The Ricochet Podcast - Own Goals

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

We couldn’t call it a year without both Founders on board, so with Rob out and about (there are rumors that he’s actually working…) we actually present our penultimate episode for the Year of Our Lord 2022. James and Peter work a two-man booth and they go fission for clean energy, talk about the journo meltdown on Twitter and then talk a little football… or is it soccer? We also welcome in our old... Source

That's what I was intending to do before you interrupted me. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Are news organizations going to stand by as the reporters are just hastily banned without explanation? CNN is saying it's going to reevaluate its relationship with Twitter. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Wicked Shape Podcast with Peter Robinson. Rob Long is off this week.

I'm James Lomax. We're going to talk to Bill McGurn about Jimmy Lai and China. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 622. How did we get that far? Well, just go to Ricochet.com and you'll see.

There's a great thriving community of people there. And you ought to be one of them as well, because it's a great place to find friends and talk about things that, well, you know, you can talk about it anywhere, but you might get banned. You might get shadow banned. You might find yourself in with a bunch of losers with fake names who are clattering around and throwing stones at each other's heads. A sane civil community, most of the time. That's Ricochet. I'm James Lilex here in Minneapolis, where we just had, oh, a lot of snow. And Peter Robinson is in California, where I assume they did not. Rob Long is off for the week. He's off working, working. How about that for Rob? Peter, how are you on this fine day? I am fine, but I would like to argue that Californians are more miserable when the temperature drops below freezing to 31 degrees as it did last night than you and Minnesota are at, say, 20 degrees below zero.

Possibly so. So I'd like some sympathy. Boo and or who? All right, you got my sympathy for it being 31 degrees. We had that last night at 31 after we'd gotten about three or four inches of snow, and then our power went out. Our power went out because a tree limb fell and i was some wire somewhere and for 45 minutes we were back in pioneer days not a sound anywhere in the neighborhood absolutely still dark it was wonderful actually only because we knew it was coming back on if it was the end of

civilization of course you would start to you know load the the the ammunition and guard your stocks. But here we are. Speaking of which, may I handle the segue this time? No, segue all you like. So last week it was announced that recently, on the other side of the bay from me, over here in Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, 192 extremely expensive and very powerful lasers were directed at some sort of hunk of hydrogen atoms the size of a pencil eraser and for a millisecond they bombarded this pencil eraser with energy and in the resulting reaction the pencil eraser produced something like 50% more energy in return than it had

taken to initiate the reaction. And I, cynic about nuclear space, just the sort of next frontier-y stuff, immediately think to myself, oh, right. All we know for certain is not that some sort of new totally carbon-neutral energy source has arrived to save the planet. All we know for certain is that the scientific establishment now has something to use against us all for the next 30 years to insisting that we spend tens of billions of our money funding their research products projects and enabling them to lead nice lives that's my view of what happened james something tells me your view is different well i want to know what happened to peter robinson if that's your if that's just you that you immediately go to yes it's just another gravy train for these guys to sop up our money.

Yes, yes, yes. Here's the thing. I've been hearing about this all of my life, that we're going to have fusion. Fusion is the next thing. It's the grail. We get this, we're good. And when I heard this, I was heartened. Now, of course, you know, a millisecond of extra energy on a pencil

eraser is not exactly, that's it, dodged a bullet, everything's fine, green future. What I was instantly mystified, though, were all of the people who were coming in and saying, no, they're wrong. This actually is not as important as they say that it is. And there follows a series of bafflingly technical stuff which makes my eyes glaze and my brain stop. Because when it comes to the heart... James, by the way... Go.

No, no, just a... Would you insert a brief explainer? You actually know this stuff because you do follow it. No, I don't. I mean, this is... But the distinction between fusion and fission. Fission is what the atomic bombs use, right? And fusion is totally different so

there's no radioactive uh waste product infusion correct that's what there's a perfect there's some from what i understand but it's not a big problem i don't think the nuclear waste as it is is a big problem we can deal with it um we we can put it in in a mountain somewhere and then at some point when we develop the technology we can shoot it into the sun. I mean, you get huge, enormous rail guns and just shoot it into the sun or use a space elevator, take it up to the top above out of the atmosphere and then shoot it into the sun. I'm not worried about that. But I heard so many debunkings of this from people who want to believe, and that's just it. I tend to side with those who want to believe and say, there's more to be done and this will be great when it happens but i i heard enough to just say i am not dancing a jig yet now will we get there i think we

probably will because i'm a new frontier techno optimist unlike you who apparently wants to live with you know ambergris candles or something um so we'll you know we'll we'll see it'll be great when it happens because Paul Harvey used to have a little feature called news, today's news of most longstanding impact or something like that. He put it more poetically in which he would pull out something that probably 20 to 30 years from now will be seen as a pivotal moment in human culture. And at the time was completely just ignored because it didn't seem like much. This may be one of those days. I just don't know. Because when we do get that, here's the problem. What if we have, I mean, we could do it with nuclear now, but because Jane

