The Ricochet Podcast - The Optimists

Episode Date: February 12, 2015

This week on the Ricochet Podcast, we’re blinding you with science and with the prospect of a relaxing and intellectually stimulating National Review cruise. First up, it’s Ricochet member extraordinaire anonymous. You many know him from his superlative Saturday Night Science series ( and hey, buy the t-shirt) and book review posts, but his expertise on topics like net neutrality, autonomous cars... Source

At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets.

Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Whenever you're ready. I am not ready. I have a stiff neck and a headache and it's too below. All right, coming in at three. It is Ricochet number 249, right?

That is correct. All right, coming in at three, two, one. Hello, everyone. I'm not going to get, I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's going to prove to be disastrous. What it means is that the people don't want socialism.

They want more conservatism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lallyxson from Switzerland and the future John Walker. And we'll talk to Jack Fowler about National Review and why you want to jump aboard. Let's have ourselves a podcast.

There you go again. Yes, welcome to this, the Ricochet Podcast number 249. We're brought to you by acculturated.com and you know where that is. It's a place where pop culture matters. Check it out. And of course, we're brought to you by Harry's Shave. Look, the holidays are long over, but in case you haven't started any new resolutions, how about leaving old bad habits behind? Bad habits like paying way too much for a blade. Make the switch to Harry's. We'll tell you a little bit more about that and how you can save some money by being a Ricochet customer.

And of course, we're brought to you by Ricochet.com, the founders of which are graced us today, Peter and Rob. Hello, gentlemen. Tell people why they should reach right now into their wallet and start typing numbers into a computer screen for the benefit of all. Well, they should begin to input data values into a query screen. Yes. Listen, if you are listening to this podcast and you're a member of Ricochet,

we don't have to tell you how great it is and how honored we are to have you as fellow members and how wonderful the conversations are. But if you are one of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many thousands of listeners who are not members of Ricochet, let me ask you this. Just go to Ricochet.com. Check it out. Sign up for the daily shot. It's our free email blast. Very, very popular. Get it in the morning.

It kind of gives you the tips and kind of a way to look at the day. It's a lot of fun and very funny. You also get – if you subscribe now, you get a free one-year subscription to National Review on PDF, the digital one. So you get to read National Review. You basically get to read my stuff because my stuff's not online for some reason. Your stuff is online, James. You have an excellent piece.

It is. No, no, that's my National Review column. That's every other week. That's different than the print stuff. They don't put the print stuff online, no. Well, then you get to read me and James then. And you get to connect with like-minded conservatives around the country, around the world.

We have meetups, a lot more podcasts, lots of great stuff. We also have to tell you that if you're listening and you say to yourself, listen, I don't really want to join Ricochet because I don't really ever want to comment or write or post. That's OK. There's other stuff you can do. You can like stuff. You can vote stuff up. You can listen to more podcasts. And you can do you can like stuff you can vote stuff up you can listen to more pod and you can

meet in person um we actually really do need you to join um if uh if you're so inclined um but we are also happy to have you just go to the site sign up for daily shot as the gateway drug because we know that when you realize what a civilized and smart and um elevated and witty club this is, you will want to join. And I will say this. This is the news today. A tablet magazine, which is not a magazine I really know anything about. They are now kind of – people on the left are slowly understanding the point of Ricochet, a point of being a member.

Our point was that – I've said this a million, billion times. If you have a little skin in the game, right, if you are a member of this club, you are not going to demean the conversation with a lot of trolling, a lot of nasty conversation, a lot of profanity because you feel – you have a sense of ownership. That's a bedrock principle of conservatives and Ricochet is proving that – not only proving it, but we are being copied and imitated across the web. Yes, Tablet is charging people to comment, which shows that the model is, well, that's two of us. So let's hope it catches on. I despair sometimes at the quality of comments at the newspaper where I work when I look at what people write, what they append to stories. This community of sour, bilious, curmudgeonly misanthropes out there who just believe it's their duty every day to troll the web far and wide and leave their little leavings in the comments section. That's not Ricochet. Speaking of leaving, gentlemen, Brian Williams gone, Jon Stewart gone.

I find it hard to care any more about Brian Williams, and I find it very hard to care at all about Jon Stewart. Am I alone? Is this a big cultural moment for the country or is this – is this just something we're talking about because the media loves, loves the auto tongue bath that they're capable of giving themselves like a dog? Well, I mean I think the Brian Williams story is sort of interesting. it says something about what happens when you're revealed on the internet for being a liar, saying something offensive or being a liar or something, just where shame still exists in tiny little fragments in our culture. The Jon Stewart thing is slightly different. Jon Stewart just said he plans to resign – he plans to quit the show in the future. That future could be a year from now. So the Jon Stewart thing is really more of a starting gun for every comedian in the country trying desperately to get that job.

Right, right. Brian Williams is interesting. I think interesting is the right word for it. It is interesting in the same way that it is interesting whenever you happen to see someone's head pop open and a duck fly out. He's just – he's crazy. Who knew it quite? I have to say I myself was not terribly surprised. I share your unconcern, James.

Who cares? But the – I thought this through. The reason I was unsurprised and I'm unconcerned is that at some point quite long ago, a time to be measured in years, not months, I stopped taking NBC News seriously. The idea that this man had violated some kind of sacred oath of journalist – he was no journalist. He's a man who – he's an actor who gets paid $10 million a year to play a journalist on television. And actors lie. They lie about their ages. They inflate stories.

They do all kinds of things to make themselves look good. At some point, even he had stopped thinking of himself as a journalist and was playing the celebrity game that he would tell a whopper is just no surprise. I didn't find it that. But I read – I think – I don't know. It was this weekend or – I think it was in the Times Magazine. I read it online. This guy did a roundup of all the people in the recent past who have had these horrible experiences where they tweeted something or been somehow publicly shamed on the internet. And a lot of them, just your heart goes out to that girl who wrote the – made a joke on Twitter as she was flying to South Africa. And the joke was misinterpreted by people.

