The Ricochet Podcast - The Forces & the Fracas

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

This week we cover a handful of great tug-of-war games, past, present, and future. Charles McElwee, founding editor of RealClearPennsylvania, returns to the podcast to give an election season tour of the swingy Keystone State. Next, Tevi Troy joins for a discussion about the epic clashes between America's masters of the universe and their presidents. (Be sure to get a copy of his new book, The Power and the Money.)Steve, Charlie and James also chatter about Florida's latest roaringly windy Wednesday, and end on the neutral note of AI symphonies. - Sound bites from this week's open: DeSantis remarks about climate change after Hurricane Milton; Biden's response about FEMA failures after Hurricane Helene

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Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lilacs, and today we talk to Charles McElwee about Pennsylvania politics and Tevye Troy about money and power. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Yeah, I just think people should put this in perspective. They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it's something. There's nothing new under the sun. Assertions have been made that property is being confiscated. That's simply not true. They're saying people impacted by these storms will receive $750 in cash and no more.

That's simply not true. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 712. I'm James Lilacs here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful autumn day. And not very many Halloween decorations up yet, which is great because they're gross and detestable and disgusting. The more lurid they get. Whatever happened to just put a little pumpkin on your front stoop? I'd like to know. Joined by Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward today.

Gentlemen, how are you? Good. Good. I am great, James. And the weather is probably better there than in coastal California, believe it or not. Yes, well, we've had no rain, unlike parts of the South, and what we see in the news is horrific, horrific, horrific devastation. However, Governor DeSantis came out the other day when a reporter asked him about the meteorological conditions and whether or not they were pertaining to global warming. I mean, we all know that there are more hurricanes now because somebody in North Dakota refuses to switch to an EV. And he very deftly sort of cited the statistics and what they had done to plan for it.

Charles, you are in Florida, and I know you're not affected by this, at least as far as I know, but is there just a general sense in Florida that this is in hand, bad as it has been? Should the nation be fretting over this, or should we be worrying more about what doesn't seem to be done in the places affected by Helene? You should be more worried about Helene. I think Florida is a well-oiled machine when it comes to hurricanes. It was a well-oiled machine before Ron DeSantis ran for governor, but he has managed to make it even more well-oiled and even more machine-like by pre-staging linemen. So Florida was always very good at dealing with hurricanes. Now,

it's really good at dealing with hurricanes and getting the power back on. So, I think the challenge is in places that are not used to this sort of thing in the way Floridians, unfortunately, are. Well, Stephen, let me ask you this. I mean, the idea of pre-positioning supplies, equipment, linemen, and the rest of it seems like a no-brainer. It seems like a core competency for any sort of government agency in anything that they do. We used to believe and assume sort of that that's the way things worked. If you look at all the old movies, whenever there's a disaster, government swings into action, the authorities are called, plans are executed, jeeps race out of garages, sirens wailing, and things are done. Now we believe that when something happens, generally the government is going to be flat-footed, stammering, and unable to really deal with the first thing they need to do.

It may not be accurate, but that seems to be the general thought abroad in the land. You're old enough to remember when we had the crisis of confidence in the 70s, where we seemed to believe that the government was incapable of doing anything, and it was just nothing but managed decline from here on in. Changed in the 80s. But do you feel that same sort of malaise when it comes to our government? Oh, yeah. What's the old joke or the old line that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, that apparently Mark Twain never said. But look, there's two things here going on. One is, you know, FEMA takes five days to get anywhere and they get and then they bigfoot everybody like the FBI does with local crime investigations. And in Florida's case, I think the subtext here is please, FEMA, stay away.

Don't come here. We've got this. And, you know, you mentioned the hyper confidence of Governor DeSantis. I'll share with you that I did get to have one conversation with him about this subject a couple years ago. And I brought up the fact that, you know, Miami was essentially leveled by a huge hurricane around 1935, but nobody lived there then. And I said, so, you know, what if you have a Cat 5 hurricane that hits Miami or Palm Beach? And he says, I don't really worry about that because the building codes since then have been very robust and they're organized for it. He says, what keeps me awake at night for hurricanes is Tampa Bay. And he said, it's the geography of it. The storm surge will be much larger and there's nothing we can do about that. And that would present a much

bigger challenge. So when you heard that Milton was heading straight for Tampa Bay, I thought, well, here we go. This is going to be the big challenge. Now, it veered off a bit to, what, Sarasota, I guess. And so Tampa Bay was spared a direct hit. So we're lucky here. But then, of course, the other thing I think you mentioned is, you know, gee, Governor DeSantis, isn't this more proof of climate change? Well, if you look at the data, Milton ranks 18th in the level of intensity of Florida hurricanes, for which we have records going back over 100 years. 18th. Most of those hurricanes that rank ahead of Milton happened before 1960, before we started having, so, you know, the whole climate change story really starts around 19. So the point is, is that the data doesn't back up the panicky narrative, but that won't stop them, of course. No, no. And Charles, the panicky narrative has a variety of

solutions which can be seamlessly and easily implemented to stop this from ever happening again, I guess. And it's just our muleishness to refuse to accept what we must do tomorrow. But if we have Kamala Harris in the White House, is there going to be a push for more green nude eels, as they used to say? Or is it

just going to be part of the usual atmosphere and chatter and lip service? No, the hurricanes will immediately stop if she wins. That's true. Was it January 20th they immediately stop if she wins. That's true. Was it January 20th they inaugurate the new president? That's it, gone. Just as the sea level stopped rising when Obama became president, right? We remember that. The Inflation

