The Ricochet Podcast - To Serve Man

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Scary times could be just around the corner. To help you prepare for that we've invited our old friend Carol Roth to stop by and talk about her new book, You Will Own Nothing... because you don't have to be a parnoid prepper to be prepared for what's coming.And, of course, James Lileks, Rob Long and Steve Hayward (sitting in again for the roaming Peter Robinson) cover the more immediate news coming down from the Summit - the NATO Summit, The Family Leadership Summit in Iowa (with Tucker Carlson presiding) and the Mickey Mouse Summit where Disney introduces a Latina Snow White and the Lone Dwarf while their CEO Bob Iger announces "that it’s not our goal to be involved in a culture war.” Say wut?!?Opening sound this week: Tucker Carlson and former Vice-President Mike Pence clash in Iowa. (Blaze TV)

Oh, we have that. Okay, three, two, one. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new answers. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long. Peter Robinson is usually here, but Stephen Haywards is sitting in for him today. I'm James Lilacs. We just talked to Carol Roth about her new book, You Will Own Nothing. So let's

have ourselves a podcast. Our economy has degraded. The suicide rate has jumped. Public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased. And yet, your concern is that the Ukrainians don't have enough tanks. I think it's a fair question to ask, like, where's the concern for the United States in that?

Tucker, I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 650. Wow. An august number. I don't know why, but I guess just those sort of round numbers make you feel, wow, we've been at this for a long time. And for good reason, because it's lots of fun. It's so much fun that Peter Robinson isn't here for two weeks in a row because he just can't stand the excitement. He's got to go someplace and just collect himself. But I'm here. James Lollux, Minneapolis. Rob Long, I presume in Gotham. Stephen A, we're sitting in for Peter Robinson in California. Gentlemen, welcome. Hi, James. How you doing? Been a week.

Been a week. It's been a week. So where to start? We had a NATO conference and Biden skipped the dinner. You know, you get a little tired at the end of the day. Hey, well, why, you know, go through all of that chatter and sitting there and making relationships and secret protocols between the meals. Why bother?

Go back to the room, watch a little television. It's not like NATO's in the news. No, no, no, it isn't. We had a call-up. We have a call-up of troops, which is interesting. It seems to be under the radar, but a lot of people are raising a spark like eyebrows at that. And we have today all over the Twitter,

a series of clips of Tucker Carlson interviewing various presidential candidates. That seems to be the most recent, perhaps, what people will be talking about the most at ricochet.com, where by the way, you should go and look and say, where has this been all my life? And wonder, is there anything more to it than this? There is, there's a member feed,

which is just a great place to make a new community. It's what you've been looking for. Facebook didn't do it. Threads didn't do it. Ricochet.com is where you go. And we'll be talking about the Tucker clips and probably having some good zesty arguments about it. Tucker's a good guy to do these interviews because he asks questions in a way that frames them outside of the usual narrative, in which case people will say, well, that's of course it's because he's a Nazi.

But no, no. I mean, hearing him ask questions about immigration and Ukraine, which I disagree intensely, but it's good and it's forthright and it's simple. And it's better than the blather and palaver we get from the usual debates, which never seem to have the sort of payoff that these Tucker interchanges have. So gentlemen, have you seen any of them? What do you think? Do you have any favorites? How do you think they did it, et cetera? subject it's boring you want to talk about something else oh well i i have not seen them but i it seems to me that he probbed my guess is that um that he's going to do a good job but mostly because he's usually when people ask these questions or ask these kind of things though the press

um they're sort of gotcha questions designed to uh embarrass the candidate in front of um democratic candidate democratic voters you know it's like um completely irrelevant to republican party uh primary voters which is the phase that we're in now mostly i don't you know obviously because they're biased but mostly also because i don't think that any member of the united states press corps could even frame a question. That would be it would have an interesting answer and a relevant answer to Republican primary voter. They don't know any. They haven't met any. They certainly don't work with any. There are none in the newsroom. So these are just like it's like, how do you what kind of questions would you ask a person who is running for the governor of Venus? Like you wouldn't even know what to begin with, you know so tucker at least is going to be relevant i mean he's going to have

gotcha questions too probably because he's going to want to make some news nothing wrong with that but at least they're going to be gotcha questions that that that are sort of interesting to watch the candidates squirm under um you know i i have the complicated feelings about tucker because i've known a long time and i and i admire what he's a lot of what he's done i i almost 100 disagree with him now um on his his priorities and analysis of what's wrong with america in the world um but he's an interesting guy an interesting mind and um wish he was more consistent mind um but uh there's no arguing that he is an important voice in the, you know, right word movement. He should be the guy asking these tough questions.

I think if I had, if I had interviewed the governor of Venus, I would ask him how he dealt with all the pressure. And ladies and gentlemen, we've just had the, we've just had the podcast in a nutshell, Rob Long. I haven't seen any of the quotes.

Here's four minutes of opinion on it well yeah i could have i could have just punted right i mean and good in my defense this is not on the rundown here so you just you pulled this one out of your ass and now i'm trying to make an answer no no but i think you're absolutely right in what you said and that's and and i agree with what you said uh anyway so there's a rob Rob points to an asymmetry in the way these debates go. The media, the mainstream media always ask questions to, based on premises of the left, to embarrass Republicans. They almost never ask questions based on the premises of the right in the Democratic debates.

To think of one example that breaks from the mold, you have to go all the way back to 2008 when Charlie Gibson of ABC News asked Barack Obama, why do you want to raise the capital gains tax when every time we raise it, revenues go down and every time you cut it, revenues go up? Why raise it at all? And I thought, that's the kind of question I would ask someone who's conversant in supply-side economics. And like I say, that's 15 years ago now. You've got to go back to find a question. Right, right. And consider that if Tucker were to throw his hat into the ring as a candidate for the Republican nomination, he would out-poll probably half the candidates he's going to be interviewing today and in the next few days or whatever the schedule is.

So, yeah, they better take him seriously. And if they're not prepared for it, I think woes to them. Also, I kind of feel like it's a good example because Tucker does represent, unfortunately, my view, he does represent a certain portion of that electorate. And so there are going to be a sizable number of voters who are going to be like, OK, I agree with Tucker. Tell me why I'm wrong. I mean, Republican primary voters in general tend to be persuadable. And that's kind of what they've shown over the past 30 years. Right.

You go in with a front runner and you can come out with somebody totally different. So they are up for grabs. They're open to this kind of debate and this kind of exchange. So why not have somebody I mean, Tucker Cross is not going to show to show up and say listen i really don't have an opinion on this i'm very neutral like it ain't him right um so this could be very very elucidating and also i would feel perfectly comfortable judging a candidate who disagrees with tucker um on the basis of how they how they treat that disagreement like right asa hutchinson for example he was asked uh you know about the basis of how they treat that disagreement. Right. Asa Hutchinson, for example, he was asked about the issue of medically castrating,

to use the terms that they use, because that's a term, because it's what happens, youth in the guise of gender-affirming health care. And Asa Hutchinson's response was, well, I like to talk about issues. He didn't believe that this was a serious issue, which shows a distinct lack of interest in the side of things that make David French uncomfortable, the culture war. The culture war that, of course, is an entire creation of the right, which was in reaction to absolutely nothing

and was ginned up out of nowhere. So if he's not conversant in that and doesn't want to have an opinion about that that's instructive but when you said rob is the rootless cosmopolitan east coast rhino squish that you are that you disagree you disagree disagree um that unfortunately a lot of the voters agree with tucker what are the issues that you think are unfortunately they agree well ukraine i think he's absolutely 100 wrong on uk. And I think he's gone way too far on his on his caution about Ukraine. He's already said he's rooting for Putin. We already know that.

