The Ricochet Podcast - Revolution on the Run

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

James, Steve and non-stipendiary host Rob Long shoot the breeze as they face revolutionary changes big and small. From the impending phenonena of Pratt Summer and unstoppable AI to the DNC's stateside Commie drama and the Euros giving nationalism another go, the trio draws some important lessons:Local elections matter. They can even be fun!Political messaging is especially effective when your opponent is the weird one.Climate apocalypse is dumb.You can be a people or a bureaucracy, not both. Artificial Intelligence is coming. Work on your human skills.

You said he travels cheaply and he has a great substack. Are these connected? No, I don't know. I just say they were just in my brain. They fired. But I was going to ask you, James, do I, am I a paid subscriber to your substack? Well, unless you gave me money, I don't think so. I got a check.

I think I might have, but I'm going to make sure if I want to read your stuff. Well, if it comes, if you get a message every day and you can read it because it's Monday through Friday. It's a five. I mean, I turn out a boatload of content on that thing for a small amount of money. There's two columns. There is the fiction. Tuesday the gallery of credible food on Thursday and I have this fun thing on Wednesday

where I give everybody outtakes and tell them why I took this stuff out of the piece. Oh, that's a really good idea. I look behind the curtain. I don't have a rundown. This mayor race is really heating up who you guys voting for. Haven't decided. Same.

Haven't really been following it. Same. Same. Same. I'm not MAGA or anything. But the city's kind of gone though, right? It's the Rurcashy podcast with Charles. No, no Charles. With Stephen. Yes, Stephen Hey, Woodens here. I'm James Lally. This is today our guest or co-host. Well, whatever you want to call him, he's Rob Long. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Look, this is a moment where there are no bad ideas.

No bad idea brainstorm is what I'd like to call it. And in that no bad ideas brainstorm, we talk about what we need to do and think about doing around the electoral college. we talk about the idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding the Supreme Court. We've got to neutralize these red states from cheating. Not that I'm MAGA or anything. He does seem really angry all the time, though. Well, they did burn his house down. Welcome, everybody.

It's the Rickoshay podcast number 790. I'm James Lylex in Edina, Minnesota, not Minneapolis, Minnesota, right across from a computer factory, which has arrayed on their lawn along the sidewalk, a series of small fluttering American flags. And I really appreciate that because it's Memorial Day. And why wouldn't they? We're joined by Stephen Hayward, as usual, about to leap off for some sort of world tour,

but at the moment anchored firmly in lovely California, and I'm sure we'll be hearing about the race there from him. And now re-contextualized as a guest is Rob Long. Previously, he was just a co-host and a founder. And then when nobody else shows up and he's glad to be here, he's a co-host, but now I guess he's a guest. So we have to treat him with a little become of respect and ask him questions and all the rest of that stuff. I'm emeritus.

Somebody said, oh, you're ricochet emeritus. I'm like, yeah, I'm a ricochet emeritus. You're a heritage ricochet. Or as they say, when you're part of a church, I'm a non-stipendiary priest associate, which means. Non-stipendiary priest associate. We can't ask you to leave because it's a church. But we're not going to pay you anything. Somehow, I don't believe that a penitent or a.

a supplicant in a monastery in the 15th century who they put up in a cot somewhere back was referred to in such bureaucratic terms. Is this everything wrong with the church today is the encroachment of this sort of bloodless language into what should be a little bit more reverent? I don't know. I think that's kind of a, it's such an incredibly hang a lantern on a euphemism. I think it's probably good. Like it's so obviously bureaucratic that I think, and I think all those things are designed to to convey something to the parishioners, which is non-stipendiary priest associate. Don't worry about this guy.

Maybe he gets a cookie and a little sandwich during coffee hour, but that's it. Because, you know, there's always somebody saying like, well, wait a minute. Where is all this money going? So there's a lot of it is. Wasn't there in your writer room days as a comedy genius? Wasn't there a phrase hang a lamp on it to make something? Hang a lantern on something? Okay.

I thought it was lamp and that you'd switch. a lantern after you'd gone to seminary stuff, that your whole sort of metal furniture has gone back two centuries. Anyway, Stephen, how are you? How are things in California? Is Spencer Pratt going to win? Well, in reverse order, yes, I think he is going to win. I didn't think that two weeks

ago, but I'm kind of thinking he's catching fire. Actually, this will be familiar to you, James. I think he's catching fire in the same way that Jesse Ventura did back in 1998. There's so much discussed with the incumbents, and there's so people on the campaign trail, and There's just this sort of, he has something that Ventura didn't have, which is these viral videos that his campaign's not even making.

They're just starting out of their own, right? And it's going to drive the campaign regulators out of their mind, of course, which is always fun. I've actually, by the way, point two, I'm actually already overseas. I'm coming to you tonight for me from Palermo, Italy, which is a on aops list. Bon anote. Oh, yeah. Or I even know, whatever. Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires. Yeah, I have, what I think is two things about Spencer Pratt as we're talking about it. One, the ads are fantastic. Yes. I mean, those ads are fantastic and they are so clean. I remember once Alex Castellanos was a Republican campaign guy. It was a friend of mine. It was really brilliant guy.

And I remember having dinner with him or something in early 2016. or maybe it was during the Hillary Clinton the Hillary Clinton Donald Trump first race and I you know it was like obviously

Hillary Clinton's going to win she's going to waste your way ahead in the polls he's an erratic campaigner all that stuff and he said no Trump's going to win and here's why I went I was walking through

Reagan National Airport and you know they always have a shop there during the general you know all camp you know big national campaigns general campaigns have a shop where they sell Half of it they sell one candidate's merch and the other half they sell the other candidate's merch. And he said, you go in there and there's mugs for her.

