Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 758: Truth Social, American "Healthcare," and Eclipse Conspiracies

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

               

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is cognitive dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome mat. This is today, Thursday, April the four. I want to say fourth, fourth, fourth.

How you doing, Tom? I'm good, man. I'm good. I'm a little disappointed because my, uh, my Trump media shares have they plummeted. Have they plummeted? Tom not really performed. See, so I checked it today because now I Am go officially obsessed with daily checking the collapse

So it was eight billion dollars when it launched whereabouts is it now? It's well as of today. It's dropped thirty three and a half percent Over its five-day high Wow, so it went from eight billion to somewhere in the neighborhood of six or less. Wow. Give or take. Yeah. So it was trading at like 70 some dollars a share and it's open. And now it's somewhere like 40 some dollars a share. I think I might still have it open on my phone because now it is my new favorite thing. I enjoyed watching. I enjoy watching the collapse of things. Sure. Yeah. You know, it's a joy. It's a cliffhanger.

That's for sure. And I have to admit, I was very surprised to see that once the SEC filing came out, that of course they're a $4 million revenue company with $58 million in losses. Is that a good or a bad cap of $8 billion? Is that a good or a bad place to be? I'm not an accountant, so I don't know. I don't know, I'm like. Yeah bro, they're trading at $46.15 a share.

What did it open at? It opened, let's see, go to. All time? $70. Wow. 69.7, so that was on March the 28th. It was 70, yeah. 69.7. So that was on March the 28th. It was a 70, yeah, 69.7. Now it's at 46.15.

And over the last five days, that's a drop of 33.78%. Because it never made any sense. Yeah. And the thing that like, the thing that is great about this, that I love so much is that Trump does not typically and historically take his companies public. So this is very, very rare.

So the last company he took public was like over 20 years ago. So he doesn't generally take his companies public. And one of the reasons you don't take a company public if you're a fucking shitey shaster shithead is that you have SEC filings you have to do. Those those those seem like they vet your company pretty well. They've got the fuck out of your company. is that you have SEC filings you have to do. Everything is public now. Those seem like they vet your company pretty well. Do they vet the fuck out of your company? They seem pretty thorough.

My wife is in the financial industry. That's right, of course, I know that. So my wife has been dealing with this sort of thing for many, many years. And she just joined a company, one of the few companies that actually crown funds people from YouTube, right? They do it through a very specific way. But she's working with YouTubers to help monetize their content. They're one of the only SEC filed companies

that are actually doing this sort of work. And the amount of hoops that they have to run through, not just to get it through the SEC, but then to advertise it afterwards is immense because you can't make certain claims. It's impossible to make those claims because the SEC will jump in and be like, you're not allowed to say that. Don't say that.

You can't say that. You can't say these things. You can't say this. They're very, very careful and very particular about the things that they can say. And you have to file all kinds of financial reports, which are then made entirely public. You have, if you are the subject of like a cyber security event, you have an obligation to notify. I mean, like, as soon as you do this, there's a huge amount.

And the SEC has something like, and don't quote me, please, I may be a little off. I just read something earlier. Something like a 90% success rate. I saw it prosecutions Yes, when you fuck around that's how often you will find out find out there's a 90% chance the find out right? I'm gonna find out. Yeah, so it's fucking delicious And then it's so they're like everyone's like oh, yeah, we're gonna buy Trump media fucking nonsense Corp or whatever and it's like oh So our filing shows,

we kinda only had $4 million in total revenue on an $8 billion market cap, that's fucking bonkers. You've gotta love that a notorious sandbagger gets caught. Yeah, man. You know what I mean? Like it'd be like if someone were to follow him around in the bushes while he's playing golf to show how much of a fucking cheater he is. Right?

You know, this is one of those moments where his, his mystique about being the powerful person and about being such an amazing businessman is open to the public and to show like, this is just, he's just a paper tiger. A hundred percent. And his company is a thousand percent. This is going to fold. Yeah. Like their own accountants in their filing to the SCC was like, this is pretty much not a sustainable percent. This is going to fold. Yeah. Like their own accountants in their filing to the SEC was like,

this is pretty much not a sustainable business. I mean, imagine this. You have 58 million dollars in losses on four million dollars in revenue. So imagine if you were in a bad position and you're like, OK, what if we doubled our revenue? No, we'd still be 50 million dollars shy. OK, what if Cecil? OK, no shy. Okay. What if Cecil. Okay, no, keep going.

What if, because I mean like. Keep going, I'm almost there. If you're a company and you're like, hey, revenues rose 33% last year, you'd be popping champagne corks, right? Sure, sure. Yeah, like everybody gets a bonus. Yeah, right. Yeah.

The executives get the bonus. But like, if your company, if your company. Not my company, damn it. Everybody gets a bonus. Here at Glory Hole Studios, if our revenue judge 33%... Everybody gets a bonus. Ian does not get a bonus, but the rest of us get a bonus. Sarah gets a bonus.

Okay, well, what if we quintupled our revenue? Oh no, no, we'd still be very, very shy. That's a lot. What if we increased our revenue 12 fold? Like duggered your revenue? Right. Yeah. No, we'd still be $10 million in the red.

That's how bad off they are. Brutal. I do want to also mention a quick story because I read this the other day. You mentioned golf. I read a story, there's a guy who wrote a book, it's coming out or maybe it's out, about, he wrote a whole book on all the ways Trump cheats playing golf. Are you aware of this?

So he said that he creates tournaments that no one shows up to and then he wins those tournaments. And then sometimes he'll be away from his club and his club will be holding a tournament. And then he will call back to his club and he will say, who won that tournament this weekend? And it's like Joe Schmo, the accountant or whatever came in and won. And they'll say, and he'll ask, what did they shoot? And they'll say, he shot a 61.

He's like, well, I shot a 59 this weekend at a different course, I won this weekend. He also will be routinely when he opens a course, he'll play it first before it's open He also will be routinely, when he opens a course, he'll play it first before it's open so that he sets the course record playing by himself with nobody else watching before anyone else is allowed to shoot the course. So like before they open the doors,

he's the course record holder. He's the biggest cheating cheater. He cheats in the most inconsequential game that's ever existed. Nothing has ever mattered less than golf. In all of the history of time, you can't do something that matters less than golf. And he cheats at that.

That's amazing. It's fucking, it's incredible. It's incredible. I cannot wait for all of this to just collapse on him. Well, I can't collapse collapse fast enough. I hope if true social collapses, it'd be amazing because not only would he take a pie to the face, but so would Devin Nunes, who's the CEO or whatever. So what I know he wants like the whole goal of taking this thing public was to get this big giant infusion of capital. But the only way he can get the infusion of capital because he can't sell his shares, right? So there's a moratorium, typically a six

month moratorium after you go public, so you don't just like go public and dump your shares, right? So, and then crash the share of your stock. So, and he's the largest shareholder. So, he can petition the board to pull that moratorium back. That's unlikely. But what I think he probably wants to do is to use his shares as collateral for loans, right? Because we talked about this back. That's unlikely. But what I think he probably wants to do is to use his shares as collateral for loans. Right? Because we talked about this before. That's how rich people get money, right?

