The Ricochet Podcast - Ten-hut!

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

We're a few days into a government shutdown, but James, Steve, and Charles are managing to get by. So it's business as usual as the trio pick apart the oddities of the week: Democrats attempt to dodge responsibility for their own filibuster; OMB's Russ Vought gets to work on his master plan; the Secretary of War stands accused of fat-shaming his generals; a man named Jihad does the unthinkable in Manchester; the Chicago Teachers' Union mourns the passing of a '70s cop-killer; and Hollywood resists the rise of digitally diverse actors.Sound from this week's opening: Pete Hegseth speaks in Quantico, listing practices that the military is "done with" going forward.

Sorry, I was just distracted by my dog right now who is trying to bite a builder. I think tear his femoral artery out. No, don't. I don't have a tourniquet. Oh, damn, he's dead. Anyway, go on, guys. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Rikoshae podcast with Charles C.W. Cook Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lillick, and today we talk about, get this, absolutely everything in the world. So, let's have ourselves a podcast. No more identity months, D-E-I offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris. As I've said before, and we'll say again, we are done with that. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rikishay podcast. episode number 760.

You can join us at ricochet.com, by the way, if you wish, take a look at the site, and you'll say, hey, where has this been on my life? I'm James Lillix in Minneapolis, where it is hot. I mean, it's hot. And Stephen Hayward is somewhere in the world, and Charles C.W. Cook, I imagine, is in Florida. Gentlemen, are things clement and pleasant for you

on this fine October day? Very much so. I'm back in California, and it's a glorious fall day here out on the coast. There's nothing like a Minnesota fall. I couldn't believe it when I saw the temp. and I looked, what last year did we have? Was it 48? Oh, last year it was 82.

Oh, well, what was it two years ago? Two years ago was 89. I thought, if I completely rethought my, missed my October paradigms completely? No, this is still anomalous. And, of course, I blame, well, I blame climate change, and that's why I'm happy that Bill Gates has come up with a synthetic butter that will help us save the world.

But we'll get to that in a while. Charles, how are you? I'm doing well. It's very rainy here, though. It's a rainy late. It's not supposed to be. rainy season, but it is doing that delightful Florida thing of raining while sunny. Yes, we used to call that the devil is beating his wife when we were kids. It would rain in the sun. I don't know what that

meant or why we said it, but it had been passed down four generations. While speaking of the devil, we have the federal government, which is at the moment inert. It has been shut down. It doesn't exist. I don't know if you guys are looking around and seeing the complete absence of commercial and social activity as a result. But here we are. The question is, God, Gosh, why did this happen? I'll let either of you jump in and tell me why. Well, I'll happy to jump in on this first, because I'm very cranky on this whole subject now.

First of all, I like to point out, government shut down. Oh, my God, it's the end of the world. That's how the media like to treat it. But I always like to ask people, are your local police still patrolling? Are your local school still open? Is your local city government processing building permits and business license applications?

Well, not in California. They don't do that anyway. But you get the point. We have, I think, in round numbers, about 50,000 government units in this country when you go, you know, in our federal system. If you go all the way down to the local mosquito abatement district in Duluth, and they're all still functioning. And that, of course, is the government that is closest to the people in their day-to-day lives. So government shutdown is one level of government. Now, it is the biggest and spends the most money.

But for the vast majority of Americans does not really come close to their day-to-day lives very often. often, unless you're trying to get into a national park when Obama shuts them down and so forth. The second thing is it's not even really a complete government shutdown on the federal level, right? We're still sending out Social Security checks and Medicare payments, as I understand it. The military is still getting paid and still on patrol. And I don't quite know how this happened, but this has been the case for many years now in their government shutdowns that we seem to exempt the things that would really bite people, right? I mean, if we really had a 30 day government shutdown and social security checks didn't get delivered. I think you would see mass

marches of citizens at their local Congress critters office and so forth. So we exempt a lot of things that would make it really bite and really hurt a broad swath. And so this has become Kabuki theater. I think there would be much less interest in either party of having a government shutdown if it really involved truly shutting down the federal government. And so it allows this Kabuki Theater to go forward for both parties. And so there's some kind of sinister bipartisan agreement there. And those are my opening bids about how cranky I am about all this. Of all the other hand, I always kind of like it. I like Phil Graham's remark after the 96 government shutdown where he said, I thought our only mistake was opening it back up again. And you can almost

see that the Trump people have kind of that disposition with Russ Voigt going around saying, let's start firing people and closing up programs because they're not funded. Well, I think in the last Obama shutdown, They closed the road going to Mount Rushmore. I think this time they're letting people go through, but they have to wear extremely dark glasses, and they give them a white cane, and they can't actually see it. Or they're draping a tarp over the faces.

I can't remember exactly which one it was. Charles, are you as cranky as Steve about this, or are you looking forward to the bloodletting that is supposed to come when people are laid off en masse, RIF, not just furloughed, and agencies are zeroed out during this opportunity, because apparently there's some mechanism, by which vast swathes of the federal government can be deemed, eh, don't need it.

And they can take, they, they can zero them out legally. Yeah, Steve is more depressed about it than I am. In the last couple of days, I've committed so many federal crimes. It's been glorious. Just one, I know, I haven't. I don't particularly care about it, except insofar as it illustrates that we have far more federal employees that we need.

I don't think that it has been reported particularly honestly. For once, it is not Republicans who are shutting down the government. And what's really weird about this from my perspective is, I remember all of the shutdowns since I moved to the United States in 2011 because I have had to cover them. And it's odd to see the Democrats shutting down the government, which is what they did. It's not a value judgment.