I'm with her forward. Not you know, forward better, better forward together. I'm with her. And like a whole range of like phrases and all sorts of different things. And then on his side, he's just hats and say, make America great again. He said, whatever you think of the guy, that's clean. You know, save L.A. LA is worth saving save LA that is and I think he the second thing I think he's going to do is I mean I

I lived in LA for 30 years I don't think I voted in every mayoral election people are going to vote in this election who did not who have not voted for a LA mayor in their adult lives and I think that that could be a huge thing now I mean I who knows how what kind of mayor he's going to be the governance of a city especially LA is so incredibly business I mean, I don't know. He's, he's way behind. But it's really a fascinating race and it's great. And it's a great. More attention to urban governance is a good thing in America, no matter who wins. It's a good thing. Well, it depends what kind of governance they want to do, isn't it? I mean, if more attention consists of we need to get teeth to meth heads because they can't get jobs otherwise. I mean, that's more attention, but I'm not sure it's exactly. I think it is. Actually, I disagree. think if the more people are involved in local politics, especially urban politics, even if they vote nonsense, that's better.

Because right now what happens is these bureaucrats just do whatever they want. No one knows, no one can really explain to, I live there for 30 years. It's really actually hard to explain how L.A. is governed. Like who has jurisdiction over what and how. And the more people who pay attention to that stuff, the better. I have faith that when you get above 30%, 40%, 40% participation in those races, you're going to start seeing major positive change in those cities. Oh, and that turnout that high would represent something new, well, new in the last 20 years.

One of the more ominous things that's been happening for 30 years now is the decline in civic participation in mayor elections. I mean, you know, it used to be, you remember Giuliani versus the Dinkins just 30 years ago, huge race. National attention, high turnout. I'm old enough to remember as a kid, the races between Tom Bradley and Sammy Orte. conservative Democrat until he changed his. And I think when Villa Rigosa was elected mayor, how 20 some years ago now, he'd been a speaker of the state assembly, I think the turnout for the race was something like 11%. And that's been true of Philadelphia, Chicago. Some of these races were crazy people in like this Wilson woman in Seattle. They have very low turnout. And so I think that

will be a sign of returning civic health and people saying, hey, wait a minute. Actually, this is important. Here's how. Here's an example of that and how crazy, was I was living when I was I lived mostly in Venice when I lived in LA but for five years I guess five or six years I lived in Santa Monica I was at a dinner party in Santa Monica a bunch of fancy Santa Monica bazillionaires and we're all sitting around and I think they were they were mostly it was about how dumb I am for you know celebrating the Republican takeover of the houses the new Cambridge era and then some one woman said to me she said well I don't know why we're we're we're

criticizing you so much I mean I mean I mean I I've lived in Santa Monica for, you know, 30 years, 20 years. And I have, I mean, I don't think I've ever voted in a L.A. mayoral race. She said it like she was embarrassed. And it's like, well, you're not eligible. And she went, no, no, we are. He's our mayor. Like, no, no, he's not.

You live in a separate town. You live in Santa Monica. No, no, I don't think you're right. Like, no, I know I'm right. Now, this is not a stupid woman. She's very smart, but she's just like, who cares, you know? Yeah. Well, that could be because they don't believe that there's any point because it's a uniparty.

It's a, there is a. But she liked that, but yes, right. Right. So what's the difference? The machine will carry on as ever. I mean, as Pratt has pointed out, when you have people making a $1.2 million a year to deal with homelessness, these people are not going to try to solve homelessness. And when you have a state apparatus that's devoted to paying the people and getting them

good pensions and the rest of it, the problems aren't going to be solved. Now, that's the cynicism on the right. The left may just think, well, as long as we have these institutions, which are trying to do the right thing, they have to be trying to do the right thing because they're Democrats, then why bother to vote? I mean, why, why bother? The right people are there doing the right things, the proper things. They're doing the best they can when it's manifestly obvious to everybody that they aren't.

I mean, some of the videos that Pratt has shown about, you know, what L.A. looks like. that stuff is effective. That stuff, I mean, I've been seeing this for years on, you know, on Twitter and X and the rest of it and wondering how people can live like that. How can they live that right? Yeah. And then when you marry that with the, you know, the ads that the other people are doing on his behalf, the last one I saw were three guys and having a suburban cookout. Oh, that's a good ad. Yeah.

It's a great ad. I mean, they're all saying, you know, I'm not MAGA. I'm not mad. They all had to make that point. And it was really sharp. And then you have a Lego ad. And then you have another AI ad. You just have a sense of vitality and interest and fun and fun as opposed to the, you know, to the peck-sniffery, unhappy, disapproving people that you have during the government now.

So, yeah, it'll be great if he wins, and I wonder what he can possibly do. But the idea that you can have a clean city that is not overtaken by tents and there's not needles and feces on the ground is not a novel concept. And it ought to be. It's just sitting there waiting for somebody to pick it up. And he did. and and and but I have to go back Rob I don't agree that the people who think that you just as long as you vote that's the right thing as long as we get more people to vote I I'm in favor of civic participation but it has to be predicated on some form of civic education

does it not I mean yeah I mean yes I mean yes I obviously that I think that's fundamentally true I just mean that that that would at this point in urban government a bunch of people a lot a large voting group of large voter participation in urban government that votes for something that I disagree with, I would consider to be a high-class problem to have. Because I'm fundamentally optimistic, and I think that when people in a city, which is incredibly practical and not partisan at all,

and like mostly about, like, I just don't want, as you put it, the famous 1970s punk group, needles and feces, I don't want that, you know, in my neighborhood, you know, The un-reconstructed hippies, let's be honest, unreconstructed Maoists that were my neighbors in Venice, who are lovely people in general and were great neighbors. They don't want that either.

And they may struggle a little harder, but I guarantee you that that's why that ad that you referred to is so incredibly effective. Because what it's said to people is, you can be in favor of this guy, and you don't have to wear the stupid MAGA hat. And if I'm a Republican strategist or a young politician, and Spencer Pratt has a great showing in the election, I'm too far away.

