The Ricochet Podcast - In Hot Water in D.C.
Episode Date: May 14, 2018It takes a special occasion to take The Big Show® to bigger things and higher heights. What’s bigger than the AEI/Ricochet Podcast Summit? Try the 400th episode of our aural extravaganza. There are... ruminations on the changes in our nation’s capital since the Reagan years, presidential portraits and Korean water heaters. (Yeah, Korean water heaters.) Meanwhile, Peter attempts a variety of new... Source
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It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long.
Our guest today is Larry Kudlow.
No, James.
No.
He just called and canceled.
He's actually going to meet with the president right now.
This is true, by the way.
I'm not making it up.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson.
Our guest today is the special secretary of the system.
He's not going to get me.
Bye-bye.
Pope Francis?
Yes, Pope Francis will be here.
Jenna Jameson, she, who is?
Oh, they're actually.
Oh, Charlie said she wasn't going to make it.
Oh, shoot.
Draft the luck.
All right.
Well, it's just the three of us then again.
Why did Larry cancel?
What happened?
He sent us a text. He said, very sorry, but he's going to meet with the
president, and I guess unexpectedly. It probably would take Larry a lot more time with the
president so he can unlearn all the economics he's known for the many years. That can't
be an easy process for someone as
intelligent as Larry. Everyone here
now is checking their phone to see if the Dow Jones
has gone down 7,000 points.
Larry couldn't make it because...
He's too busy selling everything. Right.
Which would be horrible because then, Rob, I know that you care
about your money, right? You care about what your money
I care only about my money. And do you ever
worry about whether or not there was a place your money
could do to do good?
I'll bet you think there's no such thing.
There's literally no such thing.
My advice to you if you have money and you want to do good, just throw it out the window.
Because there's not – there does not exist an organization that just doesn't.
How wrong you are, Moose Breath.
The actual truth is –
It's not as good as when he's like opening up the interruption, is it?
Because I need to tell you that actually everything you're saying is wrong.
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Ricochet Podcast Summit is graciously hosted by our friends at the American Enterprise
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Every month, a carefully curated box of meat, underwear, and gardening tools is brought to your door.
Use coupon code, whatever it is.
But we're not doing that now.
However, there's always the point where the founders, and the founders, by the way, ladies and gentlemen,
the founders, Peter Robinson and Rob Lund.
Make a pitch on behalf of the organization and why it's great to support it.
And in this podcast summit, why actually it's, this being the 400th episode,
we've been in the vanguard of something that's actually exploding
and becoming quite popular.
So, Rob, Peter, did you think it was going to turn out like this?
Actually, I'm a little disappointed.
This is number 400.
And we still haven't really got this thing off the ground?
No, no.
Robert?
When did we start getting paid?
400.
That's a lot.
Yes.
Yes, it is.
And, you know, I should say, as it started, the podcast was the way of introducing people to the site.
And then as we sort of found out that a lot of people are listening to podcasts, many of them not paying, although everybody here in the room is a member, so thank you.
We sort of discovered this new kind of way of communicating with people, which is podcasts.
Audio – the generic sort of elementary term is audio on demand.
But it's the same thing.
When we talked about having
this kind of a big convention a couple, about three or four months ago,
actually a year ago, and then of course we couldn't afford it, and then Donors Trust
nicely sort of spearheaded this organization, which I think is great.
And I think what we're doing here
is going to be the first of many because
this kind of audio on demand is remarkably giving voice to a lot of people who like calm, reason, civil discussion.
If you watch – this morning I was still watching the news and flipping around, and every single news channel on television had some kind of alarming breaking news.
It's always breaking news.
Fox special alert with all these graphics.
It's never a special alert.
It's always something really stupid.
And I think there's a hunger out there for actual honest conversation.
And we hope for us as well.
In addition to what we do, yeah.
Well, when this began, there was just this.
And now, if you go to Ricochet,
there are 472 different podcasts.
Just about, right?
And they're narrowcasting more and more,
so there's one released next week
for conservative owners of people
whose dogs have three legs.
I mean, whatever niche you want,
you will find something.
But the great thing about it also is that you can find voices that you usually don't listen to or would be exposed to.
The Lady Brains are a perfect example.
I mean, if that show was on television, would I necessarily watch it?
No, because I don't like to watch a lot of television.
But you put it on your pod or your pad or when they want to give it to you, it's busted.
And podcasts have broken that up.