Reduction Act, which despite its title was actually a way of funneling a trillion dollars to green democratic groups, doesn't seem to have stopped the hurricanes either. James, may I make a broader political point about Florida that I think might be interesting to people who don't live here? There are two things about Florida politics that I've noticed in the last seven years since I lived here that I think haven't necessarily

escaped the state's borders. One is that Ron DeSantis is not regarded in Florida as this great controversial figure in the way he is nationally, and it's very amusing to hear him discussed as such outside of Florida, because in Florida, he just seems like a normal, competent governor. The second thing, and the more important thing, I think, is to most voters in Florida, I think I'm right in saying hurricane response is why the government exists. And if you do it well, you are rewarded for it. Everything else is either on autopilot or is regarded as a luxury. The autopilot part of the equation just cannot be overstated jeb bush was a terrific governor turned florida around and made modern

florida essentially what it is and constitutionalized a lot of things that people now associate with the state no income tax and so on was already there but he extended that to all forms of income we now have a constitutional amendment that prevents the state from raising any form of tax or fee without two-thirds majority in both houses of the legislature that's in the constitution there's a bunch of things like that which means if you're a governor yes you have to do things and it's very important that you have the right governor, as we saw during COVID. But the thing that you are judged on more than anything else is not whether you're low or raise taxes, because you can't, but whether you deal with the hurricanes properly. Ron DeSantis won by 20 points in 2022.

I think he'd have won by 10 if it weren't for his response to the hurricane that happened just before. But the fact that he did so well with that hurricane is why he won by another 10 points, because independents just said, oh, great. And I think that this is going to happen again this year. I think that Republicans were going to win the state legislature in Florida again. And I think Trump was going to win. And I think Rick Scott was going to win. But I really would not be surprised now if you could tack on another five, six, seven points to how Republicans do in the state, purely because two hurricanes in a row, the party in power has shown that it did what it was there for. And I think this is just underestimated when people outside talk about Florida politics or how will the state vote? What do people care about? What about this issue or that issue? It's all valid. But the hurricane response question is really what matters more than anything

else, and it's going to have a big effect in November. Well, you just described a nightmare for most people, people on the left at least, who look at Florida and say, without the taxation system, how do you properly adjudicate what people should possess? How do you get the income from these people and get it to these people who need it that's nightmare number one and two if you want to take florida a success story i say i having with scare quotes here then you're transporting a culture of that bans books and refuses to allow people to say the word gay in any school situation i mean that that is a you speak as though you don't live in one of the most oppressive fascistic or you know nascently fascistic states in the country stunning stunning stunning uh

steven your your your response before we go to our guest uh i don't really have one i mean i mean the only you left out james was we're only you know 10 000 votes in a close election away from the handmaid's tale in Florida and everywhere else. Right. Yeah. Well, we do have an election going on. And when people think about it, oh, what people think about it is, well, they may want to reach for the top shelf where they got the brown stuff in the bottles or the clear stuff, or for that matter, a sparkling, you know, infused champagne or something like that.

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Stock up. Be safe. Be wise. Use the code ricochet at your checkout for 15% off. And we thank ZBiotics for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we go to Charles McElwee. Do I have that pronounced correctly? I'm sure that I don't.

He's the founding editor of Real Clear Pennsylvania. We're happy that he's here. Charles, tell me how badly I mangled your last name. You got my name just right. It is McElwee. Oh, good for me. You know, well, somebody who goes around hearing lilacs all the time instead of lilacs. I'm keen to be good here. All right, real clear politics, Pennsylvania. Well, you had a piece a couple of weeks ago titled Kamala Harris's Pennsylvania Problem. What is her problem? She has a problem among that vast expanse of working class regions in Pennsylvania. And, of course, we know this region as it was described inaccurately by Democratic strategist Jim Carter from Alabama in the middle. But this region has changed dramatically since he first employed that term in 86. And really, it's northeastern Pennsylvania, what was a Democratic bastion, one that was indistinguishable when it came to one's association of the Catholic

Democrats that would put Democrats over the top in elections. This is a region that is trending red. Luzerne County, for example, just this past month has a Republican voter registration majority, and that was an Obama to Trump County in 2016. And Lackawanna County, Biden's home turf where he grew up, even precincts there in Scranton are shifting red. So while there are still plenty of ancestral Democrats there who will vote Democrat in this election as well, in this critical margins fight, it's a place like northeastern Pennsylvania that will determine the electoral outcome in the state. Charles, it's Steve Hayward out in godforsaken

California, and we keep hearing that Pennsylvania is not just the key. Charles, it's Steve Hayward out in godforsaken California, and we keep hearing that Pennsylvania is not just the keystone state, but the keystone to the entire election. And I don't know, you can see lots of possible combinations of states where Pennsylvania could be lost by Trump or by Harris and still win. But it is true, I guess, that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan tend to vote together. In other words, they're three dominoes that lean on each other. And so you mentioned north, did you say northeastern Pennsylvania or northwestern Pennsylvania? I'm thinking up around Erie and all the rest, and I don't know the geography all that well. But the first question is, I know Erie, up by the lake and all that, and other parts of Pennsylvania, still strongly unionized. And yet we've seen the

data and the fact that the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters declined to endorse Harris and their internal polls showing majority of their members favoring Trump. And I don't know, what's your sense of all that? Do you think that while the polls show a dead even, do you think the polls are underestimating as they have in the past Trump's strength, especially with those kind of voters? So I think when it comes to Pennsylvania, of that traditional blue wall, when you think Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania is the hardest to discern because it's a state of complex demography that has been fueled by post-2016 changes.

The map of Pennsylvania just in the past eight years is far different now than it was when Trump narrowly won the state in 16. When you think of that union vote in a place like Erie, for example, yes, there are still plenty of traditional Democrats who have that allegiance to church, party, and union who may still vote D no matter what. But they're

diminishing in numbers. And really, when you look at the statewide map, it's a non-unionized sector, the warehousing and logistics sector that is booming across the state, especially on the eastern half. And Latinos are increasingly comprising the majority of that workforce. And in so many cities east of the South Square River and places like Allentown, Hazleton, Lebanon, Lancaster, they comprise the majority plurality of the population and they're working in warehousing logistics. And they, as 2020 has shown, are shifting red. So if voting blocked 600,000 eligible voters, if they're activated in the state to vote, they could play a real pivotal role in this outcome. So and the other thing I'm sure you can tell us about is apparently Republican registration in the state of Pennsylvania has been surging.