I don't know if he's going to win or not, but if he has a good showing, that to me is the path because Trump's got, you know, Trump's got a sell-by date now, and he's not doing great. You know, he's going to, he's flirting with the high 20s, in popularity. That's not good. And you're going to have, the Republicans

are going to have to come up with some way of saying, you don't have to wear the mag hat. We're fundamentally a common sense party. Now, I don't know whether they can do that now, but there's a guy who is a reality TV star in L.A. right now trying to show them the way.

And I hope he's successful because I think that would be good for American politics in general. Well, first of all, needles and feces was the day of Clark 5. Like insects and peppermints. That's what you need after needles of pieces. Steve, in Italy, and I don't mean to derail, but I am. In Italy, we were told that there was a new resurgent right that is trying to take back Italian culture, that sort of thing that we always hope that Europe is going to do but never seems to do.

Based on what I presume to be at least an 18 to 28-hour stay there, can you give us a full rundown? What did your cab driver say? I was just going to say, if you go, if you go, quote an Uber driver, that would be even better. Oh, I hate channeling Tom Friedman that way. You're baiting me, James. I will say that my driver in the hour drive from the airport and traffic told me that he has a cousin who lives in Southern California, and he kind of likes Trump, but doesn't

like a lot of things that he does, which kind of sounds like a lot of us, right? I do think that Italy, actually, I think Italy is, they have this crazy parliamentary system. Their governments are always unstable. but that disease, as I call it, is spreading to the other countries, like Germany. By the way, Rob, if you think Trump's in trouble, check out the approval ravings for Macron and France and Mertz in Germany. Merz has only been in office a little over a year, and he's in the low 20s, and Macron is in the teens. And that's because, remember that Merck's only got, what, 22% of the vote that was cast in the last election. Right. And you now have a coalition of center and center-left parties in, uh, and, uh, and,

And center-right parties, the point is they're in the center. They inspire to keep out the populist parties. And I think that's just storing up a whole lot of trouble for them down the road. Right now, I don't know what the polls look like here in Italy. I think Maloney is doing well. I think she's actually reasonably popular for this kind of system that they have. But I think that in Germany, if you had an election right now, the polls show that the alternative for Germany party, which was number two in the last election, is now leading by a lot. And how are you going to keep them out of a government if you have an election because they've been frozen out no cabinet ministries no lower level posts at all and normally if you get the second most votes you're at least invited to talk to the party

they got the sports about possibly joining a coalition and all the german parties are united we're not going to do that and and then we saw the results in england last week or two ago boy yeah right where i think what's important there is not just that the reform party is popular but they're showing some organizational strength you know they're actually building precinct and local organizations to turn out the vote. It's not just Nigel Farajna's big mouth. They're showing some real party building talent going on. Rob, what do you think is driving this, he said, debating him with an easy question, or maybe not. In Europe? Yes.

Well, I mean, look, I think that whenever you have a large bureaucracy, right, and you have these sort of large, essentially socialist countries, although a lot of some of them, like Denmark are really kind of trying to build out of that. You end up creating a bureaucratic class. And the thing about all bureaucrats, no matter who they are, no matter what side they're on, eventually they have contempt for the people they serve. If you don't believe me, just go to the DMV. Eventually, the government clerk doesn't know why you are in the office. It doesn't know why you haven't filled out all the 19,000 forms he's given to you. And that attitude goes all the way up to the top.

And you get farther and farther away from people. And then pretty soon you have bureaucrats in Brussels telling people in Dusseldorf, what? you know size you know chewing gum they can get and um and they just find the people to be really really you know annoying you know and and and and when the people get that get that impression the people decide to get populace that's what a populism really is ultimately it's the people's voice and you're not listening to us um we are common sense and i think that's a natural cycle that happens the problem with europe is that they they are terrified of that legitimately especially in germany right popular in italy populism in italy and germany are pretty

bad they don't have a great history so we tend to think of it all in terms of like everything that's happens since 1960 and all these liberals right but a lot of them are like well you know you guys simmer down you don't know how bad it can get when there's populism sweeping the country and i understand that too the solution of course is to have a robust democracy and to have a small government. The solution to all of these things is a small government. If you have 50% of bureaucrats, you have 50% less problems. And that is ultimately, and that's the problem we have. You know, we have this all, I hear this argument all the time from left and the right. Like, we got to get money out of politics, got a money on the politics. This is money in politics because

the tax code is 2,000 pages long, and that's just part one. And there's the federal government owns everything and controls everything. If you, if you, if you, if you, reduce that, then you don't need all those people. You don't need all that governance. And there are fewer people to have contempt for you. And populist wildfires are less likely because what are you arguing against? It's the government's not doing it. I mean, the solution is government not to do it. That's how you get out of this problem. Or the solution. Or the solution is to repatriate millions of people from other countries who do not share the values of the countries in which they find themselves now. They're not refugees. They are economic refugees.

They're coming, they're making a rational choice to go to a place where they can get more money and, you know, better life. But they are inimicable to the civilizations into which they have placed themselves. Well, we say that. We say that. I hear it. So you have people who go downtown and remember going downtown when they were a kid and it was, it was Germany. It was, it was Finnish. It was whatever and now it's 30 40% of another culture and a culture that is not assimilated has no interest in doing so in regards your culture with contempt and a lot of people look around and say where the hell of my country go and it's interesting in england how this happened because you know in england when people were first complaining about immigration and the rest of it they were complaining about people from

Poland I know I could come to work by the way I went to cafe narrow the other day and everybody there was everybody had a Polish accent what happened to the good old British accent well you see what's coming But remember, but they have a point. They're not wrong. No, they're not wrong, but I would say that. The bureaucracy to which they are, that they're offended by that they don't like. If it was just telling them the size of the chewing gum that they could have, that would be one thing. But it's part of this transnational enterprise to change the constantly, you know, the, I agree with you fundamental nature of all the countries.