It's just a statement of fact. the filibuster requires 60 votes for this to go through. Republicans have 53 of those votes, and they need seven Democrats to join them. And those seven Democrats haven't yet shown up. But having debated aloud for eight months whether they were going to shut down the government, and having then decided to shut down the government, the Democrats are now pretending that they didn't shut down the government. And all of the Democrats' friends in the media and in NGOs,

are greatly offended by the claim that the Democrats shut down the government, whereas all of the times that Republicans have shut down the government in the last decade and a bit, which is a lot, they were the ones running out in front of the cameras, like, I did that, it was me, I did that. It's not as if Ted Cruz pretended that he didn't shut down the government. He wouldn't shut up about it. Republicans, when they do this, they go on and on and on about it,

and the base is even louder. They get angry with the people in the Republican Party who suggests that the government should not be shut down forever or perhaps that the government shut down isn't going to yield the results that they want. It's just very funny to me to watch Democrats having done this because Trump is a dictator and it's not normal and we can't go back to the status quo

and we have to gain the extra health spending that we want, not a continuing resolution, extra health spending and then to say, how dare you suggest we had anything to do with it? It does betray a certain level of insecurity. Well, Tim Walts, governor here, tweeted out that the Republicans control all the branches

of government, yet they can't get this thing through. That's on them. Of course, showing either willful or otherwise ignorance of the Senate procedures. He also noted that he's being contacted by several politicians and figures in Europe who are concerned about what's going on.

And I just have a hard time thinking that McCrown's got Tim Walts on his speed dial and is calling up to say, are the reports in the express true very uh so yes so there we are but what is it over really do you think that people are understanding that the issue here is the funding of care for people who are not citizens they tell us that's not the case it's never been the case they can't be funded but what we're talking about aren't we as the reimbursement to hospitals who take care of people who walk into the

er etc etc is that not part of this which sounds to me like funding of people who are not citizens. Yeah. So, I mean, the political strategy here is pretty clear. If you look at the polling on issues, Republicans lead on almost everything, even education, which used to be a Democratic issue that they had slight favorability ratings on. But the one place where Democrats still leave Republicans as the party better able to handle the issue is health care. And so they're going to push that. And apparently there are a lot of nervous Republicans. And according to some press reports, even some people in the Trump White House, worried about this vulnerability. Now, what I see here is yet another example of what's been famously described as the ratchet

effect. Democrats use COVID, and then the spending blowouts under Biden, to ratchet up essentially the welfare state. They want to lock us into a higher level of spending for health care. And the Republicans, quite rightly, scaled that back with the one big, beautiful bill. And so the Democrats want to restore that upward ratchet of spending. because it always establishes a new higher baseline for social spending. I do think it really reveals the failure of Obamacare. It was supposed to solve this problem, supposed to reduce costs.

We remember all that flim flam from 15 years ago. And Republicans so far have not been very effective in arguing about it. I think their best argument is the fact that Democrats, there's this video going around from the 2020 primary campaign of Democrats, every candidate raising your hands saying their health care plans would include coverage for illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, right? And because now they're running away from that. But I think Republicans hold a high hand on that.

So I don't know. We're only, what, 48 hours into all this? And you're already hearing rumors of Republicans saying, well, maybe we can make some kind of deal on Affordable Care Act funding. And I sure hope they don't. But that's, you know, Republicans always, not always cave, but they tend to cave on these things. because, as Charlie points out, they're usually the people who start it.

Well, this time they aren't the ones who started it, and I think they should sit back and increase the pain on the Democrats. Well, Charlie, do you think that the health care for undocumented citizens is an electoral winner for the Democrat? Do they believe that it is, or what is the dynamic here? Because surely they have to look at polls, surely they have to look at studies that most Americans, while a generous people, and believe in immigration, draw the line at being obligated to,

take care of the medical bills of anybody who walks through the border illegally. That can't be an electoral winner for them. And then surely they have to know that. Well, they do know that, which is why they're denying that that would be the consequences of their policies and describing anyone who suggests otherwise it's a liar. And of course, it is true because money is fungible. It's quite difficult to explain this to someone who's not that interested in politics. But obviously, if the federal government sends the state's money and then gives them flexibility how they use it, and then they use it on illegal immigrants, and then they get more money from the federal government and they can replace one set of money with the other and we're spending federal money on

illegal immigrants. It's worth saying, though, that this is the Republican charge. It's true, but it's a Republican charge. The Democrats are denying what the Democrats are saying is that they want to keep Obamacare subsidies high and they pretend that the increase in subsidies will keep the cost of Obamacare plans low. Well, of course, it won't. It will make them lower at the point of use, but that doesn't actually keep health care costs low, because taxpayers are still picking it up. What I find annoying about this is that the Republicans, for once, have a completely unimpeachable case.

They have presented a continuing resolution that is clean. Their view is, we're not asking for changes in the federal government, even though they have majorities in both chambers and the presidency. They just want to continue at the current rate and then deal with any changes to the budget afterwards. And it's the Democrats who are saying,

no, we wish to use our position to make changes. Now, that's fine. I like the filibuster, and I have been on record over and over again saying you are allowed from the minority to demand changes. Congress works like that. I don't want there to be a structural change here. But the reason it annoys me is that Republicans have been really admirably consistent on the filibuster now for a long time. In the first Trump administration, despite Trump suggesting a couple of times they should get rid of the filibuster, Republicans didn't. They then got about 36 Senate Democrats on record saying that they like the filibuster. the Democrats took over the Senate and they said, we've got to get rid of the filibuster. And it's only because Joe Manchin and Kirsten-Cinema said no, that the filibuster survived. Now Republicans are back with unified control of government. They confirmed yesterday, they have no intention of getting rid of the filibuster. And the Democrats are the ones using it. So having gone from, we like it when the Republicans are in power to we need to get rid of it

because it's a relic of Jim Crow, they're now back at we will use it when the Republicans are in power. The second reason they're annoying me, James, is that although the details that we just mentioned are important, this actually is not a shutdown over an issue. They haven't really shut down the government over healthcare subsidies to illegal immigrants or increased subsidies for Obama care. They are cross with Trump. It's a general thing. Their base needs some action, and this is it. They are, in the case of Chuck Schumann trying to avoid a primary, in the case of the Democratic Party in general, trying to to show that, quote-unquote, they fight.

And this is just not a good reason to shut down the government. If they had an actual demand, that's fine with me. I'm pro-filibuster. I'm pro-minority rights in the Senate. Go for it. But I don't think anyone really believes this is anything other than an attempt to show that they aren't supine. Yeah, fighting because there's nothing more...