They have a lot of collateral that they can't touch. All the banks are just gonna be like whistling and looking away when he walks up. Who's gonna fucking take this like fucking Confederate money as like collateral? Are you kidding me? Are you like Willy Wonka bucks is fucking collateral. I would like to sell my golden ticket, please.

This is, did you ever see the Simpsons episode about the dot com crash where like, it was like, well, there's like a giant roll, like paper towel roll full of stock. And he's like, well, you can take some stock on your way out. And they're just like pulling like paper towel roll of stock off the wall. This feels exactly like that. This is nothing. It's amazing. Every time you tell me something, I figured out you're lying. It's almost like you're faking. Oh yeah.

So the story comes in the Washington Post. Trump said he spoke to murder victims' family. The victim's sister said it never happened. These are people who were murdered by immigrants, right? So these are people who are illegally here without papers. The one person was murdered and they were in Michigan and he said he talked to him, but he never did. He didn't talk to anybody even close to it. He just said he did, which is shitty, right?

Like I think the main thrust of the story is that's super shitty, right? That's super shitty. And it's insulting to the person because you're basically using them as a political tool. You literally don't even care about this person or anything that happened to them. All you care about is the circumstances. The circumstances of this are delightful to you. And that's

why you want to seize on it. You don't give a shit about these people. And I think that's the important piece to take away from that one. But they also talk about a Georgia case where someone was murdered and they are Trump followers and they refer to all immigrants as animals. Yeah. I mean, just, you know, I- Repulsive. In some ways, I can never put myself in someone's position who has lost someone, right?

I've never had anybody murdered around me. So I don't know what that feels like. So I'm not discounting that I may feel upset by that and it may color how I view the world. I'm not saying, I'm not going to discount that because I don't know what that's like to go through. But really genuinely, when you think about it rationally, you're saying, I mean, are you really saying

all immigrants are animals? Because that's what it sounds like you're saying. Yeah, well, I mean, let's put this into perspective in a different way. If I had somebody that I loved that was killed by a 46- old white man with a beard. Right. I would not, I would recognize that that was a person who had motivations that

were singular, that committed a singular act. Right. I think that when it happens and that person that committed that murder doesn't look just like you demographically, we are more likely to ascribe to them categorical traits and put them in buckets, right? So like it would not, if somebody who was a 46 year old white guy

and they killed somebody with a beard, they killed somebody that I loved, I would not be like everybody with a beard is an animal, right? That would not be something I would seize on We seize on the things that are already other to us. Yeah, and we look at that and we say, okay Well, this confirms my suspicion. You're building a racism out of a stereotype, right? Yeah, so they and It's just so telling to me that anytime it's somebody that looks like you, we're looking for the reasons why they did it.

Oh, all of a sudden they had mental health issues, right? Or, you know, it was driven by, you know, this X factor or that X factor or this X factor. When it's somebody that in some way doesn't demographically resemble you, then we don't have, we don't do that. I mean, some of us, right? Broadly speaking, that's not as often done. I think you can really see a lot of this when you look at the questions media tends to ask

when they seek out the answer of why when murders take place. When the media looks for questions about why when murder takes place, if they're asking the why about somebody who committed a murder that reflects the dominant power structure in that society, they are never using categorical labels

in order to discover the answer to the why. What they do is they look at individual labels. When that person who commits the murder doesn't look like the predominant racial and socioeconomic power structure, all the questions they ask are categorical. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

And I just think that tells you everything. Well, and I think about how often they try to make it seem, even if it's not even related, they try to make violence now either be immigrant based, where they try to tack it onto immigrants, or they try to tack it on to immigrants or they try to tack it on to, I've seen this with trans people, where they're dying to make a connection early

as fast as they can to say trans people are violent. And they're trying to make those connections, even though there's no connection whatsoever. There's no connection whatsoever that should make you think that. But there have been bad actors in the information ecosystem that have been shitting that thing out as soon as they can, as soon as something comes up.

And they're even creating a trail that doesn't exist often. So you've seen that too, but really, really telling language by that person, like you say, they've already come in, authorizing that person. So now they just need to go one step further to racism. And just reinforce the whole thing. Just reinforce it all. And for Trump to use this as like this narrative, a murder is never, a murder is always a tragedy, right?

And so using somebody else's tragedy to score a personal political victory for yourself is fucking gross. Even if he had talked to the family, he would have done it cynically. There's no way that he was actually interested in talking to these families. He's not calling everybody in America who was murdered. He's calling their families that are murdered. He's not calling the families of shooting victims, because those don't score him the political points

that he wants with his base. He's calling up specific people, but in this case, he doesn't even bother to do that. And when they confront him on it, a spokesperson for the Trump administration says, well, they didn't talk to the immediate family. And it's like, they didn't talk to any of the family. This is another, I know a guy wants who?

Yeah. You know? And this also feels to me like picking the anecdotes you want out of a larger sample set. Right? Sure. We see this all the time when it comes to skeptical thinking. Very often, people who want to talk about cured.

I cured my own cancer by eating like raw liver or whatever the fuck they did. Those people will pull the anecdotes that they want to bolster their point. Oh, this person did the same thing and they didn't, they got better or whatever. They went into remission or whatever. These 15 people took placebos and they all felt like they went into remission, et cetera, et cetera.

So they're taking these small sample sets, these individual anecdotes, and then they're making some sort of narrative out of it. That's literally what the GOP is doing. They're finding the smallest sample set. When you look at the real data, which is what the Democrats are showing, is that immigrants to our country

with or without documentation, commit less crime, period. That's just true. That's just true. And it's backed by the facts. They go in and cherry pick as many as they can to say, look at how dangerous the immigrants are. Yeah, you know, and this, and actually it's funny too,

because when you delve into the cases that Trump is trying to use to whip up racist hatred in his base in order for him to score political points, right, that's exactly what he's trying to do. When you look at the case, like the one guy came over as an undocumented migrant as a child, right? So like the one guy came over as a child, lived most of his life in the United States. That guy didn't make a choice to immigrate. He's a child. He was brought here by somebody else. So again, no volition, no agency is involved. Then like essentially what happens, it sounds like,

and it's not a hundred percent, but it sounds very much like it's an issue of domestic violence. It is especially gross when you consider how prevalent domestic violence is and that that's a real problem and that that's a real problem. And that that is a problem that we should pour time and energy and political resources into. Like women are fucking unsafe at the hands of men as a result of domestic violence. Men are animals, Tom.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's especially gross that there is a real issue here that is demographic and that should be solved structurally. The issue of violence against women, domestic violence. And it's an issue that has plagued us forever and we're still not going to do anything about it, but instead we'll look at the least interesting thing about

that circumstance. The least relevant thing from that circumstance. Whatever fits. And the least likely thing to actually get any structural change done to make people safer. None of this is going to make anyone safer. No. Holy smokes. This is the bad place. This is the bad place.

