Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 419: Pop Culture President

Transcript

Episode 419: Pop Culture President · Words & Numbers

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Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony. And this is words and Numbers
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brought to you by the fine people at KHAKI, the Center for
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American Culture and Ideas. Aunt, what's new and exciting in
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your world this week? My quick hit comes from listener
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Stu Barrett. I guess you could describe it as
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in I told you so. From economist to policy makers,
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the headline is AT&T kills home Internet service in New York
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over law requiring $20 plans. Imagine that.
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The bottom line here is New York State passed a law saying that,
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and there's footnotes to it, but basically ISPs are required to
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offer 15 or $20 plans to people with low incomes.
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So presumably there's some hoops you've got to go through.
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And not only does the law require the ISP to offer these
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low dollar plans, but the law also specifies the speed.
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So the $15 plan has to have download speeds of at least 25
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megabits per second. The $20 plan has to have 200
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megabits per second. Wow, that's a lot for $5.
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I'm looking at this and put aside for the moment my comments
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as an economist, which I'll get to.
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But I'm thinking back to when I got broadband for the first
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time. It was through AT&T.
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And as I recall, this would have been the early 2000s was around
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60 or 70 bucks a month. So adjusting for inflation,
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that's like over $100, somewhere between a hundred $150.00 a
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month today. And I believe I had 10 megabits
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per second download. Again, this is the pricing for
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low income households. I was paying six times what the
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laws requiring here and getting 120th the speed.
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Yeah, that sounds about right. And you know there's going to be
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a hell of a problem here, Ant, when they realize that entire
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neighborhoods don't have an option of switching away from
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AT&T. Oh, it's worse than that,
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because it turns out AT&T has an option, which it is exercising,
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which is to say to New York State, look, we can't deliver
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what you're demanding at the price you're requiring,
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therefore we're not going to offer broadband at all.
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Goodbye. Yeah.
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No, that's going to be a problem when they realize that AT&T is
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the only option for any number of people in the state.
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Yeah, yeah. Well, now you don't get any
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service at all, which really in the real world many choices are
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in fact binary. Yeah.
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And this particular one is mirrored on the other coast.
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California just had this problem of its home.
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Insurance companies are leaving the state for the same reason.
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California said, well, you cannot raise your premiums above
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whatever the limit is. And the insurance companies are
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saying, well, look, we can't afford to do business at that
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price. We're leaving.
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And everybody, they get their undies in A twist when this
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happens, but they forget that these are not public services,
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these are corporations. Right.
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And if you can't make a profit, well, then you can't do any
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business. Yeah, you can't wave a magic
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wand and say this has to happen. And at root this is the same
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argument that has people saying, well if you can't pay people X
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dollars per hour then you don't belong in business at.
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All right, Yeah. This is all the same argument
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and it yields the same outcome in every instance.
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And yet somehow the voters keep falling for it.
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Because honestly, I'm done arguing that the problem here is
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politicians. The fact is, politicians respond
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to voters, and the politicians would not be floating plans like
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this if they thought that voters knew better.
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Well people love free stuff Ant or cheap stuff in this instance,
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but this may all be for naughty. I don't know if you saw the
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news, but there is now a 1.6% chance that an asteroid roughly
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40 meters across will hit the Earth in the next couple of
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years. No 1.46, that's pretty darn
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high. I mean compared to what it
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usually is. 1.6 up from 1 given some new data.
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Now it's up to 1.6, and the scientists assure us that this
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isn't as bad as it sounds. It's not like an extinction
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level asteroid, which would be about 90 meters across.
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This one's only 40. This would only be the kind that
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wipes out an entire city from the face of the Earth.
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Wow. So who knows where it might hit?
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Well, I guess by the numbers there's a 2/3 chance it hits
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water, but then you've got tsunami problems.
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That's right. That might be every bit as bad
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as it hitting Earth in one place or another, but this is, you
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know, interesting business. And I guarantee you that people
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will say something like you just did well 1.6, you know?
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What are the? Odds.
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There are the odds definitionally, but those are
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the same people who will say let's go play the slots down at
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the casino next. Week, right?