By the time she landed, she was trending on Twitter. She was like the number one topic of America – in the world. I mean it's the most horrible thing and of course she's fired. And someone drove to the airport because they knew she was in a plane and therefore she couldn't catch up. And they drove to the airport to catch her expression when she turned on her phone and she realized that there had been this incredible storm. And her life was basically ruined. I mean she spent a year just crying and she was fired and she had to go. And so the reporter kind of follows her along. And there is something – I mean this is going to sound weird. But there is something uplifting or cheering about the fact that Brian Williams isn't trying to brazen this out.

Like he's not trying – he's not just there defiantly saying, I'm going to go on – I'm going to do all this stuff. I'm going to make a few jokes about it and I'm going to pretend it's nothing. Because if he did that, I think he'd get away with it in America in 2015. And at least he – at least – I don't know him. I've never met him. I have no idea if this is true. But at least I have the sense anyway that he's humiliated and embarrassed and ashamed of himself. And that, the fact that you could still do that in 2015, I don't know.

That's pretty good. Yeah. Well, yeah. You buying that? No, I sense that he is a little embarrassed as well and maybe deeply embarrassed and maybe genuinely ashamed of himself. He does seem all in all a decent human being. What I cannot quite eliminate is the thought that part of the embarrassment comes from just having signed a contract that according to all reports is for five years at $10 million a year. And I have a feeling he's not too embarrassed to have called his lawyer

and said, wait a minute, if they want to fire me, what do they owe me? I have a feeling calculations of all kinds are going on on both sides. And NBC is right now trying to – getting rid of him will be a not inconsequential matter and all kinds of sheer business – I don't think either side is too embarrassed to try to figure out to the penny what various steps are going to cost. Yes, nobody is embarrassed by money. That's for sure. Certainly not in show business as you rightly point out. This is show business. But I think the other issue here is a weird thing when you have a – Yes, he seems like a decent guy.

When you take a leave of absence for six months, right? Oh, no, no, no. He took a leave of absence for what seemed to be a few days and then Deborah Ternes, the CEO of NBC News, announced that they were suspending him without pay for six months. Six months was their idea, not his. Right. But when you're gone from your desk job for six months, someone does the desk job, right? Right. This is the worst possible thing to happen is for someone – for other people to select

your temporary replacement because six months is a long time. The understudy gets the moment, right. But if – yeah, what if this is sort of the all about Eve thing? There are probably people in New York City circling NBC studios in makeup, ready to go, just kind of like you're doing with Jon Stewart, ready for their close-up. And I suspect that's not a good thing. A question to you in your capacity as a professional. How good – these are two separate questions although of course they're related how good was john stewart and how good was the writing on the show

is the writing on the show on the daily show it was pretty good i mean it look it infuriated me most of the time um i i didn't it did not infuriate me weirdly as much as the Colbert report, which I hated because I just felt it was dishonest. He was creating a fake character and then making fun of that fake character as if that fake character was real. The Daily Show is just reliably pro-Democrat, reliably liberal. Often it was funny and often it was well done and often when it when it chose to be honest and take shots at the other side at their own side it landed some real punches um look it's hard just it's hard to do that kind of thing every day it's really hard to sit there and do it every day um i actually am more interested right now what larry wilmore is doing

um at the nightly show which is is the thing they were replacing Stephen Colbert. That has the potential to be remarkably much more conservative than anything else on television right now, any talk show certainly on television. I don't know quite what the direction is. It hasn't quite found its direction yet, but just the things they're talking about and the way they're talking about them suggests that conservatives will be a lot happier with the nightly show than they were – they are with the daily show. But again, it's a hard thing. You got to give the guy credit.

It's a hard thing to do and they did it very, very well even though it was infuriating. It's a hard thing to do to react with mock astonishment to some cleverly edited tape that your producers have done. I agree completely. I think anybody who showed up for that show on the right should have just, I think they just hand them a sheet of phrases and definite articles and they just have them read them one by one. Cause we're going to, we're going to piece this together, uh, as, as we see fit to, uh, to, to massage the preexisting biases of our audiences, reassure them that they're the elect. Uh, but you know, it managed to some people because of course it's pop culture. Rob mentioned that story before about the woman who tweeted something out before she got on a plane and was vilified by the time she landed.

As it turns out, somebody actually got in touch with her a few weeks ago. The person who led the lynch mob on the net got in touch with her and they sat down for lunch and the person was forgiven. That's following up on a story. That's actually looking at pop culture as something more than just the fleeting baubles and gigas that hang off a Kardashian. And that's, for example, why you should go to OccultureInner.com because that's a place where they take pop culture seriously. They've got features such as the Daily Seen. I'm not even going to interrupt this segue. It was so good.

I'm not even going to interrupt it. It's how good it was. Except that you just did. They cover topics like books and comics and culture and fashion and movies and games and sports and tech and TV and everything else. They've got all your favorite writers, and if you're a Ricochet reader, you will like this

website. So go there, culturator.com and read what young conservative writers have to say about pop culture. Now we're going to bring on somebody who's near and dear to the Ricochet audience and the Ricochet readership because, well, he's one of the most popular and prolific members. He's the creator of the

Saturday Night Science, and his book reviews are required reading on Ricochet. John Walker. He's also the founder, incidentally, of Autodesk, and the creator of Formalab.ch, and the author of The Hacker's Diet, and so many things else. And we're here to talk about all matters technological.

So dial us right up right now with your technical support questions to ask John Walker. Hey, John, how are you? It's great to be here, Rob. No, hold on a second here. I'm getting a flicker on my screen. And I don't know if it's a short in the court or something like that. But should I turn it on and off again? Yeah, with actual tech support. All right.

You guys handle it. Can I do the accent? Have you tried turning it off and on again? You know, there was a very, very, very funny tweet, dark tweet that someone made when the news that Steve Jobs died hit the wires and someone tweeted, have they tried plugging – unplugging him and plugging him back in again? Which is horrible but I think he might have appreciated it. Hey, John, can we just talk a little bit about something I know nothing or I'm confused by that I suspect because I love saturday night science your posts uh on ricochet so much you might be able to explain this to me um sure at live score bet we love cheltenham just as much as we love football the excitement the roar and the chance to reward you that's why every day of the festival we're giving new members money

back as a free sports bet up to 10 euro if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply.

Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie I love talking about things I don't understand. Net neutrality. Yes. Net neutrality is one of those things that I think I understand and then I read about it and I'm like, I don't really get it. But my basic – the basic premise is – correct me when I'm wrong because I know you follow this stuff pretty well because you're a smart guy and you understand this stuff. The impulse behind net neutrality is to make sure that people who – companies who control internet access, ISPs, internet service providers,

the kind of people who own the pipes don't slow down data or give data extra special speed based on where it comes from. They treat all data packets the same, right? So if I'm Netflix, I can't go to Comcast and say, hey, here's a billion dollars, make my data go faster. Is that basically it? It's a lot more complicated than that. And it means different things to different people according to what their agenda is. Certainly, many of the people that are advocating regulations are worried about precisely what you talked about, or even a much greater horror where you would sign up with your ISP and the ISP would give you a menu of

bundled services that you could buy, just like a cable provider does with television channels. That's the worst thing that could possibly happen. Nobody wants that, as far as I know. Maybe some of the cable providers do, but let's hope not. And as far as I know, nobody's doing that. So to the extent this is an imagined or an envisioned problem that isn't there right now. A second definition of net neutrality is a little bit more technical, but it is something that is probably going to be an issue. And that is, in the original concept of the internet, a packet was a packet was a packet. And the provider simply routed them as quickly as possible. And the only restrictions you had was the rate that you could send or perhaps in some contracts a maximum amount that you could send or receive in a given month, say. Well, this causes a problem because, for example, what we're doing right now, talking over the Internet or video conferencing over the Internet, if we're doing that, requires what they call a quality of service where it's not just that the packet's delivered.

It has to be delivered on time. It has to be delivered at a consistent rate. Whereas if you're downloading a movie from Netflix to watch later, you don't really care if it takes 12 minutes rather than 10 minutes. And so a lot of ISPs want to do, and I believe many of them are, what they call bandwidth shaping or traffic shaping to give priority to things that are time critical and do the other stuff in the background. And why is that bad? That seems like – that actually seems like an innovation. It's fundamental to making the things work. It's just one of the things you want to do.

But of course it can be abused. And it can be abused by doing exactly the opposite of saying our pipe between City X and City Y is getting killed by Netflix traffic. And our business customers are unhappy because their payroll updates aren't showing up on time. So let's throttle the Netflix traffic. And then you've got different classes of users arguing with one another. And the only real solution to that is to go back and say that a byte is a byte, but the ISP has the power to say after a certain amount of traffic or a certain amount of traffic rate, we want to throttle this guy because

this guy's just using more than we have available on this pipe. Peter here, in your post of the other day, I guess it's a couple of weeks ago now, you wrote on this subject that you had predicted all the way back in 2003 that, I'm quoting you, big brother and big media were working to put the internet genie back in the bottle. Question one is, why did you predict that and what is the motivation here? And then you continue to say, but I did not envision a raw political power grab by the FCC, which is what I consider network neutrality, scare quotes on network neutrality, to be. I want to get to the FCC in a moment. But first, what's the motivation that you see in big government and big media to put the internet genie back in? Why would anyone want to put it back in the bottle? Well, the paper that says

that is titled The Digital Imprimatur, and it's available on my website. And at that point, I was very worried about an initiative that seemed to be coming out of particularly Microsoft. And of course, Microsoft secure internet was to solve the problems that stem from anonymity, that stem from the ability to spoof the identity of somebody else, the ability to generate traffic on the internet that was absolutely uncontrolled and untraceable. And a lot of the problems that you have with spamming and trolling and distributed denial of service attacks stem from the fact that the internet was designed to be a tool for collaboration among cooperative, reasonable people. When these protocols were designed, we did not imagine that there would be whole industries around the world

abusing the design of the system. And so what I warned against in that paper is an approach where essentially anonymity goes away. In order to transmit packets over the internet, you have to have what's called a certificate that identifies you. And every packet you sent is tagged with that certificate. So there's no anonymity anymore. You know who you're talking to because you can't get that certificate without going to a bank and presenting your passport or some form of ID. And it's like a broadcast license. And as soon as you have the equivalent of a broadcast license, you have the ability to regulate content the way the FCC did

in the bad old days of the fairness doctrine. Fairness doctrine, equal time doctrine. I used to hang out at a low-powered FM radio station, and they had a news department with one person because they had to broadcast so much news every hour because of an FCC regulation. And people that listened to Progressive Rock didn't care about the news, let me tell you, especially in the 70s. But they but they still had a news department by the way hanging out at a lower powered fm station is as best i can tell the only low powered thing you've ever done john let me ask you so so what are we to make of the fcc's rules the fcc's uh net neutrality rules i mean obviously we can't make much of them because we can't read them. The FCC has not released them.

They're going to vote on them before anyone gets to read them. However, they did – the FCC chairman did mention a few key points, some of which seem designed to make internet service providers, ISPs, feel better about this. How dangerous – I mean let me – I will express my biases. I think this is a terrible, terrible idea. I think that the solution to almost all the problems in – that we perceive in data transportation is more innovation, more investment, more venture attempt, just basically advancement of the science because that's what got us to the iPhone. But it also seems like if I was an internet service provider, I might – the same way

health insurers felt like, well, maybe this big government takeover could be pretty good for us if we get some provisions. Maybe we can freeze all of this in amber. I mean is any of that going to happen? Are you worried about that or do you think, listen, there's no way to stop this runaway train of innovation? My fear can be expressed in three letters, FCC. Because I have seen what – I have what used to be called a first-class radio telephone license. That's what you need to operate a radio or TV station, technically.