This is the bad place. This is the bad place. The pit's getting angry. This is the bad place. Beef, beef, beef, beef. Oh, this is the bad place. Jesus Christ. This story is shocking.

I mean, it's so shocking. It's so shocking. It's so shocking. It's so shocking. It's so shocking. It's so shocking. It's so shocking. It's so shocking. Jesus Christ, this story shocked me. New scientists, US states had 65,000 rape-related pregnancies after banning abortion. Estimates suggest that there were tens of thousands of pregnancies as a result of rape between July, 2022 and January, 2024 in US states that have effectively that have effectively have total abortion bans.

I know we're gonna talk about the abortion thing and we need to, but I read this in like my jaw dropped at the fact that 65,000 isn't the total number of rapes in the United States in a year. No. It is 65,000 estimated pregnancies in 14 states as a result of rape. That's a branch on that tree that's pretty far down. That's a fucking narrow piece of pie here.

That gets sliced and sliced and sliced. And I do want to talk about the abortion thing. It's very important, but I read this and I read this number and I think there is no possible way we get to hear that number and know that number and look at where that number comes from and understand that and then decide that we do not live in a rape culture.

Yeah. 65,000 pregnancies, not rapes, but pregnancies and not nationally, only in 14 states. 14 states. That's an astonishingly tragic figure. Like you said, it's a tinier piece of pie, but when you think about how many women are sexually assaulted that you meet, it's a tinier piece of pie, but when you think about how many women are

sexually assaulted that you meet, right? Those numbers are high. Very high. Those numbers are high. And I know that there was people in the past that were pushing against those numbers and say, oh, those numbers aren't real. Those numbers aren't real. Just look at this tiny bit, right?

65,000 in a year and a year and a year and a year and a half, I guess, a year and a half. 16 or 65,000 in that, in those 13 states that resulted in pregnancies. Now that doesn't include any other types of sexual assault. That doesn't include anything that doesn't include that sort of penetration that can actually create a child. Think about that too, right?

The majority of sexual acts, the majority of even traditional PIV is not gonna result in a pregnancy. Yeah. Like it's like- That tells you how fucking prevalent this is. I mean, how many, like genuinely, and I don't know this answer,

but like how many women get raped in the United States every year? What the fuck is that number, man? That number is, that number is scary. That's gotta be a fucking scary number, man. Well, now we're gonna look it up. In 2020, this is from Statista. I don't know what Statista is. The top result on Google.

In the United States, significantly more women than men are sexually assaulted. In 2022, about 442,754 women were raped or sexually assaulted. Wow. One in every six American women has been the victim of sexual assault. So that should tell you, this is a prevalent problem. It doesn't go anywhere.

And I want to focus on it too, from another standpoint, I don't know if you remember, but when the whole abortion thing came up, everybody was talking about, well, we'll just stop rape. That was one of the things that they said was, well, we'll just quit. We'll just stop it. Well, now that there's no abortion, we'll just rape any women. Number one, you thought you didn't do that now until now? You didn't think it was do that now until now.

You didn't think it was a big deal until now. Back before this moment, you thought, well, that's fine. That's the numbers, the number. But then you say, well, we can't get abortion. And we're worried about rape. Well, fine. We'll just stop the raping. We'll just quit it.

We'll just quit it. Guys, no more raping. No, you didn't. No, you fucking didn't. And you didn't do anything about it. Guys, no more raping. No you didn't. No you fucking didn't. And you didn't do anything about it. And now, and the other thing you have to imagine too is, that's what's reported. Think about the women in those states and think about what happens if you get raped. How many of those women, if they had means, were like, I'm just getting out of the state

getting a rape kit. Maybe I'm going to get some day after pills, whatever. And then they're gonna go take care of it on their own without anybody, without telling anybody in those states. Think about that. Yeah. This is a horrifying compounding of tragedies. Yes. And the fact that this is a state-sponsored secondary

assault, this is a state-sponsored secondary sexual assault. That is what you have to think of. Yeah, you're absolutely right. That I think this, in my mind, is the only way that I can conceive of this, is this is now a state-sponsored secondary sexual assault. It's like the fucking governor of Alabama is choosing to violate again women

who were raped and assaulted. Yeah. To do that and to pretend that you're to violate again women who were raped and assaulted. To do that and to pretend that you're somebody of high moral character at the same time, the cognitive distance, the moral cognitive distance that these people must be able to hold at one time is astonishing to me. You can't, you really just have to be from a place

that just hates women. I mean, just hates women. I mean just hates women. Hates everything about women. Wants to remove anything, any gains, any gains whatsoever that have happened in the last 50 years, 60 years, seven years. They want to pull all that away from women and say, no, we're going to make sure that you can't be a full member of society. And that's really tragic.

This is horrifying. If Trump gets reelected. Oh yeah, that's another thing to talk about, right? There's a, we read an article about this in the Atlantic. There is a fairly strong possibility that he will push for a federal abortion ban or that a federal abortion ban will become effective. That's a real thing. This number of 66,000 is for 14 states. 14 relatively less populous states. So that number is

going to fucking skyrocket, man. It is absolutely going to skyrocket. And I want to point out too, if Trump gets elected, he gets elected in a Republican wave. There's no way he gets elected and all the people running down ticket from him that are Republican don't get elected. That's true. We're not going to have one or nothing. You're going to have a full on Republican government if Trump gets elected. You know what? That bears some time to talk about because that is the truest thing ever, right? Is that there is no possibility

that Democrats retain any political power at all. Literally zero. No, you don't get any. If Trump gets re-elected, it's the House, the Senate, and the executive branch. That's it, it's over. Yeah, yeah, they already have the judicial. So it's a House, Senate, executive.

It's all, and it's literally whatever they want. And there's not a judiciary that you can take it to to try to appeal your case. Because the judiciary you take it to will say, that's the way it works. Because who is the voter, right? Who is the voter that's willing to punch the Trump ticket and then split his ticket? Dick Durbin is our senator here. Yeah, right. Nobody is Dick Durbin plus Trump. Nobody is a

split ticket that's with Trump. It's literally impossible. You're absolutely right. That's terrifying. That's terrible. I hadn't even thought about that. Now that's something else to keep you up at night. God damn it, Cecil. We used to be friends. Remember when we said nice things to each other? We were friends once, damn it. I'm gay. Actually, I'm not. This is fucking so stupid. This story's from the friendly atheist. Actually, I'm not.

