Transcript
KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast - May 11, 2024
The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Mon May 13, 2024
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It's where Iowa comes to talk.
News Talk 1540 KXEL.
Good cheer.
Jacobson is here.
John Jacobson here on the Jacobson group out of the North American original blowtorch.
The Western Hemispheres won an only 50,000 watt 1540 AM channel.
That's 50,000 clear watts, caramined across our hemisphere with the assist of 100.5 FM transmitter.
out of Cedar Rapids.
This is your Mary in Iowa hometown boy John Jacobson here, former erstwhile undefeated Iowa state legislator.
Now a fiduciary working with the our court systems is an American attorney protecting those vulnerable by using the trust laws of our state and country to protect everybody ranging from
retirees, people with Alzheimer's, injury victims, ag families.
Families are in the midst of internal strife and struggle.
We step in the breach and take care of them, and I love to do radio on the side.
And doing some work for the US Coast Guard auxiliary as well, our great Iowa flotilla.
Folks, remember, we got Mississippi and Missouri Rivers navigating both.
Sides of Iowa, the only such state that has those circumstances and the Coast Guard helps with flood interdiction among the many other great things that they do.
So we're going to have another wonderful hour here today.
I couldn't do it without the one, the only, the inimitable engineer of half a century of excellence, Mike Shane.
He has earned this inimitable ringtone.
We have a great, fun show.
today here and we're going to do a variety of things.
We're going to get updated on some really important health care laws that will affect you, that have been affecting you.
We're going to salute some great business in our area.
And then we're going to have a wonderful discussion.
We'll bring some millennials and Gen Z folks into a wonderful upcoming discussion on things going on in the culture currently.
We're going to hear from the young peeps.
The next wave of Milton Friedman's, Thomas Sowell's, Dr. Walter Williams's.
The next wave is there.
There are still free market economists.
teaching in our universities, believe it or not.
So get ready to rumble, guys.
We are gonna roll starting now.
You know, folks, the last couple of weeks, we've been saluting our great examples of American free market enterprise.
Let's go back to our roots, our hometown, this wonderful legacy, multi-generational family business founded by the late great Patriots, Kurt and Norma Haymes.
Now, well into their third and fourth generations of the wonderful people at Wabash there, Haymes Homes.
Safe, affordable, beautiful homes for our folks.
Kurtis.
Welcome back to the program studio audience always with a round of applause when you show up for the show here and Great to have you on this beautiful weekend in Iowa.
We hope these storms pass although Monday's supposed to possibly be percolating again So always keep your ears to KXEL and Dr. Jeff Stein always make sure you're up to date
with weather.
Curtis, what do you got for us today?
I work alongside a lot of bankers and people are starting to get worried about financing.
The Fed, despite poor attending three rate cuts this year, they put the brakes on and so it looks like we're not going to get.
that rate relief.
But Curtis, you guys have a plan.
There is a way to seamlessly glide right in to financing for your beautiful manufactured home.
Take it away, Curtis.
Thank you for having me today.
What we'd like to do here at Hames is we want to keep it as simple as possible.
My co-worker Clint and myself, any potential homeowners, we would take an application
we would look at the buyer's credit, their income, and their down payment, and we can make a suggestion as to a bank that might be the best fit.
If someone is not particularly savvy in that area, Clint or myself, we want to make sure that they understand the loan product that they're getting into.
It's going to be very simple.
We don't have weird balloon payments.
We don't have flexible interest rates.
We have a very
straightforward, straight shot, pay off early, no prepayment penalties.
Our job is to educate our buyers and they make sure that they understand the product that they're getting.
Curtis Hames here with us and Curtis, I've got to tell you, as someone who is in the state legislature for seven years,
paperwork is the universal constant that just bores down and grinds down on all of us and yet there is such great news shining like a beacon on your website hamshomes.com is that financing application Curtis this is an easy streamlined form I mean you know this just makes it
You cut through all that Gordian knot of red tape, and it's not intimidating, guys.
This is just a very simple app, and we're underway, aren't we?
Once we get that app started, we're on the road to a process to get a home.
Again, we want to keep it extremely simple.
We want it to be very streamlined.
We want it to be very, very simple, clear, concise, end user experience.
We'll look at
Take your name, your address, be able to run your credit, some pay stubs, your ID.
We're not asking for a blood sample.
We're
asking for multiple years of tax returns.
We just need to know what we can present to the bank.
And that is your income, your credit score, your down payment.
Again, it's very, very streamlined.
We want to make it as simple and painless as possible.
Yes guys, you know they the the Hames folks they've got access to different banks financing modalities Circle Finance LLC You know you've got both Barbara and Curtis there.
They're licensed mortgage home originators You want to have that home insurance and let's talk about that Although ironically your homes hold up better during
to rate shows than the regular traditional home models are, but Curtis, home insurance A is really critical and B, you guys make sure it's available.
Absolutely.
Our homeowners have the option of getting insurance wherever they like.
We can give some guidance on good local agents.
We also have an in-house agency, Haynes Insurance Agency,
we sell from Foremost, which is under the farmers umbrella.
We want to make that part of it simple.
That's not really our primary function as a business model.
What we want to do is ensure that everyone has the covers that they need.
They can keep safe as we've seen for those of you in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa.
