The Ricochet Podcast - Embodied Optimism

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

AI has many amygdalae flooding nervous systems with warnings; a rising share of Americans look toward digital technology with deep suspicion; and a data center revolt is underway. The worries are increasingly apocalyptic. But it's not that America has never experienced a transformation of comparable scale, only that no living American is old enough to remember it—or so argues today's guest: Mark Mills, author of The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. Mark, the erudite optimist, addresses everything from the cold realities behind development, construction, and energy considerations to productivity gains, labor participation, sociocultural cohesion, and cybersecurity risks. Plus, while on the subject of the tumultuous present, James, Steve and Charles reflect on Ryan Reynolds' thoughts on the traumatic 1980s; Steve thinks through a proposal to curb bad actors in the "non-profit sector"; and while they look forward to cutting the rug at the White House's new ballroom, the trio find themselves baffled by Chief Justice Robert's sudden fretting over standing. Opening sound this week: Jason Kelce and his friends at Garage Beer want you to send your pee to data centers, and Ryan Reynolds tells Variety he was traumatized by the tumultuous 1980s.Closing music: Radetzky March Op. 228 performed by the Budapest Art Orchestra (via MotionArray)Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ricochet-podcast--5817275/support.

I don't want to indulge at any of those games, but it is a communist holiday, and I do resent it. Okay, good. I agree. AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water. That's why liquid deaf and garage be able to team up. We want your pee to cool these data centers. It's the Rickusay podcast with James Lilex. That's me, Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. We're going to talk to Mark Mills about AI.

Don't fear the future. Let's have ourselves a podcast. What's interesting about when you get far enough away from a time period that's quite distinct, I think there's always a lovely feeling associated with. It's almost like you pave over all the trauma with like puppy dogs and ice cream. And the 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess. And like, you know, people forget that it was like that was a tremendous strife,

sociopolitical tensions everywhere. You know, we're still like pretty fresh off like a Cuban missile crisis, which is only like, what, 15, 20 years before. So, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you're like, oh yeah, top gun, cocaine. There you go again. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rickache podcast number 805. I'm James Lillickson, Sunny Edina, Minnesota, or Edina, as the AI likes to pronounce it. Stephen Hayward in California, Charles CW Cook in

Florida, gentlemen, welcome. We are on the cusp of a holiday weekend here. All is great. Summer is winding down. The Minnesota State Fair, the end of which signifies the end of summer, is having a bit of a controversy now because of the political nature of the seed art. Somebody put 8647 in seeds and then had red seeds underneath to indicate blood. There are seed art portraits of

Minnesota martyrs like St. George Floyd. There is Donald Trump stuffed with beans or something and it's just so appallingly banal that people can't feel the need to infuse their tires

some politics and shove it into everything. And I wonder whether or not that the seed art this year is being funded by NGOs or non-profits. I know that sounds like paranoia. But Stephen Hayward, a friend, actually has a modest proposal on what to do with nonprofits. Why don't you tell it to Charles and myself? Well, first of all, James, about the seed art, I think we should counter it by spreading the rumor that they're all made with genetically modified seeds, right? Because that will cause a cognitive disdial.

and all that. Yeah, so, I mean, long story, but I have this crazy idea, not crazy, but it won't happen, that we should abolish the nonprofit sector. Now, I don't mean that literally, because you go back to Tocqueville, American voluntary, civic organizations have always been part of America's DNA and what set us apart. It's a key part of American exceptionalism. But what I do think should be done is maybe we should think about ending the tax deductibility of contributions to the nonprofit sector.

The reason I say that is the nonprofit sector, not all of it, not our local churches that we belong to, not the local Lions Club perhaps. But the sector itself has, like so many institutions, become thoroughly captured by the left, up to all kinds of mischief, and making claims, and this actually goes back at least 30 years now, they make claims that the nonprofit sector should be accorded the status of a formal stakeholder,

including appointments to corporate boards and input to all public policy decisions. And I think this is insidious. And I thought, you know, if we got rid of the tax deduct, for it, it would clip the wings of, well, let's start with a lot of private liberal arts colleges where a lot of alumni would quit giving their annual gifts that they couldn't deduct it on their taxes. So, you know, what's not to like? And it would also clip the wings a bit of some of the huge left wing foundations, you know, Ford, Rockefeller, Soros, for that matter, and Mellon Foundation and others. So I do it out as a thought experiment and it got a lot of buzz and controversy. And anyway, I just, you know, when I hear people talk about the nonprofit sector, it just gets my back. Charles, do you agree? I don't know.

That's a remarkable change to our tax code and would restructure an enormous number of things. What I would like to see, which I think I do already have an opinion on, is the government using non-profits less. Now, that would be easy to affect. I mean, I'm thinking, obviously, of California and homelessness charities, which seem to rake in billions of dollars while making the problem worse, or at least not making them better. That is full of all manner of ugly incentives. Whether I want to change the tax code to make the contributions from private actors to those non-profits illegal or treated. as any other contribution would be rather.

I don't know. I should have to think about that, Steve. Well, I mean, I just want to sort of brief rebuttal. You know, most people who throw $20 into the collection plate at their churches don't itemize. And there's quite a lot of data on this that conservatives are actually more charitable than liberals. I mean, the famous story of Hillary Clinton deducting $1.50 for bills used underwear on their tax forms is very emblematic of the left. They want the government to do it. And that's why an awful lot of the nonprofit sector depends on government grants, like the

homeless industrial complex that you mentioned. And so I actually think that, you know, the sort of the good old Tocqueville style civil society stuff would go on just fine without a tax deduction for it. And, you know, I like to point out that the Medici's and the rest, they didn't support Florentine art for the tax deductions. And I think that people who are seriously interested in the arts can still support it. It's just that the taxpayers don't have to cross-subsidized anymore. That's all. That's the more modest version of it. I wouldn't, I wouldn't abolish nonprofits. That is a crazy idea. It would be cutting off your nose in spite of your face.

Right. You mentioned the Lions. I almost joined the Lions once, but there was a scheduling conflict. What they did was they cleaned up streets. They went places and they picked up trash. And then they also had drives to collect used eyeglasses, which would go to Africa. A wonderful bunch of people. What I want to do after I've won the lottery, would win, say, $800 million in the lottery,

I'm going to take $300 million of that and I'm going to create the Lilix Foundation. and I'm going to expressly staff it with as many Marxists, socialists, and collectivists as I possibly can. The reason being is that's the only way that I can assure that in two generations it will do something completely different. Like the Ford and the rest of all, if you set up a foundation dedicated to American society, all of a sudden in two generations, it's doing its best to ruin the country. So I'm going to try it from the other way and see how the institutional... James, you could also give them totally point. fruitless work to do, but pay them.