So that's the great thing about it.
Where do we go from here, though, besides episode 401?
Well, I think there's a couple ways to do this model. One is for people who know each other and have chemistry on
the air or
auditory chemistry to continue
to have these conversations and to disagree with each other
but we have 45 minutes
to talk.
We've had arguments
and we've had arguments.
We have 40 minutes to talk.
I'm giving myself five minutes.
We also have arguments with guests, too.
I had a huge argument with not just a guest, but an employee.
Sorry?
Oh, that was different.
That was an argument, to be fair, to both of us.
I wasn't presenting points at that moment.
But what we're trying to do is to sort of be civil about it
and to be civil about what's happening in the country.
We need a new motto, actually, civil-ish.
Civil-ish, yeah.
Ricochet, civil-ish conversation Civil-ish. Ricochet.
Civil-ish conversation.
Just to give you scope.
Just so you can breathe. Just so I can breathe.
Just so you can breathe.
Just so I can be myself.
And one of the biggest compliments I ever heard about what we do was from somebody who – sort of a public radio impresario who said the left would never...
Public radio.
Rob knows these people.
He said the left would never
stand for this.
And it's kind of true.
I'm worried sometimes I think the right's
going down this path, but
the left is sort of eating itself alive.
They're constantly having show trials
and kicking people out. They're insufficiently... Good thing there's no division on our side of eating itself alive. They're constantly having show trials and kicking people out.
They're insufficiently whatever.
Good thing there's no division on our side of the political equation.
Well, right.
And that's kind of what we're trying to avoid.
That 60%, 65% agreement is pretty good in America in a free country.
That's pretty good.
100% agreement is scary.
I think you and I have built a friendship
of 25 years duration
on 62.3 maybe.
I take issue with the.3.
No, yeah, 62.3.
That's kind of all
you need. Well, if we're going to follow the
National Public Radio model, then we've got to
change the way we speak. If you listen to the NPR,
you know that Peter
will have to adopt
a sort of nasal millennial voice
that ends everything with uptalk
like a chestless,
milk-fed young'un.
And we're also going to need
a female voice
who sounds like
a chain-smoking crow
because they love to fry
their voice these days.
That's how you appeal
to the millennials,
those kind of voices.
This is just too much old stuff.
But then again, we are in Washington, D.C., aren't we?
And as long as we're here, we have an old hand, an old D.C. hand.
Very old.
Not old chronologically.
Ancient.
But somebody with a lot of experience.
And I'm just curious.
So here we are.
It's a beautiful city.
It's a beautiful day.
How has it changed?
You were here during the Reagan years.
Now we're in the Trump years.
What is the difference in the city that you see?
I am very sorry to say that the obvious difference is it's gotten richer.
The shops have all moved upmarket.
There's more traffic.
There are more fancy cars in the traffic.
You walk around town. When I was in the Reagan administration, pretty much the top of the
line clothing was Joseph Bank. Pretty ordinary suits because it was dominated by government and
the big lobbyists didn't want to be flashy. They were trying to persuade people who were in
government on government salaries. And that has changed. People are well, flashily dressed.
So what do I conclude?
I conclude that this is a boom town, and that's good for everybody who owns property in Washington,
but bad for all the rest of the country.
It's air conditioning that did it.
When this was a humid, unlivable, malarial swamp, everybody had to leave at some point or they would get yellow fever.
And now everyone can stay year-round because of air conditioning.
Thank you, Mr. Carrier.
Rob, you're not a D.C. lover.
I think it's a dump, frankly.
And I don't get why.
First of all, I'm reasonably intelligent.
Reasonably.
I never know where the hell I am.
Does that – which way is the white – and I'm always lost.
And I actually end up sometimes getting to Bethesda before I realize, oh, I'm actually going the wrong direction.
So I don't like it.
I'm not a fan.
I do resent it.
It's just too much for Manhattan, straight up and down.
I do resent it.
I don't like the – I don't know if the taxis still do the zone system, which is idiotic.
And I resent it as a taxpayer.
I resent the fact that – the reason it's so expensive, the reason people are so rich here is because we need to hire very elaborate, expensive mandarins to make – to create pathways through this giant federal bureaucracy.
So it isn't – it's sort of the cart driving – I mean it's sort of the cart before the horse.
The reason that we have all this is because the government is so big and we – you need your guides.
AT&T today apologized for hiring Michael Cohen because I guess that was something you apologized for.
