The Ricochet Podcast - Ceaseless Loco Motion

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

It's just Lileks and Cooke this week, back to gander at another quintessentially American week of this semiquincentennial year. The fellas cover the halted hostilities in Iran, an incredible rescue op, Mayor Mamdani's "Citywide Racial Equity Plan," the awaited splashdown of Artemis II astronauts, and all manner of transportation issues. 

Jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, okay? Get out of town. Get out of town. Because you don't represent our values. You are not New Yorkers. There are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Okay, cut me the checks. I mean, just if you want to be supportive,

but maybe the first step should be go down to Palm Beach and see what you can bring back home. It's the Rickashay podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and myself, James Lillelix. Today, we're going to talk about. whatever comes to mind, and you are going to love it. So let's have ourselves a podcast. President Trump has the option as the commander-in-chief to compel an adversary to the table, which is precisely what he did. And at the end, he chose to say, you know what, I'd rather talk to you at the table than obliterate your capability to export oil and fund your terror regime. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rurkoshay podcast number 784. I'm James Lillickson in Minneapolis.

Charles C.W. Cook in Florida is with us, and Stephen Hayward is dead. serious about not being on this podcast today. We look forward to having him back next week. Charles, hello, I'm fine, thank you. I didn't expect to say that. We were just relating before we went live here that you'd been on the highway and then apparently around Disney World

for some strange reason. It's kind of a nightmare this time of the year. How do Floridians actually view the influx of people from all over the country who come to pay exorbitant prices to be beamed at by people in furry costumes and the life. We love it. Are they regarded sort of as a pestil...

They're not a pestilence, they're beloved? Well, it's a big part of the economy, but just as important, if not more important, people who come into the state pay all of our taxes. Yes, there is that. But there's always that faction that says, oh, yeah, sure, they bring in money, they bring in employment and all the rest of it,

but they make my life incrementally a little bit more difficult, and so I hate them, and I wish we would pass regulations. But then again, that's a state that's generally a blue state. and Florida is not that. So I'm glad you're enjoying it. I'm glad you're enjoying the tax benefits of everybody who went down there. I myself made many pilgrimages to Walt Disney World during the time when the child was in the Disney life.

And they age out of that. Thank God. I did not want to be one of those Disney adults that you see infesting social media more and more and more. They seem particularly sad breed. Sad, as the president might say, in all caps with Sarah. several exclamation points. I'm not sure what we can possibly say about Operation Epic Fury because I have no idea what's going on and I don't pretend to. The only thing that seems to be the case is that we're talking to somebody, but I'm not sure who.

I'm not sure whether or not there are any political entities that have any power. I'm not sure whether or not the IRGC is doing things of their own accord from their various cells. I don't know. I don't know. You might. What's going on, Charles? Tell us. Oh, I don't know either. I do know that if we cut and run now, whether we call the deceased fire or not, then we will have in effect told the Iranians that they can get rid of us any time they like by closing the Straits of Formuz. And that seems to me to be. And that seems to me to be a big problem and in some sense to undercut one of our rationales, which is that we wish to deprive bad actors in the world of that sort of power. If you recall a very good, in my view,

Marco Rubio's speech from, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago, he made the point that one of the reasons that we can't allow the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, aside from the fact that they want to use it against Israel, is that once you get that, then you have a Trump card, as it were, and he pointed to North Korea. He might also have pointed to Ukraine, which doesn't have that and got invaded by Russia. The argument being, North Korea can now do pretty much what it wants, because any time we say, we would like it if you would change your ways, they say, ah, but we have a nuclear weapon. And we didn't want Iran to be in the same boat. Well, it's not quite the same. But if Iran has an economic nuclear weapon and just say, well, we will crash the global economy and cause gas

prices to go up, then that would be pretty bad. And I really hope that we're not going to leave this with that being the resolution. I don't see how they can. I don't see how they can. Well, I'll tell you how they could, and I agree, I don't think they should. But how they could is a bunch of people in the Republican Party say to the president, we would quite like to keep our seats in Congress, and people are annoyed because gas prices are high when we are bombing them. And the stock market goes down when we are bombing them. And Trump, who's quite short term in his thinking says, okay then. I mean, I don't think that will or should happen, but that's how it could happen, right?

