Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 931: Voter ID and Tate Extradition

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Hegseth announces annual testosterone screenings for service members ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn't supposed to have with Palantir How Republicans Turned Olive Garden Into a Voter ID Talking Point - The New York Times Andrew and Tristan Tate arrested in Florida on charges of rape and sex trafficking : NPR Pseudoscientific Cancer 'Treatment' Involves Gassing Naked People in Plastic Bags With Bleach | WIRED The Fake Influencers Selling Wellness on Your Feed - The New York Times

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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 at. Today is Wednesday, July the 22nd. We're recording a little bit early. We had some scheduling snafus by we.

I mean me, my boss, wanted me to actually do some work for a change. So we moved our recording schedule up a little bit. I felt like that was rude, but didn't have the heart to tell them. I'm not going to lie. Yeah, just a little rude. What was also rude is it turns out we made a great big deal with Saudi Arabia yesterday, it turns out. How did it go? Was it a good deal?

Do you think it was it the best deal? The best deal ever for American companies that want to sell nuclear products to Saudi Arabia. It's worth tens of billions of dollars. Saudi Arabia did, however, get some concessions out of the deal, including the ability to enrich uranium and nobody's going to look and make sure that they're not doing any bomb making with it. I'm not even kidding. Like, that's the deal. The deal is Saudi Arabia, we're going to sell them stuff to make nuclear power plants. And in exchange, they're going to buy that stuff only from America.

So, okay, cool. Corner the market. Smart. Yeah, so we got that. But they don't want any inspectors coming in to make sure that they're not making bombs. And they want to retain the right to enrich their own uranium on their soil rather than purchase the uranium from soil. Now, just as a reminder, uh, in September of 2001, 19 hijackers from Saudi Arabia attacked. Osama bin Laden was from Saudi Arabia. And we're just like, yeah, but like,

they're the Arabs we like for some reason. Now, well, we were the Arabs we liked in 2001. Yeah, we didn't. Yeah, we didn't attack that. We were like. Yeah, we were like. Hey, I know you guys sent a dozen and a half people over here. And I know that Osama bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia and his entire family dynasty and construction company and everything are from Saudi Arabia. And all the ties come back. But, you know, we're just going to attack two entirely unrelated countries instead. What? And now we're just like, hey, Iran?

Iran, no nukes. We're going to spend $100 billion making sure you guys don't have any nukes. But Saudi Arabia, you can just do whatever you want. Why are we letting, why do we consistently let Saudi Arabia do whatever the fuck they want? Oh, you guys are going to kill a journalist and chop them up and fucking feed them into a fucking woodpress or whatever they fucking did to that Khashoggi guy? We're just like, hey, shame, shame, shame. The reason why we do that time is because they like Joe Pesci fold a couple hundreds and tap it into our upper pocket every single time they want to do something. So they're just like, hey, forget about it.

Go buy you something nice over there. here. Hey, look at this guy. Oh, hey, I'm going to chop this guy up real quick. I'll be back with you in a minute. You will make yourself at home at the bar over here. And I'm going to be busy, okay? I got, don't mind the woodshipper sound you hear back here.

This is me. But da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I wonder if, like, like, I wonder if right now, because they're not going to let inspectors in, I wonder if Hans Blix is kicking rocks somewhere. He's so mad that he can't be the guy

who's like inspecting stuff. Jesus Christ. Well, you know what they say, Tom. They say there's no way to have a balanced breakfast without enriched uranium. So it is the cornerstone of a balanced breakfast. So brother, what are we doing? What are we doing? I don't know, dude.

Like, what we're doing is capitulating to other billionaires because we're literally an oligarchy run by a billionaire who has friends with other billionaires and then gets free gifts from other billionaires and likes to hang out with other billionaires and then spends his time traveling to other countries full of billionaires to get given jets that are almost a billion dollars that are more than a billion dollars is it can there be genuinely like can there be any counter argument that we are not an oligarchy is there a reasonable come on right like that's a crazy like that is a crazy thing to suggest right at this point that we are not an oligarchy we just have to admit at this point that we are an oligarchy and that like

the shreds of our Democratic Republic are mostly just a veneer. Yeah, man. Yeah, I don't think you can argue that. Right. Especially what, like, we literally said to the richest man in the world, why don't you come in without any background whatsoever and make a bunch of cuts in our government? That's true.

Yeah. Hire whoever you want. We don't even care if they're qualified. Yeah, or they're outwardly racist. We don't mind. Right. Yeah. Oh, you got some 20-something dude who got a laptop and a smile.

awesome. Like, let that guy in. Is he an ins cell? Because we like it if he's an insel. Big balls? That sounds great. The big balls in here. Awesome. Yeah, cool. I would like a series of fucking internet trolls to decide who gets the monies from the government. You're a trillionaire. Russian nesting ball. Fuck. Oh my God. But Cecil. Cecil, it's not all bad news. There is some good news. I'm jumping ahead. I know I'm four stories down, but I love this story, and I know we reorganized them, but it makes me so happy

to say this. This is from NPR. Andrew and Tristan Tate, arrested in Florida on charges of rape and sex trafficking. 38 counts. That's a lot. 38 counts. They're being extradited to the UK to stand trial. Possibly. I think that there still is some back and forth that they're trying to, and so, like, who knows what happens behind the scenes? And, we know that influence in this particular presidency is a big deal. And Tate is an influencer in those spaces, right? So we know that to be true. Even if I don't think he has a lot of respect from some of the quote-unquote influencers

that are currently making the rounds in that area, I think that he has enough influence and has enough of, has enough star power to make Trump pause. Yeah, I think that there's a real, possibility, right, that this won't happen. But I hope, here's what I hope. I hope that that has already been worked out before and then that's why they were allowed to be arrested. That's what I hope so. I hope so, right? Because it is 38 charges, but it's 38 new charges. It's 59 total charges. Oh. And those charges are the most serious charges, like they are rape and sex trafficking. And, I mean, just some of the most horrifying and egregious shit, almost as egregious.

as the capri pants that he was wearing when he was arrested. Cecil, did you see the fit? Did you see the fit? I just want to be like, look, I don't care. Like, I'm not shaming anybody's fit. Like, you want to wear whatever you want to wear. That's cool. But I love that the guy who is the poster child

for the in-cell alpha male fucking dipshit crowd is walking around looking like fucking Doris Day. I fucking love it. Like no socks. open loa furs, fucking capri pants. I'm like, okay. I've seen a trend of online women influencers reproducing his lower half outfit.

