Well, you got a drink more than it's uh, you know, it's the middle of the day. You can do that.
Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country.
Mister grbachaw tear down this wall.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Chernald C. W. Cook and Stephen Hayward, James Lylyx and today we Doctor Charles and Macawee about Pennsylvania politics and tedby Troy about money and power. So let's episodes a podcast.
Yeah, I just think people should put this in perspective. They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it's something.
There's nothing new under the sun.
Assertions have been made that property is being confiscated. That's simply not true. They're saying people impacted by these terms were received seven hundred and fifty dollars in cash and no more. That's simply you're not true.
Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number seven hundred and twelve. I'm James Lylyx here in y Appolis, Minnesota. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful autumn day and not very many Halloween decorations up yet, which is great because it grows and detestable and disgusting, the more lurid they get. Whatever whatever happened to, just put a little pump out on your front step. I'd like that. That one joined by Charles C. W. Cook and Stephen Hayward Today, gentlemen, how are you good?
Good?
I am great, James.
And the weather is probably better there than in coastal California, believe it or not.
Yes, well, we've had no rain unlike parts of the South, and what we see in the news is horrific, horrific, horrific devastation. However, Governor DeSantis came out the other day when the reporter asked him about the meteorological conditions and whether or not they were pertaining to global warming. I mean, we all know that there are more hurricanes now because somebody in North Dakota refuses to switch to an EV and he very deftly sort of cited the statistics in
what they had done to plan for it. Charles, you are in Florida, and I know you're not affected by this, at least as far as I know. But is there just a general sense in Florida that this is in hand bad as it has been? Should the nation be fretting over this, or should be worrying more about what doesn't seem to be done in the places affected by Helene.
You should be more worried about Helene. I think Florida is a well oiled machine when it comes to hurricanes. It was a well oiled machine before Ron DeSantis ran for governor, but he has managed to make it even more well oiled and even more machine like by pre staging linemen. So Florida was always very good at dealing with hurricanes. Now it's really good at dealing with hurricanes
and getting the power back on. So I think the challenges in places that are not used to this sort of thing in the way Floridians unfortunately are well.
Steve, let me ask you. Let me ask you this. I mean, the idea of prepositioning of supplies, equipment, linemen, and the rest of it seems like a no brainer. It seems like a core competency for any sort of government agency and in anything that they do. We used to believe and assume sort of that that's the way things worked. If you look at all the old movies.
Whenever there's the disaster, government swings into action. The authorities are called plans are executed, Jeep's race out of garages, sirens, whaling and things. They're done. Now, we believe that when something happens, generally the government is going to be flat footed, stammering and unable to really deal with the first thing they need to do. It may not be accurate, but that seems to be the general thought abroad in the land.
You're old enough to remember when we had the crisis of confidence in the seventies, where we seem to believe that the government was incapable of doing anything and it was just nothing but managed decline from here on in changed in the eighties. But do you feel that same sort of malaise when it comes to our government?
Oh yeah, what's the old joke or the old line that history doesn't repeat itself but at rhymes that apparently Mark Twain never said. But look, there's two things here going on. One is, uh, you know, FEMA takes five days to get anywhere, and they get and then they bigfoot everybody like the FBI does with local crime investigations. And in Florida's case, I think the subtext here is please, femous, stay away, don't come here. We've got this. And you
know you mentioned the hyper confidence of Governor DeSantis. I'll share with you that I did get have one conversation with him about this subject a couple of years ago, and I brought up the fact that, you know, Miami was essentially leveled by a huge hurricane around nineteen thirty five, but nobody lived there then. And I said, so, you know what if you have a Cat five hurricane it hits Miami or Palm Beach. And he says, I don't really worry about that because the building code since then
have been very robust and they're organized for it. Says, what keeps me awake at night for hurricanes is Tampa Bay and he said, it's the geography of it. The storm surger would be much larger and there's nothing we can do about that, and that would present a much bigger challenge. So you would you heard that Milton was heading straight for Tampa Bay. I thought, well, here we go.
This is going to be the big challenge. Now it veered off a bit to what Sarasota, I guess, and so Tampa Bay was spared a direct hit.
So we're lucky here.
But then, of course, the other thing I think you mentioned is you know, gee, Governor, isn't this more proof of climate change? Well, you know, if you look at the data, Milton ranks eighteenth in the level of intensity of Florida hurricanes for which we have records going back
over one hundred years eighteenth. Most of those hurricanes that ranking ahead of Milton happened before nineteen sixty, before we started having so you know, the whole climate change the story really starts around nineteen So the point is that the data doesn't back up.
The panicky narrative, but that won't stop them, of course.
No, No, and Charles, the panicking narrative has a variety of solutions which can be seamlessly and easily implemented to stop this from ever happening again, I guess. And it's just our mutation is to refuse to accept what we must do tomorrow. But if we have Kamala Harrison the White House, is there going to be a push for more green nude eels as they used to say, or is it just or is it just going to be part of the usual atmosphere and chattering lip service.
No, the hurricanes will immediately stop if she wins. That's it was it January twentieth and augreat the new president. That's it gone, which is just as.
The sea level stopped rising when Obama became president, Right, we remember that.
Yeah, The Inflation Reduction Act, which despite its title, was actually a way of funneling trillion dollars to green Democratic groups, doesn't seem to have stopped hurricanes either. James May I make a broader political point about Florida that I think might be interesting to people who don't live here. There are two things about Florida politics that I've noticed in the last seven years since I lived here that I think haven't necessarily escaped the state's borders.
One is that Rondo Santas is not.