Our heart goes out to all of you.
Some of those things are just
you know those acts of God are sometimes just inevitable and we want to be as prepared as we possibly can be.
Well the folks at Hames are prepared because you know that Hames insurance agency that Kurt has just referenced they are a certified specialist for Foremost and Foremost is the number one market leader for mobile home insurance in the nation so guys you can protect
your manufactured home and belongings by purchasing that.
One stop shopping is the only way to fly.
Curtis Ames, Curtis, before we let you go, how do they get in touch with you?
Come visit with us at our sales center at 5410 Wabash Street, Southwest.
Please mind the construction in this coming week here.
Hopefully that comes and goes very quickly.
Please give me a call at 319-377-4863.
or visit us on the web, hamshomes.com, Facebook, Twitter, send a smoke signal.
However you want to visit with us, we'd love to hear from you.
What better calling than to provide home and hearth for people?
Studio audience agrees.
Curtis, can't wait to talk to you again next week.
Give our best to the
all the rest of the eponymously named Hames people over there.
Great to visit with you again today.
Guys, a great interview upcoming here with our award winner, Dr. Hartzuch, the studio audience is cheering for you today because your interview down at your Texas Medical Conference where we were breaking news live
won a Large Market Radio Award at the Iowa Broadcast News Association Convention Banquet and Awards for Best Spot News.
Congratulations, Dr. Hartzuch.
You're a winner.
Wow.
Wow.
Really
glad to
hear that, John.
Play that ringtone again, Mike Shane, celebrating as we basically swept all categories, 11 categories in Large Market Radio.
Large Market, we were beating the big stations and
Guys, Dr. Hart, such as interview, we'll have to get that back up on archive because that one for spot news in the state of Iowa.
And it's amazing, Doc, because the contest was judged by, dare I say, the liberal media members from the Illinois Broadcast News Association.
And we have a little different take of the healthcare environment than Fauciism.
It's really amazing, Doc, but you delivered.
We won some brass for that.
Congrats again, and thanks for your ongoing contributions to this program.
Wow, I really appreciate that, John.
And it's great to be on here and talk about everything that's going on in the area of medical freedom.
And wow, I'm just repressed.
Well, we're going to do this, Mike, let's do a McLaughlin thing.
We're going to cue it up for Doc this way.
Let's do our McLaughlin group intro here.
Because this is unrehearsed.
But we've got with us a former Iowa State Senator.
That's why we call him the Honorable David Hartsich M.D.
Medical Doctor, one of the great heroic doctors of conscience.
Let's go to issue one with my best John McLaughlin voice.
I go to you, Dr. Heitzlitz, take it away.
I
think the issue is whether the Supreme Court has jurisdiction in my case, because the district court has said that they do not have jurisdiction in free speech.
And
I don't understand that, but we know that the final arbiter, the Supreme Court of the State of Iowa, has
ultimate jurisdiction for anything that's not in federal court.
So I'm tending to think that that should be pregnant with possibilities for you for success.
I think it should be, especially in light of the Planned Parenthood, the challenge to the heartbeat film here in Iowa.
I'm strong pro-life.
But the reality of it is that the the enforcement mechanism is the same mechanism that the boards have used in order to silence doctors and prevent treatment for COVID.
Yeah, I'm going to use the analogy of police.
You know, if you've got good cops, things are good.
If you've got bad cops, things aren't so good.
And
You know, the people that you empower have to be the right people with the right philosophies that understand the fundamental underpinning of constitutional rights.
And I'll use an analogy.
We love our law enforcement, but the truth is the state of Iowa is going to be sued probably successfully for multi millions of dollars.
because the Iowa DCI violated the constitutional rights of many Iowa and Iowa state athletes, many of whom were minority students, and here's the problem.
You got to have the right people in the right places and you have to interpret the law properly.
It was not done in that case and I'm afraid our Iowa Board of Medicine is not interpreting
the law properly when it comes to medical freedom of doctors and patient stock and I hope the court does intervene and helps to fix this, what say you?
Well I think the argument that if you have the right to judicial review in order to take the life of an unborn child and certainly doctors should also have judicial review in order to save the life of a patient
and prevent them and allow that doctor to kill the germs.
You have a
right to kill her baby, you have a right to kill the germs.
This is an important point, doctor, because I am a dedicated pro-lifer.
I ran for office because of the life issue.
And it's appalling to me that the very same activist type of court mentality that has erroneously
allowed for abortion, would on the other hand not feel like they would have any say to merely do what is within their traditional strict constructionist duty, which is to properly interpret the Constitution in favor of physician and patient rights
to full informed consent and full treatment at the discretion of the physician and the patient.
It seems like it would be gigantically hypocritical if a court that has never failed to flex its muscles in getting involved in anything.
I mean, the courts now basically can federalize any issue through the Interstate Commerce Clause
And why would they shy away now on the other hand when it comes to what I call a conservative, rock, rib issue of upholding traditional doctor patient rights for full informed consent and treatment that literally we had under public policy in jurisdictions of the United States, public policies that killed people because it denied life enhancing care to them,
and actually proposed treatments that were harmful to the health of millions, Dr. Hartzich?
Well, I think it's even beyond that.
And that the legislature has proclaimed that the life they want to save the life of the unborn child.