Fonda made a movie, everybody's still scared of nuclear power. Because Bruce Springsteen made a concert back in the 80s, everybody's scared of nuclear power. We can't do that. It's just a mystifying, crippling, neutering, castration of our own ability to produce energy. But here we are. If we do do this, then all of a sudden, it bumps up against something that drives an awful lot of the progressive ideology, which is scarcity is good. We don't deserve, really, to have limitless energy because what do we do with it? We live in houses in suburbs. We drive our cars everywhere. We consume, we consume, we consume, and all these things are, if not bad for the planet, somehow fundamentally morally bad as well. So if we get back to a post-scarcity era where we get energy

coming out of everywhere, there's still going to be people who are angry about this because they don't want us to succeed and thrive in that way. We should be metered. Every aspect of our life should be metered and constrained. Not all the rest. Can you tell me if I'm right or wrong about this and fill me into the extent of your knowledge and maybe at the end of this we just put a sort of issue a plea to ricochet listeners to put a post on ricochet to explain all this to us i think we do i think we do have some as a matter of fact i think somebody already weighed in on this back in the members oh really

okay that's this is the great thing about ricochet people know stuff on ricochet. As I understand it, my sort of thumbnail understanding of the history runs as follows. The Manhattan Project takes place, and even as the scientists are designing nuclear weapons, they already understand how this can be used to generate power. So, the time elapse from Manhattan Project to the dropping of the bombs in Japan to the development of nuclear reactors for energy is maybe a decade, and they already knew roughly how you would do it. You get the control the reaction, energy rods, cooling, use it to power a turbine, the turbine turns, produces electricity, boom, we understand how to do this.

As best I can tell, to go from what happened in Livermore recently, 192 high-powered lasers giving us a few jillionths of a second of energy out of a teeny tiny hydrogen pellet. To go from that to some kind of factory device that can produce electricity, they don't have a clue how to do it. No scientist can draw you on the back of an envelope the basic design of a fusion reactor the way every single scientist who participated in the manhattan project could have sketched out the basic elements of a nuclear energy reactor even as they were working on the weapons program am i correct about that the basics of the engineering task are simply not even imagined yet right i i think so but again this is where humankind excels i mean yes no that's true we figure stuff out and

if there is a market there again that's the thing is there a market there because really if it's too cheap to meter uh what's the incentive then for building it are you going to in what subscription fees are you going to meet it I mean, it's just, you're going to be giving electricity away. What's, what's the point of getting into that? I don't know. I tend to think, and again, because I'm a techno optimist that we figure this stuff out and it's not impossible. It's not beyond our can. Uh, and there is a post by the way, in Ricochet, uh, it's by our friend, Henry Rosette, who is sort of just blank stuff. Right. And it doesn't, I, and again, this is sort of, I glaze over when you get into it, but he explains very well why this may not be what it Hank knows this stuff. of there's a there's a just a corrosive negativism abroad in the land that will just squat on things like this because it's it's like there's a zeitgeist that periodically surfaces where it's

just it's a sign of idiocy to be optimistic because every because it just shows that you have no idea how bad things really are right uh where that applies to just about any point in human history and i admit the last couple of years yikes it's been bad um but that doesn't mean that we'd give up on the fundamental characterization i'm totally with you on that i'm totally with you on that where i my skepticism is limited it's quite my skepticism is laser-like to uh now that laser's in my mind my skepticism is laser-like and now that laser's in my mind. My skepticism is laser-like, and it's directed at federal projects. When the federal government gets involved, we already funding scientific projects, research at universities during the Cold War with what in mind? With the competition against the Soviet Union in mind. Now what has happened? Billions of dollars a year get transferred from ordinary taxpayers to well-to-do scientists

scattered across major universities throughout the country. And this just goes on and on and on, and it's in the name of basic research several decades after the Soviet Union even collapsed. So, and, all right. No, I get that. So, that kind of thing. My view would be this thing is fusion remains totally speculative. I'm not sure how to fund it. I'm skeptical of the federal government, but we have within reach, as I understand it.

Hank Reset can write another post correcting me if he'd like. In fact, I'd encourage him to but as i understand it there are a dozen different designs for smaller and much much safer nuclear reactors than have ever been built oh i agree get elon musk or bill gates push this stuff into the private sector get the regulatory overhang off their backs and let them operate that's the way to that's the intermediate at least, that we need to take to environmentally safe energy, right? I agree completely. They're not mutually exclusive. And I agree that a lot of the federal funding is absolute boondoggle.

I mean, Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award, sometimes you would target things that were actually probably a good idea. But when you have universities that are sopping up tens of thousands of dollars to study sexual preferences in the newt. Yeah, I get that. So we can do both. But I wouldn't give it to Bill Gates. Bill Gates is more interested in building, you know, buying up farmland and crafting the reaction to the next pandemic. No, but what I mean is let him spend his own money. Isn't Bill Gates, I thought Bill Gates was backing a nuclear venture. Oh, maybe he is.

I may be wrong about that. I mean, it may be that in five years in Ricochet will be doing ads for the pocket little home nuclear generator. I'd love to see it. But you brought up Musk. Now, Elon Musk, you know, has countries and companies that do interesting things. They bore holes. They do hyper loops. I think he gave away fire extinguishers or fire flamethrowers for a while.