Yeah, you could. it could. Well, at least a whole civilization didn't die. I found that tweet to be, that may be the meanest tweet of all. And I thought it was a bit, my daughter sent it to me and said, is this something I should be worried about? And I said, no, you're not going to nuke him. I'm not exactly sure what he says. What is the civilization that's going to die? Is it the ancient Persian civilization that preceded Islam? Is it the quote civilization and quote of the mullahs? What has it? What is it? it. And if it is the regime that's going to die, then why did he say didn't want it to happen? But I do love, who knows, question mark, in all caps to be the epitome of strategic ambiguity. And then it finished with God bless the Iranian people. People, right, who were going to end. So yeah, I would have worked on that a little bit more. I would have run that by a few people, but that's not how it goes. And I don't get particularly upset about it. And it did seem to concentrate in minds wonderfully. Well, I have no idea. I have no idea. It's context dependent, that sort of rhetoric, right? If you look back to Truman at the end of

World War II, he did threaten the Japanese that we would inflict destruction from the era of the sort that has never been seen. But that was a bit of a different circumstance. We were gearing up to send seven million people to Japan. So I thought that was a bit over the top of the president. But I also didn't worry about it beyond being upset by the rhetoric from an American president because I didn't think he was going to do it because he, of course, wasn't going to do it. Well, it was quite the week for America, though. We had a spectacular rescue operation, which was conducted by setting up a base inside of Iran, practically. And at the same time, we hurled a bunch of people to the moon. And they're coming back soon, and fingers are crossed. We're going to have a splash down, which seems archaic now,

doesn't it? We're so used to the Challenger and this in the other thing, not the challenger. I'm so used to the crafts just gliding to a stop, these massive bricks that these guys dropped out of orbit, managed to pilot through a particular small little landing strip. That seemed to be the future. And now a splashdown seems like they're going to get out with buzz cut haircuts and then we're going to change the channel to I love to I Dream a genie.

Do you think that this mission has accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish? And what was that? Well, I will very quickly note that it's Friday afternoon and they haven't got back yet. But if they get back, it seems that it absolutely achieved what it was supposed to achieve. And what it will have achieved if it is successfully completed is remarkable and no less remarkable for the fact that we have done it before. How long has it been since we last went to the moon? Was it 1972? I think so, yeah.

That's 54 years. And since then, no one else has done it. The United States remains the only nation to have been. And next year or the year after we're going again. Yes. Phase two. And this is great. This is great, James.

No, I think it's absolutely fantastic. You know, there was this period in around, I don't know, 2005 to 2020 maybe, where people were quite dismissive of what I think is a miracle, which is the internet and the way it's delivered to your hands. And they would say, fine, everyone in the whole world now has the Library of Alexandria in their pocket. But, and then they would list things that we could no longer do. And this was a totally fair point. I think it just wasn't fair as an illustration of our supposed decline. They would say, well, we don't not have Concord anymore. So we can't cross the Atlantic in two and a half hours. We used to be able to do that. And well, we can't go to the moon anymore. We used to do that. But now we don't. We don't have the space shuttle anymore. And there's some

truth to this. I just think that it was too depressive as an argument. But now we kind of do have the moon again. I mean, if this finishes successfully, we're back in that phase, which seems, seemed to be hibernating for 50 years. I agree. There is more... The geist has the roar of animal spirits about it again. The reason we didn't do those things before and all the things that people said we couldn't do

was not because we lost the ability to do them. It's because we lacked the will. Or rather, we elected people who believed that the will should not be there in the first place. The Concord, I mean, there were economic challenges, yeah. Cramped it uncomfortable and expensive and the rest of it. Could we have continued with SSTs?

Well, there's a big controversy here in the United States when we were trying to gear up to build SSTs. And eventually, I think that they were outlawed. So that wasn't a case that we didn't have the tech. We had the tech. We didn't go back to the moon because we couldn't figure a reason to. And because we'd lost our enthusiasm and we'd lost the initiative and the drive. I don't know if, you know, we couldn't build the base back then because we didn't have the scrubbers and we didn't have the robots and the rest of it. It's entirely possible that whatever we built.