And they passed a law that says that the board can do what they're said they're doing.
And in that case, the court has said, no, we're going to stop it.
We're going to have an injunction.
Whereas in my case, the court has said, and the legislature has already said that doctors can use off-way with drugs to treat COVID, because they enacted a law that gave them tort protection in doing so.
And in doing so, the legislature expressed its intention that doctors use these medications.
Furthermore, the board itself
I petitioned the board for the use of hydroxychloric when there's just an off-label drug, as well as Zithromax, which they also had originally said, no, no, no, don't use hydroxy, don't use Zithromax.
It's preposterous, Zithromax has been used for decades successfully for treating all sorts of things.
And Doc, I'll say it right now, when I was in the Iowa legislature, Iver Mectin, I think I was heading for pneumonia, Iver Mectin turned it around for me,
following the complete ivermectin protocol in about 24 hours.
And Doc, none of your patients were hospitalized and dying on remdesivir and ventilators.
And Doc, your types of protocols that you endorsed when they were encouraged in Nebraska literally saved thousands of lives, Dr. Hartsich.
I, you know, John, I always hear you say that.
It's not exactly true.
I didn't have patients die of COVID.
And that's because they did not receive early treatment.
Well, yeah, exactly.
If it was too late and that was, and not getting the early treatment was oftentimes caused by the inability for them to get that easy early treatment, either by knowing about it or getting a prescription filled easily or finding a doctor who wasn't cowering in fear, perhaps of a medical board.
You know, I think, I think we have to really take a look at what I've done in terms of petition for the registered
grievance.
Yeah, review this for our listeners here.
Some folks might be listening for the first time here.
In the same manner, the legislature has said it's okay to use these off-label drugs to treat COVID.
So too did the board.
The board actually answered my petition with what they call the revised joint scheme.
which corrected a lot of the things that I had said
wrong with the original joint scheme.
You actually won, but unfortunately the horse had already left the barn.
No.
What had happened was we end up with a bunch of bureaucrats that worked for the board, where the board is supposed to control the bureaucrats instead of the bureaucrats that were controlling the board.
We have what I call a powerless and very weak board.
It cannot, and what happened was
My my lawsuit in part if is to get them to mail out or to send the The revised joint statement absolutely Yeah, yeah, that's ridiculous that they should pass a revised joint statement not send it out so that anybody knows about
You know, that's the fundamental concept that law is a lawyer, Iowa Law School alum.
All laws in order to be effective have to be promulgated.
They have to be published.
They have to be made known.
Correct.
Correct.
The, uh, the, uh, what's the name of the rule?
It's, it's, it's one of the oldest rules.
We all have to live by the law.
So therefore we have the right to know it.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
government edict doctrine
right
right to this and that is that the government has a right as an obligation to let the people know that the board has basically endorsed my position
yes and now I
find myself in a position to hit the board where I'm having to sue the board in order to let their own probably promulgation of
of being known.
It
would be comical if it were not literally tragic.
A lot of people don't understand exactly what I'm seeking in this case.
Obviously, yeah, I think the legal community because some of them have a dearth of knowledge of medical ethics and Medical efficacy.
I don't think they're able to connect it up with the law and that's where I think you bridge this beautifully because you are You're better than a jailhouse lawyer.
You're a you're a medical practice Fellow who has you know, you're a man for all seasons.
You're a CPA your former state senator You get it.
You're familiar with lawmaking, but you bring that
acutely important medical knowledge that, frankly, a lot of our physicians are taking the path of least resistance.
They're now all employees and they're not going to rock the boat.
And you courageously did rock the boat and saved a whole lot of people, Dr. Hartsich.
I feel sorry for this group of doctors.
The young doctors are coming out of medical school and some of them have to pay three or four hundred thousand dollars in debt.
And you're not going to sit there.
And you're going to do exactly what they say.
Do exactly what they say.
Otherwise you are going to find yourself without a license and unable to practice.
And you will not be able to.
You will not rock.
They will not allow you to rock the boat.
And Doc, I'll take it further.
You and I both serve proudly as Republicans in the legislature.
But right now, with both President Trump and President Biden, if it is down to those two, there will be no
scrutiny and no accountability for the misdeeds and criminality that was involved by different government folks at federal and state levels.
This will all get swept under the rug.
I think we've got to have Bobby Kennedy in the presidential race to keep this issue alive, to expose, and to fix this so this does not happen again.
You know, one of the things that people have to understand is when you run for office,
you keep your opponent honest.
And often, just because you may win or lose and Bobby Kinney may win, I mean, I like the guy.
There are many, many aspects of what I like about him as far as
broader broader points of view.
I don't know.
I agree.
Oh, I agree with you
on the surveillance on the surveillance state on on medical care.
I agree.
Yes.
And he's right on the Ukraine war too.
He's against it.
Go ahead.
Go ahead, doc.
I have a big Trump supporter.
Me too.
Me too.
But the reality of it is.
Come November, I may press the button for the candy.
That's possible.
You know, Doc, you segue great into our exit here.
Ladies and gentlemen, we also, this is why we need that Mike Shane ringtone again.
Doc, we also swept every sports award and we swept the political one, two, first and second in the state for large market radio political coverage.
Our number one winner.
in the state of Iowa for best political coverage was, again, hard such was with me.
