We got him.
On the evening of September eleventh, a family member of Tyler Robinson reached out to a family friend who contacted the Washington County Sheriff's office with information that Robinson had confessed to them or implied that he had committed the incident.
Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number seven hundred and fifty seven. I'm James lolaxs Minneapolis. I'm joined by Charles C. W. Cook in Florida. And it is a somber week for anybody with any shred of decency in their heart. And that is something that we've learned and will discuss. Now, Charles, what you well start perhaps with this. I heard somebody the other day on Twitter read that
there are three kinds of assassinations. There's the zealot, there is the nut, and there is the pro And they were breaking it down as to what they thought the temperament of the shooter of Charlie the assassin or who Charlie Kirk would be. And I thought, you have to add to that another category, that's a loser. The guy who shot at the church around here in my neighborhood was a loser. Leharvey Oswald was a loser. Arthur Bremer was a loser. James Earl Ray was a loser. The
guy who shot MANGIONI was a zelot. I think this guy, and I'm not going to say his name, that they've arrested, might fall into the zelot category as well, and a peculiar modern sort somebody who just sort of drifted into it, fell into it, adopted the language, the moors, the cliches, the in jokes, without having that sort of burning revolutionary desire. You associate with Serbitia nationalists in the you know, the First World War, or Bolshevik communists, sort of lazy basement zealot.
What are you think? I think you're right.
Usually in these situations, I say, that's not ascribe motives. Let's not assign killers to a particular group. You know, in the French language, where you have masculine and feminine nouns and verbs, if you have ten thousand women and one man, you take the masculine form. And my view has always been that if someone is a Trump supporter with a Trump hat, but they also think that they're microwaves trying to kill them, that crowds out the rest,
whatever the rest is that crowds out the rest. They think the walls are attacking them or the FBI is watching them through their toaster, And as a result, usually I am reluctant to say, yeah, this guy was an ideological zella, and it really matters what he thought. But I think you're right in this case. From what we know, this guy was an ideological zalot. This was done for political reasons, and it really matters what he thought.
Yeah, it matters what he thought, and it matters what sort of social infrastructure is in place, encouraging, helping, assisting, guiding, breeding, all of these things. I mean, we're going to find out what the you know, which discord he hung out it has been wiped. We're going to find out, uh, you know, friends, the whole social media trail, all the rest of it. But as I was walking the dog this morning, I thought, Okay, the guy's twenty five. Is that what we got? He's twenty five? Yeah? Or was
it twenty two? He's twenty two? Right, he's twenty two, which would have meant that he'd been about seventeen or so in twenty twenty, which may have meant that he lost a year senior year to COVID, which may have meant that at an impressionable age, he saw this incredibly exciting, thrilling wave of revolutionary violence in gulfed the country in
the summer, and you wonder what impact that made? You know, it's it's when you look back at twenty twenty, and when you look back at the at the glee of destruction of the burnings and the and the toppling of the statues, you you realize what a poison was injected into the into the body politic, and this I think is a manifestation of it finally seeping out. And whether or not that's the body expelling a poison, i'd like to think. But we'll find out. This is not going
to be arrest him, it's over. I think there's going to be. I mean, if there's any connection to Antifa, what is Antifa? Is it? You know? Does it exist as as an organized national political organization? I don't think so. But there's going to be more of that, especially when the guy is pretty much Antifa from what he writes on his bullets and what he said right right.
I have a few preliminary thoughts in this area. I think we're going to see an attempt to wriggle out of this one on the left. Now, I don't mean by that to say that people on the left are somehow to blame.
He was the guy who did this, but there is.
No doubt that he had swallowed the idea that words are violent and that you kill people with whom you disagree, And that is the.
Notion you're obligated as a citizen of to kill Massy.
