wailed for about four minutes to the extreme distress of all dogs and some people. But nice to know that soon the twisters will be scribbling their way across the landscape to lift us either into Oz or elsewhere. But in the other version of American Paradise, Oz-like, green, verdant, lush, humid is Florida where we presume Charles is at the moment Charles CW Cook. Welcome. Thank you. Did the Hawaiian shirt give it away? Yes, whenever I see a Hawaiian shirt, I naturally think of Florida.

I suppose, Stephen isn't with us by the way, Stephen is right now somewhere off with Peter Robinson and Rob Long telling, you know, stories about me and Charlie. So I suppose before we get to the member questions because we're just sort of winging it today we're just having fun we're just you know taking having a lark is it necessary to have the obligatory segment about tariffs which will immediately be rendered meaningless by some other twist of turn in the next 48 hours or 48 minutes. Would you like to say something? Would you like to vent? Would you like to spleen dump? Would you like to open a vein on everybody or are you just sort of tired and beaten down by it all and waiting for the next week to change

things again? I'm never too beaten down to vent my spleen, James. Alright. Well, it's silly, isn't it? It's counterproductive economically, it's counterproductive politically. And here's the bit that I don't understand. You don't need to hear me go on and on again about the economics. But the politics of it fascinate me. We just had a report that consumer confidence is the worst it's been for years. That people are worried about inflation in a way that they haven't been since Joe Biden was alive.

What were the last inflation numbers, by the way? Very good. But this is the politics of it. Inflation went down. People expected to be 7%. Why? Because of it. Inflation went down, people expected to be 7%. Why? Because of tariffs. And my question is, even if you feel obliged to defend Trump in this particular, don't you want the rest of his agenda? Don't you want the rest of his presidency to work? Yes. I don't understand the gamble here.

I know. I think the gamble is, is that all of this will be short term and that everyone will come to the table and that'll be good news and that it won't have an inflationary effect and that it'll all be forgotten in a month, which is entirely possible given the speed at which these things pass these days. But they ought to do a better job of touting what they are doing. I had a post up on Ricochet yesterday, this morning. There was a cabinet meeting when they aired the cabinet. It's all on TikTok and it's all on YouTube. Everybody sits down and gives the report about what they're doing. It's like a wish list of the basic conservative ideas with the exception of a couple of things.

It's really remarkable because when you look at it, as I wrote on the ricochet.com, which you should join people, nearly every single one of them is something that people on the right would say, good, glad we're getting on that. And you realize if there was a Harris administration that none of that would have happened. In fact, we'd have the absolute inversion of every single one of those ideas, all of them.

And so yeah, they really, A, probably are doing a bad job of communicating these things, or they're content to communicate them in the usual means, modern means now, which is memes and social media. And two, yes, this is bad for the future agenda, because if you do indeed have the dislocations, the economic dislocations that people are worrying about, then the midterms are shot, but we'll see.

We'll see. It's, it's a, it's a zesty Farago. Is it not? You were going to say it. Well, the best case scenario you just outlined is it's forgotten in a month. That's the best case. I know politically that's the best case. I'm not saying economically, culturally, socially, et cetera. That's the best case. Mm-hmm. I Know politically that's the best case. I'm not saying economically culturally socially, etc. It's the best case I'm right. But my point is that even if you were gonna do this, which I oppose

Not least because I think it's unconstitutional to delegate the power Mm-hmm. I agree. But if you were gonna do this you do it later because presidencies and This is to an extent silly because we have created a pope like presidency and become very superstitious about it. But it's nevertheless true that presidencies rise and fall on the economy. And Trump last time around did a pretty good job on the economy. And Trump last time around did a pretty good job on the economy. The 2019 economy was not there because of Trump, the great and wise Trump, but he did things that helped create

the circumstances of 2019 that people really liked the tax bill that he signed the deregulation in which he engaged. These were good things that created stability and optimism and investment. And because of that, he should have been able to then move on to other things. Now he wasn't because he was very unlucky with COVID. I'm pretty defensive of Trump over COVID. I think that Trump dealt with it. Okay. I think no other president would have done better.

We were all in very, very strange place. And he also had a lot of his early presidential months years even taken out with absurd lawfare and Russia gate. So I have a great deal of time for the idea that Trump was screwed over in his first term quite frequently. But the lesson from the first term is if you create an economic environment that works for people, which 2019 did via the usual conservative policies, people like you. And when people

like you, they have a lot of time for the rest of your agenda. Now, Trump is doing very well on the border with the exception of some due process questions that I object to. But as a rule, he's doing very, very well on the border and people are responding to it. His approval rating in that area is very high. I just think that the smart political play would have been to come in, do what he's done on the border, do what he did in 2017, renew the tax cuts, pro growth policies, do some cuts, which he doesn't seem to want to do deregulate, which he is doing. And then go about the difficult bits. Now, that's not to say I'm not going to suddenly endorse all of this tariff

stuff, both because I think it's unconstitutional for the president to do. And I think that it is just absurdly over the top is one thing to have a China policy. It's another to put 10% tariffs on people who don't have tariffs on us with whom we have a trade surplus to talk to our allies as we do it all the rest of it. But some of the things Trump wants to do are quite difficult to get done. They require persuasion and they are not necessarily 60, 40, 70, 30 propositions. And I really worry that the rest of those things have now been set back by the chaos that has been unleashed in the last two weeks.

