Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 891: Bourbon, Lobster and V4C

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Bourbon maker Jim Beam halts production at main distillery for a year Mom sues Character.AI after 11-year-old son found sexting with 'Whitney Houston' and 'Marilyn Monroe' | The Independent $400K lobster shipment hijacked en route to Illinois Costco locations | FOX 32 Chicago Final Vulgarity for Charity

Hey Ontario, come down to BetMGM Casino and see what our newest exclusive the Price is Right Fortune Pig has to offer. Don't miss out, play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show, only at BetMGM. Check out how we've reimagined three of the show's iconic games like Plinko, Clifhanger, and the Big Wheel into fun casino game features. Don't forget to download the BetMGM Casino app for exclusive access and excitement on the Price's Right Fortune Pick. Pull up a seat and experience the Price's Right Fortune Pick, only available at BetMGM, MGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only, please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConX Ontario at 1866-531-260 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. This episode of Cognitive Dissinance 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 Gloryhole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is cognitive dissonance. Every episode we blasts anyone who gets in our way. We've been 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 one.

welcome, Matt. Today that you're listening to this is Thursday, January the 15th. We're recording this on January 8th. And we are joined at the end of this episode, January 8th, the earliest we've ever done it for the final vulgarity for charity. Michael Marshall, the host of Be Reasonably Skeptical. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist anymore. No, from Skeptics with a K, editor of Skeptic U.K. magazine. It was so good. It had to be canceled. Be reasonably canceled. Love Mike Marshall. So if you're going to want to stick around, it's a lot of fun, a lot of fun. So Cecil is from the BBC. Bourbon maker Jim Beam Haltz production at Maine Distillery for a year. Thank goodness. How bad is Jim Beam? I know Jim Beam is a parent company for a lot of other bourbons.

Some of the other bourbons they make, I think, are okay. Yeah. But I think like it's so funny because the big bottle, like the ones that are the main bourbons, people taste those. And they think that's what bourbon tastes like. it sucks. So bad. That happens with American beer, too. People from around the world

will be like, American beer, American beer sucks. And they're thinking about Budweiser or Miller-Ly. You're like, okay, well, yeah, sure, the big macro brew stuff isn't good. But the, you know, there's so many great breweries in the United States that produce amazing beer. And then

the same thing goes with, like, distilleries. It's like, with this, it's the biggest bottles are the worst tasting liquor. Or they taste like nothing. Yeah, right. Yeah. Well,

if it tastes like nothing, that's Canadian whiskey. I think maybe you're getting mixed up. So this is a direct result of the tariffs too. Like it's falling apart. 100%. 100%.

They're not getting exported. But yeah, Jim Beam is, like Jim Beam on its own, genuinely terrible. Jack Daniels tastes like a stomachache. Jack Daniels is Tennessee. Tennessee sour mash.

Yeah. So it's not necessarily... It's not a bourbon. It's made in the exact same way just across a stream or something. It's not a bourbon. It's very similar. It's awful.

It's terrible. It's sweet and gross and bad. I mean, it's a fine mixer for like a Coke or something. Yeah, like a gel, like where the Coke is the primary flavor. Yeah, that's fine. Sure, you don't want to spend money mixing something with a Coke. That's perfectly fine. But anything, like, if you're going to drink that like on the rocks, I would, I'd sooner

like fucking drink literally anything else. Like you pick something. You just spin a wheel and I drink it. Stop drinking forever. And Mallort could be on that wheel and I'd take my chances. You know, I would drink Mallort on the rocks. But I don't like myself very much. I always laugh in the studio and in the bathroom in the studio left over from 2020.

There is a bottle of Mallort hand sanitizer. And every time I use the bathroom in the studio, I laugh. It is, it is admittedly probably safer to drink than regular Mallort. Oh, it would take a thousand percent like Purell would taste better than Mallor. Yeah. A thousand percent. What is, what was, I know you didn't drink anymore. Yeah, yeah.

But what was like the bourbon that you really, really liked? I mean, I love Blanton's. Blan's is outstanding. I just, I always loved. Outstanding, it's so good. I remember, like, I remember, I remember before the bourbon sort of renaissance, Blantens was something you could just buy anywhere. Yeah.

You could just casually buy it at the grocery store. Yeah, it was like 60 bucks or something. It was relatively inexpensive. And you can't find it. You just can't even find it if you're looking for it. But like, like, like an, A good everyday drinking bourbon, like, man, I mean, I would even say, like, you're going to probably does, like, even like, makers mark is pretty good. Macers Mark is solid.

There's nothing wrong with it. Knob Creek is good. Woodford Reserve is good. These are just like, very. Jefferson's is excellent. Yeah. I actually think, like, the thing is, like, a lot of the bourbons that are available are surprisingly good. Yeah.

They really are. If you just, like, don't know and you're not trying to be a snob about it, you just, like, mix your glasses up and taste things. things, those are actually surprisingly pretty good, just every day, $30 bottle of bourbon. Most of the time, it's finding the companies that you want to support. Yes, that's hard. Pretty terrible. Yeah. Right?