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Yeah, yeah. The odds are much better that
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Boulder hits the earth than you hit the jackpot on slot.
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Machine. Is this that asteroid?
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What was it called? FAPHOS something a fossus.
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I don't recall what the name is, but it's something that made a
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very close pass to the Earth recently or will do recently as
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I heard it. The question is, they don't know
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what it does after that. Does it leave the solar system
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or does it come back and smack us again?
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Yeah, I don't know if this is the same one or not.
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And how could I when there are literally 10s of thousands of
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these things circling the earth at any moment?
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Do they give us any idea when they'll be able to update the
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odds? No they do not.
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Oh no. Hey.
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It is formally known as 2024 Y R4.
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Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
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That's right, they should name these things something like
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Susan. Then we'd all remember it.
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But but no NO2024YR four no. And I believe this is in 2025 S
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coming up soon. You mean the possible hit is in
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2025? No 2032. 2032 What do you know,
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right Just before Social Security goes bankrupt.
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All of our problems may be, but who knows?
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This, of course, Aunt, leads us to the foolishness of the week.
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And I know you've been busy for the last couple of weeks.
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You probably haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to
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things like Facebook and Twitter.
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We still all call it Twitter. Why don't we just change?
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I heard. One person refer to it as ex.
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Recently everybody looked at him like they don't know what he's
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talking about. Yeah, that seems right.
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But there's been this this idiocy making the rounds that
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Chelsea Clinton took home $84 million from USAID.
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You seen this? No, I haven't.
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Maybe it's best that you're busy because you're not subject to
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this kind of incredible foolishness.
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After about the 85th time I saw it on my Facebook feed, I
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thought, well, I'm going to do what all those people who posted
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it should have and go dig into this for three seconds and find
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out whether there's anything here that would even lead a
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person to believe this might be true.
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Notice all the qualifiers I just used.
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And no, there's literally nothing.
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Matter of fact, the first thing that came up was a Newsweek
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debunking of this, Which gave all the federal money that
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showed up into not Chelsea Clinton's foundation, which I
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don't think she has one. She might, but it's not that,
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but the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation.
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And it was almost no dollars at all, right?
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So you can think whatever you want.
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If the Clintons in their foundation, they're not leeching
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off tax dollars. I mean, by common sense, $84
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million. If that were true, some reporter
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would have figured it out about three days after the money hit
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her bank. Yeah, yeah.
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But of course, Aunt, everything is a mysterious cabal these
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days. It's it's not as if we could all
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be sensible and think that things work pretty much the way
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we think they do. No, no, no, no.
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It has to be this sinister. Right.
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Conspiracy of global elites. And I don't even know who to
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blame for this kind of bull crap.
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I really don't. This is the same nonsense that
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had a man show up to a pizzeria with a rifle ready to shoot the
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place up because of the pedophiles who were holding
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children in the basement of the pizzeria.
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A pizzeria that had no basement I might add.
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But here we are, right? Everybody believes anything they
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hear, no matter how crazy. And this is the weird thing that
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so many people that I've encountered who are of that
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mindset, that there's this great conspiracy out there, are also
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the people who think that the government is incompetent and
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policy makers are incompetent. Now which one is it?
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It literally can't be both of those things, but I mean, let's
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just start with basic stuff. If you're going to post
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something like this, maybe do us and yourselves a favor and check
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the veracity. And it only takes a matter of
9:58
seconds. Google's your friend here. 3
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seconds, knock yourself out, go ahead and do it.
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People get angry when I call them imbeciles for posting these
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sorts of things and they say well it could have happened.
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Like no, no, it couldn't have. For One Stop shopping for all
10:15
things James and Aunt, visit our website wordsandnumbers.org.
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We give a special shout out to our Patreon sponsors who help us
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keep the lights on. If you'd like to contribute, go
10:27
to patreon.com/words and Numbers.
10:31
Moving from one solutions to the next, what'd you think of the
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Super Bowl yesterday? AI did not watch it.
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BI heard that somebody won who wasn't expected to win, and CI
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saw some cartoon about left branch in a right branch.