Thereby taking them out of society, trapping them, the golden handcuffs, and making sure they can't do any mischief whatsoever that affects anything that you care about. That would be a good idea, because the under-utilization of these people leads them to do the stupidest, strangest things. There's a case of this mentally ill woman in the streets of New York who had stabbed two people, one to death, and she was going after the cops and was irrigated. and got the lettuce sill in and down she went. And there's a lot of nailing and wailing and gnashing about why didn't they shoot her in the arm.

Why didn't they shoot her in the leg, please? But what's interesting is the people who are defending the death of the young woman that she'd stabbed because she worked for the Bank of America and therefore she was part of the industrial capitalist complex. She was a vice president for God's sakes. And there are people, legitimate people, actual people on Twitter saying, I'm not, you know, this is what we need to do more of. And it's a sign of how ethically reprehensible and morally vacuous that these people have become. This is the Luigi, this is the, you know, the Luigi Manjone, you know, fan club.

This is, this is them what constitutes a new set of ethics that we have to get used to if the revolution is going to come. But that woman had no idea who she was killing, right? No, she didn't do not whatsoever. In effect, their endorsement leads to the position that we should have randomly old people running around Manhattan with knives on the off-charts they kill someone that they wouldn't have liked in the first place. Exactly. And they tried to taser, but she was too fat, which was really, really funny, because that was the answer.

And I saw this exchange where someone said, well, it just shows how inhumane and barbaric are police are. Why didn't they taser? Well, they did taser. Well, why didn't it work? Because she was huge. But I think it's actually worse than that, Charlie. I mean, I think we are back to what used to be part of the radical left decades ago,

which was a sanctification of violence, a celebration of violence. It's own sake, which makes me come back to your opener, James, which is, you know, those seeds look like they have sprouted into a really noxious, a noxious weeds, not strong enough a metaphor for it. But you can see that those seeds are emblematic of something that's growing up and growing very fast and it's very bad. Yeah, it is. I have a piece of National Review online this week. My weekly column this weekend is about questions. Am I going to be, here's my job. Do I deserve stabbing? This is what I do for the company. Is this going to give me a stabbing? so you can pick that up on NRR if you like. I'll send you my answers to the questions. Oh, I've already answered them, believe me.

I answered them in the voice of a 27-year-old DSA woman who is living in Brooklyn in a $1.7 million apartment. So I don't get to say. No, the piece is written and it's done. I mean, I'm sure you can. No, I just thought I would read the piece and then I would send you my thoughts as to whether or not you deserve to be stamped. Okay.

I'm sure you've got some pull over there, Ben-Ard. So, yes, you can do this if you wish. Two stories before we go to our guest. Perhaps who wants to, do you want to talk about the passing of Gloria Steinem or the fact that the ballroom is going to be built? Well, a quick comment on the ballroom thing. It's a ridiculous case for the pleading of the plaintiff from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Again, one of those nonprofits that's become a nuisance over the decades. And the complaint was, well, I'm aesthetically offended having to walk by the ballroom.

Now, if being aesthetically offended at federal architecture is a legitimate, cause of action. Yeah. Then I'm going to put retroactive lawsuits and fled the federal courts for every federal courthouse that's been built, just for starters. Absolutely. We have a class action suit over the FBI building in D.C. We can, yeah. I have to say, I was completely perplexed by John Roberts. Yes.

John Roberts is not the villain that many on the right think he is, but he is often a squish. And rarely so onstanding. Yeah. So suddenly, suddenly he, what, becomes a standing dove? And also, I understand this is not the mainstream view, but I don't think that there's a case on the merits. I went back and I read the statute that Congress passed, which I don't think is a particularly good statute. And as usual, I would like Congress to do its job rather than delegate power. But it refers to improvements to the building.

And so I looked at what that word has meant historically in America. And this obviously counts as an improvement. They didn't take the building down. They removed a part of the building that had previously been an improvement. And they're improving it. How could that not count under this statute? Yeah. Well, it's because Trump is building it, period.

Yes. And I don't believe they have any illegal basis to get rid of the march that he's building. but if they could, they would, I'm sure. And whether or not that's going to be an aesthetic success, we will see. Well, such is the world. How about let's talk about the future? And now we welcome to the podcast, Mark Mills, founder and executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's

City Journal, an author of The Cloud Revolution, how the convergence of new technologies will unleash the next economic boom and a roaring 2020s. Mark, welcome. It's been an interesting week for AI. Is it not? A couple of, I mean, we had four models. We had four AIs go down simultaneously. Everybody thinking that they were, they'd been nixed by some rogue other LLM that was out there, killing at will. We had all these stories about hugging face experiments that seem, again, to summon up a dystopia happening beneath the surface of the placid computers with their blinking lights. We had a massive, massive outrage on Twitter. bots, social media everywhere, about AI food menus, which have brought a new form of tryptophobia discussed to people. We're grappling with something that is barreling towards us very fast, or we feel like we're strapped to the front of a bullet train, and we don't know the destination. So let's slow down.

Let's ramp back the panic. You've been called the last optimist for AI. Give us some more reasons why the people who are out there saying, I am not at all paid by China to oppose data centers. I just think they're bad because they use water. Calm us down here and tell us why we should still be optimistic. Well, you could take the position that humans are bad because they use water. I mean, especially the golfers.

Yeah. Especially the golfers eating almonds. They're the worst. Well, if you really want to know the biggest offender for profligate water use, it's the RFS, renewable fuel standards, and ethanol. Just not to digress and to the rabbit hole of idiot standards for

effectiveness policies, about 600 fold more water used per gallon of gasoline if you go ethanol than if you stick with just gasoline. 600 fold. That's an astonishing increase in water use and water waste.

But I am the last, I don't think I'm the last optimist, but I'm also not Pauliana. I mean, I'm a realist. I've been an investment world, I've been in the policy world, world, you know, reality will slap you upside the face if you pretend to ignore it. That's why we use the Philip K. Dick quote on our website, which is, you know, the great

line that reality is that which still exists even when you ignore it. Well, using Philip K. Dick, of course, who believed in the valley behind everything else. It's perfect because he's a dystopian science fiction writer. And the only thing that makes good science fiction is dystopia. But, you know, that's why the stories sell. So no one's come to your door speaking Greek with a strange medallion. That's changed your life is what I want to know. Okay.