I think that's just an error of judgment that is kind of hard to come back from. I think he's wrong about January 6th. I think he's wrong about the 2020 election. I think he's fundamentally wrong on the issue of whether we should have a free market economy or a command industrialized economy. He's in favor of industrial policy. He just like everyone who's in favor of industrial policy. They're like, it's great as long as I'm in charge. But that is not how this country works. So one of the reasons why the founders made sure to circumscribe the power of government is because they know that we have a thing called a democracy and sometimes the morons win um and we are living in that under that umbrella right now that it does happen and when it does happen you're very very thankful for restrictions on federal power uh so i think he's wrong about

all those things um and i i think he's wrong about that guy andrew tate i think it was gross i think he's gross i know that's that's yeah so i don't but the thing about the ukraine is is when he speaks about uh you know christian persecution and indicates he absolutely knows nothing whatsoever about the schism the ukrainian church that's going on or doesn't or knows and doesn't care i mean it's irrelevant i'm glad that there is somebody with whom I disagree who's asking those questions of potential candidates because I want to hear a robust intellectual defense of their 100 percent agree. Yeah. So he had a great question of Tim Scott about immigration. And Tim Scott did something that was he gave sort of a standard boilerplate agreeing.

And then he stood up and started talking to the audience like i like i used to do at the uh at the night owls i accepted this was really weird it's like he interposed himself between the audience and tucker and took over and just moved the conversation where he wanted it to but it was a weird way of marginalizing tucker but it was still the clips that i see have been more interesting than anything i ever saw in the debate where 11 people are in stages are answering questions from MSNBC. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I got a question though.

Is, is anybody else having a weird Tim Scott moment? Oh yeah, Rob. I, I, I know what you mean. And yeah, I think you're onto something there.

I think he's maybe the most interesting, well, the most interesting candidate in the field that we're not paying sufficient attention to i'll put it that way good way putting it yeah yeah especially since the the dissensus campaign seems to be like the ukrainian counter-offensive um i mean it's it's ongoing and and accomplishments are being made but people are expecting a breakthrough at some point every day and something dramatic like that. And it's just not happening.

Then you go to look at Trump in Iowa. I suppose I think the last time Trump tweeted about it, he was up 147 points or something. And Trump has made people in Iowa very unhappy. Yeah. Yeah. So there's two thoughts on that. I think foolishly this week, by all the accounts I read, attacked their governor, Kim Reynolds, who's very popular and who, for what it's worth, I've had on my short list as a very strong running mate for

whoever the Republican nominee is, I think to be an excellent candidate. Second, we still don't know if Trump's going to show up for any debates, if he's going to campaign in Iowa. Again, I'm old enough to remember that in 1980, Ronald Reagan was the frontrunner and his campaign manager, John Sears, said, oh, you know, gosh, you don't want to be in a debate in Iowa. You don't want to spend a lot of time there. So Reagan barely visited Iowa and was upset by George H.W. Bush, whereupon Reagan fired John Sears shortly after and recovered quickly but the point is i think trump may be making similar blunders for even less cogent reasons than reagan had 40 some years ago you mean out of personal peak you mean out of personal peak right no he

would never do that also i think that the the the trump's in a very different position um it's not an i mean everyone is everyone in the republican party who's running for president is running against him that's how that works in in 2016 they all thought we're running against each other and there's weird this weirdo here who's eventually going to like figure it out he'll drop it my real my real opponent is ted cruz or marco rubio or somebody like that right jeb bush right yeah jeb bush now they all know who their opponent is it's one guy and what you don't want to do is you don't want to have those guys all on stage having decided at a caucus that they really don't need to right now go after each other they just need

to kill him that's something he's not really going to be able to stand up to so it may be smart for him not to show up because he's terrible at these things when he's cornered. He's just, you know, remember, he'll be depending on how far into the tank you are. He lost the 2020 election in that first debate with Joe Biden because of his behavior. I mean, this is something I'm not conjecturing. This is literally something the Trump campaign admitted at the beginning of December. The head of the campaign, the president, didn't admit it. But the other campaign, they had all the numbers and all the proof for it. That's why he lost Republican males in in in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania and in Georgia, in Georgia and in Arizona.

So, you know, these debates are not great for him when he's under fire. He's much better as the guy shooting from the hip. And so maybe, I don't know, maybe it's wise for him not to show up. Probably so, but it looks awful and it seeds the stage to people who can say what they want and will. And, you know, they don't have to make up stuff they i mean trump tweeted on the other day that one of the first thing he would do when re-elected is to you know close the border and uh seal that and solve that immigration problem which would be interesting except that we kind of have four years of record on which to look on that issue the same thing with the deep state i'll solve the deep state i'll drain this one well we kind of gave you the chance to do that before and now you're older and you're even weirder given the tweets

that you keep me so we like cast our eyes elsewhere perhaps and speaking of elsewhere there's this high-minded conversation we're having here and then there's the proud capitalistic commercialist essence that is The Spot. I am Andrew Gutman. And I'm Beth Feeley. And we're a couple of accidental activist parents who woke up and started speaking out about issues that we saw in our children's schools. So join us every week on Take Back Our Schools on the Ricochet Audio Network, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ricochet. Join the conversation.

All right. So much for the domestic stuff. International. NATO. You guys have any ideas about how that conference went? I just yearn for the days when NATO meeting meant absolutely nothing. Nothing. It meant the French were going to be difficult. Yeah. We're always kind of peripheral to NATO when they kicked us out back in the 60s. Exactly right. Yeah. So, oh, boy.

The problem here is, I'll step back a minute. I keep worrying that our biggest problem with the whole Ukraine scene is an incoherence or indecisiveness in our policy that reminds me in some ways of Vietnam, right? So review the record. The Biden administration said, we're not going to send the HIMARS rocket systems. Okay, we will send the HIMARS rocket systems. We're not going to send Abrams tanks. Okay, we will send you the tanks, but it's going to take at least nine months because the supply chain for those is huge and training, so forth. We're not going to send F-16s. Okay, now we'll send you F-16s. And now cluster bombs, which are controversial in and of themselves, because apparently Joe Biden blurted out, Biden blurted, I got to practice that,

that we're running short of ammunition, which is not exactly reassuring, specifically or generally. And so we're going to go to cluster bombs. And you keep wondering, you know, do they actually have an endgame? Or it reminds me of the graduated escalation of Vietnam, which never had a strategy for victory, recall. Deep down, I think they want a stalemate and are rumors that there are back channel negotiations underway for a political settlement, which would involve ceding some territory to Russia. Maybe that's the most sensible thing to do. I think, by the way, James, you mentioned that we keep thinking the Ukrainian counteroffensive is going to have a breakthrough. But I think that even though the modern weaponry we have, this is resembling more and more World War I trench warfare, where breakthroughs are very difficult. Both defense and offense have roughly

symmetrical strengths. And I think it's going to be very difficult to make a breakthrough unless we're prepared to give them a lot more air power, a lot more really devastating, you know, Moab bombs that we used, of course, in the Middle East and so forth. And I think we don't want to do that because we're afraid, quite rightly so, that we might provoke Russia into using tactical nukes. And what the strategy seems to be to a trit, to destroy the logistics, to destroy their ability to resupply. And that was our Vietnam strategy. Let's just bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail every day. Right. And it didn't work worth a darn. But in this case, there are very specific strategic objectives and they're doing it.