I agree with an alternate lens to look at this, right? All right. If you have a country, pick a, you know, Western European country, and that that country has, a very robust social welfare system, a very robust government regulatory system, a very robust unemployment protection system, and a very robust free health care system, those are the values of that country. And so it makes total sense why you'd want to mean, in some senses, people coming to that country, either as refugees or as immigrants, are actually coming to join the culture of that country. we and I think they belatedly sometimes think well wait no no that's not us we're actually french fries and mayonnaise and mussels and we're beer

and october fest whatever right but like that they have felt especially in germany the largest country the richest country has felt insecure about asserting it's those cultural signifiers so instead they are they signify social and socialist cultural signifiers so now they are they are not it is not as if someone is coming and usurping something someone is coming and taking advantage of their new identity and now they're thinking well wait a minute maybe we don't want that identity anymore and if you look at a country like denmark which i think is a great great example right now you know we should be flying the flag of denmark right now um they are rethinking it and rethinking it and rethinking what they stand for and rethinking their culture because their culture isn't just you know uh coffee cake and hug and whatever else that is i don't even know it's also a robust government that gives you everything. And eventually that leads to rot.

And eventually that also brings in the wrong people. Stephen, I'll let you get in a second here. I understand what Rob is saying. These are attributes and manifestations of the culture they come from. They're not inimical to it. You have, you know, but the certain, in northern European countries, for example, you may have this sort of natural desire to have these socialist impulses because you live in a cold climb where if you're stupid, you die.

And so you have to bind together. and you have a sense of identity. You have a sense of national identity. And that works as long as you've got a lot of social capital. It's a high-trust society, and you don't have people who are microwaving the seed corn. But it's more than that. And you find out that it's more than those things

that you just describe the minute that you have people from other places trying to take advantage of it. I mean, I don't believe for a second that anybody coming from Syria says, I share the Danish culture when it comes to welfare state. Therefore, I'm as much of a Dane as anybody. else. It is not racist and it is not exclusionary to say that there are folkways, pathways, ways of thinking, ways of looking that are inseparable from a people. And part of the postwar project has been to separate it from those people and to subsume them into a European

identity so we can all have the nice EU and everybody can be happy and we'll never have a big war that they voted for. That they voted for. I agree with you, James. What I'm saying is that they voted for this. And now they have changed their mind, which is legit. But we can't, we can We can't want Germany to be more German than the Germans. We can't want the European identity to be stronger than they do. They have eroded it over time, and I think partly, I understand why, and now they have to reclaim it. But it is not as if somehow five unelected bureaucrats

turned Western Europe into a socialist paradise. They voted for that money. And they did it in Britain too, and they almost lost everything. But they did not vote for the end result that they are now seeing. I could go on forever, but I'll leave it to Steve. Steve say something, jump in here. Well, okay, a couple things. One is, is that I'm a little murky on the details, but there were some dictats from the European Union back in 2015 with quotas of how many refugees, all the different European members should be accepting. And that's when Hungary said,

no, our number's going to be zero. And that's led to a lot of trouble, among other things, between Orban and the European Union. But second, the social contract, especially in those Northern European countries, especially the Scandinavian countries is. Yes, we do cradle to grave, we like high taxes, but everybody works. It's that old Protestant work ethic of Max Pover. Right. I don't want to say as a blanket statement that all the migrants are freeloaders, but I do think the language barrier and other and some cultural problems have made it impossible for them to join in that social contract. And so a lot of the opinion now is they're not, they're not rowing their weight. They're not paying their way. They're not participating their way. They're not

like everybody else. So yes, Denmark has taken some very stern measures, including kicking some people out. Sweden has been debating whether to change its constitution to allow them to strip citizenship from recently arrived migrants. I mean, if you propose that, United States, you can imagine what the reaction would be, right? And, you know, the problem in England is the Labor Party has become so dependent on the Muslim vote, as has, by the way, James. you know, this, the Democratic Party in Minnesota. I actually think the margin of victory in what is often a close state in national elections is probably a Somali vote that's been given citizenship and so forth. And so that becomes politically incendiary, regardless of how the spectrum of who assimilates and who

doesn't and so forth. So, you know, if you don't get, if you don't turn it around when you still can, like Denmark and Sweden and Norway, and we'll see about Germany, they're talking about kicking a lot of people out who should not have been let in. That's their legal angle on it. You can get to the point where in France and in England, you can't do it anymore because you're outnumbered in crucial respects. And I just, I mean, I know we want to move on. I actually two things about that. One, it will be hilarious and it's going to be joyful for all of us. Not in a few, you know, even do this now, but like in a few years to be able to say to our progressive friends, like, well, you know, we really should be more like the Scandinavian countries. Yeah. Because they've been

thrown around our base for 30 years. The second thing is I was in two years, three years ago, maybe today. I don't know, like closer around now, in Hungary. And I was at this conference and we all had breakfast. Not all of this, very few, a very small group had breakfast with Victor Orban. The former president of whatever, of Hungary, prime minister, whatever he is. And, you know, problematic figure in a lot of ways. Probably the corruption is legit. The corruption and accusations are legit. But nonetheless, a very funny, smart, charming guy. And also incredibly honest and blunt about his failings.

He had just messed up. He'd said something stupid. And he said, I don't know why I said it. So don't remember that. Yeah. I should have just, I've never heard a politician be that forthcoming about the mistakes he made. It felt very LBJ to me. It's kind of like, I don't know, you know, and he's a big guy.

And he said, and then we talked a little. little bit about refugees like the problem of the EU because I asked him I said does anybody the question I said it was like you go to these big EU meetings does anybody ever come up to you like over a drink or something

from another country and say look I agree with you but we you know like sometimes happens right and he says no you'd think and he said that all he says to them over and over again is

we were a backwater, we were a province of the Ottoman Empire, we were a part of a larger empire, we were, meanwhile, we're central European culture, we're writing music and doing beautiful things, right? We were then subsumed into the Soviet Union. We've only been Hungarians for like 20 years, 30 years. Can we just be Hungarians for like 50 years before we become a multinational, multicultural country? Can we just be, can we just enjoy being Hungarians for a little bit?