So they're wearing, so women are wearing, they're wearing like low cut or high cut pants, capris with the loafers and no socks. And then they're standing and then the camera pans up and it's a woman. I love it. It's awesome. And I like it too because to me what it says is especially, you know, to make fun of him in this way is one of the most demeaning things you could do to somebody who is consistently misogynistic, right?

It very specifically is making fun of him. Like I don't care what, like you say, I don't care what you wear. But this guy is an outward misogynist, right? So anybody who's going after his misogyny and pointing that out and then using that as a way to sort of get under his skin, I'm 100% all gas, no breaks on that. I'm perfectly fine with that. There's nothing. Look, I don't care what anybody else wears, but not everybody else literally has a podcast called Tate speech, right? Yes, right.

You know, if you don't want to be hoisted on your own petard, maybe don't go around selling potards. You know? Yeah, it might not be the thing you want to sell. Like walking around with a whole wheelbarrel full of patars. Like, I don't know what a patard is, but like, I do know that you shouldn't be fucking like being patards. Here, I got patards. And then being like, hoisted, I can't believe I was hoisted. The thing is, is if this all goes down, like the things he's been, the things he literally bragged about on his shows.

Right. Those are the things. Because what he essentially did was many of the things. these charges are he's getting women, he's getting them to, he's basically grooming them into pornography and then taking the rewards of the pornography that they're in, right? So he's essentially, that is, that's like prostitution guys. That's what that is, man. He's literally trafficking people into a position that they don't want it. They shouldn't be in if they weren't being pressured by him. And it was a real common thing that he was doing, right? Basically, he's, he's,

saying that they're going out with him is like, oh, you're going out with me. But then he brings him somewhere where another woman convinces them to do the thing to stay in his good graces, right? It's a psychological game that he's playing with these people to manipulate them into basically becoming vessels for money for him, to sell their body for him. And he's getting arrested for it.

And good, good, arrest the shit out of this guy because he literally bragged about this stuff. He has a stain on humanity. And I love, you know, there is some, I know that there's some, I read some stories that there is some backlash. Like there's some Manosphere backlash where people are like,

oh, well, first they comfortate. And then it's like, yeah. I mean, I don't know, man. Like, there's not almost 60 charges of fucking sex crimes against people who are chilling cool. And maybe if that's your, like, that's your model of manhood and masculinity,

like you need to do all of the inward retress introspection, right? You need to be like, whoa, hang on a minute. That can't be the case. And if it turns out to be the case, you'd be like, well, I made a terrible decision. Just be okay with making terrible decision and backing the fuck off of that decision. This doesn't ruin him, right? The only way this ruins him is crazy. Is if he winds up spending an immense amount of time in jail.

If he gets off with anything at all and. and leaves and has to pay like a big fine or whatever. This is a hundred percent a win for Andrew Tate. This will not change anything about what he does in the future. It will not change the minds of the people who are paying attention to him and that will give him more attention afterwards. It may even inflate his brand after this is all over if he doesn't get the book thrown at him. If he winds up skating by or there's a technicality or, you know, they just don't think that this is,

this leads up to. the level of punishment that would require him to spend a lot of time in jail, this is a fucking win for this guy because this entire crew of people, they're all grifters, man, and they all don't give a shit what your, what your qualifications are. All they need is the right message and the right person to say it, and they will make a ton of bank, and this will just up his brand. I think that's exactly. And I think it points to something, like a world that we're in now, which is, it's always been

this way to a certain degree, but I think the dial's been. turned up a lot, which is that like there is, there's a class of influencer, right, that has so much power and control and psychological sort of hold on a group of people that like if they are, it makes it so dangerous to pursue them because if they are not completely destroyed, you've made them much, much stronger. Yeah. You know, look at Trump, right? Trump is a fucking felon and that made him stronger.

Trump was indicted on all kinds of other charges that never were able to make it to court because the election. And that actually made him stronger rather than weaker. That's insane, right? That's patently fucking insane. We should look at that and say, holy shit. Like, where there's smoke, there's fire, this guy is corrupt, and we shouldn't allow corrupt people. But because we've moved

into this influencer level, cult of personality, confirmation bias is the only thing that matters, echo chamber kind of world. And we've selected our monuments and idols within that space. And we've granted them a certain kind of psychological, emotional, and social authority, unless they're ruined, everything strengthens them,

to your point. And that's dangerous. We shouldn't be in that place. We should all recognize that influencers, I know I said this before, but the idea of the influencer is a necessarily negative idea. There is no such concept of a influencer that we should accept. We should always be like, oh, holy shit, like an influencer. That's essentially propaganda. Why are you trying to give me propaganda? Right. I should be wary of propaganda.

Sure. But instead, we embrace it in this weird sort of like, oh, like, it's everything's chill and cool kind of way. And it's not, it's not chilling cool. Well, one of the things that you see with this particular administration is you see people who were charged with crimes during January 6th, serious crimes, being let out they got their partner. and now they're major influencers in that space, right?

Yeah. There's a guy who's traveling around. He was going to Minnesota and other places, and he's traveling to all these other places. And everywhere he goes, he gets his shit kicked out of him. He's a guy who goes, he went up to Minnesota,

and they scared him so bad, like he, like, pissed himself. He was standing on the side of a building. I don't know the guy's name. And it doesn't matter what his name is. Like, who cares, right? But the guy, he went up to, up at Minnesota, and it looks like he pissed himself.

I think they just threw a bunch of water on him in the cold. I think they just fucking threw a bunch of water bottles on him. And they forced him onto this ledge of this building where people are literally grabbing at him like Dawn of the Dead. They're trying to grab this guy. And they finally grab him and they just work like they basically throw him out of this area and they're dog walking him through this entire crowd. And his heads down and he's got like, he's got a shiner.

They like kicked the shit out of him and dragged him over there because he's a provocateur. He goes there with the intent to get being. up. He goes there with the intent because he knows that's just a cash grab from the people on the other side. All he's got to do is put up a go fund me. I got beat up at the protest because I'm a right wing guy. And then suddenly I get $250,000 for just getting my ass kick. I'll get my kick for $250,000. You kidding me? Right. You know, so, so of course you do something like that. So this guy just, he's figured out the grift. And so he just travels all these places as a provocateur. If he provokes people, great. He gets them on camera. He makes it look like the left is loony.