And you can, you can, you can believe or not believe the stuff that you get on telegram on Twitter and Reddit that are fed along from the Ukrainian side or the Russian side and the complaints about the shortage of ammunition, but the Russians do not seem to be particularly well-equipped. There's just a lot of them hunkered down there. So you destroy their ability to be resupplied and you keep doing that and you keep doing that.

And then you overrun a demobilized, starving under motivated force seems to be the idea uh so yeah there are parallels to it you can any war will have parallels to any other war until it doesn't yeah i'm not i think the analogy to vietnam is right i would just cast the characters differently i would say that the the smug sitting on the sidelines um barely lifting a finger but doing some help. A Russian position in Vietnam was now played by the United States and the West. And the Russians are us in there for no reason and hated and despised. And, you know, whether we're running out of ammunition or not, I think that's probably not true.

You know, we are sent they are any american equipment they're using either that comes from us or comes from our european allies is really garage sale equipment it's not actually stuff that we're using um now we may not be replacing what we needed to be replacing at the generation that we should be now but it's not this it's not this generation this is a generation ago um so when the f-16s come, which won't come from us, will come from our partners and the pilots are trained. I suspect they've actually been training for about nine months, not the two months that is public. Things will probably get worse for people living in the region, but the war might actually start looking different. But the other reason it's like Vietnam is because people are kind of everyone is every one of the actors, even the even the the co-stars right here, NATO, the West, us, even the Belarus. They're all kind of waiting for something to happen, something political to happen, something political to change in a capital far away. That's what the north

vietnamese were waiting for that's what the south vietnamese were waiting whether the russians the chinese the americans are waiting for in the vietnam war and um i suspect that when this does play out it will play out a lot more a lot more closely to a complete and utter humiliation for russia which will have which is by the way is a thing, but it isn't as if, you know, the argument that we provoked this by our NATO talk is sort of not historically accurate. In the early 2000s, as recently as the early 2000s, Putin was suggesting that NATO be expanded to include Russia. People keep forgetting that. It was only later when Georgia andia and ukraine felt they were about to be invaded that these talks got hot and of course georgia and ukraine were invaded so it's

sort of like saying it's your own damn fault your house got robbed because you were planning to buy an alarm so you know these things do happen something was provoked but i don't think it was bad provocation i think it was perfectly safe provocation. But, you know, the mystery box. Or the Schrodinger's what is Schrodinger's cat that is Putin in that room is going to has all the answers. We just don't I just don't think he has them yet. And it may be that he turns a corner and somebody's there with a gun. And that's the answer. Wouldn't be the worst possible outcome to this problem. No, he'll be poisoned out a window.

Well, that's our take on the world as it is. Now, let's go to the stuff that really matters. Money. Carol Roth is our guest, a self-described, quote, recovering investment banker, end quote. Carol's an entrepreneur, writer, and commentator who appears on Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC. And she's got a new book coming out, You Will Own Nothing, Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back. Carol, thanks for joining us in the podcast today. Great to be with you guys. Your book. Get started on this book. You were learning that some of the wealthiest people on the planet, the Davos elite, shall we say, I started predicting the end of private

property. It can be this wonderful thing. You will own nothing and you will be happy. Everything will be a microtransaction. You'll have no privacy and the world will never be better. Tell us about that revelation of yours and whether or not you think these guys were serious and where we are in the process of getting to this utopia or dystopia that they want. James, you know, when I first heard you'll owe nothing and you'll be happy making its rounds on social media, I sort of internalized it the way I internalize many things on social media going, ah, that's a funny meme. Maybe it was out of context.

You know, there's it's the World Economic Forum. It's littered with the business and political elite. There's no way they're actually predicting the end of private property by 2030. Somebody must have gotten this wrong. And so it did not take very much time to go find the video. It's on the WEF's Twitter stream still today. And it was based on input from their global future councils. And there you have it, like in black and white. Number one is you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. By the way, the other seven are kind of horrible too. Everyone sort of focuses on that first one. But it did stand out to me as somebody who for over a quarter of a century has been focused on wealth creation opportunities for everybody to kind of think about this. I know that ownership leads to wealth. You have to own assets that have the opportunity to retain their value or to appreciate in value

in order to accumulate wealth. So the idea that the people who were wealthy and well-connected were saying, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. One, it was pretty clear, you'll own nothing. It wasn't, we'll own nothing and I'll own nothing. It's all about you, right? So that's kind of staggering. The second was the happiness part, that they're almost trying to get you to buy in, that somehow this is great for you. You can live this free Instagram YOLO life and you don't have to worry about anything. And as the students of history, I think we can all agree that people who haven't had access to property have not been free and have not been happy.

So I kind of put that aside, but it was always in the back of my mind. And as I started kind of thinking about all these different issues that were coming up with the debasement of the dollar and the shift in the global financial order and the dollarization, central bank digital currencies, social credit, ESG, Wall Street competing with you to buy a house, big tech trying to rent your life back to you as a subscription or a service. Like anytime I started to get one of those, like I kept going, there's gotta be a through line here. There's gotta be a through line. And just one day I'm walking and it hit me sort of like a lightning bolt, you will own nothing. And there it was, it was like, it just like spoke to me. And I said, that's the through line. And, you know, so it's not necessarily that everything we talk about in the book is some, you know, World Economic Forum cabal intention, but it is really a really good way to frame and think about all these different forces that are coming at us. There's you will own nothing and you will like it. And there's also you will own nothing and you'll like it. It does seem like, I mean, can we just go piece by piece through the things that you're not going to own? Like people say, you're not going to own.

Well, you're not going to own it. You don't have to own a hard drive, right? Because you can store all of your stuff in the cloud. You don't have to own a car because you can ride share Uber, Lyft. It's efficient. You can do that and you'll never have to own a car because you can ride share Uber, Lyft. It's efficient. You can do that and you'll never have to own a car. And won't that be better? There's a whole new move.