Regarded in Florida as this great controversial figure in the way he is nationally. And it's very amusing to hear him discussed as such outside of Florida, because in Florida he just seems like a normal, competent governor. The second thing, and the more important thing, I think is to most voters in Florida, I think I'm right in saying hurricane response is why the government exists, and if you do it well, you are rewarded for it. Everything else is
either on autopilot or is regarded as a luxury. The autopilot part of the equation just cannot be overstated. Jeb Bush was a terrific governor, turned Florida around and made modern Florida essentially what it is, and constitutionalized a lot of things people now associate with the state. No income tax and so on was already there, but he extended
that to all forms of income. We now have a constitutional amendment that prevents the state from raising any form of tax or fee without two thirds majority in both houses of the legislature.
That's in the constitution.
There's a bunch of things like that, which means if you're a governor, yes, you have to do things, and it's very important that you have the right governor, as we saw during COVID. But the thing that you are judged on more than anything else, is not whether you're low or raise taxes because you can't, but whether you deal with the hurricanes. Probably rohonder Sands won by twenty
points in twenty twenty two. I think he'd have won by ten if it weren't for his response to the hurricane that happened just before, but the fact that he did so well with that hurricane is why he won by another ten points, because independence just said, oh great. And I think that this is going to happen again this year. I think that Republicans were going to win the state legislature in Florida again, and I think Trump was going to win, and I think Rick Scott was
going to win. But I really would not be surprised now if you could tackle another five, six, seven points to how Republicans do in the state, purely because two hurricanes in a row, the party in power has shown that it did what it was there for. And I think this is just underestimated when people outside talk about Florida politics, or well, how will the state vote, what do people carry out? What about this issue or that issue.
It's all valid, but the hurricane response question is really what matter is more than anything else, and it's going to have a big effect in November.
Well, you've just described a nightmare for most people, people on the left at least, who look at Florida and say, without the taxation system, how do you properly adjudicate what people should possess? How do you get the income from these people and get it to these people who need it?
That's nightmare number one and two. If you want to take Florida a success story, I say I'm having with scare quotes here, then you're transporting a culture that bans books and infuses to allow people to say the word gay in any school situation. I mean that that is a you speak as though you don't live in one of the most oppressive, fascistic or nascently fascistic states in the kinds of stunning, stunning, stunning. Stephen, your your response before we go to our guest.
Ah, I don't really have one.
I mean, I mean the only you left out, James was we're only you know, ten thousand votes in a close election away from the Handmaid's Tale in Florida everywhere else, right, Yeah.
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You got my name just right.
It is macawee.
Oh oh good for me, you know, well as somebody who goes around hearing lilix all the time instead of Lilacs, I'm keen to be good here, all right, Real Clear Politics, Pennsylvania. Well, you had a piece a couple of weeks ago titled Kamala Harris's Pennsylvania Problem. What is her problem?
She has a problem among that vast expanse of working class regions in Pennsylvania. And of course we know this region as it was described inaccurately by Democrats strategists Jim Carter Alabama in the middle. But this region has changed dramatically since he first employed that term in eighty six And really it's Northeastern Pennsylvania was a Democratic bastion, one that was indistinguishable when it came to once association of the Catholic Democrats that would put Democrats over the top
in elections. This is a region that is trending red. Luzern County, for example, just this past month, has a Republican voter registration majority, and that was an Obama to Trump county in twenty sixteen at Lakawana County, Biden's home turf where.
He grew up.
Even precincts there and Scranton are shifting red. So while there are still plenty of ancestral Democrats there who will vote Democrat in this election as well, in this critical margins fight, it's a place like northeastern Pennsylvania that will determine the electoral outcome in the state.
Charles, it's Steve Hayward out in god forsake in California. And we keep hearing that Pennsylvania is not just the Keystone state, but the Keystone are the entire election.
And I don't know.
You can see lots of possible combinations of states where Pennsylvania could be lost by Trump or by Harris and still win.
But it is true.
I guess that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan tend to vote together. In other words, they're three dominoes that lean on each other. And so you mentioned north, they just say north eastern Pennsylvan northwestern Pennsylvania. I'm thinking you up around Erie and all the rest. And I don't know the geography all that well. But the first question is, you know, I know Eerie by the Lake and all that,
and other parts of Pennsylvania still strongly unionized. And yet we've seen the data and the fact that the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters declined to endorse Harris, and their internal polls showing majority of their members favoring Trump.
And I don't know what's your sense of all that. Do you think that while the polls show a dead ea.
Do you think the polls are underestimating as they have in the past, Trump's strength, especially with those kind of voters.
So I think when it comes to Pennsylvania, of that traditional blue wall when you think Wisconsin Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania is the hardest to discern because it's a state of complex demography that has been fueled by post twenty sixteen changes. The map of Pennsylvania just in the past eight years is far different now than it was when Trump narrowly
won the state in sixteen. When you think of that union vote in a place like Eerie, for example, Yes, there are still plenty of traditional Democrats who have that allegiance to church, party and Union who may still vote deed no matter what, but they're diminishing, diminishing in numbers.
And really when you look at the state wide map, it's a non unionized sector, the warehousing and logistics sector that is booming across the state, especially on the eastern half, and Latinos are increasingly comprising the majority of that workforce. And in so many cities east of the Soft Squarehanna River,
in places like Allentown, Hazelsen, Lebanon, Lancaster. They comprise the majority plurality of the population, and they're working in warehousing logistics, and they, as twenty twenty has shown, are shifting red. So if voting blocked six hundred thousand eligible voters, if they're activated in the state to vote, they could play a real pivotal role in this outcome.
So and the other thing I'm sure you can tell us about is apparently Republican registration in the state of Pennsylvania has been surging. So talk about that a little bit because that seems certainly favorable for Trump.
It's a fascinating dynamic because when you look at voter registration statistics going back to nineteen ninety eight, which is the first time that the state has them on record, it's the narrownessive advantage that.
The Democrats have since that time.