I remember taking the FCC exam to get that license in the 1970s, and the circuits on that exam were stuff out of the 1940s and 50s. That's a clue to the way that they view technological innovation. A friend of mine tried to start a service in the 1970s, yeah, it was the 70s also, where he was going to use unused subcarriers of FM stations to transmit data and essentially have a very, very low speed, unthinkably low speed by present day, data casting service that would be used for news and classified ads and so forth. He spent the better part of three years of his life trying to get this through the FCC and eventually gave up. I mean, I think his general conclusion was by the time it ever got regulatory approval, the whole thing would be obsolete.

And I think he was absolutely right in that regard. It's like it's in a way it's like the FDA. Nobody ever. Of course, nobody gets fired, but you don't get discipline for saying no. But if you say yes and something unexpected happens, that can be trouble in your career in an agency like that. So it's a tremendous – it's just a tremendous brick wall against innovation and so far the internet has escaped it. And we're talking for free around the world today because the internet escaped that level of regulation. I think that's really – if you're just listening to this podcast, you should know. John is in Switzerland. I'm in New York City.

James is in Minneapolis. Peter is in Palo Alto. And the sound quality on this is fantastic. And every time the sound quality wobbles a little bit, all we do is text each other furious obscenities about Skype. And how Skype is so crappy. This free service that we are using. It is astounding. Yeah, it's astounding.

So John, before I let Peter ask the five last questions, let me ask you a last question. What are you – if you were – I know this is a crazy hypothetical and you're not – you would never do it. But if you suddenly found yourself walking into the offices as a managing partner of a large venture capital fund in Palo Alto or Sand Hill Road or one of those famous venture places, what would you be most interested in right now? What areas would you be most interested in? Very good question. In exploring and putting your money behind, where do you think the big innovations are coming? Well, of course, I don't know. And the great thing about being a partner in a venture firm is that you have hundreds of people coming in and you get to pick from them. Okay. But I think in terms of a general filter to use for these things, it's exactly the one that I used in 1982 when we were starting Autodesk. And that is you can you can draw a straight line on semi log paper and that's the amount of computing power that you can buy for constant price.

And that's been true for almost 50 years now. Now, that can end tomorrow, but let's assume it doesn't. If it doesn't, then you can look three years, five years, seven years out. There are things that today are completely intractable, science fiction dreams. I hate this word, futuristic. Well, it's only futuristic because you don't have the computing power for it. And if you can make a guess or a prediction and say that in five years we'll have the computing power to do X, then that's probably what you want to invest in now. And if you're wrong, if the computing power doesn't arrive, we would probably have run out of money because we were betting on a machine with that amount of power being available at the price our customers could afford. Well, if you look out, if you're starting a business now and you expect to get to market, and I'm talking about the big stuff, not social media where your to market time is 18 months or maybe a year. The big stuff, that stuff's going to be maturing around 2020.

And that's the start of the decade that I call the roaring 20s. I call it the roaring 20s because if, again, you go with this prediction of the increase in computing power, in that decade, a whole bunch of things that are completely intractable today you can do with brute force. You don't need artificial intelligence. You don't need a breakthrough in the understanding of how thinking works or something like that. You just throw enough computer power at it and beat it to death. And that's what's happening right now. You can see it with, I hate the term self-driving cars.

I call them autonomous vehicles, which can be abbreviated to autos. That's not original with me, by the way. But within a few years, we're going to see – well, I guess I just saw yesterday in 2017, a city in Britain expects to have two-person cabs that you can just get in and there's no driver and you just tell it where you want to go. That's happening. They're expecting that in New York City too. I just read a piece about that. We will have. Go ahead.

Sir, another thing we could beat to death that I expect to happen probably before the Roaring Twenties is real-time language translation. You'll be able to call up somebody that owns. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race.

Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie. He speaks Russian or whatever, Chinese on Skype. And it won't be perfect, but it'll be usable. And that's something a lot of people don't see coming. Well, not the ones that are working on it right now,

but it's coming. And there's a whole list of other things like that. In the early years of the 20s, we would be able to map the structure of the human brain and simulate the human brain at a level of capability that's unimagined now. Those projects are already underway, and they're expecting to get to fruition in that era. And I could just go down a list of things. So despite I mean I read your column and you have a

very specific style but despite it all you're kind of a a goo goo headed optimist. You know what I mean? You feel like the roaring 20s are going to happen, that great things are going to happen with technology if we maintain –

what's the threshold for a thriving investment culture or a thriving venture culture? Because a lot of these things are going to – self-driving cars and simultaneous translation. There are going to be a lot of expensive attempts here, experiments that fail before they succeed. How optimistic are you? I am wildly technologically optimistic as long as we don't have a financial collapse or we get regulated to death. This is something that Peter Thiel talks about. One of the reasons we've made –

Those two things, by the way, often happen – those two things are often linked. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I mean Peter Thiel talks about how we've been – we've had this tremendous explosion in information technology and everything associated with it because we regulate atoms, but we don't regulate bits. And one of the things I explicitly fear about with the FCC camel coming under the tent is the beginning of the regulating of bits. I mean, for example, an example I used in a comment on Ricochet was, okay, it's five years from now. We have net neutrality. Everything works pretty much the way it worked before. And now I have realized that I can make a fully immersive virtual reality headset that I can use, for example, to use one of Microsoft's examples.

How do I change the trap on my sink? And somebody can come in and do that. And you have all these images projected. And now you have to go to the FCC to get a license to send that high bandwidth traffic over the internet because it might interfere with the services that are already licensed. That's exactly what the FCC did in the whole era of radio and television. And that's what I fear most because that increases.

In other words, if I invent something, it's not a question of can I get it to work? Will I have the power to do it? The customers want it. But can I get it licensed when it comes time to roll it out? And that's a fear that you don't have now in most of computing. John, Peter here. Let me ask you about what I think is an even bigger and deeper fear, maybe. Let me ask you about it. And that is artificial.