It was the interview with Bobby Kennedy at the Iowa State Fair that I then did part two with over here the following night in Council Bluffs.
Top story, top radio news story in the state of Iowa for 2023, our interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
So, Doc, you're like a good luck charm for the show, baby.
I keep going with it, let's see.
And Doc gave me some magnificent medical advice back in August too that has really, the guy's a genius, Dr. David Hart such, hey Doc, how could people get in touch with you if they want to help you on this true legal and medical crusade to keep us all healthy and free?
Best thing you do is call myself on 563-508-9266.
You've been in the portfolio management area for a long period of time.
No one loves your portfolio more than you do.
You've been a senator and you know that nobody loves your campaign more than you do.
And when it comes to your health, nobody loves you more than you
do.
Isn't that the truth?
That's very sobering, but it just resonates.
Guys, Dr. David Hartstich, the honorable Dr. David Hartstich from the Quad Cities, our studio audience loves you.
Doc, we'll have you back.
We got to win some more awards.
Although, I hope these are load bearing walls here in the studio, Mike Shane.
If we hang up any more plaques, you know, the walls might come tumbling down.
Well, guys, as promised, we're bringing in the next wave of free market enterprise economists in our universities.
They do exist.
And we're going to have today Dr. Peter Jacobson.
Same last name, same spelling, Mike Shane.
Professor at Ottawa University and sitting at his Gortney Institute with his peers, the professorial
class there that are the next wave of Art Laffer's Milton Friedman's Thomas Sowell's Dr. Walter Williams's.
Peter actually studied under the late great Dr. Walter Williams at his doctoral work at George Mason University.
A great interview where we bring in the Gen Z and Millennial professors, high art, low culture, and hyper stimulus from their Faith in Economics podcast, permission of the Gortley Institute at Gort
G-W-A-R-T-N-E-Y.
They're very fancy, but still, they wanted to know what exactly constitutes high art.
Is there any substantial difference between the avant-garde and what the rest of us enjoy?
Dr. Peter Jameson walks the Gordney team through an interesting article, purporting to answer this very question.
Along the way, they touch on hot cuisine, cinema, center folds, and punk rock.
Take it away, Dr. Pete.
This article was written by an economics professor, Cameron Harwick, who, based on my last checking, is professor of economics at the State University of New York in Brockport.
And he wrote this interesting article about high culture and hyper stimulus.
And I liked the article, A, because it had an interesting lead in, but also B, because it had a lot of interesting implications, which are the opposite of what most people analyze, including that
things like high culture and snobbiness are actually in no sense counter cultural or are a counter have a counter cultural impacts to a certain extent and So we can get into it with like a simple beginning question Which I know both of you read some of this article, but you can give first impressions or what you remember from the article But he starts with a question.
What is the difference between a renaissance nude and a playboy centerfold?
Yeah, both are exciting
So awkward.
I said difference, Russ.
So difference, yeah.
One of them seems a little more explicit, but maybe not really for the Renaissance, man.
So yeah, they were writing about things over in Europe, right?
Paintings that are a little more on the risque side that you kind of go through.
And that allows people to think about life, about the greater, the higher things in life.
I guess Playboy, traditionally, when it first came out, of course, would be a little more seedy, a little more hidden, I think.
So I think that would be some differences in how they were viewed, maybe.
Of course, I don't know exactly in the Renaissance time, but Dr. Clark, what do you think?
I think that the difference between a Renaissance nude and a centerfold is that this boy's on the less risqué side of...
what I think would classify as like pornography is that the route to what like the stimulus and as they say in the argument, the route to the stimulus is a much straighter line in the centerfold example.
Yeah, so the author's argument and I think there's like two ways to approach this.
One is like intention, which is how I would have answered the question initially, which I think is kind of a weak answer in hindsight.
Like I
my my first blush would have been well like the Renaissance painter did not paint the nude lady like with the intention that the
Playboy, you know, centerfold coordinator director did like a different intentions, but I'm not sure that that matters in particular.
I think
that in a profit way or because that one thing that came mine was the playboy center what's getting paid and I mean in the sense of without getting explicit
like what is the What am I trying to create as a result of this?
Like what am I catering to and like the different things are being catered to and I think that's still true But I think the author makes a like a better argument
Cameron says that what's really going on here is that like they're both trying to address like a certain stimuli in your brain, some sort of like human desire wants.
But one of them is doing it in a really, really direct way.
Think of the difference between like drinking a cup of tea and taking crack cocaine, right?
Like this is what Cameron is saying is the difference between the two and I think that's basically right.
both tea and coffee and crack cocaine like all these things are trying to like stimulate your brain and focus you there's like a stimulus that it's achieving but one of them hacks straight into the stimulus the crack cocaine right pornography is the same way compared to high art right both are trying to represent some sort of aesthetic beauty maybe even attractive aesthetic beauty but one of them really hacks your brain and gets directly to what your brain is looking for and you can one like evidence of this even though i'm
Don't recommend you go back and do the research, but I don't think you need to is my guess is that like Playboy type centerfold magazine centerfolds I think probably get more explicit over time And if not just centerfolds like pornography in general has gotten way more explicit over time It's gotten way less suggestive and way more direct as an attack on like your brain stimulus And so Cameron argues that this is in general
the difference between high culture and low culture.