So talk about that a little bit, because that seems certainly favorable for Trump. It's a fascinating dynamic, because when you look at voter registration statistics going back to 1998, which is the first time that the state has them on record, it's the narrowest advantage that the Democrats have since that time. For perspective, in 2008, when Obama won, there was a 1.2 million advantage for Dems, and it is diminished now. And that is driven in part by those ancestral Democrats and working class regions who they have been re-voting Republican, let's say, in the past 20 years. And they're just catching up with their voting patterns. But there are also plenty of people who are just disaffected with the Democratic Party. They no longer view them as defenders of their economic self-interest. And these voters aren't just in

those blue-collar areas of the state beyond, let's say, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. They're around Philadelphia, too, pockets of Delaware County. Bucks County, for example, they flipped to red recently. And that's driven in large part by blue-collar Catholic Democrats who have gone red in the lower half of the county. So one more question before I hand over to Charlie. Trump-Harris, of course, is not the only thing to watch in the state. There's a very hot Senate race between what's-his-name, Casey and McCormick. And lately, by the way, the last several election cycles, presidential cycles,

the Senate races have tend to go with the top of the ticket. In fact, there's only one exception, I think, and that was Susan Collins in 2020 in Maine. Maine went for Biden and Collins kept her seat comfortably. But what can you tell us about that race? Is it also as close as the presidential race? And what are your expectations? When you look at the RealClearPolitics polling average, I mean, the advantage that Casey has now is about 3.9 percent. That's the narrowest at this point in memory since he was first elected in 06. And really the last time that, let's say, the ticket split in Pennsylvania between the Senate race and the presidential election was in 2004 when Kerry won the state, but Arnold Specter, the Republican, carried it out with the power of presidency. But this is extremely close, really the most competitive race that Casey has faced since he was first

elected statewide in 1996 as Auditor General. And that's that's driven again by that complex changing demography and then unforeseen circumstances. For example, I am talking to many Jewish voters across the state, including outside Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, who hold no love for the Republican Party. They are quite liberal in their positions, but they don't view Casey as representative, but they're from the party left-ward turn on the issue of Israel and the intent of voting for McCormack. That's actually a good segue to my question. It's pretty much uniformly assumed on the right that Harris should have chosen Josh Shapiro because he's in the governor's mansion. And it's also assumed that she didn't,

because he's Jewish, and that there is a constituency within the Democratic Party that would have had a problem with that, given its problems with Israel. How true is that? Is that something that people on the right say because they don't like Harris, or is there some substance to it? I think the decision that was made is more complex than that single issue alone. I think there's also the factor that Shapiro, in terms of his raw political talents, whether it's oratory or just campaigning, outshined Harris. And that was a factor that was taken into serious consideration. It will be fascinating to find out what we do learn in the history books about that decision, because it may prove to be quite a consequential one, because I do think that had Shapiro

been chosen, while I think it's also overstated that if he had been chosen, Pennsylvania would have been assured for Harris, It certainly would have helped her cause in the state, considering his work in regions that have been less targeted by Democrats in recent cycles. And my second question, you just described the way the state has changed and is changing. I have a friend who said something really provocative a couple of days ago to me. He said, you know, Pennsylvania is becoming Ohio. It's moving towards where Ohio is going to become a Republican state. And I instinctively just don't believe this because I always think Republicans are going to lose. How true is that? Is there anything to that? That's flat wrong, because part of that change is driven by there are booming suburban

areas of the state. So we associate suburbia with just greater Philadelphia. But in reality, the fastest growing area of the state is south central Pennsylvania, the Harrisburg-Lancaster- Carlisle corridor. Cumberland County, the western suburb of Harrisburg, is the fastest growing area of Pennsylvania. And all those West Shore suburbs are going blue. And it's driven by the health care boom in the state. The health care is really the primary employer in so many suburbs across Pennsylvania. And physicians, once a reliable GOP constituency, they have been going deep. So it's going to stay a swing state?

It will stay a swing state? It will stay a swing state, and part of the reason it will stay a swing state is because of those vastly growing suburban areas. You say physicians are going blue, but most of the physicians I've met in my lifetime trend to go the other direction for a variety of reasons. Is it just that there's an installed bureaucracy? When you have a big healthcare bureaucracy and a lot of nurses and the such that they tend to be red. I mean, if you lose the doctors, you're not going to lose a lot. Well, the sector itself has transformed. So physicians trended Republican back when they were small business owners running their own practices, but they're now employees of these massive systems, which is exactly the case of Pennsylvania. So, for example, Lehigh Valley Health Network and Allentown recently merged with Jefferson Healthcare System in Philadelphia. That is, together with that merger, the largest employer in greater Philadelphia this fall.

And so many of those nurses and physicians, really this healthcare workforce that is just exploding throughout the state and exploding in part because people are getting sicker um it is these are workers who have been voting democrat as one uh elected republican in the harrisburg area recently described it to me he was talking about a town-like development was going up outside harrisburg it has gone up similar to what you see like around metro d those townhouses. And the developer told him that the development itself is comprised mostly of young nurses. And we know exactly how those young nurses will default in their voting patterns. Yeah, James, if I can stick in here and then pivot to my last question for Charles. You know, there's a big story about why the healthcare industry is trending blue as a whole, and that's a subject to take up some other day, perhaps. But it's now, in my mind, the parallel to the K-12 education system, which we've

seen over the decades, how that has gone. It's because the government now dominates the sector. And by the way, so much of the growth in health care is administrators, just like public education. And a lot of doctors I talk to, by the way, James, they hate all this. But they may know where their bread is buttered up. I'll tell you, long story. The other side of the street, of course, in Pennsylvania is the fracking story, which Harris has done a 180 on. And there's a case of where the people who used to work as all the pumpjacks and all the other people in the industry unionized for the most part, probably habitual Democratic voters. But now they see the bureaucracy and the Democrats as their enemy.