Right, And that is the problem here. Spencer Cox's, the governor of Utah, was exceptional, I think in his remarks twice in drawing this distinction. That is the problem here. The guy's own father reportedly told the police that he had become increasingly of this view, that he believed that Charlie Kirk was spreading hate, and he killed him because of it. This is not a story about temperatures being too high in America. It is not a story about
fundamental disagreements between free people. It is not a story about guns. We can argue about guns in many circumstances. I do, but this gun was precisely, quite literally, the sort of hunting rifle that gun control activists will tell you if you ask them is the type. They don't want to ban your grandfather's hunting rifle. We're not talking about that. They say it didn't even have a magazine
that you would recognize assay magazine. It wasn't a high capacity, it wasn't an ar whatever it is that they say next. So to me, this is a very straightforward case of the poisonous idea, the idea that is incompatible with the republic, that it is okay to shoot people if they say things that you dislike. Now, of course, in academia this
gets filtered through all sorts of secondary jargon. They will say it only applies to those who have power or the structural inequalities undergirding Charlie Kirk's words render his words violence, but others not.
All of that's guff. It's guff.
We've spent five hundred years in the West, particularly in Anglo America, setting up two inviolable precepts. One, you do not discriminate against, or attack or suppress or kill people for their religion. Two you do none of those things to people for their political views. And this guy blew right through that. And I think that's the story.
It is, but piecing it together in retrospect. And I know you know this is that Charla Kirk's views what they believe them to be, what they believed anybody's views on the right to be are not just simply political views like saying I disagree about the marginal tax rate or whether or not we should recycle plastic bags. They are all existential threats. They are existential threats to the world. The utopia that is about oh six or seven days around close around the corner, if we just do this
and do that. They are existential threats to the planet because they deny climate change, and they are existential threats in the sense that they do not accept the foundational precepts of a lot of lazy people who've cobbled together various elements of socialist marksians leftist progressive theory, that which is to say that the West, in American particular, are uniquely evil on this planet in human civilization, and that we are all the product of a variety of malodorisisms
from colonialism to settlerism, to capitalism, to all hetero central is whatever you want to call all of these things, that all of these boogeymen that have been stuffed under the beds by these people. There's if you want to fight these things, where do you go? Exactly? You can't. It's not as if there is a you know, a figure, a place where you can go and fight the slavery of the nineteenth century. There's no place. There's a thing
you can do to dismantle whiteness. You can't. You're constantly being told about all these bad things, but you were really feeling internally powerless to do something that is a tangible act. So what occurs in the minds of point zero zero zero one percent of the population, I guess, is to kill somebody who is saying the things that go against the doctrine, the liturgy, the theory, everything that undergrades what they do. So it's not speech that they
think he's doing. They think what he is doing is an excess cidential threat to the culture that they want to bring into being now right, and there will always be those one percent, there will always be those crazy people who take it to that extreme. Right. Anyway, you wanted to say something about what.
Well, that's why I mentioned religion before speech, because of course I agree with everything you said, But it's not much of a freedom to be able to debate marginal tax rates. The tax rate is going to be twenty eight percent or forty percent. That's the settlement we have arrived at since nineteen ninety. Religion, though, is a much more impressive feat as a tenet of Western smaller liberalism, because it could.
Not be more important.
You cannot reconcile, for example, the claims that are made by Islam and the claims that are made by Christianity. You can't reconcile the claims made by Christianity and the claims made by me as a non believer. These are genuinely existential. These relate to core precepts about how the world works, what happens to human beings, how we should live. And we have managed, in the most part in the West,
to agree with each other that will just disagree. And you would think that if we can do that, because we don't have much religious violence in America, you would think that if we can do that, then we could also agree to disagree on political questions that are more fraught than the tax rates, such as what as a woman. But it's odd, isn't it, that for some reason we've
managed to maintain this religious tolerance. But we're now seeing assassinations over disagreements about climate change or transgender ideology, and that is terrifying.
Yeah, and I agree, But I would note that the ability to reach an uneasy or cold or sometimes warm and ecumenical peace with people of different religious beliefs came
at a great cost. And when Europe started going through the convulsions of the Protestant Revolution and such, or when you come to England and the c of E and the Catholic I mean there have been deep, deep, deep, fundamental disagreements which to us now may seem a little remote and not that important, that were incredibly important and
led to a lot of blood being built. So Europe reached its ability to have sort of a truce within the warring parties partially, I think, because they cease to believe in them at all, and it's easy to get along with people with whom you don't. You might not necessarily agree about the you know, the differences in doctrine if you really don't believe in the doctrine at all.