So that's why I think it's politically bizarre. Anyway, we can move on to the questions now that I get that and I agree. The only thing that I will say, and I'm not saying that I agree with it, but that I understand the argument is that you are not going to get China's attention otherwise, and you are not going to get China's attention otherwise and you are not going to get China to do anything otherwise because as we know everyone sits down around a table and talks for two years and comes up with something that eventually supposedly down the road in 2029 will begin to address the problem of

possible fines for IP stealing and the rest of it. And everything goes on as usual. And everything that you buy on Amazon continues to be Tmoo junk and et cetera, et cetera. And this rankles trunk in a way that just apparently is just a corrosive acid soaked popcorn hull and is gull in his gums and we've been hearing it for years. But you're right. Let's get on to the questions.

Because members of Ricochet, of which there are many, and they are a Wonderful bunch with great opinions Put some questions on ricochet for Charles not to address and the first comes from Michael minute question What do you see as the pros and cons of the current global packs Americana? Do you think there's a practical way to pay for it without beggaring the American people? Charles? Oh, I have many thoughts. There's a two separate questions.

I think the Pax Americana is a wonderful thing and that it would be an absolute disaster if we traded it for a pack. Something else. The Pax Americana followed the Pax Britannica. The Pax Britannica was broadly begun in 1805 on the water and in 1815 on the land with the battles of Cofaga and Waterloo respectively. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the British Empire was exhausted and depleted and broke and we handed over control of the seas to the United States. That sounds as if we did it out of the kindness of our heart. We had to, but we passed

the baton to another English speaking nation with the rule of law. And this is a wonderful thing. This is why the world looks as it does is that America is in charge because the alternatives are all awful. China, Russia, France. We don't want those people. You can take the British citizenry out of the man, but you can't take the British desire to just take a little swipe if possible. Yes, I don't think there'll be a French Pax Français. But that's the first part. So we should want't think there'll be a French packs from say, but that's the first part. So we should want this because there is no alternative. How do we pay for it? Look, this does cost us. But not that much. In 1960, that question would have been much more difficult to interrogate because 50% of the federal

budget was spent on defense. Now the amount we spend on defense, I believe, is 8% and that is less than we're paying on interest on the debt. We do not, relative to other things, spend very much on our military or on the Pax Americana relative to other nations in both absolute terms and When compared to our GDP we spend quite a lot But we do not spend much on defense compared to say Social Security or Medicare or interest on the debt. And because of that, I think that the Pax Americana is a bargain.

So if you were looking at the budget, and the question were and ought to be given our predicament, where do we cut? That's the last thing I would cut, because that is, in my estimation, the reason we have a federal government. The federal government, whether it's a good idea or not, does not exist to provide Social Security or Medicare or the Department of Education or farm subsidies or to borrow money every year. The federal government exists primarily for international relations and within that for defense and I am open to the idea that across the board cuts would involve some reductions in defense spending although I think there are solid arguments against that too but to start with that or to make that the focal point of any inquiry into our expenditures seems to me backwards the cons would seem to be that the focal point of any inquiry into our expenditures seems to me backwards.

The cons would seem to be that we feel obligated to get involved in conflicts, which manifestly on the surface do not seem to be issues we should care about. And that's why people on the right are indifferent to Ukraine or what the knockoff effect would be if Russia just had taken over and rolled it up. And they're indifferent in a large part. knockoff effect with D.F. Russia just had taken over and ruled it up. And they're indifferent in a large part, and I see you get a lot of this from Vance, to Europe in general. And I was trying to explain this to somebody the other day who is European and was baffled

by what they see as antipathy to Europe amongst people on the conservative side, not all, but some. And I think it has to do twofold. Part of it is maybe, look, we've been paying for your defense, which allows you to essentially perform the government equivalent of taking a long vacation. You get to spend the money as you wish on the things that you like because you know that we're going to be there to back you up and you don't have to spend any money. And you can't project power and your armies consists basically of bureaucrats and you know, your guns are rusty and that we find that contemptuous.

Why wouldn't you want to be able to defend yourself? But the other part of it is, is that I think people on the right correctly or not believe that there is a general lack of faith in the European idea at all. And that there's sort of been a combination of a hand waving techno utopian trans nationalist belief that all individual national identities can be subsumed into of a hand-waving techno-utopian transnationalist belief that all individual national identities can be subsumed into this wonderful European project, coupled with a sort of, you know,

strange subconscious desire for cultural suicide that requires the changing of the national character by importation of people who are antithetical to it. And so you look at this and say, you know, the reason perhaps that America is not interested in Europe anymore is that Europe doesn't seem to be interested in being Europe, is that you want to be a collection