He makes rockets. NASA just sent a capsule around the moon, which was really cool. It really stirred my heart. But we're not going back for two years. I was thinking when Artemis landed, I thought, okay, so we're going to be crewing up and going in a couple of months? No, because it's NASA and it's a government bureaucracy. We're taking two years, at which point Musk will already probably have, you know, a city established on Mars. With his rules, perhaps, the interesting thing about this week is that Twitter went from having a sort of arbitrary set of rules established by a bureaucratic

nomenclatura that changed the rules as they went along to a set of arbitrary rules that got changed as they went along by one guy instead of the arbitrary nomenclature. It's been very interesting. I don't think that, you know, what happened was that people got banned. Journalists got banned. Yes, can you just fill me in on what happened? I just had a moment to look at, it's earlier here in California than it is where you are, and I just looked at my Twitter feed, everybody's outraged but i can't tell what

they're outraged about a bunch of journalists cnn new york times and otherwise got banned and supposedly this was for linking to uh a site that was giving away real-time jet information including elon musk's private jet And he regarded this as doxing. He made a statement before that anybody who gives the real-time movements of anybody or addresses like that, this is doxing. And so he had this, and he also had an incident where somebody was stopping and filming his kid. It really got on his nerves. And so the ban hammer came down. And I think most of the people who got banned had to do with the jet thing.

Turns out it probably isn't a permanent suspension. It's probably about seven days or so. So you have two, the only sensible reaction is to say one, this sort of arbitrary suspension. We don't like it because it's like the arbitrary suspension that came before that we didn't like. It doesn't matter that this guy has been doing stuff that we like. This is not, no.

The other part of that reaction is schadenfreude because the people who were being banned were part of organizations that completely squatted on and ignored the Twitter Files story in the first place. And were the ones who shrugged their shoulders when people were banned obliquely and arbitrarily before. They didn't care about that. Hey, build your own platform. It's a private company. So a lot of people are laughing that it happened to them. But at the same time, it's possible to be amused by what happened to these people and still wish that there was a little less of the flavor of autocracy about it but it's his company is there a flavor i mean i i'm based on the way you've described by the way i see that bill mcgurn has joined us shall we bring bill in to to uh i'd love to hear what bill makes of elon but while

we're bringing bill in it's based on what you've just described it seems to me i could make a pretty good case that this isn't autocratic at all, that this fits within any understanding of the First Amendment and freedom of speech still, because the one limitation that we've admitted on free speech and have admitted for more than a century, Justice Holmes hands down the clear and present danger doctrine, you do not have the freedom of speech to yell fire in a crowded theater. Yes, you do. But you do, especially if the theater is on fire. I get your point. Hey, I have no problem whatsoever telling you my coordinates for tonight and they're going to be in my bed, which is the most comfortable place in the world.

That's right. In the wintertime, a warm bed is just my favorite place to be. But home is my favorite place to be. With the holidays, getting everybody back together, it's going to be absolutely wonderful. We're going to have a little bit of a different Christmas this year, but I know for certain that if I was to give bowl and branch to any of the people, that they would probably think, oh, how can you overtop this? You can't, really. Now, the holidays are the most exciting time of the year. If you want to enjoy them the fullest, you need to get that best sleep, right? And it's easier than it sounds. All you need are the softest, most luxurious organic cotton sheets from Bowl & Branch. Bowl & Branch sheets are made from the finest 100% organic cotton threads on the earth, and they make a difference you can truly feel night after night.

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And I'd love to see the numbers. I can't imagine whoever ever spends one night on these sheets and sends them back. Bring home a better night's sleep this holiday season with Bold and Branch bedding. For a limited time, get 20% off your first set of sheets and sends them back. Bring home a better night's sleep this holiday season with Bowlin Branch bedding. For a limited time, get 20% off your first set of sheets and free shipping when you use the promo code RICOCHET at bowlinbranch.com. That's B-O-L-L-A-N-D branch.com. Bowlinbranch.com. Promo code RICOCHET. And we thank Bowlin Branch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Bill McGurn, member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. He writes the weekly Main Street Call for the Journal each Tuesday.

Previously, he served as chief speechwriter for President G.W. Bush. His gunson is Jimmy Lai, who has been in prison since April of last year for protesting the Chinese Communist Party. Lai insisted on his innocence at trial at, and now is scheduled for an unfair trial in September in 2023. We'll get to that in just a second, but first of all, welcome, Bill. Thank you. You, I imagine, have been marinating steeped up to your chin

in the whole Twitter problem here. Or is it a problem at all? What do you see is going on? Peter was just talking about how it's not autocratic. I'm defending Ilan. He is defending, and I am inclined to do so too but it does seem like he's kind of taking it personally and making it up as he's going along uh but there's room for lots of opinions on this what say you well i'm inclined to defend him too though i think it doesn't look good you know just on the surface you've taken over and you've complained about

what they've done before and then you start um suspending people for a different reason now i think there's a huge difference um for one thing a lot of what he's objected to before has been like with the government and people plotting to suppress information. And this, as we say, is personal doxing. I think if he had picked another case to operate on, it wouldn't look so personal. But I don't really see that he doesn't have the right to do it. You know, we have the right at the Wall Street Journal not to publish Elizabeth Warren. And, you know, I don't think you owe it to people to publish everything. Well, so what about the argument, Bill? I'm partial to this argument since I just made it.