This story is from the friendly atheist. Prominent Christians falsely claim that Joe Biden chose Easter to honor trans people. These are Christians that don't know how Easter works. Look, I don't know how Easter works either because that shit's complicated. Here's what I want to say. Just because your fucking crazy moon holiday lands on Easter, that doesn't, lands on the Trans Day of Visibility, doesn't mean that you're, like, they're blocking your shit out. Trans Day of Visibility is a static day.

Always March 31st. It always stays that, it's always that day. If your crazy moon holiday fluctuates with the fucking lunar cycles, that's on your crazy moon holiday. Bro, do you have any idea? I didn't. I tried once to look up. It's complicated.

It's about it's 40 days from a full moon or something like that. I looked it up once. I'm not even kidding. It's like 40 days from a full moon or something like that. I looked it up once and I was like no. I'm not even kidding, it's like 40 days from a full moon. It's nonsense. Yeah, if they wanted to have Easter or whatever on a no moon or a full moon or a half moon or a handy moon, I don't know exactly.

They wanted to have Easter on a certain day. So now, Lent starts 40 days before Easter and Lent starts, so that day fluctuates. So, you know, if you wanted to go down to say the fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, which is when a lent starts in earnest, you've got to, you got to fluctuate. You could be down in New Orleans in February,

or you could be in there in March. You know, it can fluctuate. It changes by a couple of weeks, doesn't it? Several weeks, yeah. It's like, cause I remember. Next year, it's even farther down. It's going to be a 420. Is it's even farther down. That's gonna be a 420 Is it for 20 next year? They're gonna get pissed because it's a national weed day. That's my anniversary is gonna be

That's funny, oh, that's great. All right, it'd be five Six six. Yeah, okay six. I was like. You could do like we're rising again or something. You know, you could do it. Maybe we're six this year. Maybe it'll be seven. Seven. It'll be seven. All right. I don't know. How long have you been married? Between six and seven years, I think. I'm not five. Between five and seven. Wow. Some. I'll check my notes. Okay. The other thing I want to point out too is that in the same article, so not only are they bagging on Biden because he, he looked at the calendar. This is six. It's six in two weeks.

All right. Sorry. I had to do the math. Look, look, there's going to be somebody mad if you don't do that correctly. I was like, God damn it. I I gotta get this right. So, uh, all right, Biden. But Biden is saying, look, this, this holiday is happening on the same day, but I'm going to give it, I'm going to, I'm going to do it justice because it's an important day. We don't need fucking Easter visibility day. Everybody fucking, almost everybody celebrates Easter anywhere. You don't need, you need to worry about it. The other thing too, that they're, that they're pissed off about is that a while ago, the fucking egg council, Tom, the fucking the dairy council and the egg council got together and they went to the White House and they said, hold on when the egg council and dairy council

love each other very, very much. They get the beef council. But but in any case, they came up and they said, hey, we want to do a thing. We're going to promote fucking eggs because we want to sell eggs. And so they said, we're not going to do any religious ones. And that's been going on for a long time. But the headlines out there are all saying that there's not any religious eggs allowed during this.

That Biden won't allow them. Yeah. And I think't allow them. Yeah. And I think you get away with it if you were to not mention Biden. If you were to just say, they're not allowing religious eggs. And then you just put Biden's picture there. But instead they're saying Biden, that's not true. That's just not true. The other thing I want to ask you is, what apostle said Jesus laid the egg?

Where is the egg? When you pull the thing back, is he eating egg salad? What is happening with the egg? Does he push the egg through his hand? So the Cadbury Cream Egg. It's like the fucking 242 video where he spits out the egg and it goes through his hand or whatever. That's a deep cut for Ian. Yeah, it's an Ian deep cut.

He loves that. It's his favorite song. He'll tell you all about it, this cut he's going to do now. If you guys want to ask, Ian knows all the lyrics to Headhunter by Front 242, so ask him about it. You guys, it's ridiculous. Whenever we're doing a soundcheck, Ian will not stop playing this song.

He actually asks us, he's like, can you guys go out of your way, please, and play Headhunter by Front 242. So if you send Ian at Dissonance Pod a message, ask him about Front 242. It's his favorite band. It's his favorite band. We're gonna get him tickets.

The show's coming to Chicago. Yeah, I think it's a Cadbury Cream Egg issue. I think that the rock in front of the tomb was a giant Cadbury Cream Egg. If I remember my biblical, I'm pretty good with the literate. I do think that's probably true. And the thing is he had to unwrap it

and it doesn't come off and it's got like little pieces that stick to it. And then you crack it open and you hold it underneath your mouth. It's like a fucking nasty, fucking sperm slime that comes out of there. Do I love those so much when I was a kid? I fucking loved them. Same, but if you had one as a grown up.

And I had one as an adult and I'm like, this tastes like, it tastes like a fucking elf came in my mouth. It's the worst. And I've had that before. It's just like it. It's very sweet. I ate a lot of pineapple those elves. You remember that old Cunard? I got a hold of a North Pole elf once tastes like peppermint.

Dude, I had a Cadbury, I was the same way. Cadbury cream egg was, cause they're only around once, like once a year. Yeah. And they were such a fucking treat as a kid. They were the best. Oh my God. Sugar bomb, dude.

I was probably 30 and I bought one and I was like, I'm going to get a Cadbury cream egg. And then I go to unwrap it and it's impossible to unwrap. It's impossible to unwrap. Little bits of that foil stick to it. And then you're trying to peel it and you're getting chocolate under your finger. They hand it to the hottest hand guy there to hold for like a minute and then he puts it away. And then he holds the next one on the line and then he puts it away. And then when you get it, you're like, it's all fucking melted.

I can't even get it off of here. And then you bite into this fucking sperm-filled, cheap chocolate egg. And it is the grossest thing. It's like you've got to swap it with a friend. I feel like what you want to do is you want to just break the top open, take a condom and just shake all that out. And then you just eat the egg afterwards. Also let's return to the dairy and the egg council.

Sure, yeah, yeah. My guy, do fucking eggs need to be promoted? Is there somebody out there who's like, he's like, eggs? That one guy's like, I never heard of an egg. What is it? What animal? There's just somebody trying to make a Denver omelet with just ham and green peppers. Just, just, no, you know and tie this together eggs what the fuck it's a goddamn egg it's an ingredient food with his moustache and his dick voice and he's like beef is what's for dinner fucking promoting an egg you fucking kidding me? Like there's somebody out there like, I should try one of those. You know, the neighbors down the street, I think the Johnsons bought eggs the other day.

I would love to see the guy who's like, I don't believe this government chicken stuff. I am 100% a fucking pheasant egg guy or whatever. Right. Yeah. You know, there's like some like contrarian fucking hipster out there is like, no chicken eggs. No, I only eat open source fucking free range, organic cage free partridge eggs or some shit. I will tell you the one thing that would stop me from ever going vegan is eggs. I love eggs, man. I eat a lot of eggs. I love eggs. Among the things that would stop me from,

I all the time, like our nanny is vegan and all the time I'll be like, oh, you could try this. And I'll be like, wait, no, it has eggs. And I'm like, how do you not eat eggs? Yeah, eggs are the thing that I do like. Eggs are in all the food. Eggs are. They're in all the food. Eggs are, and eggs are also an amazing ingredient

in so many things. Yeah. And because they do like 10 things. Right. They do so many things. They add fat, they add structure, they add protein. They add so much stuff to, you know, you're talking about liquid, you're talking about actually, like you say, structure.

