The Ricochet Podcast - A Turning Point

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

James and Charles discuss the political assassination of Charlie Kirk and the disturbing implications it has for a country founded on certain inalienable rights.Sound from this week's audio: Utah Governor Stephen Cox announces the capture of the shooter.Photo: Dennis MacDonald / Shutterstock.comPlease visit today's sponsor, Cozy Earth: CozyEarth.com and use code RICOCHET at checkout for up to 40% off

We got him. On the evening of September 11th, 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 Ruricey podcast, episode number 757. I'm James Lollick's Minneapolis. I'm joined by Charles C.W. Cook in Florida. And it is a summer week for anybody with any shred of decent. in their heart

and that is something that we've learned and we'll discuss now. Charles, what are 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,

the murder. or Charlie Kirk would be. And I thought you have to add to that another category, and that's loser. The guy who shot up the church around here in my neighborhood was a loser. Lee Harvey Oswald was a loser. Arthur Bremer was a loser.

James Earl Ray was a loser. The guy who shot Mangione was a zealot. I think this guy, and I'm not going to say his name, that they've arrested, might fall into the zealot 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 Serbian nationalists in the First World War or Bolshevik communists, sort of lazy basement zealot. What do you think? I think you're right. usually in these situations I say let'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 10,000 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 their 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. zeal 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 zealot. 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 which discord he hung out. It hasn't been wiped. We're going to find out, 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 25. Is that what we got? He's 25. Yeah. Or was it 22? 22.

He's 22. Right. He's 22, which would have meant that he'd been about 17 or so in 2020, which may have meant that he lost a year, senior year to COVID, which may have meant that an impressionable age he saw this. incredibly exciting, thrilling wave of revolutionary violence in Gulf the country in the summer. And you wonder what impact that made? You know, it's, when you look back at 2020, and when you look back at the glee of destruction of the burnings and the toppling of the statues, you realize what a poison was injected 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 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, He had swallowed the idea that words are violence and that you kill people with whom you disagree.

And that is a notion. You're obligated as a citizen to kill Nazis. Right. And that is the problem here. Spencer Cox, 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 then 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 as a magazine it wasn't a high capacity it wasn't an a r whatever it is that they say next so to me this is a very 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

500 years in the West, particularly in Anglo-America, setting up two inviolable precept. 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 Charlie 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, even 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 foundation, precepts of a lot of lazy people who've cobbled together various elements of socialism, Marxist, leftist, progressive theory, which is to say that the West, in America in particular, are uniquely evil on this planet in human civilization, and that we are all the product of a variety of malodorous

isms that from colonialism to settlerism to capitalism to federalism, central is, whatever you want to call it. All of these things, all of these boogeymen that have been stuffed under the beds by these people, there's, 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, the slavery of the 19th century. There's, there's no, there's no place, there's a thing you can do to dismantle whiteness. You can't. You're, you're constantly being told about all these. things, but you were really feeling internally powerless to do something that is a tangible act. So, what occurs in the minds of 0.0001% 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 undergirds what they do. So it's not speech that they think he's doing. They think what he is doing is an existential threat to the culture that they want to bring into being. Now, and there will always be those one percent. There will always be those crazy people to take it to that extreme, right? Anyway, you wanted to say something about what I did. 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 28% or 40%. That's the settlement we have arrived. that since 1990. Religion, though, is a much more impressive feat as a tenet of Western small ill 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 we'll 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 rate,

such as what is 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 know.

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 beings 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 that are antithetical to

what you in the West have established now that's Europe. In America here, I think it's just more of the, I mean, and again, in America we had massive anti-Catholic prejudice for a while, massive anti-Semitism for a while in a lot of those religiously based, but we've gotten past that. Not because, I think,

like Europe, we ceased 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 town you will find the you know the people who belong to this church and the people who belong to that church and within the people who belong to 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 replace religion the part in the soul that yearns for something other and greater than themselves and when you replace that with the dreary ideas of ideology, then new zealots are born, and the violence starts all over again. It's, I mean, of this, of this, crooked timber, no straight 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 normie 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 bomb abortion clinics. And when that does happen, which is rare, but it does occasionally, I say 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 50 years overturning Roe in the courts. We didn't start a revolution.