It started really, I mean, you know, for, I mean, to think for all of American history, you were supposed to own a house to the extent that we created an enormous bureaucracy to subsidize and kind of distort the prices of houses. And then around 2008 or 2009 or 2010, people started saying, you know, coincidentally, with the collapse of the housing industry or the housing finance business, hey, maybe you should just rent, try renting, or maybe the renting is good. So you don't have to own a house. And the arguments for all that has been, well, why would you want all this extra stuff that you then have to like this you're liable for instead there's

probably a more productive way to use and to save and to invest your money um why i mean i think i know why that's wrong it just doesn't feel right to me but what why is it wrong from just an economic business prosperity yeah i feel like you've gone through my cover and we've sort of crossed out all those different things and you can see it behind me, you know, all those different things that you won't own. You know, I think it's different for every category of ownership and each one has its own unique issues. Having a car, which unless you have a classic car is probably a depreciating asset is different. It's about, you know, freedom and not depending on, you know, infrastructure, those kinds of things. The home is one that we really should be focused on because when you think about the American dream,

and I see Steve nodding along here, you know, the American dream, what is the symbol of the American dream? It is a home and, you know, it might even have a picket fence in front of it. And there's a reason for that. That is the largest asset on people's balance sheets in America and frankly, in a lot of other places around the world by dollar value. This is the way that Americans have created wealth. I talk about in the book that I think that that probably has to do with duration, right? You're consuming your home, your kids are going to school, those kinds of things.

So when the stock market has ups and downs, you might panic and sell out of the stocks, but you're not doing that when the housing market goes up and down, unless you got yourself into a situation like around the Great Recession financial crisis. So most people ride out those ups and downs, they hold it for a long period of time. And so they're able to create and retain that wealth. So the idea that you would take the largest assets on people's balance sheets and say, no, we're not going to let you have that wealth creation opportunity. We're going to let Wall Street have it. And it's going to be great for you. You're going to be so happy to not be wealthy. Congratulations.

To not be wealthy and to be at their whim is insane. And the fact that this has come out of fiscal and monetary policy and other government policy, the fact that one of the craziest things when I researched You Will Own Nothing and did the deep dive there, I did not realize that before 2010, there was no meaningful institutional capital in the single family home market. It was only through the distortion of the market and this nearly 15 years of easy money policy. Can I just stop you? Those are really big words. Can you explain those again? Yeah. Okay. So 2010, before then, there was no meaningful, not saying that there was none, because maybe like one or two people did it on a small scale, but institutional capital,

corporations, Wall Street. So I'm not talking about a mom and pop who might come along and buy one or two houses, but we're talking about the capital that's coming in and buying hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of homes. And so that didn't exist. They invested maybe in apartment buildings or corporate real estate, but they weren't competing with you to buy your house and take that wealth creation opportunity away from you. So that market didn't exist at all before 2010. And because we had the Federal Reserve suppressing interest rates, printing money, allowing these corporations to have access to cheap capital, they were able to go out and buy all kinds of assets and inflate those asset values because there was more money chasing these assets. And we saw the stock market go up and whatnot. And they were looking for places to put this abundant, cheap capital. Interest rates were near zero. This was a gift for them.

Yeah, money was free. They were going out and they're like, oh, hey, we can buy people's homes and we can tell them that this benefits them. And we are at a point now where corporate investors, as of the end of 22, bought approximately one in every five homes. And that was not done with the intention to make them better for you and give you the opportunity then to participate in that wealth. That is to transfer that wealth creation opportunity from that biggest asset class on your balance sheet from Main Street to Wall Street.

So can I, I know she wants to get in here, but before he does, I just want to like, either have you confirm, which would make me nervous, or tell me why I'm wrong in my little paranoid, kind of little paranoid voice in my head that says that a house and even a car represent two things aside from shelter and a savings account for the house and and freedom it represents sovereignty like your house is your home you're my home is my castle that's your sovereignty and as long as you got a car and gas it, I can't tell you where to go or where not to go.

You get to go wherever you want as long as you obey the speed laws. And even then, you know. Okay, so if they represent that, and I can convince you to liquidate that. And I can tell myself, well, when you're liquidating, you're turning it into liquid. I'm giving you money for it. It's not nothing. Don't be stealing it from me. But right now, no one can really regulate you out of your house, right?

We can't really control what you do in that house, you know, aside from the big bad stuff. We can't tell you what to read and what not to it in your iPad, you do not own that book. If the publisher wants to remove dirty words from that book, they can do it while you're asleep in your book. So if I can get you to liquidate everything you own and then it's fine we have all of these fantastic financial institutions and they will invest that money and they will make sure that your money is safe which is all true but once it's just money then i can control where that money goes right because if i run an esg kind of fund or i run a financial regulator

or I'm a crackpot left-wing president and I decide to have a crackpot left-wing Secretary of Treasury and decide to impose a lot of crackpot left-wing rules and regulations on financial services. Hypothetically speaking. Yeah, right. Hypothetically speaking,

I've just taken all of your sovereignty away. I haven't cheated you out of any money, but I brought you and everything you own under become paranoid enough because there's another layer to that. People rarely say that about me, by the way. Which is the social credit piece of this, which is very informal right now, but certainly gaining momentum. But think about if you don't own a home and somebody else owns it and you do something that somebody doesn't like, then they could have cause to remove you from the home, right? You are not a worthy person, you have become, you know, you're a mom that shows up somewhere and to protest for your kids. And the FBI has now said you're a domestic terrorist. I'm sorry, I can't have a domestic terrorist renting from me so you can no longer have access to housing. So the sovereignty argument extends in all different directions. And I you are somebody who owned a house and you liquidated that, I mean, most people, they're just renting to begin with, right? They never get into that

opportunity to buy the house now, the younger folks. And so they are taking their money and it's not like they're saving money and then investing it somewhere else. They're just giving it to somebody else who is creating the wealth for themselves. But if we get to the point of the central bank digital currency, which is also not conspiratorial, the Fed, New York Fed ran a pilot program with 12 financial institutions starting last November that they just reported on at the wholesale level, but they said it's a wild success. The G7 came out with their principles, I think it was 13 principles for retail facing CBDC. So these aren't the activities that you do if this is something that nobody has considered before. And so to the extent then that you are liquid, you have your

money in a form factor that's cash and when it's not going to work for you and you're not building that wealth. It's just sitting there in a currency that's being debased by the government and the Fed. But then you have them trying to centralize control of the currency and monitor that potentially and make decisions that take away your sovereignty and agency over your capital. This is a real threat. I mean, potentially the ultimate threat to our freedom and our agency and our ability to create wealth and all of those related things that I don't think enough people understand. And just given the level of financial literacy we have in this country, I mean, think about things like the stimulus checks. I went on many media outlets and begged and pleaded, do not do the stimulus.

Do not take that $1,000 or $1,200, whether it was a Donnie dollar or a Biden buck. It didn't matter who the president was. But don't do this. You are going to pay seven to 10 times that easily a you know, a year for the rest of your life for taking that nobody, you know, believe that. And then we, you know, live through double digit inflation. So we don't have people who are real savvy with the, you know, they're going to, they're going to buy into all of these narratives and they're, they're going to think that they're going to be financially better off. And it's a really scary proposition.