The left is attacking you. The left is violent. And he gets the tape he wants and he puts it on his, on his, on his page or on his Twitter or whatever. And then if he gets his shit kicked out of me, he just like, hey, guys, I got medical bill, pay my medical bills. And everybody just throws a bunch of money at him. So it's really smart on his part. So these guys, but he's a January 6er, right? Like, this is a guy who shouldn't, he shouldn't be out there as a person who's able to just grift and make a shit ton of money off this.

He should be a guy who were like, hey, man, that guy's still in jail because he tried to, like, join in on an insurrection. And we're not cool with that. But instead, he's out and he's making way more money than probably anybody listening to the show right now. It's insane. It's all fucking insane. It's Westboro Baptist Church. They had the same model. Yep.

Westboro Baptist Church had this model. And, you know, what's happened is like it's now become, you know, it went from something an organization did at the organizational level to something that people can do at the individual level as long as they can amplify. Because we've handed everybody the same bullhorn. For sure. All right, this story comes from The Hill. Peg Seth announces annual testosterone screenings for service members. This is just embarrassing. This is honestly just so embarrassing.

He's like, he's calling it like, there's a name for it. What is the name for it real quick? He's got like the high tea military or some fucking nonsense that he's calling it. The high tea department of war is what he's calling it. The high tea department of war. This is just cringe. This is just so fucking cringe. He honestly seems to be advocating a position that, like, checking the testosterone levels of soldiers will increase their lethality.

And he is fucking obsessed with lethality. But, like, the military produces lethality as a byproduct of its operational goals, right? Lethality is not usually the primary goal. it has an operational objective. Lethality is a means to achieve that objective. But he's like call of duty obsessed, right? This is like this is a child's version of what creates lethality. Because first of all, testosterone doesn't do it.

Yeah. This is a child's version of how to accomplish task. And this is a stupid person's idea of what the military is actually for. Do you think that this is, I'm not going to ask you if you think this, because I think it's pretty obvious what this is. This is, I think, very specifically, a message to all the men that are a part of this party that are pro-America, pro-military to say men are the reason why this is important. Men are the reason the patriarchy is important. The women aren't part of this because it's not high hormones, right? We're not saying that they should have like high hormones because hormones are the thing that control this thing or whatever.

No, it's testosterone only, right? There's a very specific reason why I think it's testosterone and why you're pushing testosterone. And it's because, one, he has already said multiple times that he doesn't think people that aren't men should be in the military. That's not the thing that makes a military good. It's not, but he has distilled it down to that because I think what he can turn and say to everybody is men are important and men are the most important thing. And that resonates with all the people who are going to listen to him.

And it's this very like narrowly prescribed vision of masculinity that he wants to carve out and allow people, only allow people to occupy this very narrow vision of masculinity. And like, I want to be very clear. Testosterone actually has nothing to do with how masculine, not necessarily has anything to do with like how muscular you are, how jerk your voices, whether you have facial hair. I mean, like it plays a part in many of those things. But unless you're like at a subclinical level, typically speaking, like there's a big range in how much testosterone people have in their bodies. But this idea of more is better.

You know, it oversimplifies and creates this sort of like really narrow prescription of manhood, which is all these guys want, right? What they want ultimately, what the project here is, is to very narrowly prescribe for everybody what their gender roles should be. and we can attach a metric to it and we can put a number on it. We can say the right kind of man looks like this and tests like this and has these characteristics and the right kind of woman does this thing and the right kind of woman behaves in this way and looks in that way because they're trying to tell us who we have to be.

That's the goal here. The goal is to put everybody in their fucking place, to put men in their place, to put women in their place, to carve out lanes and paths that are socially, that are socially acceptable, but so narrow that people are not allowed to be who they are and they have to fit this certain fucking bucket. And anybody who doesn't fit in that bucket, it becomes otherized and by the process of that otherization becomes either the enemy or irrelevant. That's the project here.

I think, too, this also plays into how this administration treats every single problem. And I'm not just talking about the president himself, but I'm talking about every single person who's underneath him in his cabinet and all the people who work for him, I think that the problem is, is that you have very complex problems and the dumbest people running who think there's an easy solution, right? They think there's an easy solution to everything. They look at a problem and they're like, oh, all you got to do is this. And Trump is the perfect example of this, right? He will say something and he'll be like, this is the thing. And you say, well, that's not anything, or that is barely scraping the surface.

But it doesn't matter because he's figured it out. He's got it down. He knows how to fix this problem. And it's a three-word answer. And it's always a three-word answer. And the same thing here, right? High team military. There's your three-word answer on how we're going to fix this.

First off, I don't think there's a problem at all, right? We're already funding this shit out of this entire endeavor. So I don't think there's a problem at all. But I think that this is one of those things. things that they can say, we figured it out. We did that. We know what's happening behind. We understand the world so much better than all the other politicians that came before

us. And all it needed was this one program and it changed everything. It revolutionized everything. All of these people are mavericks. All of them have like the one, the one cool trick your doctor doesn't want you to know about. It's like a military running entirely on like apple cider vinegar shots and turmeric powder or some shit.

And also think about, and we'll get off this topic eventually, I promise, but think about how much this does not comport with the reality of how modern warfare is fought. I know. Like, what are you going to do? Put it in the rocket? Like, what are you talking about? We are fighting war increasingly in ways that do not rely on the physicality of human beings like fucking stabbing each other with swords and bayonets or even like charging trenches

with guns and shit, right? We are fighting wars increasingly with technology. Technology plays a bigger, broader, more robust role every fucking passing hour in war fighting. So lethality is not defined by your ability to do 50 unbroken pushups or whatever fucking Heg Seth, or literally not a single pull-up if you watch his pathetic fucking pull-up attempts, which are pitiful Hegg Seth. But like, I mean, come on. Like you want to brag about shit, be able to do it.