For perspective, and two thousand and eight, when Obama won, there was a one point two million advantage for Dems and it is diminished now. And that is driven in part by those ancestral Democrats and working class regions who they have been revoting Republican, let's say, in the past twenty years, and they're just catching up with their voting patterns. But there are also plenty of people who are just disaffected with the Democrat Party. They no longer view them
as defenders of their economic self interests. And these voters aren't just in those blue collar areas of the state beyond let's say Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. They're around Philadelphia too. Pockets of Delaware County Bucks County, for example, they flip to red recently, and that's driven a large part by blue collar Catholic Democrats who have gone red in the lower half of the county.
So one more question before I hand over to Charlie Trump. Parisays, of course, is not the only thing to watch in the state. There's a very hot Senate race between what's his name Casey and McCormick.
And lately, by the way.
The last several election cycles presidential cycles, the Senate racers have tend to go with the top of the ticket. In fact, there's only one exception, I think, and that was the Susan Collins in twenty twenty in Maine. Maine went for Biden and Collins kept her seat comfortably.
But what can you tell us about that race?
Is it also as close as the presidential race, and what are your expectations.
When you look at the real clear politics polling average, I mean the advantage that Casey has now it's about three point nine percent. That's narvous at this point and memory since he was first elected at six and really the last time that let's say, the tickets split in Pennsylvania between the Senate race and the presidential election was in two thousand and four when Carrie won the state by ar On inspector of the Republican carried.
It out with the power of fancy.
But this is extremely close, really the most competitive race that Casey has faced since he was first elected statewide in nineteen ninety six as art or general. So that's driven again by that complex changing demography and then unforeseen circumstances. For example, I am talking to many Jewish voters across the state, plenty outside Phildelphia and Pittsburgh who polled no love for the Republican Party. They are quite liberal in
their positions, but they don't view Casey as represented. But the party's left war turn on the issue of Israel and the antend of only from McCormick.
That's actually a good segue to my question. It's pretty much uniformly assumed on the right that Harris should have chosen Josh Shapiro because he's in the governor's mansion. But and it's also assumed that she didn't because he's Jewish, and that there is a constituency within the Democratic Party that would have had a problem with that given its problems with Israel.
How true is that?
Is that something that people on the right say because they don't like Harris or is there some substance to it.
I think the decision that was made is more complex in that single issue alone. I think there's also the factor that Shapiro, in terms of his raw political talents, whether it's oratory or just campaigning, outshine Harris.
And that was a factor that was taken into serious consideration.
It will be fascinating to find out what we do learn in the history books about that decision, because it may prove to be quite a consequential one, because I do think that.
Had Shapiro been chosen.
While I think it's also over stated that if he had been chosen, Pennsylvania would have been assured for Harris, it certainly would have helped her cause in the state when considering his work in regions that have been less targeted by Democrats and recent cycles.
And my second question, you just described the way the state has changed and is changing. I have a friend who said something really provocative a couple of days ago to me. He said, you know, Pennsylvania's becoming Ohio. It's moving towards where Ohio is going to become a Republican state. And I instinctively just don't believe this because I always think Republicans are going to lose.
How true is that? Is there anything to that?
That's flat raw because far that change is driven by there are booming suburban areas of the state.
So we associate suburbia, which is greater.
Philadelphia, but in reality, the fastest growing area of the state is south central Pennsylvania, the Harrisburg, Lancaster Carlisle corridor Cumberland County. The western suburb of Harrisburg is the fastest growing area of Pennsylvania, and all those west shore suburbs are going blue.
And it's driven by the healthcare boom of the state.
Healthcare is really the primary employer so many suburbs across Pennsylvania, and physicians once a reliable geob constituency, they have been going d.
Yeah, so it's going to stay at swing state.
It will stay a swing state.
And part of the reason we'll stay a Swain state is because of those vastly growing suburban areas.
You say physicians are going blue, but most of the physicians I've met my lifetime trend to go the other direction for a variety of reasons. Is it just that there's an installed bureaucracy. The more when you have a big healthcare bureaucracy and a lot of nurses and such that they tend to be read. I mean, if you lose the doctors, you're not going to lose a lot.
But well, the sector itself has transformed.
So physicians trended Republican back when they were small business owners running their own practices, but they're now employees of these massive systems, which is exactly the case of Pennsylvania. So for example, Lehigh Valley Health Network in Allentown recently merged with Jefferson Healthcare System in Philadelphia that is, together with that merger, the largest employer in Greater Philadelphia this fall,
and so many of those nurses and physics. Really this healthcare workforce that is just exploding through alph the estate and exploding apart because people are getting sicker. Is that these are workers who have been voting Democrat. As one elected Republican in the Harrisburg area recently described it to me. He was talking about a townlike development's going up outside Harrisburg.
It has gone up similar to what you see like around Metro GC of those townhouses, and the developers told him that the development itself is comprised mostly of young nurses, and we know exactly how those young nurses will defall in their voting patterns.
Yeah, James, if I can stick in here and then pivot to my last question for Charles. You know, there's a big story about why the healthcare industry is trending
blue as a whole. It's and that's a subject take up some other day perhaps, but it's now in my mind the parallel to the K twelve education system, which we've seen over the decades, how that has gone it's because the government now dominates the sector, by the way, so much of the growth and healthcare is administrators, just like public education, and a lot of doctors I talked to, by the way, James, they hate all this, but they may know where their bread is buttered, would say, long story.
The other side of the street, of course, in Pennsylvania is the fracking story, which Harris has done a one to eighty one, and there's a case of where the people who used to work as all the pump jacks and all the other people in the industry unionize for the most part, probably habitual Democratic voters, but now they see the bureaucracy and the Democrats as their enemy. And so my last question, Charles, is you know, again from afar, it seems like this fracking reversal by Harris is a
really big story. Are we right in concluding that? Is that a big story in Pennsylvania.