Yeah, Carol, it's Steve Hayward out in California. James, and to a lesser extent, Rob, used a rule that I think is worth crystallizing and keeping in mind and extending. I call it Uelman's razor after the late Mike Uelman, who was a very important guy who's not as well known as he deserved to be. But he used to say, and he said to two generations of students, including me, whenever you hear some nifty sounding progressive idea to make the world better, slow down, repeat it slowly in a German accent and see if it still sounds as good. It works great, not just for this, but for all kinds of great ideas. By the way, Steve, as a Jew, this resonates really highly with me. Exactly. I'll just mention in passing, Mike Uelman is the person who saved the Electoral

College back in 1970, and the world would be different if he had not succeeded. That's a long, very interesting story. But back to you. I could go on for a while about the point Rob raises that's also fundamental, which is if you don't own property, at the end of the day, you don't own yourself. That's what James Madison would say if we had a time machine and dropped him here. I want to ask you for some, you know, how do people fight back or what do you recommend people do? I'll give you one very specific idea. I keep going into places where I pull up my wallet and I'll pull out a dollar bill, not a dollar bill, a $20 bill in the age of inflation, and they'll say, oh, we don't take cash. And I'm perfect. I like the convenience of using cards on my phone too, but I noticed my dollar bill still says on it, I checked,

this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private. I wonder if maybe you think we shouldn't have a mass movement of people insisting on paying cash for things at all these places that say they, because this is the gateway to a lot of the controls of our lives that you talk about in your book. Maybe we should do insist on cash. Don't you think that it's an interesting coincidence that we have had this sort of reversal of policy on crime at a time where they're trying to get people to go towards a digital currency? It may be entirely coincidental, but it is not lost on me that the reason why many of these small businesses and other businesses don't want to take cash is because they don't want to get robbed. And you have a bunch of cities who, you know, won't enforce any of their crime laws and are basically encouraging the criminals to go ahead and do whatever they want. So I think there is, you know, an interesting push and pull there that I think it would be very smart for people to go ahead and, you know, continue to use cash and

try to make that viable. But I also understand as a small business advocate, you know, why you wouldn't want to put, you know, the person who's working behind the counter in jeopardy. I do think for something like a CBDC, though, you have to do that math, you have to to come up with that plan and say, okay, if this does happen, and you know, maybe I can't use cash anywhere. But I also can't use my CBDC. Because, you know, Steve, and I went out for too many burgers, and Rob, and I posted bad things on social media. And James, well, you know, they just decided they didn't like James, you know, from somebody had a tiff with him back in the day, and they're now going to come back and say, well, let's just put him on whatever it is. Or maybe they're trying to help us by controlling inflation. They want to,

you know, slow spending, destruct demand. So they're just going to cut off all of our access to our money. Like, what are you going to do? Like, have you done things like get small pieces of silver and gold? Have you talked to, you know, like-minded people in your community about like, hey, you know, things, you know, where to go sideways, like who's the doctor, who's the person who's raising chickens, you know, what are the things that we need to get through a period of chaos? Because it may not be that it's a final and total switch. It could just be a period of chaos before it resets and goes back to sort of some level of normalcy. But it's very much kind of like if your house is burning down, that's not the time to get an insurance policy or to create an escape plan. You want

to think about it. And even if you think if it's a low probability of happening, you know, it's still a high cost outcome that if it does, and so you want to make those decisions now. So I think people really do need to do those things. And I'm sure there's at least one or two people listening, they're going to go, Carol, you sound like a prepper. And I will, I will, I will give you the distinction here. There's a difference between being a prepper and being prepared. Being a prepper is somebody who lives this lifestyle every day. Like every aspect of their life every day is about this is all going down and I'm getting in my bunker and this is how I'm living. Being prepared is again, just coming up with the plan and just making sure you're not caught by surprise if and when this

happens, because we can see the trajectory. We just don't know duration, right? We don't know if this takes 12 months. We don't know if it takes 12 years. We don't know if it takes 50 years, but you know, in the off chance that it's sooner versus later, you don't want to be the person going, oh boy, I didn't really think about this. Wow. I'm screwed. Now I have to follow what the state says, or, you know, nobody will let me do anything. And I don't know what I'm going to do. So I just think it's important to go through that level of preparation, which is, you know, most of the things I talk about in the chapter about fighting back are common sense things that you should probably do anyway.

And, you know, diversification and certain behavioral things, they're just good basic practices, but they take on a new meaning as you kind of see you know the different shifts that are happening here and some of these you know very specific proposals that are being said aloud there's no secret to them okay i like cash i love cash i'm holding up the camera right now my father's paper father's money clip which i carry around uh but i rarely use it you can't run a lot let me just see that hold on that's only a buck okay i thought the winner was a pretty wild what's that it's only a what i'm sorry my father always told me that you know if you got a full tank of gas and 50 bucks in your pocket you're a free man and he was right

but it's so convenient to just walk up to a terminal and tap my watch and it's done it's so convenient at the end of the day not to have to empty out change what am i going to do with change the bank's barely taken they won't roll it for you anymore and it leads me to believe that so much of what we're talking about here i never really think that there's some big conspiracy because that that invests in them more intelligence and foresight than they've ever demonstrated that they have. Rather, it's a confluence of things that make a certain sort of world come about and everybody gets used to it with a boiling frog effect. Part of it is the ease of payment means that if they say, you don't want that digital dollars. Well, what am I using now? I'm using a digital dollar. Well, they'll be able to track where you got it. Well,

they can track what I'm doing now. I mean, it was a big, I'm not doing it. So people get used to that. It used to be that I would buy Adobe Photoshop and it would work until computers changed enough and it fell out of me or whatever. I can't do that anymore. I rent it. But on the other hand, I can use it from any computer I want. I get a new computer and it's already there. It's seamless. It's easier. It's so much easier to rent these things. So much of what they're selling us is an easiness. But I hit my wall, the one point at which I, and I grate against a lot of these things. I do.

I just, I want to own things. I want things to be tangible. I agree with you. Owning a house is important. Even though at the back of my head, I know that when the mortgage is completely paid off, I miss my taxes and they take it from me. So I'm not sure how much that ownership thing in the end really matters there. But I reached the end when I saw an ad on Twitter for what looked to be a really interesting water shower faucet, very stylish.

And it wasn't Bluetooth enabled either, which is great. Didn't have an app connected to it, which is even better. So i click on the ad and i'm looking at it and pricing it out the shower faucet head ran on a subscription model no please seriously no oh that is not possible it did and i looked at that i said you cannot be serious i mean i i'm used to the subscription thing with software all the time now and I don't buy it because of it. And it had to do with the filters. You signed up for it, and every so often they would send you the filter. But the idea that something so quotidian as my bloody showerhead, which I stare at every day, would require a subscription.

But then again, if you own nothing and you don't have to worry about it breaking down and all you have to do is just to have an automatic debit, there's a lot less friction in your life. And so many things that people are getting used to these days, the frictionlessness of it sort of trains them psychologically to say, I can see what they're talking about and it may not be so bad. But I'll ask this long-winded thing, which not even as a question but a speech of some sort i'll end with this it seems to me that what these guys are doing they're just they're techno futuristic you know uh dreamers who believe that somehow we're here the perfect star trek future is here and in between there's some stuff that happens

and then we get to there what's the most important thing you think that we should look for that says, uh-oh, Rubicon crossed, alert, alert. This is the thing that really means we're in trouble when it comes to the WF future being right around the corner. James, you said so many great things there that I want to talk about all of it.