You said a moment ago that we'll very soon be able to map the entire human brain. And Ray Kurzweil says the singularity is upon us. The moment when computers are as intelligent as people. Elon Musk a month or six weeks ago said that artificial intelligence, that this moment when computers become smarter than we are, is very, very dangerous. Against that, I interviewed Peter Thiel a couple of months ago and he said, ah, you know, I'm not so sure. I think there may just be a fundamental difference, not just in quantity of computing power, but a fundamental difference in kind between computing intelligence and human intelligence. And his general attitude was relax. Where do you come down on this? Well, first of all, let me clarify. By the, I think by the start, the first part of the 2020s, we will be mapping the brain with unprecedented detail and modeling it, but we will be nowhere near having a map of without replicating the human brain. That's another possibility. You have another entirely different technological development and you figure out how to do it without slavishly copying the way the brain is wired.

I don't – the one thing I believe that I disagreed with vehemently – oh, and he hedged his comment in your interview with Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge, was when he said that there may be something about the substrate that cannot be replicated in a machine, to which I, as an engineer, say, nonsense. You said, bring it on. Let me try. Yeah. Try. If it is, it will be the very first thing that we've ever found in nature that we have not been able to improve on once we figured out how it worked. Right. give you a thought experiment that intelligence, consciousness, emotion, free will has anything to do with the fact that you have a meat computer in your head. Thought experiment is very simple

to describe. We already have people with prosthetic joints, prosthetic hearts even. Imagine you can make a mechanical emulation for a neuron and wire it up and put it in your brain okay and now now let that go limit to the number of neurons in the brain is there you start out completely meet you end up completely computer where's the transition point where do you lose your consciousness just because you've replaced a neuron? I think a lot of people would have said 300 years ago that a human with a mechanical heart is not a human. Who would say that today? Right, right. That's a profound question. When would you cease to be you, in other words? Right? We know you can give you a fake leg and you are still you. We know you can give you somebody else's heart and you are still you. But if we gave you an

entirely mechanical brain, would you be you? That's the question in a sense, right? That's the question. And I guess my answer is why not? Well, the question is also whether or not you are you after you have absorbed the experiences of other people. In other words, if we can transfer consciousness to a machine, if we can parse that, if we can slice it up, we can make program files, we can have downloadable experiences that people can use to augment their own. At what point does the sum total of other people's experience in your head make you not you but a sort of amalgam of all these other individuals who have contributed to this information stream. I find this fascinating and not just for the philosophical tones that we're talking here but just the more practical applications of entertainment. You mentioned before an immersive virtual reality set that you can put on your head to change the trap in your sleep. That's great. rift system with massive computing power with persistent online universes where people can go and live lives is going to change entertainment, is going to change art in ways that we can only begin to dream about at this moment. The idea of going to a movie theater and sitting down and

passively absorbing two hours of pre-digested material is going to be replaced, I think, by something completely different that's going to change movies, fiction, our very definition of leisure time. So, John, I'll ask you, do you fear a world then in the future where the family comes home and at the end of the night, instead of sitting around a television set or perhaps off on different sets or different screens, that everybody is plugged into these little sets in their heads, living lives completely separate and different from the family that they're living with? Well, I don't know what family life is like today in the U.S., but what I always see is families out at a restaurant and they're all looking at their screens at their little devices

and not talking to one another. That's exactly right. I think we're getting, on the other hand, to get back to the first part of what James said, yes, there's maybe a threshold with how vivid it is, how immersive it is, how interactive it is.

But am I not me because I've read 500 novels and live vicariously the lives of these people who live lives that are absolutely nothing like my own? I know it's changed the way I think, the way I behave.

That's why you do it. Yes, but for example, I'm sorry, Peter, but if I read Clockwork Orange, I'm getting a very interesting story about a persuasive and charismatic person who himself is morally bankrupt. That's different than actually experiencing that character from the inside and incorporating that into my own. I mean, I know what you're saying, but there's still a glass barrier between you and the novel that would cease to exist the minute that you become that person and experience it with all of your glands pumping out

what they're supposed to pump out and your heart feeling the thrill. We'll find out when we get there, like so many of these technologies. And we're getting there. How involved do people get in Grand Theft Auto? Oh, true, true. There's still that screen in front of you. I absolutely agree. I played Bioshock.

Bioshock Infinite was the last game that I played, which is about the most immersive thing that I've ever done. Bioshock Infinite. Hey, John, Peter here. I don't have time to give you a last question, but may I be very presumptuous and give you an assignment? And here's the assignment. You don't have to accept it, of course, until you hear what it is.

Years ago, when I was at Oxford, I was trying to decide what courses to study, and one possibility was philosophy. And so in those days, one thing you could do was go look at the previous year's exams, exam questions, and see if you wanted to follow a course that would lead you to exam questions like that. And I can remember word for word the question that decided me against the study of philosophy, but that I now all these years later wish I had taken on.

And this is your assignment if you choose to accept it. Answer the following Oxford essay question, which sounds silly, but I think is profound. Quote, could you turn into a porpoise? Question mark, close quote. If you can work that into a Saturday night science, I will be profoundly grateful. I just would like to see what your mind does with that one. I'm done. Not even a last question, just an assignment.

Let me say that back in the very early dawning days of virtual reality, the one thing that always came up when people were talking about virtual reality was, what does it feel like to be a lobster? OK, in other words, can you internalize what a lobster perceives and act on the world the way a lobster can act on its world? That was considered the way out science fiction-y crazy thing. Now there's probably 75 Xbox games, you know, Lobster Sim and whatever, but we're getting there. Problem with Porpoise is that Porpoise has capabilities in its brain that you don't. It has this whole sonic imaging thing, and it can actually see into objects to some extent.

And so there'd be a question, how do you map that to what the human brain is, is evolved to understand. That's the nicest way I've ever heard anyone tell Peter Robinson that he's not as smart as a porpoise. And if we had that, that translate button, we could do that. Hey, John, I've got one last question before we are,

I know we've got a lot of jokes. I think it's late there. Saturday Night Science. For those of you who are listening to the podcast who are not members of Ricochet or don't go there that often, as I said before at the top of the podcast, you really should. One of the reasons you really should is for John Walker's column that he decided to spontaneously do called Saturday Night Science. It's great.