It's a big story in a certain part of Pennsylvania, but from the state wide residents, it's more complicated. The issue of fuel costs attendant with inflation.
Yeah, that matters.
Living in these struggling communities where you're living in the have double.
Home built before World War One and supporter community.
You rely on natural gas for fuel and it's going up and up whatever. But in southwest part of southwestern Pennsylvania, where fracking has been an employer, that is a concern. But it's also an issue of pricing the industry itself. It's in flux because lost in the story, this region needs the infrastructure to transport the natural gas that has to other parts of the country, like New England's, and that infrastructure isn't there due to red.
Tape issues that go to the local level. So that's where it has sailings.
Charles, in your view, is Trump better placed or worse place than say, your generic Republican presidential candidate to win a state like Pennsylvania. I mean, I understand each candidate is different, but one of the arguments for him is he'll do better in Pennsylvania. Would he have done better in Pennsylvania than the Santis or a Nicky Haley or a Tim Scott do you think when.
You consider the type of Trump voter in Pennsylvania? Yes, because this is the land of Obama to Trump voters. So really, all those registration gains that the Republican Party has been enjoined, they're among people who persistently voted Democrat up until twenty sixteen. They harbored no love for the Republican Party. So really the Republican Party. Trump's presidency was somewhat of a blood transfusion when it came to certain
parts of the state in driving up those numbers. But nevertheless, the challenge for Republicans and one that will be testing this McCormick Casey race. McCormick's going after those suburban nites. And if McCormick pulls an upset and actually defeats Casey, it will be in part because he brought back some of those suburban voters who may have sat out twenty twenty or voted against Trump that year.
Do you think Republicans can keep those voters in Pennsylvania post Trump.
I think McCormick himself is showing a model for how it can be done. It's a robust campaign. He's taking trumping in positions while making inroads with the traditional Republican Party. So he has proven palatable to the emerging working class space has emerged post Trump while trying to make gains or regain the people who had voted for let's say Pat Toomey in twenty sixteen.
Well, we will see. Thank you so much, Charles for giving us the load in Pennsylvania. I'm still just wrapping my head around the dudes for Kamala people from Pennsylvania who I guess are taking the state by storm and redefining its culture and upbanding expectations. But we'll see how that plays on an election night anyway, Real clear, Pennsylvania. The link will be on ricochet dot com. We thank you for joining us today, great being here. Thanks a lot,
and now we welcome back to the podcast. Tevi Troy, Senior fellow of the White Partisan Policy Center. He's the best selling presidential historian whose latest entry on that front is The Power and the Money, The epic clashes between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry. Welcome Tevy, Hey James,
thanks for having me so. Most of us are familiar with the you know, the left right split that has the Democratic administration's reigning in big business, you know, like the statues in front of the Federal Traders Association, and then Republicans come and loosen the reins and let the entrepreneurs flourish in the thousand flowers, et cetera. What can pre coolist history tell us about how to view that particular relationship. Is it just the usual yin and yang?
Is it the plebeians and the optimates? Is this a timeless tale that we cycle we simply cannot break out of well, it would be.
Great if it actually did work like that. You could always count on the Republicans to loosen the reins, but they don't always do it. In my book and the Power of the Money, I go back one hundred and fifty years, and you have Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt who went hard after the corporations, including him going after John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, and he was looking to break up a lot of them, what he called the trusts.
He was also there at the cusp of when you started to have this development of regulatory APPARATUSUS and new legislation and new regulatory bodies. And so it's been a complicated one hundred and fifty years in which Republicans sometimes are on the side of big business, but sometimes they don't.
Yeah, hey, Tevy, it's Steve Hayward out here in god forsake in California. And just to guild your point, I mean, I think you know this that the largest regulatory expansion over business in modern times occurred under Richard Nixon right in the late sixties and early seventies, from which we've never recovered.
And then you probably, I mean, I love these trivia points.
You know, President Taft t our successor actually had more antitrust prosecutions than Roosevelt did in just his four years in office, whereas Roosevelt had what seven years. But you know, tr reminds me most of Trump in this way. I think you know that, you know, tr strategy was, look, you guys in big business, I'll kind of let you do what you want as long as you take orders
from me. That's a slightly crude summary, but only slightly, I think, and you know Trump's pretty much that way right, It's all transactional.
But how do you I mean, I think it's a good important point.
The Republicans are not always pro business or pro big business anyway. But right now it seems the Democrats that the last two Democratic administrations have been trying to.
Revive that the old simple narrative, haven't they.
I mean, the current administration certainly is very aggressive, you know, this week proposing to break up Google.
I suppose.
Yeah.
Well, what I would say is that maybe there's four quadrants, and you've got pro business and pro market and then anti business, anti market, and the Republican are often pro market and often pro business. The Democrats are always anti market and often anti business, and so you have this
kind of weird mixing of the different perspectives. And what we've seen in recent years is a split within the pro market and the pro business Republicans, and then you also have a second split with the more anti business Republicans that JD. Vance is more apt to criticize corporations than some Democrats these days. So it's a complicated story and has long been.
Yeah. Yeah.
One other thing I haven't had a chance to get in your book yet, Tevy, but I wonder if you talk a little bit about Coolidge, who maybe is a hand's figure in some ways. You know, the old myth was always Coolidge said the business of America's business.
He didn't actually say that. He said the chief.
Business of America is business, and then went on for paragraph about how America's commercial character is always subordinate to its democratic character. All that gets left out. Do you dwell on this at all about Coolidge and maybe even Harding in your book?
Yeah, definitely have Coolidge and Harding in there, and some of their relationships with CEOs, including Henry Ford, and I do have the quote correct in my book, which I think is important.
But there's another thing.