I'll just give you my highlights so I can answer the question. First one is that they don't really know what they're doing. Okay. So when you go into a casino and they have shifted from cash to chips and now to digital cards, do you think they didn't know what they were doing or do they think they knew? Oh, no, no, no, no. I know. I agree. Exactly. No, psychologically do. I'm talking, you know, the individual constituent elements may indeed know what they are doing about the thing that they do. I'm talking too much debt. They're getting desperate. We're on a unsustainable financial trajectory. We're seeing things like de-dollarization happen and power shifts happen around the globe. I think your guys' first part of the podcast was talking a little bit about some of those things. And the people who are the wealthy and the well-connected who are

not stupid see that happening and they don't want to hope that things work out for them. They want to control it in a way that's happening or that they can and make sure that they are on top of what is happening. And I do think that it's different. It's big tech is different than the Fed and the government, which is different than the World Economic Forum, which is different than big business. The challenge is that we have all these different

forces coming at us at once. And sometimes what they're trying to do overlaps, and sometimes it doesn't. So sometimes they'll work together, and sometimes they may not. But in each of those cases, we have to be aware and understand that the decisions that we're making and us not pushing back creates more of that reality of this barbelling of the population. When you talk about this, kind of these people who think that they know better and that they're doing for the benefit, there's a story that I share in the book that's based on a vintage Twilight Zone episode. And you guys might know the episode, but basically these aliens come down to earth and obviously the people of

earth are like, Hey, why are you on our planet? And the aliens say, you know, we've been watching you, you have war, you have famines. We have technology that solves for all of these things. We just feel bad that you guys are going through this and we want to help you. And, you know, the people of earth are like kind of skeptical about this, right? They're like, I don't know. They really want to help us. That sounds like, why would they want to help us? That seems weird. Maybe we should give the guy a lie detector test. So they give the alien a lie detector test. He passes it with flying colors. Well, meanwhile, he leaves behind his like his playbook, his manual. And somebody from the CIA organization goes and they decode the cover and it says to serve man.

And they're like, well, you know, they said they want to serve man. And you know, that he passed the thing, like they just want to help. So they start using the technology and it's starting to work great. And everyone's really happy with it. So then they're like, well, we should go visit their planet. And they invite the aliens, invite the people of Earth to their planet. And they start boarding spaceships and all these people are leaving earth and one of the cia guys is like oh i'm gonna go too that sounds fun he starts boarding the plane and one of the coke crackers gets further into the book to serve man and realizes that she's running to the spaceship steve do you want to give the line? Yeah. It's a cookbook.

It's a cookbook. And that's the thing, James, I want people to take away. Okay, but who's the actor who played the main alien? Tell me that. I don't know. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who it is, you know? Ted Cassidy.

Oh, fantastic. Okay. Wow. Well done. Well done. Okay. Well done lurch ted cassidy in mind and when they say we're just doing this to help you we're trying to create a better future it's great for you which again not us not me but for you i can't i'm just here for the children. I'm just here to serve man. To serve man in the cookbook. If we can't take one look at Klaus Schwab and realize that he's lurched from to serve man, then we're really lame.

Rob, you had one thing to go before we go? Just because, you know, we try to innovate all sorts of different things, right? But it seems like what you're saying is owning house is good saving money is good diversifying your retirement savings saving and investing because if you just saving the best you save and you leave it in that form factor right question yeah okay so saving and investing for the future is good and making sure that um that those funds are diversified so that you hedge against this and you hedge against that and you pretty much come out even.

That seems like- Basic advice. I mean, yeah. And also like, how do we veer away from that? I mean, my dad gave that advice and I think his father probably gave like, how do, how do we make sure that we just don't stray from that again? Well, we have to, to first of all, get people to read things like the book and understand this information. I think most people haven't gone down the path of financial literacy. I think

there has been an intentional shift away from financial literacy. I mean, we pay for the schools. If we wanted that to be part of the program, that would have been part of the program. But if that was part of the program, then the government couldn't nationalize student lending and enable a wholesale wealth transfer from young people to colleges and their administrators and get them more dependent on the government. So I think it's- Well, schools are busy, as you know, teaching pronouns. So it's not like we can add one more thing. You don't even want to get me started on what my old library is teaching. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, we need to equip... First of all, there are a lot of adults that don't have strong financial literacy. So we have to kind of start with them. And we do have to make a commitment to find ways to get young people

more involved and make it more interesting to them. Because, you know, for whatever reason, people like to look at the shiny new things and the stupid stuff on TikTok and whatever, and nobody seems to care about their financial wellness, you know, as something maybe because we've been so prosperous for so long, and they just haven't felt the need that they have to. So I do think it's a concerted effort. And, you know, I see this in the media, I mean, people, the business and finance people kind of get relegated into this side space. Oh, no, we have to talk about this other newsy stuff here. But like, when was the last time we had a march on Washington over your student debt and predatory

government lending and the Federal Reserve and inflate? I mean, never, but like, you know, oh, somebody, you know, put a face on a Bud Light can or something, and everybody goes wild over that. I'd like to see that same level of outrage over the financial foundation because the other stuff is going to shift and change, and it's going to constantly be moving. And if it goes in one direction, you can get it back. Once the financial foundation is broken, that's it. We don't know how that gets put back together. And the thing that worries me the most is if you look at the shifts in the global financial order, you know, before us, it was Britain, before them, it was

the Dutch. When we moved from Britain to the US, you know, the US was standing as this like bastion of, you know, free market ideals and private property and wealth creation opportunities to step into that role. The folks who are trying to step into that role right now are like bastions of tyranny and dictatorships and really bad actors. So if the U.S. isn't going to survive and thrive, like who is, you know, what's going to happen? You're not here just here in the U.S. and for the future, but in the world with the global financial situation. So we have to get this tight or, you know, it's going to shift what happens on a global basis. The book is You Will Own Nothing.

And we advise you to buy it in the hardcover, of course, because they can't digitally alter it right now. If they want to alter the copy of Carol Roth's new book, they have to come to your house in the middle of the night with a Sharpie and an X-Acto knife and change things. So you buy the book in physical form as a metaphor for the physical form

that we should all inhabit and keep in mind going forward. Carol, it's been fascinating and lots of fun. Write another book soon, Quig, so we can have you on or we'll just gin up some other leisure. Thank you, guys. So much fun to chat with you again.