So Cameron would say Renaissance paintings are high culture, right?
They have like a display of aesthetic beauty that you can appreciate, but it's not a direct attack on your stimuli versus low culture like pornography.
And so we can sort things now into high and low culture, right?
Like high culture desserts, for example, are desserts that are like very subtle, different flavors.
But is there not, like, over-sugary, right?
This is the difference between my palate when I was 13 and my palate now is, like, more sugar is not better.
It's what I slowly learn over time, that, like, something that has a very subtle chocolate-fit flavor actually maybe tastes a little bit better.
It's a higher culture than, like, you know, injecting Hershey's chocolate straight into my esophagus or whatever.
Way different stimuli- or the same stimuli being addressed, but in way different ways.
So you can kind of, like, mentally now sort things into high and low culture.
You can see the bag of smarties that you have.
That belongs to the Bundy Institute at
Ottawa University.
I guess one clarification on high versus low, I mean, are you relating it to income at all or is low just an appeals to everybody?
I'm a little confused on the high and the low culture part if it's just that.
Every average Joe no matter how sophisticated they are even the most unsophisticated person can can take the the hyper you know the heavy sugar one or whatever
so I think being associated with high culture often times relates to income but it doesn't have to and so like sometimes people are so rich that they can like use their money to figure out what high culture is and sort of like pretend to be high culture But I do think there are some people who are more naturally high culture focused who like they don't even like
I, for example, am not actually very good at appreciating high culture.
A lot of my friends can go to a movie and naturally know if the movie is bad or good.
Again, high-culture, low-culture, think of a war movie like Saving Private Ryan.
This is actually a very in-depth movie, a lot of emotional weight, things like that, versus...
you know, I don't know, Jack Reacher 12 or like one of these movies that it's like, Transformers is a great example
of
like Michael Bay, low-culture movies, right?
You can have two different war
movies.
Yeah, you can have
two different war movies that are attacking like very Marvel movies, right?
Marvel movies are increasingly, I think, being recognized to be low-culture.
Their roller coaster rides, they're not in-depth stories.
At least a lot of them are.
And so that's, it's not always a rich poor thing.
I think historically there's been a lot of like rich poor thing going on there.
But it's more about what you can appreciate.
So that kind of takes us to the main question, which is how do some things end up high culture and end up low culture.
And Cameron's argument is that things become low culture when the stimulus becomes solved.
In other words, when you find out exactly what the person wants out of things.
So punk rock, he says, is a good example of this, or K-pop, if you're familiar with K-pop.
But his idea is that when punk rock came out, it was sort of appreciated as this, oh, this is a different thing in the industry.
These bands are doing things that people have never seen before.
A lot of professors really liked punk rock.
They thought that punk rock is high culture.
to a certain extent but then you know what happens is like a bunch of bands come along and they sort of like notice the elements that like the mass really likes about punk rock and they start distilling those elements down it's like you know a list of things or you can it's like top 20 music is the same way is like okay let's look at all the things that people like in music and then let's combine those things into one like amalgamation and so k-pop right now is very popular across the world mostly in korea it's green pop
And if you notice, K-pop just looks like a distilled version of the Backstreet Boys.
It's like boy bands take into the crack cocaine level.
And this is high culture, low culture.
So I guess we could talk about why this sort of thing matters, why it matters that there is high culture and low culture.
So I don't know any thoughts.
I tend to think that the punk rock thing and then I think
you can do like he talks about like Jackson Pollock in there and I think some of you know we're gonna talk about punk rock we we would also have to talk about like Andy Warhol because I think these are two similar things and I think he doesn't get it quite right about punk rock I think he gets like close to right which is like the originators of punk rock if you look at people like the Ramones they weren't they didn't take themselves as being high culture they were explicitly low culture
That was the point of the Ramones.
And then you had this weird thing, I mean, you might, where a lot of people who consider themselves high culture, like, tried to find something that was like, oh, it's actually, I know it sounds basic, but it's actually just a really important focus on rhythm and speed and guitarists.
like, dude, have you listened to D.D.
Lamont's block?
This is
force of, you know... Yeah, and I say this as somebody who loves the Ramones, right?
And you know a Ramones song when you hear it.
ACDC is another example.
And you know, if you listen to like Angus or Malcolm Talk, they go, no, we play hard rock and roll.
That's what we do.
We're not trying to progress.
People say, why'd you make, you know...
ACDC's made the same album 17 times, and Angus goes, well, first of all, you're wrong.
It's 18 times.
We've made the same
18 times, right?
And we're proud of that.
And so I think there is some kind of like, it's not like this process where something starts as high-culturing goes to look.
I think there's more intermingling than the song here.
I
swear, you comment.
I think there's something here.
I have to, of course, as the economist, bring in the market to it that
The high culture thing, it works in some way, right?
And then you're talking about the unbundling, the distillation of the parts.
Those parts are the profitable parts.
We start thinking about the ACDC and the pornography or whatever.
Whatever it is, it's taking those things that don't work actually for the average show.
Those are the high expensive, a smaller market for the rich only.
because they were pretty expensive but oh what's what's really making this tick oh it's this piece and this piece and this piece i can sell that i can make that album i can uh do that so uh that's what i kind of got from uh high low things and so it is capitalism bad
you know, that, oh, we had a marketable, I'm not going to stand for that, but I just thought I'd throw that out.