There's the fat in there, there's the binding power of it. They can add a leavening when you whip them. You know, there's so many things that they can add to a very, I mean, it's, it's, they're almost impossible to, unless you really know what they're doing in the thing, in the actual thing you're cooking, they're hard to actually substitute out. So you have to know what it's doing. Is it adding fat and leavening? Is it adding moisture and creating protein, you know, connections in there? What is it doing? And then you can maybe change it out.

But yeah, I mean, fucking A. Get out of here. Yeah, you don't need to, I'm your spokesperson. Egg Council should contact me. This is a long-form bet on the power of eggs. I'll do it, I'll do it all day. Are you kidding me? And I kind of look like Jesus.

Right. So that I could do it on Easter. I could go to the- You're fucking hired, man. Hire me, Egg Council. I'm your dude. God damn it, we need do it on Easter. I could go to the you're fucking hired man. Hire me egg council. I'm your dude God damn it. We need that big egg money. I Need a nest egg this episode of cognitive distance brought to you by eggs eggs fucking eat them Business bad fuck you pay me. Oh you had a fire fuck you pay me place got hit by lightning, huh?

Fuck you pay me. All right. This story is from the New York Times. It's kind of a longer article from Pizzagate to the 2020 election, forcing liars to pay or apologize. So long story short, there is a powerful, nascent but powerful movement of lawyers who are working essentially for free to hold liars accountable. And they've had some huge wins, $146 million win or thereabouts, I don't know if the exact number,

against Rudy Giuliani. And Jules. Billion and a half against Alex Jones. There are some others that are high profile, I'm forgetting. Trump, Eugene Carroll. Thank you, Jesus. Trump over $.G. and Carol. Oh, thank you. Jesus. Trump over a hundred million dollars. Defamation lawsuits may be the key to holding powerful people accountable for lying. The

article goes out of the way to say it's not going to stop disinformation at the sort of viral level. Yeah. But I think that that's actually a misunderstanding or a minimizing of the power of these lawsuits myself I think it's a minimizing of the power of the people who are spreading those lies Yes, right because we saw how much Disinformation dropped off a cliff once the drop got removed from Twitter And if you can shut him up about this stuff and when was the last time you heard a peep? I did Rudy Giuliani time. Yeah, man was the last fucking Chris heard a peep out of Rudy Giuliani, Tom? Yeah, man. He's fucking crooked. He's out there shining shoes.

Whatever he's doing to come up with that money. Motherfucker's getting sued again. Because after he lost the first lawsuit, and this is a problem, and I want to speak to this too. You cannot squeeze blood from a stone. So let's say you juice me for $146 million. I'm not, I don't have $146 million. Right? So it's not like you get a check for $146 million, I'm not, I don't have $146 million, right? So it's not like you get a check for $146 million.

You get what I have and then a lien lives on my everything. And then I continue to pay into that until we probably settle at some point. But I, at that point, I'm essentially kind of bulletproof. You can take me to court and win again, but what does that really mean? It's like getting like seven life sentences. What does the fifth life sentence mean? Sure. It doesn't mean shit. So like at some point you're, it actually kind of renders some of

these guys, if they're desperate enough and if they really want to hawk the message after they've experienced the maximum personal responsibility at a financial level, they're kind of scot-free. But like what it also does, I think, is it, and what this story minimizes, in my view, is what you touched on. I think it minimizes that these stories originate somewhere. They don't originate from your Uncle Joe and your Aunt Sarah and like your cousin Frank.

They're just moving it around. Yeah, they're players. Right, so, but it originates somewhere. So you gotta go after who originates this shit. That's a much smaller group of people. Yeah, and they're vulnerable. And it shows too, how you can get them to pay. And sometimes you force them to apologize.

You force them to take things back. You winning the judgment in itself proves your point in a lot of ways. We've seen that, you know, we might've even seen that closer to our own community that sometimes winning a judgment proves a point. So, you know, winning that judgment proves a point that you were trying to make.

And so the very fact is, is that people will see that. And especially if they hear that, you know, I don't know the last time I saw a viral clip of Alex Jones. Yeah, I know, man. I mean, I'm sure he's still producing a show and he's still being sad about it. But I haven't seen many viral clips of Alex Jones. Last time I saw Alex Jones go even remotely viral was because Kanye was in his orbit. That's the only read though.

And that was a minute ago. And that was a long time ago. It wasn't yesterday. So we're talking about a while back that he was actually only relevant because of the person who was in his orbit. So we're talking about some chilling effect it's having on some of these people

who are these big players in the disinformation field. I hope that more and more people start to do this. I would love to see more and more people start to work their way in and say, you can't say that sort of thing. You can't, you shouldn't be allowed to say that in a public square. And libel laws are hard to win too.

In America, hard to win. Yeah, yeah. What is encouraging is that they continue to set a playbook and a precedent. Yeah. And that shit is important, right? And I think it should, at some point, begin to make the big liars quake in their boots, right?

The RFK juniors need to be quaking in their fucking boots at some point. He's a massive spreader of disinformation, massive spreader of disinformation. Has been my whole life. I think my entire life that guy has been a fucking massive misinformation machine. I want to see these guys all go bankrupt, like all of them. So, and more people will come up and take their place, right? The incentive structure is always going to be there. And,

you know, there will be problems too. It can't knock the whole thing down flat, but I think that what you can do is throttle some of the air out of it. You can't knock the whole thing down flat, but I think that what you can do is throttle some of the mind! I'll show you the life of the mind! I'll show you the life of the mind! I will show you the life of the mind! A mom's $97,000 question, how was her baby's air ambulance ride not medically necessary? This is just a story that speaks to the structural problems of trying to pay for a necessity

like medical care with a bullshit liar's system that is rooted in capitalism like insurance. We are a country that has decided for insane reasons to rely on insurance to pay for healthcare and that's a crap way to pay for healthcare. And that's a crap way to pay for healthcare. And what that means is that what your doctor says is medically necessary may not be covered by your insurance. So who calls the shots? It's like, you know, we say like Congress controls the purse strings.

So that effectively controls, you know, the actions of other players within the government, particularly the president, because if you don't have the money, you can't actually do the thing, even if you have the power to do the thing. If you aren't going to be able to pay for the service, your doctor saying this is what's necessary doesn't mean shit. It doesn't mean fuck all. In this story, there was a little baby that needed to be fucking airlift. They don't airlift people just because like they wanted to take a ride in a helicopter today. They airlift it and there's a hundred mile airlift. A hundred miles.