And appreciate the time and the conversation. Okay. Yeah. Bye. Bye-bye. Should also note that this is a digital medium, the podcast and whatnot. And that means that we can actually just do what they used to do in the old days, which was to pull up, you know, bring the horse and the carriage in the middle of the town. And then the guy gets out and sells you old-time McGillicuddy's elixirs to all the

folks and holds it up and pass it around. You can smell it and you can drink it. We can't do that here because it's digital, but we got something else to tell you about. And it's just as good. Matter of fact, it's even better. Hello, I'm Dennis Neal. And here's what's bugging me. The media are burying some of the biggest scandals of our lifetime, and I'm here to call them out on it and make fun of them for it. The Twitter files and government censorship, the Biden documents, the Hunter laptop, the lies of the FBI in the Russiagate hoax, China spy balloons and toxic chemical burnoffs. Join me to hear things no other journalist will dare tell you. All that and more on What's Buggin' Me, available for download

and streaming every Thursday right here on the Ricochet Audio Network and wherever you get your podcasts. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Well, before we go, and we're not going anywhere soon, but, you know, the end is in sight. It has to be. This is not like one of those nine-hour podcasts that Dan Carlin does. I love Dan Carlin, but honest to God, sometimes it's like I turn it on and it's

nine hours of one week in the pacific war and it's uh it's great it's great for road trips anyway uh speaking of road trips rob you want people to get into the car you know that they own yes that you own or that you lease whatever like i don't know why you have to own a car that is an example of longest lift an exemplar of you know freedom as you know james that the fun of ricochet are the people and the people sometimes people we fellow your fellow ricochet club members will you know enter to get in conversations and debates and and sometimes just weird celebrations of things online but we also like to get together irl in real life right now as we speak there's a

meetup ricochet meetup happening Winston-Salem um so uh our shout out to those guys and hope they're having a good time uh on July 18th there's going to be one in Portland Oregon which I really think anyone any ricochet member who's even it's even possible to get there I want you to go because I want to see some I want to see some on the ground reporting from ricochet members on portland um my guess is that there are parts of portland where you could be and it's like a tornado like you're there and it's like this great look how beautiful this is and then you like you turn a corner and suddenly there's just devastation but you know that's a that's a ricochet member uh task there uh there's a german fest meet up in milwaukee on

july 28th through july 30th that's that weekend so if you're in that area you should go and cookville tennessee labor day weekend cookville tennessee september one through four um so those are the ones coming up for the summer uh there'll be more obviously the autumn if you want to go to one please do if you will not go go to one and you are not a member of ricochet that's a simple solution to that join ricochet actually join ricochet and if you can't go to any of those and you really want to have one put up a post on the member feed saying how about a meetup in x place at y time and i guarantee you ricochet members will show up because that's what we do we show up cannot shame charles cw cook to going to cookville

then oh that's a good idea yeah we gotta figure that out yeah let's tell him that the town named themselves for him like that's right out of an excess of zeal no he wouldn't not for a moment uh well all right other things here cultural wars i think we were talking at the beginning of the show about how you know conservatives are always starting culture wars i always just ginning up this nonsense over nothing i guarantee you tomorrow it's going to be right wing loses its mind or is melting down two things i never hate never enjoy seeing about anything uh over over disney snow white casting i think that will be the the latest thing so disney does this whole recasting of snow white the white part being particularly problematic and then uh

there's a reaction to it which is basically scorn and laughter and pointing and going haha because that's precisely what we thought that they would do and i was looking at that and thinking you know when i was a kid and i saw that movie and i saw all the disney movies i never thought that the dwarves were i never thought that they were physically uh handicapped that they were there's something wrong with them they were just short you know little short guys with big heads and theyapped that they were, there's something wrong with them. They were just short, you know, little, little guys with big heads.

And they were, they were industrious for heaven's sakes. They went to work every single day and they, I could never figure out whether or not their attributes were derived from their nomenclature or the other way around. Is that the way it is in their culture? They give you that name at birth and you are fulfilled that you are destined then to your mold,

your personality around it, or do they actually have some long unpronounceable names and the ones they use for human facing or their attributes emotionally uh so there's a lot too but that's all going to be lost in the new version because they're no longer dwarves they're going to be forest people and non-binary and the rest of it it's ridiculous etc but but but but steven let me ask you this eiger bob eiger sat down with c with CNBC a little while ago and said, quote, the last thing I want to do for the company is to be drawn into any culture wars. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

And also said he's open to selling ABC and ESPN and the rest of it is the company attempts to make money or keep money. Disney in trouble. American icon. And that's the fate. So what do you think is that a white flag was that them saying you know what we got so many things coming you know in the pipeline hey yeah what am i going to do but in the future going forward we don't want to be involved in any culture wars yeah i mean two thoughts uh to at least open up one is of course this new rob knows this better than i do but there's a long lead time for making these movies.

And so this decision to cast a person of color and change around the dwarves was made, what, two, three, four years ago, probably. And my point is, if they were starting today to make the decision to make a new version of Snow White, I'm not sure it would turn out the way it has turned out now. And behind that, point number two is I think the corporate world is shocked at what you've seen happen to Bud Light, which is now the latest figure I saw slipped to number 14th in the bear sales list, having been number one for several decades. And there's other things. I mean, Disney park attendance is way down. Some people say, well, that's because the prices have gotten too high. Maybe that's true. It wouldn't surprise me. I've always thought that Disney was an amazing, the parks were an amazing machine to separate you from your currency, your physical currency, right? And they're geniuses at that. And maybe they've overdone that. I don't know.

But I think corporate America now is waking up to the fact that a wokery is, I mean, we overdo the go woke, go broke business, but we're now actually seeing that conservatives are flexing their market power in ways that you've never really seen before on this scale. And I think they've gotten the attention of corporate. Question for Rob, question for Rob here. David French disagrees. And I believe so in the newspaper today, he was saying that actually these companies are not doing the companies are doing this because they are embracing the directions in which American people are increasingly going. i don't know i mean look if if if show business companies could actually predict what people want they they wouldn't be in the trouble

they're in right now they're they're in terrible trouble financially they're they're you know they're when you you know when when you're laying off thousands and thousands of people in your company it's not because you managed it right it's because you made big big big fat mistakes which they've done right they've alienated two of the giant trade unions that are now on strike the writers guild who's like on their last legs son on my last legs but been on for a long time they're weary strike weary now they've been given a shot in the arm of adrenaline with the sag going out so you're going to have bigger you know there's no place for them to hide now these companies they're just everything shut down which is probably what they wanted but you know the problem with the off switch is you have

to know how where the on switch is and so it's one thing to turn the spigot off and you can kind of reset your financials for the next two quarters and show you know kind of refigure out what you're going to refigure who you're going to pay and how you're going to pay them but at some point you got to start back up again and that's i think that's what that's what guided eiger into saying he's a very smart guy but eiger is talking about like the things he'd like to sell and he'd probably like to sell them now so that when sun comes up again and the strike is over he doesn't have to worry about abc and espn and a bunch of other broadcast properties i think that's wrong i think the broadcast properties in the future for these people but they don't know it um but you look i you know that to me the

argument for disney is like uh they have these classic titles snow white those kinds of things which are great and then they have this enormous ability to manage the creative process which they have shown like a thousand times in in brilliance i mean one of the best disney cartoons of the recent past five years was coco and it was great i mean my god if you haven't seen coco you gotta see it and i it's the end of the air the end of pixar greatness oh my god it's so beautiful lee unkrich who is just an absolutely stonkingly talented man he's an amazing guy and i've had several conversations with him oh really uh yeah um i started i started um emailing and tweeting with him a long time ago and we developed this back and forth conversation he would have um

the guys from like the team on monsters inc sent my daughter who was about two or three at the time it was just boo a shirt signed with wow the animators yeah so what i'm saying is like that that was a that was a movie that with that was about a a non-white culture or something set in mexico and i guess if you're kind of super churlish you could complain that it was awoken some way but it really wasn't it super churlish you could complain that it was awoken some way but it really wasn't it was just a movie about those people and it was incredibly brilliant and like my argument to disney is do more of that do more of that stuff take me when i go see a movie or tv show take me someplace i haven't been right don't try to give me moral or character homework, which is what it always seems like to us when they change the Snow Whites and the stuff like, yeah, you're basically telling me that I need to that I need to use and work on myself.