Somebody would say, oh, see, the markets are bad.
They bring this low-brow culture.
So kind of.
And initially, I addressed his reaction, but the author convinced me otherwise.
But I do want to mention Justice First.
I think there's an extent to which that's true.
But again, I think we can look at the relative changes within punk rock and see the author's argument hold.
Like, there could be a sense in which, like,
maybe punk rock in and of itself was like a movement from some sort of like from classical to hard rock was a movement from higher to lower culture but even within punk rock now you have bands that like have totally distilled those elements of punk rock and made it all like every song is exactly the same right it's not it's not like acdc or you know like jokingly the same it's like you know you can listen to two bands and unless you like spend time trying to figure it out they sound like identical
And so it's sort of like, low culture is when you take what was new about the Ramones and you distill those elements into something that is like a stamp and identical to everything else that's out there.
The Ramones wasn't identical to everything else that was out there, right?
But I do agree with you that like, maybe if we take a longer timeline here that the Ramones themselves were the catering to the lower culture, but now relatively they're not.
So
that's kind of, there is a relative aspect here.
Yeah, I'm fully on board with what I think one of the main thesis of this argument is, which is that a lot of low culture stuff becomes low culture when it's... ...formulizable.
Yeah.
This way, right?
When you can have a formula for it.
A formula that we know just hits that thing that people want.
My objection to it is that it seems to kind of ignore where high culture comes from.
And I think a lot of times high culture steals from low culture in a way that...
that, I don't know, I was, I was trying
to- No, I think you're right.
Yeah, they steal from low culture and try to make it non-formulaic, right?
Like that, that's maybe an even ex post.
So I think we should probably take the break now, but when we come back, I do want to address Russ' point, because I think Russ' point is one of like the main contentions that the author is working with, and it's one of the things he convinced me the most of.
Peter becomes anti-capitalist.
I can't wait for this cliffhanger to be resolved.
We'll be back
in a bit.
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All right, so we're back to the exciting comments from Peter to see if he is still a free market guy or not, or if he is now somehow a Marxist socialist.
Yeah, so I'm...
To shortly answer us, I'm always pro-capitalism, but I am not pro-consumerism.
And I think those are two different things.
Consumerism can exist in capitalism, but it doesn't have to.
And here's where the difference lies.
Cameron spends some time talking about nature, and I think he makes some interesting parallels with nature.
He spends a lot of time talking about birds.
because birds have very direct roots from their visual cortex to like particular stimuli.
And so an example, or even audio, an example that he gives is like there's a, in fact, a lot of birds have like a stimulus that the mother bird, if they hear a certain cry from the baby bird, then they have like, they satisfy that stimulus by feeding the baby, right?
And stopping the cry.
But Cameron points out that there are certain birds that have adapted over time to lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and their cries are similar enough that the other mother bird will feed their babies, right?
And so there's two types of birds.
And Cameron also points out they look nothing alike, right?
There's this big, ugly black bird amongst this group of very small birds.
But the big, ugly black bird is like so, it's like a crow, some kind of crow, I can't remember.
It's amongst all these others.
And it's so loud and so persistent that it is eating like way more and it just continues to ask and actually the mother will continue to feed the baby bird up until the point where the other baby starve.
And so it's like this parasitic thing that's going on.
So again, like visually looks nothing alike, but it's able to hack the mother's auditory stimuli.
What you're saying is the reward centers can get gained by yeah me exploit.
Yeah,
exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so the the and he does other things like, you know, he points out like birds who have like certain red marks on them and like similar things will happen here and how you can like game the red marks to make them do things like and pursue them.
So the point is like stimuli can be games on it's harder to gain gain human stimuli.
So he points out that's why like subliminal messaging isn't real because we can't actually gain game.
human stimuli by putting an image in a commercial very quickly.
But you still can gain human stimuli.
Addictive types of drugs are the best example of this, right?
Is that if you get someone hooked on crack cocaine, heroin, these sorts of things, they can't break out of it even if they want to, in a certain sense.
And so what Cameron points out is low culture, it's the same sort of thing.
It's a parasitic use of signals.
And it gamifies those stimuli in the same way.
And so people solve these stimuli and then they offer you really bad products that are actually really crappy.
They're not good for your soul or whatever you want to put it.
That just like fix that stimuli.
And so again, that's like really sugary candy.
It's like, or soda is a great example of that.
It's like.
I'm gonna give you so much soda that you've blown up to 350 pounds, and you're gonna buy it because I'm gamifying like your sense of taste.
The taste for it, right?
Yeah, the social media is
another example, right?
The gamification in general of social media is a good example of this.
You know, your screen lighting up when you hit like now, or like rainbows flashing in a YouTube video, and the person says subscribe, now the subscribe button lights up.
It's all very, like, gamified.
And pornography is the same way that it's like, oh, you know, I'm gonna present you this
hyper, you know, specific thing that's catered exactly to the stimuli you're interested in.
And that's going to cause you to be so interested in that that you're going to totally ignore what the stimuli is for, which is relationships.
And so you ignore what your stimuli are for in favor of just like hijacking the stimuli.
And Cameron says that's low culture.