of quaint little tourist places, dense little cities with nice old churches and twisty streets and cafes and the rest of it. And beyond that, you know, we'll visit and we'll see your art and your art and then get our stamp the passport and go. But Americans don't feel that same sort of connection as they used to. And part of it may be again, because we're a couple of more generations distant from the immigrant project when so many people from Europe came over. You know, now we have the grandchildren of DPs,

we don't have the children of DPs. And so just all those connections get severed. And I hate it, frankly, because the history of Europe, bloody and awful and remarkable and storied as it is, is a unique story in the elevation of the human spirit and individual liberty. And I hate to find us disconnected on an emotive as well as intellectual level from it, says I. But then again, I'm not European. Let's go to Henry, Henry Castain. This is, this is great. I'm getting out my 12 foot pole because I'm not going to touch this with a 10. Would we be better off if we got rid of universal suffrage? I'm sorry, I almost went daffy duck on you. Would we be better off if we got rid of universal suffrage? I'm sorry, I almost went daffy duck on you.

Universal suffrage. Would we be better off if we got rid of universal suffrage? Because that's what's going to happen now with the new voting requirements, right? Women won't be able to vote unless they show up in a handmaid's tail outfit or provide some documents or something like that. Would we be better, Charles? And what is the argument? what is he saying though? What do you, what basically, what's the underlying point that he's making?

Cause I think we, we know what it is. Well, look, the United States is a Republic and it was founded by people who are openly skeptical of democracy as they had seen it operate in various places around the world for the 2000 years prior to the founding. We still have a great deal of skepticism toward democracy in the United States. That's what the Constitution is, especially the Bill of Rights. The notion that the public is always right is a silly one.

But there really is no better mechanism to correct the behavior of those in power than elections. If you look at even the last 10, 15 years, it has been necessary over and over again for the public to step in, especially with a secret ballot that is inoculated against the pressures of public life and make their preferences clear. I don't want to see that go away. I think that's an integral part of the system. I think that our problem is not so much in the balance of what we allow to be voted on and what we don't or in the balance of who we allowed to vote women, 18 year olds, immigrants or

what you will. I think our problem is that we have put far too much authority in the hands of the national government and then subjected that national government to the democratic will. And that's why we're all angry with one another. I hear very few complaints about democracy from people at the state level. Now, yes, I live in Florida, and Florida has been a success story, but I don't hear from those in other places, Iowa, Wyoming, Massachusetts. I'm really worried about this or that election. But nationally, whenever we have an election, everyone panics because there's so much writing on it.

So I don't think our issue is with the franchise. I think our issue is with the vertical allocation of power, which is massively out of whack in favor of the federal government. America is a pretty diverse place. I say diverse in the useful sense of that word, not in the DEI sense, which really means getting people who have different immutable characteristics, but all agree and put them in the same room. I mean that it is a good thing that Minnesota is different than Florida, because Minnesotans are different than

Floridians. But if you ask them to channel all of their political preferences and energies through Washington, DC, they are going to come to blows. That's the issue as far as I see it, I wouldn't change the eligibility for voting. Well, you're right. And that is why it is baffling to me. Well, it isn't, but it is baffling why people insist that we are presently under the increasing pressure of the jackboot of fascism on our necks because of getting rid of the Department

of Education. If you had an administration that said we are now going to subsume all educational requirements in Washington under the Department of Education, if Trump had done this and said that we are now going to, this is the uniform national pro-america curriculum that's going to be instituted, people would scream that this was fascism, but if a liberal government did, a leftist government comes in and says

the Department of Education is now going to be given double its budget because we're past the horrible days of Trump and we're going to sweep out all these old ideas and institute this new thing which we guarantee if you look at the stats and figures are going to teach our children well and oh by the way tell them, give them all the ideological tools that they need to be good citizens, planetary citizens good climate citizens in the rest of it that to me it idiot that i am seems closer to fascism than saying we're getting rid of the

national department of all the things out of the states more you do all down to the individual down to the smaller units of government the less i don't know for fascism you seem to have, I so bet I don't get. And I'm all in favor of doing this because it's more responsive, it's more immediate. I've got a better chance of going to my local, you know, city council.

Well no, my city council is hopeless. But I've got a better chance of influencing something at a local level than I do possibly being My one vote is you know a tincture of Iodine into this great ocean of Blue so yes, you're right. You're absolutely right It's the concentration of power in the hands of the government and I if if there's nothing else. I hope that the left Looks at the last hundred hundred twenty days and says, you know hope that the left looks at the last hundred, 120 days and says, you know, use executive order things here. Let's rethink exactly how this works in a democracy because I'm not crazy about them and I wish that there was a

instinctive revulsion on both parts to ram stuff through using that. I prefer the legislative process. That's what it was set up for. But here's the thing. I think Henry's playing with us. I think what Henry really means is didn't all of our troubles start when women got the vote? And I think the reason he thinks that or he's just playing with us and because it's something that you hear people actually say you know that it wasn't the best idea I mean I suppose we hand to what they're ascribing to the female vote or half of it is a sort of

outgroup empathy amongst liberal women who have you know the childless cat ladies that JD Vance was talking about who regarded as he's in the four eighty badge of moral superiority that they have great empathy and uh... and well desire to help people who are completely outside of their own social group their own social norm their own cohort their own tribe whatever and that this meaningless consequence free desire to spread money and uh... and gifts and the rest of it to populations

for whom they have a strange disconnected empathy and sympathy has actually been injurious to the government and to society. That I think is the point that he's trying to make us say. And that's something that I hear from somebody. I know that's not the case in your household, Charlie. Well, my wife thinks I'm a left-wing squish. So imagine if that is where Henry's driving, then he would make an exception for her.