But like, lethality is defined by your ability to engage with technology. to engage with like systems, to understand how these systems work to like find an enemy, you know, to identify who they are, to put, you know, munitions in place at the right time. It's, it's, it's, it's, brainier than it's ever been. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's about intelligence, not musculature. Yeah. But that doesn't prescribe properly. So he's got to be like, I don't know, but that and burpees. Yeah. It's that. You know, I know it's about, I know it's mostly about, you know, drones. and technology and fucking infrared cameras and fucking flying surveillance shit

at fucking 70,000 feet into 1,000 miles an hour, fine, sure, that's what you sound like. But honestly, it's burpees. It's how many burpees can you do? How many burpees can you do when you down that 12-pack? That's what I'm curious. So when those cops ask questions,

what do you do? Shut the fuck up. And never consent. Shut the fuck up. Never consent. Shut the fuck up. And what do you say when the cop first comes up to you? Why'd you come up to me or why'd you pull me

over. And he starts asking questions. Not discussing my dear evening, sir. And he keeps asking questions. By being detained or am I free to go. And if detained, what do you say? Sir, I invoked fifth. And then what do you do? I shut the fuck up. Never consent.

Shut the fuck up. Never consent. Shut the fuck up. Never consent. Jesus Christ, this next fucking story is from NPR. ICE shared Medicaid data it was not supposed to have with Palantir. and Cecil, boy, were they fucking flippant about it? Well, who's going to punish him? I know.

That's my answer. That's my question to this entire story, right? They share this data. There's literally, like, judges saying you can't do this. And Pounder's like, yeah, we just deleted it. No, you fucking didn't. Like, this is, this should be a, this would be a scandal that rocked an entire administration and shook it to its core in it.

any other time in the history of our country. But this is fucking Wednesday, man. Dude, how depressingly right is that? Like, our Medicaid data, your Medicaid data, the Medicaid data of Americans, that should be, that is private data. That is, that should be private data. And ICE is using this to find people

that they can fucking deport with their giant fucking deportation project that they're on. this evil fucking papers project that they have going on. And then they're sharing that fucking very private, very sensitive information with a private company? Yeah. Palantir is not a government. That's just a private company. Again, we are run by oligarchs. Yeah, man. The oligarchs are just in charge. And we're all just fucking puppets to it. And when they got caught with this shit, they're like, oh, well, we'll try to find all the stuff and get rid of it. And then they're like,

well, but you didn't get rid of it. You actually gave it to fucking Palantantern. They're like, well, it's really hard to find. They literally have us, they literally are quoted. And I'm only paraphrasing a little when they're like, look, it's really fucking hard to figure out where we put all this stuff. And you're like, what do you mean? It's hard to figure out where you put all this stuff. You shouldn't have fucking had it in the first place.

But then if you have it and you say you're only going to scrape it for this like tiny amount of information. And then you find out, oh, you didn't actually scrape it just for a tiny amount of information. And then you didn't safeguard it. And then you intentionally gave it to a fucking third party technology company run by a fucking evil mastermind who's probably got a fucking metal arm and is petting a cat in a volcano layer right now. He is though. Jesus. What is like everything should be. See, so when you were in fucking high school, do you remember, and I don't remember what it was about, but you remember like, we spent like two weeks learning about like the teapot dome scandal.

You know? And it was like, you're like, oh, and you'd learn about this. You'd be like scandals. Scandals seem like a big deal. Look, now it's like, scandals. I want to touch on what you just talked about. Oh, no. Because I think this is so important, right?

Here you have Palantir getting this information. Nobody's going to do anything. Nobody cares. And these oligarchs are embedded in our system. Somehow there's a pipeline of information that gets its hands. Somehow Palantir has its hands in there somehow. But, dude, flock cameras are the same thing. This is a project that is, you know, basically funded.

One of the biggest funders is Andresen Horowitz, Mark Andreessen. He's a very, very rich person, a billionaire investor. And he basically invested a ton of money in these flock cameras. And these things are all over the place. They're all over the United States. And they are using them nefariously. And we know they're using them nefariously. In fact, in Texas, they were searching for a woman to see if she,

left to get an abortion. Oh my God. In, there was another, there was another couple stories that I saw recently, specifically about these flock cameras. There was a, there was a big one that came out on the news because this, this lady recorded on her fucking ring doorbell when the police officer came and said, what were you doing in this city, this other city? And she's like, oh, I drove through it or whatever because like, I just, I was like on my way.

And he's like, well, you don't have any business there. Like, essentially, like, accusing her of like, and you're just like, dude, I don't need to tell you where I am. And he's basically saying, I have you on camera. And she didn't do anything wrong. She just went to another city. She doesn't have to explain why she's there. But here's the thing, man, they're going to, if you don't think that this is coming,

if you don't think that these people aren't just going to sit at their computer and try to figure out ways to fucking charge people with shit with fucking random shit because you're on camera, they're going to do it all day and twice on Sunday. And this is what the problem is. And look, I thought there was a ton of people who were anti- against that were totally privacy hawks that wanted to make sure we got as much privacy as possible. And I thought a lot of those people resided on the fucking right.

That's what I thought was happening for many, many years. I thought that they were the ones who were going to champion as much privacy as we possibly could get. And where the fuck are you with these flock cameras? Like, where the fuck are you, man? Because those things and like Palantir just dipping its fingers into all this data. And Elon Musk literally the richest, the world's richest person having access to behind the scenes data?

Like that's fucking what are we doing? And if not every single one of these people isn't thoroughly investigated after this administration, it's a failure. Dude, I, it is, it is so in our face. It is so in our face that the name of his company, I know. The name of the company is from the Lord of the Rings that evil guys seeing eyeball, crystal thing. that looks around and like, like they're naming their company, I'm going to spy on you.org.

And we're just like, cool. No, really, we're the villains.com. And you're like, yeah, no, I got it the first time. Awesome. Yeah, our website is 666.com. Yeah, I'll for five. Hi, I am from mark of the beast.org. And the fucking Christian, right is everybody's lining up to lick the boots of these fuckers.

I don't know why. I don't understand it. I don't know what's going on. we are building a surveillance state and the libertarians aren't screaming and the right isn't screaming. Why is it us that's screaming about this? Yeah, man. I don't understand that.

I don't understand why the active construction of a privately, of a government and private partnership toward building a surveillance state is not one of the most frightening things that we are actively. Why is that not a big deal? Why is everything not scary right now? And there's just a bunch of people like, well, whatever. I mean,

women shouldn't have abortions anyway. There won't be any repercussions for this. I guarantee. None. None. And I just want to remind people because like it just came to mind when you were talking about the woman, like you don't have to talk to the cops.