I'm a shareholder of AT&T.
Why?
Absolutely, absolutely not.
I think it's in their interests to pay a friend of the president a zillion dollars a month because you have to.
The state power is so strong.
I actually feel like the guy the president instead of apologizing for is he said, yeah, you know what?
Reduce the regulatory state, then I won't have to hire these sleazebags.
But if you live in a country which has this enormously powerful regulatory state and you are the head of a publicly traded company,
you have a fiduciary responsibility to hire a couple of sleazebags to help you deal with it.
I don't see why that's something that we shouldn't be saying.
Proof of that is the spectacle that took place, what was it, two weeks ago, three weeks ago,
for 15 years, 20 years now, the rise of Silicon Valley.
All the entrepreneurs have been saying, we don't need Washington.
Just let us operate.
One of the tremendous advantages of Silicon Valley is that we're on the other side of the country.
We're not going to think in terms of regulation.
We're just going to think in terms of engineering the product, changing the work.
And there's Mark Zuckerberg apologizing for two whole days before a special committee in the Senate
and then a special committee in the House.
And I don't even want to contemplate, because I'm not on the receiving end of it,
I don't want to contemplate the budget, the Facebook budget for lobbyists over the next year or 18 months.
And how they're sort of – well, I know a little bit about their lobbying effort.
You do?
Which is that for a long time they just thought that was silly.
Can you cut me in?
No, I wish.
They employ everybody now.
But less than 36 months ago they were saying, we don't need this.
We don't need this.
That's right.
But the most chilling part about that was that Zuckerberg, and I think probably the same now for Google, all these large companies are in favor of regulation.
Yes.
They want it.
And when a big company wants regulation, that's never a good thing.
And they're going to get it because we live in a regulatory state.
So if it moves, we slap it with regulation.
And they want regulation.
Why?
Destroy any possible competition that might arise.
So, ladies and gentlemen, the republic is doomed, and we will see you next year.
Yes.
I like it here.
I used to live here, and I hated it here because I came here in the early 90s when there were just 300 murders a day,
and the city was filthy, and nothing worked, and there were potholes everywhere,
and my neighborhood was choked with spare change artists.
And you would walk to work, and you would have to get out your diamond-sticked walking cane and batter them out of the way
and hope that they didn't spit on your spats.
It was not a pleasant place to live.
Stop, stop.
Spit on your spats.
Unbelievable.
As you can see, this is the reason for having these things live.
So people can see him do it.
Maybe the reason you were so unhappy here
is because you dress like a Monopoly guy all the time.
Exactly it.
Clearly.
Penny bags.
So I left, and I was happy to get back to Minnesota
where things worked, where life wasn't hard,
because everything here was just a trial and a struggle.
And then after many years, I started coming back,
and I realized that the city was precisely as Peter had described it,
much more prosperous, much more cleaner.
And it's just now I love to come back here
because it's beautiful beautiful and it feels safe
and there's great things to eat.
But you're right.
You know in your heart that the reason it is
is because there's so much money sloshing around
and the money is there to hire the people
who will go to the government
and say here's what we want to have happen.
So underneath all of this wonderful urban experience
that you have is the essential corruption
of the American experiment.
But you can put that aside for a little bit if you're just going to the museum.
And I did.
I went to the National Portrait.
Has anybody here been to the National Portrait Museum recently?
I find that Washingtonians had, when I lived here, had very little interest in the civic history of the place itself.
The buildings, the architecture, the fact that it's laid out among strange
Masonic principles with all these lines, diagonals, and the rest.
And so when you go to the National Portrait Gallery, you would like to think that it's
full of people who live here, who work here, who are steeping themselves in the culture
and the history.
I want to take inspiration from this picture of Chester Arthur to learn how I, too, can
fight the postal patronage unit.
But it's all
tourists. So I hadn't been in a while. And I went up to the presidential gallery area where they
have the pictures of all the big guys. And they're hilarious too. There's Nixon. My favorite is
Nixon. And it's really small. It's like the Mona Lisa. You think the picture of Nixon is going to
be really small. And Norman Rockwell said he had trouble figuring out how to paint Nixon.
I wonder why.
So Nixon's sort of leaning towards you like this with a smile on his face.
And he looks like they've said, Mr. President, these are some yippies.
Talk to them.
And he's saying, I understand this rock and roll is popular with you kids.