It's always a different topic. It doesn't really follow one thread. It's always something interesting. Are you working on a book? Would that ever be a book or is it just a column? It's just a column and I will confess that about three quarters or more than three quarters are essentially book reviews or discussing a book and then riffing on the author's comments in the book. And many of those are books that I've read over the years. In fact, my biggest fear in maintaining the column is what happens when I get behind.

So the book reviews are already archived on my site, so I don't see any need to cut down trees or something like that for it. There's some original columns, but even Isaac Asimov in the grand old days of his column in fantasy and science fiction only did one essay a month. And I know Isaac Asimov. John, true to my usual technique, I lied when I said that was the last question. Here's the last question. Why do you do it? Why do you find Ricochet worth your time? I was trying to recall because I expected somebody to ask, how did you end up here? And it was the podcast, I believe. And I don't remember what sent me to the podcast. And then I started to visit the site and recognized that there was this tremendous community that really was

troll-free. And that's something that even on very highbrow intellectual sites is something I'd never experienced before. And the scope of the topics that were covered was much broader than you'd find at most other places, again, with this high level of discourse. And now I find, I mean, and I think one thing that I'll mention for people that don't know about it is we not only have physical meetups for Ricochet members, we have twice a week audio meetups, one on Sunday and one on Monday. This is members only. And people can just call in and chat with one another on whatever they want. I host the one on Sundays, which is it starts at 6, 1800 universal time. You can convert that in your head. And we often have guests. And in fact, Peter has been a guest on the call. And so has Troy and John Gabriel and a bunch of other people in specific

subjects. I mean, last week we had an aerospace engineer, Ricochet member, who talked to us about safety in aerospace and the space policy and so forth. And that's another thing that you just don't find in other places. Wow. Right. I agree. I mean, I hope we recorded that. We should use that instead of what I – Yes, exactly.

It's considerably better than what I cobbled together at the beginning of every podcast. That is always the surprise on the site really is the level of sort of not just expertise and intelligence but also just the ability of people who really know what they're talking about and really know their stuff to communicate it in a way that everyone else can understand it and you still feel like you've been edified so that that is something that was an unintended consequence of of the uh of the of the fee the free market fee how we keep the trolls out we just make members uh you know as i said all owners of the club well and i think i think as an engineer, I always admire things that spontaneously self-assemble. And that's, to me, a lot of what Ricochet does. The in-person meetups were essentially spontaneously generated by people that said, let's try this. The audio meetups, spontaneously generated.

Saturday night science, gee, it'd be fun to have a science column here, spontaneously generated. As a flaming libertarian, I don't believe in central planning, and I think what we have is an example that you don't need very much of it. People will just come up with good ideas and start doing things. I agree. Thank you so much for bringing the crisp antiseptic tang of the Swiss atmosphere to the podcast here. We'll be over to your place soon for the meetup as soon as we all get our passports updated. John, thank you very much. We didn't have the time to ask you so many questions, including how you wrote the first virus for the Uniblab machine.

But that will be the next time, perhaps. You can have me on one of your little shows, and we'll discuss the great age of vacuum tube computers when they were fused into desks and the like. It's a wonderful romantic age. Thank you so much, John Walker. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, John. I heard that John Walker was going to be on the show for a second there.

I had this mental image. I couldn't place him and I was thinking, John, you mean John Walker Lind? You mean that Taliban guy? Yeah, we found him. I looked at a picture of him. If you remember John Walker Lind when he came back from the Taliban in the early days of the war against Syria, this huge, big

Afghan beard. And I'm sure he doesn't have it anymore. And I'm sure when he took it off, it hurt because when you shave with something inferior, you're going to get red bumps. You're going to get a rash. It's going to be too much pain. And you think, why would I even bother? If you want to shave yourself well and clean and clear and have your skin smooth and un-nicked, then you're going to have to go to the best blades in the world.

And the best blades are sold by Harry's. Harry's.com. You know the story. Two guys who were passionate about creating a better shaving experience. And what they did was found the best blades, bought the factory, and they bring them to you at a low, low price. Oftentimes, you associate a low price with cheap razor. Now, have you ever gone to the store and you pay a little bit less than you'd like for a razor and it turns out it just drags your entire three top epidermal layers off with one stroke?

No. Harry's doesn't confuse a good price with a bad shave. No. What they have is the Best Blades delivered straight to your house in a package that's aesthetically pleasing as well as pleasing to your skin. Now, what you do is you call OtoHarris.com and you consider the fact that the starter kit is just $15. $15! That includes the razor, three blades, and your choice of Harry's shave cream or foaming shave gel.

I like the cream myself. As an added bonus, though, you get $5 off your first purchase with the code RICOCHET. And after using this code, well, you can get an entire month's worth of shaving for just $10. Shipping is free. It's free. So why would you not go to Harry's? I can't figure out why. If you got hair you want to take off, Harry's, that's the guys to do it. That's H-A-R-R-Y-S dot com. Coupon code RICSHAY. Check out for five bucks off and start shaving smarter today. And now we welcome to the podcast an old friend, somebody we've been on the high seas with many a time, on the bounding main, Jack Fowler himself, a man who runs a cruise line that just happens to put out a magazine from time to time every fortnight.