Yes. My wife is somewhere to the right of Attila the hun. Well, yes, I can, I can imagine a fun weekend at the cook household where she's berating you for your trigger discipline. That is just great. Well, good for you. Good for you. Good for you.

Hey, something else I want to mention though. What did you, without giving too many details away, what did your wife do? She is a stay at home mom and has been since our first child was born. Well, good for her. I was a stay at home dad for a while and years and it was the best thing I could have possibly done. I, I do not understand anybody who just sort of looks down their nose at stay at home parents because that time doesn't come back and you get to be there at

every single moment. The bad part about it is that your whole life is, is flowers for Algernon because they grow up and they don't remember any of the things that you keenly recall. I mean, I recall when my child was two and we were sitting on the floor and we're reading a book and we're playing with this toy and I can summon up the slant of the light. I can tell you what dog it was and what his expression was and what was on the television set on Disney Playhouse and the rest of it. I'm the only one who's got that stuff. My daughter, who had a great time, doesn't remember any of it, any of it. And that's just life, that's just normal.

So I don't know, it's better than hiring a nanny. That's all I can say. I don't even know how you'd begin to hire a nanny in these days. You know, HR is a problem for people all over the world, whether you're hiring a nanny or trying to onboard somebody to your company. And you know, if you're a business owner,

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See for yourself all that bamboo HR can do and how truly affordable it can be. That's bamboohr.com slash free demo. Bamboohr.com slash free demo. And we do thank AmbuHR for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now we have a question from, let me see here, oh, this one, Don G. Will AI make the

thesaurus obsolete? That is, is nuance in writing dead-m- only be replaced by the brutalism of bullet points? Oh first of all no, it's not gonna make the thesaurus elite. One of my favorite thesaurus stories is actually, I bought a Roger's, it was a public domain copy at some point Roger's in some iteration went into public domain and I bought it and I was looking for something to replace the word idiot and one of the phrases used by the Thesaurus was he who did not invent gunpowder which cracked me up because it's the equivalent of he's not a rocket scientist. You know, they're looking at some drooling

fool down there, he didn't invent gunpowder. The problem is the the... sorry, I've not had enough coffee or I've had too much plywood this morning. It's full of archaic words that you can't slip into conversations anymore. And if you asked AI to actually go back and find old thesaurus words, it would look fake. It would look wrong. Just like they're saying now, you can tell something is AI written if it's got an M dash. So no, I don't think so. But Charles, the general effect of AI on writing, can you tell it when you see it? And do you think that the problem is it's going to get better and we won't be able to tell it when it's obvious?

I think I can tell it. I don't think that it getting better is necessarily a problem. It might be if you are a beat reporter whose sole responsibility is to use facts gathered by other people and rewrite them in a mundane manner. I think that probably is not going to survive AI as a role, but you can't write like George Will if you're a computer. And I know that when I say that people raise their eyebrows and say, are you sure? No, I'm not sure.

But let me give you an example of why I think this. There is, at least for now, no soul in generative AI. It is necessarily derivative. I have played with musical AI, and I've asked it, for example, to compose a piece in the style of a late Beethoven Symphony, or an Italian Mozart opera, or a Tchaikov Ballet, and it's very, very good at it. It's so good at it, in fact, that it is possible that we will in a few years have lots more, quote, unquote, Mozart operas. But they are nevertheless all copies or adaptations of Mozart's operas. They are not innovative.

They are not new. So AI might be able to ape certain people quite well, but it's not going to be able to do what George Will does unless you want every writer to be George Will or you want every new writer again in quotation marks to be a facsimile of a writer who has already existed and I don't think we do. Which is to say, I don't think we care if your average blunt, stylus news story is written by a computer. But I do think we care if the opinion page of the newspaper is set in amber is always for the rest of time Presented by the same people and the same goes for novels and Plays and TV shows and so forth. I think we are going to demand that

individuals Fill that role. So I'm not so worried about it Replacing genuine creativity, but the drudge work, yeah, that's going to happen. I think you're right. What I mean, when you talk about derivative works, yes, it's all derivative, but you can say that for many composers who start out, who are influenced by the work that came before, that they are derivative of their predecessors. And you certainly find that in pop music. I mean,

if you asked AI to come up with a highly polished multi-instrument string-backed pop group that takes extensive use of Beatles harmonics, you would get electric light orchestra. Because Jeff Lin was very derivative of the Beatles in a lot of spots. You can find, you know, you can find Beatles-esque harmonies in early cheap trick. That's not a bad thing. They're taking, they're learning, they're changing it,

or they're dropping it in as a reference, or all of those things. So yeah, is it a bad world in which we actually have 20 Beethoven symphonies, and it's gotten so good that actually Two of them have evolved in ways that Beethoven might have That's the part you see that I don't think you can do and to hit my not with the sledgehammer once again sounds painful I think that your

