The Ricochet Podcast - That Crucial Bit of Crazy

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

President Trump's disruptive tendencies continue to shake up the Executive Branch at dizzying speed.  Thankfully, James and Charlie can keep their wits as they discuss the spending freeze/unfreeze and the reasonable expectations of the good that can be done with the president's pen. They're then joined by Dennis Kneale, host of the Ricochet Audio Network's "What's Bugging Me" podcast and author of The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk. Dennis teases some of the life lessons he thinks readers can draw from Musk to lead better lives; he also provides background for Elon's critical political conversion. Plus, James and Charlie wrap with some thoughts about the awful air collision in Washington, DC and the many reasons to be suspicious of DeekSeek...Sound from this week's open: Newly sworn-in Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy responds to the US suffering its worst commercial airline crash since 2009.

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here. Let me check. Am I right? Stephen? Okay. So we have, oh it's just me and Charlie. Alright. Redoing it all. Coming down. 3, 2, it's just me and Charlie. All right, redoing it all, coming down. Three, two, one.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lollix, and we've got Charles C.W. Cook with us as well. We're going to be talking to Dennis Neal, host of the What's Bugging Me podcast, to talk about his new book on Elon Musk. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Prior to the collision, the flight paths that were being flown from the military and from American,

that was not unusual for what happens in the D.C. airspace. And as this investigation moves forward, we will be able to provide more information to you about the details of that statement. Welcome, friends. It's the Ricochet Podcast, and it is number 726 if you're making hash marks on your cell wall. I'm James Lalix here in Minneapolis, sitting across from a beautiful 31-story skyscraper, which is the tallest building built in the year 2000 in the United States of America. It sold a few years ago for $200 million. It was sold yesterday for $6 million,

such is the state of things here. In Florida, we have Charles C.W. Cook. Charlie, how are you doing? I'm doing well. I imagine. Is downtownapolis really that troubled um well kind of sort of yeah it is and what it's causing of course is massive increases in property taxes for the homeowners so everybody got to go work from home and that was absolutely fantastic and And who needs a city anyway? I hate to commute. And the end result is an empty downtown.

So it's remarkable because I pass through this building every day, and I'm thinking it may be torn down. It may be a 31-story skyscraper demolished because it costs $10 to $25 million a year to heat and cool the thing, and there's just simply no money to be had in it. Or everybody says, let's turn it into housing as if you can wave a wand and all of a sudden pipes and windows are manifested everywhere. It doesn't work that way. We'll see. Anyway, it's been an interesting week. It's been ups and downs. It's been calamitous. Let us start with, well, there was a freeze, and then there wasn't. You can talk about the metrics, the performance, how it looked, the optics, the idea, whether or not it was good or bad, or what are the rest of it.

I think the kerfuffle surrounding it will be forgotten, but you hope that the enthusiasm for a line-by-line examination of these programs and grants is not. That's the important thing to take away, isn't it? Yes. There may be some legal obstacles, but in many cases, this power has been delegated to the president and to the various agencies which work for the president. And so a freeze is permissible. There will be exceptions.

I'm sure there will be litigation, and that's fine. But the White House has been tasked by Congress with an enormous amount of the legwork in determining where these funds go, fact-finding, and so forth. It seems a little odd to say you're not allowed to pause before you make your next decision. You're not allowed to audit. You're not allowed to reconsider based on your political re-evaluation of the landscape. So I do expect in the long run this project will be continued. Right. The New York Times had a list of 2,600 grants which were in danger, and one could peruse them, and that was a nice public service. I'm glad they did that. I kept scrolling down and scrolling down, and my browser struggled to keep up with the number of programs that it was loading constantly until I got to the bottom. And you

can look through some of them and say, well, I think that's a legitimate expenditure for government. But then you can look at others and say, I have no idea whatsoever why we are doing this, other than we did it last year and ergo must do it next. Somebody online, and I can't remember the name of the person, alas, I'll try to find it for the comments, Twitter user, SmallRRepublican, i think is what it is is a data cruncher extraordinary and built a database into which you can plug any keyword and it will tell you the government programs that are perhaps spending money on that somebody put in yarn and came up with a whole variety of programs that the government is funding to encourage

knitting in underserved communities i put in coffee and I found a $600,000 grant to another country to encourage sustainable farming on some plot in some indigenous land in the back of the country of whatever. It's remarkable how much we pump out in terms of largesse and how little we seem to be able to know how to get our hands around it. Do you think, however, that Doge, and I just love the fact that it's named after a mispronunciation of an animal and a coin, is actually going to be able to do something of this?

Because the reason that I was saying the freeze is good, I think the freeze was done wrong i think and across the board freezes they did announcing it and then having to explain it and say no these things are exempt i think it's easier to just say to come out and say here is a trench of programs that we are freezing and we're going to look it has nothing to do with anything else that the government does. These are 2,600 non-essential or perhaps essential things. We're going to look at these and then go through them and freeze them line by line. Because we all know when we have these blue ribbon panels and commissions that issue a white paper about what to do, nothing is ever done, ever. So this seemed to be a good way to do it. But do you think then that after we do have the freeze and evaluation do you actually think there's going to be an appetite to to to knock them off because i don't think it's

performative i think they actually are serious about doing this i think they are i think this is the one area where doge will be useful so the way that this has been sold is typical of the Republicans in that it is exclusive of the real drivers of our debt and deficits, which are entitlements and interest on the debt. You can't touch those because the public doesn't want to, the president doesn't want to, and congress doesn't want to. And because you can't touch those, you can't reduce the debt, and you can't not pay your debts because otherwise you default and you cause all sorts of other problems. So we aren't serious about cutting spending. But there are two areas that were identified in that initial Doge report that you really can do something about. One of them is this, which is discretionary grants determined by the executive branch. And the other is fraud.