Tell me about it.
And he's got the most unconvincing smile you can imagine.
Next to him is Calvin Coolidge. And Coolidge is standing there just like, you know, get it over. Let's about it. And he's got the most unconvincing smile you can imagine. Next to him is Calvin Coolidge. And Coolidge is standing there just like
get it over. Let's do it. And next to him is Woodrow Wilson like bow to me now.
And it's just great. You go to the 19th century guys and they all
got their mouth closed because their teeth were horrible. It's just fascinating. And then you get
to the Obama one. And that's the newest edition. And it's startling.
It's this incredible,
colorful background of flowers meant to indicate Hawaii. The painter himself, Wiley, I think
his name is, is known for this kind of kitschy, hyper-realistic repurposing of African-American
figures into classical European art. So it's got all these different levels of appropriation
and jesting. I mean, there's so much much going on and the president's sitting there and you can't see his feet
completely. They're in the foliage. And then you look at his
hand. And the president's left hand appears to have six
fingers. And you look at it very closely and you can't disabuse
yourself of the fact that you think that he has six fingers.
Does he have four on the other hand
no no it's not like they were moving them around he might because the thumbs and so i went back to
my hotel and i googled it and sure enough there's just 90 million pages about obama's six fingers
and there's a video explaining the secret satanic code and the guy's got his web browser up there
and he's taking pictures of on youtube and and the tabs are like, Biblegate, Biblegate, Apocalypse, Apocalypse,
Alex Jones, Weekly Standard.
So there's all this. But what struck
me the most about the Obama portrait, aside from
its fascinating newness, was that
in front of it were these little
rope lines because they
expected that there would be a procession of people
who would come up and want to
be and have their moment with the picture,
where they would bow, do whatever they had to do.
Everybody else is just this old president whose lives and careers we've forgotten completely,
but eventually Obama, like them, will be somebody that somebody looks at and then moves on
because the 21st century produced some other colorful character.
None come to mind at the moment.
So go there. It's one of the things I love about D.C.
The art, the culture, the history is fantastic. But then again, coming here,
I inhaled this perfume of mulch that they put down
that makes everything sort of like a cow barn. And I thought
Donald Trump should have come here to drain the swamp because you'd have to get EPA clearance.
It's a wetland. He should have come here to clean the Aegean stables.
I feel like Dorothy in the tornado.
Almost anything might go by the window when James is talking.
That was brilliant.
I'm pretty sure it was brilliant.
Pretty sure.
By the way, for $1.75, you can get that on videotape and have your own James Lilac's guided tour
of the National Portrait Gallery.
This morning, I sat in my underwear in my hotel room
and flipped around looking for cartoons.
That's the difference between our D.C. experiences.
I actually like the portrait of Obama.
Yeah, so do I.
I think it's kind of fine.
What? Wait, excuse me.
We'll return to you in a moment. What do I. I think it sounded fine. What? Wait, excuse me. We'll return to you
in a moment.
What do you mean
you like it?
You just gave
a whole riff on it.
Well,
Six Fingers doesn't ruin it.
It's not just,
I mean,
that's because
I think this guy,
like a lot of artists,
great artists of the day,
farms an awful lot of stuff
off to the studio assistants.
I mean,
Michelangelo did it,
Da Vinci did it,
they would paint the eyes
and the smile
and then they'd have the guys that they
pay a buck a month come in, you know, who
lived on straw, and they would paint the background.
That's common. From what I understand,
So which bit is it that you like?
Well, for one thing, it's
so startlingly different from the standard
presidential portraiture.
And it's also not abstract. If you
look at the Kennedy picture, they got
de Kooning, and they didn't get de Kooning, they got to Kooning. They didn't get to
Kooning, they got to Kooning's wife. So it's got that sort of, I'm going to grab some chicken of
the sea and smear it on a canvas is what it looks like. It's abstract. It's modern, almost
abstract expressionism. This is startlingly realistic. And so for that, it's good. Almost
down to the point where there's an argument as to whether or not there's a spermatozoa embedded in his forehead.
James, put the internet down.
This is true.
The artist who's gay has said that he enjoys putting spermatozoa into his work.
Not literally, but if you look, there will be little swimmers here and there.
And so when this portrait of Obama comes out... Only in Donald Trump's Washington. There's a big vein on the
side of his head, of Obama's head, and then a sort of little oval right here.