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Left branches, Philadelphia loses, the right branches
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Philadelphia wins. And they both went to the same
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door. There's rioting in the streets
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in Philadelphia. Well, all of that I think is
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correct. And that exhausts my knowledge
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of the Super Bowl this year. It's just sad.
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It's just sad. This isn't the Super Bowl.
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Or me hurricane. You It was actually an
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entertaining enough game. The game actually itself not
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terribly exciting, although very surprising.
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The halftime show, probably the worst I've ever seen.
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I mean, it was just dreadful. I have no idea what the hell was
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anybody was thinking putting that on my TV.
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But there was this fascinating thing, and I don't know if
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anybody really picked up on it all that much, but both Donald
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Trump and Taylor Swift were there.
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Both of them, yeah. This could be a Jeopardy
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category, people I don't care for.
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But anyway, they were both pretty roundly booed, which was
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kind of nice. I thought Taylor Swift was
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largely liked everywhere. Is that not the case?
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She is beloved, but put into a football context.
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She is dating one of the Kansas City Chiefs.
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And it was largely a Philadelphia Eagles crowd at the
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game. So, you know, this wouldn't have
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happened anywhere she went, but it certainly did happen here.
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And Donald Trump was booed. And this goes back to the cabal
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theory we were just getting into.
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Rumor has it that some of the, if not all, of the television
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networks superimposed some favorable crowd noise over the
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booze. Now wait a minute.
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Taylor Swift, she's dating the football player, so she kind of
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has to show up. This is the middle of Democratic
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America. Why did Trump show up?
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I don't know. I can tell you that he's the 1st
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president to ever show up to a Super Bowl.
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Oh really? Sitting president.
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Wow. Yeah, I was shocked to find that
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out. I can also tell you that if I
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were president, I'd be at every Super Bowl.
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If they just let me walk into a Super Bowl and go straight to a
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corporate box, you bet. I'm.
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Going to go and watch the Super Bowl for free every year that I
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am able to do such a thing. And next year, if any of you
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corporate types out there want to invite me to the Super Bowl,
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I'm I'm your man. Let's go do this.
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But the thing that got me thinking, Aunt, was that where
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did we get to the point where a president gets to be a cultural
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icon? That's a weird thing to think
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about it in those terms, especially in this day and age
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when we're all predisposed to think of Trump in this way.
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He's almost messianic to his followers.
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Maybe I'd even take out the word almost.
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Yeah, when you first raised this topic and you had suggested
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Obama was the first, I said Clinton was the first, but I
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think your definition is better. I was thinking about widely
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loved and popular, but you mean something different here as
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cultural icon. Yeah, I really do.
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And you remember seeing those paintings with Obama, with the
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sun shining down upon him and the word hope underneath it and
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and these sorts of things. And when Obama ran for office
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and his campaign did a masterful job, but when he ran for office,
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he was above all of it, arguing policy that was for all these
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other people. I'm about hope and change and
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the people who followed behind him really seemed to think that
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he was going to lead us to some sort of ill defined promised
14:33
land. Now he didn't, but how could he
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have? Well, and by the same token,
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people on the other side thought he was going to lead us to
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Armageddon, and he didn't do that either.
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In fact, I think in retrospect, I didn't like the guy as a
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president, but I think in retrospect he wasn't that bad.
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Well, yeah, but we always think that of our presidents.
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The ones in the past are always better.
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That's right. I mean, Jimmy Carter died and
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everybody said, aw, remember when Jimmy was president?
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When Jimmy was president, nobody could stand him.
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We tend to build up our ex presidents here.
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I just want to leave that off to the side.
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That's an interesting phenomenon for another day.
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But in this one interesting way of looking at things, you can
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see Obama on the one hand and Trump on the other, occupying
15:29
essentially the same sort of territory for their respective
15:33
groups, right? And it's a little hard to figure
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out how presidents became, for lack of a better word, messiahs.
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And I do think there is a lack of a better word there.
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If there is a better word, I'd like to hear it.
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Well, profit, maybe. Messiah seems better.
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It does seem better, and I'm thinking that what goes with the
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Messiah on the part of the followers is faith, and you
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could say blind faith. I think that might be redundant,
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but it's faith, right? It that's what we're left with
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because too few voters think through the policies, think
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through the implications. There's not a lot of thought and
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reason going on in our political space.