And he says that therefore, and one of the interesting implications is that
High culture is actually a defense against compulsive consumption.
And actually, it's basically the thing that protects us from all becoming conformists.
And this is one of the great ironies he points out in the article, is that low culture aims to make us all conformists.
Like, eat the same food, listen to the same music, you know, it's all gonna be same because we've hijacked those senses.
But high culture, because the stimuli for high culture are not solved,
can't know exactly what it's going to look like.
You actually have non-conformity in high culture.
And so Marvel movies, again, solved.
It's like everyone is exactly the same.
It's like funny, joke, and serious moments.
You know, big action sequence in the third act.
It's like it's all the same movie.
It's completely solved.
And you're a total conformist if you enjoy Marvel movies.
That doesn't make you a bad person, but that's what it is.
Whereas, you know, you look at the movies that win awards that are generally high culture and like
are to predict and they're very hard to understand and like sometimes I watch them and I completely hate them because I think they're very dumb right and maybe some of them are dumb but the point is they're not solved and that's what Cameron's trying to argue in this is that low culture is ultimately like the big crow baby stealing the food from all the other babies in the nest even though the mother like it somehow can't like notice that the big crow baby is not one of the babies right it's it's catering directly to the stimulus
Yeah, these are stimulus pathways that normally urge us to do things that are in our best interest.
And the hijacking is when we get exploited to do things that aren't in our best interest.
And don't though, you know, help us flourish or whatever.
Yeah.
And I think we have to be very, and I don't think Russ did this because I think there was some ambiguity, but we have to be very careful to avoid against the idea that just because we like capitalism, that we have to like the results of
capitalism.
In fact, this is something that, you know, anti free market
people use
against
stuff.
Yeah.
And I was going to say it's not the result of capitalism.
It's the right result of simple human beings that that ultimately drive this it's human behavior.
And so I don't think there would be, let's say, less of this, some other form of organization, then it's still going to be there.
So it's a misnomer to think getting rid of capitalism or minimizing capitalism would somehow fix the problem.
It's not going to.
Yeah.
And like, you can even find like in Ludwig von Mises, who's writing like, you know, hundreds of years past, it's like a hundred years past, he writes about things like, well, it's not the fault of the entrepreneur.
If people prefer like, you know,
What are like romantic novels or mystery novels?
He says to like great theological works or something like that They're just responding to the stimuli and I think I think that's true to a certain extent So we don't have to like embrace soda pop in order to be capitalists.
In fact, I think a lot of kind of like
neoliberal folks today to use the word, that is how they feel about things.
Like if the market chose it, it must be a good thing.
And we have to be very careful not to fall into that trap of thinking that like soda pop and pornography are good because the market chose it.
It's like, no, these are like parasites.
They hijack like good things that we desire and replace them with like these things that don't actually help us in any serious way.
And so this does bring into, like, the authors, you know, I don't know if it's a major point, but the major implication, one of the onuses for writing for Cameron seems to be that he worries about the effect of AI.
Because AI is this thing that can actually solve human stimulus pretty well, and it can do it in written form.
So one of Cameron's arguments is that he thinks that writing will cease to be a vehicle of high culture in any serious way.
over the next 100, 200 years, because AI is going to hijack the ability to write something that mass audiences enjoy.
So I don't know if we agree with this, if we think Cameron's off base.
So
I'll tell you why I think he's off base.
One of the things that he talks about is that he says high culture, as differentiated from low culture, high culture is distinguished by solving these desires for stimulus.
that haven't been gamified yet or haven't been don't have formulated answers yet, right?
And I don't think he's right about that.
I think that a lot of high culture does that, but not all high culture does that.
And I think if you think about the way like cuisine and cocktail culture has developed, there's a really good analog here.
Okay.
A lot of like really expensive dishes, they give you taste that yes, that like we don't know how to mask.
That those are things that you will not get at a like a fast food restaurant or something like that But there are also examples of like very so there's a good scene in the show the bear Which I think you've seen
yeah, where you know when the guy goes in the TV show Yeah, yeah where he goes in he's Staging with this really famous chef and they're tasting the chef's premier dessert and he goes That's amazing and the chef goes was it tastes like right and he goes kind of tastes like a mint like a
mint Snickers he's like yes It's a mint.
It's a high-class version of a mint Snickers right now and when you make like in cocktail bars You will see like a $16 cocktail and the point of the cocktail will be like doesn't this taste like a tootsie roll right and Yes, it does and those are like high-class high-class, you know, you will get sophisticated people who go
That's amazing.
You know, I just paid $17 for this.
It's just like
Snickers or a Tootsie Roll.
And they're not going home going like, honey, order 17 Tootsie, like order all the Tootsie Rolls.
I just paid $17 for this thing.
So it's not only that high culture things satisfy desires that we don't know how to gamify.
It's that the high culture also takes a very complicated route to something that has already been gamified, if that makes sense.
And if that's the case, then even if AI gets to the point where AI can gamify this thing really well, I still think there will be a demand for writing that is done.
by human beings and one of the ways you might uh... you know we can talk about how will you know what's done by human or something like that well we can be spoken word or whatever
they're ready to be done live
yeah i think it's the same objection that i think got raised when people are like well once we're able to three d model the david and you can have that you know a three d model of the david at your home who the hell is going to want to go to the academia in Florence and see the david
just see it you can have a printed and sent home it's like no
People actually they do value authenticity and they want to see the thing upon which Michelangelo actually labored and People do like to sit and watch somebody put you know
seven ingredients together that are all high-class liquor and it tastes like a Tootsie Roll rather than go home by a bottle of Barton's and a tub of Tootsie Rolls and sit in front of the television and go like, haha, you idiots, I'm doing this, you know, on the cheap.