And the insurance company was like they could have taken a regular ambulance. Denied. Denied. Ninety-seven thousand dollar bill. And it was a surprise bill. It wasn't that this person submitted everything, their kid had an emergency event, went to the hospital, was literally in between life and death. Had a tube in their throat. They had to be use some sort of bellows or something, whatever they call that to get the air in there. And then after the baby was quasi stable,

they then put the baby on a ventilator because the baby couldn't breathe. Right. It was having a really hard time. And they had to move that baby quickly and efficiently from one hospital to another, where the baby could get the most medical care, the best medical care it could get.

And the doctor said, let's do this. We should do this. Let's get the thing, the air rescue thing, and we will fly this baby up to this place. It's going to take 40 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever it was. And they were able to go there. Think about how long a hundred mile car ride can take you. That can take you over two hours long, depending on how how crazy it is. It could take you a while. So the idea that it's over 100 miles away, that's an insane distance to travel in an ambulance as it is. It's so much easier to get up there, and especially with a baby that's not in stable condition.

That's a stupid thing to think that that some guy at a desk who's not a doctor, he's just somebody who's deciding whether or not or she's just deciding whether or not there's a payment you're gonna make, makes that decision. This is such a shitty, terrible system we have that we constantly keep on going back to, well, they keep on saying the other side that is against sort of a universal healthcare or a better healthcare system in some way,

maybe it's not universal, maybe it's something else, but whatever it is, they constantly talk about death panels. What is this if this isn't a death panel, right? If they were in charge, they might have killed this kid because they wouldn't have paid for that hospital ride. Yeah, man. Financial duress is a de facto death panel.

Absolutely. duress is a de facto death panel. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And like, who the fuck is the insurance company to second guess this after the fact? Yeah. Like there are, there's... Cigna, by the way. Yeah. Cigna. Cigna is the insurance company that's that's second guessing this.

They're second guessing it after the fact when there's no emotionality to it. Right? Yeah. There's no emergent situation that the insurance company is. They've got all the time and it's all happening afterwards. Like I think listeners that are not from America would have a hard time understanding how insane this is. What happens is like you make all your medical choices in a moment of like like duress and fear and everything in an emergency situation with your doctors are giving you the best counsel

they can. But before they even do that, they take your fucking insurance card. Like when you go to the hospital, like I don't care like how, you get a fucking arterial blood shooting out of your eyes and they'll fish around for your wallet, man. They're gonna get your insurance card. But the insurance card isn't a guarantee of payment. Even in a hospital that is in your network,

because the doctor working that day might not be a doctor in your network. The whole system might not be an emergency. They might decide after the fact. They might look at it and say, you know what, you should have waited it out. You should have went instead to your family doctor on Monday. Yeah. Or they might say, okay, well, the doctor did this procedure, but they should have done this other procedure because, you know, it's less, it's more cost effective. It's cheaper.

Yeah. So, so we're not going to cover it. We're going to cover a portion of it. You can easily, like the biggest cause for bankruptcy in the United States is medical debt. Yeah. Medical debt. When I was, when I was in an HMO, and this was years ago when I was in HMO, I switched

to a PPO, which cost me more, but was a little better at making a decision on my own. But the HMO, there was such a rigid structure in order to get me to a doctor, and it wasn't a doctor that was one doctor below, it was two doctors specialized. It took me a month and a half to see a doctor, very specific doctor about a body part that I was having a problem with my shoulder.

And in order to see a sports therapy doctor, I had to first go to my regular doctor who then referred me to another doctor who then referred me to that doctor. It was like three steps down the road. And there was a couple times when I was actually going to some doctor's appointments where they would do that referral

and I would get better in between and I would just, I just cancel and they're hoping for that. They want that. Because they know that like, yes, you'll just suffer and time, time plus suffering will fix a non-zero amount of medical claims, right? And the one of the, one of the counters also that you hear from the other side is, oh, well, you know, in other places that have universal healthcare coverage, you have to wait forever to get anything done.

You have to wait for, you already have to wait. Yeah, you already have to wait. You already have to wait. That's the other thing is like, Haley has, Haley has a gastroenterologist that is literally booked 14 to 15 months out. Jesus Christ. 14 to 15 months. If you see him in January, you go to make your next appointment and it's February or March of the next year.

The next fucking calendar year. If you want to see certain people, it takes fucking forever. When I wanted to get my back surgery, I decided in October that I needed back surgery. I saw my first doctor in October. I got my back surgery in March. It took five months for me to get my back surgery to fix my fucked up back. There's already an enormous amount of waiting. So it's not like we're not getting anything for this.

We're getting worse. There's no benefit. We're paying through the nose. We're waiting just as long as everybody else. We are, our outcomes suck. Like our maternal and fetal mortality rates fucking suck. Like the whole thing is crazy. When I had meningitis, I had just transferred to a new job,

just taking a new job. And at that new job, I took a pay cut to take that job, knowing that down the road, that job was gonna be a better overall long-term decision. But it was like a pretty big pay cut. And then pretty quickly thereafter, like within the first year, I got meningitis. They had to do a spinal tap.

And I'll tell you, I was pretty uncomfortable. The meningitis was pretty painful. And I remember being in the emergency room and they're like, okay, Mr. Curry, we're gonna wanna do a spinal tap. And I remember being like, no, no, no, no. And in my brain, I was like, it's too expensive. Like I don't wanna do that.

I'm sure it's just a migraine. We don't need all that. And then they gave me a whole bunch of Dilaudid and asked me again. And I was like, change this. Whatever you want. That is the best by the way, that is the best,

makes me laugh in his obvious and retrospect trick of the emergency room. It's like, okay, we're gonna need your consent to do this procedure. Nah, that sounds really expensive. I'm not gonna do it. Okay, we'll just give you some of this medicine. Then we'll ask you again when you're essentially

the highest you've ever been. Yeah, man, you turned it down though. I turned it down first. Because it was too expensive. And then they came and did it and they're like, you've got meningitis and I was like, well glad I got the smile tab, you know? Turn it to 11. The watchdog group of nuclear scientists has moved the doomsday clock to two minutes

until midnight. Who needs assholes to say when doomsday approaches? I say when doomsday is approaching. Oh my fucking God. Cecil. We live in my eyes time. We live in the dumbest time. I'm gonna rub my eyes this whole story.

You put these in the notes. You're gonna rub my eyes this whole story. You put these in the notes. You're going to rub my eyes. And me rub my eyes. Cecil, you put these in the notes. Oh God. Why though? And I'm not, there are times, there are times when I read the notes to do the show where I'll just be like, fuck, that's depressing.