That Elon actually, Elon is drawing a distinction here. This is the same distinction that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. drew, the clear and present danger doctrine, where you don't have the right to shout fire in a crowded theater, even under the most expansive understanding of the First Amendment. And so, Elon is saying, wait a moment. Publishing the coordinates of my jet, linking to that, places me and my family in danger. That has nothing to do with freedom of speech. That falls under the most traditional interpretation of the First Amendment you can imagine. We've been interpreting that way for

a century now. You don't have the right to do that. Boom, you're banned. That strikes me as perfectly straightforward, and it only looks bad because the other side is making fun of it. They want it to look bad. It's perfectly defensible. What do you make of that argument? Yeah, I agree with it. The difference is again on the superficial level most of the people being banned are left-wing or otherwise opponents um and mr musk has just made a huge case at all the bands that came before so superficially it adds to a hypocritical. But I agree with you. He should. And also, when the owner makes these decisions, they take ownership of it.

What was happening to Twitter before is the FBI was talking to them and they were doing all these things in the dark. No one knew what was going on. And people, people you know would say i'm being shadow banned and everyone treated them like they were kooks and turns out they were right about everything at least this is up front and open you mentioned the rules you know make the rules clear and uh and live by them but from the sound of it people are reacting as though the suspension of these journalists somehow stifles their voices entirely and deprives them of their First Amendment rights, which is nonsense. Somebody who works for CNN is still perfectly capable of going on, oh, I don't know, CNN and saying what they need to say. Same for the New York Times and the rest of

them. It's the extent to which Twitter occupies the minds of the chattering class that's been revealed throughout this whole thing. A, their indifference to what happened before and the ever-shifting kaleidoscopic array of rules that they would come up with their Orwellian Truth and Safety Committee. How tone-deaf do you have to be to name your organization Truth and Safety? Their complete indifference to it before, and now they're obsession about it. Everybody always says, you know, well, something else is going to come along because that always happens. Facebook replaced MySpace, and Twitter eventually will die and be replaced by something else. Bill, do you think that that's actually possible, or is it so that Twitter actually is the apogee of the Internet and its hive mind, its immense throngs of bots and unknown people?

Twitter is almost, it seems to me now, something that is not going to go away because it's what everybody so desperately craves to exist. Yeah, I look at it looks dominant now, but even a year ago, people were complaining. It looked like nothing would happen on the censorship issue and then Elon Musk took over and there's been huge changes not just in the rules but in the employees and so forth you know capitalism is dynamic and I think if there's going to be competition it's not going to look the same it's not going to look the same. It's not going to be a bastard version of Twitter. It'll be something else. It's like in the early days of the Internet, if you were a bank, you know,

you had been used to competition from other banks, you know, physically across the street, across the country. Then all of a sudden, your competition was someone's icon on a computer screen and i think we don't know what it'll be but it'll be something there's so much you know there's so much money out there um it's going to attract interest and someone's going to figure out something after they figure it out and successful people would say it's obvious, but it's not obvious now. Well, it's not Mastodon, that's for certain.

Yeah. No, I think the problem with those things is they're too much like Twitter. They don't really offer anything new and revolutionary like Twitter did. So I don't know what the

future is going to look like bill your godson jimmy lye jimmy lye billionaire in hong kong made his fortune principally in the clothing industry worked his way up from being a kid working in a sweatshop to owning an enormous clothing operation, and then decided that once he had made his money, he wanted to do something more meaningful, went into journalism, became the publisher of the principal pro-democracy magazine and newspaper in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, began participating, a man now in his 70s, a billionaire, in pro-democracy protests and made a point of always going to the front of every protest so that the cameras of the bad guys could pick him up and know exactly who he was and where he stood and now he's in jail so what's the latest on jimmy what's the prospect for him as i understand it they still permit you to

exchange emails with him at least every so often fill us in if you would bill yeah not emails letters regular letters but they look them up i just just got one delivered yesterday by DHL, and it has a sticker on the outside saying it was open by security. I'm sure they photocopy every letter I sent and Jimmy sends me. Hey, Bill, you know what? I'm sorry, but before you get to the current situation, you know what you should do? I don't think there's a listener in 100 who understands how a 75-year-old billionaire in Hong Kong can be Bill McGurn's godson. Could you tell that story first? Well, Jimmy and I met in Hong Kong in the 90s, and we became very close.

We're both very free market. You know that he's an admirer of Hayek. Yes, he was a friend of Milton Friedman took Milton in to China on one of his trips. And Jimmy's wife, Teresa, is from a very old Catholic Chinese family. And so she and my wife became very close, too. And around 1997, she asked me to ask Jimmy about converting. And he turned me down. He said he didn't want to convert, not because he was hostile to religion. To the contrary, he said he thought religion was really good and vital for China, but he didn't want to favor one over the other. Then a week later, he called me into his separate room at his apartment and said he wanted Jesus Christ in his life. And he was ready to convert.

And he talked to the cardinal and he read everything the cardinal said and he was baptized about a week after the handover by Cardinal Zen. Since then, of course, both have been in trouble by the law. So, you know, I'm not the cause of Jimmy's conversion. I just happened to be there and, you know, and close to him. He's kind of like a brother to me, although he does call me Godbrother all the time. I think of him more as an older brother.