I mean, I think sometimes a piece about this in NRO, as a matter of fact, on this very day. If we had gone back where I now write a weekly piece on the weekends, thank you. If we had gone back and built a base in the 70s, by the 90s it would have been outmoded and kind of a joke. And people would have made fun of it. And nobody would be particularly impressed. And there'd be an air leak and six people would die. And they'd say, why are we up there? We'd be reading stories about how the outdated computer system of the movement base is still running on, you know,

floppy discs the size of a record album. I'm kind of glad we didn't. If you've seen the alternative future show for all mankind, that's an interesting view of what it happened if the space race indeed made us build bases to compete with the Russians in the

80s. But we didn't do that because we didn't, I mean, we could have, but we lacked the initiation. So all these things that people are talking about, well, we can't do this, is usually the result of some larger organization frowning, banning saying no. I mean, we could have built a California bullet train very quickly

except for the environmental regulations, except for the union padding and the rest of it. We still could. We still can. We know that we can. But you're right. But they don't want to build that. I do think this is the big difference is,

I saw a tweet and it said, Elon Musk managed to send 300 rocket into orbit for $10 billion and the California bullet train is $120 billion in and hasn't gotten any track. And it's a fair point, but the difference is Elon Musk wants to send rockets into space. That's what the money that he has allocated for it is for. If the rockets don't go into orbit, then he fails. Whereas I'm looking at tweets from the project, the California Highspield Rail Project saying,

this is great because we've created 16,000 well-paying jobs. Okay, that's not the same thing as building a train, though. They don't actually want to build the train. No, the money stops to the unions and the rest of it when they actually finish the train. Now, I love trains. I do. I love whistling around Europe and a train. I like being on trams in European cities.

It doesn't mean that I think that has to be replicated here. It's a huge country. I was listening to the podcast the other day, and somebody was a Brit was talking about. talking about. He said he had to drive across the entire country. He took him four hour car trip to drive across the entire country. I'm not sure Midlands or South or whatever, but that, I mean, that's, that's here to Fargo. Well, I just did that. That's why I'm 10 minutes late. I just did that today. Yeah. I mean, so, yeah, and so it's a big, we don't, we don't, we don't, we don't,

we don't need them. But it seems every day, but once a month on my feed, there's a story from somebody in some travel magazine. I took the Empire Builder. her overnight and had a cabin and here was my experience and it's always the same it's always i absolutely had the greatest time america should build more trains um we did have a 17 hour breakdown in the middle of montana in the winter but they gave us free peanuts and my room wasn't heated very well but you know i the price you pay no americans fell out of love with trains an awful long time ago so what are some other things though charles that we can do because i'm you're the one who wrote the piece on optimism and cheer.

There's some other things that we can do that people scoff about. Well, I actually think we should bring back Supersonic travel, partly because it would be very useful to me. Yes. It would be how long to fly from Miami to London on a supersonic plane about three hours? Hmm. I don't care if it's cramped.

I would take that trade off. And you're a rangy guy. Yeah. And then I've seen these plans for planes that go up essentially into the stratosphere. And then they can go from London to Sydney in about three hours. Now, I'm sure it's expensive. But that sounds pretty great too. I would love to get to England faster because there's absolutely no way to avoid hideous jet lag once you get on the other side.

And I know, I know, first world problems. So we can do that. We should do that. He says we could. I think we can still build incredibly tall skyscrapers. That is something that we can still do and manage to do. New York just recently opened a very, very tall building for J.P. Morgan, which I believe is actually one of the most hideous structures to go up by the design by the hand of modern man in years.