We didn't start assassinating people writ 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, too. 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 force, by violence, which some would say is, you know, some, the right would say it's absolutely necessary because innocence are 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 elasticity, staying away from the seductions of its elasticity is one thing that we, that civil societies and smart people do.

one of the things that's that absolutely smacked my gob and it shouldn't have because I should have known I remember 1981 when Reagan when Reagan was shot there was this herodin sitting at the bar where I worked and she was pissed off about it and she said why couldn't they have shot them after the soap operas were over

because everything that she wanted to see was being preempted never forgot that writ large a million unfold on Tick-Tock 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 business, 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 Twitter, you look at what they're, it's not some Ted Kaczynski sitting in a cabin somewhere.

It's a fireman. It's a military recruiter. It's a nurse. It's an army guy. It's a teacher. So many. Teachers, elementary school teacher. You read the most violent, vicious, nasty, echo-dripping statement,

and then it's from the assistant principal of Pony Field Elementary in Happy Glen, Ohio. And you just wonder what percentage of the population somehow has become sociopathic over the last 10 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 killer's 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 step 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 Perry, vortex of grotesqueries, 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. He's been fired, 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 the, 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 council culture and misinterpret or define council culture. Council 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 council culture, I think,

was when Kyla Murray, who's 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 15, he'd said something ugly and that he now didn't believe. And then they put it all over the newspapers and then 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, is that how far do you go? Now, the people in position of authority, those entrusted 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 I'm jonesen for, was almost 80% reporting what people had said. Now, in the past, it would just be that. Look at this person, sunlight best disinfectant, 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 go to work and digging up and finding out exactly who all these people are. And they're 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 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 actions school boards, yes, but private businesses, 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, as the man said, you know, you get two fundamental rights in this country, you do whatever the hell you want and also to face up to the, you're

to 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 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 a key that is a database searchable database of everybody who said horrible things and there it is as long somebody keeps paying the registry fee Now, you mentioned going after the people of public authority and trust and the rest of it. What do you think about going after the finance, 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 then it doesn't mean it doesn't matter I think it mattered that they went after Kyla Murray I think it mattered that the Benham brothers got cancelled 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 there's a case-by-case issue quite clearly if somebody went into a job interview and said, by the way, just before we finish, 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 worry more James about what it is that he's engendered that in the first place I'm not trying to avoid the question but I don't understand 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 think. That's the difference. That's the difference. When you said, I, and I understand 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 Down. 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. That was just absolutely stunning. I mean, he's literally imagining Yosemite Sam in the first row. 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 be. 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 butte, yeah, this morning. That said, 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 them. Now, these three things striking as being important, because what it suggests is that the person who wrote that Times article, plus all of the editors who look, at it. Stephen King, up in Maine, big figure within our culture historically, 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. That the positions that Charlie Gork had for the most part are outside of the mainstream of any, go to any decent person. I mean, these are the ones who have the multicolored little statements on the front lawn in this house we believe. These are the ones who are always

telling us to be kind. These are the ones 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. has it and it's what they hear coming back to them from all the selected media sources when they talk about the right living in a fox news bubble i don't watch fox i don't listen to talk radio uh i'm perfectly capable of uh adjudicating the temperature of the nation and the ideas and the

rest of it without being handheld by any particular medium or forced 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 is but you know you know you know wood lined 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, until temperatures, cool. This is a guy who saw a video of this woman. She did a TikTok where she's doing a pretend thoughts and prayers and she's dancing and she's smiling and she's all happy.

but he'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 the other end of this is going to be unfortunate things that do not belong in this country and ought not to happen. 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 friction, let's just say, the friction that is coming is not going to abate soon because as we all, somebody How did they put it? They said this wasn't just ordinary bad news. This felt like an Archduke Ferdinand moment.