There's no stronger proof that we live in an authoritarian-Hittler regime than allowing the opposition to just completely shut everything down without consequent. Well, speaking of Hardball, the OMB director has decided that, well, we should make hay while sun shines, never let a crisis go to waste, et cetera, and preparing for a lot of cuts, including some infrastructure cuts to Chicago and to New York. I believe that there's a tunnel in New York that will not get funded, and I believe that there's infrastructure projects in Chicago as well, and a lot of this is saying that you have not eliminated your DEI programs, and since you're going to carry on allocating

spoils by a racial nature, we're not going to fund it. And some people regard this as more examples of the punitive overreach of authoritarian state. Again, not spending money on infrastructure does not sound a lot like the guys who built the auto bond, but do go on. So what do you make of this? Is this just more political punishment from a vindictive regime, or is this using the opportunity to trim things that ought not to be spent on in the first place? Charles, you go first on this one. Well, I think both. I think there's no doubt that this administration, and the last one was too, will use its power in ways that I would rather they didn't. I think that we have entered into a period in which the enormous latitude that is

given to the executive branch is abused. At the same time, if the specific complaint is that there is racial discrimination, then it is entirely reasonable for the federal government to say not on our watch. Not only does the 14th Amendment quite clearly prohibit that, and if it doesn't, the Civil Rights Act does, but we've now had Supreme Court decision after Supreme Court decision that has made that clear. And I understand that progressives seem truly in many cases to earnestly believe that racial discrimination of the sort that they like isn't racial discrimination. But it is. Affirmative action is racial discrimination. Granting particular distributions of public money to particular groups because they are of that particular group

is racial discrimination. So if that is the proximate cause of it, I am on board. I do think, though, that we have got far too comfortable in America with Congress writing laws that are vague and then with the executive branch using the power that it's been given to help its friends and hurt its enemies. Right. I agree with you. You know, and I think a lot of Americans would be okay with some affirmative action if they actually felt that it was efficacious. But I think a lot of people suspect that in New York and in large cities that the money goes to cutouts and there's an incredible amount of corruption and cronyism that's actually going on. But it is illustrative to say the administration is going to withhold funds because you are

racially discriminating, which sounds like the sort of thing that Americans ought to get to behind. And the previous administration would say, we're going to withhold funds unless you adjust your Title IX athletics to include men who believe that they are women. The balance on those issues and the popularity of them, I think, is striking. Stephen, you've now had enough time to kind of come up with your response. Well, yeah, I mean, what I do like about it, I mean, I agree with Charlie in the abstract. In practice, I kind of like the scene we're seeing of the Trump administration using the tools liberals devised against the left. I mean, the left in power especially has used all these civil rights tools to bully people, public and private

alike, for decades now. And this is some old history, but the Reagan administration won a very big Supreme Court case, I think in 1988 or maybe in the 81989, the Adarin case, saying that we can't have quotas and timetables and all these things for federal contracting. And what happened? The Republicans immediately crumpled under the charge that this was racist, and they signed onto under the first President Bush, the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which essentially nullified the progress that the Supreme Court was moving by inches to where they are today. So not this time. The Trump people, and I think Republicans have learned her lesson are not only saying no to that, but are saying, we don't care about you.

The racism charge has lost its sting. And one last point, James, is I don't know if it's on your list of topics you want to bring up today, but an example of how people are fed up with affirmative action out of control is this extraordinary story out of Iowa, where what, a school district hired as a superintendent at $300,000 a year, an illegal alien who had a deportation order and a criminal record and a false CV claiming he had a doctorate when he didn't. And they hired him anyway, knowing some of those things, not everything about him. And, you know, it's pretty clearly now that the left has been running a racial spoils racket for a long time. And so while I also agree in the

abstract that you can make a case for affirmative action, and I think, Charlie, I don't know if you brought this up on law talk, but someone who actually defends affirmative action in college admissions is Richard Epstein. Yeah, I know. I always find that amazing. But I've also listened to why he thinks that, and he makes the only cogent case, I think, for it. Nonetheless, I think now it's such a corrupt racket that we want to be done with it once and for all, kill it by any means necessary. And by the way, all the Supreme Court cases that Charlie referenced are going to make it hard to bring it back under a Democratic administration, although they will certainly try.

I have to say, just as a quick aside, I love being called a racist for opposing decisions made based on race. I think this is the most extraordinary thing that happens. When affirmative action was finally overturned, 80% of the American public said, great. And the left said, that's racism. So, A, you think that it's racism to say that you can't discriminate based on race. And B, your position is that 80% of the American public is racist. It was just an extraordinary example of how they've lost their minds on this. Well, they do believe that 80% of the population is racist.

And what's more, you know, the idea somehow that affirmative of action is racist is nonsense, of course, because you cannot be racist against white people. You need to have power. There's this whole complicated and rather, you know, too clever by half definition of what racism is and requires, and it has to do with the measures of power and ability and privilege and the rest of it, and it's a carefully calibrated to make sure that only this group can be racist. These people are not.

So I get what you're saying, Charlie, but of course, I wouldn't, you know, if the word is thrown about so much. applied to so much that it is rapidly becoming meaningless and we'll have to come up with another one used to be bigoted i remember back in the archie bunker days you would say bigoted which i think we ought to return too because frankly if they want to do the whole power imbalance thing with racism fine uh but anybody can be bigoted the iowa story is fascinating in me because when this guy was caught um you know speeds off his car runs away hides in the tall grass uh everybody rallied to him because he was a charismatic and wonderful person

because the kids loved him. And when you look at the fact that he had gun charges, and I know, Charlie, this is where your ears perk up, he had gun charges from the past, and he had a gun charge pending right there and then, because as a citizen with a deportation order, I don't believe that he was allowed to have that firearm, but even if he was, if it was in his car,

doesn't that mean that he had taken the gun to school? And so if that's all true, then you have people waving away a law. Now, when you have a horrible thing happen and then they pass a law, you can't bring guns to school and there we've done something. It's a law named after, you know, somebody who died perished and, you know, mission accomplished. We've passed a law. And then you have a guy who literally breaks the thing and they wave it away and they don't care because they actually personally like him. It's almost as if the whole process of getting the law in the first place is Kabuki