It's appalling. But people love it. And it's a new big, huge addition. I don't understand exactly why New York continues to grow and add. the office space that they do, even if the previous government was not exactly business-friendly. Mundami is now making all kinds of noises about the worst sort of democratic socialist of American nonsense, equity taxes and the rest. What are your takes on this? He's been pretty explicit about what he's saying and why these taxes are supposed to be done. Doesn't sound

very constitutional to me. Oh, it's certainly not constitutional at the federal level for different reasons than it may not be at the state level, the federal government is only allowed to do those things the Constitution says it's allowed to do. And there's nowhere in the Constitution that the federal government is empowered to impose a wealth tax. The champions of that tax are conveniently ignoring this and essentially insisting that it has to be done because it has to be done. But I think the Supreme Court's already been clear about this, albeit by implication, and would be again. The state question is a little bit more complicated. Certainly, it is a horrible idea in New York. And I think I'm right in saying that unlike with the billionaire tax

that is being proposed federally, which has quickly become the multimillionaire. tax you may have noticed. The one that Mamdani wants is what, 750,000 or something? Perhaps that's the estate portion of the tax. It would effectively wipe out. I think it went from $5 million to $750,000 for the estate tax, right? For the estate portion. And the equity tax starts pretty low by New York standards, given how much it costs to live there. So I think this would be a real boon to Florida once again. The big trend here is toward exit taxes internally.

I mean, we've seen 10 states now propose exit taxes. Now, exit taxes are unconstitutional. You can sort of impose exit and entrance taxes if you don't do it explicitly. So when I move from Connecticut to Florida, we got hit on both ends because Connecticut has laws that are neutral. but that charge you when you sell a house. And Florida has quite high, for example, mortgage initiation taxes and that sort of thing. So clearly Florida is aware people are moving in, and Connecticut is aware that people are leaving. And so they have taxes that coincide with those things.

What you can't do in America because of the free movement of people and capital within its borders is literally do what East Germany did. I'd say you're not allowed to leave. or if you leave the state, we will charge you this or that tax. But that is in effect what Mamdani is aiming at. And I really am not trying to be hyperbolic when I say this. I do get the impression with him and some others that if they could build a wall, they'd do it.

If you heard Kathy Hochle complaining about people moving to Florida and being unpatriotic recently, she said this as if it was a problem. She said, well, of course we live in a country which people could just move. I think that's a wonderful thing. I think that's one of the best things about America. It's a free trade, free people's zone. If you don't like one state, you can move to another. And that doesn't just mean in the way I would approve of.

I think there are good places that have different governments than I would like. Massachusetts is a nice place to live. And if that's your worldview, then you probably get on pretty well there. So it's good that you can move there. But I think that the blue states are starting to freak out about this and actually would like to see it be different. Oh, absolutely. The problem is, though, is that every time they do this for the name of equity and the rest of it,

they make the golden goose, which has been fatened up for their convenience, scronier and less healthy. The result of all these policies is an exodus. Minneapolis is considering a tax on the rich, wealth tax, the Minnesota legislature is considering, I believe, a wealth tax as well. Minnesota is not a low-tax state. Now, Minnesota used to have a great bargain with its people, which is, we're going to tax you, A lot. We are. But you're going to get good schools and good roads, good governance, no corruption. It's going to be a fair play, and we're all going to benefit. And local corporations pitched right in and promised to give 5% of the pre-tax profits and the rest of it. And for a while

there, it all worked. And everybody talked about the Minnesota miracle. Mary Tyler Moore was perfectly happy to move here. But consequently, what happens, of course, is you get a lot of people who move in for the benefits and don't contribute. And then you have an elected class of people who just continue to take and siphon more money out of the productive class until you've got. Well, I'm not exactly living in a hellscape here. I'm in the Dinah, Minnesota, which is a nice part of town. But on the other hand, there was a, you know, shooting right around the corner at the L.A. fitness there by some miscreants who had moved in. And, yeah, people tend to look at places that are safer and cheaper.

Why wouldn't they? The exit tax just makes me think that they're going to have state troopers on the freeways. heading out and if they see a car with a U-Haul or too many boxes piled on his roof, they're going to haul you over, check your fillings for gold you may be trying to smuggle out or some jewels that you've sewn into your clothing like the Romanoffs when they were taken off. Here's some more of Mondami's racial equity plan. According to the New York Post, and according to Perry, who's cheerfully provided it for me here in the rundown, you're going to increase the number of city teachers who, quote,

receive professional learning in implicit bias and culturally relevant. pedagogy. Now that's interesting because it means we're going to pay more professional lecturers to teach the professional lecturers about implicit bias. Charles, do you think that the school system of New York is riddled with people who themselves are absolutely shot through with implicit bias? And that's the reason for the poor test scores? No, I think these people are maniacs. And although the consequences of it are slightly different and although it is less frowned upon, given its lack of a direct connection to the bad parts of our nation's history. I think at root this sort of thinking is no different than was routine in the clan.