Some of them are pretty terrible and you don't want to support them. Yep. But what's really interesting is watching a state that essentially voted Trump in. Yep. Have to, like, let the leopard eat their face because it's covered in peanut butter right now. You know, it's funny because it's two states. Because a huge amount of bourbon is manufactured in Evansville, Indiana. So the companies are owned in Kentucky,

but a huge amount of these distilleries are actually for these big manufacturers in Evansville, Indiana. If you look at the bottle, a huge amount. So also a red state. Yeah. Another red state. Eating shit. Man, you got to, you got to, there's so many leopards in all these red states. All these.

All these. Om num, num, num, yum, yum. From the independent mom Sue's character AI after 11-year-old son found sexting. With Whitney Houston and Marilyn Monroe. Is it? It's not going to get any better, right? No. It's getting worse.

Think about who's in charge. Jesus. Is anybody, Cecil, when you think about who runs and owns these AI companies, and now basically anybody can make one, is there anybody that you're like, yeah, that person should probably be in charge of one of the most powerful technology in the whole time? Yeah. They're crazy people.

Yeah, man. They're fucking crazy people. They're all insane. They're all like fucking super high. ketamine or whatever, or their fucking white nationalists. And sometimes both of those things intersect. Porque no los dos.

Yeah. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's going to get a million times worse, man. It's going to, like, I've got an 11-year-old. Our rule had always been in our house with our kids. Like the kids can have a cell phone, like a smartphone, when they go to middle school. I've got an 11-year-old.

He's about to go to middle school next year. And I'm like, fuck that. No way. When you get your driver's license. and I'm serious. Like no... No cell phone. I don't think it is reasonable.

And I would say not even then if I could get away with it, but I think from a safety perspective, a cell phone in this day and age is kind of like, you kind of have to have it with the car at this point. But yeah, before that,

fuck that, man. I think this shit is insanely... It's going to get so much worse. It's not like it's going to get better. No. This is the thing, though, like... Moore's Law.

This is such... It's such an egregious use of this. Yeah. And the reason why this is happening is because there's just no guardrails. And every time somebody tries to put guardrails in, they're like, what are you trying to make it woke and lefty? And people immediately take damage from that. And then they change their minds.

And you're like, no, we've got to be like, maybe it should just be a little more woke and lefty. Yeah, man. Well, like, even the systems, even the AI systems that have guardrails in place, the problem is that AI isn't really well controlled. So, like, I read a study the other day. I think I even said it to you. I read a study the other day. And it was a full-on study that was like, hey, we looked at all these different AI platforms,

and we tested them to see how well they performed and how accurate their results were. And none of them were better than 69, 70%, on any of the five metrics that they used to see how they fail. But they also, importantly, do weird shit all the time. So even when they put these guardrails in place, the AI just goes off the reservation and does whatever the fuck it wants anyway, because it's not really a program that has like hard and fast rules. It's a program that has hard and fast suggestions. And not even that. I mean, those suggestions get thrown out so frequently.

It's just, you're just like, yeah, none of this is useful. I have not found a good use at all really for AI. And I've tried a bunch to see if there was anything at all redeemable in it. I just don't see anything. I can't figure it's used out either. If it just goes away, that's okay, man. Yeah. I can't, I just genuinely don't see any use in it.

I know some people do, but I can't see any use. And I'm like, and the uses you have, is it worth something like this happening all the time? It's just like the gun conversation, right? Like, people will be like, oh, you got to have a gun in your house because there's going to be a burglar with a gun. You got to protect him with a gun. And then you got to cook guns for dinner. You got to have a gun to drive me to fucking Costco or whatever. But like, I'm having bullet bullionets.

Is there all this, all this bullshit we do around guns, all this performative bullshit we do? And then the same thing happens here. We're just like, maybe we shouldn't allow it to have any, maybe we should just forget about it. Maybe we should be like, you know, the tiny bits of things that it allows us to do are not worth the problems that it creates.

Like one of the major problems is inaccuracy. We, like, we cannot, in a world that is now, I think, I think if you were to define the last 10 years of, of the world and say like what is the most important word for the last? I would say in my opinion

it's misinformation or disinformation, right? I think misinformation has been the scourge of the last decade. And now you have misinformation machines

that operate at scale and one by design and then also just on accident. Like I was doing some totally just random, but I was doing some totally like bullshit Googling like I do when I watch TV.

So I was watching all creatures. is great and small. It's a PBS show. Haley and I were watching it. It's set in England in World War II. It's about a veterinarian in like the countryside. It's very wholesome. So this World War II stuff starts to happen. So I start thinking about World War II stuff. And I start doing that thing you do when you're watching TV and you're Googling shit instead. So I started asking some World War II. Like what was the, you know, most dangerous occupation for the British in World War II? I'm asking it these questions. And fucking Google's Gemini starts answering. It answers every.

time that fucking Gemini answer pops up. And I was like, I start instinctively, Cecil, I start reading that. I don't want to read that. I've tried to train myself to ignore that and to actually like find the answers in this the, you know, like Google. But I start reading it. And I'm like, oh, holy shit. I start believing what it says.