No. I found that was a very compelling argument. No. Well, yeah, but I mean, that was a very compelling argument to me. And articulated in a way that you understood why Hungarians, who may disagree with them, a bunch of other things, were like, yes, I agree. Look, I mean, I agree with Rob that there were some corruption issues, which happens with parties that are in power too long, regardless of your ideology, right? And I think there was some serious economic mismanagement, too. But I think, and I've spent some time over in Hungary also with our mutual friend, John O'Sullivan.

Yes. You love, right? And what astonishes me, regardless of those circumstances, is how intense was global interest in that recent election for this tiny little country of 10 million people. That tells me a lot about how uniform, how enforced the conformity is in the European Union. I mean, that's a legitimate gripes with. hungry blocking some aid to Ukraine, okay. But it seems to me that the intensity of the hostility toward Orban and his party goes far beyond just the Ukraine issue

and other things. They're going to make hungry submit, damn it, no matter what. And you could tell because how happy they were. Right. He was kicked out of office and replaced with somebody who basically agrees with them on all those other issues. So like it was all personal. They just didn't like the fact that he had been.

you know, so pugilistic about all this stuff. It's which is, I mean, you know, and I think for us, it was actually, it was a really good example of when somebody is a populist leader, the problem with populism is that you like them emotionally so much for standing up to the powers, that you, you lose the ability to, to describe, to talk about when they are wrong and when they're doing dumb stuff and when their economics doesn't work. and when their country's economy you know the problem populism is they basically believe i can fix it and i can fix it by getting into it not instead of i can fix it by standing away from it he had a it was a very interventionistic economic philosophy it was incredibly wrong he's a fool when it comes to running a country's economy and he was a fool when he talked about all of his like population stuff and creating incentive for families. They were failures, complete failures.

So, like, we have to, you know, our job is to, like, as people, as citizens, is to say, like, you know, I do Spencer Pratt again. I'm not MAGA, but I like this part. And I think we're allowed to do that. And I think that's what the Hungarian voters did. Well, Steve, no doubt in Hungary, they're going to have a scathing and reflective period where they figure out why the election went where it did, just like the DNC did, which is scratching its head over why Kamala Harris lost. And they released the autopsy, as it's called, 192 pages or something like that.

Have you, I assume you've read it all committed to memory. Can you tell us what you think about it? Well, no, I was traveling over here, but I've caught up with some highlights of it. And it reads like the political equivalent of the dead parent sketch in Monty Python, if you ask me. And the fact that they're calling it the autopsy recalls to mind when the Republicans did an autopsy after the 2012 election when everyone thought Romney was going to win and then he lost.

And the funny thing about that autopsy was, well, first of all, the premise of the autopsy, which Republicans used that name. The Democrats really didn't. This is the media phrase for it, right? That autopsy said, well, gosh, Republicans are just too mean to Hispanics and we need to be for immigration reform.

And, you know, two years later, Trump shows up and he's not only, you know, what was it, murderers? They're sending us murderers and rapists and all the rest of that. That was not really the language the RNC had in mind in 2013. And then it turned out that enforcing our immigration laws turned out to be popular. And even more so, as time went on. So I think this thing is pretty amusing. I think it's dumb for parties to try and do these autopsies because they really just represent the opinion of whichever lead is picked to write it, whichever faction is picked to write it. And one of the things about, oh, the Democratic National Committee is disavowing reports saying we had to release it, too much interest, but the results and findings are not

verified. Well, verified by what? There's data. Like, you know, this is what's wrong in political science today, is there got to be a regression model. And, you know, I actually heard graduate students at Berkeley say, you can't study what you can't measure. And I'm like, what? I mean, I love data too. I'm kind of a data nerd, but that's ridiculous when you're talking about political phenomenon, but it's now crept into the highest reaches of our political parties. Also, like I have like a simple test. And it works for their left and the right.

It works for Republicans, too. If you ever see the words message or messaging, you know it's total nonsense. Because people, look, when you lose something, you ask yourself one question. Did I lose it or was it stolen? You always want it to be stolen because then it's not your fault. Then it's something you could do. And so the idea of like moving it all to just a way we messaged and messaging and our message, message, messaging, outreach, all that stuff.

The problem is that people did know where she stood, that they did. Like the Latino males, which is one of the things they pulled out, they knew exactly where she stood and they didn't like it. There's no way to message that better. You were just too out of step with that voter. and all political parties do it. They wanted to be about some kind of weird technicality, some kind of weird, like we didn't have the right ads.

We didn't have the right ads spend. And every time you look at a race, it turns out that ad spend doesn't matter as much as you think it does, that money in the bank doesn't matter as much as you think it does, that messaging and messages is what the loser says, instead of saying, I guess people don't like, policies and the problem with the policies now in America and the cultural policies is that they're so close to the bone there's no way around it you

either believe yeah that the boy in the bulging speedo should be swimming against the girls or you don't everybody knows that's the problem and it's not about messaging or messaging you don't need an autopsy you just need to decide full speed ahead on the boy in the speedo or reverse course And that's at a certain level, that's it. That's the only thing that matters. Quote from the report, quote, male voters require direct engagement.

The gender gap can be narrowed to the report. Quote, deploy, here's like they want to do it. They want to, quote, deploy mail messengers. And I believe that any party that says, use of the phrase, deploy mail messengers in order to connect with men is doomed to lose. Address economic concerns. Oh, that's nice of you.

And don't assume identity politics will hold. male voters of color. And that goes to what Rob was just saying there about the guy in the speedo competing against the women. But this is a concession in one sense. I mean, for 30 years now, we've been hearing Republicans have a problem with the gender gap. They do more. They don't do as well with women as Democrats do. And I've always been raising my hands saying, doesn't this go the other way? Doesn't this say that Democrats have a problem with male voters? Now they've acknowledged that, oh, gosh, maybe we do. Who knew? Who knew? Yeah. But in order, as Rob noted, in order to get them back, they have to reverse themselves on a variety of core principles.