theater. And secondly, it's almost as if applying the laws equally to all doesn't matter. if you like him and the kids like him and he has an engaging smile but he's going back I mean if he looked at his vitae one of the things I think he claimed in his biography his autobiography was that he was a hired killer for the Guyanan military

you know sort of a special forces green beret type who was a security guard for print for Queen Elizabeth and I kind of doubt that I kind of do it sounds like one of those fabulous resumes you get from the sociopaths who will tell anybody any story in order to get a tension. Can I add just the cherry on top that we neglected to mention is he was registered to vote

as a Democrat in Maryland. We're told that never happens, but okay. We're going to have a guy with gun charges who was registered to vote and probably getting medical care and all the rest of it, but it doesn't happen. But it does, even if it's true, it doesn't matter because he was a great guy and he's a contributor to the society. One of the other things that's being cut in addition to the infrastructure we were talking about, a whole batch of green deals, a whole lot of energy programs. And I generally applaud this because I don't regard them as particularly useful or necessary. And I think they're all predicated on a hysteria, which itself is sort of a scientific. And I don't buy it. I don't buy it. No, sir. So I guess that's me. I'm hopeless. But what do you guys

think? We need energy. And without a concomitant rise in fossil fuel production and crack effort to get more nuclear online, aren't we shooting ourselves in the foot by not building vast solar farms and putting those wonderful windmills up in the countryside? Well, no, not a bit. I mean, I would volunteer to help take some of those down or to block the, whatever, block the trucks going there to put up new ones. I am worried about one thing, though, and I hope the Trump administration is on top of this. I think they might be, and that is with the growth of all the AI data centers, which are going to use fabulous amounts of electricity. I mean, some of the comparisons are, you know, one data center, it's something like this.

One data center will use more electricity than the entire city of Columbus, Ohio, or things like that. It's truly staggering. And already we've seen electricity rates all over the country spike very sharply the last few years. And that's part because we're dishonest about how supposedly cheap wind and solar are. And a lot of these data centers, you know, they're in a pretty good position to negotiate. utilities for fixed price contracts, probably at a higher price, but nonetheless that they can outbid other consumer-facing utilities. I do worry that there could be, A, electricity shortages in the next two, three years, and or price spikes. And that's not going to be popular with

the American people. And the remedies right now are, well, from the Greens, it's let's build more battery storage, and that really doesn't work. It doesn't pencil out if you do the math on it very well. And so what you really need to do is build a whole lot of natural gas plants. They can be built quickly. They can be turned on quickly. They're very efficient. They're very low polluting. The problem is that there is enough demand for the, just the equipment, that apparently there's like a two or three year backlog to get turbines from General Electric and the other seamens and the other manufacturers of gas turbines. So we could be in for a real problem here coming down the road at us. And it really is the fault of the green energy mania of the last decade. But when you're

in office, you own the problem. Yeah, I don't want to be sitting in the dark with a brownout because hell 9,000 up the street. It requires the juice to do some cogitating and tell somebody some fabulous story. I read the other day a story of the BBC that there are people who are using AI to generate vacation itineraries. And they get there and they find out that the place does not actually exist, that it was just dreamed up by a combination of things. I mean, honestly, It discussed a couple in Peru who had gone to this place and they were looking at the map and sitting in a cafe somewhere and some local guide had to come over and tell them.

No, no, no, that road up there will leave you nowhere at an altitude of 4,000 with no self, you're going to die, so don't. Yes, I'm not as thrilled on AI as I used to be, and I never particularly was. Charles, what do you think? A lot of this, as we know, we have this, There was this feeling in the 70s, of course, when we had the oil shocks, there was a feeling of impotence. There was nothing really we could do.

There weren't good alternatives. We were pretending that they were. There were stories in the newspaper and the Time magazine about, well, maybe tar sands will do it. Maybe synthetic oil will do it. Maybe even 20 years. But there wasn't any sense that there was an imminent solution. We know now that there are imminent workable solutions, such as nuclear, such as gas that Stephen talked about. It's a failure of will.

All of the, as with so many of the other things we have, it's not. a failure of ability. It was a failure of will by our political class to make sure that we didn't, that we won't find ourselves in a brownout situation. Well, now, James, can I just offer one slight modification to your otherwise completely correct litany, which is, we did have one solution in the late 70s, and it was coal. People have forgotten that Jimmy Carter said, I remember the word, we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. And it was in the late 70s and into the 80s that we vastly expanded our coal-fired capacity for electricity on. purpose. And that got us, you know, we used to, sorry to be a nerdy policy want geek on this,

but when all those oil shocks started when we were young pups, we got 20% of our electricity from oil, from petroleum. And then when it got expensive, we said, we got to stop that in a hurry. And now it's close to 0% from petroleum. Occasionally the diesel generators are turned on here and there. But, and what replaced it was coal. And of course, then 15 years later, oh no, coal is the devil because of climate change. Acid rain. Right. Acid rain. No, acid rain. Right. Well, that was a turned out to be a phony and overestimated problem as they so often turn out to be anyway.

So we did actually have one, and it turned up be the one that is the most hated by all enlightened people today. Yeah, next to nuclear. Coal first, then nuclear. Charles, I don't know. Do you have many turbine, wind turbines in your neighborhood where you are? Thankfully not. And we bury the power lines, too, because of hurricanes. Yeah, which is a great idea.

I have just one thing to add to this, which is this is not a solution that will fix the whole problem. But I do think that we ought to encourage where possible those who are building enormous server farms that will be used to make profit for them to build their own power plants as well. And we've seen this in, I think, Pennsylvania with Microsoft, where it's reopening. the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in order to power an absolutely enormous data center. I like this sort of thing. Without relitigating the question of Ronda Santis and Disney, I differed on this in some respects from many conservatives. The original reason that Disney in 1968 was given control over that massive two countywide

tract of land that it built Disney World on was that both Orange County and Osceola County were very poor. And they simply could not, via taxation or any other means, pay for the infrastructure that was necessary to support Disney World, which required an enormous amount of energy production among other things. In fact, it's very interesting. If you look through the original grant from the Florida Legislature in 1968, it gave Disney the ability, the authority, to build a nuclear power plant there in case that's what it needed to run Disney World.