And I started asking it different questions. They're all World War II questions. And then I stop. And I look at where like Gemini is pulling this shit. It's pulling it from Quora answers. It's pulling it from fucking Reddit posts. It doesn't, it's, the fucking AI is agnostic from where it pulls information. And then it delivers information as if it were like confident in the results.

Well, I think that that is a wonderful metaphor for the internet itself. Yes. It's a wonderful metaphor for what we've created, which is a group of people, if you were to sit them down and they were anti-vaccers and you were say, show me your information onto why you're an antivaxor. Why do you not think the measles vaccine works? they would go and do a search on their Google and their Google that they're signed into, their specific username that they're signed into, would get the results it would need to show you what it is.

And it would treat those results the same way it would a PubMed study. Yes. Right? Because it doesn't care. Google doesn't care how that's served up to you. It's just serving what you want, not what it thinks is sort of the higher level truth.

Right, right. And that's the real issue is that that's what the Internet is. That's what the Internet does, but that's also what chat GPT is doing. It's giving you links on the side and if you click on the link, you're like, well, that's not, what is that? That's not anything.

That's a Quora answer? Like any, you realize there's no barrier to entry for Quora answers, right? You would think that there would be some basic standards for factual questions or it can't pull from just, there's some people talking on Reddit one day. Like Wikipedia. You can't just like link to something that's some random shit,

it's going to be like, and if it does, it's going to take that link out. be like citation needy. You've got to have something in here. You can't just make that claim. But there's no checks. There's nothing there to look at it. There's no editor, right?

It's just the thing is editing itself. We've allowed it to edit itself. And now it's just this massive mess. And we're just going to go into the world being fucking confidently wrong. That's not a good. It's not like that's new, though. Yeah, I know, man. That's been happening for a while.

But we'll think we're fact checking. Yeah. And that's the problem is that it gives the illusion. I did my research. I did my research. How many times have you heard somebody say in your life? I've heard this at work. Somebody said, well, I looked it up and chat GPT said this.

And I had to stop and say, chat GPT doesn't say things. Chat GPT aggregates information and puts it in a sentence format for you and you think it said something. It doesn't say anything. Stop that. Don't do that. But they think that it's a reservoir of knowledge.

They're misunderstanding like at the most fundamental level. that it is not a reservoir of knowledge that it is drawing from. It's a fucking large language model. It's predictive text on steroids. The reservoir it's draining is the drinking water. Yes. That's the reservoir.

Used to be fluoridated, but you know. From Fox. Fox 32 Chicago. $400,000 lobster shipment hijacked en route to Illinois Costco locations. Tom, where were you? The other night. You either want surf and turf

or you don't ask me these questions. Gosh. I think lobster's the lesser of the shellfish. Really? Yeah. Are you... King crab is a thousand times better. You like king crab.

King crab is a thousand times better. We eat snow crab legs from time to time. Because snow crab legs will go on sale for like $8 a pound. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you think you're getting a deal. But then you realize you threw away most of the weight. Oh my gosh. It's so much of it.

You threw away almost all the weight. Yeah, it's $8 a pound, but you have to eat 39 pounds of fucking like like crab in order for you to have any food in you. Taste better, though. it is good. It tastes better and has a better texture in my opinion. I think both those things are true about it. I will say that I have had, like the lobster I get from the grocery store is not as good as one time for New Year's, I had lobsters like main lobsters flown in. So it was just like a splurge thing for a celebration. They legitimately did taste better. Sure. They were fresher. I think that was the deal. They were just fresher. They legitimately did taste much better. But crab is a fucking great food. Crab is solid. Such a good food.

I don't dislike lobster. I've still never had like a traditional lobster roll. The only lobster roll I had a bite of was a cold one and I hated it. Oh yeah. Was it a mayo one? It's that mayo killed.

Fuck that. That's a subway sandwich, man. I know it's fucking like I would eat three of them, but like it's not my favorite. It's certainly not anything I would ever eat again if somebody were to be like, would you like one of those would be like, no.

Well, look. Yeah, but I'm going to be unhappy. I'm going to be a little unhappy. The bun was solid, but I'm like, well, put something else on there then. I mean, isn't that great. I love that somebody's just like got a place where they can unload $400,000. Oh, that reminds me.

Did I ever tell? I think I told you this story. I don't know if I told the audience this story, but many, many years ago when I was in the title insurance business and I was doing closing. So like my job initially was to go out and actually close the loans. That means that I would take the paperwork to the owner of the property and I would explain the paperwork to them and have them sign it and notarize their signature. That's what a closer did.

It wasn't like closing a deal in a sales sense, right? But I would drive around and I go to people's homes. And so I went in all these crazy fucking homes. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, one time I went to this guy's house and, like, it was a super bizarre closing, like, he was a lot of... He was a lobster. Dude, it was the weirdest. It was a very weird closing for a lot of reasons.