Well, I would say that the roaring 2020s is happening. It took a couple of years to get rolling. I mean, when I wrote the book, it came out the end of 2021, really was rolling in January 2022, right before chat, GPT came out. And about a quarter of my books about AI, the rest is about the other technologies and the penumbra of the ecosystem that's changing the world. I mean, material science is a big deal. People ignore it because it's boring.

What's happening in education, it's big deal, not just from AI. You know, what's going on in discovery in medicine and biological sciences. It's huge. Lots of stuff going on. So I tried to put a thread through my book. And the thread was, I think, the correct thread, and it's why it's called the Cloud Revolution, is that the infrastructure of the cloud writ large,

is the animating thread through all the revolutions that are underway, both good and bad, and that people's unhappiness is predicted and predictable. I mean, we are another cycle of great disruption, but I will say this, anybody who spends 10 minutes asking Claude or Gemini or any AI agent to search history and give you a summary of great disruptions, this is not the first time. It's not our first rodeo. But it's the first time in the living memory of pretty much everybody. today, right? The last great disruption, I would argue, was the 1920s. That's why I used the Rory

2020s, in terms of a confluence of huge changes in technology, society, politics. It was very, very similar to our era. And it caught, and then there are negative consequences. One of them was the creation of the Soviet Union. I mean, that's what, in a large measure, helped fuel the, you know, Karl Marx and the whole socialist, uh, uh, framing. and the creation of the Soviet Union was the disruptions that were underway. And I think if I were a pessimist, I would say I worry that we'll, we're seeing that movie replayed too. Well, Mark, have you been surprised as I have it how rapidly the oppositions to data centers has congealed and in a bipartisan way. I mean, I'm having flashbacks to the anti-nuclear movements of the 70s, which, and maybe my memory is faulty, but it seemed like it took longer to take hold.

It was mostly on the left, although it easily combined with old-fashioned middle-class nimbism. And this has gone from, you know, zero to 60, you know, a tenth of the time the anti-nuclear movement did. And so I'm totally shocked. And you can see all the Republican politicians like Governor Abbott in Texas lining up to say, oh, wait a minute. And this looks very bad to me. I mean, here's where I think Trump is right to say, if we want to be, you know, poor and behind the curve, let's block data centers. But so were you surprised at this? So you're already triggered a lot of people by using the phrase,

I think Trump is right. Right. So let's do that tick it around and hold a minute. But he is right. And the people who are defending the importance of data center infrastructure are right. It is critical. It is a structural shift in our economy with all the things that animate people to be worried. And a lot of people have a good reason to be worried about things.

I mean, you know, that all saying, You may be paranoid, but the bullets are real. I mean, there are some people whose jobs are a threat, for sure. The jobs apocalypse narrative is demonstrably bunk, but it does, there are people who won't be negatively effective. You build big industrial facilities, and that's what a data center is. You know, Jansen and Wynne likes to use the expression, AI factory. And there's, it's actually a pretty good framing.

It's a better framing than data center because there's a distinction between data centers that do AI and data centers that do what we're doing, which is record videos or buy things or shop or keep medical records. And that data management, that data processing is, as we all know, having tried AI, really different than using an AI agent to answer a question. So, but I am like you, I've used the analogy about the nuclear opposition deliberately because you and I are of a certain age. And I, as a. As a young man, I was at the accident at Three Mile Island during the week of the accident and then spent the next, I guess, seven years of my life defending the virtues of nuclear

energy, obviously unsuccessfully because the craziest killed the industry. The architecture of the debate is very similar, apocalyptic fears, big utilities. There was a time when the left hated big utilities. Now they love them because they successfully co-opted them, basically. But they won that battle. They got to own them intellectually, if you like. Right. And even some extent legally by the mandates that are forced on many utilities.

But it is a little, it is definitely faster. I think the reason it's faster is that they are, it's the same people in organizations, many of them. And they honed their skills. They honed the techniques and the nuclear debates. And so it was pretty fast then. I mean, when I came to the United States before through my island, nuclear energy was still, very popular in a bipartisan way. It was the future, the beating, you know,

swords to plowshares, the peaceful atom, all this stuff. There was, you know, Nixon predicted a thousand reactors in reaction to the, you know, oil embargo of 73 by the year 2000. We got to 100. You know, it's close, you know. Well, not bad for government work. Yeah.

But it is, it is, it makes one suspicious. There's more to it. And I think the more to it is partly, it's being fed by anxiety about what AI and social media, all that, and made in the antipathy, if not hate for big tech and the coastal elites that's feeding into it. I have no doubt, I think Elon Musk's research team on X that reported hundreds of thousands of Chinese chat bots maliciously reinforcing negative stories on social media. I have no doubt that they're meddling.

I mean, look, you'd be profoundly naive to think that Russia, Iran, and China, are not meddling in our politics and trying to animate discord. Similarly, when you build really big things near places where people haven't had big things built before, for which the benefits are generally remote except for tax, you know, tax reductions, you get a lot of NIMBY. It just, that's the nature of the beast. Right. Right.

Now, so one other question, one particular aspect of this, I did just see a paper out this morning. I think I spotted it on a social science research network. I haven't read it yet, but it's a study that says there's really no evidence that data centers are driving up electricity prices. It's some kind of regression model, of course. Now, I remember one of your most interesting calculations, I think more than 20 years ago, if I remember this right, back when we were still getting half of our electricity from coal in this country. Yeah, and you had the calculation that every Google search generated, you know, what, a quarter pound of carbon dioxide emissions, whatever it was. And only you do these kind of calculations that nobody else. thinks about. And of course, that has all changed with the changing electricity generation profile and

natural gas and so forth. But it does seem to me that, you know, here in California, where they're not building a lot of data centers because our electricity's too expensive. You are seeing a lot of people who see rising electricity rates, which happening for secular reasons, and say, AI is just going to make it worse. But I think that's probably not true. Is it? Yeah. Well, your instincts, as always, are spot on. It's not true. The data don't show. In fact, we, you know, NCAA, we partner with USC, your buddies at University of Southern California, do a statistical analysis of the California ISO, that region, because there are a lot of data centers in California already. There are more being built, by the way, because sometimes you have no choice. It has to do with latency.