I think that if you spend your time obsessing over the immutable characteristics of your fellow citizens, then you're a bad person and a bad American and you're going to lead us down a dark path. And I see this as being not so much an overcorrection, but an inversion of that ugly habit. I really do find it revolting. I saw on the Washington Post, I've been on vacation, but I saw on the Washington Post there was a piece slamming the Supreme Court. And just the piece was that this ultra-conservative Trump-appointed Supreme Court is, for the first, time in years refusing to uphold civil rights. And I thought, well, that's very interesting. That sounds bad. So I read the headline was the headline literally was the meme of women and minorities

you know, happiness hurt. Yeah. And so I read down and the first and really only substantial claim that civil rights in America have been undermined was a reference to the Supreme Court finally refusing to sanction affirmative action, which It's quite literally colorblindness. Right. You can argue if you want with the reasoning in that case. I was probably more of the view that the Civil Rights Act was being violated than that the 14th Amendment necessarily was, although there are good arguments against that, one made by Clarence Thomas.

But irrespective, it is absolutely preposterous to suggest that government stopping discriminating on the basis of race is a civil rights violation. And yet, and yet there's a certain class of people, and unfortunately, there are far too many of them in our media and academia and government who think that the way that you achieve, the values that are inherent to the Declaration of Independence is to bring people into a room to be lectured by those who cannot see human beings but for their skin color or sexual-oriented. or what you will, and I think it's tragedy. Well, I mean, yes, we'd like to be colorblind, but there's a disparate impact to that. I mean, that flipped at some point. Content of the character was what they wanted. And that flipped in order to make the numbers better

and to achieve, you know, better results now and all the rest. It's an inversion, of course, as we've said, of what the original objections were. But you're right, colorblindness is is a violation of civil rights because because you know as man damey says because of systemic racism now the idea that there is systemic racism endemic in new york institutional educational educational structures at this point is preposterous it's it's it's it's a conspiracy theory as somebody pointed out there all these systems interlocking and such

that do these things as opposed and it's it's it's never no bad outcome is ever the fault of the people who are experiencing and manifesting the outcome. It's all these institutions operating in seamless meshing behavior. So when you talk about culturally relevant things as he did, that's one of those phrases that makes you think back to the 60s when everybody was protesting about what they were being taught in school because it wasn't relevant, man. It wasn't relevant to me. It wasn't, I can't feel that. So what they're saying, and what they've been saying all along, is that we can't teach the American story. We can't teach the American experience. experience, the exceptionalism of it. What we have to do is to find a way to pluck out some

narrow little things and give those to people because they are incapable of understanding anything beyond themselves in whatever particular clan that may happen to be part of, which is grossly insulting. But the only history they're going to teach them is 1619. They're not going to teach them anything else because how culturally relevant is that? How culturally relevant is the expansion to the West and the rise of the railroads and industrialization and the rise of communications and the rest of it to somebody in New York in 2026. I mean, please, come on, get out of here. And it bothers me that he's an immigrant, James. Yeah. Because that means that he came to the United States and that's what he picked up.

And that's a failure, I'm afraid. That is a failure of the system, speaking of systems, to inculcate, and I use that word quite openly, newcomers with the foundational values of the United States. If we have immigrants who are obsessed with that, that's a failure. It is a problem, but I don't think it was stuffed into him like he's a goose being fattened up for foie gras. I think that that's what he naturally gravitated towards. And in this country, there's a big, and in New York, there's a lot of juice that you can get by going to that side. Because that's the side with virtue.