And there is a lot of fraud in Medicare and there's a lot of fraud in Medicaid. I could be wrong. I think the number in the report was $200 billion. Now, relative to the overall budget, that's not going to fix our issues, but it would still be good to have that $200 billion in the treasury. $200 billion here, $200 billion there. Eventually, you're talking a lot of money. Exactly. So, providing they get the right people in, i think this could be useful i also think as a rule that it is really good for any organization especially those that take money from the public by force to re-evaluate every few years what is doing i do it with my finances i look through my

credit card bill and think do i need that do need this? Was that a good use of money? I was 15 years ago dating this girl whose grandparents lived in a really nice part of Michigan that is full of enormous houses. And I was absolutely astonished at the time by that house and many cars and clothes and so on. And one morning, the grandmother drove 16 miles to find gas that was 30 cents cheaper. And I thought, hang on a minute. You have champagne at dinner. You have this massive house.

You have these Lincoln cars. and you're doing that. But then it occurred to me, well, that's a habit. And that habit is one of the reasons they have all of that stuff, is that they have gone through and looked at where to save money as a matter of course for probably 50 years and the federal government is the opposite of that it hasn't done this for probably 50 years there are probably line items in there that started at some point and may have completely transmuted themselves from the original intent i i don't want to be too harsh on the New York Times. I'm sure that resource is useful. But it's also probable that whatever the New York Times is explaining a given program is doing may not be exactly what it does in practice. Or if it does do it, it perhaps doesn't do it

efficiently or in the way that we would want. And the only way that you could find that out is to conduct an audit. So, I think this think this is really really good providing that we don't kid ourselves that it is going to solve our issue which is that every year deliberately and with the blessing of the american public we spend about a trillion or more dollars more than we take in right well i mean yes if they put that in the sense that um we're going to do an audit and figure out you know we're paying're paying both for Acorn Streaming Service and BritBox. We can probably get just one. And people would put those in. At least it would be explainable to the people who are addicted to British crime shows, of which I happen to be one of them.

Watching something now called Cormorant Strike, which is apparently a very famous private eye series. And J.K. Rawlings is the executive producer, so I'm amazed it got on the air without enough people protesting outside Netflix headquarters. But the second thing is this. When you mention entitlements, is it not the time, perhaps, for somebody with Trump's megaphone

and a bull in the china shop paradigm-breaking reputation to say, hey, we're not going to touch anything from anybody for anybody who is below this age, above this age. But if you are below this age, we're going to give you the option to quit, to opt out of it, to put your money into some, I mean, various ways to do it. Say you have to invest in the stock market, you have to have a 401k, or you have to have something to supplement Medicaid or Medicare or Social Security to have something to supplement medicaid or medicare or social security but just you don't if you don't want to you don't have to be now i know that the system depends on younger people coming up the chain and paying into it that's the ponzi scheme nature of

it but we're going to be stuck paying this entirely forever unless we figure out a different way to run social security or is that just too much of the plate for the moment it's time for trump to do that if he wants his approval rating to be 25 i completely agree with you i think paul ryan was correct about this i say this but i'm allowed to be perhaps even enthusiastic about being unpopular trump is is not. I'm a writer. I can do this. I do spend a lot of my time saying things that I know the people reading me won't like because I think they're true.

And I think I owe it to the few people who do read me to tell them what I think is true. And if they don't want to read anymore, that's fine. But I'm certainly not going to bend to public opinion because I'm not a politician, but Trump is. And that's a more complicated relationship. And without going edmund burke and all of the debates over whether you're supposed to lead or follow as a politician in a democratic society donald trump understands and is correct in his assumption that the american public does not want to do entitlement reform and

he knows that if he touches this and i should say i don't think he wants to i don't think this is trump's political view but he knows that if he touches this he will be demagogued in every direction it will get in the way with the way of all the other things he wants to do in his brief time probably two years before he loses the house, certainly four years before he's unable to be president anymore, he knows it will destroy his presidency. And I don't like the fact that both parties have alighted on this view and that this is where we got to as a country. And I don't like the fact that we were willing to talk about it

at least 16 years ago. In a way, we're not now. But I also do understand that from Republicans. And I ultimately blame the left side of the aisle for the total unwillingness to even discuss this that leads to republicans having to essentially give up on it because when we did talk like adults we were crushed for it so what have they done they've decided that they'd rather get all the other things on their list done,

and this will just have to collapse of its own volition. Quite right. Panhead or Phillips, we're screwed. But you, of course, are part of the National Review monolith that does nothing but praise Trump, according to Matt Iglesias, who I guess hasn't scrolled down below the site or opened up the magazine in some time. Nevertheless, I can imagine that somebody at NR or NRO doing a little research over the freeze and the programs and the rest of it might have thought, I wonder what the OMB website is saying about this.