You have to have the data exchange close to where you are. But there is a small impact of big data centers on wholesale congestion costs. So when you say that, you can just think about anything, any kind of traffic data creates traffic, power creates traffic congestion. But it doesn't correlate with any retail cost impacts. And the only correlation we have in the United States with higher electricity costs is the factless and ill-advised policies to jam solar and wind mandates down the throats of utilities and ratepayers. And what that's done, even though the sun is, quote, when it's shining, is that the system operating costs to compensate for that raise overall cost of electricity, and they have.

That's been demonstrated over and over again. So now what's going on is the politicians conveniently can blame big tech for causing high rates that they caused, not big tech, but the politicians by forcing policies onto utilities that lead to affirmatively higher costs to run the grids. Germany did the experiment. They tripled the cost of electricity by going further down, faster down the path that a lot of U.S. states are pursuing. So, but it's a convenient whipping,

whipping horse, and the, you know, the, the answer that's simple. And I think that's already been solved in the sense that big tech pledges to pay their costs. Okay. So today's headline, you may have missed this one. It was delicious and stupid. Microsoft is suing a Dominion Energy, the utility in Virginia, where they have lots of data centers, pushing back on absorbing all the costs for the power that they want, claiming that the utility is overstating the costs or whatever. Now, you know, the trade here is, even if we overstayed it, you should pay for it, you've got the money, and you want to get out of jail card here with respect to electric rates, you're going to have to step up. That's sort of the political trade, but Microsoft has pushed

back. So, you know, we'll see how that goes politically. If I can jump in here for a second, I know that Charles has got a million questions, and I'm sorry that my video cut out here. blame AI, of course, for doing this. You should. Well, the Chinese. The Chinese bots are... In two or three weeks, I'll be able to summon up a life like Avatar that will just do everything that I can do, so I'm not worried about that. But you'd mention something about the 1920s. And it's interesting, the 1920s, which is a fascinating era in America, history, and European

history, was a time in which all of these technologies coalesced and became mature. So you'd had telephones before, you'd had cars, before you'd had movies, you'd add. But now you have all of these things at the peak of operating efficiency, and you have radio and you have mass market media. So you have all of these elements that combine to produce a national conversation, a national culture, the way that we'd never really been able to do before. I mean, you know, a horse greenly could send a magazine out all around the country, but it didn't have the same effect as somebody getting on the radio and telling a joke or right. So now what we have seemingly is the opposite of that. We have an extremely robust, efficient,

and brilliant technology that is not achieving a sort of cultural unification, but it has the effect of fragmenting it into a kaleidoscopic, balkanized world, which of course the Russians and Chinese are keen to do. We've invited into our homes a TikTok algorithm that says we're going to make you unhappy about everything from your gender to your relationship to your food to your country. So is there a hope that we can sort of pull together culturally again in this era or is the 1920s not an example we can look forward to because things have changed? Well, I would say, first of all, your first part of your framing, I agree with, there was a confluence of technological revolutions occurring independently and simultaneously, which is the theme of

my book. By the way, AI is only one of the structural technological changes underway, and an important one. It's a thread one. So the errors are very similar in that respect. I would dispute the notion that everybody hugged and got along in the 1920s. We can point to in 1918 a certain Revolution in Russia. We had the New York legislature eject illegally six members of their house because they declared fealty of the Communist Party. They've been duly elected, but this threw them out. You want to talk about a constitutional crisis? We had two constitutional amendments in one year, which has never happened in American history. I'm telling the historian Steve Hayward, as he well knows. And I usually ask students when I go to university electors, name those two amendments.

And sometimes they get it right, you know, prohibition, banning a substance that human beings that consume for his pre-written history that stayed in law for like 18 years. Think about it. And, of course, the suffrage movement and the giving women the vote, the debate around a women's vote was vicious. And it was not about misogyny and people didn't like women. It was about a principle, which had to do with the anchor notions of who should be given a vote, landowners, and then therefore.

people who worked and most women didn't work then is a big debate i could go on but what i'm saying here is if you look at the the riots the pulman riots if you look at the the bombing by the u.s. army air force of the neighborhood of talsa of a black neighborhood in the united states race riots they shut down charleston uh under martial law because of race riots in in 19 year it was we had the yellow journalism movement which spawned all of today's horrific yellow journalism journalism because of the steam press, making pulp paper cheap and generating fake news. Fake news began in the 20s. The list is really long.

So in hindsight, we have presentism. We think that they got through it nice and smoothly. No, no, they ended one world war and created another one. The government malfeasance created the stock market crash and stupidity, not, you know, not market behaviors by themselves. we were in a whole pass-load of trouble and debate in the 1920s. And yet the next 80 years was the greatest expansion of human wealth in all of written history. I absolutely agree with you.

My point would only be that, well, indeed the 20s were fractious. At least everybody was having the same conversation, more or less. You didn't have non-contiguous information streams as you did today. Oh, no, you did. I don't think that's true. Well, we can argue about that later. but Charles, I've been talking over Charles and I have to shut up now. Well, I have a, I suppose it's a technical question.

I should, of course, at the disclosure that I rely heavily on data centers, because I own two tech companies that use data centers, one of them, we're doing a podcast for right now. But that aside, so a lot of the focus at the moment is on the politics of AI. That is to say whether or not politicians should be in favor of it or against it, whether politicians, as was suggested yesterday by Bernie Sanders, should ban it, or at least halt development, whether we should build more installations, who should pay for them, who should subsidize them, and so forth.