So I think he's right about like a lot of high culture takes is this form and a lot of low culture is this form.
But I don't, I'm not worried in the way he is that since AI can do this thing that therefore there will be no demand for
the kind of art culture that he thinks is in jeopardy here.
Yeah, I tend to believe, and I'm not sure I'm correct on this, but I still believe it, that the human mind will always be more creative than the computer, and that there'll be demand, like you say, for that creativity.
There'll be some innovation, some difference that might start off as high culture because of it being
expensive or different or something, but perhaps not.
So I think the lacking the human element is the linchpin to society still continuing on with AI.
I think
I
disagree with that statement because I think AI is the human element and that doesn't mean that AI is human.
That's a different conversation, but like...
We've talked about in the podcast before.
I can't remember the Chinese box experiment, the Chinese room, this idea that like, you know, someone puts in a Chinese character and he's got a translation guide in the room or something he translates that he puts in the other side and you could say, oh, the, you know, the person in the room therefore knows Chinese.
It's like, no, the person in the room doesn't actually know Chinese.
They just have like this method of producing some output that they don't themselves actually understand, right?
And so.
What AI is doing but at the end of the day, you know the maker of the manual the maker of the symbols those were humans And so AI is using human-like thinking to create the things they create I think it is possible for them to write like more
clever mystery novel.
Yeah, so I wasn't recognizing that being possible.
But I do agree that people value authenticity and people value like humanness as a thing.
And as long as that is a possibility, I agree.
And the reason I asked about the AI thing is I think this is where I part ways with Cameron on this.
Is I agree where he won me over is the idea of high culture being a sort of like a defense mechanism against like
mass consumerism, I think that's right.
In fact,
Even what just talked about with like the Tootsie Roll cocktail, that in and of itself is still a sort of like defense against the mass consumerism is like, this is another way is like, once you've hijacked the signal, we're going to create this alternative means of achieving the hijack symbol, which is way less straightforward.
Like you can't go to the store and buy 50 cocktails and a Tootsie Roll wrapper, right?
You can't afford it.
Yeah, that's that's part of it too.
Yeah.
And like, you wouldn't even know about it if you could afford it, right?
That's another piece of it is like, I did another.
It's your old cocktails because I'm not high class right and so I like ultimately I think that and to Russ's point I think AI is very good at creates creative things like within an area and so it could be really good at writing novels but there is still the possibility of like new forms of art that could be done.
I think Justin wants to say that AI won't even take over the current forms of art that exists right now.
I'm open to that.
I hope that's true.
Yeah, it would be weird.
Like the analog would be weird.
It'd be like a person who's writing a book that is supposed to like look like an AI book, but it isn't really an AI book.
That would be like the Tootsie Roll Cocktail version of this, which would be kind of weird to think about, but I'm not opposed to the idea that it could exist.
I think that my stance is that the AI will never as completely understand the human condition as a human.
And so that always is going to leave room for somebody, an entrepreneur, otherwise, uncovering some new innovative way, the Tootsie Roll Drink or whatever.
I think that's where AI is going to face a hard constraint on that.
It's just hard to imagine the human condition being fully usurped by a computer that was made by humans.
It's kind of the maker and the...
the maker and the maid argument but
yeah I'm not sure on that I think that's possible but I also have like personally consistently underestimated the extent to which AI could do things
like
I would have been
be able to draw beautiful things and it's like now it can draw like really like like way better things than I can at least so like the the iRobot like you know can you compose a musical and their responses can you and it's like
Anyways, so yeah, I mean overall, I'm not doom and gloom about AI and its effect on arts.
I do think that AI will lead certain mediums to like dissolve more into like this mass culture, low culture thing that will move into consumerism, but that's already happened to some extent with people too.
Like we already have the romance action novel series that has 4,000 additions in it, right?
Like it's the same idea.
I worked at an ad agency once and they were the
They did all the ads for Metro PCS, which was a phone company on the West Coast.
And we employed like seven graphic designers.
And all the graphic designers did was make ads for Metro PCS.
They took the Metro PCS template.
and they changed the locations where you could get it and the names and then they made sure the shapes didn't interfere with each other because the names were different lengths and so you had to adjust it.
And that can easily be done by AI, right?
So maybe a lot of those graphic design jobs go away.
Oh, yeah.
But if you talk to those graphic designers, you know, and I did, we'd go out drinking after a lot of the time, it's like, yeah, I got into graphic design because I liked art.
Moving the circles around on a Metro PCS ad this is not So a lot of the a lot of the work that is a longer rhythmic will easily be taken up a AI
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John Jacobson with Mike Shane saying thank you for listening to 1540 KXEL.
Look up our podcast at kxel.com slash Jacobson and Pentecost is one week away.
Come Holy Spirit fill the hearts of thy faithful and kindle in them the fire of thy love.
Till we meet again, God bless and bye-bye!
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