And my wife is very close. So, in addition to my being Jimmy's godfather, his wife, Teresa, is my daughter, Maisie's godmother. Oh, I didn't know that. And Julie is his daughter, Claire's godmother. So, we're very intertwined. Oh, wonderful. I didn't realize all that. Okay, so now we come to the sad present what's up with jimmy now well um jimmy knew he would go to jail you know uh i think they they kind of always knew this day was coming and uh lots of people urged him to leave and save himself he has you know he has homes in tokyo

london paris uh but anyone that thinks jimmy lye would leave doesn't know him um he thought he owed it to hong kong to stay and his wife is um is totally on the side. Her idea, she told him, Jimmy, when I married you, I knew this day could come, but now I want you to pick up your cross and carry it, and I'll walk with you every step of the way. And that's where we are.

She shares in the sacrifice. In some ways, you know, Jimmy's at peace in jail. He reads all this stuff and religious literature. In fact, Cardinal Zen complains when he goes to visit Jimmy now, he has to do some reading on medieval philosophers or something. He has to brush up on Athanasius and Aquinas because Jimmy's going to ask him some question. So Jimmy's like treating his time in jail like a monk, reading and drawing religious drawings. It's very hard in his family, though. You know, they're on the outside, and they have to make decisions. It's very tough on them,

but they've all been wonderful. Well, so what does this tell us about China, about the current state? I guess the puzzle for me, I know a lot of smart people who know much, much more about China than I do, and I still can't figure this out. Whether Xi Jinping, the current president, whose name I'm sure I mispronounced just now, but you know who I mean, whether the current president is a departure from the trajectory of open markets, greater prosperity, following the example of Hong Kong and South Korea and Taiwan, that the economic freedom would eventually begin to produce political freedoms, and all of that was taking place. All of that was on track. And then along comes Xi Jinping and clamps

down on everything. He's the departure from the trajectory that China was on. Or, no, no, no, the Communist Party was always in charge it wanted greater wealth it permitted more open markets as long as the open markets served its purposes but the moment the open markets did begin to lead to some suggestion of greater political freedoms the party clamped right down this was always the plan the party was always in control, which is true. Well, I think both are true in some ways. And, you know, first, I start with the operative belief or proposition of communism is not socialized markets or anything. It's Leninist. It's about control. And they always have agreed with that

like the second part of your question they they've always been concerned about the party and also the communists have watched what happened in poland what happened in south korea you know with with the dictatorship there what happened in Taiwan they're not stupid but I do think that Xi is a departure in that he he is more of a Mao character he takes for granted the market China has and China also has an advantage the size is so large. So they can bully people the way like a Burma could not bully people or South Korea could not bully people. I mean, foreigners by that. They use their markets. that she really is determined to restore what he thinks some lost glory is. But I also think communists are always about power, and he's just more so. I hate to interrupt Bill because he's on a roll. He's got great stuff to say, but I've got to tell you something.

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Bill, we hear, looking at China, hear a variety of contradictory narratives, one that the power is incredibly in control, the party, and then also that they're facing extraordinary challenges because of real estate, because of about is the decoupling, the fact that people are regarding China now as just as not a place that they necessarily want to be connected to. And so they're pulling out and they're building their factories in India and Vietnam and even heaven forfend in America. Is this just a little bit and not enough? Or are we seeing the Western world actually draw back seriously? With Xi now seeming to step away from Putin and want to make more overtures to the West, is that a reaction to him realizing that the Chinese brand has been damaged beyond, has been besmirched beyond repair in the Western world? I don't think Xi Jinping cares about his reputation in the Western world? I don't think Xi Jinping cares about his reputation

in the Western world. That's not a thing. You're right that there's some decoupling. Look at Apple, you know, trying to complicate its supply chain by diversifying into India, Vietnam. China's been very good to Apple until it wasn't. And the market is reaping some revenge for the dependence on China.

Too many people just became totally dependent on China. And it's not, you know, the problems that they're having, a lot of them is because of the government. The COVID lockdowns are affecting something like 20% of the economy. Think about that. It's disrupting supply lines, causing all sorts of havoc. It's getting some revenge. So I think there are some market incentives to diversify away from china but back to peter's other point like apple's a good uh story it made a lot of money

setting up in china with its the factories that it commissions but you, now it has problems. And I think, you know, they suspended the, what is it, the airdrop function. Yep. So to make it harder for dissidents and democracy people to spread the message. And God knows what else for that level of support. I think that's probably a change. They're more aggressive. Look, China is very clear. They make no distinction between the public sector and the private sector.

Everything serves the party. And that's true with respect to religion his campaign against religion to sinusize it or make it you know um uh adhere to the party and it's true for business okay so so bill this is sort of a bigger this is a 10 this is a decades question not tomorrow not next week the problem we face over coming decades i compare the soviet union and the old cold war with china and what's emerging it seems to me there's real first of all let me just ask you this we're in a new cold war is Is that fair? Yes. Okay.

And actually, we have been, but we just haven't realized it before. Right, right. Well, in a certain sense, you could have said that of the Soviets too. During the Second World War, they were already putting themselves in position. Okay. But here's, I contrast the old Soviet Union. It was more dangerous than China, but only in one limited sense. Not nothing, but limited. And that sense was that the Soviet ideology, Marxist ideology, had many admirers and sympathizers in the West. For that matter, you can still find nostalgia for the old Soviet Union in humanities departments at universities across the country. And China does not elicit any such

sympathy, as far as I can tell. I am not aware of any professor, left professor, anywhere in America who stood up and said, you know what, Mao was right, Xi Jinping is doing the right thing. That's just not happening. Let's get Tom Friedman on the phone, shall we? I think he might have something to say about that. So, on the other hand, we could outspend the Soviets. Their economy was creaky and backward. We can't outspend China.