Like with the 65,000 rapes or whatever. I'm like, oh my God. And then, then there are other times when I just stare at my phone and I'm like, how is this not the onion? how is this not the onion? Why is this not the onion? We have stories back to back guys. We're regressing. So this story in particular is Christian site Eclipse

may bring massive earthquake. And the other one is from I fucking love science. This one's from Joe, my God. This one's from I fucking love science and it's conspiracy theorists thinks the eclipse will begin a quote, massive human sacrifice event. I'll end quote. I love that that's a quote by the way.

But in any case, this is what we're dealing with. We just got done getting mad about a moon house. So it makes sense that we would get mad about a sun thing as well. Do you remember when the Mayan calendar ran out and we all died after the Mayan calendar ran out? Oh, we raised money for that. We did. We did.

What did we call it? Apocalypse without borders. Apocalypse without borders. We raised money for Doctors Without Borders. It's one of our first charity things that we ever did. We raised money for several months. We kept on putting it in Everyone's a Critic. And then was it Everyone's a Critic? I think it was Cogdis. Maybe it was Early Cogdis.

Early, early, early Cogdis. And then we raised money and then we gave them the money. We were so excited because that money came in and it was like thousands of dollars. It was like five or eight thousand bucks. It was a good amount of money. And this is actually a funny aside. Cees and I had never done this before. We had no idea how to raise money for charity. So we took the money in,

because we didn't know what else to do. And then we gave the money to Doctors Without Borders and then we paid taxes on the income. We did. Because we didn't know that we should just have people donate directly and send us a receipt. And send us the money. So because we got the money, we paid taxes on it.

Well, what's funny too is, is that we became mega donors then. We did, yeah. They sent us messages afterwards. Hey, you should come back and donate or whatever. We did in the past too. We've done it a couple times. We've done it doctors on board a few times, yeah. But what's so funny about this whole thing is this happens with all kinds of events that

don't happen very often, right? If it doesn't happen, if it's not a weekly thing or a monthly thing, people always latch onto it as if this is gonna be it. You know, you talk about when comets go by and they go by infrequently, right? There's gonna be somebody who's gonna have some sort of doomsday cult idea about it.

Same thing when we talk about eclipses and these don't happen, especially total eclipses. You know, you might get some eclipses here and there that are a little less, but total eclipses like this, they're infrequent every few, you know, several years it takes and they normally take after a couple go by, like, you know, one and then the other, then they normally it takes them a long time for them

to be 20 years between another, between the eclipses. go by like, you know, one and then the other, then they normally it takes them a long time for them to be 20 years between another, between the eclipses. So it's a, this is, this is what people tack onto. And I think there is some of this booster signal stuff that we were talking about before, where a lot of people are talking about the eclipse. It's an easy way to get your crazy theory out there so that people see you as a, they're kind of crazy so they can maybe follow you.

But I think there's also just people are afraid of so many things because they're easily, we're just, we are so afraid. I mean, it's literally just going to be a shadow in front of the sun and we're terrified of it. For about eight minutes, it'll be dark. And if you were like in your house playing video games, you wouldn't notice it happened. That's the thing. It's like, unless you go out of your way to notice it,

you're not going to notice this, right? You'd have to be outside at the right time. In the right place. In the right place. It's a fucking eight minute long event. This is paleolithic shit when we talk about being afraid of celestial events. This is genuinely like ook and ock shit

where you don't know how the world works yet. Like pre-Galileo shit. We've known for so long how to predict an eclipse because we understand what it, you can't predict it if we didn't understand what it was. It doesn't cause earthquakes. Those are tectonic plates shifting around. Like just fucking read, literally read any book, anyone. It doesn't even matter if it's a science

book. Read any book. Read Huck Finn. You will be like, yeah, all right, I finished a book and all of a sudden this makes more sense. You know what I mean? This is a level of stupidity. This is going to cause earthquakes. What is it going to cause cause an earthquake because it was dark for a minute? I think though if you're thinking about people who are worried about an eclipse I have a feeling those people also think that because Mars was in its incension or whatever I also am a little snappy and mad sometimes. I don't like mornings because You know my Venus was in my up swing because, you know, my Venus was in my up swing or whatever. You know, whatever it is.

Yeah, like, fuck it, I was conceived while Mercury was in retrograde, and that's why I like lasagna or whatever. Get the fuck out of here. Those are the same people, though. They don't understand how things work, so they just... And to be honest, these people don't understand how things work in general. At all, man. This is fucking magnets. For them to think that an eclipse is going to cause some sort of seismic activity doesn't

surprise me. It doesn't surprise me at all if they think that. Can I read from this I fucking love science article real quick? Because they just sort of dropped something in here that I thought was insane. He says, diving further into the nonsense, the Reddit user then use the path of the ring of fire eclipse to find further arbitrary exes, this time near a Tesla factory.

Okay, so what they're referring to is, if you plot out the path of the eclipse from 2017, and then you plot out the path of the eclipse from 2024, they cross. And because- So I'm gonna show a picture of this on our show so people can see what it looks like. They cross and it looks like they're kind of crossing at the bottom of Illinois. Yeah. And because any two things that are in a straight line that intersect will form an X,

right? Like, this is how that shape is. Don't tell me they're not gonna do what I think they're gonna do. So let me read this, Cecil. I gotta read this. This is shape is. They're not gonna do what I think they're gonna do. So let me read this Cecil, I gotta read this. This is fucking incredible. All right, so forms an X. Speaking of X. Okay, I knew you were gonna do this. Elon Musk changes Twitter's name to X.

His baby's mother, Grimes, posted a strange image on Instagram before COVID that literally told us COVID was gonna happen all the way down to the three injections. In that same image, a few rows beneath the COVID prediction is a solar eclipse. Under it, a flower between two dragons. 2024 is the year of the dragon. The lotus flower begins blooming and shine on April the 8th. The eclipse is happening on April the 8th. Go lay down. And then that is way too many coincidences for me to feel comfortable along with, and this drop, this line is the reason I'm reading all this, along with the Deagle projection of a 225 million person decrease in the US by 2025.

It would appear some massive sacrifice could possibly be in the works. See, so what the fuck is a deagle prediction where 225 million people die in the U.S. The smell of this thing that is going to happen. The smell. I love the idea that it's gonna be like one big sacrifice and no one was gonna notice. Nobody knew. We had no idea. 220. I'm just saying, if I get to pick the 225 million, I know where my first 74 million are coming from. That's all I'm saying. I know where my first 74 million are coming from.

I want to say to anybody who's going to go enjoy this, because I think this comes out the day before the actual eclipse. It's next Tuesday, right? Is it Tuesday? I think so. Yeah. So this will be out the actual eclipse. It's next Tuesday, right? Is it Tuesday? I think so, yeah. Yeah. So this will be out the day before. Follow the guidelines on how to look at it.