And so my last question, Charles, is, you know, again, from afar, it seems like this fracking reversal by Harris is a really big story. Are we right in concluding that? that a big story in pennsylvania it's a big story in a certain part of pennsylvania but in terms of statewide resonance it's more complicated the issue of fuel costs attended with inflation yeah that matters living in these struggling communities where you're living in a half double home built before world war one you're and it's a poor community you rely natural gas for fuel, and it's going up and up, whatever. But in a part of southwestern Pennsylvania where fracking has been an employer, that is a concern. But it's also an issue of pricing the industry itself. It's in flux because, lost in the story, this region needs the infrastructure to transport the natural

gases it has to other parts of the country like New England. And that infrastructure isn't there due to red tape issues that go to the local level. So that's where it has salience. Charles, in your view, is Trump better placed or worse placed than, say, a generic Republican presidential candidate to win a state like Pennsylvania? I mean, I understand each candidate is different, but one of the arguments for him is he'll do better in Pennsylvania. Would he have done better in Pennsylvania than a DeSantis or a Nikki Haley or a Tim Scott, do you think? When you consider the type of trump voter in pennsylvania yes because this is the land of obama to trump voters so really all those registration

gains that the republican party has been enjoying they're among people who persistently voted democrat up until 2016. they harbored no love for the Republican Party. So really, the Republican Party, Trump's presidency was somewhat of a blood transfusion when it came to certain parts of the state and driving up those numbers. But nevertheless, the challenge for Republicans, and one that will be tested is this McCormick-Casey race. McCormick's going after those suburbanites. And if McCormick pulls an upset and actually defeats Casey, it will be in part because he brought back some of those suburban voters who may have sat out 2020 or voted against

Trump that year. Do you think Republicans can keep those voters in Pennsylvania post-Trump? I think McCormick himself is showing a model for how it can be done. It's a robust campaign. He's taking Trumpian positions while making inroads with the traditional Republican Party. So he has proven palatable to the emerging working-class base that has emerged post-Trump while trying to make gains or regain the people who had voted for, let's say, Pat Toomey in 2016. Well, we will see. Thank you so much, Charles, for giving us the lowdown in Pennsylvania.

I'm still just wrapping my head around the dudes for Kamala, people from Pennsylvania, who I guess are taking the state by storm and redefining its culture and upending expectations, but we'll see how that plays out on election night. Anyway, real clear, Pennsylvania. The link will be on Ricochet.com. We thank you for joining us today. Great being here. Thanks a lot. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Tevi Troy, Senior Fellow of the Bipartisan Policy Center. He's a best-selling presidential historian whose latest entry on that front is The Power and the Money, The Epic Clashes Between Commanders-in-Chief and Titans of Industry. Welcome, Debbie.

Hey, James, thanks for having me. So most of us are familiar with the left-right split that has the Democratic administrations reigning in big business, like the statues in front of the Federal Trade Association, and then Republicans come and loosen the reins and let the entrepreneurs flourish in the thousand flowers, et cetera.

What can pre-Coolidge history tell us about how to view that particular relationship? Is it just the usual yin and yang? Is it the plebeians and the optimates? Is this a timeless tale that we cycle we simply cannot break out of? Well, it would be great if it actually did work like that. You could always count on the Republicans to loosen the reins, but they don't always do it. In my book, In the Power of the Money, I go back 150 years, and you have Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, who went hard after the corporations, including him going after John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, and he was looking to break up a lot of what he called the trusts. He was also there at the cusp of when you started to have this development of regulatory apparatuses and new legislation and new regulatory bodies. And so it's been a complicated 150 years in which Republicans sometimes are on the side of big business, but sometimes they're not. Yeah. Hey, Tevi, it's Steve Hayward out here

in godforsaken California. And just to gild your point, I mean, I think you know this, that the largest regulatory expansion over business in modern times occurred under Richard Nixon, right, in the late 60s and early 70s, from which we never recovered. And then you probably, I mean, I love these trivia points. You know, President Taft, TR's successor, actually had more antitrust prosecutions than Roosevelt did in just his four years in office, whereas Roosevelt had, what, seven years. But, you know, TR reminds me most of Trump in this way. I think you know that, you know, TR's strategy was, look, you guys in big business, I'll kind of let you do what you want as long as you take orders from me.

It's a slightly crude summary, but only slightly, I think. And, you know, Trump's very much that way, right? It's a slightly crude summary, but only slightly, I think. And, you know, Trump's very much that way, right? It's all transactional. But how do you, I mean, I think it's a good, important point that Republicans are not always pro-business or pro-big business anyway. But right now, it seems the Democrats, that the last two Democratic administrations have been trying to revive the old simple narrative, haven't they? I mean, the current administration certainly is very aggressive, you know, this week proposing to break up Google, I suppose. You know, what I would say is maybe there's four quadrants, and you've got pro-business and pro-market,

and then anti-business and anti-market. And the Republicans are often pro-market and often pro-business. The Democrats are always anti-market and often anti-business. The Democrats are always anti-market and often anti-business. And so you have this kind of weird mixing of the different perspectives. And what we've seen in recent years is a split within the pro-market and the pro-business Republicans. And then you also have a second split with the more anti-business Republicans. J.D. Vance is more apt to criticize corporations than some Democrats these days. So it is a complicated story and has long been. Yeah, yeah. One other thing, I haven't had a chance to get into your book yet, Tevi, but I wonder if you talk a little bit about Coolidge,