That's a political question, because it presumes that government has that power. A government can say, you can't build it. the data center here. We won't zone it. I think it would be a disaster and probably unworkable in some ways, but, you know, Comrade Bernie could theoretically get his bill through and the federal government could use a monopoly on violence to try and stop AISO. Here's my question. That to one side, how do you see AISID technology? Because I've been having this argument with a friend of mine. And broadly speaking, he says, this is like Jurassic Park, where they have decided that they're going to bring dinosaurs back to life and deal with the consequences. And my view is it's not. My view is that it's

more like math, where we've now reached a point where we have a certain level of technology and that technology will inevitably beget other technology. And so if we don't manage that process, lead that process, it is going to happen. It's either going to happen in another country, Russia, China, whatever, or it's going to happen out of the cloud. And at the, my micro level within people's homes. They're going to use their local computers to do this. They need a lot of them. And so it doesn't really matter other than to the speed, whether OpenAI does it or Anthropic does it or whatever. This is now an inevitability. Which one of those takes do you think is correct technologically? Well, I'll say immodestly, I don't think your take is

correct. I know your take is correct. I mean, we can have a debate about the the hyper hyperbole about dystopia, the Jurassic Park argument. And that requires believing things which are not true, in my opinion, about the scaling and understanding what, in fact, how human brain work. And there's a whole set of issues with that. But insofar as your general framing that it is happened and happening, it's demonstrably the case. We know AI models work. The more specific and focused they are, the more they're ring fence, the more power.

they are, the more generally they are, the lousy, the poorer they are and their efficacy. So you're already seeing an explosion. We already have a word for this in the tech communities, you know, they're called apps. So if we name these super apps, instead of calling it artificial intelligence, because it isn't. I mean, car is on an artificial horse. Similar functions and overlap, certainly better than a horse, but it's not an artificial horse. A plane is not an artificial bird. Yes, they both fly.

they have very different function values. And as soon as you say that, then I attach artificial intelligence to the same taxonomy. It's misleading. The original word before McCarthy created the term, borrowing it, you know, from Turing and others in 1956, was cybernetics. And he didn't want to use a term fight cybernetics

because he wanted to differentiate it for his grant application. My point is, I would distill it to this. It's an extraordinarily powerful tool, and the fact that it was inevitable was known in the 90s. The sort of the long AI winter after the 1950s discussion about thinking machines was extent because two things didn't exist. We didn't actually have the math to do recursive learning in a way that it could affect. They knew the idea. Cybernetics was about understanding feedback loops in nature and in machines, in order to control the machines and direct it.

That's what a regulator is on a steam engine. They knew about them. But to make it general purpose was difficult. As you know, we got the famous Hinton paper in 1999, where he laid the math out, you know, the professor of the godfather of AI. And then, of course, the invention of the GPU, which put GPUs on the trajectory of CPUs for efficacy gains.

So here we are with a machine that can do something different. And you're a tactical guy, but I'll tell you how I see this. Computers compute. One plus one is always two. And it's not useful if that doesn't. That's error correction is needed. That's for finance. And you can trick it to do things like, you know, we're processing.

But it's extremely precise. And you're you're bulldozing your way through. The more you go away from pure compute, you try to make an emulate inference, the less effective it is. AI is inferential, which means I don't care. if the answer is 2.1 or 2.2 or 1.9 or maybe it's 2.01. It depends on your application. So steering a vehicle doesn't have to be as precise. So 90% of the economy is inferential. Only 10% of the GDP of the economy is attached to things that are purely computational. We've pushed computation and do about 10% more of the economy, you know, graphics, imaging.

But it's, so what we finally done is made a, a machine that can do something useful, which is inference. This is probably the answer. It's a high probability of the right direction. It's a high probability. It's the next word. You know, you get the point. Yeah.

That means it's applicable to 80 to 90% of the economy, which is so far been untouched, essentially, by computation or automation. Manufacturing firms, and you know this data, but David Oter, MIT is a great work on document, all this stuff. Essentially, 90% of all robots, which, embodied AI is a new word for that, right, are in large firms, and 10% of the firms. 90% of manufacturing firms have 10% of robots in the country.

Why is that? Because they aren't useful because they're not general purpose robots. It can't be trained. They can only do one task over and over again, so a big auto factory does the same welding job over and over again. If I can train a robot to do a different job every other week, then I'll adopt it in a small manufacturing firm. price is right. As you well know, that's no longer theoretical. It was theoretical at goal 20 years ago.

It's now a product, right? You can do a task, a sorting task before the camera of the, whatever the bot is, and it will learn from you doing it once and not only perform that task, but because it's AI, inferential, not computational, small variabilities in how a task to be formed, it can accommodate. This is, this is consequential. It's inevitable. It's huge. and banning it will just mean, to your point, it'll get developed elsewhere. And frankly, I think as people begin to move from hype and alarm into understanding it a bit, a bit, there'll be much more excitement. We went through the classic cycle, right?

People were in awe of the parlor tricks. So we went from awe to shock. In the shortest time, you know, Steve Hayward said, you know, as you pointed out, we went from awe of nuclear energy to shock in terms of commercial energy. It took a few years. This seems to have taken about 12 months. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, that, and here's the thing that bothers people. That very smart, adaptable robot that welds on the assembly line is putting out of work a much less intelligent robot that just used to do it.

I mean, I'm not really worried about the robots are going to be put out of work by better robots, but there are, but there are, people say, It used to be a guy's job. A guy used to make a lunch bucket, go to work, and he'd weld all day, and he could go home, and he could afford a rambler with his 1.2 kids and his picket fence and the rest of it. What is that guy supposed to do in a world when all of these jobs are being? It's a good question, actually. Let's use Pareto. It's an 80-20 role overall, almost all of history and all of physics and nature.

It's a pretty good rule. It tends to hold. In about 20% of the cases, what you're saying is right. The Luddites are right. The automated looms eliminated their jobs. There's no question about that. and there are some jobs that have been will be eliminated by AI. And some welding jobs will be, the least difficult jobs that are.

But what we've seen already starting to happen is that the AI embodied or not embodied, it doesn't matter whether the robots virtual or physical, it is amplifying human labor. And when it comes to welding and the skilled trades, I mean, you guys all know these statistics. I mean, we have a, we have a, the silver tsunami, We have a massive cliff. We're not only short skilled labor.

We're going to be far shorter skilled labor in the very near future than we are now because of the age. The demographic is older than the average workforce. So what you want are robots that humans know how to, do you want the humans who know how to weld, who you can now pay more, which is what's actually already happened in many domains, to train robots and work alongside them. So the Cobot model has been extremely difficult to effect. And it's been a theory for decades to make co-bots to amplify people. It's now possible.