Analogy is spot-on, but that it stops chronologically. So if you look at, say, the early Beatles records, please, please me was supposed to be a Roy Orbison song, it was supposed to be slow. And George Martin said, no, you need to speed it up. Right. You could see all the tags hanging off that tomorrow never knows was like nothing that had ever been done. Or if we're looking at Beethoven, a lot of early

Beethoven sounded like Mozart because Mozart was Beethoven's hero. But then when you get to the fifth, you go, Oh my god, this is essentially heavy metal in classical music. I don't think AI can take that step. I don't think it would have stopped at being Mozart or would have stopped at being Roy Orbison. You're absolutely right. And I wanted to make that point too. Example, you could train, you know, the AI on the first five, on the first four symphonies

of Mahler and it would kick those out but it would not be capable of coming up with the seventh or the eighth. It certainly wouldn't be able to come up with the tenth, the first movement of the tenth because Mahler for all of his tonality and all of his viennese antecedents and the rest of it comes about two notes short of a twelve-tone row and i don't say that like you know he's a few cards you know abbey mills short no i mean although i hate serial music so there is a point to be made that two tones short of a twelve-tone row is a good thing or a bad thing but he does there's a dissonant chord that appears in this that that ai would have i don't think AI would have been able to say well I think

Mahler's going in this direction I think he is anticipating or following Alban Berg and Wojciech I think he is I think he is realizing that the tonal tradition is dead and he's adapting to it or more likely Mahler was just effing depressed because his family you know his home life was bad. And this was this expression of great despair. I think he actually, if it wasn't the, maybe the 9th, I think it was the 10th, he actually just wrote his wife's name just over these measures because he was just freaking out. I think she was, I don't know if she was banging Franz Werfel or the architect or what.

But that's, I mean, an AI is not going to have an emotional reaction and scream Out of dissonant court in the middle of the 10th Symphony because his wife because the AI's wife is having a problem It can only extrapolate from histories and say of the number of composers who had domestic problems that therefore came up with this And they're a can work now that isn't to say that there isn't some super intelligence that can't evolve from this. I've read enough Star Trek, I've seen enough, you know, all these things to know that I'm not leaving anything out. But you're right about the soullessness of the derivative work. As far as other art forms though, it's entirely possible in the world of gaming, the ability of computers to sell enough things on the fly is going to revolutionize what computer gaming is, if it hasn't already.

And secondly, when the tools of cinematic creation are as good as I think they're going to get, it is going to put into the hands, it's going to put a tool into the hands of people who otherwise would not have been able to really create what they do. It is great that Wes Anderson has the money in the budget to be able to dress as sad as he does,

but there's a lot of people who aren't, and they're going to be able to do it with AI. The other but I don't know if you saw this Elon Musk I know the Hitler loving Musk came up tweeted out something the other day it was a landscape of Mars a video of it and said you know hoping to go there in 2025 and then he added something with Optimus Robots. I had not heard about this before. Have you heard this?

I did see the tweet, but I'd never heard of it before either. Sending Optimus Robots on a Mars mission, which makes perfect sense. I mean, I've seen these guys wearing Cabo hats playing barmaid, you know, being bartenders and you know, doing various interesting things, which I assume is a result of somebody you know working the the strings behind the but if he's sending optimist robots to robot to Mars first of all it means probably there's going to be some human being back at the control room who is in essence going to be the first person on Mars because his sensibility his intellect all of these things will be controlling the

robots. Second, if there's a bunch of them, they're going to be doing stuff on Mars that's fantastic. They're going to be line dancing. Like four optimist robots are going to be doing humorous things up there. We're going to have like the Marx brothers on the Mars. It changes the whole thing from little, you know, wall-y robots rolling around and picking up rocks to humanoids reacting as the best of the personalities of the creators

of their controllers back on Earth. I think it's fascinating. As long as we don't have to rescue Matt Damon. Again, we spent entirely too much money on that. Third time, I think, is Matt Damon in the new Hail Mary movie, which is no, he can't be because he was in the other one. Don asked another question here and I got to put it in because it's just too great. James and Charles have done many guest interviews over the years. Do they have a favorite Charles? Well, I did enjoy having Mike Rowe on my podcast a couple of years ago, talked about something which is very dear to

my heart and also to Mike Rowe's heart, that is the over-credentialization of our society, and how we can reverse a horrible tendency of looking down on people who have good jobs, skilled jobs, but didn't go to college and don't have a piece of paper that reflects some educational achievement. I thought that was a good one. I enjoyed talking to Andrew Roberts about his book on Winston Churchill walking with destiny. He also made the case for Napoleon, which is a Brit, I find very difficult to swallow.