who maybe is a hinge figure in some ways. You know, the old myth was always Coolidge said the business of America is business. He didn't actually say that. He said the chief business of America is business, and then went on for a paragraph about how America's commercial character is always subordinate to its democratic character. All that gets left out. Do you dwell on this at all about Coolidge and maybe even Harding in your book? Yeah, I definitely have Coolidge and Harding in there and some of their relationships with CEOs, including Henry Ford. And I do have the quote, correct, in my book, which I think is important. But there's another thing you were talking about in terms of Nixon and his expansion of the regulatory state, with the EPA and the Philadelphia plan. And I have a great story in the book about a young Lee Iacocca, who was a Ford executive at the time, going to the Nixon White House and trying tos into less pro-free market and just pro-business.

In the Carter years, he's looking for subsidies, and then in the Reagan years, he's looking for tariffs. So interesting transition there. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Tevi, which of the two current presidential candidates, Trump and Harris, do you think is most likely to be pro-business as opposed to pro-market? And I think we're in an interesting moment because Republicans have soured a little bit, certainly on big business, in part because big business has

taken a side culturally. And the Democrats, although they like to talk about sticking it to the man are quite happy it seems to me to recruit big business to their side when they need to for example harris is all over twitter and the stump citing the number of ceos she says have endorsed her she sees this as a sign that she's a sensible one economically, for example, whereas Trump is more likely to shout at those people. So how do you see these two candidates right now with their relationship to business as opposed to markets? Yeah, well, I would say that Harris overstates it a little bit. There is that letter of 88 business leaders that signed endorsing her. But if you really look at the letter, half of them are formers,

showing that they're often reluctant to make a partisan point while they're in power. Half of them are from Silicon Valley or from Hollywood, which are traditionally liberal. And then you have people like Larry Summers in there, who's a smart guy and an economist and everything, but he's not a business leader. So she is trying to make it seem like she is going to be pro-business. She also has her brother-in-law, Tony West, who's a senior executive at Uber, advising her. So I think there will be favors to businesses that play along, but I wouldn't call her pro-business, and I certainly wouldn't call her pro-market. Trump, look, there's always a question of who is going to win out in all the various battles inside Trump world,

but there are usually pro-market people within them, and so maybe there's a chance or a hope that you will have the anti-regulatory push that you saw in the last Trump administration that did help goose the economy. Yeah, Tevi, you know, I could see a scenario. Let me run a scenario by you. This is what Peter Robinson likes to do and see what you think of it. I think you know the history of, or the cliches, again, about the New Deal and World War II ended the Great Depression. We pivoted away from the New Deal.

And, of course, the real story, as our mutual friend Arthur Herman wrote so well about a decade ago, is that when World War II came, the government realized, the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt realized they had to take their boot off the neck of business. So they end up being, by circumstance, pro-business and pro-market. And that's what ends the depression and sets up the prosperity of the post-World War II era. So I could see a situation in which we have a President Harris. Sigh, I hope not. But we have a President Harris, and you run into a serious economic problem here, you know, a year, 18 months, two years out because of our deficits and other problems.

And they decide, like Roosevelt did in 1940-41, that in fact, if we're going to get out of this, we're going to have to let business rip. By the way, the fact that her brother-in-law is a big executive with Uber, what's Uber's business model been? It's been to charge ahead and open new markets quicker than the interest groups can organize against them. And that has succeeded most places, but not everywhere. And so even the liberals who run Uber understand that government regulation and interest groups are their enemy. And maybe Harris and the people around her might figure that out. Am I being just completely ridiculously optimistic, or is that a scenario that you, Tevi Troy, think might be possible? Well, Steve, as you know, I cut my teeth working for Ben Weinberg, who is the greatest optimist in political life of all time.

And even I think that's a little optimistic. Oh oh yeah me too but i want to throw it out there right but but it is funny it does raise some interesting issues including something that bill gates said which is he said back in the day when he was running microsoft that the high tech industry is three times faster than the private sector the private sector is three times faster than government which means that the high tech industry is nine times faster than the private sector. And the private sector is three times faster than government, which means that the high-tech industry is nine times faster than government. And that's true. And that's kind of the Uber approach. However, the government is big.

And if they grab their hold onto your ankle, they're not letting go. And Bill Gates found that out to his misfortune. Yeah, I sure did. Debbie, Charles mentioned something earlier, just in passing, that one of the reasons that people on the right have fallen out with big business is because they've taken a side in cultural issues, culture wars. to the Democratic Party and to the Harris administration that America is in love again with all of the progressive movements that they want to use to reshape various institutions and ways of thought, etc.? Or are they going to realize that there actually is a backlash, there is a pushback that the companies that have been putting their thumb on the scale,

the companies that have been endorsing DEI procedures, and all of a sudden find themselves in the crosshairs of various internet activists and have to backtrack and cancel and the rest of it. How do you think that business embrace of progressive social agendas would unfold during a Harris administration? Well, I think they would feel a little more protected from the government side. But you have to remember, no matter who wins this election, it's going to be a closely divided government and continue to be closely divided for the foreseeable future. And a lot of Republicans were alienated by the corporate embrace of DEI and ESG. And a lot of Republicans, rightly in my mind, feel,

hey, we've been carrying your water. We've been getting hit for being pro-corporate for all these years. And you take on this DEI stuff and this ES esg stuff what are you doing to us and so that's one of the reasons why republican lawmakers have soured on big business i mean i have a question how corrupt great start yeah how how corrupt was american politics 150 years ago i just watched this documentary on netflix about wyatt up and the argument in it was that jp morgan i won't go into the all the details because it's quite complicated but jp morgan in the end of the 19th century in the early 1880s uh sort of wrote checks to politicians he was a backer of the 19th century, in the early 1880s, sort of wrote checks to politicians. He was a backer of the Republicans. Then he moved to Grover Cleveland and got what he wanted,

because he just gave them money. And there weren't even any campaign finance laws or rules at the time. How true is that? How true is the story that we're told about Teddy Roosevelt realizing that the monopolies were corrupt and a danger to democracy. How true is all that? Well, I think that you wonder if it is corruption if you do something when there's no laws against it. So when John D. Rockefeller is building his empire, he uses a lot of sharp-elbowed monopolistic techniques that I wouldn't say were nice, but they weren't against the law at the time.