And this has been a bugaboo of mine for the last week. And nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to care that there isn't a website for the omb there used to be that is that true i didn't know that not anymore um because my wife who works in health care and finance and the rest of it when this all dropped everybody was you know chickens heads on fire whatever metaphors you want to construct frankenstein like was going to the omb website for guidance and if you type in oh you know omb.gov whatever permutation you do it goes right to whitehouse.gov right to a picture of president trump filling the whole

screen pointing at somebody and there is no omb try it maybe they fixed it now in the past omb office of management and budget.gov has always defaulted to the White House page, but it's a subdirectory OMB, and therein you will find all kinds of stuff. I went back into archive.org's Wayback Machine and was able to find countless screen grabs of a discrete site that the OMB had with a variety of links to programs and resources. They're not there anymore. And they stopped being there on inauguration day. Now, I was reading The Hill because The Hill was talking about the Trump administration taking down all these sites. Okay. And I thought, well, that's interesting. I can understand this. I can understand that. And The Hill said that the Trump administration had taken down a site

about the Constitution, which was up during Joe Biden's years. Now, what would you take away from that, Charles? What impression would you get from that? Well, I don't know. What did the site say? Well, that's just it. It was about the Constitution. It explained what the Bill of Rights were, explained the ratification process. It didn't have an actual copy of the Constitution, but it did have the Bill of Rights, etc. But the idea was, during Joe Biden's administration, WhiteHouse.gov would talk about the Constitution.

Trump comes in and he takes it away. Well, actually, no. What happened was, there was a subsection of the site called our founding documents or something like that, and they nuked that, and the Constitution site

happened to be one of them. The Constitution and the founding document sites were actually put up during the Trump administration, and then were actually put up during the trump administration and then were just sitting there during the biden administration so the impression that the hill gives you is that well biden was was keen on putting the constitution up there and trump took it down it's not true constitution could be found at the national archives it could be found at the senate pages anyway so i know that somebody came in and just nuked a whole bunch of subdirectories and OMB was one of them.

But we don't have a reason of all times not to have an OMB resource. This would seem to be one that you want to be able to go to that page. And you can't. And I called them up and I called their chatbots and I asked where the page was. And all they could tell me is the OMB website is not available at this time. And nobody seems to care about this. And I think it's a really strange thing. I mean, never ascribe to malice what you can to incompetence.

But it's like I've spent my week trying to get people to say, did you know there's actually no website anymore for the OMB during a time when we're talking about, I don't know, management and budget? It seems. But that's just me. Probably this will get fixed because Trump's OMB guy is pretty good. He's the same guy he had last time. And he's one of his best appointments.

I think he's already got through the Senate. If not, he's going to sell through the Senate. Well, good. Well, that's fine. All I know is that, you know, maybe they should hire some people who are a little better when it comes to the website and getting it up there. And actually, if you're in the business of hiring somebody, if you're a business owner or such, you probably have felt, no doubt That's not why you got into business. But what you really do well as a small business owner is find solutions, right? And the solution to the HR problem is Bamboo HR. Bamboo HR is a powerful but flexible all-in-one HR solutions

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managing editor of Forbes, a senior editor of the Wall Street Journal before starting the Dennis Neal Media. He's the host of What's Bugging Me, a podcast available right here, or maybe not so aggressively. What's bugging me? We'll have him tell you. It's a podcast available right here in the Ricochet Audio Network. And he is the author of the just published The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk. Dennis, welcome. Thanks so much, and it's so great to see you because I hear your voice, James, on my podcast,

What's Bugging Me, which is a house ad that runs in virtually every episode. So I've had this person pictured in mind this and man i wish i had your voice it's a great voice and it's great do i do i do i match the the vision because i'm all you know i'm napoleonic in my stature which is to say not particularly tall and your voice your voice is 12 feet tall it is so rich and sonorous and the entire time in my mind, I'm seeing Stephen Hayward, actually. That's kind of who I'm thinking. Well, I'm here in my autumnal colors and my special color-coordinated glasses. If you'd caught me on another day, I'd be in a suit and tie with the white glasses or the horn rims.

I'm a chameleon, actually. I'm an absolute chameleon. So whatever vision you have in your head, wipe it away. Upend the etch-a-sketch. It'll be different tomorrow. But we've got you here now. We love your podcast, of course. And Elon Musk has gone from being the darling of the left because he's the guy.

He's an immigrant. He came here. He's high tech. He envisioned what the future of electric cars can be. God bless this guy. And now he's a Nazi. And I was going back and trying to figure out the point at which things began to turn on him. And I actually think that the progressives began to turn on Elon Musk at the moment that he launched a convertible sports car into space.

I think that was the first moment that they realized that there was an American vibe to this guy that they didn't like. But, of course, he's a Nazi. It was surprising that he even started out with their support because the left, and by the way, we always refer to the far right, but the left is only just the left, but the left so hate wealth creation. They so resent the very wealthy same donors that they then go to the back door to get money from uh and so i'm surprised that he did have that support but then of course once he came out for trump and it cannot have been an easy decision i think he really genuinely feared for america's future and

his being an adopted u.s citizen he has the zeal of a convert and he cares a hell of a lot more about many american issues than most Americans do. And I think the First Amendment is paramount among them. Well, that brings us to X or Twitter. And I've given up calling it Twitter. I just have. I'm sorry. I lost.