So Sean Hannity gets on Twitter and says, there's a spermatozoa
on the head of the president. And everyone makes fun of this as the most ridiculous
thing they've even heard, even though the artist himself has said that he puts it into the work.
Please tell me this is not a segue
to Fresh Direct.
Well, you know, some people
spermatozoa...
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And we're back. I'm done.
Could we have a little longer pause? Yeah. And we're back. I'm done.
Could we have a little longer pause?
Yeah.
Oh, I like it because I feel like there's this tendency on our side to think that anytime you hear the word Obama, it has to be followed by something you don't like.
And I remember having an argument with somebody saying, they seem like nice parents.
Yes. And the girls seemed like they're nice.
I haven't met them, but they seemed like they're nice.
And it was just,
what?
What?
You think they're nice people?
What?
Like,
we have to,
the level of rage
and anger
we have to have
constantly on,
like those Korean
hot water heaters
that are instant hot,
is so exhausting
and so tiresome
that we have now created a culture where we're supposed to be angry
at everyone who we disagree with all the time for everything.
Like, Obama ate pizza?
He ate pizza?
What a jerk for eating pizza.
Like, what's wrong with eating pizza?
Boys, between the spermatozoa and the Korean hot water taps,
I'd just like to be carried out of here right now.
It's a weekend in Fire Island right there.
No, you're right.
You know those Korean hot, you know, the ceramic.
Oh, I don't know.
They're instant on.
They're actually kind of cool.
They're expensive, but there's no hot water tank.
You just kind of press a button and you get hot water.
It's some kind of weird Korean voodoo.
The water ghost lives in there.
When it comes out on the TV, it kills you seven days later.
And they're fantastic.
I recommend them.
Where did you encounter them?
They were everywhere.
I counted them on Earth in 2018, Peter.
You might want to just stop in every now and then and just take a look.
How many of you have encountered Korean hot water?
You have?
Oh, you liars.
All right.
It's the size of like one of those, half of that glass panel.
They're fantastic.
They're great.
It's not me, right?
He's not in the world.
Why was I placed in the middle?
What I'd like to do is that I do want to talk briefly about the high and the low of Peter Robinson. He was here not that long ago speaking to Secretary of Defense Mattis and you know using a
lot of big words and like his little clipboard had all these things on it and
acting very very smart going through the threats and now he's got to sit here and
talk about Korean water heaters but I I did want to know, when you're doing that,
are you just focused on the,
at any point did you,
did your brain go to where my brain went,
which is,
how many people have to die
so that he could be president?
Like, tomorrow.
Because that's what I want to happen tomorrow. And I got confused in the Constitution, because, like, it's always, you know, it's not quite clear.
And then it's, oh, Christ, Ryan, got to put Ryan in there, because he's the Secretary
of the House. So it goes goes Pence, but that's constitutional.
And he was elected.
And after Pence comes Ryan and then Secretary of State.
Who's that now?
Pompeo.
Yeah.
And then, oh, the President of the Senate?
It goes to the President of the Senate? It goes to the President of the Senate?
It goes to the President Pro Tem of the Senate.
Well, since it's come up, Speaker of the House, President Pro Tem of the Senate,
and then it goes to the Cabinet, Secretary of State,
and then Secretary of Defense is next, right?
Oh.
Okay.
Okay, all right.
Then it's Mattis. Then it's madness.
Then it's madness.
So we need six voodoo dolls fast.
Or malfunctioning Korean hot water heaters.
Right.
I don't think you have to worry about Mnuchin. He will throw himself in front of something.
No.
It's so depressing.
Maybe a stack of bullion could collapse him.
It's kind of a good metaphor, though, isn't it?
For the guy who I think, I mean I'm listening to him.
I thought he should be president of the United States.
He's like, no chance.
Not him.
It's going to be Steve Mnuchin.
We'll get just that far.
We'll get just that far.
Yeah.
And it's like President Mnuchin.
I, Steve Mnuchin. And it's like President Mnuchin, I, Steve Mnuchin do so on. And it'll
be like, wow, if I just
set the timer right.
I'm talking around the federal
crime that I'm
committing now and you're all accessories to it.
The marshals are gathering outside as we speak.
Let's imagine that doesn't happen though and let's think 200
podcasts into the future.
What do you think we'll be talking about then?
Because we used to do this thing, next week's big story,
which, of course, we just didn't know what we were talking about.
But let's really not know what we're talking about
and project four years into the future.