If they come to your door, you don't have to say shit. Yeah. You don't have to say anything. If they ask you a question, you don't even have to respond to it. You don't have to talk. to talk to the cops.

You could just say, I don't answer questions. That's an easy answer. I do not answer questions. Like, what the fuck? That's it. You literally have rights that protect that fucking very right from you. Yep. I don't even know.

And like, you should fucking check this shit. Like, I'm not sure you even have to answer the door if they don't have a warrant. Yeah. And the other thing, too, is I've seen so many lawyer testimonials from lawyers who say, never speak to the police, even if you have nothing to. hide, never, ever, ever talk to them. Never. You are, what you're doing is they've already figured out what they're going to do, right?

So one of the things that police always, we talked about this, we covered a bunch of stuff and we covered forensics and how a bunch of a bullshit forensics is, right? Most of the forensics, a lot of forensics is not real or it's just made up or it's literally just what it is it's made to shoehorn the guy they already thought did it. That's not like they just like take a hair. sample from a site and run a DNA and they're like, oh, it's bill down the street. Let's go get billed. No, they find you. And then they're like, they figure out who they want to pick. They pick that person. And then they try to smash that data so it matches the guy who they got.

That's literally what they do. Hair follicle analysis and all this other stuff. There's a million things that they do that literally they just pick and choose what they want to find. And then like the body decay rate, all those things that they say are like hard science. It's not hard science. It's just what it is. It's fudgeable. And the same thing goes for talking you. The only reason they ever want to talk to you is if they got a guy already or if you're

the guy. And neither case, it's good for you. So just shut the fuck up. And as soon as somebody calls you and says, I want to talk to you, be like, I don't want to talk to you. And if they say, you have to come be like, I will talk to a lawyer, I will not speak to you. And then you bring a lawyer with you.

And then the lawyer does all the talking because the lawyer's going to look at him in the face and be like, we're not answering that question. Next question. And then they have to stop because there's nothing they could do. So don't ever do it because there's never in your, it's never in your best interest. Never. Sometimes we go all out and order the olive guard tour of Italy. The sample platter of classic Italian dishes that is hamburger Italy. Two all beef patties and a sesame seed bun smothered in Alfredo sauce. Hot dog rustica, a kosher wiener, a kosher wiener, swimming in all of chips. Bada Bing,

barabum, Bada baby back ribs and chicken fingers mortadello. Motto vene. And of course, the world famous La Dolce Rida

Chinese chicken salad. Mikhail. Okay, y'all, I may not be I tell you, but this food is just nasty. He's shit. Hey,

who wants another box of wine? This is just fucking bonkers from the New York Times. How the GOP turned Olive Guard into a voter ID talking point. So Olive Garden, evidently, has a promotion where you can pay a set fee. And for that set fee, you get, like, unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks or what have you for a certain period of time.

Like, you just be like, yeah, I've fucking bought into the Olive Garden. It's a subscription base. Breadsticks, sir. That's right, Cecil. That's right. You can now get a goddamn subscription to breadsticks and carbs. Amazing. just get a subscription to overloading on carbs. And hey, look, if that's your thing, if you want to

eat some fucking Cisco brand fetichini Alfredo, and that makes you happy, I get it. I get it. I get it. Some food is just comfort for it. If you want to go to Olive Garden, I mean, it's not Olive Garden. Some food is, but it's not like, if you, if you just are like, hey, my blood pressure isn't high enough, how much sodium can the human body actually intake? in a single meal. But just understand everything is microwaved. Like, just understand, like, everything is made in a microwave. Like, don't think it's like a guy back to be like, pass me the padule.

It's not that at all. Here's the thing. Like, I'd be in a snob, but I would go to Olive Garden right now. Yeah, and it's fine. Right now. And it's fine to enjoy. Like, it's perfectly fine. You know, when you go to Starbucks in the morning, they microwave your sandwich.

So, like, of course, it's made a microwave. It's fine. Again, however you want to eat, whatever you want to eat, it's fine. Do not care. Do not care. But I'm just saying, like, if I'm going to choose a place to eat, I personally probably wouldn't choose Olive Garden, but I don't have any fond memories of Olive Garden, so it doesn't matter to me. I do have fun memories of Olive Garden.

It's funny, like when I was a young man, like late teens, early 20s, like I thought Olive Garden was fancy. Capital F, fancy. So I ate at Olive Garden whenever I was like, I want a fancy food. And then like once every few years, if the fucking stars aligned and I got a gift card or something, I was like, ultra fancy for me, Cecil, Red Lobster. That was a high-end establishment for me as a young man. Cheddar Bay Biscuits, my friend. Cheddar Bay Biscuits, motherfuckers.

So like, I get it. And it's fine. And like I said, I would go, if somebody's like, Tom, you want to go to Olive Garden right now? I'd be like, dude, I'll drive. Yes, let's, what is happening? Why aren't we there now? I would take you to a place where you could eat. But yes, you could go to Olive Garden.

if you want. But Olive Garden has a subscription for pasta or whatever that you can get. And somebody asked, it's one big long noodle that you can slurp once in a while. It's a month long noodle. You just tuck it between your lip and gum.

And somebody asked online like, hey, if I get the subscription to Olive Garden, can other people use my subscription? And Olive Garden was like, no, that's not how subscriptions to things work. That's how losing money as a company works. So we're going to need you to like be you if you pay for this.

So you got to use an ID. You know, if you want to come in and use your subscription card to Olive Garden, you have to actually beat yourself. And so the GOP was like, oh, oh, my God. There's more security to get pasta primavera than there is to vote in the United States election. This is not a bad faith argument. What I love is every time there's ever a talking point on the left, there is a million people on the right are like, it's so manufactured, it's so goofy, listen to them all. They all say the same thing. Look at every single one of these Republicans that are doing the exact same thing that happens when there's a talking point.

Somebody made a joke online and then from that point on, it's in the congressional record 50 times in one day. So like the idea that somehow one side is immune to that sort of thing is the stupidest shit ever you're trying to sell people. And the reason why you're trying to sell it to people is because you think that the other side can't think for itself. That's why you're saying it, right? They can't think for themselves. So they have to have the same talking point. No, both sides just find talking points and then they repeat those talking points because they think they're good. The problem with this one is it's fucking stupid.