And you didn't have these regulatory bodies that could enforce against it. So I'm not willing to say that everything was corrupt. And in fact, in my book, The Power of the Money, I specifically tried not to choose out and out bad guy. All the people, all the CEOs I profile are complicated. None of them went to jail or were arrested or did actually criminal things for the most part. So they were just trying to live in a complicated environment that gets more complicated when you have this government regulation in there. So I don't think it was all just a whole bunch of corruption, but they did use their influence, specifically Rockefeller and more importantly, Morgan, because he engaged in politics sooner in order to try and get what

they wanted. Well, you know, I'm on the side of the revisionists like, oh gosh, the economist at Hillsdale College's name is blanking on me right now about the, oh, Burton Folsom, the myth of the robber barons, right? So, you know, it turns out that just to pick on Rockefeller, who everyone liked to pick on, while he was consolidating the refining industry, the consumer price of petroleum refined products fell by, what, 90 percent? I mean, where was that? The whole revolution in antitrust in modern times was, what's the harm to the consumer? And then the other one is, I don't know if you know the famous article by the economist John McGee, but he went through the trial record. So the breakup of Standard Oil was, I think,

1909 under Taft, or 1911, sometime around that. 1911 is when the Supreme Court case comes down. That's when the case, okay. Well, going through the trial record, what you find is all these people that Rockefeller was buying out, they all said, we all thought we got a fair price. None of them on the stand in the trial said, you know, we were strong-armed, it was a mafia, or, you know, sort of illegal or, you know, unethical practices. And, you know, his conclusion on all this was, if you look at this, you go, where was the legal violation even under the sort of very, okay, I can get off in the weeds here, and I already have done too many already. But in other words, this is more political than it is substantively economic. That's my point. It was then.

It looks to me like we're returning to that today. Yeah. You know, I also tried to disabuse the notion of the robber barons. If you look at some of the great philanthropic and educational institutions of this country, they were funded by the Robberians. Now, some of them, like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fork Foundation, I think the founders would be rolling in their graves at the ridiculous things that those foundations pursue. But the truth is that they were very philanthropic. Part of it had to do with shaving income taxes, but that's still the case today. But part of it was also this great philanthropic impulse that they wanted to give back. Rockefeller, as I show in the book, in the 30 years after he retires, he's still in public life. He's trying to help the economy

during the Great Depression. He helps out in World War I and gets a street name for him in France. So again, these people weren't all bad guys. I think the robber baron myth is a little overstated. Yeah, I think it's a lot overstated. Can I shift gears for a bit and ask you to talk about some general politics? Because after all, you did work in the Bush administration. You're also a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. I've spent some time with BPC folks and, you have any particular observations or particular things you're looking at that maybe the rest of us are missing? Do you have a hunch of who's going to win? How do you size up the scene in front of us? So I think that no matter what, as I said earlier, it's going to be very close in terms of the split between Democrats or Republicans. Nobody wins knockout punches in today's politics.

And I think that's an important point to be aware of. The second thing is that I think there are some things that could have bipartisan buy-in in the future. What are we going to do about AI? What are we going to do about China? So I think after the election, maybe when the political rhetoric tones down a little bit, we could actually see an environment where you get some things done, and things that we as conservatives may not, may not completely abhor. Now, that said, if Harris wins, I won't like her policies, although I'm not sure what they'll be, because she's playing hide the ball in her campaign. And with Trump, you also don't know, because there's, there's constant wars within the Trump team about which team is going to win out. That was my last book, Fight House.

I know you like Steve. And it talked about the reason there was so much infighting in the Trump White House is because there were three teams that could credibly claim that they represented true Trump, the so-called globalists with Jared Kushner, the MAGA types with Steve Bannon, and the traditional Republicans with Reince Priebus. All of them could say Trump has said things that indicate he agrees with our perspective. And so I think we may see more of that in the year to come. I think after Trump was elected, I remember there were a couple of tweets from prominent people who said, well, that's it for the stock market. I'm selling

everything because nothing's going to happen. And then, of course, there's the famous cartoon of the dinosaurs who are watching a meteor streak across the sky and one of them says it's priced in and i think about that one i think about people saying that the the harris administration would not be bad for the stock administration of the stock market either because it's priced in because they're going to continue the policies etc etc i who knows i absolutely don't um but it does raise the question what do you think might be the impact of either administration on the finances of ordinary folk? Inflation is what matters the most, is the issue that bedevils minds on people because they encounter it on a daily basis. We can talk about China, we can talk about AI, but people are incensed at the price of X, not Twitter.