That's the side where everybody's going to praise you. So for him to plug into that as classic grifter mode. Really is. But he also said, he wants a public school curriculum that reflects the diversity of families and communities. Okay, we just dealt with that. And he's demanding anti-racism training for city government staff to help workers, quote, combat racial discrimination in the workplace, which again, apparently New York is just a hellscape after. I mean, granted, he's the first person on the left to govern New York in what, a hundred years? How under these previous administration, under Adams, under these previous administrations, was racism allowed to fester to the point where he's got to bring in somebody to read them, Ibrahim Kendi books. Every time I use here, see the phrase anti-racism, I know that somebody's drunk all that flavor rate. Because that doesn't just mean, oh, I'm against racism.

It's a whole set of behaviors and thoughts and things that you have to do to combat racism every single manifestation. And Kendi is not a deep thinker. Kendi is not particularly the guy, your go-to guy for heavyweight analysis or heavy-weight intellectual lifting. I thought his free ride was over, but apparently he's got a new book out, and people are paying attention to him again. Good for that. Finally, he's requiring the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to, quote,

ensure racial equity is considered in evaluating 100% of new proposals for construction. 100%. Now, what that usually means is using small firms that are cutouts for other people to say that we've got 10, 20, 30% minority contractors on this one. Actually, it's kind of a shell game where they got a guy up front and they got other guys, in the back. So that's more, I mean, that's just more money. All of this stuff that he talks about, none of it is going to achieve anything except the enrichment of the class that comes in and tells you how to think and how to behave and what not to do. None of this solves, changes anything. Have you ever been through implicit bias training, Charles? I have not. And in fact,

I have made it a point of principle to refuse to work anywhere where they would put me through that or with any organization that would require it. Now obviously this has not been a problem in National Review, which is institutionally. Hotbed of racist though it is. Oh, exactly. No, but it is institutionally against this. But it has crossed my mind that if I lost my job or what you will, and I went in a different direction and I was told to do this, what would I do? And I think I would just have to say,

I'm sorry, I'm not doing that, but of course, maybe I wouldn't. Maybe I would see my children's starving mouths and say, I better sit through it. Yeah. But I feel, you see, this is, this is why I think that DeSantis was right in Florida when he signed the bill that effectively outlaws this. and I think that those with whom I usually agree who said, ah, but the First Amendment were wrong. I'll tell you why, because I am fortunate. I have a nice life, and I work somewhere that's never going to ask me to do this.

And I am not typical in that respect because most people, in increasing this is the case, work for large companies. More people now than ever work for large companies. The number of people who work for small businesses is declined and declined and declined. And large companies are much more likely than other companies to put their staff through this sort of nonsense.

And that makes those who work within those large companies somewhat powerless. If you're a middle manager at Unilever, you don't have a huge amount of say as to whether you have to sit through this. Now, as a general rule, I am a First Amendment absolutist, and I think that those companies should be up to do whatever they want.

And that means that if they want to be conservative or progressive, or Christian or not Christian, fine, their private institutions. But we do have civil rights laws in this country. And if you, I suppose this goes back to our earlier conversation, if you said to someone, look, middle manager at Unilevo, you need to sit through a presentation as part of your job that tells you why black people are inferior. It would be abundantly obvious to everyone,

given our civil rights precedence, that that was illegal. You wouldn't say, ah, but what about the First Amendment? you'd say, well, in this case, the civil rights laws control. And unless we change that, then that will continue to be the case. Well, I do not see any difference between that hypothetical and what was going on, especially during and after COVID in the summer of George Floyd, where people were being asked to sit through presentations that effectively said, white people are racist,

the United States of America is racist, and you, white middle manager at Unilever, are the problem. And DeSantis said, we're just not doing that. If we're going to have civil rights laws, they're going to be applied in both directions. They're not going to be applied. And he got sued and sued and suit. And I'm not quite sure what the status of the law is.

And a lot of people I really respect to a big free speech guys like me, said, well, he can't do that. Well, why can't he do that? Why is it the case that only in one direction? Because if you read the Civil Rights Act, it doesn't say in one direction. It doesn't say white, black, Asian, Mexican or whatever. It just says to script.

on the basis of race. It just says hostile work environment. It just has these terms. So I was very strongly in favor of that because I think it was supposed to protect everyone, which is what it did. And it also prevents what you're talking about, which is this circular grift where the people who are obsessed with this, hire the people who are obsessed with this. And they transfer my money, usually, between themselves and then pat each other on the bag. I've said this before, but it's a good thing nobody remembers what I say. I have gone through this kind of training and three things stuck out in my mind.

