Pat (3:45)

What do you think about people who say we need to focus on turning down the temperature in this country? We have to tone down our political rhetoric. Because what seems to be lost on them is it really just takes one person to do one of these atrocious acts. Like with the Charlie Kirk assassination, for example. It's not the fault of the left or political people in general that he was shot. It's the fault of that one person who took it upon themselves to engage in the shoot. That shouldn't be reflective of what hundreds of thousands, millions of people think. I think it's absurd to draw such a conclusion. So is it incumbent on, like, you and me, for example, to supposedly turn. Tone down the rhetoric of our show as if we're encouraging violence? We're. We're not doing any of that stuff to begin with. So what exactly are we supposed to change here?

David (4:33)

Yeah, you know, there's this thing where oftentimes the people calling for something are most guilty of it themselves. And so the problem is there's an asymmetry here, right? Charlie Kirk is killed, and they say, we got to turn down the temperature. What they mean is, stop criticizing Trump. Trump immediately goes out and goes, liberal scum is responsible for this. I hate my enemies and my opponent, my opponents. He said at the eulogy, which is such a crazy term to use. It was no eulogy. It was a political speech. And so they're turning up the temperature. But then if I just go like, hey, farmers are getting screwed by these tariffs. They go, oh, that's exactly the type of rhetoric that led to the shooting. And it's like, no, they have that sort of rhetoric everywhere. What they don't have everywhere are presidents inciting insurrections. Right. You know, and so. So there is this asymmetry in their demands.

Pat (5:28)

But of course, any time you bring up Trump, they'll just claim that you have Trump derangement syndrome. They won't accept that there is a double standard here. And what they're asking for. They want left wingers to supposedly turn down the temperature, but they don't expect that from Trump, maybe because they know at this point that that's just not in his nature. He's not the type of person to do that. So he's. They've given up on that. Or they just view him differently. He gets a different set of rules than the rest of us. Because every time I see this double standard get pointed out to them, they always say, oh, all you can ever do is bring up Trump. And they don't address the actual issue here, which is that they're not being consistent.

David (6:05)

Right. And of course, the reason we're bringing up Trump is Mitt Romney isn't out there saying this stuff. Right. Who's another nominal Republican, like even Rand Paul, who I find totally distasteful in terms of his views. He's not out there turning up the temperature. And, you know, maybe I'll end up having to eat my hat on that. I don't think Rand Paul is out there saying this sort of stuff. The reason the focus is on Trump is because Trump and the people he's chosen to have around him and Caroline Levitt, Stephen Miller and others, they are the ones that are primarily the purveyors of this. And so, again, it's just an attempt to defeat an argument without a real argument where. Oh, you're just talking about Trump. Well, he's the guy who said that we've got to stop this leftist scum. That's why.

Pat (6:49)

And of course, and not only is he one of the only ones doing. And he's also the President of the United States. And that's still supposed to matter. Right? What the President says is supposed to be reflective to some degree of what we as a country think. And, and sure, that's eroding over time because people don't like or trust what Trump has to say. But, you know, it's still a much different standard than even a senator or congressperson saying some of these things, let alone one of these commentators that they tend to equate the president to, without a doubt.

David (7:19)

So, listen, we're going to wait and get the full details here, but this is part of a much broader cultural rot, and that I think is much more difficult to fix. You may remember the other assassination attempt of Donald Trump this was Ryan Routh, who was caught in and around Donald Trump's South Florida golf course. He has now been convicted of attempted assassination. Now, I genuinely have some questions on this, Pat, and I want to get your take on it. You may recall that the rifle was not fired. Secret Service caught this guy, and the argument was he had the intent to. To assassinate Donald Trump, and that by being there with the rifle, that was a substantial step in his attempt to assassinate Trump. He faces life in prison. Now, I don't deny for a second that this is someone who was there with the goal of killing Trump. I just wonder, like, would your average person who is caught somewhere with a gun be charged in this way? I don't know. I'm just not sure. Without ever having even approached the potential victim or fired the gun. Maybe that's typical in terms of attempted assassination. I don't know.

Pat (8:31)

Well, yeah, I mean, I'd have to imagine there's a different set of rules when it comes to a president. Right. So if you are in the vicinity with a gun and you have plans to assassinate the president, they're going to throw the book at you. And I'm not surprised, especially because this attempt took place, what, just weeks after the one that Trump got shot in, that Trump nearly died in. So, of course they're going to be serious about it. And I don't buy his defense that he didn't plan on shooting Trump. Why else would you be there with the weapon? He argues that he had an opportunity to shoot the president from a long distance away, but decided not to. So that goes to show that he didn't intend to kill the president. Well, no, that probably just shows that you're waiting until he got closer so you'd have an easier shot at him. Also, something strange that happened was that after this conviction, yeah, this man tried to stab himself with a pen, of course, you know, unsuccessfully. And I think it goes to show that this was probably just someone who was clearly not in the right state of mind and certainly deserves the penalty that he's facing.

David (9:39)

Yeah, I. Every aspect of this just goes, again, to some of these bigger issues, like how many times are we going to have very similar sorts of analyses on the same situation? At some point, it's like, hey, until we change something, this stuff is going to continue happening. It is different, as Pat points out, because we are talking about a president here, but it's another young man, happens to be white, decided to try to take out whatever grievances he perceived against the president, whether even doing that Successfully would have satisfied whatever sick belief he had about how he would solve problems. Kind of doesn't even matter. So I think that we really need some kind of situation. By the way, this guy was not young. Right.