And they don't want to do that because these are fundamental ideological notions that they subscribe to. These are not just little, this is not a matter of whether or not you think the tax rate should be goes from 17 to 19 or 15. I mean, this is a way of looking at the world that is almost theological in its nature. And how do you, how do you repudiate that? I mean, how do you, they had everything for them. They believed that the culture had shifted tectonically. The Overton window had been moved. and the majority of people were now on board with the transgender, just as they were on board with the idea of importing lots of people from various countries that might be bleepholes, as the president said.

To go back to our populist argument, the problem with that position, and I'm not even taking a side on it. It doesn't really even matter what side you're on it. The problem with it is that it is out, it negates and ignores people's legitimate concerns. so they feel like this is a symbol of how far apart you are how far away you are from me and that is never where you want to be i mean that the old like they had this stupid old cliche like all of these sort of political shibbolists is is um is is is wrong in because it's the it's backwards that in america poplarics we say well you know the american people vote for the guy they want to have a beer with that's what they you know that's what we say hi they are

going to vote for the guy they want to have a beer with and i think that's why you know they're going to vote for the guy they want to have a beer with and I think that's wrong but it's backwards the American people vote for somebody that they think would be willing to have a beer with them and that is a different that's a different position right and it what it means is I'm I vote for the person who isn't pretending that my concerns are irrelevant or that they don't exist because that person is dangerous and scary and way out of touch and I don't that that's the first order, right? That's the first order of

your discernment. After that, you decide whether you agree with their position or not, but most of a lot of Americans vote, and we have a binary system, like they vote for a president, somebody they disagree with on stuff. But they agree with the fact that that person seems to be connected

to them in some way. And that when you remove that top layer, it doesn't matter what you do after that because you've lost people. Because people are like legitimately saying, these are people from planet Neptune. What on Earth, what planet are they from? And, and, and, and, and, and, and if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, I don't, if you, I don't, I don't mean, like, need stuff. I just mean, acknowledging weirdness. And, you know, that's, I mean, speaking, because we mentioned Newt Gingrich. When I remember in, in, in, in 1993, I went to something. I went to something. I went to something. event. Yeah, it's 19993. And he was speaking and he said

our strategy is this. I thought he was insane by the way. He said, they're going to win back the house. I just thought this is a crazy person. But he said, we're just going to remind people how weird they are. That's like, brilliant. Brilliant. That word was used in the last election. The left was used,

the Kamala Harris guy, folks and the people on the social media were using the, we're weaponizing the word weird against JD vans and the rest of it. And it didn't work. Well, it didn't work. because they're weirder. I mean, it wasn't wrong. I think that J.D. Vance is very weird.

I think that this administration is extremely weird. But they're just, they're just at an eight. And the Democratic Party is at an 11. And to me, the only thing that makes me, makes me rethink my absolute bedrock belief in free market economics is that there seems to be a market opening for the non-war. weird party. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That isn't building a giant triumphal arch or like, or putting Home Depot gilded statuettes in the White House that isn't the boy in the Speedo. That it's some, there's a weirdness to this that I think, um, seems like as a market opportunity for somebody

to say, a Spencer Pratt to say, you don't have to be MAGA. Um, and I, I, I, I hope there's somebody watching right now with, you know, who can do that. Because I think it's really interesting. We were at this position when Bill Clinton walked in and took it up and picked it up and had his sister soldier moments and played the sax and talked about his undies and was a normal, was a normal guy with a bit of charm and a hound dog to him. And, you know, if another guy like that comes along, boom. So I don't know why they're not finding that or looking for that and why they persist in these things. One of the things, for example, that apparently didn't work very well. And Stephen, maybe you can address this because you're from California. I mean, token raw, but climate change.

It turns out that when you strip the NGO money from a lot of places, climate change doesn't seem to really make the news as much as it used to before. Oh, I hear things from time to time. There's something in my newsfeed today about how the ocean hotter than ever or the Gulf Stream is the jet stream is going to collapse in 15 minutes or something. And then I read that the Arctic ice is at its peak for 100 years. I'm on and on and on. But it really isn't the issue that it was before.

I don't think it ever was amongst most folk I think most folk looked this as irrelevant to their own lives and an imposition because it meant that they had to flush the toilet twice their light bulb sucked their car was tinny

they had to run the dishwasher all these little tiny bureaucratic things that were done in order to save the planet but now it's really kind of a non-starter and a lot of people were looking at this apparently in the traditional democratic base saying I don't see any future economically job-wise for me in this here, I'm, you know, I work at the refinery. I'm not going to learn to code and

I'm not going to learn how to install solar panels. Is this a dead image, Steve, or a dead issue, man? Well, it's dead, but it will come back, I think, or maybe not. Well, they're already moving on, James, to opposing artificial intelligence data centers, right? Yeah, yeah. It's, they're rerunning, this reminds me of nuclear power in 70s, right? But the climate business, I mean, I think it, I think apocalypse fatigue set in with the public a long time ago. And if you just read the polls, you could see this. And finally, a few, well, it's the really important part is even the UN agency, that's the apex of all the so-called consensus science,

they have been drawing away from their apocalyptic forecasts, actually for the last five or six years, but now they've really made it official in recent weeks. There's a long technical story, and I won't get into it, except to say that more than 20 years ago, I spotted the problem. The climate models that give us the doomsday scenarios, they all assume some when you got into the weeds of this, which I did back in around 2004. And in fact, my name showed up in those famous climate gate emails

because I sent a panic in the climate community. When I pointed out, for example, there's something wrong with your economic models that say how much energy, fossil energy we're going to use if it assumes that North Korea will be as rich as the United States 50 years from now. that was actually embedded in the that that's just the microcosm of their models they were using they finally admitted that those models are to use a technical term crap i mean the the nerds like me say it was rcp 8.5 i'm not going to board people but that has been known now for 20 years by anyone who