One, first they were asking us all to identify ourselves what we identified as. And I said a North Dakota. Because that's the culture in which I was brought up for which I got my ethics, ethos, the rest of it. And so they smiled indulgently and also chalked me up to, oh, you're going to be one of those, aren't you?

The second thing we had to do was play with Lego. And they just gave us a bunch of Lego and asked us to build something. So of course, you're on your guard right away. How am I going to be? John what? So I designed, I built a little house. I did. And then when I looked at it, at the end, I said, oh my God, I grouped all of the colors together. There was a red wall and a blue wall and a yellow wall because to me that seems to be a more aesthetically appealing thing. And there's a chimney. I've built a segregated crematorium. And I was terrified. They're going to look at that and say this guy's built a segregated crematorium. But they never explained what that was about anyway. Finally, they showed us pictures. And we're supposed to have reactions to these images. And they showed us a guy with facial hair. Can we think of like a biker, and a leathers? And he's holding in his hands, he's holding a dowel of sorts, like a

trench, like a truncheon. And so it was a little circular picture around him and we're supposed to ask what we thought about him. And generally people said, well, he looks like, he looks mean and dangerous. I would avoid him. Well, then they pulled out on the image and it turned. And it out that this biker, the troll that he was holding, was actually the handle of a pram. He was pushing a baby cart. And we're supposed to think, oh, aren't we silly for having made the assumptions that we did? And I'm thinking, who walks around in the world with, you know, looking through their life through a toilet paper tube where they can't see the entire thing?

Of course, I'm not going to be scared of a man in leather who's pushing a baby cart. But this was meant to show us how we make assumptions that don't turn on to be true. You can't assume. Remember when you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you an option in a It was miserable and nobody learned anything and everyone just sat through and endured it because the company made us do it and they could check a box and move along. I almost got sent to sensitivity training towards the end of my tenure at the Star Tribune because I committed a gross racial insult that I had to grovel. I had to go through I had to go through a struggle session in Slack. I did.

I don't think I've spoken about this. I had used a phrase, I said in many cafes, small-town bars in Minnesota, you'll see a sign that says tipping is not a city in China. And those signs used to be everywhere. As a matter of fact, they still are. When I did a Google search for it, the phrase came up in a BBC story. But it was regarded as racial insensitivity and making fun of the accent of Asian people. And what's more, it was Asian-American Journalist Month or something like that. that compounded my sin.

And there was something else in the piece that was not to the liking. I mean, I generally sort of kind of made fun of everybody, and I didn't really think that I couldn't. Anyway, so the piece got yanked from the paper, scrub from the internet. The print version was still out there. The paper apologized for the insensitivity in its corrections phase. And people were writing, I was following this on local Redits and other stuff. People were saying,

I have no idea what they're talking about. I read that thing. I have no idea what he said that was so bad. It was a mystery. I had scratcher to all. Probably the beginning of my downfall there. So, James, what was the piece replaced with? Was it replaced with an editorial explaining why it's important for social justice

to keep Asian people out of colleges? Which is the literal position of those who were torturing you? I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. It was absurd. Can't say tipping is not a city in China. can systematically discriminate against Asians in college admissions. That's the social justice rule. Right. So that I guarantee you that the watch that I got a little bit of what people

with the Washington Post and the New York Times did. Where anybody, any grayhead there, any veteran journalist with experience found himself dealing with these these Maoist red guards and just, I mean, I got a mild version of what some guys do. But we're told this is crested. We're told that in 2026, Woke is over. It's in retreat. We're told that Me Too is spent.