But is this too micro to be concerned about? It would seem not. It would seem particularly pertinent to this. Yeah, well, James, first of all, I would want to make sure that I had a list of all those people who said the stock market's going to collapse and never rely on them for financial advice. That's the first thing paul goldberger was the architecture critic for the new york times i just written about him that's why i think his name came to mind well i already i already don't rely on krugman for political or economic advice so that's fine i think you can't predict these things necessarily you don't always know which

administration is going to be good for the economy, because I don't think that there is a specific correlation, a certain type of politician is good for the economy, because there's all kinds of macro effects that you don't know about. I mean, we had a huge boom in the 1990s, not necessarily because of Bill Clinton, although he, I did like some of the things that he did in conjunction with the Republican Congress, but because we had this massive tech revolution, and that helped increasing efficiency in the economy. So there are other factors at play, and it's not just as simple as Republican pushes a go switch for the economy and Democrats push a stop switch. That's true, but you can say this. The more you have, if you have a candidate who is more who is interested in less regulation less government power less government expansion etc which seems to generally be on the

right side of where if we're lucky then you have down the road less of an installed base of a bureaucracy that will thwart that will suck up resources that will vote in a certain way in order to perpetuate their their positions so i mean yes it On an immediate effect, no. It's not like Trump gets in and all of a sudden the price of eggs goes down to $1.99. But a general idea pervading the way the administration behaves and the

loosening of things, the disinclination to create something that will be sclerotic and intrusive in the future, that matters. And I'm just stating the obvious. Yeah, of course. Look, less regulation is better for the economy. And we all know that as conservatives on this podcast. So that is what I would like to see. But the effects of whatever one administration does are not necessarily seen

immediately in that time so yes less regulation is better less government spending and certainly government debt is a good thing and i think the overspending the biden administration contributed to this very problematic inflation we're dealing with but again there's a lot of factors involved indeed power money there's a lot of factors, and it is what makes the world go round, etc., etc., etc. Listen, folks, Power and the Money is the book that Debbie Troy wrote, The Epic Clashes Between Commanders-in-Chief and Titans of Industry, relevant today and relevant a year and ten from now, whoever happens to get into the office. Debbie, thanks for joining us, and we'll talk to you down the road.

Thanks for having me. I love the podcast. Oh, what a pleasure. Well, he's talking about Stephen and Peter and Charlie and the rest of it. See you later. Before we go, gentlemen, a couple of things. Amazing here, isn't it? We're going to wrap this up in under an hour with two guests.

I mean, that's a swift, brisk, efficient bit of podcasting. Why, it's almost as if we're trying to keep ourselves from being replaced by AI. There's a new program out of which I haven't yet tried, and I'm terrified to do so, frankly, where you can take an article, any article, and you can drop it into this AI program, and it will generate two hosts, male and female, who will discuss the article, tear it apart, tell little anecdotes, um and ah, and laugh, and the rest of it. And apparently, it is frighteningly accurate to the subject material. But more than that, it's actually enjoyable.

So this is the sort of thing that unless we can come up with some quirks that cannot be predicted or replicated by AI, we are ours. Well, I was going to say a year from being rendered moot, but maybe by the time we finish the podcast, they already will have come up with Charlie Bot and Stephen Bot

and me and the rest of it. Why would people then say, oh, I have to sit through these people asking these questions which aren't really questions, it's speeches and the humming and the aahing. Why would I do that when I can just take the entire text of Tabby's book, dump it into AI and get a five-part series on exactly what it's about? You know, James, if I was a science fiction writer, I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was a teenager, and I don't much anymore, but if I were one today,

I think I'd write a short story, and it would be about the alien civilization, you know, 200 light years from us, who discovers that we exist on Earth, and they send an expedition out, and they get here, and what they discover, the punchline, the twist ending would be, you can see it coming, is that the human species have long gone extinct, hundreds or thousands of years before, and what they're picking up and what exists on the planet are only robots and AI robots carrying on discussions, podcasts, news, elections even, right? And that's sort of the frightening sci-fi take on where this might be going. That's a Bradbury story, and it's interesting. And that's the sort of the frightening sci-fi take on where this might be going.

That's a Bradbury story. And it's interesting. We get Skynet, but instead of Skynet coming down and terminating everybody, it's Skynet plus Matrix with no thought, with no consciousness, just absolute generated jabber forever and ever and ever. You know why I'm not worried about it? Depressing. Why?

Why is that? Because I think I would listen to this for a little bit, and then as I do when I listen to anything, because I'm argumentative, I would disagree with it. I'd be annoyed by it. And so instead of saying, do you know, I just read this thing in Slate, and it really annoyed me, and here's why it's wrong,

which is my job, I would end up saying, I just heard this stupid AI chatbot, and it really annoyed me and here's why it's wrong which is my job i would end up saying i just heard this stupid ai chat bot and it's ridiculous interpretation of tevi troy's book and here is why it's wrong because there's just no way that it could possibly with two people encompass every opinion on the spectrum so i think think it might lead to more, not replace James Lilacs, but lead to more James Lilacs to argue with or facilitate the different views that had been expressed. Well, that's heartening, I'd like to think. But then again, it gets to the point where a large language model can assume and predict every objection that you might have. And that Stephen's dystopian future comes true because not only do we have the radio hosts jabbering, but we have the callers who are generated by AI and then the crazy callers. The question is how much imagination does it

inevitably will it have? And will it have just enough simulacrum of intelligence and imagination that we will accept it to be real. I work with an awful lot right now with an awful lot of AI-generated art for a project that I'm doing. And it's still in this sort of charming phase where it just simply cannot generate text. And as such, comes up with the most fascinating words. It's like having a stroke in Dutch when I look at some of this stuff. It's just great. I ask it to do English ads for British ads for English muffins in the 1920s. And it will come up with these, you know, these ways that are almost right. It's an earnestness of saying, do I have it yet? Have I got it? And you

say, no, you don't. Really, an ad would not say English muffin. Are you lating muffin? They just wouldn't. And let me tell you why. So right now there are enough tells, the fingers, the eyes, the rest of it. But at the same time, you know this is temporary and it's going to be fixed in a trice, flux 1.1 or 1.5, whatever the latest is. Apparently it's really good at text, so we're not going to have to worry about that. So it's improving at an extraordinary rate and you know we're going to look back i think with a little nostalgia at the time when we could actually be reasonably certain that something was a bot or something was ai generated james oh go ahead sorry i was gonna say have you have you ever seen any ai attempts to do four panel cartoons because it has the it has the tone and the setup but it doesn't understand how to