But at the end of it. I mean, like, it's such a, it's such a big claw. So at the end of it, he goes, do you like lobster? And I was like, yeah, I'm like 23 years old. Am I going to wind up in a basement? So he walks me over to the, he walks me into the garage. He's got a giant chest freezer. I do not go into the garage.

I should have learned that. He probably don't want to go into the garage. He opens up the freezer. Moves the dead body. It is. Cecil, it's a big chest freezer. Picture a big chest freezer. Not a little one.

The whole thing is full of lobsters. It's a double D chest freezer. It's stocked full and they're not wrapped. They're not like, there's just whole. lobsters, like somebody like just stuffed a freezer full of lobsters somehow, not in packaging. And he's like, you can take

one if you want. And I was like, yeah, I'm good. I don't know you, man. I don't want your unwrapped freezer lobster. What? Why don't I just give myself food poison? Unwrapped freezer lobster's name of my band. It was so weird.

Yeah, man. I don't know if it was $400,000 of lobster, but it was a lot of lobster, man. I know, I know for sure. that this guy is buying lobster from a shady source. Yes. He's a hundred percent like there's a guy who's like scooping him up with the minnow net at the grocery store when they have those lobsters that are in those tanks or whatever. Yes.

There's a couple that are floating at the end of the day. He just scoops up in the middle net and he's like, hey, Hal, come on by, I got a couple for you. And then they slide them over the other one and behind the cover, under the cover of the counter or something. Some guys at the Greyhound station with a trench coat, he opens it up. Hey, man, you want to buy a lobster? You sit next to him in the bar.

And there's a newspaper and he just pulls the newspaper. A little dead ass lobster. And it's upside down. Right. Upside down lobster sitting there. Little legs still moving around. It's dead, Tom. It's not moving around.

It's 100% curled up. It's like a fucking brine shrimp. It's just completely curled up. You got to add water to it later on. When Haley and I were dating, she was staying at a hotel in Queens overnight because her flight got delayed. So her flight got canceled. Sheated to flight the next day.

She's staying overnight in a hotel in Queens. She didn't have drive all the way back. home. And she's outside smoking. We're talking on the phone. And she just sees crayfish walking down the street in New York. She's got video of it. Like they clearly got loose from some restaurant that had live crayfish to cook. And so just and then like a little while later, another crayfish just goes walking down the street. Just, hey guys, wait up. Don't leave me here. I don't have a subway map. I got to get a city pass. It's amazing. It was the weirdest thing.

Even better if they stopped to take a selfie video. Oh, yes. Or a little camera. Or they ask for directions to Central Park? They all stand next to a very small fountain and they get a photo. It's adorable. Cravefish are good too. I like crayfish.

They make a bunch of them. New Orleans has them. It has like a whole thing. And then they get boiled with like other things like corn and other things. And then they just dump it all out on paper. There is a place in Chicago. You can get that. Oh, really?

Yes, you can go there and get that done. I would go there. But like, the thing about it is, is like, it's fine. But there's, it's like so much work. Yeah, for one bite. For one, at the tiniest morsel of food. Yeah. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, crack those little bit. Yeah.

And then I've got to, like, hold it up to my mouth like I'm whistling. It's like all this work. And I'm just like, I don't want to do all that work, man. Like, there's a reason I'm going out to dinner. Like, if I, it's the same reason why. at home, I would buy a bag of shelled pistachios over shell on

pistachios. I would be like, well, I already don't want to do that. Like, I don't want to do that. I'd be like, I had to put another, like, bite it in half and then like Or sit there with your two thumbs like trying to open up. This little morsel of meat, nut meat in your mouth. And then like, yum, yum, yum, yum. Grap another one. I'm like,

I don't want to do that, man. Little morsels of nut meat is the name of my band, actually. They're touring with Unwrapped Freezer Lobster Later this year Welcome back to Vulgarity for Charity. This is the last segment of Rose for the Year. We want to thank everyone that donated

to recovering from religion and to help us with this final segment we've invited Michael Marshall from the Skeptics with AK and the No Rogan experience to join us. Welcome back to the show, Marsh. Thank you so much for having me and having me on the last one of these as well.

Clearly you were building up to having me on to roast these people. Everything else was prelude. It's either we saved the best for last or afterthought. I don't know. Everybody's exhausted and so you've called in the backup. It's either the best thing on the plate or the thing I want to quietly throw away so I don't insult the host. It's one or the other. I've never understood to save the best bite for last.

It's like, but I'm maybe not hungry now. I mean, I guess That's the thing I've heard about from people. Yeah, I mean, other people don't get home. All right, before we dive in, we want to thank all the wonderful people who donated just to donate. So big thanks to Laura Williams,

Teresa Teresa, Teresa, Julie T, Crystal Y, Ofear, John F, Greg B, James G, April Puff, Marvin J, Georgie, Thomas W, Charles M, Scott D, and Kevin V. Thank you. And a huge thanks to Eric V. John A.

Ann Fan. Sam S. Donna A. George Ramaka. Lauren B. Marcus G. Elias G. Beth T. Donna A.