The Soviets were of negligible economic importance. China is critical to us. Supply chains of all kinds. It's not just Apple. Supply chains of all kinds run through China. In the old days, the Soviet Union, we had a few physicists who came over and studied at American universities. As I recall, the number of Chinese nationals,

not Chinese Americans, Chinese nationals studying at American universities right now is well over half a million. Does China strike you as a more formidable adversary? Are we in for a rougher Cold War this time around than we were the last time? I think we are because they're determined to use their wealth to challenge our supremacy, you know, the Navy and so forth. And they have the resources, as you say, that the Soviet Union did not. And we're kind of waking up to that you know christopher ray at the fbi you know talks about china spying in the u.s it's just immense uh because they have so many people and so many resources i think some people think we can totally cut off trade with china and cut off the world's trade, I don't think that's possible. I don't think we can totally lose the supply chains. Whether it's desirable or not,

I just think it's, as a fact, impossible. And plus, the other countries around the world won't do it. So I don't think we're, but we can, you know, worry about technology transfers. There are things we can do, primarily by building ourselves up with the same as Reagan. I mean, my God, we need tax cuts and a better investment environment to set off the economy to pay for a military buildup. We're building up everything but the military, you know, big green, so-called green economy with no weapons. So I think we have to start being serious about that. Our weapons will be our virtue, which will be an example to all well you know james you mentioned something before or peter about people not defending it uh first there are a lot of business people that defend it you know who are invested in china and they stand to lose a lot of money and i have some

sympathy for them you know if you're mcdonald's and you're selling hamburgers to Chinese people, okay, fine. Apple's a little different because it has technology and whether it's allowing technology to be used against Chinese people, you know, it creates a different kind of narrative. But one of the things was after Tiananmen, you say no one defends China. The left always defended Mao and the Cultural Revolution. You know, Mao is a butcher. So many people died on him. Yet he's regarded as almost a joke. You know, Mao suits and buttons and stuff. He's's regarded as almost joke you know mouse suits and buttons and so he's not regarded

as stalin uh some ways and the left always was in love with china and put the best face on china until tiananmen and business investment what the left didn't like was China discovering markets and profiting from them. They hate profit. Now, they're right that the business has been in partnership with the government. But, you know, I don't really think of them as morally pure. I mean, I'm for trade. I'm not for giving them special conditions like to join the WTO is undeveloped. Hold them to standards.

That's why I think Biden is really missing an opportunity by not promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is a trade deal for Asia that keeps China out. And the advantage of that would be it's a rules-based organization that had high standards. And I think it would help some of these businesses diversify, give them alternatives to China. And when China starts bullying them, like it did with Australia over wine and all sorts of products, they would have alternatives of where to go. But for domestic reasons, Joe Biden's never going to be for that. The one thing I think the Biden administration or somebody who advised them did do was to cut them off from AI tech and issue some comments that if you're an American national in China, come home or you don't get your citizenship anymore. And a lot of that caused a huge, fast, quick brain drain with Chinese industry, which is great. But what we mentioned before about calling Tom Friedman, he was making back in the days before Xi's true face became apparent, all of these statements about how it would be great to be China for a day, the things you could get done if you just acted with one mind as China did,

think of the trains we could, think of the train stations we could have, think of the things we could accomplish. And it betrays a fundamental impatience with Western governance because it's not really democracy that is dying in darkness that they're worried about. It's about their ability to do the right things that need to be done to save the earth or to do this or to do that or the rest. But you're right. I mean, the old left loved Mao partly, I think, just because he had a kitschy portrait that they could hang on their wall and feel sophisticated about or laugh at it. And because the Little Red Book was full of homilies and little fatuous truisms that betrayed a multicultural perspective. But, you know, you're right.

When he got into profit, all of a sudden then China's off the table. Last question, perhaps. How is their Belt and Road Initiative going? How is their attempt to get into eternal servitude the countries that produce the raw materials they need by giving them airports and roads and then putting them on the hook forever for it. It's almost like a mafia bust out. How is that doing? Or have they been forced to cut back, shall we say, by the last two years? Well, I don't follow it closely. And like all government programs, you assume there's a lot of weights and efficiencies. But I think it does help them. They go into a country, build a port or an airport,

and in the short term, it can help them. I'm not sure in the long term it's going to do that. It might build resentment against China for something but shows their determination to reach out into all parts of the world and have their influence what you just mentioned the argument that you just presented is the updated version of um making the trains run on time right fascism was supposed to do that. And they all think it's efficient. And it's not efficient. It's just we don't know of the inefficiencies. You know, and it extends to the democratic process. A woman that I got to know when she came to America. Nian Chang, she wrote Life and Death in Shanghai. She was a Chinese. Her husband was a Chinese who worked for Shell Oil

in the Cultural Revolution. Her husband was dead. She and her daughter were put in jail for Western influences. And when she was in jail, her daughter was killed remember mal's wife was jealous of pretty young actresses and her daughter was killed and uh she was stuck in jail and when she came out she told me you know in democracy the advantage is you know who your enemy is because they denounce you. Right. They say, I disagree with you.