And I got that feeling. I sort of felt that. Why did you think this broke through so much? Well, 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 calling them names without being a bomb thrower

that he wasn't somebody who just simply sat in a studio and took calls from only people that he wanted to take and said what he wanted to say that it was the fact that he wasn't a political figure in the sense of running for office he wasn't controlling the Republican Party to the sense that he was. He was up there in the echelons 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.

We don't always know what they're worried about. You can put this in a piece with the two Israelis embassy, people who were murdered in Washington inside of a museum event by somebody shouting free Palestine. You add to that the loser shooting here in Minneapolis, trans-identified guy who'd written every single internet meme possible on his stuff and 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 was murdered on a bus by a convicted felon who should have been put away an awful long time ago, but it would be led up by judges who have been soaked in the restrictive 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 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 Jaguar's 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 silence last night at the Packers' Commanders game. We got a moment of silence. And I've wondered whether that's because Kirk's audience primarily was younger men. Yeah.

And athletes. Yeah, if it had been Jordan Peterson, it wouldn't have been the same. It just wouldn't have. Yeah. That's partially personality. And I mean, personality has an awful lot to do with this. This morning I saw, and again, 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, you know, 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 biblical lessons that reinforced the idea of being true to your nation, of being such, such, such, such.

And while, you know, we can debate that, I'm not interested in, well, let me stop there. 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. 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 he treated the people with whom he 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. If I can just interrupt here, have to say it, awful events make you look for places that are places of sanctuary, frankly. And even the best of times when life gets hectic, finding your comfort and your calm, it's essential.

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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 wrote this piece 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. That's 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, 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 1998 and Alta Vista before it, I have stopped thinking in search engine terms when I need to look something up. So by. So about. So how long was that? 1998 to 2023 is 25 years. Well, weren't you there before? Yahoo and Ask Jeeves.

So more. 25, 30 years, let's say. And within maybe a month of using ChatGPT in particular for a whole. 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, and I think, is Google going to understand this? I mean, seriously, usually I use GROC 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 enshrified itself with this AI overview which you can turn off I guess but nobody nobody goes to the pages from which they supposedly are scraping this information you just get this AI overview you need a tiny links down at the bottom of it

I try to find the primary source 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 remember where it was.

It'll be in my website a year from now. And when I googled the town, it said that it was a very important town in Palestinian history. Palestinian antiquity. That was it, the term it used, Palestinian antiquity. And when I went back to the original source, it was quoting something about

from 1924 when of course it was called Palestine but people would look that and say oh look there's a pet you know it's been Palestine since 1924 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 compose 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 mail 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 a lot of those jobs are going to go away but I think that the ineffable human quality is going to be the killer app for us and I fear the day when AI can replicate that so well that human ingenuity 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 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 in that you don't have to read through 30 websites to get the information you want. And the problem with that is that you don't have to read through 30 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 Onnisians, 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 see, all right, this is from the New York Times.

I know what that is. I know who rights for it. I know where their 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. And 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, Trump 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 in the piece, because AI chatbots scrape everything. And you only need to scrape something once to echo it infinitely. So if you, for example, run Charles's roller coaster encyclopedia, and you've 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 a 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 would 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 35 years in these wonderful little projects. You have one on your website that are accessible. One. Dozens that I've been working on since they plugged this damned thing in. 29 years, I believe, will be. But I mean, your website's wonderful, is what I meant.

It's one website. Then the internet changes for the worst and chat GPD 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 Harper Collins to write a book. And they said, we're not 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 20 bucks a month.

You wouldn't write the book. No, absolutely so. This is a big problem. 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 own 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 has 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, Charlie? I think that if they're engaged in an organized attempt to commit crimes,

then the federal government should investigate them. The palmer raids might not be the analogy I would draw, given how overbroad 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 Lilix calls for

suspension of civil liberties and massive deportation of Italians. No. Thanks for joining us, folks. Thanks to Cozy Earth, our sponsor. 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 Steven? I was sick of Peter and Rob anyway. These guys are great. See, now we'll find out with another listening. Anyway, thanks, everybody. And what version of ricochet are we up to so far? just a full point 11 point something point something okay we'll see you at that one at ricochet.com

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