Jonathan S. Charles W. and Julie L. And also many thanks to Christina M. Marvin H. Brian Eggle. Joe K. Adam B.

Alex H. Elizabeth M. Adrian A Arsa B Trevor R Tyler L and Nathan K You folks are

amazing So Marsh Let's jump right in With a great pick This is a roast Of Nick Fentes This is for Hal Okay

Why is it That white supremacists Always look Like they're all scraped off the absolute bottom Of the evolutionary barrel You never ever

Get someone Who looks like Chris Hemsworth proclaiming that they're part of a master race. It's always people like Nick Fuentes who looks like he had to be scooped out of their gene pool like a turd in the shallow end.

Nick Fuentes looks like the lesson he learned from Charlie Kirk's murder was to have less neck to make him less of a target. Woof! All right. Now another great pick. This one is of Stephen Miller. This is for two requesters. This is for both Chris and William.

Stephen Miller is like the guy who smashes into a car on the street and then gets out and then writes a note but the note says, ha ha, fuck you with a fake number. And then he folds it, he puts it under the windshield wiper. Except the car is America

and the note is Project 2025. Stephen Miller looks like someone spackled the gaps in Vecna's face with pure-e carrots. That's a stranger things reference, by the way. He looks like he's going to be cursed to get one extra

layer of skin every single day for the rest of the life until he dies. So it keeps on getting bigger and bigger. He's like an everlasting Goebbels stopper. Oh, that's so good. Okay. He would never stop Goebles, though. I mean, I just want to say, no. Wouldn't you want to cut into it?

Wouldn't you want to cut into it to see the rings? So bad. So bad. That's actually how you age of Stephen Miller. Because you have to count the rings. You got to count the rings. Okay, Tom. We're cleaning up all the requests for you.

your very specific brand of roasting here. This one, this one is of Jody, who is a coworker of Erica. Look, I am a bad boss. I don't really understand most of what my people do anymore. And when they try to get into the weeds on things, I just, I get kind of sleepy. I'm actually sympathetic to bad bosses. It's hard to be in charge and get big checks for the creativity, labor, and intellect of others. But what the Jodys of this world don't understand is that to be a really good bad boss is so,

fucking easy. You just get out of the fucking way. That's really most of what smart, competent people want. Just stand the fuck aside and let the team of fucking grownups that you pick for the work do their goddamn work. And when they ask for help, then you help them. That's it. Sure, maybe you should have a big picture idea, the direction you want to point people in, but by and large, if you just stand aside and stand up for your people, you'll get bonuses and very nice gifts on Boss's Day. Being a good boss is like being a good boyfriend. or husband actually. Generations of assholes have pushed the bar so low.

It takes almost no effort at all to be a hero. But the duties of the world will never figure any of this out. They will always think they know better. They're in charge because they alone had the guts to say yes to every fistful of cash rammed down their throats in exchange for selling out. If there's anything worse than working for a Jody, it's getting rift by a Jody before she too finds herself holding a copy or paper box filled with her knick-knacks and family photos. The difference, Erica, and I know right now it's a small comfort, is that Jody won't land on her feet forever.

Eventually, these naked emperors are exposed, and unlike you, when they are, they have no actual skills to fall back on. And when Jody does get let go, it won't be because an artificial intelligence took her job, but because actual intelligence can see what and who she truly is. which is nobody. Jesus Christ, dude. All right, another great choice. This one is for Ian. He would like a roast of artificial intelligence.

Huh. Okay, so what better way to roast AI than to get Chat GPD to write a roast of AI? The answer is literally any other way. Stop asking the plagiarism bot to do your homework, especially if it'll spend half its time trying to see whether there are any tween celebrities that can deep fake into a bikini for you.

Fucking shit, man. Best case scenario, the AI Gold Rush is going to turn out to be just another global economy destroying Ponzi scheme, which looks likely given how insistent every single tech company is in forcing AI onto you against your will. Do you want Gmail to summarize this email for you? Why not download Corpilot to chat to this PDF? Now, AI turn your shopping list into an animated video. Please engage with our Pidobot 3,000.

entire company and literally all of late stage capitalism on it. Amazing. Amazing. All right, Tom, they cannot stop requesting you. This time it isn't a roast of a person they want. Instead, Frank would like a roast of their previous garbage liver. Imagine being a liver in 2025 and still failing at your job, right? Your job is to produce bile. What the fuck could be easier to do right now than produce bile? You piece. of non-blood filtering organic waste, which you also aren't doing a good job of eliminating? Jesus, liver, you're basically a glorified metabolic security guard,

and you fail? What did you have better things to do, liver? But I think I get it, actually. I think about it like this, Frank. It's 2026 now. Aren't you at least a little understanding of the quiet quitting and taking the whole fucking machine down with you into the goddamn dirt? I mean, aren't we all just fucking.