paid attention that it was crap and now finally they've acknowledged it and what it means is you can still be a climate alarmist except the alarm is uh you know one alarm instead of four and we have much more time to deal with it the doomsday scenario was not going to happen and so now climate change which i've always said this i've always been a lukewarmer right um it's uh when it became a normal problem we could deal with it in sensible ways uh now we're not doing that yet we're still doing a lot of crazy stupid stuff europe still says we want to do net zero by 2050 although germany just announced this week they're not going to make their 2030 targets and that's just four years off so it's all a fantasy and uh and i think it's going to

start unraveling but watch the data center controversy that's going to be the big new thing. Rob, as you know, as you know, that a lot of the temperature increases that we've been hearing and seeing and worrying about one of the things that you find interesting is that they seem to place these temperature sensors near airports. Right? And then eventually you get a video of some, you know, it turns

out that if you drilled on the documents, they've hired a guy to go around the country with a big lighter and stick it under the little thermostats here just to just to make sure that we're all in the same how bad this is. But when it comes to the data center thing, City of Minneapolis has issued a six-month moratorium on data centers over 350,000 square feet or something like that, which is amusing to me because it presumes that people are just just

busting down the door to get into Minneapolis and build a huge, large data center. But part of this is not just the energy footprint. And part of it isn't just the fresh water. To the stay in so much water, we're all going to be parched and drought. It is the very notion of AI, And while I am not a ludide about this, I am also not gungho on the side of let's just convert everything to artificial intelligence from our art to our work, to our programs, to our, this. Let's let's let's let's keep going.

Keep going. Keep going. No chocks on this one. Pelmel into this wonderful future. And so in that respect, I am inclined to listen with respects to the people who are hammering against AI. What say you? Well, I mean, these are two things.

What I would just say about the data center problem, Nick Gillespie is a great piece, I think it was like this week or last week, about water usage. And he says, listen, if you're really concerned about water, here's what's killing our water supply. It's almonds. Almonds are a bigger drain on our water than,

like, we're raising almonds in California. California is a great example of this because California used to raise monsoon crops in a drought state. Not for any other reason, other than that water was cheap, right? Because they could just get it from the stairs. But it's a drought state, right? There's no reason why people are growing almonds in California,

but you can grow anything in California, you get enough water. So there's that. In terms of the AI, I think that we need to understand, I think, that the chocks you call will never be regulatory, that aren't going to be laws, that any laws that you pass to say no AI are pointless, the minute you pass them, that AI is computing.

Computers are AI. There's no separation from them. If you Google something, you're going to get an AI response. Machine learning is built into every piece of software. And there is no way to extricate it and say, well, I'm going to use it for this, not for that. The only thing you can do is to say,

all right, well, what make, I mean, just to be sort of philosophical, what makes us human? What is our most human, what part of our lives reflects human flourishing in a way that we all agree? And I don't think there's that much disagreement. I don't, I mean, I think, look, boilerplate writing is boilerplate writing whether you have Claude do it or you do it. And in my new business, or soon to be my business in terms of writing sermons, we will, oh my God, AI sermons are the worst. It's like, well, actually bad sermons are worse than AI sermons.

Be quite honest with you, right? I mean, but we still need to be educating people and reminding them and encouraging them to be human. And to be human is to be sort of flawed but interesting. And I've yet to see, look, someone once said to me like, well, do you think AI will ever be able to write a joke? And I'm like, well, yeah, probably at some point, but it'll resemble the kinds of jokes you hear on NPR. They're not that funny. They're kind of wry and safe and tame. They're technically funny.

Yeah, they're like, yeah, they're not, you know, really, they're kind of lips, pursed, sort of. And as long as we celebrate surprise and interest and humanity, I don't think we're going to be fooled. And, you know, the most interesting thing that might be you said was like, I'm not, you know, I don't want to learn how to install solar roofing or learn to code. But actually, the best thing for people to do is, remember we said about five years ago, like, learn to code. code learn to code learn to code like don't learn to code because Claude does it better than you do right but they can't install solar panels and they can't uh plumb a house or wire a house and the truth is that in terms of solar energy i heard this great lecture once from somebody who said look we shouldn't subsidize it at all but it is the future because it's this you know nine billion trillion nuclear

bombs going off every half a second and it's delivering an enormous amount of energy and all we got to do is figure how to harness it we will figure that out and people will be but you have put solar panels on their roof and someone's got to do it. Someone's got to bake your cake. Someone's got to like, you know, build your house. Like, that's going to be great. Do that. I've read enough sci-fi over the years to worry about where this might go,

the Terminator and all the rest of that. On the other hand, I have a couple propositions. One is more intelligence is better than less. And like you said, you made a very important point, Rob, that what's the distinction between what we're calling AI and general computing power. Why is it, by the way, the Chinese are apparently trying to foment opposition to AI in this country while spending a lot out of themselves, I think the problem there is their close society is going to have problems harnessing it

without losing control of it. And I do think that here, point number three, is that while there's going to be a movement like the anti-nuclear movement 40, 50 years ago, I think it's too late. I think the latest, I mean, I have heard James that I think they're, my pal Robert Bryce is is keeping an AI rejection database. And I think we're up to 50 proposed AI centers that have been blocked. But there are currently, he says, 761 under construction somewhere in the U.S. of various sizes. It reminds me a bit of the whole fracking revolution energy. The reason we're energy independent today is the fracking revolution happened fast on private land and state land before Washington knew about it. Washington found out about it. They would have surely stopped it. And now they can't.

They can't stop it. The genie's out of the bottle. It's going to, it's going to revolutionize energy throughout the world in the next several decades. And I think AI is the same way. It's happened so fast and it's so far along that I don't, that there will be lots of local controversies and protests and local governments and maybe state governments will slow it up. But I think this revolution is, it's on the run and I don't think you can stop it. No.