I give in. It's X. So he buys X, which everybody regards as an absolute folly. Musk's folly, I'm surprised they didn't call it. And it's like a rich man, it's like Jeff Bezos writing, you know, buying a newspaper, except you get the feeling that Bezos does not spend every day obsessively reading every single article in it and responding to it, whereas you really get the feeling that Musk is camped on this thing and actually using it to shape a national narrative, which is

what appalls people on the left and gladdens some people on the right. I'll let Charlie get in here for a second, but is that your feeling about it, that his stewardship or his destruction and turning it into a right-wing Nazi cabal, that X and Musk have been instrumental in shifting a national vibe. You know, it's so sad that when one immigrant to America and the world's richest man decides to favor free speech and just let it let it go, man, go ahead on the platform and we'll let you say as much as possible that that ends up being looked at in the way you just described it as such a terrible negative thing that it's a conservative agenda i was in college in the decades ago the liberals were the ones who wanted to live and let live hey man you

live your life the way you want and you know free speech and gosh now several decades later it's totally flip-flopped around, and the liberals, do you know that something like, I forget the stat, I think it's one-third of Americans, and this is in a poll taken over 25 years for our sentiments on the First Amendment, one-third of Americans say it is more important to prevent hate speech than it is to protect free speech and that's just horrifying and then another one-third or so say yeah i don't know well that's really bad that you guys don't know but along comes our adopted u.s citizen who says lesson six you know my book offers 11 lessons of elon lesson six is free speech is everything.

Stand up and be heard. And he's done so at great expense to his own personal pocket of, once you're worth 400 billion, who cares? I mean, he lost 40% and so did his investors on Twitter turned X. After that first year, all we saw, James, was story after story and the lib wit lamestream media saying he's ruined Twitter he's breaking Twitter he's destroyed Twitter today X is the single most powerful influential platform in the world and he made it that way by freeing it not by pursuing an agenda but yeah he comes out and he takes sides now that's a bad idea when you're a ceo he wants to sell cars to 100 of the audience he's just turned off half the audience why would he do

that he did it because he loves america and he loves the first amendment i truly believe his intent is good which is why i'm so offended to see this stupid dimwit media backlash. It's a Nazi salute. Seek Heil. Give me a break. This man wore a medallion in honor of the Hamas-taken hostages around his neck for a year when he was given that by the parents of a hostage. I mean, it's just ridiculous.

First it was Trump, and then we had a huge backlash by voters and viewers saying, you know liberal media he's not hitler what are you talking about i'm now seeing he's not hitler first we had that and then now they've kind of transported over to musk and it's such a tired card to play it's really sad so is he crazy and i say that affectionately because my worry about the illiberalism you're mentioning, aside from the fact that it's just not how the United States works or should work, is that when you start pressuring people, when you create a conformist culture,

what you do is you push out the sort of people who are eccentric or odd, but who are brilliant and who will push your society forward. And worse than that, you prevent others from flowering. And I've written about this before. I've talked about it a lot. If you look back at some of the great figures in American history, some of them were crazy, literally crazy. Same in Britain. Some of them were also evil, which I don't think Musk is. But Henry Ford was a terrible, terrible person. He was

also a great genius who invented the car industry. Is Musk someone that we should look at and say, all right, he's a weirdo who is off the charts brilliant and the greatest industrialist in a century? Or is that more calculated what was your conception of him when you were looking into him and writing the book um i would say but i would say that there's a 90 is the the real part and the genius and it's this mix of like the edison einstein jobs and pt barnum there's this 10 sliver on top that is insane that's out of his mind out of this world and even though it's only 10 it's required to unlock the full value of the other 90 this ability you know it's uh this ability to dream huge dreams and and to think of going to mars

on a private enterprise approach instead of just going to government and waiting to do it for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years is truly insane to even think of that. I mean, you know, Walter Isaacson and his 688 page tome, Elon Musk, tells the story of 20 years ago, him going to Russia to buy an engine and tell him, I want to go to Mars. And this engineer, a famous engineer in Russia, spits on his shoes. I devote a whole chapter to that with a guy who was there with him, who was introducing him to the Russians, James Cantrell. So yeah, there is that incredible dream. But the other thing, though, is he is willing to spend decades pursuing it.

Look at what he just did. There's an announcement this week. Visa. Hey, man, we're going to be the backbone for X money. So you can send your friend on X or your vendor or plumber money over X. This is something that Elon wanted to do with PayPal when Elon 20 years ago invented X.com, the everything app. PayPal board said no.