Yeah. He's a Napoleon defender. That was very interesting. And he defended King George III. The real devil's advocate. Hey, I'm just asking questions. Yeah, right. You know, another good one was with our own Peter Robinson,

who came on and talked about his time in the Reagan White House and writing the speech. I didn't know any of the story. I asked him to come on and tell it not because I wanted to share it with the world, having been thrilled by it, but because I knew he'd written the speech, but I didn't know how he'd got there in the first place or the details of its composition, or that he'd been over to West Germany and seen the wall. That was a really solid oral history of a particular moment in time. Those come to mind, but there are so many of them. You?

For me, first is the most recent would be Michael Palin. Oh, wow. Just a delightful man, and a smart man, and a cultured man, and a good man, you is the most recent would be Michael Palin. Oh wow. He was just a delightful man and a smart man and a cultured man and a good man, you get the feeling. And we talked at length about his book and I was just sitting there saying, I'm not going to bring up Python. I'm not going to bring it up there. Everybody brings up Python.

And he brings up Python. So I took that as a hint that I could go down that road. But mostly we spoke about his family and his great uncle who died in World War one in the book he'd just written about it and then we talked about art he's a keen fan of a certain style of painting a period of painting and I have sympatica with that so it was just great great conversation and then he came to a show that I did in London a year later and I just felt like oh my good new friend Michael Palin here. Would you like to meet the wife and child? So I treasure that Donald Rumsfeld in the Ricochet podcast was fun.

As usual for those days, I got to say virtually nothing, but, um, I did get to ask him if he thought that about the debathification was a mistake that it might've been better for post-war stability to just include these guys and roll along. Because I don't think that anybody really was a committed bathist in their heart, it was just simply a state ideology to which you had to pay ritual abyssiens. And he said, you know, that's a really good idea and we don't know. Really good question, and we don't know. And he said some other things. And I enjoy that moment only simply because

whenever the Iraq war comes up, I can say, well, you know, I talked to Donald Brown's film about that once. And the other finally would be, because it's one of those, don't meet your heroes, but aren't you glad you did, was William Shatner, who we interviewed a couple of years ago, who's notoriously prickly, they say in some interviews,

can be great and gracious depending on the topic at the time or the mood, but I caught him on the notoriously prickly side. And I didn't ask him any Star Trek questions whatsoever, and he just wanted to talk about his new show with Henry Winkler, and we did. But I also wanted to talk about some old, you know, some bad guy roles that he had played in some movies. He played this racist southern preacher who comes into town and stirs up discord. He's just great. Just fantastic. I didn't want to talk about it.

It just, you know, that, and then finally at the end of the conversation, I was asking him how he felt about being in the most recent Star Trek movie. And he was confused and he didn't know what I meant. He hadn't seen it. And I explained to him that at the end of the Star Trek movie, yeah, they either, they take out a picture and it's a picture of the old Enterprise bridge crew, you know, you and everybody else. And he didn't know that. And he was a bit stunned to find out that.

And I thought, I just spoiled the Star Trek movie for Captain Kirk. And it was my way of paying him back for being such a prickly guy, but I still enjoyed talking to him. It was still great. In a related point, Eustace C. Scrubb says it's popular culture, film, TV, music, at an all-time low. And if so, can it, will it recover? Charles? I think TV's not at an all-time low. I agree. I think there's a lot of really good stuff on TV. I can't say I'm wildly impressed with movies at the moment,

although as I've confessed before, I think to you, James, I am a movie idiot. Mm-hmm. But I... He who did not invent celluloid. But I do remember most of the 40 years I've been alive. And it seems to me that there are fewer and fewer movies that I see advertised or hear about from other people and conclude that I must watch.

Hopefully that will change. Music, I think, is generally awful at the moment, with the exception of country music, which my wife likes, which, although it's very different from country music that I like, Patsy Cline era country music in particular, does seem to be quite good and does seem to be better than it was 15, 20 years ago. and does seem to be better than it was 15, 20 years ago. But generally speaking, music, I think, is quite poor and derivative and over the top at the moment. So yeah, I don't think we're in a good place. And this has disappointed me slightly because I thought a couple of years ago, when we were in the midst of the worst inflation for 40 years, and Joe Biden was president, and all these terrible economic theories were coming back, but at least if we were going to have to live through the 1970s, could we get the music and the movies?

Maybe not the TV. We didn't. Well, if you'd gotten the TV, you would have gotten a lot of Norman Lear sitcoms, which for all their various flaws at least were consistently funny and consistently dependable. And you had new sitcoms which kind of played around the edges of some of the old tropes. I mean you could say the Mary Tyler Moore show was quite different from the 1950s housewife shows or the fantasy shows of the 60s where the women were wrinkling their nose to create magic or doing the genie thing.