He's the publisher of National Review. Jack, how are you today? Hi, James. Very good. You're on with Peter and Rob, all of whom, of course, have enjoyed the pleasures of a National Review cruise. And I understand that – Well, we'll keep those parties behind below decks to ourselves, shall we? You've got a cruise coming up. You would like people to go. It's not the post-election cruise,

which means we're not going to be bobbing around the Caribbean and lolling in the sun. It means going to a destination of interest and doing interesting things and hearing interesting people, like Rob, for example. Tell me why people should join this cruise. Aside from the opportunity to see you in a Speedo? Yeah, exactly. You want people to sign up here, Jack. Oh, okay. Well, first of all, I appreciate you having me on, and I appreciate

you gentlemen having been with us in the past on the high seas. And the cruises are, frankly, a lot, it's ricochet on water, in a sense. Intelligent conversation by interesting and thoughtful thought leaders and the occasional comedian. you would like to hear intelligent discussion by and join in that conversation yourself, not only in a formal seminar setting, but, hey, there's James Lilacs having lunch all alone. I think I will go bother him for half an hour and discuss his views on Minnesota politics. I mean, these opportunities are out there for people. That's what a cruise is about. It's spending time with really bright, really intelligent people,

not only the quote-unquote celebrities, but the other folks that attend the cruises. We typically have 400, 500, 600 folks on a cruise, and there's always one screwball in the lot. the cruises. We typically have 400, 500, 600 folks on a cruise and they're really, I mean, there's always one screwball in the lot, but very thoughtful people, successful when they start telling you their own stories of their life, you know, half the time, most of the time, often you're amazed at the things they've accomplished. So it's a great sense of camaraderie and being with people like yourselves who many conservatives admire. And they want to hear more from in a thoughtful way and frankly,

a funny way and an off-the-cuff way too. There's no formal speeches on these trips. So we've been doing these for 20 years. The folks keep coming back. I assume the speakers have a good time because when we invite them, they return. It's a lot of fun. I mean I recommend – it's a lot of fun. I mean the post-election cruise is great because like there's all that – all those politics to talk about. This cruise coming up will be great because we'll have really an assembly of candidates at the starting gate running for 2016,

which is something I wanted to ask you about that. How do or do they, candidates for the Republican nomination, start buttering NR

up? I mean, don't they kind of need NR a little in their side early on? What's the, like they send you cookies or something, Jack? What do they do? No, the cookies came too late for Mitt Romney. This is an interesting little story. Let's admit what National Review is. It's the founder, the founding instrument of the conservative movement and the largest journal of opinion in the country, a major website. Yes, if I was running for president, I think Iney, who, as you know, is a former cruise guest and an all around great guy.

Yeah. Nice guy. Um, his, I called one of his, um, top aides, who's a good friend of mine and, and probably yours will not mention his name later later, as the campaign got later, said, you know, this dude has not reached out once to us. You would think that if I want to be president, I think I'll probably pick up the phone and call Rich Lowry every three months just to say hi,

just, you know, be in New York, like to meet with the editors, et cetera. So I think it was sort of symbolic of Romney's initial distance from the conservative movement. I mean clearly to me there seemed to be some effort in that area. So that's ancient history. Coming up soon for National Review

and the National Review review institute our sister organization there will be an ideas summit in uh late april early may uh in washington um invitation only sorry james and uh oh no no i've i've heard i. There's inner party and there's outer party. And this will be a sort of a formal public opportunity for candidates to meet with National Review and meet with National Review's, you know, friends and readers. And we've already got a healthy number of leading candidates signed up to participate at that. Also, the fact that we're in New York City, conveniently located, when the folks come to town, when they have out the tin cup, they often will stop by the office to meet with the editors and sometimes we try to set up meetings with uh we'll call them friendly uh media folks of the the journal commentary but you don't you're not you're

not taking sides yet right no oh no no no no not at all when do you think when you plan when you expect nr to say hey you know what here's here's our candidate well Well, we don't always do that, Rob. Even last time around, what we were most famous for in 2012 is saying who should not be the candidate. And that was Snoot Gingrich, who was portrayed as Marvin the Martian on our cover with a quite devastating – I do remember that. Mark Stein column. I think it led off with the example about let's light highways from satellites with mirrors or some sort of craziness. But actually, what we said at the time was at this point, three – I mean, this is not the proper verbiage, but acceptable people at this point would have been Romney, Santorum, and the guy that spoke Chinese. I don't even remember his name.

Hansman. Yeah. God, I forget. Thankfully. And the last two I found quite laughable. I mean, Hansman I think is laughable. And, you know, personally, when it comes to Rick Santorum, I always think of Pat Toomey and, you know, I have that Irish Alzheimer's disease. You never forget the grudges.

So, but we featured them on the cover at critical points in the primary process and took some candidate who was really the best conservative and most presentable, you know, the Buckley rule, most electable conservative, and we gave them prominence. And in every case, it projected them to the front of the pack and to victory, but not with an endorsement. I mean, just the cover, just the story. Yeah, the big warm embrace. And if you ask any of those candidates, they will tell you that it was National Review that made was the critical point in their campaign. By the way, same thing first time round for Scott Brown

and also for Pat Toomey second time around. So anyway, National, but in no time did we end. Well, I must say, when Cruz

they had the second – what do you call it? The runoff of the primary. At that point, we did endorse him. But our damage for his sake was – it's very rare. Very rare we endorse. Well, speaking of Cruz, of course, we want to remind everybody to go to NR and get themselves a ticket. And you don't have to be necessarily on the right in order to be on this cruise.

As a matter of fact, in the Norway cruise, there was a couple of people who wandered into one of the shows and explained, I was standing there when Jack was welcoming them, they said they'd just been searching for a fjord cruise and National Review came up and they were Democrats and they were finding it absolutely fascinating. You can't not enjoy yourself on a National Review cruise.

So we'll see you there, Jack. We'll see you there, Rob. We'll see you there. Everybody who wants to go and book a room, as usual. nrcruise.com. That's the website. If you want to find out more, that's where they go. We'll have a link on the podcast page.