CEO said no. Boom. Elon left. PayPal kept X.com for the everything app. PayPal board said no. CEO said no. Boom, Elon left. PayPal kept X.com for, I don't know, like 17 years or something. And then like 2021 or so, I think it was, Elon buys back X.com for a million dollars. This is two years before he would move to buy Twitter. So the guy was thinking all along, I'm going to do that one day. He never gave it up. And so look at Mars. And then I read about

this. I didn't know this. I thought, okay, he'll make it to Mars and yay. No, he thinks in 30 years, 20 years, we'll have a million people or more on Mars. But then he's thinking, but then we got to figure out a way to make it to the moon of Jupiter farther out. And from there, we should be looking at that asteroid belt. And it's an amazing, an amazing bold grandiose vision and as much as he loves optimism because he says it's the what do you call that the epigram at the start of the book that I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right as optimistic as all is the weird thing is it comes back to a fundamentally bleak view where we are going to expire as a species if we stay only on this planet because

we're going to blow it up we can't even go to the moon because that's too close to the earth and when the earth blows up the moon's going to get blessed we got to get to mars so it's kind of a pessimistic bleak view that's motivating this incredibly buoyant vision well any solar events such as a supernova the rest of it would pretty much fry mars as well maybe he's talking about an extinction level event where a big rock hits the earth and we better have a backup but he's right if we don't get off this rock then that's it then the only the only expression of humanity will be this small little craft that's going out there with a laser disc of beethoven and chuck berry and that's not enough i mean it's more probably than most species get and it's great but it's a science fiction imagination that he has

it's a star trek imagination that he has it says looks these things are actually plausible these things actually there's a reason there's an underlying reason for that if i may go on and uh charles did that answer a question or not yeah absolutely okay well but there's an underlying reason okay my book has these 11 lessons one per chapter it's 11 lessons that i argue fuel elon's enormous success on so many different fronts. And what can we borrow from that to build a better life for ourselves? Because a lot of us are living lives of quiet desperation. We are underachieving. We are not taking on risk. We are not loving out loud and living out loud. How does Elon do it? It's not just because he's rich. He's always done it. And I believe that the first lesson, and the publisher told me dude mention this

last okay it's just too weird the first lesson is all of this may be fake so just go for it he believes that we live inside a computer simulation he believes the chances are billions to one in favor of this idea and while it might have started out as a thought experiment, he came to embrace it. And once you believe that, and what I argue in the leadership genius of Elon Musk is, well, let's say you did, let's say it were real. Well, now wouldn't you take bigger risks in your life? Wouldn't you speak out out, when you live a bigger life, because this is a game, you've got to make it as entertaining as possible. And I think that drives

a lot of what Elon does. It frees him to take on extraordinary thoughts and projects. Look at the brain chip. You know, he's helped two quadriplegics, I think it is, you know, get some kind of control of computer streams through this brain chip.

But his real vision there, guys, is in 30 years, millions of people will have a brain chip to help them communicate with AI faster. Because right now, talking with AI, because AI can operate in trillions per second floating point operations or something. So talking to AI, AI feels like it's talking to a tree. It asks it something of you, but it's taking forever in its time for you to answer. And he says, eventually we'll have these chips ourselves. I mean, the guy's just so amazingly beyond anything we've ever seen before. So why did he become a Republican? What happened to move him from being that guy who you said has always been like this in his disposition but who was all in for obama to becoming a guy who stood on stage with trump and

if you look at the absurd accusation that he did a nazi salute it was exuberance over trump's win which was a shift for him given his position 15 years ago what happened there so two things happened to him dimwit democrats and live wit media i mean the democrats and i have been a registered democrat all my life. I still am. Because if you're in New York, the Democrat primary determines who's getting into office. Although now, in recent years, I have not voted because I just think I'm not voting for any Democrat ever again. Because they left me. They went so woke and so stupidly liberal and this whole race-based identity that you are what your skin

color is not what you have achieved not what you're striving for this whole shift toward we want equity and equal outcomes for everyone regardless of the amount of effort they put into it that's equity instead of equality and equal opportunity to make the most of yourself all right sometimes there's not enough opportunity in some sectors and some among some people right work on that but but what they did my god and look at this why they swapped in one word seamlessly with another because they seem like they're the same equity equality what's the difference this is everybody wants equality or believes in it fundamentally is a cornerstone of american identity all of you equity just gets swapped in there when it's a totally different concept it was just adopted by new york city voters election or two ago where

equity is put into our new york charter that we seek equity and everything and it's just awful and it's antithetical to what elon. So you look at how the Democrats went crazy and were allowed to because of the media. And I was a reporter, editor, on-air anchor for CNBC and Fox Business for a total of over 30 years. And I don't recognize a lot of the media today. And by the way, it might add to, it's self-important to even think of it, but it might add to, you know, some media not doing stories on this book when they did plenty of stories on Breaking Twitter, that book that came out, and Character Limit, another by three New York Times reporters, you know, going after Elon and attacking him. But when the media abandoned their role as watchdog of both sides, and they were always kind of more left.

And when I worked at the Wall Street Journal and at Forbes, I was always more conservative than most of my colleagues. And still, once they abandoned even trying to hide the liberalism and the bias they had in the media, well, then there's nothing stopping the Democrats. And they weren't stopping themselves. And I think Elon just felt like, oh, my god, we've got to do something, because the Republicans are just not very good at it, okay? They're just not very good at marshalling, you know, they fight so much among themselves, the Republicans, it's really kind of touching to me that they don't even manage to marshal a good force, a good phalanx going after the opposition.

They're too busy fighting amongst themselves. Look, they can barely even get cabinet approvals for Trump. You've got Republicans voting against him when he just won the way he won. So I think Elon stepped in. And it was a multiplier effect, as a matter of fact. And I'm stealing this from someone else. I was just on Wise Guys. John Tabaka on Newsmax.