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It's just a whole bunch of belief.
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Yeah. It's interesting that it fell to
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a president. Yeah, Why a president as opposed
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to, I guess the president's? The only thing that unify might
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be the wrong word. It's the only thing common to
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all of us. Yeah, unify might be the wrong
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word, but it's a point well taken nonetheless, right?
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The president, the vice president are the only two
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people voted on by the entire country.
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People tend to forget about that, right, when we think about
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politics. But, you know, everything else
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is local or state. So all right, it's the one time
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we all get to have a say in the same thing, and that's
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interesting. But how did we get to the point
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where we literally think the president is somehow better than
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the rest of us to the degree that it's almost otherworldly?
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Again, I would go both directions.
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Half of us believe that it's almost otherworldly how perfect
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the president is. The other half believe that it's
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almost otherworldly how horrible and evil the guy is.
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But all of them, if added together.
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Let's be honest, it's not half and half.
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We understand the better math. But in the name of a colloquial
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conversation, how is it that both halves agree that there is
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a better person than the rest of us?
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Because it's absurd to think that, right?
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The reason why we put all kinds of safeguards on these offices
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is because we all know good and well that these people are not
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better than we are. And above and beyond the
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original constitutional impediments to the office of the
18:11
presidency, which were not insignificant, we later had a
18:17
constitutional amendment to keep anybody from doing it more than
18:20
twice. Why?
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Because we all understood somehow that that just wasn't
18:26
healthy, that we're better off if that weren't allowed.
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A friend of mine actually suggested last week to me
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privately, and I thought this was actually more interesting
18:38
than I would have. He suggested that maybe we'd all
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be better off with a six year presidency with no.
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Oh, that's interesting. Run again.
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Yeah. Yeah, I thought so too.
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It's something I'd. Frankly, I'd never thought about
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it. And the minute he mentioned it,
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I thought, huh, you might be on to something there.
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But I'll leave that for another day.
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It's just strange, right, when we think about the turf that the
19:04
president now occupies. And, and maybe I could feel the
19:08
Trump supporters in our audience getting agitated as we speak.
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So let's shift gears for a second and talk about Kamala
19:15
Harris because you might recall, aunt, as I do, that Kamala
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Harris ran for president and got less than 2% of the vote and was
19:23
out before Iowa. Yeah, And then magically became
19:28
vice president, which proves you don't have to be all that big a
19:32
deal to become vice president. But then, through a series of
19:37
machinations that no one could have predicted at the time, she
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finds herself in the big chair in terms of the campaign.
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And what did the people on the Democratic side do?
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She was just the greatest thing that anybody had ever seen.
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Yeah, that's after giving her 2% of the vote in the primary.
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Yeah. Right when she got none of the
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vote in the primary and then she got no attention at all for
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being vice president, apart from the little bit of attention she
20:08
got for not having done much of anything.
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Somehow she became the greatest person in the history of people
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to a very big portion of the electorate.
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And that doesn't pass the smell test.
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That's crazy. And if you can see it on one
20:25
side, you have to be able to see it on the other.
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So what are we doing here? I guess, well, there was a
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point, at least in our lifetimes, going back far enough
20:39
that presidents weren't these cultural icons.
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But what's bothering me as I listen to you is I'm recalling
20:50
at the same point in history that I can remember in which
20:53
presidents were not cultural icons.
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It was also the case that few people knew who the Supreme
21:01
Court justices were. You might be able to name the
21:04
Chief Justice, but beyond that, they were all below the radar.
21:08
At the same time, presidents have become cultural icons.
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It seems that Supreme Court justices have taken on that
21:15
higher level of publicity exposure the president used to
21:19
have. And what bothers me is what
21:22
happens if twenty, 30-40 years from now, we've made cultural
21:26
icons out of the Supreme Court justices, and these are guys
21:29
that once they're in, you don't get rid of them till they die.
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Well, that's the plan for right now anyway.
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People are moving to change that with the each passing year.
21:40
But you know, the interesting thing is, I mean, you could make
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a case for Kennedy, you can make a case for Reagan, right?