tired. You know, in reflection, this roast is for my liver. Hey, what the fuck are you doing? What are you keeping this machine going for? You know, fuck you functioning liver, you goddamn literal blood traitor. All right, here's one for you. Mark wants someone to go after Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. Okay, so when Peter Thiel said he wasn't sure if the human race should continue, it's because he spends so much of his time with Alex Carp and Palantir. If I had to spend an afternoon listening to him give sub-Ted-Tad-Talk levels of pseudo-intellectual justifications for how he made his obscene wealth, I'd probably be 50-50 on whether we deserve to survive as a species as well. The only saving grace is that given how Palantir is a global

leader in surveillance technology for spying on citizens, he more than anyone else in the whole world must be acutely aware of just how many people hate him and why. All right, Cecil. Sarah wants you to roast the Bachelorette or a contestant on the Bachelorette or a contestant on Real Mormon Housewives of Salt Lake, Taylor Frankie Paul. Taylor Frankie Paul got her start off on...

Wait, is that one person? It's not the whole cast. I thought that was three people, you got to pick one. No, it's three, it's one person. It's three people, matched into one. I hate their name. We start there?

Taylor, Frankie, Paul got her start on mom talk. And I can't tell if that's short for Mormon TikTok or mother TikTok. Either way, it's fucking gross. Let's just say that. She started in the secret wives or secret lives of Mormons. And she had a scandal where she and her husband were soft swinging with other Mormons, which is just Mormonism with more husbands. She looks like she uses the word journey.

Way too much. Like a journey for her is when she had to use only one of her four bathrooms when her house was being remodeled. That's a journey. Okay, Tom, this one's for you. A famous person for, which is pretty rare, actually. Congressperson, so this is a congressperson, you get to roast Brad Finestead for Paul. All right. Brad is both a farmer and a MAGA guy.

Think about the level of dissociation from common sense and reality. that that requires. The farmers got hard-fucked and short-lobed in the first administration, and they are repairing their anal fissures again in this one. And still, here you are, representing the dumbest man and the worst ideas that the 21st century is hopefully going to produce. And for what? Brad? I'm guessing here, but it's usually always the same answer. You think that if you suck the right dicks hard enough, you'll swallow the right dictator's sweet, sweet load and be rewarded for it. But you jackasses don't understand.

You never understand. That's not how any of this works. Because when you are being used by someone, it's because the someone using you doesn't care what happens to you. They don't see you as human or worth rewarding. You're not an equal. You're not a power broker on the rise, Brad. You're a dumb sucking mouth.

And you've suppressed your own gag reflex in service of nobody and nothing that will ever see you as more human than a handful of Kleenex. So when you are discarded, and you will be, you piece of shit, nobody, I hope that there is not enough Kleenex in the world

to dry your stupid tears. Kenny and Kyle's app company sent in a roast request for this very specific ICE advertisement. So I literally don't even understand the ad. It's like a picture of Arnold Schwarzenator

flexing, and he's looking away from the camera while he's flexing. And then there's a body a water and a boat that's clearly going the other way. And the text says, the text says protect the west, join ice.gov. And the text on the Facebook post says, answer the call.

So that's the entire thing. Are we supposed to infer that someone is on our shores? They protect from random boat landings by flexing menacingly and docking watercraft. And I could see that being somewhat intimidated. If it's Arnold Schwarzenegger who's actually flexing at you. But have you seen these ice guys? That's like putting body pillows outside your house to scare away home and be. It's like the Pillsbury doughboy trying to intimidate the oven.

What the fuck? Dude, I'm going to jump in here too because I have to. Because like what is even happening? What is the idea that Western strength on the high seas is going to be projected out into the world by like your sweet deltoids or visible striation of the glutes? You do know, man, that bodybuilders on competition day are actually at their weakest, right? Like, to project strength and as performance, they actually become so emaciated and dehydrated. They will likely never be weaker than on Flex Day. You know that, right?

You get what I'm saying? No. No, you don't. No, because you're too busy listening to a man in a bow tie telling you to sunburn your own asshole. I hope you'll fall off your boat and drown slowly. Amazing. Okay, Tom. Yet another special request. This time it's for Shahidu. This is Sydney's husband's supervisor. Look, everybody plays favorites. It's just how people work. We have favorite kids and favorite pets and favorite jobs and favorite employees. When we pick our spouse, what we're

really just saying is, you're my favorite, and I don't want that to change. It's okay to have favorites. But if you're the boss and you can't tell the difference between your favorite employee and a valuable employee, then you're hunting for sycophantic starfuckers rather than the best person for the job, which makes you the worst person for the job of being in charge. Shahidu is holding court more than running a team because he needs that lunch table high school,

cool kid, click bullshit to remind him that he's not worthless because he knows that he is. He's repeating the social hierarchy of high school because that's where he peaked. And there's nothing more pathetic than reaching your personal best when your brain hasn't finished making itself and nothing you're doing right now matters. Guys like this are low rent, low stakes,

low-quality dipships who are doomed to drink in towny bars and attend reunions. These guys aren't even big fish in little ponds. They are minnows in piss puddles, irrelevant and disgusting. I'm noticing a trend. People are mad at work.