He's this Staten Island guy, Italian. He plays up the whole angle. And it's just a wonderful time to go on there and talk with him. And someone else there said, well, it's not just what Elon said. It's that he freed the X platform to let everyone else say whatever they were going to say. That was the bigger factor. When we had Twitter, Facebook, all of those guys in with government, letting literally dozens of agencies, Department of Defense, CIA, FBI, the White House,

request, hey, muzzle these accounts, play up these other accounts. It was all a liberal agenda. They were silencing literally thousands of conservative voices that millions of people had the right to listen to, and the media did not even cover that scandal. I did more columns and more podcasts on the Twitter files, revelations, than the entire staff of the New York Times and the Washington Post combined. I did a story count and looked at it. But in the media, when did they stop believing in and defending free speech?

It was up to an immigrant. It was up to a US adopted citizen, Elon Musk, to free that platform and then forgive the filibuster guys. But what happened next? Mark flippin' Zuckerberg comes out and says, the government pressured us. We were wrong to bow to that. I want to, he literally said the words,

restore free expression to Facebook, Instagram, threads. Remember when threads was the Twitter killer? Oh, yes. And today it's at less than half of X. But even, and he says that i'm not going to rely on mainstream media for fact checking and i'm firing the fact checking agencies i know a guy who knows a guy they're going to lose half their employees because they were making millions on this this censorship industrial complex that's not because they think we're in trouble it's because

they want to make millions okay that's the profit But my gosh, the whole thing is just out of control. And Elon and Freeing X allowed us to fight back. And not enough of us are speaking up. I think this is that same survey shows like 40% of people have never posted online because they fear getting called out or canceled. Well, it's time more of us did stand up and make ourselves heard because because the the liberals went way too far and there was too much silence from the other side afraid of being somehow racist or sexist or or hitlerian or canceled or called up and having yourself doxed and swatted because somebody doesn't like what you say and has a bug in their bonnet about you yeah now you're right there i mean the the the previous commitment to free speech and free expression was thrown out the window the minute it seemed

as if the other side would it would would take advantage of it to challenge the prevailing narrative and what the prevailing narrative was covid was an absolute, came out of a wet market when a pangolin farted. And Trump was unquestionably a Russian agent. And when those things were the truth, then any pushback against them was seen not only just as disinformation, but a social evil that had to be oppressed. It doesn't matter whether or not years later people find out that's not the case. We'll just shrug and go on as usual no we're not going to shrug and go on as usual because we saw how the instruments of the state were brought to bear against the instruments of of information dissemination and it's not going to happen again and the people who just want to

blindly pretend that it didn't are said are it's remarkable how they've just memory-holed. I've said this before, is that 1984 turns out to have been a volunteer project. We ourselves memory-hole the necessary information. We put the listening devices in our own home willingly. Too many people have volunteered for that. And Musk doesn't have that spirit. We'll let you go with this. One of the things that I really enjoy about the guy,

and he's weird, he's strange. I think, like Charlie says, he's crazy in many ways. And he says, and is susceptible to things and may have a attention span of a gnat on a hot plate. But also, he's made those cars. Also, he's made a company that bores holes in the ground where the cars can go. And even named it the Boring Company, which I think is delightful. He's made the Neuralink, which is going to be fascinating. I'm not a transhumanist, but we'll see where this goes.

And what he's done in space has revitalized the American imagination, or at least it should have. boring shuttle flights and nothing really happening and space just sort of becoming nothing but the international space station up there which probably smells like old diapers and has a bunch of guys who are doing experiments on whether or not agar can form bubbles in zero g i mean i don't know we have rockets going up all the time and landing like the rockets of your like the ones of the science fiction movies that we saw as a kid, or caught by the little pinches that come out and gently take it to the earth. The imaginative, illustrative potential of this is so invigorating that how anybody can watch this and see, Musk had released a wonderful time-lapse photography of rockets, of X-rockets going off over the years. And it's just like, what a remarkable civilization we are

that this we can do. And to scatter the skies with satellites that can give internet to the whole world where a sclerotic government spends $73 billion to wire up broadband to the barn somewhere and can't get it done. And this guy has a constellation of objects up there which can provide information. I'll leave with this.

There was a guy on Twitter who said, I like the old days when the billionaires would build like a library in small towns instead of trying to go to Mars. I thought, you idiot. The Carnegie libraries were great for the time, of course, but every single one of those Starlink panels is itself a Carnegie Library times a million. So let's say it isn't Mars.

Could it possibly be that a global, interconnected, non-governmental, free information society that Starlink enables may in the end run be the greatest thing that he did. I certainly hope so. At the same time, let's remember that the internet began as an instrument of freedom and governments helped fund its start and then governments quickly turned the internet and online commentary as their way of surveilling all of their people. And now we have our allies in the UK jailing people because of what they post on the internet,

which was supposed to free us. Let's remember also that Republicans will be every bit as willing to try to censor voices they don't like as the Democrats. I really believe that. During the Trump administration, they requested 5,500 accounts on Twitter be silenced. And so it's up to the people to stand up.

But if they have a platform like X, if they have a satellite uplink access the way Musk is providing, we can get around government. I mean, I don't think Musk trusts the Republicans all that much more than he trusts Democrat because Musk doesn't trust government. So I appreciate what you just said about Musk.