You were talking about in terms of Nixon and his expansion of the regulatory state with the EPA and the Philadelphia Plan. And I have a great story in the book about a young Leiah Coca, who's a Ford executive at the time, going to the Nixon White House and trying to convince them to overturn what the Department of Transportation is trying to do in imposing Natorite type regulations
on the auto industry. And I thought it was really interesting that Leiohcoca starts in the book as a pro free market, pro business guy, and he morphs into less pro free market and just pro business because in the Carter years he's looking for subsidies and then in the Reagan years he's looking for tariffs. So interesting transition there.
Yeah, that's right, Yeah, Tevy, Which of the two cars and presidential candidates Trump and Harris do you think is most likely to be pro business as opposed to pro market?
And I think we're in an interesting moment because Republicans have soured a little bit, certainly on big business, in part because big business has taken a side culturally, and the Democrats, although they like to talk about sticking.
It to the man. I'm quite happy.
It seems to me to recruit big business to their side when they need to. For example, Harris is all over Twitter and the stump citing the number of CEOs she says to have endorsed her. She sees this as a sign that she's a sensible one economically, for example, whereas Trump is more likely to shout at those people. So how do you see these two candidates right now with their relationship to business as opposed to markets.
Yeah, well, I would say that Harris overstates it a little bit. There as that letter of eighty eight business leaders that signed endorsing her, But if you really look at the letter, half of them are formers, showing that they're often reluctant to make a partisan point while they're in power. Half of them are from Silicon Valley or
from Hollywood, which are traditionally liberal. And then you have people like Larry Summers in there, who's a smart guy and an economists and everything, but he's not a business leader. So she is trying to make it seem like she is going to be pro business. She also has her brother in law, Tony West, who's a senior executive at Uber advising her. So I think there will be favors to businesses that play along, But I wouldn't call her
pro business, and I certainly wouldn't call her pro market. Trump. Look, there's always a question of who is going to win out in all the various battles inside Trump world, but there are usually pro market people within them, and so maybe there's a chance or a hope that you will have the anti regulatory push that you saw in the last Sump administration that did help goost the economy.
Yeah, Tebby, you know, I get to see a scenario. Let me run a scenario by you. This is what Peter Robinson likes to do, and see what you think of it. I think you know the history of or the cliches again about the New Deal. In World War Two ended the Great Depression, we pivoted away from the
New Deal. And of course the real story, as our mutual friend Arthur Hermann wrote so well about a decade ago, is that when World War two came, the government realized, the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt realized they had to take their boot off the neck of business. So they ended up being by circumstance pro business and pro market, and that's what ends the depression and sets up the prosperity of the post World War II era. So I could see a situation in which we have a president
Harris saih I hope not. But we have a president Harris and you run into a serious economic problem here, you know, a year, eighteen months, two years out because of our deficits and other problems, and they decide, like Roosevelt did in nineteen forty forty one, that in fact, if we're going to get out of this, we're going to have to let business rip. By the way, the fact that the brother in law is a big executive
with Uber. What's Uber's business model been. It's been to charge ahead and open new markets quicker than the interest groups can organize against them. And that has succeeded most places, but not everywhere. And so even the liberals who run Uber understand the government regulation and interest groups are their enemy. And maybe Harris and the people around her might figure
that out. Am I being just completely ridiculously optimistic? Or is that a scenario that you Tevy Troy think might be possible?
Well, Steve, as you know, I cut my teeth working for Ben Wannberg, who is the greatest optimist in political life of all time, and even I think that's a little optimistic.
Oh me too, but I want to throw it out there.
Right, But it is funny. It does race some interesting issues, including something that Bill Gates dead, which is he said back in the day when he was running Microsoft that the high tech industry is three times fast than the private sector, and the private sector is three times faster than government, which means that the high tech industry is nine times faster than government. And that's true, and that's
kind of the uber approach. However, the government is big, and if they grab their hold onto your ankle, they're not letting go. And Bill Gates found that out to his misfortune.
Yeah, yeah, I sure did.
Charles mentioned something earlier that just in passing that one of the reasons that people on the right have fallen out with big business is because they've taken aside in cultural issues culture wars. Now, let's say again, as Stephen
just did we have a Kondell Harris administration. Do you think that that is going to signal to the Democratic Party and of the Harris administration that America is in love again with all of the progressive movements that want to use to reshape various institutions in ways of thought, etc. Or are they going to realize that there actually is
a backlash. There is a pushback that the companies that have been putting their thumb on the scale, the companies that have been endorsing DEI procedures and all of a sudden find themselves in the crosshairs of various internet activists and have to backtrack and cancel and the rest of it. How do you think that business embrace of progressive social agendas would unfold during the Harris administration.
Well, I think they would feel a little more protected from the government side. But you have to remember, no matter who went this election, it's going to be a closely divided government and continue to be closely divided for the foreseeable future. And a lot of Republicans were alienated by the corporate embrace of DEI and EESG, and a lot of Republicans rightly in my mind, feel, hey, we've
been tearing your water. We've been getting hit for being pro corporate for all these years, and you take on this DEI stuff and Thiseschief stuff. What are you doing to us? And so that's one of the reasons why Republican lawmakers have soured on big business.
I mean, I have a question. How corrupt.
A great start?
Yeah, how corrupt was American politics one hundred and fifty years ago? I just watched this documentary on Netflix about whyatt Up, and the argument in it was the JP Morgan. I won't go into all the details because it's quite complicated, but JP Morgan in the end of the nineteenth century, in the early eighteen eighties, sort of rote checks to politicians.
He was a backer of the Republicans. Then he moved to Grover Cleveland and got what he wanted because he just gave them money and there weren't even any campaign finance laws or rules at the time.
How true is that? How true is.