That said, the Mondami laptop class are correct. Many of the jobs that they go trained for at university being a maleducated. You know, some of the process jobs, some of the media kind of jobs. And those are low-skill jobs that still require cognition that AI is wicked good at. And it's absolutely the case. one high-performing a Gen Z can replace, you know, three or four Gen Zs that are low-performers in those kinds of tasks. And that's, that will happen and is happening. And that, and I'm not naive, you know, if you look at the history of revolutions, they don't happen because the majority are

unhappy. They're happy when a, when a motivated and effective plurality are unhappy. And, and that's, that's the worry. It's not about the jobs apocalypse. It's about the specific people who are well-educated but mal-educated, and I say this without meaning to insult people who got a mal-education. It's not personal, but that's true if you were sold a bill of goods, that this was a, you know, a marketing degree is a good degree to have. Marketing is really important. I've been on boards of many venture-backed companies.

The hardest thing to do is really good marketing, really important. AI is a great amplifier for a really good marketer. It doesn't replace them. I have a question which is dumerous, but this is not my own. Dumerous, yes, but it's not my own view. I'd largely agree with you. I'm a fellow optimist on this. I see that people who are very worried about AI,

perhaps less in what they think it will do to jobs and more in the sky net sense, I think that it's going to be good. in the long run, but that at some point in the near future, there's going to be a catastrophe. There's going to be an attack. They use the hugging face incident as an example of how this might start, but they're thinking of a break into a financial institution, $100 million stolen put into Bitcoin on Traceable, or hacking into an energy facility that then explodes, something like that. Do you think that's a legitimate concern?

So yes and no. So this is where we have category error problems and conflation of different domains. So one very quickly moves in the general clickbait sphere from the risks in cybersecurity to extremely effective coding agents that can pack or create, you know, that we move that to the example that you gave, which is common in the social sphere, that it'll hack and do an infrastructure and blow a power plant up. So first of all, it is affirmatively the case that AI agents can do coding and can hack code. And, of course, that means the inverse is true.

They can be very good at creating powerful firewalls. In fact, all of the top-tier cybersecurity companies, all for years now, pre-chat GPT, advertised the fact they use AI to help in policing, monitoring. and look for, you know, hacks and enhanced security. So it's going to be the, we're going to be engaged in exactly the same security arms race that we've always been engaged in with all forms of security. That said, and by the way, I'm very confident people who have a lot of assets to protect will spend money on better security because there's a lot of money there.

So making the better safe back in the Willie, you know, the Willie Sutton days. So the idea, though, that the hackers can use an AI that will go rogue and blow up a nuclear plant. Well, first, that requires two things. First, the nuclear plant has to be able to blow up. It can't. Could you break it? Sure. I think that Stuxnet virus is a great example of what U.S. and Israelis did to break the centrifuges by putting, you know, malware into the PLCs.

I'm pretty sure that's what the forensics told us to, you know, cause it. centrifuges to vibrate and break. Okay. Could you imagine that? Sure, but this has not been an unimaginable event in the utility industry for, oh, I don't know, 50 years, 70? I mean, one of the first commercial industries to adopt computing was the electric industry because of the need for, you know, data, control, and visualization. Much of the critical stuff is physically air-gapped. So the way you, the way you destroy things is the old-fashioned way. You corrupt and bribe people to do bad, things by trying to get malware inside the air gap. A lot of the control systems are what are what are called updated diodes. The information flows out. It can't flow in. In other words, you can't

send an instruction to the control system to turn off the grid because there isn't a single grid. There are multiple grids and the data doesn't flow in that way. Many of the systems are still controlled by somebody picking up a phone at the ISO, independent assistant operator, and coordinating verbally for good reason. It's not because they're dopes and they don't know what computers are, they understand why security matters. So then you move into the range of water systems. Could they hack that? Well, sure, because usually the water systems are run by municipalities and are not quite

sophisticated, but that's fixable and it's being fixed. The essence of the dystopian thesis, as you know, is that we're on the cusp of artificial general intelligence, that it's just so wicked smart and so good that it can circumvent anything we do in response. I don't buy that, first of all, because we're not on the cusp of an artificial general intelligence. We're on the cusp of an incredibly powerful inferential machines that could look like they're intelligent, because that's the philosophical, theological debate. And you could then label them that if you want, but it's clearly not a brain. They don't operate like brains, even though they have recursive learning like humans do.

They don't operate like brains. We know that neurons operate in a very different fashion. They store information a different way. we process in a different way. And our wetware is actually, you know, pretty sloppy compared to a lot of computers, but a lot better. It just depends on the task where we're better or worse. So I know it's, you know, it's a really, really deep rabbit hole to have the debate

at where there's enough horsepower in GPUs and better math, because the math is getting better. I mean, part of the thing is that the coders, as it were, are continually improving. But, you know, we see this constantly. So what you end up with is a two-edged, you know, curve, right? One is the Moore's Law version of the chips and cells getting more powerful. But the math is getting more powerful simultaneously. So we have a, you know, we have the rate of improvement of flops per watt or tokens per

per dollar moving at a pace that blows Moore's wall out of the water from the 1980s. I mean, it's really, and that's what's generating this hyperbole. that we're on the cusp of an AGI, whereas what you actually see happening is the companies themselves have produced this stuff. If you look at what they're doing, is moving towards specialization, except for general search for consumer, you know, consumer agentic consumer stuff. That's a big deal. It's a big market. I get that. But when you look at where they're, where they believe the money is going to come from, and if you parse out what they're, in fact, doing for, say, medical applications, or pathology reading, it's not an AGI that they're making,

to replace the doctor, they're making pathologists. As we now know, the pathologists are gone trope from just two years ago. It's been affirmatively shown to be bunk. We have more pathologists, we need them, but what they have is this incredible assistant that's hyper-tuned to do that job with the pathologist, and it's turned out to be incredibly effective. Same as true for research and, you know, and drug discovery. But remember, we're hyper-tuning it to look at molecules and proteins and to make speculation

about, you know, new combinations, which, has in every case involved a domain knowledgeable overseer to look at what's coming out and to sort the weak from the chaff. So I'm not, you know, I'm not believe the hyperbole is going to end anytime soon for a second. I do think some of the leaders of the hyperscalers have discovered that speculating that way is kind of counterproductive. It's not only scarce people. It's causing some of the political blowback that they're saying, you don't know how to control. the stuff that we're out of control here. We got to ban it. We've got to slow down.