I mean, you're taking all the stuff I would have said, and you make me sound less kind of adoring. That's good for me. I'm just talking. You wrote the book. I'm just blabbing. Well, you know, so the question is, I mean, you're right that he gives us vision and excitement. He believes that all of life, this is Lesson 11, that the most ironic outcome, the opposite of what expected, or the most entertaining outcome, is the most likely outcome because he does believe in that simulation. You wouldn't run a simulation and have boring outcomes. Well, his going for those most entertaining, incredible, opposite outcomes, that gives us hope. That gives us the ability to

dream big, huge dreams. So apply some of his techniques to your own life. Build a better life or feel better about the life you have. That's what these 11 lessons could do. That's what I'm selling, baby. I really believe in it. I feel so grateful that I've been allowed to publish this book. Thank you to Harper Collins and Eric Nelson, the editor who came up with the idea. It wasn't my idea.

But then when I ran with it, it just fit all these 11 lessons. And you'll be amazed at how they interlock and feed off of each other. And I really hope that people can get something out of it. The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk by Dennis Neal. And of course, Dennis can be found in his own podcast here where you can find out exactly what is bugging him here at the Ricochet Audio Network.

Dennis, it's been great. It's a great subject. And your book, I look forward I mean, smart guy. You always gave us a couple, two or three of the 11. Folks got to buy the book to get all 11 points and see how they apply to their own life. Thanks a lot. We'll talk to you later, Dennis.

Have a glorious day. You too. You know, when you get to Mars, though, and that's the thing, it's just amusing to me that the people who used to be excited about the humanities spreading out, like back in the 60s when we had good liberals like Gene Roddenberry, who would come up with this whole big narrative about we're going into space, we're going to do wonderful things out there, we're going to bring the best of American human values out there. that's seen as, I'm sure, colonization and extractive. So it's right. You can't go to Mars and act in an extractive fashion because that's a wrong thing. And besides, it's silly because it's very cold

and people will die. Well, I think they'll probably take some warm blankets there. And you know what the thing of it is, is warm blankets here at this time of the year, I got to tell you, I live in a place where the temperature today is 55 degrees what it was a week ago because it gets cold here.

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DeepSeek. Supposedly, stocks tanked, hair was pulled, sweat was exuded. People wondered whether or not it was over for American AI. Stargate in trouble because the Chinese apparently were able to run a far superior AI on, I think they're running it on the CPU from a Timex watch from 1979 or something like that. They're very proud of it. How do you take all this? I've got an opinion, but what do you think?

I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical of these claims and I'm skeptical of the response. Let me give you a few reasons I'm skeptical. One, I think they've got a bunch of really high-powered Nvidia chips that they smuggled in through Singapore. Two, the Chinese Communist Party is full of lying liars who lie, and the claims that they make ought to be taken with that understanding. Three, the scale of Chinese industrial espionage

is such that if indeed they stole a lot of this, and goodness me they steal everything, then sure they will have been able to cut some of the development time but they're not ahead of us they're behind us and they're merely echoing what we've done and the fourth reason i'm skeptical is that when everyone started using this product they very quickly said oh now no one else can sign up this is only to be used by people who have Chinese phone numbers, which is the sort of thing you do if you look at your metrics and realizing you're hitting server capacity, but don't want to say that because your entire claim rests upon the idea that you can scale this up for a fraction of the cost.

Now, it doesn't mean nothing was done here. They have the second mover advantage, of course, but I am skeptical of this. And my last thought on this is, don't install it on your phone. Seriously. Do not install it on your phone. It's a keyboard logger.

It is absolutely amazing to me that we've just been through this TikTok saga. There is a Supreme Court case you can read. It was nine to nothing, and it includes a whole bunch of information that even I hadn't read as somebody who's interested in this about the extent to which TikTok was Chinese spyware. And a few weeks after this happened,

the American public voluntarily said, sure, why not download the latest Chinese spy app? It records your keystrokes. It records your IP address. It can tap into the geolocation services on your phone. And it says literally in the terms and services, this is not a secret. This is not subterfuge.

It literally says on the bit you have to press with your finger that the data that it collects and it lists all of the elements will be stored in china and could be accessed by the chinese communist party so here is my thing in addition to my skepticism it is not going to miss on me that having lost the last mass surveillance tool that the chinese managed to inject into the American market, they suddenly came up with another one. And Americans, for some reason, said, oh, where do I get that? Don't don't. I don't like AI at all. I use it all the time, I find it. We've had this conversation before. And I use Gemini,

the spoken back and forth interactive one that Google put out. And I always find it interesting that when it says something that I know to be untrue, which is interesting because it will go off and scurry and get its stuff from its sources and come back and say something.