The problem with that, of course, is when you have an element of your society that really does truly believe in those things and those and believes in a set of religious ideas that are antithetical to what you and the West have established. Now that's Europe. In America here, I think it's just more of the I mean. And again, America, we had massive anti Catholic prejudice for a while, massive anti semitism for a while, and a lot of those
religiously based. But we've gotten past that, not because I think, like Europe we cease to believe there's a little bit of that, but because something in the American character put getting ahead, forming a civic identity and improving the body
of the nation ahead of those things. But you know, again, with any with any town, you will find, you know, the people who belong to this church and the people who belong to that church, and within the people who belong with that church, they wouldn't be caught it dead at that other church in their same organization because of a liturgical difference or something like that. So there's still lots of schisms about. But you're right, it doesn't come
to the fore and we're blessed that it doesn't. But when you replace ideology, when you place the part in the soul that yearns for something other than greater than themselves, and when you replace it with the dreary ideas of ideology, then you then news elets are born and the violence starts all over again. It's I mean, of this crooked timber in the streat house shall be built.
There's this weird idea on the academic left as well, that it's different for them, that they are driven to justify this sort of thing because the stakes are higher that anyone who is a normy or a moderate or right of center already has everything that they want and therefore would never consider the need for violence. But this is nonsense, James, and I'll give you an example. I'm pro life. I'm pro life because I think that abortion is killing. I think that abortion doctors are murdering humans.
But I have agreed, as an American and as a member of a polity, not to go and kill those doctors, not to abortion clinics. And when that does happen, which is rare but it does occasionally, I say no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. Partly because killing doesn't help, but mostly because that is the deal. We on the right spent fifty years overturning Row in the courts. We didn't start a revolution. We didn't start assassinating people ri at large. And I think that needs to be pointed out to
our friends on the other side. No, no, no, we believe all sorts of things are really truly terrible and are accepted in our culture. Two, it's not just you, We.
Have our own. Yeah, they'd be surprised, right. It was done through you disagree, But it's done through argument, through law, and not through attempting to force it into being by forced by violence, which some would say is you know, some of the right would say it's absolutely necessary because in a sense they're being murdered and if you don't do anything to directly stop it, you're complicit in it. But you can apply that to a wide variety of things.
And it's a very elastic concept, and staying away from the staying away from the seductions of its elasticity is one thing that civil societies and smart people do. One of the things that's absolutely smacked my gob And it shouldn't have because I should have known. I remember nineteen eight anyone, when Reagan was shot. There was this Herodine sitting at the bar where I worked, and she was pissed off about it, and she said why couldn't they have shot him after the soap operas were over because
everything that she wanted to see was being preempted. Never forgot that writ large a millionfold on TikTok and Twitter. This week we have seen an expression of ghastly and
ghoulish and horrifying reactions. And they vary from you know, the people who just say, you know, rest in this, to these women, these women with their bright eyes and their perfect teeth and their manicured nails, having all of these elaborate gesticulations as they smile and perform and dance for the little magic mirror in front of them that's telling them they're virtuous and telling them they're good. And it's stunning the way people reveal themselves in this way.
And then when you read the posts on Facebook that people are putting up again on twe it, you look at what it's not some Ted Kaczinski sitting in a cabin somewhere. It's a fireman, it's a military recruiter. It's a nurse, it's a it's an army guy. It's a teacher, so many teachers, elementary school teacher. You read the most violent, vicious, nasty, ichor dripping statement, and then it's from it's from the assistant principle of pony Field Elementary and Happy Glen, Ohio.
And you wonder what percentage of the population somehow has become sociopathic over the last ten years or was it always such? And they just now have a platform.
Well, this, I think we can judge. I would hesitate to take this horrendous killers deeds and condemn the left side of the country for it, and I didn't say anything about the motive until we knew for that reason. But this I think is fair game. We have seen on the left an extraordinary amount of grotesque behavior, speech, reaction, what you will. And it's taken two forms. The worst form is the celebration of his death, the notion that this was a good thing, that it was a forward
for progressivism. And then we've seen people who took the opportunity simply to lie about what Charlie Cook believed, and that is unforgivable per se, but also because of all the people in the world, you did not have to guess what Charlie Kirk believed. Charlie Kirk spent hours and hours and hours on his show and in speeches telling people what he believed and just as much time, and indeed he was doing it when he was murdered, arguing
with people. If you choose now to try to posthumously lie about the man.
You're a disgrace.