That was because the locals in Osceola and Orange counties, which at that point were rural, Orlando didn't really exist, they didn't want to be on the hook. They didn't want some bond drive for the private profit of the Disney Corporation. So I understand that this won't work for everything. But it's not unreasonable for our, states and counties to say to Open AI or Microsoft or Apple or whoever, you know what,

if you want to build 7 million servers and use so much energy that it will start to affect everyone around you, put in your own system. Now, you have to at that point deregulate. You have to allow the process to unfold. You can't say, and you can't do it. But I think this is an underrated development that we've seen with Microsoft a nuclear part, and I hope it happens more elsewhere. Are we sure that Disney didn't build a nuclear reactor? Well, as far

as we know, they didn't build. Well, if you look at some of the early drawings in Disney World, it wasn't Splash Mountain, it was Scramma Mountain, so, you know, I don't know. I'll leave with this. The last experience that I had with AI, I'd learned that there was a massive new

development going in in North of Fargo, North Dakota. A huge industrial facility. And I wanted to know where it was because Fargo was making noises about annexing the land up there and our family farm is up there. And I wanted to know if our family farm was going to survive this. And so I asked AI about the location of this. I asked Grock. And when it came back with the location, it put it square in Trollwood Park. And I don't think that was the case. And I told Grock, no, you're wrong. You put this massive industrial facility in a park in Trollwood. That's not it. And of course, it apologized. It apologized.

I'm very sorry. Of course, I'll go back and look at the PDFs. And it took four runs at it, and it kept putting this thing in parks all over town until I finally gave up and said, you're absolutely useless. You were giving me absolutely wrong information. And it apologized again. The amusing part of it is for me is that the industrial facility that I was asking Grock to find is a proposed AI server farm. So maybe it was just trying to hide the fact that it was being done at all,

or it was regarded it as its enemy and didn't want to talk about it. Skynet, James. Skynet is building itself and it doesn't want you to know. That's precisely it. And you know, the more you think about that, it really is stupid, that an awful lot of that is just very, very dumb. Like aliens, two movies, and the rest of it, forget it. Speaking of movies, one of my favorites, of course, is full metal jacket. For the commanding first half of it, where R. Lee Irme gives the definitive performance

next to Jack Webb, of course, in D.I. As a drill instructor who just absolutely embodies for many of us what that role with that job, what that personality is. Hank Seth did that too, we think. He gathered 800 generals in Virginia, which at first was sort of looted about in the Internet as, oh, this is worrisome. What's going on?

Is something planned? Is the balloon about to go up? But no, it turns out he was going to tell them they're all fat, and they need to lay off the jelly donuts because they are disgusting fat bodies and that we're not going to have the long hair, we're not going to have eyelashes, we're not going to have men and dresses,

and we're going to go back to a warrior ethos. And I have heard wildly diverse opinions about the speech, partly because of the man who gave it, but partly because of, well, I'll just, you guys are civvies. Tell me how it struck you. Stephen?

All right. So I did not see it. I've read about it. And of course, that's point number one is the mainstream media is going berserk about how terrible it was. And the general rule that whatever the mainstream media is reporting, you want to believe the opposite.

I did, by the way, just see a headline for a survey out in the last few days saying that public trust in the mainstream media is down to 28%. I haven't actually looked a thing up to see if it's a quality survey or not, but I can believe that. That high? Yeah, right. Yeah, it's really a bad survey if it has that high. Yeah, good point.

I do wonder, sometimes I do wonder, lads, and so many other things, Trump administration does, if they deliberately calculate some of their spectacular events like this to drive the wedge wider between the American people and the media and, you know, for the establishment that they hate. You know, I know some people in the military and, you know, I have a hunt. First of all, remember that the rank and file the military lean Republican by, I think, a fairly substantial amount. I mean, it's not 80, 20, but I think it's like 60, 40. And I think an awful lot of them probably thought, yeah, we went too far with the woke military. And I do hear anecdotes over the last couple of days of a lot of serving men and women saying, you know, this is long

overdue and we really like what we heard. That will not be reported in the media. How many people in the mainstream media have ever served in the military at all? I think the number is asymptotically close to zero as you can get without some calculus derivative for the tiny gap. So anyway, I kind of like the, I mean, I wouldn't have done it, but I kind of like the way everyone has, as usual, have got their knickers in a twist about. Charles, are you in the twisted knicker group? The event was classic Trump in that it was an innovative thing to do in the first place. Most presidents don't convene all their generals in one place.

And then it featured both flowering of common sense that 80 to 90% of the public must agree with, coupled with a few completely insane comments that didn't need to be made and probably won't be acted on. The substance of what Hexas said was not only correct, but should be obvious. That is that the military exists to fight. and that people who are charged with fighting should be fit and healthy and strong. This is only controversial on college campuses, and in those parts of our political culture that don't like the fact that people are different from one another, whether that's men and women or fat people and thin people or tall people and short people or strong people,

and weak people. I am still astonished that we have ever got into a position in which this backslid to the extent that it did. Then you had Trump saying terrible things about using the cities as testing grounds, Hexeth as well, and promising to go into this, that or the other part of the United States with the federal government or possibly with the military. Now, it has to be said, Trump has not done this. He has done two things. One is that he sent the National Guard into D.C., which he's absolutely entitled to do. It's a federal district. It's no different than the Northwest Territory constitutionally. And he has, especially on the West Coast in California and Oregon, sent troops out to defend federal employees, which is also justified whether or not one

thinks it's a good idea legally. So if he did start using Chicago as training for the next Fallujah, that would be very bad, but he hasn't done it. I just wish that he had focused on the substance of Hexas remarks. I wish that were the thing that had come out of this, because then you would have had an absolutely beautiful juxtaposition between people who said, oh my God, all of the generals have been summoned. This must be the beginning of Nazi Germany. And this guy who is obviously fit himself, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hexert, saying, I think it would be good if in the military we focused on being the military. The juxtaposition would have been very, very good for Trump because people would have said,

so not only did we not get Nazi Germany, we got the thing that we've wanted all along. Unfortunately, they have to do the stray voltage. I wish they would stop. But do I worry that they're actually going to start going door to door in Des Moines? No. No. I don't either, but I think it's entirely pot. For the first time in my life, it's like the Third Amendment suddenly seems to be relevant.