write jokes so it's always some guy at a desk and then in the second one he's like wow a coffee would be nice and then on the fourth panel he's got his eyes wide open and it just says something like are you circling yeah right i know it's supposed to be emphatic and funny, but it's not. Can I ask a question or introduce a complication, because I'll bet I don't know the answer to this. James, you used a key phrase, which is we call these large

language models. And I think they're mostly being done in English, because English is, by the way, a large language. It has a much bigger vocabulary than most other languages. I wonder, there are other languages that are more complicated, you know, French, your regular verbs, and Hungarian, for goodness sake. I wonder if it works as well with those languages, or whether English is going to be, going to dominate it. And why this is a serious question is, let's see if I can do this in 20 seconds. You know, I do read about linguistics

now and then, and you know, this is, there's something mysterious about how, you know, human beings just start talking by age three without any special instruction. They just, we just do it. That's what makes us different from any other species. You know, monkeys, we can teach them a vocabulary of 50 words, but only with a lot of effort, and there's no deliberation there. You know, Bobo may say Bobo want banana, but Bobo never says Bobo wants justice, right? So that's where I think it starts to break down. And I wonder if, one more point on this, you know, Noam Chomsky's most famous serious contribution to linguistics was there's a universal grammar, and apparently that is very controversial among the super linguistics and the semioticsicists of the world. I don't know. It's all over my head.

But I think there's something to all that that probably bears on this whole thing. And so I'm wondering, is this really going to be just an English language thing, which is not insignificant, but it may also be its limitation? I think it will, because the expandability, adaptability, syncretic nature of English, it just will. And as far as Chomsky thing, you know, Leonard Bernstein picked this up too and thought that there was an inherent musical template that was shared by all humans, where children in every culture go na-na-na-na-na, or something like that.

And he built this into ten episodes and a book and the rest of it, and it was impressive at the time, back when we had public intellectuals. But mentioning, you know, Lenny reminds you that there are already AI generators of music, and they can range from the quite comic and hilarious to convincing enough slop that it'll do for a commercial or a podcast bed or something like that. Why worry about copyright when you can

just simply type in a few things and have generated for you something that's all yours. It's not going to get takedown notice and the rest of it. So music then gets taken out of the hands of the individuals. Again, we're going to get to the point where the artisanal, the handmade, the definably human, the stuff that actually has the stamp of human is going to be the most prized thing. And in a way, that's great, because we're going to go from an era in which we have this explosion of content generated by human beings, most of which is dreadful and meretricious, to actually sort of living in a warm bath of fairly competent, very good AI-generated stuff, but the real, real top of everything will be that crafted by humans what do you think

you know james i did a whole episode of my podcast the charles cw cook podcast on an ai generated opera that i worked on to annoy one of my trolls who leaves rude comments. You've got to listen to that. He leaves rude comments under my episodes, and so I wrote a whole opera using AI about him called The Saga of Boiling Rago, or Saga di Teppeto Valente, and it's really astonishingly accurate,

the way that the AI works. but the only thing it can do and it does this in a way that i was absolutely blown away by is look at existing musical styles and hate them and so what the the challenge was ultimately was to say no make it more like late italian mozart or no please add in a an overture that is more like verdi or no please put this in a minor key in the way that Tchaikovsky would have and the technology that resulted was incredible but it was entirely unnecessarily derivative and that's the one thing that I think is often missed what I think is very likely to happen is obviously this won't be sanctioned necessarily but we are going to get new mozart operas i mean listening to this in its early stages you could see we are going to get another don giovanni era mozart opera and we are going to get another late beatles album yes that's going to happen

yeah can you give me can you give me two more elvis costello albums from the period of 1979 to 1982 that's absolutely going to happen and the disturbing and distressing part of it is that some of them are actually going to be good because this opera is the operas that uh the opera that i made up with ai it was actually stuck in my head for days uh some of these original melodies that it came up with were really good but what it it can't do at least i i can't see a means by which it could do it at least not yet what it can't do is do what sergeant pepper or the white album did which is synthesize what came before and come up with something completely new what it can't do is what beethoven did in beethoven's fifth or ninth and i think that that's going to be the great challenge.

If that Rubicon is crossed, then all bets are off. But until then, it is still ultimately an impersonation machine. You know, what I want to see, just quickly, is I want to see an AI version or update of John Cage's Five Minutes of Silence. That might break the AI machine. Well, just tell it to do it in another key. That's all you have to do i mean i i i've heard people fake that in a major key and it's just hilarious no you're absolutely

right i mean it wouldn't be able to walk up to the machine and say finish von schubert's eighth symphony and it will for us but again as much as i love what charles said and as much as i believe in the the look the indescribable essence, the ineffable human quality that gives these things merit and meaning, I am not one of those guys who says,

it's a Rubicon, it won't be crossed. If you look at the Rubicon, it wasn't that wide, and it wasn't that deep. It wasn't that deep at all. Gentlemen, we have had fun. And you know what? I would love to clear the decks and have an all-AI podcast with you guys and take it into every single facet from writing to art to painting and the rest of it

and do so without prejudice and do so without fear because this is where the things, the art, the world are going. You, the listener in the meantime, are going to Apple Podcasts to give us five stars. We really appreciate that. And you are going to ZBiotics, where with the coupon code RICOCHET, you can enjoy the products at a discount. And you are also, after all that, are going to Ricochet.com and sign up if you haven't yet, because the member feed is where you will find a community you've been looking

for all your days on the Internet. Same, civil, mostly center-right conversation. Charles, it's been fun. Stephen, good to have you with us. And we'll see all of you in the comments at Ricochet4. Ricochet. Join the conversation.