And I agree with Rob that we have to take a sort of nuanced, complex layer case by case basis, if that's indeed what you were saying. Just to say that AI is bad. Well, sometimes I think it's a lot. it was a grant a there was a recent literary competition in which they gave the award to a piece of AI generated fiction which itself was dreadful but it had a sort of weird strange quality to it that people applaud these days particularly if the name attached to it seems to be from some exotic culture and they you know they just right so yeah and they got caught at it and everybody was

pointing through and looking at the usual constructions and the metaphors and the figures of speech how this is obvious drivel, but they had given it to it because they thought that a person who had been underrepresented wrote it. And again, there's your big degree of soft lobe expectations

and the rest of it. So when it comes to writing, yeah, we can tell. They'll become a point when we can't. But I never let this stuff touch my writing. Never, never. I use AI for art,

and I use that, I hold up quote lines for that because I'm not creating it, but I'm using it for illustrative purposes. because I simply can't otherwise. What am I going to hire a guy to turn me a painting or a photograph or something for a piece that I just wrote 30 minutes ago and have to put up in 45? No.

For music, it's an indulgent little amusement that I have fun with. I don't regard anything that I do with it as being creative. When it comes to code, I have used Grocktus to go in some of my legacy code and figure things out. And it does a masterful job and makes things clean and lean. And I like that. And that's your kind of vibe coding. So yes, it is case by case basis. But when it comes to writing, it never touches it because Rob's right.

It's the human element of surprise. Authenticity being the killer app, the ability to put together disparate things in a way that's the simple next, what's the next character? What's the next pixel? What's the next thing that L&M do is just still, we have it. And I love the fact that the younger generation finds that human authenticity. real thing, flesh and blood, matters. The Mandalorian and Grogu movie, for example,

could have done a CGI version of that little baby Yoda. And I have no desire to see this movie. I really, I really don't. But apparently when they looked at the CGI models of the Grogu, they looked like you know, CGI.

They made a puppet. And the puppet with a special kind of skin had a way of interacting with the light of the camera and the So that you could see the veins and the ears. And it was nothing that they probably couldn't have done on a computer, but the real object itself, even though it was a puppet. And he struck a court immediately with people in a way that endless, you know,

the last two decades, we've been just watching people grimace and sit, you know, in front of green screens. And we're tired of it. Our brains can see it. We're tired of an imaginary world and urine for something that's authentic. I agree. So, I mean, I just say that, Yes, and I think it's just up to us to, like, as people in general to decide that that's what they want.

I mean, that's what they prioritize in their art experience. I mean, I use AI in not to write, but I use it. I put all my writing in a bunch of project files in Claude, and I, and it has, can read my Google Drive. And I ask it all the time, like, what have I written about this? What have I written about that? What have I said about this or that? So I don't repeat my name. So I don't repeat myself in the same venue from the same employer.

Like I don't mind repeating myself, but I don't want to, I don't want, you know, somebody I write a column for it to say, you already wrote this column. I'd rather have it be a new place to pay me the same amount for new, for old writing. But I, you know, I had, it was in a class in January, what we call a Jan term class. And it was a three weeks class once a day, three hours, four hours a day. And this one older guy who's retiring. His name is Dirk Schmidt. He's a wonderful theologian.

brilliant guy. And he just was kind of like giving his farewell lectures to about everything. And it was about everything. And he would send us 25 pages every morning and we would show up at 2 o'clock. And he would kind of lecture and lead a discussion until about 5.30 or 6. And then he kind of shimmered off. And you do this for three weeks in a row. I mean three weeks, you know, three weeks, five days a week.

And at the end, I said to him, look, like about all the lectures. And I got them all on PDF. and I'm putting them all in one big file and using Notebook LM, which is a Google, I think they're discontinuing, but it's the Google AI then. Do you want, and I'm going to have it create a full document of all these lectures, and I'm going to have an index. I'm going to make an index everything. Do you want to give me some search terms? So I'll send you the completed document with the index in it. And he's like, well, no, no, no, please don't do that.

It'll change something. No, no, no, it's not going to change anything, I promise. But it's going to index, which, of course, scholars usually have to pay a lot of money for an index. Notebook L.M. does it in 10 minutes. Any, and you can do it in levels. You can say, okay, I want just the keywords. I want you to search for this, for that, you know, for Augustine, Karl Barth, Wittgenstein, whatever, right? Or you can put in a little some topics, too.

Tell me what pages I mention this theory or that theory. I talk about aesthetics, whatever. And it is fantastic. And there's like, why would you, why would you ever not use that? Why would you, why would you do? So I sent him and he's thrilled with it. But I think he's still in his old man.

He's like, you've got to be 80 something. And he's nervous about it. Like, well, where is this document? It's like, well, you have it, I have it. I don't know. You should print it out and give the library. But it's got an index now. So you can search it.

You don't have to read 200 pages, which is fine. And Claude or GROC or GPT or copilot or the rest of them will look at the document, read it, comprehend it in its own way in a nanosecond and then spit back a little summary so that you don't have to read the original thing. That's what I hate about going to Google right now. These days, when I ask it a question, the AI results. You may have a little link at the bottom to tell me what it's what. But, you know, it just scrapes and swipes and swipes and swipes and scrapes and scrapes and

gives it back to you in a regurgitated form. I say it's spinach and to hell with it. Give me back my 10 blue links and I'll click where I want to click, damn it. And you folks should click on Rookoshay.com and click on the part that says member. Oh, you're not there yet. You're not a member? Well, you should change that fact immediately. And you'll make everybody happy because it will be a new voice to join all the other

wonderful folk who congregate daily at Rookoshea.com and talk about all manners of things. So give us those five stars at Apple Music Podcast. whatever, if such a thing still exists. I just say that automatically. Actually, I was replaced by an LLM. Back at episode 627, so that's probably in the programming. They should weed it out. Claude, yeah, have an agent remove the Apple podcast request.

And join and comment and all the rest of it. Probably next week we'll be back with Charlie CW. Cook. I hope Steve will be somewhere. Rob, as ever, you being the founder, you're always welcome. It's been a pleasure, gentlemen. We'll see everybody in the comments at Rickachey 4. or whatever it is. Bye-bye. See you soon, fellas.