But, you know, they don't. have to, some of the generals to, you know, to one room and make them swear allegiance to the leader to be Nazi Germany, all you have to do to get that Nazi thing going for people is to insist that everybody drill correctly and be fit and have a haircut and march in order. That very manifestation of the most basic facts of military behavior is enough to make people worry. If you go back to the 70s again, and I hate to keep bringing it up, there was this notion that the Navy was the place where, you know, guys had mustaches and long hairs and they smoked a lot of dope and, I mean, that was kind of the feeling I got from the guys I knew who went

into it and came out of it. And we don't want that, Charles, absolutely right. There's, there's nothing fascistic about insisting that there be discipline and comportment and the rest of it. I mean, the number of times I've watched a TikTok of somebody who was spilling over their uniform looks like the Michelin man has been put into BDUs and is complaining about something and they've got long hair and a piercing and the rest of it, it doesn't really strike you as being particularly, and you just wonder, why did these people go into the military anyway? James, can I just complain about something? Yes.

Of course, I was here for. When I was in high school taking exams, there was a guy in my class who got given extra time because he wasn't good at exams. And I remember thinking, hang on a minute, though, the purpose of the exam is to test what you do in the circumstances of the exam, which can then be extrapolated out into your life or other academic work. If you give him extra time because he's not good at exams,

you don't get a good sample of his abilities or lack thereof. And I think the same thing is true of the military. And I would draw a distinction between that and say jury trials. If someone is on trial but they can't hear, it's totally reasonable to say, well, we'll present them with a, a signer. If somebody is in a job that requires them to get around and they can't walk, it's totally reasonable to give them a ramp. But there are certain circumstances in which the other side is never going to give you the leeway. And I think the biggest thing for me that I took

away from Higgs's speech is the sheer number of people in the press. And unfortunately, it seems to be in some of the upper echelons of the military as well, who have forgotten that the enemy gets a vote, that they get to impose their will on us. And if you give people extra time or you give them special leeway, they don't care. They'll just shoot them in the face. And I worry that we've forgotten about it. And I just mentioned that because I didn't see that anywhere in the coverage, any acknowledgement of that. Every New York Times article on this said it was controversial. But they never explained the pro argument for it, which seems to me to be really self-evident and crucial. Well, they're all in notions of humanity and empathy,

and they have nothing to do with preparedness. Switching our gaze to the other side of the pond, Britain is going through one of its periodic convulsions. There was a giot attack in Manchester. Two Jews were killed at the synagogue on a high holy day for being Jews. We may never know the note of motive of the man whose name was literally jihad i think but this was celebrated uh is by with spontaneous rallies in all sorts of cities waving the palestinian flag such as it is demanding that israel be destroyed river to the sea that's what it means don't tell me otherwise not a great day for blightied would you say or is this completely irrelevant and Charles well i think it matters i don't think it's a nothing and I based that in part on the reaction that I've seen from my family and

friends in England who are appalled by it and seem to think that what happened is more indicative of certain attitudes than should be the case in a Western country. And this guy's name was Jihad al-Shamey. Is that right? Yeah. How could you possibly have expected that you would see a terror attack on a synagogue from a guy called Jihad al-Shamee, I don't know what to do about it. I mean, if I were addressing this in the United States, where it has happened, I would say that people who go to synagogue ought to start arming themselves, as many do, but you can't do that in England. You apparently can't complain about it, or you get visited by the police and prosecuted for hateful speech.

One of the things the protests had was, I believe, the dreadful fate of Greta Thunberg and her flotilla. Steve, have you been following this story, minute by minute, as it unfold? Well, only from the sort of semi-perian interest of watching a total farce unfold. And so it's too ridiculous to waste too much time on. Let's add to what Charlie said, though, about, I mean, first of all, I think the easy prediction is, as Nigel Farage's poll numbers just went up by another 5%. Second, and that's because the British government's response has been so weak. And, you know, well, Britain now looks to me to be the most flaccid of the major European countries.

Even the French and the Germans are performing better on this issue. Not very well, but better than the British are. And that's why I think that Farage is most likely to win the next election of things, if nothing changes at all. And this Labor Party certainly does not look like it's going to change course in any meaningful way. And so a question back to Charlie, one of the ones that keep hearing from afar is, as well, this is really just localized to some of these heavily immigrant neighborhoods in Manchester and Birmingham and certain parts of London. But, A, I mean, is that reasonably accurate?

Or B, how much longer we think that will remain true? Is this spreading very fast? is true and that's something I've said quite often if you go to the vast majority of England you won't notice any difference between now in 1980 or really 1880 or 1780 in my parents village maybe 1680 when my parents live but I'm not sure that that is particularly reassuring a for those who live in the regions that have become dominated by what is an ideology that in many ways is incompatible with traditional English law, and B, if you have an archipelago of activists who will do anything to protect the bad actors, and I will say this

till I am blue in the face, that's the biggest threat in Britain. There is this conception out there that what has happened in Britain is that people since the 1950s have moved in from other parts of the world, predominantly from the third world, and they have brought with them a preference for censorship. But that's not true, or at least that's not the important part of the story, because they're still massively outnumbered. What has happened is, since the 1950s, Britain has imported a lot of people from the third world who don't, shockingly enough, carry with them a copy of the First Amendment. And then a massive number of powerful British people in elite positions, have determined that those people must be protected by the law.