And I know that that's wrong, and I will tell it. It will just blithely say, you're right, I was mistaken, and proceed at full steam with the same amount of confidence that it had before. I know, it should work at CNN. CNN, AI, DEI, the acronyms of the day uh there's nothing much to say about the dreadful accident in washington dc in the air is other than to regret deplore into all the things you do in this international tragedy like this the secondary conversation

that is being had about that is the reaction of people to it. And when I got this, I was on the treadmill when this happened, and I was looking at this, and I was convinced that when I went to Twitter, I'm sorry, to X, that everybody would have gone into two camps. And I knew that there were going to be people who said, well, this is DEI in action. And I knew that there are going to be people who said, well, this is DEI in action, and I knew that there were going to be people who said, well, this is because of Trump, that Trump fired the FAA director, and Trump is going to cut the budget, that this is true, and I was astonished to find it, but the ratio, interestingly enough, on X, which is supposedly, of course, the Nazi platform,

was like seven to one, blaming Trump. Again, that may be my algorithm. I've sort of liked to culture disparate, dissident voices on X, at least dissident as regards to what I think. So I'm not in a bubble. But when I went to Reddit, it was virtually the same thing there. The problem is, is that when Trump comes out and says without any evidence whatsoever, let me put that a different way. The message that people have gotten is that when Trump comes out and says without any evidence, you know, whatsoever, let me put that a different way. The message that people have gotten is that Trump came out and blamed DEI and they don't know what the backstory to that is. Do you think, Charles, that we're going to, that there will be a fuller,

because I don't think that had anything to do with what happened. I really, I don't. I may be wrong, but i don't think that had anything to do with what happened i really i don't i may be wrong but i don't but there is a conversation to be had about how the previous administrator i believe it was under obama changed what they were doing in order to reconfigure the demographic population of the faa and i assume the air traffic controllers Is this a conversation we're ready to have? I think two things simultaneously. I think having DEI in any organization is immoral, and I also think that it is a problem because you are by definition eschewing meritocracy.

The second thing I think is that it is unlikely that it is the proximate cause of this particular incident, and I think those who are making the second claim are wrong. It's a little bit like, and forgive me if you've heard me say this on another show or elsewhere, but it's a little bit like gas prices, where you can make the sophisticated case, the correct case, I think, which is that as a country, we should have a drill baby drill approach. We should open up lands, we should encourage investment, we should create as much cheap energy as we can, and end up with cheap energy. That's a correct argument.

What is usually not correct is that the transient change in gas prices is the product of whoever happens to be president at that moment. We confuse these things. No, I mean, no, it's not going to go up 10 cents or 15 cents here. It's more likely to be the effect of supplies of the California switching over to a different blend or something like that. But the aggregate effect over the years is the result of executive actions like striking down a pipeline. Exactly. And so what I think is probably true is that our air traffic control system is not as good as it could be because

of decisions that were made by Obama and Biden. I don't think that this accident happened because of DEI. And I think it's a mistake to make that claim. Certainly, if you don't know anything concrete, I would just say that flying is unbelievably safe. And this is a horrible accident. It's the first accident since 2009. The sum total of deaths in commercial aviation accidents in the United States in the last 15 years is 67, and they all died two days ago. There were 60 passengers, four crew on the plane, and three soldiers in the helicopter.

That is horrendous. I feel very sad about it. I also know that in the same period, since 2009, 1,000 Americans have been killed by wasps. There are so many flights in a year that it boggles the mind. 800 million Americans fly every year. There are 800 million passengers in the united states there are around 15 billion passengers in the last 20 years in the united states and we have had very very few accidents let alone fatal accidents that the

safety record is fabulous and occasionally you're going to get a freak accident like this. And to try and blame it on a proposed hiring freeze that hadn't affected anything yet, that was submitted eight days prior to the crash, is just rank stupidity. To try and blame it on this president or that president or this policy or that president without evidence is rank stupidity. The statistical likelihood is that once in a while, this is going to happen. And we will learn from this, and we will, as we have in the past, make it less likely next time.

And probably air travel will get safer as a result of this, as it did after the 2009 crash in Buffalo, as it did after the post-9-11 crash in Queens, and as it did after 9-11. But I just think that we have reached a point, James, at which far too many people are so obsessed with politics and partisan politics at that, and in particular, who is the president, that they have come to treat presidents as talismans, who are responsible for every single thing that happens, and have thus concluded that when something awful like this happens, when a military helicopter hits a passenger jet, and 67 people die, that it must be

because of what the person sitting in the White House did. And I don't think it's a very good model for evaluating aviation safety no it isn't no i spent a lot of time in old newspapers and if you go back to the early days of commercial aviation the number of planes that regularly fell out of the sky was just astonishing i mean i'm surprised they didn't have a standing illustration that they could just slap on these things you know some cartoon plane with a question mark an exclamation point coming out they went down all the time and people still got up on them and uh it, and it got better, and it's the miracle that it is today. I love to fly. I love to look out the window.

I love to leave the earth and join the great beyond on the other side of the clouds. You are vouchsafed in a vision which has escaped humanity its entire life, and there you are like a god piercing through these pillowy white landscapes it's extraordinary and yes we will keep going but yeah let's take a look at how we're hiring let's take where we're hiring and we'll learn and on we go we've learned a lot from this podcast and we will go on we didn't get to the uh to the point about they've found a new painting by Vincent Van Gogh. The only thing that I want to say about this, Charles, is we're running out of time and I got to eat lunch.

Would you say Van Gogh or Van Gogh? I would say Van Gogh. You would? Okay. Like Jared Goff who plays for the Detroit Lions. Okay. Well, I'll say Van Gogh there and speak for middle America, the true heartbeat of the country. We were grown up. By God, we grew up with Van Gogh and Peking, and we're going to stick with it.

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Trust me, it's a community that discusses everything in the face of the earth, and you'll find friends there, too. So, I'm James Lylex. Charles, thanks for joining me. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Ricochet. Join the conversation.