You know, Peter on this, James on that. Right. And they're out front in it. In China, that kind of country, everyone says with you all the way, Peter, with you all the way, James, in public. But you always suspect them applauding in private. And that's one of the inefficient that's why they're all paranoid like putin and she she they they have to be because you don't know who's plotting against you you know i remember sitting in a restaurant in maryland with her and she had a high squeaky voice and she was talking she was saying when i was in prison and i looked up and everyone was looking at her and i think they were thinking i wonder what the

old bird was in for do you know did she kill a couple of husbands along the way or something but um you know she talked about the inefficiencies of the Chinese system. And we don't know, you know, Contra Thomas Friedman. We don't know what their inefficiencies are. They don't have a press that reports them. So we don't know. You know, we don't even know Putin's wealth. Right.

We don't know. We know he has a lot. Some people say he's the richest guy in the world, but we don't know, because they're so opaque. It's amazing to me what we still don't know about these regimes. Hey, Bill, may I, sort of a last topic here,

changing, you mentioned what we need to do is have a kind of revival like the kind we had in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. Okay, of course this leads us to the mandatory question, Donald Trump. Three items. One, he's announced he's running for president. Two, polls have begun showing that Republicans prefer Ron DeSantis to Donald Trump. Three, yesterday, Donald Trump announced the new line of Donald Trump baseball cards, effectively based superhero cards. I mean, at the level of a carnival barker, as far as I can tell. Is it finally over? I think so.

I was never a never Trumper. I disagree with a lot of what Trump says and so forth and so forth. But he did a lot of things that I think were good. And so I'm not a rabid Trump hater. But I'd say one, I was wrong. I didn't think he would announce he's running. Now, I think the announcement may have more to do with deflecting attention from his legal problems and the election, whereas candidates didn't fare, and a belief that he might be in a better position legally if he's a presidential candidate. Two, you mentioned the polls. I don't think he's going to win a Republican primary. I just think people are not into 2020. You know, it's like a bad play in football. It stinks. Life goes on. Most people,

even if they disagree, they want to know what it means for the future. And Trump right now, unlike his run in 2016, is not pointing to the future. It seems to be all about his grievance, and especially with the Republicans that disagree with him. So I think someone's going to win, if I had to guess, it would be Ron DeSantis. And three, what I always feared is not that he would win, but that if he lost, he's going to blow the party up. He's going to take whatever core Republican support and turn it on Republican nominee, and it might be enough, it'd probably be enough to destroy his campaign and make the Democrats win. I think that's a real danger. You still do still yeah i think it's a danger that he walks away and uh doesn't support the gop nominee if he only saps five percent votes you know in a close election that could spell the difference i don't know where you get the idea.

The guy's not a team player. I said, I'm going to flesh this out a little bit later. In the meantime, we thank you, Bill McGurn for showing up today and we will see you as ever in our accustomed spot on main street. Thanks for joining us in the podcast.

Thank you, Bill. Welcome back. Welcome back. And our love to Julie and the girls. I will. And your, and your God,

and your God children. Yes, we will thank you bye merry christmas and merry christmas bill you know the main street of america today if you go on google street view and take a look is often a rather underwhelming place empty storefronts old buildings and the rest of it i'm waiting for something to happen i don't know a change in the tax codes shifts the population back to the rural areas where these small towns become revitalized again, and people can go downtown and that shop is full of something useful. Now, maybe you're one of those people who'd like to do something like that. And if you are somebody who's got ideas and a storefront, either physical or digital, something you'd like to occupy, well, I want to talk for a

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slash ricochet. And we thank Hover for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now the obligatory note of the promos, the meetups, you know, you may be thinking it's the holiday season. Why don't I have to go see somebody else? Well, look, Ricochet is here not only to help you keep you occupied and entertained and intellectually stimulated in the web. We have meetings in real physical places with real physical people. They pop up all the time. You hear a few coming down the pike. January 14th, where? Sarasota, Florida. Susan Quinn's got one going. 14th through the 16th. Vacaville, California, the other side of the country, January 28th. Quiet Pie has got something. John Gabriel, one of the ricochet high mucky monks, he's been kicking around the idea of a Phoenix meetup in March.

I like the idea. And I am thrilled to know that Fresh Fish is actually thinking about a Twin Cities meetup in the near future. I'll be there. Randy Wivoda is working hard to set the itinerary for our New Orleans French Quarter Fest, Shindig, April 13th through the 16th. Now, the thing is, if your money's tight, get it. If you don't want to go, I get it. But if you are a Ricochet member and you announced that you're having one where you are, Ricochet members will come to you. Now, of course, not uninvited. They're not going to show

up in a horde and start like zombies out of 9-11 dead and start clawing at your windows. No. Put something together, say the name and the place, and Ricochet members will show up. Might be two or three, might be 10, might be 15. In any case, you will get to meet in person, the people that you know on the site. That's one of the great things about Ricochet. I went to one in March or was it March? No, last May in New York and had a capital time.