The story that we're told about Teddy Roosevelt realizing that the monopolies were corrupt and a danger to democracy?
How true is all that?
Well?
I think that you wonder if if it is corruption, if you do something then there's no laws against it. So when John d Ruckkeller is building his empire, he uses a lot of sharp elbow belum monopolistic techniques that I wouldn't say were nice, but they weren't against the law at the time, and you didn't have these regulatory
bodies that could enforce against it. So I'm not willing to say that everything was corrupt, and in fact, in my book At the Power of the Money, I specifically tried not to choose out and out bad guy people. These all the people, all the CEOSI profile are complicated. None of them went to jail or arrested or did actually criminal things for the most part, So they were just trying to live in a complicated environment that gets more complicated when you have this government regulation in there.
So I don't think it was all just a whole bunch of corruption, but they did use their influence, specifically Rockefeller and more more importantly Morgan because he engaged in politics sooner, in order to try and get what they wanted.
Well, you know, I'm on the side of the revisionists, like, oh gosh, the conoms of the Hillsdale College's name is blanking on me right now about the oh Burton folsome the myth of the robber barons, right So you know, it turns out that just to pick on Rockefeller, who everyone liked to pick on while he was consolidating the refining industry. The consumer price of petroleum refined products fell by what ninety percent? I mean, where was the whole
revolution anti trust in modern times? Was what's the harm of the consumer?
You know?
And then the other one is is I don't know if you know the famous article by the economist John McGee, but he went through the trial record.
So the breakup of.
Standard oil was what I think nineteen oh nine under taft or nineteen eleven, sometimes.
Run nineteen eleven when the case comes down, that's.
In the key.
Okay, Well, going through the trial record, what you find is all these people that rose that Rockefeller was buying out, they all said, we all thought we got a fair price, none of them on the stand, and the trial said, you know, we were strong armed. It was a mafia or you know, sort of illegal or you know, unethical practices.
And you know, his conclusion out all of this was, if you look at this.
You go, where was the legal violation even under the sort of very Okay, I can get off in the weeds here and I already have done too many already. But in other words, this is more political than it is substantely economic.
That's my point. It was then. It looks to me like we're returning to that today.
Yeah, you know, I also friend, disabuse the notion of the robber barons. If you look at some of the great philanthropic and educational institutions of this country, they were funded by the robber rounds. Now, some of them, like the Rockefeller Foundation of the Fork Foundation, I think the founders would be rolling in their graves at the ridiculous things that those foundations pursue. But the truth is that
they were very philanthropic. Part of it had to do with shaving income taxes, but you know that's still the case today. The part of it was also the great philanthropic impulse that they wanted to give back. Rockefeller, as I show in the book, in the thirty years after he retires, he's still in public life. He's trying to help the economy during the Great Depression, he helps out in World War One, and gets a street name for him in France. So again, people weren't all bad guys.
I think the robber baron myth is a little overstated.
Yeah, I think it's a lot of us.
Can I shift gears forbid and ask you to talk about some general politics, because, after all, you did work in the Bush administration. You're also a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. I've spent some time with BPC folks, and you know, interesting and enterprise that tries to bring
people together from across the political spectrum. Maybe you don't want to comment on the election season we're looking at, but do you have any particular observations or particular things you're looking at that maybe the rest of us are missing.
Do you have a hunch who's going to win? How do you size up the scene in front of us?
So I think that no matter what, as I said earlier, it's going to be very close in terms of the split between Democrats and Republicans. Nobody wins knockout punches in today's politics, and I think that's an important point to be aware of. The Second thing is that I think there are some things that could have bipartisan buy in in the future. What are we going to do about Ai?
What are we going to do about China? So I think after the election, maybe when rhetoric tones down a little bit, we could actually see an environment where you get some things done and things that we as conservatives may not, may not completely abhore. Now that said, if Harris wins, I won't like her policies at at though I'm not sure what they'll be because she's playing hide the ball in her campaign. And with Trump, you also don't know because there's constant wars within the Trump team
about which team is going to win out. And that was my last book, Flight House. I Know you like Steve, and it talked about the reason there were so much infighting in the Trump White House is because there were three teams that could credibly claim that they represented true Trump so called globalists with Jared Kushner, the maggotypes of Steve Van and the traditional Republicans with Ryan's previous All of them could say Trump has set things that indicate
he agrees with our perspective. And so I think we may see more of that in your head.
I think after Trump was liked it, I remember there are a couple of tweets from prominent people who said, well, that's it for the stock market, I'm selling everything because nothing's good. And then of course there's the famous cartoon of the dinosaurs who are watching a meteor streak across the sky and one of them says it's priced in.
And I think about that when we think about people saying that that the Harris administration would not be bad for the stock administer with the stock market either because it's priced in, because they're going to continue the policies, et cetera, et cetera. Who knows. I absolutely don't, But it does raise the question what do you think might be the impact of either administration on the finances of
ordinary folk? Inflation is what matters the most, is what the issue that Bedevil's minds on people because they encounter it on a daily basis. We can talk about China, we can talk about AI, but people are even sensed at the price of X not Twitter. But you know, is this too micro to be concerned about? It would seem not, It would seem particularly pertinent to this.
Yeah, well, James, first of all, I would want to make sure that I had the list of all those people who said the stock market's going to collapse, and never rely on them for financial advice.
That's the first thing.
By his crew. Paul Goldberger was the art the architecture critic architecture critic for The New York Times. I've just written about him that's why I think his name came to mind.
Well, I already don't rely on Frigmant for political or economic advice, so that's fine. I think you can't predict these things necessarily. You don't always know which administration is going to be good for the economy, because I don't think that there is a specific correlation a certain type of politician is good for the economy, because there's all kinds of macro effects that you don't know about them.