That's the problem with this talking point because voting is a right. It's a right every American has. And for you to say there's less integrity and there's less chance to catch somebody who's cheating is fucking stupid. Because we have systems in this country, many states do not require you to show an ID

and there's no voter fraud. And the reason why we do that is because we identify them in some other way. People who think there's no voter ID are the dumbest people, and they fight for it, are the dumbest people because they somehow think that there's no way to identify someone unless you can look at a picture of them.

But there's a million ways to identify people. It happens online all the time. I forgot my password. Oh, do you have to send a copy of your ID to that company in order to get your password back? Is that how this works? No, I fucking tell you the name of my dog when I was a kid.

And then you give me my fucking password back. There's a million ways. And we figured this out with computers. We know it works. We know there's ways to get. There are ways to get around it. Sure, there's ways to get around it. There's ways to get hacked.

We know that, like, people get their email fished and things like that. So I'm sure there's ways to get around it. It's not impregnable, but it is a way to identify someone. And it also puts less burden on the person who's being identified. if you make passport or birth certificate the standard for people to get a vote, to cast a vote, they may not have those things or they may have to take time out to get those things, or they may have to pay money for those things. All of that infringes on your right to vote.

So don't do that. That's stupid. Unless you can somehow say when a human being is born in the United States and they become a citizen, they get this voter ID card and it's 100% free and that's the only thing that they need. that's fine as long as it's 100% automatic, I'm down. If it's not, then it shouldn't be something that we do because you're inconveniencing people for a right they have. Yep.

Yeah. And that's the difference. We require ID. This isn't new. It's not like Olive Garden is the only time anyone has ever had to show an ID for anything. We require ID for all kinds of things that are not rights. That are not rights. Like take a page, if you're a Republican and take a page.

page out of the people who've been talking about restrictions on the Second Amendment, right? So if you're a Republican and you're trying to, I'm trying to steal man this whole thing, it has been, it has long been posited by the right that we can't do all kinds of stuff as far as gun control is concerned, because a lot of that stuff would amount to a de facto tax on a right that we all hold. Yeah. Right? And we've said, like the right has come out and said, hey, you can't require everyone to have

insurance, for example, in order to own a gun because that creates a tax. You can't require everybody to do this process or that process or whatever. If it costs $1, it's a tax on a right and you cannot tax a right. You can't tax a right. That's it. End a story. That's it. There's a difference between the things that make us Americans, that make us citizens of this country and like products and services we'd like to purchase as an option. Yeah. It's a difference. It's okay. If I go, well, if I want to buy booze, right, I might have to show my ID so they see how old I am. That's cool. Nobody gives the shit. You could have made the same argument a hundred times over this. This is why it's so bad faith. They could have said, oh, there's more security

around buying a six pack of beer than there is around voting. There's more security around, you know, proving your identity at the doctor's office than there is around voting. Think of all the things you show an ID for. They could have used any of them. This is not a an honest good faith argument. They don't believe this. This is just pasta. This is just like political creepy pasta. Well, what it is, it's a snappy thing that they can say

that their base doesn't have to interrogate, right? You don't have to interrogate. I don't have to think about it. I could just say, oh, well, it's harder to do this than this. And that's an easy way to get my point across to a bunch of people who've never thought about this. I consistently hear on Joe Rogan show how there's voter ID is essentially necessary. And if you don't have voter ID, you're essentially cheating.

And it's just, I mean, like, I tell anybody, go try to vote for me in the next election. Right. Go try to vote for me. Because you can do it. Like, it's possible, right? It's possible somebody knows my name, my full name, they know where I live, and they know my day to birth. It's possible that they know those things, right? But if I go to the polling station, I probably have to say all three of those things.

And then I have to sign a piece of paper that matches the piece of paper that they have that shows my signature. That's four different ways that they're identifying me, right? And I don't have to show an ID during that entire process because I have four pieces of information. Now, is it impossible for someone else to vote for me? No, it's not impossible. Is it useful? No, it's not useful. That's the real issue, right?

is that you would have to memorize, have a list of thousands and thousands and thousands of people who you know weren't going to be voting that day, and you would have to then memorize all their data so you could walk in and be able to forge their signature well enough to get the person behind there to say, okay, yeah, that's you. That's so much work for so little gain. There's no reason to do it. How you manipulate votes if you're going to do voter fraud is behind the scenes.

Now, with actual votes, voters with manipulating the votes behind, throwing ballots away, large swaths of ballots. Oh, those were all mail in while they wound up in the garbage. Oh, here's a big group of people from this county. Well, those ballots got misplaced. We don't have them anymore. Oh, I'm going to go behind the scenes and I'm going to fucking computer hack in there and I'm going to change the way things work.

Those are like substantive ways to do voter fraud if you can get away with it. Sure. Those are ways to change big swaths and numbers. But one zy-tozy voting, memorizing somebody's name and their birth date and then hoping that they didn't vote as well isn't going to get you the outcome you want. The things you're saying are the reason why you're saying them is because you want to limit voting, not open it up. That's it. There's no other reason. They never want to say that, oh, we just don't want anybody to vote.

What we want is we want only a few people to vote. want the rich people who can afford a passport to vote. They don't want to say that, but that's what they mean. Because the motive isn't there. It doesn't make any sense of the other way. Yeah, man. And two other quick things. Like the motive isn't there and the potential cost here.

The cost benefit, the cost, if you get busted doing this, if you do this thing that is almost certainly going to have no real effect, the cost is enormous. It's enormous. It makes no sense. Like, people may be. induced to commit crimes, right? Because to some degree, they look at the cost benefit and they say, okay, the likelihood of me getting caught is low. If I get caught, the punishment is not that high.

And I want the thing. And I can affect, by my actions, I can affect a change or a result that exceeds the risk to me. There is some amount of that calculus that is often done. I know that's not how all crime works. But it doesn't make any sense in voter fraud. You're still, like, even if you spent the whole day as a person, as an individual, as voting day, you spent the whole day just fucking furiously driving around committing fraud, all you've done is increased exponentially your risk for yourself. And maybe you did what, like 12 votes? Well, even if you did it with a thousand other people in your weird conspiracy somehow, you've figured out, each of you is going to take 12 and you're going to sway this election by

12,000 votes. That's 12,000 opportunities for you to be caught. It's fucking patently insane. And the other thing that I just want to point out is that we have in power at the highest place of power possible the most ardent conspiracy theorist around this issue in Donald Trump. Yeah. And you would think

that if this fraud was so real and so rampant and there was so much proof that the most powerful man in the country with all of the powers associated with the FBI and the Department of Justice and all the levers of power he could pull that they would have found this and shown it to everybody.