200 podcasts, the 600th podcast.
What do you think will be consuming the national imagination?
Without a doubt, Korean hot water taps.
Without a doubt, because that will be part of the deal
that Kim Jong-un strikes with Donald Trump in Singapore.
I think you're right. I think you're absolutely correct.
We denuclearize, but every American has to buy Korean hot water taps.
But they'll all be made with enriched plutonium.
There's a plan to give everybody...
But that is interesting.
I mean, I know Peter's making a joke, but...
Did it show?
Yeah.
President Reagan, you heard of him?
He always wanted to take whoever the living,
at that point, the living Soviet dictator was.
And they were like Andropov and Chernenko
and a few others before it went to Gorbachev.
Almost a senior moment. Yeah, before Gorbachev. Almost a senior moment.
Yeah, before Gorbachev went and ended the Cold War, single-handedly, as they say.
And he thought if you just take him on an airplane ride or helicopter ride above the San Fernando Valley,
and if they give the premiere of Soviet Union, you could just look down and see this vast,
basically some of them are fancy houses,
but most of the San Fernando Valley is working class or middle class.
Have you been there?
Yeah, a lot.
And they all have swimming pools.
And that's something that I think we kind of forget,
just the sheer affluence of this country.
The sheer affluence has its downsides.
But I always say the same thing, which is like if you could go back in time, not even that far, and say to an American, in the future, in 2018, our poor people will be fat.
That is the nutritional problem that America's poor face, obesity.
That's
bananas when you think about it.
That's a
unthinkable, unfathomable
turn of events, but in fact
that is what has happened, and a lot
of it is due, there's been a lot of research due to
the food stamp program.
And I always
think that conservatives forget how valuable the food stamp program. And I always think that conservatives
forget how valuable the food stamp program is
to our point of view,
which is the government didn't want people to starve,
so it created a food stamp program.
It didn't buy supermarkets.
It didn't run farms.
It didn't do any of the things
that it insists on doing for health care.
It just
gave you a voucher
to buy food. And that seems
like, since we are going to be living
in a liberal
welfare state, no matter what we do,
that is what it is.
That seems like
a better model than the government
getting into
as
Trump announced today the President of the United States
had to sit, I mean whatever you think of the man
he had to sit there and come up with
a way that hospitals
should charge you
for procedures, that's what we did
today, that's what the President of the United States did
today and that is either
if you're on the left you think that's fine, that's what the
President should be doing.
He's telling you how much you should be charged
for your stint.
Or if you're on the right, you're like,
why is anyone telling, why can't that be the,
why can't we just give somebody a voucher
to spend as they wish?
And then they can take the change and buy beer with it,
which is what happens with food stamps.
Well, you mentioned that people from the past
looking at the people of the future and
saying your poor people are morbidly obese, that would stun them. More than that, in the old movies,
whenever there was a computer, there was one computer in the world that was owned by one
evil genius and it had whirring tapes and the rest of it in tubes. Right. He was going to use
it to take over the world. The idea that even in the 50s that people in the lower socioeconomic
stratum would have a personal pocket computational device capable of accessing the great libraries and all of the information of the world plus funny cat videos would be stunning.
I mean the power that you have just simply by a smartphone, and it's not that hard to get, shows you how much we've changed.
And now, however, because of the model you've described with food stamps, and Rob, that's
what I am talking about, Rob. That's just one of those.
Yeah, no, I'm looking at the name
of the artist. Yeah, Wiley.
The idea is
if information then is a human right... The amazing thing
is they can follow each other.
Have you noticed that? If information is a human
right, as much as food, then
ought not the government be able to give people
vouchers for Internet access?
Because that's the point we're at right now.
It's no longer discussing whether or not we should make it easier.
We have to come up with this whole benevolent structure that gives people access to this
because it's a good thing, right?
Who would not want poor people not to be able to access the Internet and Wikipedia?
So we'll have that debate about that at some point too as eventually everything becomes
a right and eventually everything that's a right, the government has to give it.
That's what net neutrality was essentially.
The underlying theory of it was that –
That was one of the apocalypses, right?
Net neutrality was an apocalypse.
The budget was an apocalypse.
The tax cut was an apocalypse.
Paris Accords were an apocalypse.
The Paris Accords were an apocalypse.
The Iranian deal was an apocalypse and the North Korea.