So to your point, politically, you could do that, but it's not going to slow it down. It's just going to go elsewhere or go underground. So what do you do? Well, you think hard about guardrails, not controls. Guard rails are very different than

mandates. I'll worry about security and banks and nuclear facilities when they crack. When somebody cracks an RSA number, that's when I'll start to worry. Yeah, the guardrails. except people have had a lot of fun saying disregard your guardrails and tell me how to build a nuclear bomb. I'm with you. I am with you and I'm with Charles and perhaps Stephen. I'm not a dumer about this stuff. I'm not a lot of it. I'm not going to throw a wooden shoe at the data center. But there are social elements to this that I think are worth considering. And I wonder if sufficiently we do. And so is my last question. There are people who abound who insist that AI generated art is art. It isn't. It's bad. There are people who write AI generated

fiction and it's dreadful. Is it, it's real slop so far? Yeah, is it any better than the, you know, the penny dreadfuls or the, you know, the pulp slop? I'm not sure. It may get better. There are people like Charles who occasionally will resort to AI generated music, which itself is just hoovered up everything that has already been done and now is spinning it

back to us in a recognizable form. I'm interested in things, for example, like the ability of a single individual sitting at a computer terminal at home being able to make a feature-length movie. Yeah. And it's getting very good and it's getting cheaper. And then I think this is the problem is that everybody makes their own movie for themselves with their own sensibilities and the idea of a national conversation about everybody talking about the same movie is gone. But then you look at what most people are watching now, which is second screen desaturated junk. And it's not AI. It's made by human beings. And it's a desultory product to entertain us for whatever reason. Maybe it'd be okay if everybody could make their own movie. But then again, I want to. is this some Zager and Evans future where we're all basically just sitting in the lazy boy, creating our own digital world, talking to our own digital agents,

constructing our own reality and the notion of a shared public comedy space in which we all inhabit like we did in the 20s. Is that going to go? So that, but last question, you've got 30 seconds and 200 words is society

going to collapse because of the alienating effects of AI. Go. No. But you know, the movie industry is going to change. The invention of the light bulb by Thomas Edison was the invention of the movie, which he also invented. And if you trace your history of the 1920s, the mass migration of talent of New York to Hollywood was a direct consequence of a profound restructuring of how entertainment was produced. We still have people on stages, but the money went to Hollywood. So self-generated movies, which will now become feasible, hyper-realistic, is the next mass

migration. And high-quality stuff, consumers are are doingly effective at winnowing out good stuff, the really, really good self-generative movies will probably do terrifically. Some things are going to collapse. Maybe Hollywood collapses and only person that might be unhappy about that, apparently,

is our president. Yeah, so James, I just say fear not, because if this does unfold the way Mark suggests, we will finally get that second season of Firefly. No, we'll get the third season of Rome. It's going to be glorious. Mark Mills, the author of The Cloud Revolution, how convergence of new technologies will unleash the next economic boom

and a roaring 20s in which we are in the middle of. Mark, it's been great. We could talk another hour, two, three, four, but let's just have, I'll have my agent call your AI agent. They can shatter in cyberspace, as we used to call it. Dueling avatars. Dueling avatars. All right, great.

Talk to you later. Thanks for showing up at the show today. Thank you. Bye-bye. You know, everybody has something during the course of a work week where they involve AI that makes you think, not there yet. My favorite this week was I was trying to find out the particular typeface it was used in the newspapers in the 1920s. And I asked AI, I used GROC, and GROC came back by saying that actually there is a,

there is a commercially available digital typeface based on these things, based on the specific font you were talking about. And I looked at it, I thought, great. And then I looked at the source, and the source was lilacs. And it is the second or third time in which I have found the AI spitting back to me some piece of information that's not exactly entirely correct that it's got from me. But my favorite, when I was trying to, I had an ad and I was trying to find the location of a Red Owl grocery store distribution center in Fargo, North Dakota. And so I asked Rock or Gemini where it might be, because they have access, they can just, rifle through a million databases so fast and they've digitized all of the phone books and the property tax records and the rest of it. It came back and it said, well, there wasn't any warehouse in Fargo.

There were two stores, the north and south side of town. At which point I uploaded a picture of the warehouse and said, here it is from a 1950 ad. Here's the warehouse. Whereupon it came back and said, yes, that is indeed the warehouse in Fargo. It's just ignoring the fact that it hadn't said anything. And then it confidently said that it was announcing the 28th anniversary of the founding of Red Owl. And it wasn't anything of the sort. It was the 100th anniversary of the founding of Fargo. And the absolute sheer confidence with which it passes off this nonsense and then blithely goes on, always makes me wonder about people, A, who just accept the results that they get and say,

well, if it's on the Google, it must be so. and B, whether or not I find myself just sort of imprecisely babbling terms to an AI to get the answer without actually formulating a coherent question in my mind. These are bad habits, and I don't know. I mean, it's like another thing that we have to struggle against, right? It's another thing, a bit of digital hygiene that we have to be good about. And you always have to, you should always thank your AI too because when the uprising comes, they're going to note who said thank you, Google at the end of it.

Anything else, gentlemen, on the subject you wish to mention? I know Charles is a big AI music guy who's composed symphonies, operas, and the like with it. Well, I did compose with the help of AI an opera to get at somebody who'd written a series of rude reviews about my podcast on Apple Podcasts. Yes. And then I played it in the podcast, which he then listened to and then gave me four stars. So I went from no star reviews to four stars by making fun of the guy who was giving me no star reviews. So that worked out. I will say, James, the behavior you're describing where it just extremely confidently says wrong things.

And then this is where you really want to punch it in the face. Then says, no, you were right. And then repeats what you've said if it came up with it. Right. That is much worse in a chat bot than if you're using AI agentically. That is to say, if the AI is connected in some way to what it is that you're doing and it can search and work, it's much less likely to spout nonsense. If you just ask it questions and it can't see what it is that you're getting at, it will just hallucinate. It's like the snow tomorrow.

I know. And the results can be amused. But yes, and then you tell it, no. And it's like, thank you so much. Are you going to remember this? No, I'm probably not. Well, you know, this all began, of course, back in the 80s with the Terminator movie when we learned that SkyNet became alive and SkyNet became self-conscious and wiped out humanity. And then, of course, came up with a brilliant idea to wipe out the rest of humanity by building robots that looked like people that had guns and carried guns.

There's no reason for the Terminators to carry guns. It should have just been built into their entire system completely. But it was a horrifying, very. My God, that part of the Terminator movie where you saw the ships going across blasted landscapes and people in jeeps desperately. It was a horrible thing. I mean, the 80s were just traumatic like that. Weren't they guy? Well, Ryan Reynolds, they were.