The trend is get Tom to roast your boss. and every roast is a confession. Shut up. You shut up. You shut up. You shut up. That's my heart. Don't see that, Cecil.

All right, Cecil, Venture-Free McGee asked you to roast. Those assholes that make the rest of us look bad by donating huge sums without even wanting a roast. Absolutely not, Venture. Fuck you. Okay? Those people are literally the best of. So many people instead of asking us to roast their fucking cat's lumpy bed,

are the people over here, they're making it fucking rain forest. They're literally nothing for a chance to do some good. But you gave us a choice in your roast. You said we could also roast griefers in video games. So instead I'm going to do that. Griefers and video games are shitty people who try to ruin everything for everyone because deep down, they know they're fucking worthless. It's like you're living your life as Tim Pole,

but you're not getting any Russian money for it. And that's a terrible. That's mean. That's just mean. I don't like griefers, but that's mean. Okay. So here we go. So we're going to take a second here to do a little special one.

This is something that's near and dear to my heart. We got exactly $100,000 in the roast for the fundraiser this year. And we were actually below that, but I wanted to make sure that it was sort of a round number. So as it was closing, I donated. And basically, I did what you do at the grocery store where I rounded up to the nearest one. $100,000 like you do at the grocery store now when you go to get eggs. For half your groceries. Yeah.

Yeah. And so it was thankfully close, but it also was enough to get me into the big money donor. So I did want to get a roast out of it. And so, Marsh, I'm going to ask you, this is a dealer's choice. You can roast any of our Supreme Court members. Okay. Where to even start? Well, how about with the whole thing, your entire Supreme Court?

Fair. America, it likes to think it's a most sophisticated democracy in the world because your leaders are kept in check by a crack team of insurrectionists, Christian nationalist handmaidens, and rapists. Oh, my God. Those people get to make the law of the land as long as they spend an entire afternoon pinky swearing, they're not going to use that power to do the very things they've spent their lives saying they'll do if they ever get that power. Don't say our system out loud back to us. That's me. That's mean. So you've got your insurrectionist, Samuel, I promised it was my wife's idea to fly that flag upside down a little.

You've got Amy Coney Barrett forcing through abortion repeals that nobody wants, like the bill was a fetus and America is a 15-year-old in Alabama. And then you have the rapist. And it's not a great sign for your democracy that you've got to check which ones that I mean. Oh, my God. You've got enough sexual predators in the Supreme Court right now. they could form their own caucus. And it's a caucus they're going to give you whether you want it or not. Oh, shit.

Look, it's totally fine because Brett Kavanaugh was sober, long enough to write definitely not raping anyone on an old calendar with a Sharpie. So it would actually be unfair not to let him wear those fancy robes forever. And then the other side of that caucus, you've got Clarence Thomas. And for a long time, people weren't sure why he never said anything in court. But it turns out it's just that his jaw was just too sore from being perpetually teabugged

by Harlem Croathe decades. People think the solution is to pack the Supreme Court. I say it's to pack the whole thing up and go back to the drawing board. I love that somehow the most milk toast yet shitty person

Gorsuch missed all your ire. I love that you missed the shitty guy but he's shitty and bland so he has nothing to roast it. Exactly. He's like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, his course is too. He's there.

Yeah, he's, who's fucking his wife, I want to. He's your ballast vote, he's your ballast vote for sure. Okay, last few here. This one is another famous guy for you, Tom. Remember, Lyle Jeffs, James wants you to roast him. Lyle Jeffs is the little brother of the disgraced, polygamous FLDS, Pito Warren Jeffs. And just in case you aren't familiar,

he was arrested in 2017 when a pawn shop owner who described him as acting, and this is a quote, like a freak called the cops when Jeff's pawned a pair of pliers. I just want everyone to pause for a minute and think about how far your life has to collapse upon itself when a fucking pawn shop owner is like, hey, look, I know my business model is literally built around fencing stolen iPhones for meth heads. But this guy, this guy was so weird even I'm calling the cops.

And let's return to the pliers for a moment. This is your highest ticket item you're trying to move? A pair of fucking pliers? This piece of shit went from running a multi-million dollar food stamp scam created and maintained by his religious coercion to unsuccessfully reselling Harbor Freight Hand Tools. Look, I know he's been out of prison since 2021 because stealing is only really stealing in this country

when the brown people do it. But even in 2017, his followers had already largely abandoned him to his own devices, which were, it turns out pliers. Bottom line, I guess, is this. These fuckers are all past their use by date, right? They've expired. The whole Mormon

cult seems to be imploding upon itself and people seem to be leaving and exposing it for the inexplicably successful racist rape cult that it is, and that it has always been. And Lyle Jeffs and his ilk are being exposed for what they are, desperate and stupid and pointless.

One of the major concepts the LDS Church admires is the idea of accountability, taking personal responsibility for your role in the outcome of your own life. And all I hope for Lyle here is that every night forever, he really absorbs this idea. And that when he sees that the world has abandoned him, he understands with the deepest fullness of his whole heart, that it is only his fault and forgiveness is never coming. Jesus Christ, dude. Okay, Marsh, this is a real trash bag of a human being. So tear into James Dobson, please for Nathan. Okay, James Dobson of Focus on the Family.