There's no need to do it, there's no justification for doing it. So we've got this vortex of grotesquery here where you've got people who are justifying the taking of his life and others who are trying to remove from him after death without him being able to argue back what he achieved. And I think that is absolutely ripe to be judged, and in some cases it should lead to the people who are doing it being fired.
Now I understand this is our next big subject. I just wanted to say to our producer Parry, vortex of grotesque aries it would be the appropriate episode title. I know they're always looking for a phrase to fit.
There is a line somewhere that you don't want to cross, even when people say things that are as horrible as that Charlie Cook deserved to die. But I think there are also a good number of people whose jobs make publicly holding the position that people should be shot on college campuses for disagreeing with you an untenable thing to say. So, for example, one of the people I saw was a
college assistant dean. Now you cannot be the assistant dean of a college and say in public that people who go to colleges to speak should be shot in the neck. That is obvious to me. I think a lot of people who teach children fall into this category. I think some first responders, certainly government officials, who are held to
a different standard than those within the private sector. I don't want to buy a house from somebody who believes this, but by the way, that's a choice, right, But I sure as hell don't want to engage with a government official who is bound constitutionally and statutorily to treat me as an equal if they believe that those who dissent
from his or her worldview should be killed. So I think we ought to be careful here not to reflexively say we're against councel culture and miss interpret or defying cancel culture. Councel culture is when somebody says something that is unrelated to their current job, or said something a long time ago that doesn't reflect who they are, and
then I can for it anyway. The great example of councel culture, I think was when Kyler Murray is now the quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, won the Heisman Trophy, and on the day that he was being given the Heisman Trophy, someone went back through his Twitter and found that when he was fifteen, he'd said something ugly and that he now didn't believe. And then they put it all over the newspapers and people said should he get a Heisman Trophy? And you think, what the hell does
that have to do with being a college athlete. But if you are a college dean, or a school teacher, or a nurse, or you work for the government and your first reaction was to publicly say that I think this guy should have been murdered for his beliefs, then yes, that is actually important that we know you believe that, because that speaks to your qualification or disqualification for the job.
Do you agree with that? I do, absolutely, I do. The question is that how far do you go? Now? The people in position of authority, those in trusted with public safety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Somebody who's front facing to the public. You mentioned the realtor, I think there was a guy in Las Vegas who popped
off about it and was relieved of his position. Yesterday on Twitter at the end of the day it was my feed for whatever reason, Oh I know what reason, Algo knows what what I'm jonesing for was almost eighty percent reporting what people had said. Now, in the past, it would just be that look at this person, suddenlight, best disinfect and show us. You know, they're showing us
who they are. But now you seem to have this army of guys out there popping the riddle and going to work and digging up and finding out exactly who all these people are and their normies. Supposedly they are people who work at a financial services company. There's somebody who has a catering business. There's somebody who runs a barbecue restaurant. And this morning the Twitter feed was a list of consequences. It was a list. Was was the fos to yesterday's effing about one after the other being
fired and people reacting with dismay. Of course the people were being fired, but action school boards, yes, but private businesses, uh, sports organizations, radio stations. I've never seen anything like this. So and again I thought you and the right were against cancel culture. I thought you supported free speech. Well, of course I do. And as the man said, you know, you get two fundamental rights in this country to do whatever the hell you want, and also to face up.
You have a duty to face up to the consequences of what you've done. This is that, this is the consequence part. But whether or not it's it's good to go after everybody who was saying these things is the question. And there's a website. Now I've never seen anything like this before. Again because because this was different, there's a website that just that is, there's a database, searchable database of everybody who said horrible things been there. It is
as long as somebody keeps paying the registery fee. Now, you mentioned going after the people, public authority and trust and the rest of it. What do you think about going after the fine about publishing comments and contacting their boss and demanding that something to be done. How do you feel about that?
Well, I don't quite know where the line is, and I am less interested in doing that purely because that is a private matter. If the boss wishes to fire him, so be it. It doesn't particularly affect me that it doesn't mean it doesn't matter. I think it mattered that they went off to Kyler Mara. I think it mattered that the Benham others got canceled from HGTV because they were Evangelical Christians. I do think it matters within our culture.