Everything that the Trump administration has done, I understand. What's interesting is our memories are so weird that it wasn't that long ago that people would say,
Trump is being so insulting to the premier of North Korea.
He's going to get us all into a nuclear war.
Right.
And now with Trump as being so slavishly nice to the premier of North Korea, he's going to give away the store.
I mean, the left
and the media in this country is doing
its best to make me a Trump voter.
They really are.
I mean, I'm not, but...
Well, you know, we've got two more years left.
Well,
200 podcasts from now, I mean, I heard this joke.
Go ahead.
While we're talking about the 200 podcasts, something semi-legitimate,
civil-ish, semi-legitimate.
Ricochet, civil-ish and semi-legitimate.
I think we've got something there.
That's it.
Anyhow, so here's the thought.
As Rob pointed out, I live in Silicon Valley,
and this is something we've almost forgotten about.
It was big news.
It got written about and talked about over and over and over again,
10 years ago, 15 years ago, Moore's Law,
this general notion that computing power would double
while holding the price constant every 18 months.
And there are disputes about whether Moore's Law still actually functions
because we're getting down to the atomic level and you can't shrink.
On the other hand, you can build them on top.
The point is that in the background, it's no longer considered astonishing.
It is now a background fact of American life that computing power continues to become more and more powerful,
more and more available, and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. So if there is a technical problem
that cannot be solved today, wait six months and then think what occurs to you and wait another six months. And this is why I asked this question when Jim Mattis was here,
when Secretary Mattis was here, that the Chinese, well,
so one thing we'll be discussing, to me, the big question of the next X number of years
is whether the Chinese can move beyond copying us and actually become innovative themselves.
A, I hope not, because really that's our only advantage,
and B, I sort of think not.
I buy Jim's argument that crummy though democracy is,
appalling though freedom of speech is,
as exercised by everyone other than us,
it really
does give you a permanent
advantage, and it shows up in all kinds of
ways, but one specific way is technical
innovation.
I'm exhausted.
It's also one way to keep the population
distracted. I mean, China's going through this whole
social clout score
with an embedded internet and everything that can be able
to attract your movements.
I mean, now nobody thought that Big Brother was going to be a volunteer event,
which it is here in the States.
We put our own cameras to watch us.
We turn on devices willingly and put them in our pockets
that tell everybody where we are.
So Big Brother is us.
But we like it because there's all of these tradeoffs.
Now, what comes with this is not only a disconnect from actual human people
in the meat space, as they call it,
but also from your own previous self because you become so expectant of Moore's Law to give you some new toy every six months.
I bought a new iPhone, right, because it's got facial recognition.
And the idea of something that I could point and it would look at my face and get turned on, at my age, I really like that.
And so I'm used to it now.
But if I'm wearing my sunglasses, because I'm kind of in my vice mode,
it won't recognize me, and I have to enter numbers by hand,
and it feels like 1906.
I go to the store, and if it doesn't take my watch for payment,
it's like, you mean I have to take my card out of my pocket
and put it into the slot and wait, which is always the same.
Do not remove card.
Do not remove card.
Do not remove card.
Do not remove card.
Remove card.
Not fast enough.
Your family is dead.
And so with every new wonderful innovation that we get,
we become happy for a little while and then we're used to it
and then we're aggravated when it isn't perfect
and then we're anticipating the next thing
and contemptuous of what it was a year ago.
So, I mean, if China wanted to really truly create a society
that was easy to manipulate,
they would not bother to innovate.
They've got our factories over there.
Copy the stuff.
Give everybody an iPhone.
Unleash Twitter and Weibo and the rest of them
and just let them distract themselves
as we are doing right now.
Where do you shop?
I have nice experiences where I go and take it out, put it in.
Sometimes it's, is it a swipey or is it a chippy?
You know, it's kind of fun.
I have these charming interactions with people in downtown Manhattan.
I enjoy my life.
I guess I'm not looking for trouble.
I would just say about the future is that the one thing we can say, especially about technology, is that
what I would have wanted to ask Secretary Mattis is,
which is sort of paradoxical, but what's the stuff
that you don't anticipate? Because the stuff that you don't anticipate is where
the explosions happen. And that's where
we're here celebrating the idea of podcasting,
which has been around for a long time,
in technological terms.
It's exploding now because some advertisers
realize that it's a pretty good way to reach people.
And it's exploding now because,
not because of computing power, really,
but because of a parallel explosion
in store width and bandwidth.