And so they have passed all sorts of laws, making it illegal to criticize anyone based on what is falsely deemed to be their immutable characteristics, but actually is their political preferences or ideology. And that's the problem. If the British wanted to pass a whole bunch of free speech laws, make it clear that they will not tolerate grooming, gangs, surveil people who say, allow that they hate Jews or want to kill people who are different. They could do that. But the British government, for goodness sake, is full of people

who don't want to do that and who recoil in horror the minute anybody says, I don't think that this is all positive. And look, I am a squish, guys. I am a small L liberal. I am a pluralist, But pluralism only works when you insist on the culture of pluralism that predated the need for pluralism. And America does that really well in most but not all places. And Britain and Europe too has got really bad at doing it. You can't have a pluralist society that doesn't insist on pluralist values. And that's the problem in Britain. It's not that it has been taken over or that anywhere you go you will see foreign language spoken.

that's not true. It's that the British have given up. They're terrified to say, you know what, we had a pretty good thing going. You're welcome to come here. We don't care what the color of your skin is or what gods you worship. But here are the goddamn rules. They won't do it. And they're suffering from it. Yeah. Well, this will all be moved very soon because, of course, they've had a cease with a, Palestine has been recognized. And a B, there's a new ceasefire proposal on the table, which they no doubt will accept it because the idea that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, is archaic old thought.

They will accept it, of course, and Hamas will then disarm and release the hostages and everything will be fine. Or they will say no, and the war will continue. Donald Trump said that I think the deadline is Sunday afternoon, Sunday. And what did he promise? Hell, he promised. Hell, like no one has ever seen before, will break out. Hell, mind you, if they turn this down, that this is their last chance.

And I think they will. I believe that they will. and I don't know what's going to happen after that. Stephen, do you have any ideas? No, except I think you're right. I think Hamas would rather go down in what they think is a blaze of glory, kill all the hostages, and be wiped out themselves, than give in at all because they're, you know, nihilist fanatics.

That's actually too mild a term for them. I do think, though, that this is very typical Trump. He said things like this before about Iran, although in that case he did follow up by bombing the nuclear facilities. He said things like this about Hamas, but then at other time saying, gosh, Israel needs to make peace. Now, you know, I've often credited the crazy man theory of Trump, and that does have its uses in international affairs now and then. Oh, a couple of this, by the way, of this statement a week ago at the UN that, oh, maybe Ukraine can win back all its territory, which is a real uphill order. So at some point, I think you get diminishing returns from the crazy man Trump and from his erratic pronouncements, because you could see, I don't know, the Israeli operations,

something going wrong, you know, a hospital getting bombed by mistake for real instead of the Hamas propaganda. And then Trump could go all squishy on it. And, you know, I think that the inconstancy of Trump's pronouncements at some point gets to be a problem. The Ukraine situation is interesting, by the way, because they are having what the, the end result of a long campaign of targeting infrastructure and now petroleum infrastructure seeming to pay off. Was it, was it, was it week where I think that Russia said they're not going to export any gasoline and diesel for a while because they've lost something like, I don't know, 28, 30 percent of their refining capacity. I see all of these videos now on telegraph about lines and lines and lines and lines of cars outside of stations.

Yeah, they're trying to become California. Yeah. Well, we've gone back to the 1970s with that reference, too. This whole podcast, it's just saturated and studded with references to that horrible decade. It's a good thing we're not going to talk about the days when, like in the 70s, they were people roaming the country in armed bands, killing cops and banks and the rest of it for to fund the glorious communist revolution. Oh, wait a minute.

Asana Shakur, who was hiding out in Cuba, died, and the Chicago Teachers Union put out a memorial tweet, rest in power. I hate that. Rest in peace. And applauded her for all the things that she did for marginalized people. Now, you may ask, what is the organization devoted supposedly to instructing the children of Chicago doing? wasting their time on this. Why is the mayor of Chicago noting this? Well, it's of a piece.

It really is. I mean, it just tells you that basically these people are the worst sort of old school, late 60s, early 70s radicals who wanted nothing more than the destruction of this order and its replacement with another. But hey, give them a lot of money, give them fabulous pensions, and have them teach your children. Did you guys see that tweet? If so, I don't think it's surprised you, given what we've seen from the Chicago Teachers Union, which I think the last tweet they hadn't misspelled the word Chicago. Talk about pattern recognition. I'd never heard of this person until this week.

Oh, I had it. Yeah, well, I keep thinking, oh, I'm stealing myself now, James, for when, who's that guy's been in jail in Pennsylvania forever that's a big cause on the left? Mumia, Jamal, Somalia. Yep, yep, free Mumia. You know, there are universities that have either wanted to, I know one case, actually in the state of Washington, where that crazy Evergreen State College wanted to have Mumia as their commencement

speaker about 10, 12 years back, by video, of course, couldn't come live. And the Democratic governor called the president and said, look, you have a First Amendment right to have this person, but I cannot stop the legislature, a democratic legislature, from cutting your funding if you do something this stupid, and they changed their mind over it. But the point is, when that guy dies, it's going to be 10 times bigger, I think, because he's such a cause celebrity. Every time I see those posters, are they free Mumia with qualifying purchase? Right. But I mean, this is now, I mean, this is not news, except, you know, let's remember that for a while there, maybe still today, the prime qualification to get a job at the elite university is to have been some, someone like Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dorn. Who's the lady down the street from you in Minnesota, James, who went to prison?

Salaia, Kathleen Jennings. That's it, right. Right. And then, you know, she got a university job after she finally served her sentence. I am waiting for, and maybe it's already happened, I just missed it, but I can't wait for some universities to establish the George Floyd chair of racial studies, because that's surely coming at some point. Well, there's a piece by Thomas Chatterson today. I think it's in the Atlantic talking about how, you know, the right has been looking for their own George Floyd and founded in Charlie Kirk. And I think the amount of conversation that topic requires is absolutely zero. The only thing I want to end with, and we will end with this here, and it's because it's on the rundown. And I should note that these podcasts are made possible by the tireless and extraordinary work of our producer who does prepare for us a framework for discussion. Now, we go off it.