No, that's not how it works. And if it's set in Alaska or it's set in medieval Europe or it's set in Mexico or it's set, I don't care where it's set. If it's a great story, it's going to be forever. I mean, I don't know. Is the Lion King? I mean, that's set in Africa. Is that I mean, to do more of that. That's all diversity. Like with your stock portfolio, we just talked about is a good thing.

Right. But it doesn't mean you have to go, everything has to be a lesson where like you are, you know, you like those little dwarves, didn't you, James? Like that's like you were laughing at Doc and Grumpy and Snuffy and all those. Like we're going to change that around.

No, stop retreading. New, new stories, new areas, new worlds. That's how you make show business work. Agree. But what they want to do, you're absolutely right. But the intention, or maybe not the intention, but certainly the second effect is to replace those other stories, is to apologize for them, is to say, we were wrong in these representations. We're going to make up for it by doing this, and this will be the new version and so it it edges the old one off the stage because now we have this new one which is better and more correct and it's a way of retconning

their own history instead of just saying yeah we made what we made when we made it so what get out of here one of my prized possessions which i'm now now um regretting that i did not rip into my computer was i used to have like the six cd six dvd set of like pretty much every looney tunes ever oh yeah and you know fully a third of them are what we might call problematic at this point certainly everyone set in cowboy times where there's an indian and there's like i mean it but and i know you're not going to see them on tv but they are great and i do feel like keeping the tablets especially those tablets is probably really important i gotta have to dig that out and see what i can see if i can just put it on but then

of course then i'll put it on i'll put it but i won't save it on my computer right i'll save it in the cloud and then it'll be there they can find it oh you have that one where bugs bunny shoots at the indians you know what do mean? You scanned all my photographs and did character recognition on every single one of them. Right. It's like, well, you're not paying for this. You know, we gave you two two gigabyte and yet there was this thing you scroll down at the end and signed. Right. Remember that whole thing? Right. Right. I know. So I have cloud services stuff, too. But yeah, you're right um so so steven you would go to see a new movie that disney made as would i at pixar for the rest of it it was a new

idea i mean supposedly elemental is not doing that bad that's the latest pixar movie the decline of pixar in the public imagination is an extraordinary thing it's not all going to be hits you're going to have to like there could be someone that don't work that's right but every one of them used to be an event because there was some there was some way in which they had raised the bar technically there was there's something new they were going to show us and you knew that you were going to be flabbergasted by what you saw and you also knew that whatever technological advance made this thing more immersive it wouldn't matter because what counted was the storytelling bones behind it which were unparalleled run of stories behind pixar

so now that's done but you know they may come back and that's great they may merge with disney animation which itself is a pretty good shop but rob's right new stories from and the world abounds with the opportunities for them as opposed to just going and giving us one more bleakly recorrected version of something they did before i mean we're to the point now where i think they're going to do a a remake of song of the south oh you know an acceptable version of song of the south man you know what i hope they do because i would would love to see what they come up with. A rap version of Zippity-Doo-Dah.

You know, I for a long time thought that, well, I put it this way. The Pixar movies were always not just technically unique, but they were very original. And for a while I was saying, I think we ought to have a law that only Pixar can make children's movies. I thought they were always better than the DreamWorks movies. I mean, the Shrek movies were fun. But the Shrek movies always had, you know, a baby boomer rock and roll from the 70s and some of their soundtracks for it. Okay. They're winking at the adults a lot of times, sneaking those things in.

Pixar didn't try to be cute that way. And I thought they were, you know, an order of magnitude better. And maybe, you know, you just can't keep it up forever. But so anyway, that was my for a long time. And I don't know.

I was always astonished that they were, that there were some years where like, I think for Coco and I think for Lion King and I think for up the movie up and definitely toy story. There was those years where that was absolutely without a doubt those were the best movies made that year they should have gotten best picture oscars there was no reason not to give them the best picture oscar they were they they represented the greatest kind of film storytelling you could do and uh there was just that well you know they're animated

like so what i mean they are i mean the first 10 minutes of Up are devastating and astonishing. Beautiful. And Wally went, what, 20, 30 minutes before there was any dialogue. It's the bleakest children's movie ever made. Right. Ever made. My daughter is looking at this with a drained expression and absolutely absorbed. And then, of course, at the end of the just as just as a way of telling a story here they do the entire end credit sequence

with a series of escalating sophistication of the visual arts from you know from cave paintings to to um because they can to van gogh because they can but when i was talking when i was communicating back and forth with lee about coco because i was so knocked out about it there's a scene they go to the afterlife there's this big bureaucratic place, which I think is modeled after a hotel, a nouveau hotel in Mexico City, which is this gorgeous, gorgeous Tiffany, not Tiffany, but stained glass roof. And I said, the reason that this all works so well is not because it's so beautifully conceived and animated, but I have the feeling that everybody who was involved in this, well, let's say there was one guy whose job it would be to research what kind of coins would be in the pockets of these characters.

Yeah, that is. We would never see the coins, but they would model the coins correctly and they would be there. And maybe there'd be a nanosecond where they're doing the rigging and there's an impression of the bas-relief of the coin in somebody's gossamer thin pants that level of complete absorption and culture and idea is what they just absolutely fantastically did so right the dream work stuff is great because it's pop culture it has all the references and it has all the people making those you know you know it's fine for what it is but you're right i would have let pixar give all of the stories over in the future. Last thing we'll end with this up. Do you know exactly how they shivved Walt Disney's worst enemy in that

movie? It's a beautiful thing. No, you know that wrong. Oh, well, the villain, if you remember that great villain,

the guy who's, you know, in the, in the Zeppelin and he's up there. Yeah. And it was named months. So he's named after the guy who stole away Oswald the Rabbit, the lucky rabbit from Walt Disney in a copyright,

wrested it away from him and forced Walt to create Mickey Mouse. So he was like the bad guy to all the Disney lovers because he shafted our hero Walt at one point. And then 60, 70, 80 years later, they stuck the name of the character. So had he not done it, know the people at disneyland be wearing bunny ears yes entirely possible oswald well oswald never got back to mickey it took a long time before they finally got back in cartoon form but i think they got back in a video game um where there was just a lot of you know who owns the rights and they put it together like a roger

rabbit thing and uh and and mickey and Oswald the Rabbit were actually together again, after all. Well, they're never apart. Or they're never together originally, but they got together finally. The story of how Walt created that is all, of course, part of the iconography and mystery of Disney. And it hates me and pains me

the way to see this company has fallen into the public imagination, but it's an entirely self-inflicted wound, just like tweeting off something stupid about Iowa. There. Full circle. We're done. Happy day. Visit our sponsors. Go to apple.com.

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Lurk all you like. Make some friends, and we'd be delighted to have you at Ricochet.com. Rob Long is one of the founders. Peter Robinson is another. But, of course, we've loved to have Stephen with us today. And, gosh, guys, it's been great. Have a fine weekend, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0.

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