But there's nothing there. There's nothing there. There's never been anything there. If there was something there, don't you think that the guy who's been screaming about it would have shown it to us? He can't show it to us because it's not real.

It's all fucking made up. It's all made up. And if he thinks, somehow that voting by mail, and I've heard this by so many people, that it's all just fraud, that voting by mail is just 100% fraud, why would you, as that person, entrust your vote to mail? Because that's how we votes. Like, if that's the case, you're basically saying, my vote's going to be taken away from me. I'm somehow going to be fraudulent.

The idea that you're going to say, like, you're going to hand wave away that many people and just say, oh, it's all voter fraud. Like you just, what they don't want to do is they don't want to run on any positions that will get them voted in. That's what they don't want to do. What they want to do is they want to enrich a very slight group of people, make a ton of people happy by making other people mad. And that's all they want to do. They don't want to have any real policies. They don't want to run on those things.

And every time they get elected to government, the fucking thing goes down the toilet. It's a fucking speed run to ruin the government every year. single time one of these idiots gets elected. It's a fucking speed run. It's a disaster from the beginning. They blow the deficit. They give their friends a bunch of money. They're corrupt and shitty.

They're fucking start fucking random wars by fucking throwing a fucking dart at a map. They don't give a fuck. And every single time it happens that they get elected, they've gotten elected by somehow tricking all these people into thinking they're going to do good for them. They've somehow got the sucker vote.

They got the sucker vote. Every single time. And the fucking, the real issue is, is that they never want to run on any kind of policy that can be sustainable for their party. What they want to do is they just want to grift as much as they can, as quick as they can, fall out of favor for one cycle, and then blame everybody for all the bad shit that they did two cycles ago. He killed one, right? The thing I live most in the world. Vivica, get off the line now. A hooker.

All right, you killed a hooker. Calm down. Here's what you're going to do. Get your hands on some bleach, some hydrogen peroxide, and a shitload of lime. Noah, Panda. Amanda, come on, dude. That's probably not even a real name. No, a panda. Panda. This story comes from Wired. Pseudo-scientific cancer treatment involves gassing naked people in plastic bags with bleach. Jesus Christ. A London clinic owner has claimed he is treating people with stage four cancer by sealing them into a plastic bag while they're naked. from the neck down and gassing them with chlorine dioxide. Now, Cecil, that subheading does beg the question, are they not naked from the neck up?

What are they wearing? You have to wear like a ski mask. It's like a buck ass naked, but you're wearing a ball of clobba. I got a, I got a head peat. I got a hat on. I got like a, like, some sort of like ball cap. I have sunglasses, earrings. I'm wearing a scarf like a cowboy.

Right. Yeah, I got a babushka. I'm wearing a babushka. I don't go anywhere without a fine. I love that we're like vacuum sealing people with bleach. And we're like that'll help. It's so sad though because these are all people that are going to die, right? They're all in this.

And really, we should have given a myvermectin and sunlight in their ass. That's the other problem too is that there's a bunch of people like I know we're kidding. But God, there's a group of people. I get Joe Rogan's email sometimes, right? So I do a show. called the No Rogan Experience with Michael Marshall. And we have a form on our site that says send an email to the guys, right? Nobody reads anything.

So what will happen is people think that we're the Joe Rogan experience. And what they do is they go there. Even though it says in big red letters, we are not associated with the Joe Rogan experience at all. Doesn't matter. People will still send and use this form to send us messages about themselves. They'll suggest guests. They'll suggest. And these are for Joe's show, not for us.

because they're like, hey, Joe. I mean, that's how they started. They're like, hey, Joe, so I know that I'm talking to me. And look, some of it could be fake, whatever. But before we even announced that this was happening, we were getting messages. And I remember after Mel Gibson was on Joe's show, we got multiple messages from people because Mel Gibson talked about ivermectin and how a bunch of people were going into remission that he knew they had stage four cancer.

They took a bunch of ivermectin. And then the cancer went away. And because these people don't realize they think. cancer is a parasite. So they think if you take an anti-parasite, you're going to fix your cancer. And so Joe thinks Joe was talking to him and broadcast it to a bunch of people.

And we got messages from people who were like, hey, my friend has stage four cancer. Can you tell me more about this ivermectin stuff? So like literally people are listening to this and saying, I want to try something. This person in this story, like there's a bunch of people in the story. First off, the person in the story

didn't even have the fucking self-respect to stay at a holiday in last night. This guy is a baker. He's like just a dude. He's just like, yep, I read about this stuff. It's in a book, and I started a clinic. If this doesn't scream grifter to you, I don't know what does, right? This person has no background whatsoever in medicine, period.

Like, sometimes these people will, like, dabble, they'll get an associate's degree, or they'll work somewhere that's near it, or sometimes they're even straight up doctors who realize they can make just a shit ton of money this way. So on occasion that happens. This person isn't even related in any way at all. It'd be like somebody being like, yeah, I'm a, I actually am a server at Olive Garden, but I built this rocket. Like, anything you do in your regular life prepared you at all to do this thing,

and it doesn't matter because you're going to pay for it. And it's terrifying. But the thing is people will go forego the or own good treatment at regular doctors for something they hope will work because the other stuff, It hurts. It's not great. I don't know exactly how that stuff works because I'm not a doctor person. And you shouldn't take my doctor advice anyway, right? Because I'm not a doctor person. Right. But I know that people don't feel good when they're on that specific thing. And so that like chemotherapy or radiation therapy, so they go find some other things that make them feel okay. And then they think that's going to work and they'll forego regular treatment all the time.

Dude, I, I knew people. I knew a guy. There's a guy that worked for me years ago. And very sadly, he got cancer. He got like leukemia. And it was very sudden onset. And, you know, he went to the hospital and they put him on a very aggressive course of chemotherapy. And he did not survive. And his, like, the conversation around that in the office was like, oh, my God, the chemotherapy killed him. And it's like, I mean, the cancer killed him.