But I'm not implicated by the decisions of a private company that I don't use in the way that I am by those who hold power over me with the police to back them up. I think that's a case by case issue. Quite clearly. If somebody went into a job interview and said, by the way, just before we finished, i'd like you to know that I think that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered, they wouldn't get the job, So saying it afterwards can be considered in that light
in some circumstances. I I worry more, James about what it is that has engendered that in the first place. I'm not trying to avoid the question, but I don't understand things thinking that I really don't understand. I spend a good deal of my time trying to work out what it is that the people I disagree with believe and why I think I have a fairly good handle on a lot of it. Some things that my opponents believe I used to believe. I wasn't always of these
political views. I have friends, good friends, who believe different things than me, And I understand why I mentioned being pro life. I'm emphatic in that view. But I do understand the other side. I do understand what they That's the difference.
That's the difference when you said I and I understand what they what they believe. You don't agree with it, but you understand it without having a preset demonization of it. The best way you cannot exist intellectually in this country unless you understand what the other side thinks, not a parody of it, not a shadow of it, not a caricature of it, but actually what they think and their reasoning behind it. Because then you can grapple with that,
you know how to argue, and you can have productive conversations. Right.
But I don't understand seeing someone murdered and thinking it's a good thing. I don't understand it in any circumstances that could possibly obtain in America as it exists today. Yes, of course, I can imagine living in Nazi Germany and concluding that I had to kill someone. Of course I can imagine that, but I cannot imagine looking at the
United States and thinking this. And you know, one of the things that I thought was the most interesting about the early reactions, the first firing, in fact, which I believe was Matthew Dowd from MSNBC, was not what he said that got him fired, which was terrible, but what he said before that. The first thing he said on MSNBC that day that was crazy was well, we don't know that Charlie Kirk was shot by someone who was
trying to hurt him. Maybe it had been a supporter who was firing off his gun in celebration.
It was the most that was just absolutely stunning. I mean, he's literally imagining Yosemite Sam in the lad exactly.
But that's the point. What I took from that was, Ah, they actually know nothing about America. To say that, you have to know nothing about America, and in particular nothing about the people you're critiquing to believe that this is a thing that happens in the United States on the right is so absurd. And then we got Stephen King, the writer who seemed genuinely to believe that Charlie Kirk
wanted to stone gay people to death. And we also got a correction from The New York Times that was a beautyeah this morning that said, oh, when we wrote that Charlie Kirk had made terrible anti semitic statements, what he was actually doing was reading out someone else's anti
semitic statements and disagreeing with him. That these three things strighten us being important because what it jests is that the person who wrote that Times article, plus all of the editors who looked at it, Stephen King up in Maine, big figure within our culture, his starkly and Matthew Dowd at MSNBC, don't know what America's like and what the people who are prominent in America think, and what more than half the country statistically believes in how they act.
And that's the part about this that I find alarming, because I can't get into the head of the person who thinks this was a good thing. But maybe they really do believe that we're living in Nazi Germany.
Mm hm. That these that the positions that cherlie Grek had, for the most part, are outside of the mainstream of any any decent pro I mean, these are the ones who have the multi colored little statements on the front lawn in this house. These are the ones who are always telling us to be kind. These are the ones who are who believe they have an intellectual apprehension of the world that needs no revision and needs no refinement.
And they've had it all their lives and everybody they know, and it's what the you're coming back to them from all the selected media sources. I mean, they talk about the right living in a Fox News bubble. I don't watch Fox, I don't listen to talk radio. I'm perfectly capable of adjudicating the temperature of the nation and the ideas and the rest of it without being handheld by any particular medium or force fed and told what to think.
They don't know. No, they have a caricature of it, and the caricature of it is always going to be some hang Hill character sitting downstairs and you know, you know, you know, woodlined a rumpus room with a Maga cap on, you know, looking at the television and fulminating about the gays. No idea. Now, one of the things that I saw this morning that everything's going to be taken up to a new level a bit until temperatures, you know. Cool.