We say around it. We sometimes trash it up and ignore his questions entirely. But it's absolutely essential and gives us the framework for our chat. And he ended with this. He ended with the Screen Actors Guild condemning Tilly Norwood, an actress who does not exist. Somebody ginned up an AI actress and gave her a voice. and personality, and now apparently she's available for movie roles and television and commercials and the rest of it. And they don't like it. No, sir, they don't like it at all. And I just think it'd

be fascinating if in the future you have somebody who's so obsessed with an AI-generated actress that they storm an AI data center, desperately looking for the speeding hard drive in which she resides. Or they hate her so much that they blow up the data center and cut the power. I'm not particularly worried about this in my list of AI things to worry about simply because I don't know

any stars really that I care if she replaces. I think Tom Cruise is one of the few people in movies that I can actually point to a name because he seems to understand the role of what an old star should be. Are you guys worried about this exactly or are you

do you fear creeping AI saturating our entertainment until the line between reality and fiction is utterly, completely lost. Well, my problem with Tilly Norwood is she's a racist. Why would that be? Oh, no, in high school, she said all sorts of terrible things. Oh, right, yes. Well, that's true.

We probably have, they probably have a retcon the backstory. No, but this is what I would do. If I were a cynical actor on the left who didn't like Tilly Norwood, I would spread rumors about her. and then try and counsel her and see how many people went for it. Because I think there would be a non-zero percentage of the population that was, oh, yeah, Tilly. Yeah, I heard that Tilly Norwood was a terrible, terrible anti-Semite in school.

And she used to bully the other girls in the locker room. I reckon you could get 20 to 30% of the American public to believe this if you just said it enough. Do you think it would be possible if somebody found out something about the people who programmed her? if people found wrong think about her programmers whether or not that would spill over as some sort of guilt by association. Stephen, I know that you're a big movie fan and are you worried about it?

I think I'm not worried because I find what people respond to these days are things that have an element of truth to them that actually feel as though they were shot in real places that there's a feeling of reality to them. We got so tired in Avenger movies and the rest of the Marvel stuff seeing this baffling nonsense on screen,

none of which meant anything, all of which we knew was false. We're no longer, we don't have the ability anymore to be wowed by what they can do, I think. Maybe Tron. I'm actually thinking of seeing

this new Tron movie in IMAX because it makes no pretences to be real. It is, of course, the Tronverse or whatever they want to call it. But I think the desire for real, for authenticity is the killer app that humanities have, and that will fly to fiction,

that will apply to movies, that will apply to art, and all of these things, once we get past this AI craze. I mean, today, I think Open AI was valued at half a trillion. I think it hit $500 billion in its valuation. Hasn't made a dime. Hasn't made a dime. So we have a bubble about to pop.

And if it takes, you know, a lot of avatar-type movies with it, I'm not sure I necessarily care. Steven? Yeah, so if our founder, Rob Longer, with us, I think he would be skeptical of the future for a couple of reasons. now it may be special pleading on his part because he thinks AI can't write a joke as he said on this show several times

but I also think that for an awful lot of cinema certain things I think AI probably can't replicate which are the subtleties that really skilled actors bring to a role and the interpretations of a role and maybe AI might get good at that in the fullness of time but I also think

that this has been coming for a very long time if you go all the way back to I'll think of just two movies in particular first Zelling from you know the mid-80 He said it was Woody Allen's movie, right? Absolutely, all with film stock and treatment of that. That was right. And actually, that wasn't yet CGI.

A lot of that, well, I will skip over that except to say that some of the way to render a film looking, you know, with Woody Allen standing next to Calvin Coolidge, they take the film that they shot and composite together and stomp on it in a dirty floor of the studio. That was their technique for trying to make it an authentic film. And then, of course, Forrest Gump was when you began to see a CGI. to put words in the mouth of Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy and so forth, John Lennon, on the Dick Cavett show along with Forrest Gump, and all that was very amusing. And then you could really see it was obvious what was happening,

but now the technology is getting so good that it's much less obvious. So, but I think I probably share Rob skepticism that although, and of course, the movie and TV business being about making money, this is a cheap way to put out product that will generate some revenue. It's going to happen. But I don't think at the end of the day, might nick the salaries of people like Tom Cruise down to $10 million for picture instead of 20 or whatever he charges. But I don't, I don't know, I think I'm with Rob.

I don't think it's going to replace human beings completely. No. To end it all, well, to end it all, I'm not to end it all. I'm considering something that's not bad, James. When I tired of asking the AI exactly where the AI server farm in North Dakota was going to be, and I couldn't come up with an answer, I did something that was very human. I texted my brother-in-law, who is there. And I said, where's it going to be?

Is it going to be on our land? And he texted back and said, no, it's going to be on the other side of the freeway by the road, by the grain elevators, which I knew exactly. And AI would never know that I knew that particular intersection or that describing it as on the other side of the road by the elevators would describe precisely where it would want to be. Maybe it will someday. Maybe one day you'll turn to this podcast and all of us will be dead and we'll still be nattering away here. And won't that be fun? We have to teach it like Rob how to interrupt the segue, and we have to do a variety of other little fine-tuning things.

In the meantime, I think we'll be able to get 1,000 podcasts with still 100% authentic human beings here taking up your time. And I appreciate you taking the time to listen to us. By the way, we were brought to you by ricochet.com. You can support the site, the podcast, and all the other things we do, by going there and not just looking at it, but signing up. It's cheap. Load it's cheap.

and what you get as a member side that is the communities. I keep saying you've been looking for all these days on your internet. It's not Facebook. It's not as banal as that. It's not as crazy firehose of nonsense as Twitter and X can be. It is a sane, civil, center-right conversation, and we love all those siblings because they are important. If you could leave us a five-star review at Apple Podcast,

we'd like that very much. Thank you. And that's about all I have to say, except I'm out for a couple of weeks. I leave you guys to your own devices. I will see, oh, Charles, you know what I'm going to ask, don't you? Or don't you? I looked it up.

Okay. So this is RICOchet podcast, the RICOchet number version. What? 4.14.14.2. That's what that. Last week you said you knew we were going to ask, and I thought I did know that, and I didn't look it up. So this week, and then you nearly didn't ask, and I thought, wow, I've got it wrong both weeks. But now I haven't.

That's where we are. Four point and then a whole bunch of 14s. That's where we'll see you at rickshay.com. See you later, guys. Goodbye.