So let's have a look at that life well lived. He was against homosexuality. He was anti-gay marriage. He was against women's equality. He was pro-corporal punishment for children. And he was pro-highly traditional gender roles. And how did those fights go for him? Well, he's overseen more else.

He's had more else than a game of Welsh Scrabble. And okay, look, the tide has turned more recently on that. Christian nationalism has started to develop a foothold in America and it's making headway on some of the things that he worked his whole miserable life to achieve. And he's not even a footnote on their Wikipedia page. He died less than six months ago. I had to Google him to remind myself who he was. It's not even been six months. Half the people on his side won't even ever bother to do that. So yeah, congratulations, Jim. You wasted your entire life pushing back against anything positive

and the movement that you tried to help build barely care enough to brush your dead body to the side as they walk on by. Because statues and commemorations are for people who achieve something and your corpse is barely even a speed bump on the road to progress. Okay, here's one that needed a downloadable document

to explain how bad a person Kyle can be. Can you roast him for Rebecca, Tom? All right, look, I want to be very clear, here to start, that consenting adults should be able to have fun with their own bodies, however, they want to have fun. No shame, no judgment. But that's sad. Like many well-intentioned forays into complex relationships, a certain subset of abusive assholes weaponized sex positivity into manipulation and control. Convincing people that the abuse they are suffering at the hands of those who are supposed to love and care for them is their fault. Their fault for holding onto antiquated

norms like jealousy or possessiveness or for holding monogamy as a personally preferred value. A very real danger for those with an open heart and mind is that manipulative assholes seem to have a kind of radar that allows them to find good intentions and to weaponize them to take soft and tender hearts, wrap them in barbed wire, and then blame you for your own chest pains. These motherfuckers have picked up a whole language and emotional architecture that they use to spin and twist people into knots so that a reluctant, begrudging yes, becomes ethically the same as enthusiasm. They contort love into something that is made to serve them rather than something that inspires us to serve others.

And Baz, I'm so very sorry that your open and tender heart found someone who failed to hold it tenderly, who uses other people's bodies to masturbate into because they cannot understand or appreciate how reciprocity and connection work. And I'd like to tell you that your abuser will get his. But we both know karma is just a Taylor Swift song, and that might not happen. But what I can tell you instead is this, that to live with an open heart is to be fully alive. It is to know and experience joy and connections so profound that they are their own poetry. That to walk and step with someone else's heart and to be trusted to hold theirs is the point,

the only point of waking up again tomorrow. And that every day that you wake up, you are more alive and more fully human than a thousand of the rest of them. All right, let's close out the show with a roast of the AAA games industry for Nick. I don't care how many fucking A's you string together. I will not play Death Stranding. I am sorry. It's a post-apocalyptic game where you deliver packages. Wait, for real?

And the gameplay is balancing those packages as you walk. What? And if you don't get there in time, you die? It's like being an Amazon driver in a 15-minute city. The worst part about a AAA game industry is when you buy the game, you're just getting a basic framework. Then they spend, then you have to spend so much more on add-ons,

new levels, better weapons, faster leveling. They sell fucking gambling to kids in the form of loot boxes. Can't you guys just get kids hooked on vapes like normal, evil people? Hey, we want to thank everybody.

Marsh, thank you for coming on. And we want to thank everybody who donated this time around. Really amazing work. And we're so happy that we were able to help recovering for religion. Absolutely. It's a great organization.

It's a great charity. they spent, to my knowledge, none of their money per se, which we really appreciate. Really appreciate. Yeah, don't buy any expensive breaches and we're fine. Thanks, Marsh. Thank you. Absolutely pleasure, guys. Absolutely pleasure.

And great work on the whole charity thing, man. It's incredible every year. But yeah, it's great stuff. I want to thank, of course, Michael Marshall for joining us for the last roast segment of this year. We're going to be back next year. but we're so happy that recovering from religion had made that kind of that kind of donation went to them and that they're going to be able to use that money in a way that's going to help a lot of people.

And so that's really awesome. We're going to come back next year with another whole bunch of roasts. We want to thank everybody who donated. It didn't matter, you know, the tiniest amount of money is awesome that they're getting it to somebody who needs it. So it's really amazing. And we want to thank everyone who donated every single person. If we didn't read your name, if we didn't get to your roast, if we didn't catch you,

come catch us next year, you know, there's a possibility we'll be able to pick you up, get one of those rows. There's a limited number, but we're so happy that people were able to respond and people were able to help lift this organization up. Right, that's going to wrap it up further. This funny show will be back on Monday with the full show. 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-Bablon bullshit. Couched in Scientician Double Bubble Toil, in trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late night info docutainment.

Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and towers, tarot cars, 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. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon

at patreon. fan.com forward slash dissonance pod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Preds, all under the handle at DissinencePod. This show is Can credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org.