This is a guy who saw a video of this woman and she did a TikTok where she's doing a pretend thought and prayers and she's dancing and she's smiling, and she's all happy about it. She's happy that the man got shot in the neck in front of his children. And we found out that her husband owns this electrical company. So the guy who shot this video went to the husband's electrical company, walked in, confronted the husband and asked him what he thought about his wife's TikTok, and he
was duly pushed out. Again, that's a different level, and that's going to get somebody shot, and that's what we got to prepare ourselves for. Well, we're happy that the school teacher is facing consequences for saying horrible things, but at the other end of this is going to be unfortunate things that do not belong in this country and
ought not to happen. I mean, I don't know if the guy who's running the electrical company believes what his wife believes possibly does, but there's going to be a lot the frick, let's just say the friction that is coming is not going to abate soon. Because, as we all, somebody did they put it, they said this, this wasn't just ordinary bad news. This felt like an Archduke Ferdinand moment. And I got that feeling. I did.
I sort of felt that why why do you think this broke through so much?
I well, because because a lot of people, I think who are on social media have seen an awful lot of Charlie's debates and they've seen a genial but passionate and committed guy engage with people without ad hominem, without you know, calling them names, being a bomb thrower. That he wasn't somebody who just simply sat in the studio and took calls from only people that he wanted to take and said what he wanted to say. That that it was the fact that he wasn't a political figure
in the sense of running for office. He wasn't controlling, you know, the Republican Party to the sense that he was up there in the echelon's pulling strings. He was somebody who was murdered for his beliefs, and that just seems to sort of click in a way that the others haven't, I think. And also this and also this I think this is and what a lot of people on the left who don't get what people on the
right are talking about. I've talked about this before, non contiguous information streams, right, they don't know what we're worried about. That we don't always know what they're worried about. You can put this in a piece with the two Israeli's embassy people who were murdered in Washington outside of a
museum event by somebody shouting Free Palestine. You add to that the truth the loser shooting here in Minneapolis, trans identified guy who'd written every single internet meme possible on his stuff and you know, had all the standard bog
standard leftist grievances, but was a loser basically. You can add to that the resurfacing of the video of the Ukrainian woman who who was murdered on a bus by a convicted felon who should have been put away an awful long time ago, but it had been let up by judges who had been soaked in the restricted justice
and the rest of it. And then you add this and they all connect in the minds of people center right right, because they are connected, and it's and what exactly is the nature and the width of that connective tissue is something that we have to figure out. But there's been a sort of a sense of an accumulation and acceleration of these things. And the Charlie Kirk one added to that. I can't explain it any more than that, but that's one of the reasons that it hit.
It also seems to have broken through in particular in sports circles. I saw Jacksonville Jaguars players tweeting about it, which never happens. They only ever tweet about charities and football. I saw Lamar Jackson comment I saw the New York Yankees hold a moment of science. Last night at the Packers Commander's game. We got a moment of science. And I've wondered whether that's because Kirk's audience primarily was younger men, yeah, and athlete.
Yeah. If it'd been Jordan Peterson, it wouldn't have been the same. It just wouldn't have That's partially personality, and I mean personality has an awful lot to do with this. This morning, I saw and again the clip just rolls up and it's a young black Christian arguing with Charlie about Christian nationalism and it really was a piece of work. Now, I the Charlie made a distinction right away between being a Christian and a nationalist. He didn't conflate the terms
into one thing. But then he was talking about the biblical lessons that that reinforced the idea of being true to your nation, of being such a such. And while you know we can debate that, I'm not interested in, well, let me stop there. What he what he evinced was a rapid fire and very very you know, talmudic knowledge of what he was talking about. And the back and forth that he had with this guy was really interesting. And even me who's outside of that particular realm of
thinking and respectful and good and meaty and interesting. And I came away from it learning a good deal and I think a lot of people got that as well. Here is a contrary idea expressed with confidence but without malice, and it you know, he treated the people with whom we spoke with respect in that he expected them to realize the merits of what he was saying and how
this argument was convincing. Of course, he was talking to a greater audience as well, but he was addressing them if nothing else, we learned that college students are going to college is not necessarily guarantee that you're going to be smart, nimble of mind, and eager to entertain ideas in a socratic dialogue. Nah, if I can just interrupt here, I have to say it. Awful events make you look
for places that are that are places of sanctuary. Frankly, and even in the best of times, when life gets hectic, finding your comfort and your calm, it's essential. We all need time for relaxation and recharging and soaking in a sense of peace, to remind yourself that all is not lost because of the earth. You can create a space that feels like a personal retreat where comfort and serenity
come together naturally. And we're talking sheets here and speaking to a man who lives in a climb that's both soakingly humid and I imagine frigid and by Florida fridgrid standards, probably what fifty one degrees. You want a sheet that's going to there's going to manage all those climactic extremes that you.