Like at fay towers? Right, but you also had a grittiness to 1970s television which befit the world. Kojak is no place in which I would want to live and you know if you look at some of the ones set in Los Angeles in California you can see the rot. You can see the rot in 1967 Dragnet. So I wouldn't mind the television back. It was working within certain constraints, but it still, at the same time, it was frothy, trivial nonsense with Battle of the Network Stars

and a lot of gruesome variety shows where the Brady Bunch come out and do dance routines. But yeah, all of a piece. It was an interesting time. Film-wise, the 70s, again, Hollywood system was broken. You had the Out Tours come up and they were being gritty in the rest of it but everybody died at the end. There was no heroism, there's no joy in any of it. Star Wars changed all that and it was happy and they got medals at the end and it was a great story and

that started the downfall of the whole thing I think frankly because when you say there aren't any movies really that you want to watch, we reached a point over the last five, six years, thankfully, thanks to Marvel and their insistence on this multiverse phase four whatever stuff, where movies just simply ceased to engage. They became meaningless, slop of endless CGI that nobody could get invested in

because we all knew it wasn't true. None of this mattered and none of it was real. It was just a bunch of people standing around in green rooms talking to each other and what was you know what worked great with Captain America the first one by the time you got around to the the last slew of marvels who cares who cares what this complex corroded cosmology is I don't so no movies didn't do that music don't get me started. Part of this is that I was lucky enough to have the switch off occur at a point where music became just empirically, objectively worse than it was before. When I hit the point where I'm old and I don't get it, the stuff that I wasn't getting wasn't

as good as the stuff that I had before. You don't have people playing instruments like you did before. You don't have songwriters. If you do have a songwriter, they've thrown out the bridge, they've thrown out the chorus. They are taking an old riff, they're running it through a compressor and they're pretending that it's new or maybe they have to, it's all machine noise. That said, underneath that are a million sub-genres in which people are doing interesting work. My daughter once a week will send me a song that's amazing, that is stunningly good, and it's one guy in his basement like Prince used to be, but it's really good. And it busts all the genres and plays with things.

And I will find her something from Club de Belugas which is a German neo jazz group that put out something that could have lit up the charts in 57 so yeah there's stuff under there and it's good so will it recover as Eustace adds I think it already has and they think it already hasn't and it's just a question of keeping your eyes out for the good stuff as always more stuff now which means more bad stuff, but more good stuff. On a similar thing, Django. Django says, I know nothing about recent movies. The last I watched, actually rewatched, is Touch of Evil.

A couple of videos on YouTube related to that movie were of particular interest. One was an old interview with Orson Welles that included some comments from Charlton Heston. Welles made it sound as though the studio was embarrassed by the movie. The second video discussed a long quote, tracking shot. Not the opening sequence, but a rather longer shot set in an apartment.

Any thoughts on the movie and Welles' career? I'll throw that to you, Charles first. Wow, I haven't seen it. Well then. So you want to take this one. Welles then, he says. It's been a while since I it's a great movie Wells is fat and bristly and sweaty and it's one of the movie And I love Orson Welles. I think he's an absolutely tremendous uniquely American talent and I wish we had more of him but Wells came up recently in a

discussion with my daughter because we were talking about Star Trek movies and I noticed I noted to her that the director of the very first Star Trek movie was Robert Weiss Who directed Sound of Music and West Side Story and you usually just don't think of you know the Star Trek movie Directed by the guy with the same sensibility that gave us West Side Story and Sound of Music, but it's true And Weiss was really good. He also did the Andromeda Strain which is not exactly a musical but Robert Weiss was the film editor on Citizen Kane which is the greatest American movie ever made. It's not that you know I'm sorry it's the greatest American film the

greatest American movie is Casablanca. So what do I think about Well's work you know it I I love everything practically that he does, whether or not it's a misfire or a mistake or it's overindulgent or the rest of it. I just like, I mean, his Shakespeare movie is amazing. Citizen Kane, even though it's a collaborative work, is an astonishing piece of art. The tracking camera though, the only reason I want to stick with this one, because I could actually do this on a diner for 35 minutes, the tracking shot. The tracking shot was the distinctive element that first got people's attention in adolescence.

Have you seen adolescence, Charles? Nope. Okay. Well, this is the problem then, you are now completely out of the the conversation and you are You're not worthy to participate in discussions of youth and in cell culture the Manosphere and the rest of it because you haven't seen the Most important movie or television show of our time Adolescents that's actually what they told a guy in the BBC the other day. We're talking about knife crime You said why don't you he said I don't need to see, and he named some long running British BBC hospital,

or ITV hospital, casualties. I don't need to see casualties in order to talk about the problems with the NHS. And they were appalled by that. You mean you haven't seen adolescents? I saw it before it became a necessity and a cause celebre and the rest. But the fascinating thing about the movie,

the show, is that it's one shot And it's not done Jimmy Stewart rope style where Hitchcock goes behind somebody's back And that's when they're swapping the reels out and it's not done Brian DePalma style where there's a couple of moments where yeah They're going behind a pillar and no they Did one shot and by the fourth episode of the series, you don't even notice anymore. You may think, oh, we got from the inside of the house and now we're in the lorry and we're going down the road.