So do that. And of course, join Ricochet. And you know, there's a sidebar somewhere, ricochet.com events and you will learn what's coming up. Peter, before we go, we will be talking next week. So we're not just going to flounce off down the phone to go out and touch grass. And even though some are castigating these kids for being classist, you have the luxury of being able to be digitally disconnected, which I guess is a luxury now. It is heartening to know, isn't it? Yes, I like that idea very much. I have no idea how to introduce it in my own family, but I like that idea a lot. I like post-device as a world to which we can all aspire. By the way, with the holidays coming up, and I have, who knows how many times this will

happen again in the future because my kids are now grown, but all five are coming home. Oh, you lucky man. And what that means is there won't be enough football games. And so I have to ask the emperor of American popular culture, one James Lilux, what to watch? What movie to watch? The movies. If you've got, I have, I guess what I'm suggesting here is to talk to me now, but I'm sort of begging you to write a post somewhere. Oh, I should, I should.

There was somebody on, it was, I think it was Ricochet or Reddit, one of those R sites, was talking about classic holiday movies and everybody always trots out the usual. There's one that never gets mentioned that I absolutely adore and it's called Arthur Christmas. It is a. Arthur Christmas. It's an, Arthur, he's one of the gets mentioned that I absolutely adore, and it's called Arthur Christmas. Arthur Christmas? Arthur. He's one of the lesser Christmases. He's a lesser Claus. He's a gangly kid who works for Santa Claus. His brother, who is much more capable, is streamlining the organization into a highly efficient operation. It's animated by Aardman, who did Wallace and and gromit but it's not claymation that's one of their cgi attempts and it's it's it's a witty smart warm completely ignored holiday movie

throw that thing on and just about everybody will find something in there they like because it's not dumb it doesn't pander it's not cringy. It's different enough. The idea of the Christmas, you know, Santa Claus's trip around the world being run like a highly efficient corporation with a great big control room and the rest of it is delightful. It's just, it's a delightful movie, and I wish more people knew about it, but they don't. We can say the same thing about everything that we love in this world, and sometimes maybe we just hold them close to our hearts with the knowledge that you know something special. Make with the knowledge that, you know, something special,

make the family watch that one, Peter, and perhaps they will find it special and pass it along as well. But you mentioned football. I think it's hilarious that Bill Gern, McGurn said, well, it's like a football play.

It doesn't work. You just, you move on. Not unless you're the Vikings. Then you try to drive up the Delvin cook up the middle five, six, seven, eight,

nine times in a row. We got a game coming up tomorrow and I'm just thinking, oh, is this the end of it? Wait, who are you playing tomorrow? Detroit. I believe we play Detroit tomorrow again. And I'm not looking forward to this. Anyway, that's it. Another painful season, James.

Another painful season. But yeah, but we're 10-and-10. Anyway, we're winning. We've got a winning season, but everybody's saying that's just a mirage. Absolutely no defense whatsoever, and so we're going to get creamed. Which is popular. The great thing about it is this has been a great

year to watch the NFL, because the amount of talent is extraordinary. The number of games is great. I missed Thursday night football last night, and I'm kind of glad I did because those games have been a bit underwhelming, and it tends to take away from my ability to do anything.

You think you're going to watch the game out of the corner of your eyes on another screen? No, you end up watching them all. James, just to demonstrate how cosmopolitan we are, I have to ask you the following question. World Cup? World Cup? I could not care less. I'm incapable of having... Oh, God bless you, James Lilacs.

I feel exactly the same way, but until you gave me cover, I was too timid to say so. I'll tell you what it is. Soccer is... Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's 90 minutes, 90 minutes, and then it gets settled. 90 minutes, nothing happens. Zero to zero or one to one. Overtime, overtime, overtime, overtime.

And then a bunch of guys kick balls at the goal. Why didn't they start that way? Save us all for the last two hours. Well, that's the argument that says, why doesn't professional basketball just conclude with the last 90 seconds of the game since that's all that matters? I get it. If other people love it, that's fine. That's great. I understand the passion of it.

I understand rooting for it. I understand growing up and being a supporter of this team or that, and your father was as well, and all of the cultural roots in that. I just find it hideously boring because why invent a game where you cannot use hands? Hands are pretty useful. They come in, I don't know, handy might be the word. Why do you encourage this preposterous act? We talked with Charlie about this, and I was noting that in football, you will have a guy carrying this little spheroid, this object,

be piled upon by about 600, 700 pounds of other human beings who grind him into, not the dirt, but a synthetic grass over a concrete floor, and the guy will get up and shake it off. You have somebody in soccer who brushes up against somebody else, and a follicle detaches from his eyelash, and the guy acts as though he's been lanced by mortal combat. And it is preposterous. You are teaching the youth of Europe and America to lie, to be little drama queens, and to fib, and to bounce, and to flop, and to grip, and the rest of it. It is a fundamentally dishonest sport if flopping is part of its culture. You don't see anybody in football doing it. You will have guys who will, you know,

they grab a little, you know, they tentatively grab at their ankle when actually every supporting tendon and nerve has been ripped away and they're going to have to spend the next six weeks in reconstructive surgery. So anyway, that's that. I got to go. We say to everybody, we'd say Merry Christmas, but we're going to be here next week. Myself, Peter, and Rob, and who knows who else might pile in. We might get some of E.J. Hill and Blue Yeti. We'd like to hear them on the mic to wish you wishes as well. In any case, it's been fun. It's been great. We'll see everybody in the comments.

Next week, James. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Forgot to say it. We were brought to you by Bowling Branch. We were brought to you by Donors Trust. We were brought to you by Hover. And those are great places that are going to make your life easier if you go and patronize them. And we'll come out in the end pretty well ourselves. So that's it. Now we're done. See everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.