Thank you, Jack. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, gentlemen. Take care, Jack. We know that Peter lives a busy, fascinating life and that he is about to dash into a phone booth and rip off his shirt and review the big blue R

on his chest and swoop off somewhere to interview somebody. So we'll let you go, Peter. What fascinating person are you interviewing this week? No, this isn? Oh, no. This isn't even an interview. This is a business lunch to talk about a company that somebody – this is very much in line with what John Walker was talking about 10 minutes ago about what you can do with new computing power. And I'm being invited along to a breakfast where somebody is talking

about a new company for internet security. And I will be as at sea during the technical aspects of this breakfast as I was at sea when John started. By the way, I am a little bit ticked off with John Walker. Rob and I were English majors. I don't know, what did you major in, James? Were you an English major as well? Yes. It is just, okay, so all three of us are English. It is unfair for somebody who is as technically knowledgeable as John Walker also to be

able to write as well as John Walker. Don't you think? No, not at all, as a matter of fact. There's nothing fair about the distribution of talents whatsoever unless we want to put some sort of intellectually hobbling device around his ear that makes him incapable of doing things so the rest of us don't feel bad about ourselves. I wouldn't mind that. I wouldn't mind that.

Yeah, yeah. I'd vote for that. I'd vote for that. All right. OK. Well, you bring that up with your technological investor angels right there, the Harrison Bergeron device that will cripple people's intellectual capability. So everyone is equal and we can all feel good about ourselves. So see you later, Peter.

Off you go. Off you go. And Rob, while we're still here, there's a big, bad, nasty world out there. The president wants authorization to go to war with ISIS. There are some people who say that the Congress should send him up an authorization that also includes the ability to, oh, I don't know, go after Iran if we want to if they start acting in an inappropriate fashion as school teachers might say. Should we go to war with ISIS and do you trust the president to prosecute something like this? Well, yeah.

I mean no and I don't even know what war means. I mean I think this is a lot of this sort of political theater that he engages in when he wants to change the subject or sound tough or whatever it is. There is – or frankly when he wants to appear to have a strategy that he doesn't have. or ISIL, whatever it is, except in very specific circumstances where if we chose to reclaim Iraqi territory and drive them out of Iraq, we can't really do it in Syria where they're making inroads. We can't really do it in a lot of those places. Those are going to have to be done by the leaders in the countries in the region, not by us. The reason there's a power vacuum in Iraq is because Barack Obama wanted to leave Iraq. He didn't really – he was not interested in staying there and finishing the job.

He was not interested in making sure that was a secure state. He was more interested in making sure that we were gone. And this is what happens when you do that. You end up creating a power vacuum. So I'm not really sure. I don't take him at his word. I believe this is a disingenuous move on his part, going for authority to do something. I think he has no intention of doing it and probably at this point rightly so except maybe in the case of Iraqi territory. Do you believe him when he says that he thinks global warming – I'm sorry, climate change is a greater danger to us all than the isolated miscreant who just shoots up some folks at random? No. Look, I don't think – I think this guy says stuff the way a teacher says things, a bad teacher says things because they're trying to make a point.

That's why he mentions the crusades and global warming and all that other stuff because what he wants is for Americans to stop worrying about terrorism and to start recycling or to stop worrying about terrorism and to start – his wife, eat better or be less Christian, right? All those things he wants. So they're all interchangeable little dependent clauses or independent clauses. He sticks on to every sentence that he would say the same about, hey, don't worry so much about the high taxes. Worry about global warming instead. I mean, anything he thinks the right wing or his detractors are obsessing over, which

is usually a thing that he's weak on, he would rather change the subject to something else to make you feel like to remind you that you need to do a lot of work on yourself, right? Don't worry so much about the terrorists that you need to do a lot of work on yourself, right? Don't worry so much about the terrorists. You need to remember about the crusades. Don't worry so much about terrorists. You need to like change all your light bulbs to those little Dairy Queen thingy, compact fluorescent things. So no, I don't take him at his word on that at all. I mean, do you? Well, it's hard to know exactly what to take him at his word at. Axelrod's new book reveals that the president did not evolve on the issue of gay marriage, that he actually believed in it in 2007, 2006, Lord knows when, and that he was advised to do so,

to lie about it and to use his faith as a reason to lie about his faith in order to win election by courting a demographic, a large basis of his support that – I didn't agree with him on that particular issue. So is there any core principle that the fellow would not dissemble about in public? Well, no. I mean in order to get elected? No. And the thing about that was that that was so obvious to everybody who voted for him that he was lying. They all said it.

Everybody said it at the time. When I would use that, use his position on gay marriage as a brick bat, try to attack his supporters. Hey, well, I guess you're actually more against gay marriage than Vice President Dick – Vice President at the time, Dick Cheney. And they would look at me and they kind of roll their eyes and say, Obama doesn't really mean it. Even they knew it and these people weren't – they didn't hear from David Axelrod.

They just knew intuitively that Barack Obama is in favor of gay marriage and he's just saying this because you have to say stuff so that the vast, crazy American reactionary voter doesn't, is not galvanized to vote against you. Everybody knew that. Yeah. You know, I was seeing a story and I think Washington Free Beacon the other day was talking about how China is maybe, how did they put this, surreptitiously supporting Hawaiian independence movement as a way of getting back about Taiwan. And I thought, you know, it's come to this. You like to think that the president leaves the country pretty much intact by the time he's done with the second term. But, you know, you think it's entirely possible that the president would support the independence of Hawaii

because it's an indigenous movement. And actually, you know, we were quite imperialistic in taking it over. So 49 states at the end of the term and Guantanamo released, turned back to Cuba, Iraq and complete chaos. But hey, on the other hand, we have a new composting program in our neighborhood that requires

us to put all of our wet organic garbage into a separate pail. So America, we're on the right track. And you, my friends, are on the right track if you go to Harry's.com and enter the coupon code RICOCHET because you'll get five bucks off. And once you start getting those razor blades delivered right to your door, you will never, ever, ever go to

the store and pay high prices for blades again. You'll also want to go to Acculturator.com where pop culture matters and you can find the sort of things we were talking about in games, for example. When I mentioned Bioshock Infinite for a second there, here's a game that actually tackles philosophical concepts in the story in an immersive environment and changes

the way you look at entertainment. And Acculturator.com is where you'll find people who know what they're talking about, talking about pop culture. We thank, as usual, our guests. We thank Peter, who's gone, Rob, and we will see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 2.0. James, see you next week. Thank you. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Thank you.