That's right, but you're more interested in what's happening. If it's a gimmick, it's a great gimmick. Brian De Palma's tracking shot at the beginning of that Nicolas Cage movie, I can't remember what it was, Snake Eyes, something like that. It's interminable, but I love it it the tracking shot that begins in Goodfellas is maybe the best in the business the one in Adolescent sets the scene and the stage and the tone and the rest of it I love them they're very good oners and one is 1917 really did you see that the Sam Mendes yes, yes, yes. Yes. I did I did I did

I mean, I think maybe there's the whole movie is to Continuous tracking shots and it as a moment in the middle where he gets knocked out and it goes dark And then they start the next one, right? So while it's easier today with drones and smaller cameras and the rest of it My hat is off to Orson Welles who had to put these things on Cranes and take them from up there and put them down the street and into people's rooms and the rest of it my hat is off to Orson Welles who had to put these things on cranes and Take them from up there and put them down the street and into people's rooms and the rest of it it's just great and

The day that we forget the artistry and the contribution of Orson Welles is a sad day in America Here's one for you Charles in commemoration is from the honorable. Mr. Fancy pants In commemoration of the Florida Gators winning both the NCAA championship. Here's a movie sports related question in Charles opinion and mine too. What is your favorite sports movie and why? There's a lot of great sports movies. I do like the trilogy of Kevin Costner baseball movies. And I think the last one in I won't call it a series, but the

trio for the love of the game is much better than people think it is. The other two of course are famous there. Bull Durham and my goodness, I forgot the name of a if you build it, they will come. Field of Dreams Field of Dreams. Thank you. Tarots of Fire is a really great sports movie. Although it's about running, which is not something I spend too much time doing.

Yes it is. Anything else come to mind? I think it might be Chariots of Fire. Okay. I think it means rollerball perhaps, I think, because I'm just a child of that era. And then there's a Burt Reynolds sports sports movie I don't remember anything about it it was based on a famous book that told that that ripped the the mask off professional football and the only reason I think I went to see it as a teenager even though

you went to the movies to see movies right you didn't necessarily want to see this one but you went to the movies and this was your choice was because I think one of the the product demonstrators from The Price is Right was supposed to be topless in the first five minutes of it. And you never had a kind of crossover like that in your life. You never had the presenter from The Price is Right being topless in a movie. You just didn't. But you did. then we were it was remarkable and I think it was Janice. I think it may have indeed been Janice. All I remember about the movie that's it. Which may be a function of age. I'm not exactly sure.

You get to my age and you think did I forget that simply because people forget things and it wasn't worth noting in the first place or am I aging? Well I know I'm aging. Doing my best to forestall it though, diet helps, exercise helps and the rest of it but sometimes you need a little bit of assistance pruning dead cells because you got them frankly. That's why we like to tell you about qualiacinulitic. It's the first of its kind formula designed to help your body naturally eliminate senescent cells. The

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There's so much more that we can do. We've got great questions and I would love to go for another hour, but Charles has to be somewhere and I have to have lunch. So I think we'll end with something like Frothy from Yarob who asks, which great opponent of Cartesian dualism resists the reduction of psychological phenomena into a physical state and insists there is no point of contact between the extended and the un-extended. Is it Reginald Modlin? Yes that's absolutely correct it is indeed Reginald Modlin. I'll whine for one more

Gary McVeigh says how's the lawfare situation going? Is Ricochet currently okay against frivolous, stupid, cash-hungry, ideologically motivated attacks, dealing with photographs maybe? If so, how can we help defend it? Interesting. Well, we took action against this. This was a serious problem. We have for now, stalled the worst offenders.

I know that as a result, there are a lot of posts that were promoted that are no longer accessible. This will be resolved in Ricochet five is built in to the system. It has been built into the system. That work is complete. We can't do it before then for a bunch of technical reasons. If we do, it'll be very hard to go back. This is a problem on the broader internet.

This hasn't just affected Ricochet. I am involved in one way or another with a bunch of other organizations that have been targeted in exactly the same way. Some of them in even more cynical ways than we have. But the good news is that as of now, touch wood, we have fought off those attacks. I think in the long run, Congress, I hear you laughing already, is going to have to act to change the rules around this, because the intention of the 1978, I think, perhaps 76 Copyright Act and various court decisions across the country was clearly not to create a situation in which anyone who posts a picture, including on Twitter or Facebook, which they don't own the copyright is liable to be harassed by horrible ambulance chasing lawyers from California.

is chasing lawyers from California. In the long run, we're going to need a legislative fix. But until we have that, especially given the arena in which we operate, we are going to have to be careful. Great. There are other questions that were posed by the members. And I'm going to go back into the thread and to answer the ones that we didn't have the time for. Great questions, as usual from a smart bunch of people. And if you're the sort of person who's enjoyed this podcast, the others that proceeded, the 735,

and you're not a member yet then, I don't know what we gotta do, frankly. It's probably hopeless, we can't reach you, but if you're one of those persons on the fence, on the cusp, you know you can go to Ricochet and there's a whole members feed where the communities and the other topics and the non-political stuff and the fun stuff and the politically incorrect stuff and the memes of the day and the radio shows and the songs and the other topics and the non-political stuff and the fun stuff and the politically incorrect stuff and the memes of

The day and the radio shows and the songs and the rest of it The full panoply of American culture forward and backward is there and it can be yours for just you know Pennies a day as we like to say we'd like to thank a bamboo HR and quality of signal ethics for sponsoring this show We'd like to thank you for giving us good ratings wherever you happen to find it I'd like to thank you Charles for being with me here today. It's been a great pleasure and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Bye bye.