Pat (10:29)

I was about to correct you on that. He was 58, 59 years old.

David (10:32)

This was a 58 year old. It's another. Another white man. This one happens not to be a young guy, but. But often they are. I don't know. I'm kind of out of ideas, Pat. Like, if we're not going to deal with the gun aspect, if we're not going to deal with the cultural rot, if we're going to just talk about mental health without. Without actually encouraging and making it easier for people to access mental health services. None of these things individually would prevent every shooting, of course, but there are things that we talk about and we never do. I don't know, Pat. I mean, is it a race to the bottom where it's just like the solution is get better security?

Pat (11:04)

Yeah, it may be. I mean, it's a terrible situation that we're in, even when we think about solutions that don't involve the guns. Because maybe we view the gun issue as futile in this country with the amount of weapons that we have. If we just want to approach this from trying to change our culture or change, like, mental health in this country or change how the media covers these shootings, all of those things aren't easy to do. All of those things would be tremendously uphill battles. So I don't see a solution in sight. And it's terrible, but I think events like this are going to continue for the foreseeable future.

David (11:40)

Yeah, it's just like, what's going to stop these events? It's just nothing's happening that would stop the events. So it's unlikely that. That we would see them stop. Hey, I don't know if you remember a story we did a little while ago about legal briefs being filed which had references to cases that didn't exist, which led to the understanding that Chat GPT generated some of this stuff. Well, now a California lawyer has been assigned a. Has been levied a $10,000 fine for filing a state court appeal full of fake quotes generated by ChatGPT. And the verdict is that 21 of 23 quotes were made up by Chat GPT. And the court said that this ruling and $10,000 fine should be seen as a warning. This is a warning that briefs, pleadings, motions, or papers should contain citations that are real and that even if they are provided by Chat GPT, the attorney ultimately is responsible. You can't say, well, ChatGPT came up with it if the as an excuse. If the lawyer submitted it and signed their name to it, then that is their responsibility. This is going to become a bigger and bigger deal, Pat. And I know I have a lot of lawyer friends who have already acknowledged a bunch of the work I do is going to be taken over by AI eventually. How soon that is going to happen is sort of a question mark. But certainly like I have friends in real estate law, they're like, you know, first of all, a lot of countries don't even require lawyers necessarily for real estate transactions. Or there might just be a lawyer that's sort of like handling paperwork, but not that each party has a lawyer. Anyway, the point is a lot of my real estate lawyer friends are like, ChatGPT is going to get pretty good at handling a lot of this stuff. We're going to be more valuable for the advice and counsel around business issues or strategy. But especially given that even many lawyers believe this is inevitable, we still have to be clear on who's ultimately responsible for what's submitted. And right now it's still got to be the lawyer.

Pat (13:49)

Yeah, absolutely. And this happened a while ago, back in July 2023, I think. ChatGPT got released and got popular at the very end of 2022. So people were still getting used to the technology. They didn't realize that sometimes ChatGPT will make stuff up even though 90% of the time, whatever, things are fine, sometimes it will hallucinate and you can't trust what it says. Yeah, of course, using just a made up number there, but that's in my experience about how it works. And it even says at the bottom, if you read the disclaimer that sometimes it makes mistakes. And to check important things, I think we should treat it largely like we do Wikipedia. Right? Which is you can go to Wikipedia and pretty much 90% trust what you read. But how you really verify it is to click on the links that it provides and see for yourself what the primary source information says. You can use ChatGPT in a very similar way, which is it can come up with the answers for you. Also include the citations, click on those citations and make sure what it's saying is actually backed up by the primary source material. So we can still take advantage of AI, lawyers can still use it for their research and I'm sure it helps a tremendous amount. Right. You don't have to seek out the information yourself. It can just assemble it for you, but then you just have to take that extra step of verifying everything. And I don't think that's. That's. That's that hard.

David (15:04)

I have so many friends who teach college right now. They said a lot of their work is. Is now just trying to figure out how to get around students using chat. This includes even just for emails written to them, like, obviously for assignments, for tests, for work, no doubt, but even just, like, for emails. They have come to believe that a lot of the emails they get from students are written by chat. Cbt, certainly, like the blue notebook with a pen in class is one way to do it. It's not really applicable to every single class type necessarily, but they're beside themselves about what to do here.

Pat (15:43)

Yeah. Because the notebook with the pen in class isn't really what we're doing in the world today. And in fact, in many areas, we are using ChatGPT for work. So we want to prepare students, but we also want to make sure that they're not cheating. So I don't envy their position. That seems like a really difficult place to be in.

David (16:01)

Yeah, I would not want to be teaching college right now. That's. That's for sure. I'm glad my tenure, and I'm not using that term literally, I didn't have tenure, but I'm glad that my tenure teaching is not. Not active at this point in time. I guess I would say you just.

Pat (16:15)

Wanted to be able to say that you were a former professor. Adjunct at that.

David (16:18)

Exactly.

Pat (16:19)

Former professor and former professor.

David (16:20)

Bestselling author, former instructor. Exactly. All right, everybody, we'll be back tomorrow. New show and new bonus show if we're lucky.