And we had a huge boom in the nineteen nineties, not necessarily because of Bill Clinton, although he I did like some of the things that he did in conjunction with the Republican Congress, but because we had this massive tech revolution and that helped increasing efficiency in the economy. So there are other factors at play. And it's not just as simple as Republican pushes a ghost switch for the economy and Democrats push a stop switch.
That's true, but you can say this the more you have if you have a candidate who is more who is interested in less regulation, less government, powerless government expansion, et cetera, which seems to generally be on the right side of where if we're lucky then you have down the road less of an installed base, of a bureaucracy that will thwart, that will suck up resources, that will vote in a certain way in order to perpetuate their physicians.
So I mean yes on an immediate effect. No, it's not like Trump gets in and all of a sudden the price of eggs goes down to a dollar ninety nine. But a general idea pervading the way the administration behaves and the loosening of things, the disinclination to create something that will be sclerotic and intrusive in the future, that matters. And I'm just stating the obvious.
I'm so yah of course. Look, less regulation is better for the economy, and we all know that as conservatives on this podcast. So that is what I would like to see. But the effects of whatever one administration does are not necessarily seen immediately in that time. So yes, less regulation is better. Less government spending, and certainly government debt is a good thing. And I think the overspending of the Bide administration contributed to this very problematic inflation
we're dealing with. But again there's a lot of factors involved.
Indeed, power, money, there's a lot of factors, and it is what makes the world we're on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Listen, folks, Power and the Money is the book that Debbie Troy wrote, the epic clashes between Commanders in Chief and titans of industry, relevance today and relevant a year and ten from now. Whoever happens to get into the office. Debbie, thanks for joining us and doc to you down the road.
Thanks for having me. I love the podcast.
Oh what a pleasure. Well he's talking about Stephen and Peter and and the rest of it. See you later before we go, gentlemen, A couple of things amazing here, isn't it? We were going to up in under an hour with two guests, I mean, and I mean that's that's a swift, brisk, efficient bit of podcasting. Why it's almost as if we're trying to keep ourselves and being
replaced by AI. There's a new there's a new program out of which I haven't yet tried, and I'm terrified to do so, frankly, where you can take an article, any article, and you can drop it into this AI program and it will generate two hosts, male and female, who will discuss the article, tear it apart, tell a little anecdotes on and on, laugh and the rest of it, and apparently is it is frighteningly accurate to the subject material.
But more than that, it's actually enjoyable. So this is the sort of thing that unless we can come up with some quirks that cannot be predicted or replicated by AI, we are ours. Well. I was going to say, a you're from being rendered moot, but maybe by the time we finished the podcast, they already will have come up with Charlie Bottens even bought and and me and the
rest of it. And why would people then say, oh, I have to sit through these people asking these questions aren't really questions and speeches and hum the humming in the eye. Why would I do that when I can just take the entire text of Chevy's book, dump it into AI and get a five part series on exactly what it's about.
You know, James, if I was a science fiction writer, I may used to read a lot of science fiction when I was a teenager, and I don't much anymore.
But if I were one today, I think I'd write a short story and it would be about the alien civilization, you know, two hundred light years from us, who discovers that we exist on Earth and they send an expedition out and they get here, and what they discover the punchline, the twist ending would be, you can see it coming, is that the human species have long gone extinct, hundreds or thousands of years before, and what they're picking up and what exists on the planet are only robots and
AI robots carrying on discussions, podcast news, elections even right. And that's the sort of the frightening sci fi take on where this might be going.
That's a Bradbury story, and it's interesting. We get skyne It, but instead of skyne It coming down and terminating everybody, it's just it's skyne plus matrix with actual with with with no thought, with no consciousness, just absolute generated jabber forever and ever and ever.
You know, I'm not worried about it depressing.
Why because I think I would listen to this for a little bit, and then, as I do when I listen to anything, because I'm argumentative, I would disagree with it. I'd be annoyed by it.
And so instead of saying, do you know, I just read this thing in Slayton. It really annoyed me. And here's why it's wrong, which is my job.
I would end up saying, I just heard this stupid AI chat bot and it's ridiculous interpretation of Tevy Troy's book. And here's why it's wrong, because it's just no way that it could possibly with two people encompass every opinion on the spectrum. So I think it might lead to more, not replace James Lylax, but lead to more James Lylyax to argue with, will facilitate the different views that had been expressed.
Well, that's heartening, I'd like to think. But then again, it gets to the point where a large language model can can assume and predict every objection that you might have, and that Stephen's dystopian future comes true because not only do we have the radio hosts jabbering, but we have the call, We have the callers who are generated by AI and the crazy call. The question is how much
imagination does it? Inevitably will it have and it will have just enough simulacrum of intelligence and imagination that we will accept it to be real. Mean, I work with an awful lot right now, with an awful lot of AI generated art for a project that I'm doing, and I'm still it's still in this sort of charming phase where it just simply cannot generate text and as such comes up with the most fascinating words. It's like having a broke in Dutch. When I look at some of
this stuff, it's just great. I asked you to do English ads for British ads for English muffins in the nineteen twenties, and it will come up with these these ways that are almost right. It's it's an earnestness of saying do I have it yet? Have I got it? And you say no, you don't. Really an ad would not say English muffin? Are you lating muffin? It just wouldn't, And let me tell you why. So right now there are enough tells, the fingers, the eyes, the rest of
it there. But at the same time, you know this is temporary and it's going to be fixed in a trice flux one point one or at one point five, whatever the latest is. Apparently it's really good at text, so we're not going to have to worry about that. So it's improving at an extraordinary rate, and you know we're going to look back, I think with little nostalgia at the time when we could actually be reasonably certain that something was a bot or something was AI generated.