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But I really think it was Obama where we saw the the tides
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change. Yeah, I lived through Reagan and
21:56
I recall, look, he was more unifying as a president if if
22:00
you just go by the votes than any other modern president.
22:05
But not messianic. In fact, if anything, it was the
22:08
reverse. There was a good chance he
22:09
wasn't electable because he had been divorced and remarried.
22:15
Right. I also remember some of the
22:18
dimmer bulbs in the adult universe I was running in at
22:21
that time saying Ronald Wilson Reagan.
22:24
Each name has 6 letters. Interesting.
22:27
Makes you think and I thought, God help us.
22:31
Nothing makes you think apparently.
22:33
But I digress. I really do think it was Obama
22:36
and I think it's reached another fever pitch under Trump.
22:40
But these things happened after the rise of the 24 Hour News
22:43
Network. So did the identification of
22:47
Supreme Court justices, right? Nobody could have picked these
22:50
guys out of a line up 50 years ago.
22:53
But now, because they're on our TV's all the time, it seems that
22:58
that place, I don't know how deeply it plays, but I think
23:01
that place and this idea that we could have these sorts of people
23:08
coming to the fore as saviors to the public really tracks with
23:14
not only the rise of 24 hour news, but the splintering of
23:18
those 24 hour news networks into partisan outlets.
23:22
Well, let me push back a little bit because I think you've
23:25
correctly identified as having this messianic aura about them,
23:30
Obama and Trump. But I'm thinking back to Hillary
23:33
Clinton and now more recently Joe Biden, and I don't get the
23:37
sense that they had that persona.
23:43
No, I don't. Think so, and I think the George
23:45
W Bush certainly didn't have it and.
23:47
George, not George H. The first George Bush certainly
23:50
didn't have it. So look, I don't think that
23:53
we're always going to see this, but when we do see this, it's
23:57
going to be in this place. Could it be the case that there
24:05
is an incentive to bring to the four candidates like that
24:08
incentive on the part of the parties because it brings out
24:12
the voters? I think that's going to be a
24:16
lesson that they all figure out pretty quickly, if they haven't
24:18
figured it out already. And that's, I think, really,
24:22
really dangerous because it virtually guarantees that we see
24:27
this sort of nonsense moving forward every single time.
24:32
And, you know, there's a little bit of evidence for this when
24:36
you sit back and and what do you see with big stars?
24:39
Sports athletes come to mind pretty quickly.
24:43
They say, well, maybe I'll run for president as they get older.
24:46
Right. You got it, really.
24:49
And look, there are great examples of sports figures who
24:52
went on to serve in government very, very well.
24:56
And I'm thinking primarily here of Whizzer White, who was a
25:00
football player who became a Supreme Court Justice, right?
25:03
So you can do these sorts of things.
25:05
And there are any number of congressmen who were pro
25:08
baseball players and things like this.
25:10
You can trade on the fame to achieve another goal if you
25:16
want, and I think that's fine. But there's a group of people,
25:22
and we started by saying, you know, Taylor Swift and President
25:26
Trump were both at the Super Bowl.
25:29
Do you think Taylor Swift could run for president right now and
25:32
win? Well, and win, yeah.
25:38
Yeah, I absolutely do too. And that would be a catastrophe.
25:44
But all they would have to do is declare her candidacy and then
25:49
make sure she never said anything, right?
25:53
I think she would walk to the office.
25:56
And that's really, really bothersome to think about that.
26:02
Well, that's kind of odd now I think on it, because what you're
26:06
describing in effect is a transformation to a figurehead
26:12
that, you know, if, if I'm one of the party leaders and I've
26:17
got the wherewithal to lead the party to do the mechanisations
26:20
in the backroom, I want someone exactly like a Taylor Swift,
26:23
provided this person isn't interested in putting his or her
26:28
own fingerprint on the thing. Let me make the decisions.
26:32
You just attract the votes. Well, we had a figurehead in the
26:37
last four years. Joe Biden was a figure.