And to me, I'm more interested in store width and bandwidth
because if you have this enormous database,
then the computing power has something to compute
and something to crunch.
And we are developing these enormous databases
for a whole bunch of different things.
And then if you have bandwidth, an increased bandwidth,
everyone can be watching TV on their phone, which was
something that we were told in Hollywood will never happen because it takes 30 minutes to
download a clip. And it's too expensive for that ever to change. And it's usually when
people are saying, okay, here's what you don't have to worry about. Don't worry about that
over there. That's where the monster is going to come. And I would say that the
one thing we never think about with China, we always think of China as relentlessly moving
forward to a certain goal, and we don't really understand, no one agrees with me, which is
the phrase I use is, we don't understand, which means you don't agree with me, is that
China is driven by deep paranoia about its unity and its unification.
And they have trouble in the West,
and they have trouble in the North,
and they have trouble in the South.
And they have a sort of...
Joan talked about it briefly today.
They don't have a sense of a unified nation
of different races.
Instead, they have a very, very, very,
very powerful idea of racial identity.
The Han Chinese are the most important. And they have colorful Mandarin phrases for the
other Chinese people who live encircling them. And if we wanted to troll them and be mischievous,
we would simply encourage
the celebration of the diversity
of the nation of China,
which is something they don't like.
The one thing they have plenty of right now
is Han Chinese.
So they send a million of them to the west
and a million of them to the north
and a million of them to the south
as often as they can
to kind of dilute those areas.
But if you go up to,
I've said this on the podcast a lot,
if you go up to the northern China,
to Venturia, Dongbei, those people are Korean.
They look Korean.
They sound Korean.
They identify with the ancient Koryo Empire.
Some of it they kind of made up so the UN would send them money.
But there are these big piles of dirt, and they've convinced everyone that these are ancient tombs.
And when the – when it hits the fan in North Korea – I say this over and over again.
I'm the only person saying this because people don't understand.
Those Koreans, 23 million emaciated North Koreans are going north.
They're not going to go into that tiny little isthmus in the south.
They're going to go north where there's plenty of space, and there are Korean people there who are speaking Korean. And the Yalu River is 30 meters wide, three feet deep,
and the Chinese are going to freak.
And so one thing I think that we're not prepared for is China dealing with its own internal unrest.
Well, that's one side of the world that we'll talk about in 200 podcasts.
Then there's the other side of the world, and we should maybe end with this.
There was something I heard the other day that President of Iran called Donald Trump and said,
President Trump, I have to tell you, I just had a dream.
I had the most amazing dream.
I saw America, and it was beautiful, and it was gorgeous, and it was rich and golden and prosperous,
and there were banners on every building.
President Trump said, what did the banners say?
The president of Iran said, they said the United States of Iran.
Donald Trump said, well, I had a dream last night as well.
I woke up and I saw Iran as well.
And I saw in my dream that Iran was golden and perfect and it was
prosperous and beautiful and
there were big gorgeous banners on every
building. And the president of Iran said
and what did the banners say?
And Donald Trump said
I don't know, I don't read Hebrew.
So between China and Iran we got our hands
full and I'm sure between That was a great joke. Between Peter's extraordinary So between China and Iran, we got our hands full.
And I'm sure between Peter's extraordinary Rolodex, we will have wonderful people to talk to.
And because of Rob, who nobody listens to, but he's always right. He was telling us about Chinese water heaters 10 years ago.
Did anybody invest? Nobody did.
You should invest with DonorsTrust.org, though, however.
And we thank them for sponsoring them.
We thank AEI for bringing us here.
And we thank all of you who are listening
and all of you in this room for being the best audience in the world.
And thank you. This has been the Ricochet Podcast.
See you next week.
See you next week.
Thank you. In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of fame
To the river so deep
I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it's too hard to cross
Even though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening and stand on the shore
I try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find what I've been looking for
In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the valley of fear
To a river so deep
I'm in search of something
Taken out of my soul
Something I'd never lose.
Never lose.
Something somebody stole.
Something somebody stole.
I don't know why I go walking at night.
But now I'm tired and I don't want to walk anymore.
Oh, but I'll stick the rest of my life until I find what it is I've been looking for.
In the middle of the night. In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the jungle of doubt
To the river so deep
I know I'm searching for something
Something so undefined
That it can only be seen
By the eyes of the blind
In the middle of the night Ricochet.
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