James, Oh God, I say, have you ever seen any AI attempts to do four panel cartoons? Because it has the tone and the setup, but it doesn't understand how to write jokes. So it's always some guy at a desk, and then in the second one he's like, Wow, a coffee would be nice, And then on the fourth panel he's got his eyes wide open and it just says something like.
Are you suckling?
Yah?
I know he's supposed to be emphatic and funny, but it's not.
Can I ask a question or introduce a complication, because I'll bet I don't know the answer to this, James, you use a key phrase, which is we call these large language models, and I think they're mostly being done in English because English is, by the way, a large language, right. It has a much bigger vocabulary than most other languages. I wonder there are other languages that are more complicated, you know, French or regular verbs and Hungarian for goodness sake.
I wonder if it works as well with those languages, or whether English is going to be going to dominate it. And why this is a serious question is, let's see if I can do this in twenty seconds. You know, I do read about linguistics now and then, and you know this is there's something serious about how you know, human beings just start talking by age.
Three without any special instruction. They just we just do it.
That's what makes us different from any other species. You know, monkeys, we can teach them a vocabulary of fifty words, but only with a lot of effort.
And there's no deliberation there.
You know, Bobo may say Bobo want banana, but Bobo never says Bobo wants justice. Right, So that's where I think it starts to break down. And I wonder if you know one war our point on this. You know, Norm Chomsky's most famous serious contribution to linguistics was there's a universal grammar, And apparently that is very controversial among
the super linguistics and the semiodsis of the world. I don't know, it's all over my head, but I think there's something to all that that probably bears on this whole thing. And so I'm wondering, is this really going to be just an English language thing, which is not insignificant, but it may also be its limitation.
I think it will because the expandability adaptibil, the syncretic nature of English. It just will. And as far as Cholms get thing, you know, Leonar Bernstein picked this up too and thought that there was an inherent musical templace that was shared by all humans, where children in every culture or something like that. And he built this into ten episodes and in a book and the rest of it. It was impressive at the time, back when we had
public intellectuals. But mentioning, you know, Lenny, it reminds you that there are already AI generators of music, and they can range from the quite comic and hilarious to convincing enough you know, slop that it'll do for a commercial or a podcast bit or something like that. Why worry about copyright when you can just simply type in a few things and have a have generated for you. Something that's all yours is not going to get takedown notice and the rest of it. So music then gets taken
out of the hands of the individuals. Again, we're going to get to the point where the artisantal, the handmade, the definably human, the stuff that actually has the stamp of human is going to be the most prized thing. And in a way that's great because we're going to go from an era in which we have this explosion of content generated by human beings, most of which is dreadful and meritriitious, to actually sort of living in a warm bath a fairly competent, very good AI generated stuff.
But the real real top of everything will be that crafted by humans. What do you think, you know, James?
I did a whole episode of my podcast, the Charles C. W. Cook Podcast on an AI generated opera that I worked on to annoy one of my trolls who lead comments to listen to that live through comments under my episodes, and so I wrote a whole opera using AI about him, called The Saga of Oiling Raga al Saga the tippetto Valente. And it's really astonishingly accurate the way that the AI works. But the only thing it can do, and it does this in a way that I was absolutely blown away by,
is look at existing musical styles and hate them. And so what the challenge was, ultimately it was to say no, make it more like late Italian mozart or no please add in an overture that is more like Verdi or no, please put this in a minor key in the way that Tchaikovsky would have. And the technology that resulted was incredible, but it was entirely and necessarily derivative. And that's the
one thing that I think is often missed. What I think is very likely to happen is obviously this won't be sanctioned necessarily, but we are going to get new Mozart operas. I mean, listening to this in its early stages, you could see we are going to get another Don Giovanni era Mozart opera, and we are going to get another late Beatles album. Yes, that's going to happen.
Yeah, can you give me? Can you give me two more Elvis Costello albums from the period of nineteen seventy nine to nineteen ninety two.
That's absolutely going to happen.
And the disturbing and distressing part of it is that some of them are actually going to be good. Because this operas, the operas that the opera that I made up with AI it was actually stuck in my head for days. Some of these original melodies that it came up with were really good. But what it can't do I can't see it means by which it could do,
at least not yet. What it can't do is do what Sergeant Pepper or the White Album did, which is synthesized what came before and come up with something completely new. What it can't do is what Beta Oven dated Beethaven's fifth or ninth. And I think that that's going to be the great challenge. If that rubicon has crossed, then all bets off. But until then it is still ultimately an impersonation machine.
You know what I want to see just quickly, is I want to see an AI version or update of John Cage's five Minutes of Silence that might break the action.
Well, just tell it to do it in another key. That's all you have to do. I mean, I've heard people fake that in a major key and it's just hilarious. No, you're absolutely right. I mean you wouldn't be able to walk up to the machine and say finish fon Schuber's eight Symphony. And it will for us. But again, as much as I love what Charles said, and as much as I believe in the look, the indescribable essence, the ineffable human quality that gives these things merit and meaning.
I am now one of those guys who says, you know, it's a rubicon, it it won't be crossed. It's if you look at the rubicon, it wasn't that wide, and it wasn't that deep. It wasn't that deep at all. Gentlemen, we have had fun and you know what we got to. I would love to clear the decks and have an all AI podcast with you guys and take it into every single facet from writing to art to painting and the rest of it, and do so without prejudice, and do so without fear, because this is where the things
the art the world are going. You the listener in the meantime, are going to Apple Podcasts to give us five stars. We really appreciated that. And you are going to Zibiotics where with the coupon code Ricochet you can enjoy the products at a discount. And you are also, after all that, are going to ricochet dot com and sign up if you haven't yet, because the member feed is where you will find a community that you've been
looking for all your days on the internet. The same civil mostly satur right conversation Charles it's been fun, Steven. Good to have you with us, and we'll see all of you in the comments, said Ricochet. Four point ricochets join the conversation.