Experience, right Cherman, that's absolutely right, And I have one, In fact, we have a few. They are extremely comfortable that's just as important. They adapt to the temperatures and the humidity will But they're so comfortable to lie in, and I wish I had more time to lie in them. My children have got worse and worse and worse about sleeping in, and worse and worse and worse about not
waking me up. But if I had more time, James, I would spend more time in my Cozy Earth sheets than I do because their comfy and adaptable.
Well, Charles's kids will be in college by the time the warranty runs out. Probably they stand by their quality. The blankets come with one hundred nights sleep trial in a ten year warranty, and they're apparel. Well, it's all backed by a lifetime guarantee and they mean it when they say it's made to last. So go to Cozy Earth dot com and use the kupon quote Ricochet to check out for up to forty percent of your new
favorite pajama set and blankets. That's cozyearth dot com code Ricochet, And if you get a post purchase survey, why do let them know they heard about Cozy Earth right here. And we think Cozi Earth for sponsoring this. The Ricochet podcast, Charles, you know this will hit in the weekend. People may or may not be interested in what we have to say, but I know they'll be keen to know what you have to say about AI something that's coming up in a future issue of National Review.
Well, yes, I just started this for the latest issue of the magazine. I think it will be out next week. I've spent an enormous amount of time with AI A the right word over the last two or three months. I've been using it for a couple of years, but I've really started using it in earnest over the last three months. And one of the things I point out in this piece is that whether one likes this or not, whether one thinks it is good for society or not, AI is going to be the next thing. It is
the next thing. We're no longer talking about the potential for AI to enter into the mainstream culture. It is, and has and will. I have noticed that, despite having used Google since nineteen ninety eight and Alta Vista before it, I have stopped thinking in search engine terms when I need to look something up. How long was that nineteen ninety eight to twenty twenty three is twenty five years?
Well, weren't you there before Yahoo and ask jeeves.
For more twenty five thirty years, let's say. And within maybe a month of using chat GPT in particular for a whole host of tasks, I no longer really know what to put into Google because the interrogative nature of AI is so superior.
I know exactly what you mean. I find myself typing something into Google and then it's like is and I think, is Google going to understand this? Usually? I mean seriously, Usually I use rock and I will say something to it, and I know that it won't be grammatically correct necessarily, or that I would have prefaced with something that is irrelevant maybe, But it parses what I say perfectly and gives me the answer and lately gives me answers that are turned out not to be entirely correct, which is
the problem, Which is the big problem. But when it comes to Google, Google has just absolutely in shitified itself with this AI overview, which you can turn off, I guess, but no one nobody goes to the pages from which they supposedly are are scraping this information. You just get this AI overview. We need a tendy links down at the bottom of it. I try to find the primary source every sin every time I possibly can. I'll give you an example. I was looking for something. I was looking.
I think it was a town. It was some it was in the Middle East, and it was some city I was research. I can't even remember what it was. It'll be in my website a year from now. And when I googled the town, is said that it was a very important town in Palestinian history, Palestinian antiquity. That was it, the term at us Palestinian antiquity. And when I went back to the original source, it was quoting something about from nineteen twenty four, when of course it
was called Palestine. But people would look that and say, oh look there's a you know, it's been Palestine since nineteen twenty four, it was Palestine. So context and nuance here was everything. And I'm still waiting for the day where I can just say I, okay, I trust you, but I don't. But I don't. And I know I'm saying this to a guy who has AI composed operas
about people that he doesn't like. And I get that, and I have been I have used AI for music projects when I need a quick stinger for something, but I feel guilty about it. I feel like I like I male ordered a rubber sex doll instead of asking a woman out on a date. So I get my keyboard out and I come up with something that isn't as good, but it's mine, but it's real. And I know people in the creative professions who are terrified, terrified
that they are going to be evaporated by this. And you know, a lot of a lot of those jobs are going to go away. But I think that that the ineffable human quality is going to be the killer app for us. That you and I fear the day when a I can replicate that so well, that human ingenuity.