You know, if you're gonna be in the- Trump was a great example. Trump did a good job in 17th. Whatever you do, don't just stare at it. I was a woman today that I saw a video of a woman today who had permanently damaged her eyesight when she was young looking at the eclipse. And someone had said damaged her eyesight when she was young, looking at the eclipse, and someone had said to her,

if you put a pin in paper, you could look through the pin hole. But that's not how that works. What that is is a pin hole that you then look at the shadow of it on another surface. Instead, she just looked through the pinhole and thought that that's how someone gave her bad information. So go seek out the correct information on how you can safely view the eclipse. You don't want to ruin your eyesight for eight minutes. Okay, but isn't it

true that if you are the executive of the United States of America, you can stand on a balcony and squint at it. Because I do remember in 2017, the fucking knucklehead in chief standing on a balcony, just squinting at the sun. Do you think though, that there's any damage that you can do actually to his eyes at this point? No. He's made of tissue paper.

Yeah, well, and also eyes are the outer most portion of the brain. Yeah. So obviously it doesn't work. Window to the nothing on your soul. Right? Hey Gilmore, you suck, you duck ass. Story from the friendly atheist as well.

More Americans are ditching religion, citing anti-LGBTQ bigotry and clergy sex abuse. What a great article though. You know, I'm happy that, you know, when we first started podcasting, we thought that this was going to be the case, that there was going to be more and more people that ditched religion. And I remember when we first started podcasting too, we recognized early on that just being an atheist doesn't mean that you're a critical thinker. That just means that you answered one question.

That's it. You just found the answer and maybe not even the answer, but you at least had enough doubt in your head to understand that there is no real evidence for a God. So there was one thing that you did quasi right. That doesn't mean you're a critical thinker because there's plenty of people out there that are hard atheists that are not critical thinkers. Absolutely.

And so, you know, my plea to the people who are relieving religion is to reach out into, you know, the humanist places to help, you know, guide your morality and also reach out into the skeptical places to help guide your morality and also reach out into the skeptical places to guide your intellect. Because one of the things that you wanna make sure you have is a skeptical mindset, not just for gods,

but for all kinds of paranormal and supernatural stuff. Yeah, and I will say that what I find, I agree with that completely. I find particularly heartening the reason that people are leaving religion, right? They are not really leaving religion because they have a philosophical disagreement. They have a very private,

they're looking at religion and saying, this is hurting people. I don't wanna be a part of it. I fucking love it, right? Good, because religion is fucking hurting people and nobody should wanna be a part of it. I fucking love it, right? Good, because religion is fucking hurting people and nobody should wanna be a part of it. And we should see it and we should call it out for what it is and be like, yeah, you know what?

Maybe if you guys hadn't fucked all those kids and maybe if you guys could fucking find it in your heart to be more loving and open and accepting of like the mass of humanity, you wouldn't be, you would have a message worth hearing. But the truth is you don't have a message worth hearing. It's a bunch of fucking child sex predators and bigots. And that is an enormous amount

of the religious people in this country, in the world. In the world. It absolutely is. You know, I had a conversation with someone recently, we were talking about Catholic hospitals. We were having like a long conversation about it. And one of the things that Catholic hospitals are starting to have to grapple with now

is their stance on trans issues. And they're bigots. A lot of them are bigoted. A lot of them are shitty. A lot of them don't wanna do a lot of stuff. They don't wanna do bottom surgeries. They don't wanna do some of these things that other more other

different places, you know, other hospitals will will do because they have some sort of religious hang up because of it. And I think, you know, you talk about it's not just trans people to it's you're talking about abortion, you're talking about end of life stuff, you're talking about a lot of different things that religion has a whole lot to say about. And if they're helping fund the hospital or their names on the door, suddenly that's a big red flag about where you should be getting care even. Because if they're not open or progressive, what kind of care might you get if you're a rape victim or something like that?

You got to think about that when you go to the hospital, you shouldn't have to think about that. That shouldn't be something you have to think about. But this is what that's another thing that, you know, when you talk about, when you're talking earlier, I think it's great too. These are, these are people who are seeing a moral failing and then making a decision about a moral failing. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's really looking like, what are you selling? What is it? What is your, what is your actual message here? Because like the truth is like, it's not really about

God, right? Most of this is about how we live our life now, and how we survive our lives now, and how we treat other people while we're here and now. All the rest of that stuff is a lot of window dressing, honestly, it's a lot of window dressing. So what people are turned off by is the horror show cruelty. Good. You know, I look at them, I'm like, well, I don't know, man, stop living in a gilded cage, what people are turned off by is the horror show cruelty.

Good. You know, like I look at them like, well, I don't know, man, stop living in a gilded cage and fucking shaking your fist at people while you're fucking a teenager or whatever. There's also plenty of progressive churches out there that people are part of or whatever. And, you know, maybe there's a possibility that some of these people filter back into religion into a more progressive place

where there isn't as much of that stuff going on. But I wouldn't hold my breath for that sort of thing. Those are fewer and far between. Church itself thrives on conservatism. Church itself thrives on tradition. And tradition is a cornerstone of conservatism. So to have that religious mindset means you have to have a deep traditionalist mindset.

And traditionalism doesn't accept progressive behaviors and progressive ideals at all. And so you constantly are gonna be butting heads the more and more progressive society becomes. So churches themselves will become a thing of the past because they can't adapt to the new way of thinking. Yeah, they literally, like they, to your point, they literally can't without like sacrificing the thing

that makes them relevant. Yeah. And the thing that makes them appealing. And I think that, well, there will be a non-zero number of people that say, all right, I'm tired of the kitty fucking over here, I'm going to go to a more religious or a more progressive church. I think once these cracks get opened

and people start looking and asking and being like, ah, these are cracks that are very, very hard to cock back up with another church. You know what I mean? It's real hard to see some like shadow of the truth and then to just turn your back on that. Yeah, man. Once you get a peek under that, the wizards poking all the buttons behind that curtain. It's real hard to be like, no man, Oz is really...

No, I'm good. I'll go sit back in the pew. No, you won't. No, you won't. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this week for this Monday show. However, this Thursday is a long form show. Tom read two articles, two different articles. So if you're a patron, you'll get those in your feed tomorrow sometime. And we will be talking about male friendship and how difficult that is in the United States. So it's a couple of different stories that happen to intertwine. And so we'll be talking about that male adult friendship, which is a very interesting topic.

And we hope you join us on this Thursday. So, but until then, we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue hypno Babylon bullshit couched in scientician double bubble toil and trouble pseudo quasi alternative acupunctuating pressurized stereogram pyramidal free energy healing water downward spiral brain deadpan sales pitch late night info docutainment Leo Pisces cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot

massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, bigfoot, yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your signs. Thrust your hands. Bloody. Evidential.

Conclusive. Doubt even this. The opinions and information provided on this podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. All opinions are solely that of Glory Hole Studios LLC. Cognitive dissonance makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information and will not be liable for any errors, damages, or butthurt arising from consumption. All information is provided on an as-is basis. No refunds. Produced in association with the local Dairy Council and viewers like you.