26:39
He did not govern. Joe Biden did almost nothing by
26:43
way of governance. And if you're out there getting
26:49
ready to curse me, I'm going to throw something in the show
26:51
notes that you can watch that will give you an insider's
26:55
perspective on just what Joe Biden did for the last four
26:59
years. So you can yell at me
27:01
afterwards, but don't yell at me before.
27:03
Give it a look. Is that really what you want?
27:06
Because, you know, everybody's moaning right now that Elon Musk
27:10
was unelected and therefore what he's trying to accomplish is
27:14
somehow illegitimate. Well, the guys who ran the Biden
27:17
administration were all unelected, too.
27:20
Was that illegitimate as well? I mean, how do you start drawing
27:24
lines here that don't cut right through your favorite thing?
27:29
And therein lies the difficulty, right?
27:32
Nobody's willing to draw the obvious line because it cuts
27:36
into their favorite thing. And in order to keep on going,
27:40
well, maybe they need to run somebody, oh, I don't know if
27:43
the next election, somebody who became quite famous because he
27:47
was a billionaire or parlayed that into a reality TV career or
27:54
had a yeah, wait a second, That's what we've got right now.
27:59
Oh, wait, no, that's not what we want.
28:03
Except it is what we want collectively.
28:06
How do I know? He just won the last election.
28:10
So I don't know what to make of this, except to say that the
28:16
presidency is in uncharted waters.
28:18
Now, that might always be literally true.
28:21
The presidency might always be in uncharted waters.
28:24
But it's so obvious here that the rules of the game have
28:28
changed, and we may end up getting president after
28:32
president after president whose only qualification is that he
28:35
was famous before he decided to try to become president.
28:40
And does that mean I have to take somebody, you know, as
28:43
stupid as Kanye West seriously? There's a number of people out
28:47
there who do take somebody as stupid as Kanye West, meaning to
28:50
say Kanye himself, because almost nobody else is that
28:54
stupid. Seriously.
28:55
He came out last week and proclaimed his love for Hitler.
29:00
Oh man, come on. Right, and here's the weird
29:04
part. Nobody's going to tell Kanye he
29:06
can't come to the party because of what he said.
29:10
That's not disqualifying for Kanye.
29:14
Well, how long is it going to be before somebody realizes, hey,
29:17
if that doesn't disqualify him, nothing will.
29:20
Let's run him or somebody equally as horrible, if you can
29:25
dredge somebody equally as horrible up from the depths.
29:29
So, you know, what we're left with here is a lot of very
29:34
unseemly possibilities. Every time we have a
29:36
conversation like this, I hear in the back of my mind words
29:40
from Jefferson about fearing a democracy.
29:45
That's that's basically it. Now you want people to have a
29:48
vote. But the beauty of a Republic is
29:51
you keep the people one step separated.
29:55
They elect people, and the people they elect then think
29:58
about and vote. And I think we've lost a lot in
30:02
reducing the Electoral College to a rubber stamp.
30:04
The Electoral College could have solved this problem that we're
30:07
now. Discussing well, we've
30:11
democratized everything to the extent that we could have right
30:15
within the constitutional provisions.
30:18
And we're going to talk next week about something, the 17th
30:20
Amendment, that was a further democratization that causes all
30:25
kinds of problems that were unforeseen, right?
30:28
But when you hear people say the answer to the problems of
30:32
democracy is more democracy, that might be crazy.
30:37
The answers to the problems of democracy are clearly not more
30:40
democracy. And the founding generation knew
30:43
this. And they gave us a government in
30:46
which the voice of the people would be heard, would often be
30:50
definitive, but didn't have to be definitive at anyone given
30:54
point in time, that if we really needed to do something and the
30:58
people didn't want to do it, we could do it anyway.
31:01
And there might be hell to pay at the next election for the
31:03
people who did it, but they could do it nonetheless.
31:08
And we've really gotten away from that sort of thing.
31:11
And it's caused us, I think, what might be irreparable harm.
31:17
And that's all the time we've got this week on words and
31:19
numbers. Until next time.
31:21
Send us e-mail wordsandnumberspodcast@gmail.com.
31:24
Try to be nice to one person who doesn't deserve it till next
31:28
week. Can't take it easy.
31:29
See you next week, James.