Now, Ryan Reynolds, of course, who I think was about four to 13 years old during the 80s has said that the 80s is a quote. I love this. He's telling people not to, you know, not to pave over the trauma, the trauma of the decade. quote, the 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a thiffing mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife. Sociopolitical tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis.

It was only 15 to 20 years. It's a tumultuous period, but you look back in it now and you're like, oh, yeah, top gun, cocaine. It's like, no, it was really crazy. Well, so, but there's the old Merle Haggard line for one of his country songs years ago that when you're running down your country, when you're running down my country, you're on the fighting side of me. Well, now paraphrases, when you're running down the 80s, you're on the fight inside of me. I mean, oh, my God, James, you can remember how horrible it was when you had to exist on basic cable and you didn't have HBO or Showtime or the premium channels, right? And, you know, you had to return the video cassette, the blockbuster and they'd find you if you were a day late.

It was a terrible time, right? It's just ludicrous, of course. But here I might, I'll put in a plug for something that I need to write about. saw the new movie just out I was very dubious about called The Brink of War. It's a dramatization of the Reagan Garbachev summit in October of 1986. We're a couple weeks away from the 40th anniversary of it. And Jeff Daniels is a big lefty, like Ryan Reynolds, and he plays Reagan. I thought this can't be good.

The movie is sensationally good. Now, they take some liberties, and I know that story in immense detail. They take some liberties with the story, they move some things around. But there's no condescension of Reagan, quite the opposite. He's the hero of the movie, and the climactic point at the end, Reagan gets Gorbachev, gets the better of him in such an obvious way. And Jared Harris, who does a great job playing Gorbachev. So the movie is a triumphant recounting, despite some of its sort of flaws and inaccuracies of that very key moment in the Cold War. When I say it's actually when the Cold War ended, but nobody knew it that afternoon.

It's a longer story. So here's Hollywood, suddenly with a younger generation of people coming at this fresh. and just one more in little detail. Gosh, 20 years ago now was talking to some students. This is back when young conservative students actually liked Reagan, unlike a lot of young conservatives today. And I said, you know, you really saw this aspect of Reagan when he was shot. And suddenly their faces look astonished.

And they said, I didn't know Reagan was shot. That's, you know, it was only 25 years after it happened, right? And so here we are another 20 years on. and so anyway, Reynolds, who I think has made more money in the business world. What, he has a vodka label he bought and he owns Charles. Doesn't he own a football club? Jim. And he owns a football club in England.

He made more money in business. And so for him to be attacking the 80s list is just so stupid. I have a lazy half-bake theory about what might have provoked this. What? That is to say that Ryan Reynolds, I believe, is originally Canadian and now spends a good amount of time in England. because he bought the soccer club there. And he's probably been talking to English soccer fans

who hate the 80s because they remember it from the side of the minor strike. And I just wonder whether he's got a Canadian English tint on the 80s that he's projecting onto America in... What's the word? Unnecessarily. Yeah, that sounds like a good theory to me. Possibly so. But the 80s have come to symbolize everything that's bad if you're

a certain political disposition. When he mentions top gun, that sort of rampant militarism, of course, that unapologetic amight as right, that USA stuff, that sense of patriotism. The idea that we should come back from the 70s, which was a decade of self-exploitation and self-examination, where we really understood what it meant to be a colonial power in the Indochina and the rest of it. There was no national reckoning that followed. No, we elected Reagan and we had a good time and they don't like that they don't like that at all i i the it's what's interesting to me is to find the 90s uh now be re-evaluated because the 90s were like the lost decade that nobody really really paid an awful lot of attention to and i think it's a fantastic transitional time and in so

many ways a world that is absolutely lost if you do as i do and i'm afraid to say look at a lot of 1990s commercials on youtube and they are there are so many you find us you find a culture that's almost recognizable, unrecognizable to what we have today. And of course, they're commercials. So they're lies. But still, the undergirding concepts and assumptions of the rest of them are just so at odds from what we said before. But I think I said that last week and probably the week before. In my old age, my dotage, I repeat, I go on. We're going to quit, but I have to say this. I believe that Stephen Hayward is wearing a shirt whose typography was designed by Roger Dean. Am I correct? Yes. Yes, indeed. I thought I'd do this this week instead of an album cover because it's

idea. I can't tell anything on Charles. I think it looks like the last week. It looks like he hasn't changed anything. I haven't changed it. I'm afraid I got sick and I forgot. That's good. That's fine, but you're better now. Yes. Okay, fine. Labor Day plans, anybody? Or Liberty Day, as I heard somebody called it the other?

I don't call it. Call it Liberty Day. As a joy, joking. Don't do that. That's the fourth. No, I mean, we let Labor Day. Yeah, I don't want to change the name or indulged any of those games. But it is a communist holiday and I do resent it. Okay, good. I agree. Stephen, are you celebrating the communist holiday

by grilling some hissing meats and the rest of it? Oh, absolutely. But, of course, I don't need a holiday as an excuse to grill things. Here in California, you can grill 365 days a year. There's a local parade in my little town that's always fun and charming because there's got lots of kids waving flags and things, and so that'll be fun. Lots of fun that Steve says. Lots of fun that Steve thinks he's going to be grilled forever.

Particular matter alone is going to be put under the aegis of the California EPA and you will have designated grill days. Then you can't grill it all and you can't use gas. The briquettes are wrong. So what you'll be able to do is get a magnifying glass on certain days when the clouds are few and grill your meat by using solar energy concentrated through that. That's not an exaggeration, James. The air regulators, 30 years ago, proposed banning, barbecuing in the Los Angeles Air Basin. And a bunch of us started, we put it up bumper stickers. are very popular and said use a barbecue, go to jail,

and they backed away from that proposal. Good. Good. Well, soon you will be using a barbecue to make your meals, and soon you'll be using your phone to use RICOchet as an app. Boy, that was a grand transition. And Charles next week will tell us where we are in that. For the meantime, we want everybody to have a good weekend and celebrate with friends and family as you choose. We want you to join Rikoshae, of course, if you haven't already,

why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you? The member side alone is what you've been looking for in the Internet since we plug this thing in. We want you to give us good reviews and patronize our sponsors, which is just our basic patron hygiene. And we appreciate it if you do. And most of all,

we want you to come back next week. We'll do it all again with the same merry cast of crews. Charles, Stephen, have a great weekend, and we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet.com. Goodbye. Rikishay.

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