We're told that the trans mania has peaked and subsided. Do you think these things are true? I think they are, but that doesn't mean they're gone. I think they are in one sense and not in another. I think they are in that the public, which never had much time. for them has even less time for them now. I think that one of the manifestations of that was the victory of the Trump campaign in 2024 and that we are likely to get some democratic victories in the midterms and probably in the 28 presidential election and when we do many of the

people who don't care that the positions that they espouse are unpopular will once again have control of the levers of power and they will push this stuff irrespective of public opinion. So I think that it has peaked in its popular form. We probably won't see as much of it from private companies, but I would be surprised if we get a Democratic president 28, come mid-29 if we're not looking at the Department of Justice starting all that stuff up again. But I don't see it with a trans issue. I think everybody's backed off that one and realizes that there's no gain in it anymore and that it is no longer the vanguard of human thinking and transformation, so to speak,

and that the lawsuits will start coming. Yeah, that's a good point. The lawsuits is a big part of this. That's how things change in America. Yeah, well, you know, not and good for us, good for us. I'm, you know, speaking of the future, let us conclude with this. I think you made a bombshell announcement the other day in Rikshay that 5.0 is en route. Now, those of us who have been with this thing since they plugged it in, and I've been here since the original days.

I remember when Robin Peter came to my house, as a matter of fact, at one point for a party. And I said, what don't I write for you? And they said, yeah, why don't you write for us? And then the next thing I know, I'm doing this for years. So I was there at 1.0. I've been there for the various iterations of the logo and the typeface and the style and the rest of it. But it's been static for some time. And now comes 5.0.

I'm a big fan of occasionally shaking everything up and redesigning. Charles, what have you done? What have you done to our beloved ricochet? Well, it will be a big shakeup because this will be the first time in Rikosha's history that RICOcee is. an app by which I mean to say not that it will run immediately on your mobile although there'll be a mobile version in a browser but that it is not going to be built on something else my understanding is that ricochet has historically been atop a CMS and other infrastructure currently is WordPress it's no secret and it won't be this is going to be like Twitter or Facebook or

anything else, its own thing. It will be built from the ground up as a bespoke custom, self-contained piece of software. I have taken that decision despite the fact that it is something of a jump after a lot of thought. As some people will know, my business partner passed away six weeks ago and I reviewed everything and I came to the view that ricochet is not best suited to being crammed into someone else's software or working within its confines. So there'll be two stages. Stage one is the launch of ricochet with all of its legacy data. Everything up until the point at which it is Ricochet 5 will be there. And then the second step will be pretty aggressively adding new features to the new system.

Well, you're going to have to go to Rikishay to find out what those are. And the release date is when? Is it this weekend? Is it next? It's not this weekend. Oh, okay. It will be no later than September 30th of this year. Ah, okay, good.

So we're not going to tease you with things that might not appear. We're not going to wet your app. Well, we will wet your appetite. But I tell you what, right now, Rickash, 4.0 is still a great place to be. I love it. I'm there several times a day. I should also add that I understand the trials of building something on top of something else of using somebody else's platform. I my site has had code so simple for so long that when some people look at it, they just they it's like they feel young again. It's like 20 years never happened. I have tables.

I have image maps. I have spacer gifts. I mean I it's this thing is just is ancient, but it works. Anyway, I may change it up at some point too, but you, the listener, can go to RICOchet, as you probably already do, but if you don't go to the member feed, you're probably always wondering what is behind the curtain. And the answer is, everything from lots of amusing memes to discussion of the unanimities of Canadian politicians to things, to arguing about the war, to arguing about literature, sports, and the rest of it, movies, there's nothing really that isn't discussed over in the member feed at RICO. So I advise you to park with a few shekels, Tenari, Lira, whatever you please. Go there, join, and you'll find that 4.0 is pretty good. And then you'll be amazed when you see what 5.0 is. I got to go because I got to have a guy come over here and put a table together or a desk together. I could do it myself, but I am tired of assembling furniture.

I nearly wept with the last IKEA thing that I put together. It took me days. I had to actually find a guy who just silently put it together, holding out his hands and showing the parts and pointing to what to do. It was brilliant. I actually was so grateful of that guy. I sat through all of the ads and didn't skip them, so he got however little revenue came about from that.

Anyway, Charles, glad you're back from your trip, your home. Have a great weekend. Have a great weekend. Everybody else, I hope Stephen will be with us as well next week. I'm Jamie Lalix here in a dinah, Minnesota. A cake eater now that I am. And we'll see you all at Rickashay 4. point whatever bye bye