Just you know, I'm talking to a guy in the ad industry the other day and I was asking him about this, and he said, you know what, AI can't duplicate, can't It can't duplicate bad ideas because we get great stuff from bad ideas, we get new directions from bad ideas, and AI doesn't know how to do that yet. Yeah.
Yeah, So the singular source of truth is its virtue and its vice, and that you don't have to read through thirty websites to get the information you want, And the problem with that is that you don't have to read through thirty websites to get the information you want. In other words, it's fast and often correct. It's read all the manuals. That's good, you don't have to read
the manuals. But if you don't know where it's coming from, and you're not old enough to understand that it is scraping the internet, that it is not born with Omnissians, then you might start getting led down the garden path. And I do worry a bit about that, because it's intrinsically non pluralist. I like that when I use a search engine, I can see what the sources are and judge them accordingly. I can say, all right, this is
from the New York Times. I know what that is, I know who writes for it, I know where they're bias is. But the biggest problem of all, James, I don't think, is to do with bias, although that is an issue. The biggest problem of all is this AI, if it's not carefully treated legally, is going to have within it the seeds of its own destruction. At his event on AI a couple of months ago, which was very good in General Donald Trump answered questions about copyright
in an extremely flippant manner. He said, Look, the Chinese don't observe copyright. We can't either, So in effect, there's going to be no copyright where AI is concerned. Now, JUMP can't do that. That's a matter for Congress. And if they don't do anything for the courts, because we do have copyright laws.
But that was his take.
And if that happens, it will destroy the Internet. And I point this out on the piece because AI chat bots scrape everything, and you only need to scrape something
once to echo it infinitely. So if you, for example, run Charles's Rollercoaster Encyclopedia and you spent years putting it together and you are paid for your efforts, or at least your hosting is covered for your efforts by either ads or subscriptions or combination of the two, and then chat GPT comes along scrapes the entire side and can give people the same information without crediting or paying you.
What will you do, Well, either you'll stop doing it.
At that point the resource goes away and the next resource, whatever it is, never gets off the ground, or you put it behind a paywall, it'll be more likely, but at that point chat GPT can't access it, so the whole Internet either goes behind a paywall or people don't do all of the things they've done for the last thirty five years. And these wonderful little projects you have one on your website that are accessible.
One dozens that I've been working on since they plug this damned thing in twenty nine years. I believe it will be.
But I mean, your website's wonderful, That's what I mean. It's one website. Then the Internet changes for the worst and chat gpt has nothing to scrape, right, So we are going to have to work this out because I
don't think that is a sustainable model. And the analogy that I would draw is imagine if you were commissioned by HarperCollins to write a book and they said you were not I'm going to pay you a big advance, but you will make it up on the sales, and then you only sold one book because that's all it took for chat GPT to scrape it and then give it to anyone who was paying twenty bucks a month. Hey, you wouldn't write.
The book, no, absolutely, So this is a bad problem that it's a big problem. So let's just end with a big problem unsolved. Let's end there and look forward to better times. But also remember that Charlie was killed for a reason, and we owe the honor of going back and looking at what he said and finding solace perhaps in the fact that he was a man of great faith and knew where he was going, and just think about his poor family and his kids, which just
absolutely breaks your heart. The whole week. There's been one that breaks the heart the whole damned month. It's been a rough year, but we've had these before, and let's all hope for some Palmer raids for the Antifa. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, Am I kidding? Am I kidding? Jermany.
I think that if they're engaged in an organized attempt to commit crimes, then the federal government should investigate. And the Palmer rates might not be the analogy I would drawn, oh, but broad it was. But I do think that there are statutes that are designed for exactly this sort of thing, and if there's any evidence, they should be investigated.
Yeah, well this will come back then, I'm sure. As Lilax calls for a suspension of civil liberties and massive deportation of Italians. No, thanks for joining us, folks. Thanks to Cozy Earth, our sponsored you can make your life more comfortable in a personal retreat if you avail yourself with their fine products. And of course you can leave that five star review at Apple Podcasts and say things like who needs Stephen? I was sick of Peter and Rob. Anyway,
these guys are great. See now we'll find out when anothery're listening. Anyway, Thanks everybody, and what the version of Ricochet are we up to so far?
It's the full point eleven points something points something.
Okay, we'll see you at that one at ricochet dot com. Bye bye,