Nope. Right? Like, because nobody just gave him chemotherapy because it was a Thursday. Right? he didn't have chemotherapy because like somebody was bored. It wasn't a Flintstone vitamin. Yeah. You know, the, the reason that the guy got, like, let's go back to the fucking cause here.

The guy got chemotherapy because that was the only treatment available for the deadly cancer that he was absolutely going to die of. Yep. There was no chance. So it's not like he was going to survive except that they gave him chemotherapy. And boy, that did him in. That's not true. Yeah. It's not true.

He had cancer. He was dying of cancer. They tried this. It didn't work. Yep. He fucking died and it was sad. But like people are weird about that kind of stuff. Like we want our interventions, our medical interventions to be painless and perfect.

Yeah. And they are never either one of them. Yep. It's got to be 100% or it's not a good system. All the time. All the time. Many interventions are not painless. Many interventions, I mean, I don't think any are perfect.

So, but like it's still. better than the nothing that you had as an alternative. See, but fucking putting yourself as a fucking sealamil meal with a bunch of fucking chlorox is insane. Yeah. It's insane. Yeah. It's really crazy. And when he's asked questions, he basically just says, read this book I read. That's how he answers questions.

Imagine if you trusted, because we do this only with medicine that I'm aware of, right? I'm not aware of any world where we would trust somebody with literally no credentials for anything that was this important. Somebody was just like, yeah, you know, like, if you took your car to the mechanic and you're like, oh, I hope they're an ASC certified mechanic, I, you know, I'm going to ask about that. And you went and said, hey, just want to double check. All you guys here are actually like certified mechanics, right? You guys know how to do this. And some guy was like, yeah, no, I'm a paralegal.

And you're like, I don't want you working on my car. feels crazy, right? That feels like a crazy situation to find yourself in, and the stakes are very low in that circumstance. Didn't you have ads in the 20th century? Well, sure, but not in our dreams, only on TV and radio and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and bananas and written on the sky, but not in dreams. No, sir. This story is from the New York Times. The fake influencers selling wellness on your feed. The New York Times found hundreds of AI generated doctors, healers, and wellness influencers on social media,

touting the health benefits of supplements to American consumers. Many of these hyper-realistic-looking ads promised medical miracles and appear to be targeting older women while making misleading health claims for a profit. This shit is like, I'd like to be wrong. about being scared of technology once Cecil. This is like exactly what we have always been like, hey, maybe we don't do that. And then companies are like, well, we're definitely going to do that. And then the grifters are like, awesome.

Thanks for the most unbelievably powerful grifting tools that have ever been invented. And a Wild West type approach to regulation, right? I think that's the big key. Because if you were to run these commercials, they say it in this article, it's actually a thing you can listen to. It's like five minutes. But in this specific, you know, reporting on this, they mention, if you were to do this on television, you wouldn't be allowed to do that on television. We have rules against that. We say, you're not allowed to do that. That's not a thing you're allowed to do. And what they do is they'll show a couple, and it's clearly an AI'd couple. And they'll say,

this is day one of this medicine. And then two seconds later, you're like, this is day 50. And they've lost 100 pounds. And they both look 10 years younger. And the thing is, I think, Just like those fishing attempt emails that are made to sort of, they're not getting, 99 or 99 people aren't going to pay attention to them, but the one person is, that's what this stuff is, right? If you saw this commercial, you wouldn't be convinced of it at all, Tom. You'd be like, even if, even if, like, I wasn't the thing, and they used two different actors or they did something,

you would immediately, something would go off in your head that would say, this is crazy. That's not a real thing. But it doesn't matter because all you need to do is hit that one person. All you need to do is like, especially with the way in which you can, you can seed the ground with this stuff and the spread at which you can spread it and the way in which you can go viral with these things and get people to share it and pay very little money to get it promoted, all those things are so easy for you to spread your message. So the hard work of trying to be a con man, isn't there anymore. You don't need it.

You don't need it. If I saw this, I would immediately throw it out, but I don't matter. I'm not the target. The target is somebody who's going to be less, more gullible, you know, maybe a little less critical of this stuff, and maybe somebody who's desperate for an answer. All those things will then feed into whether or not you're actually going to pick this thing up. You're going to choose this random cure, this random supplement that's garbage.

All I need is a few of these people. and my massive reach will be the thing that creates the numbers for me. Yeah, and that's exactly the thing, is that people are going to say, oh, this has always been the case. But there's a couple of things that make this particularly dangerous. And you hit on them. It's the scale, the speed, and the cost. Yeah. Those things matter, right?

They matter in exactly the same way that a musket is not the same thing as a machine gun. It is exactly the same analogy, right? Like when the founders were like, hey, everybody can have a gun. they were thinking about something that takes fucking 38 seconds to load between shots, right? Yeah. And now we're talking about like wildly different weapons that are just inherently more dangerous because we've scaled them up. What AI does is it reduces the cost.

So if you've got a numbers problem, your point is right, if you've got a thing where you say, okay, look, 99.9% of the time this doesn't work, the solve for that as a business, and this is scamming is a big business, the solve for that, is to say, okay, well, then it works 0.1% of the time. So what I need to do is produce this at such scale that that 0.1% builds an economy that I can function off of. I need to produce enormous volumes at low cost. And AI was just like, cool, here you go.

Awesome. Here's the most effective grifting tool. The costs are essentially almost nothing. There's 20 bucks. 10 bucks to make the video, 10 bucks to promote it. and you can make thousands of dollars. Why wouldn't you invest that money? And like, I will share a very quick story

that just happened literally last night. So, like, Haley's been going through some health stuff. Everybody knows that she is on the upswing. We're very grateful for that. But there are still some challenges that she has to her health, specifically her stomach continues to be a problem. And we were looking at, like, what are the treatments for X, Y, or Z?

And, of course, when you start, like, looking around online, one of the things that came up was this, supplement called squalamine. And I'm like, what the fuck of squalamine? Never heard of that before. So there's like, you know, antibiotic A, B, C, and D. And we're reading about those.

But then, of course, I'm curious. So when we see the squalamine thing, I'm like, oh, I'm wondering what that is. And it's a fucking, like, extract from the spiny dogfish shark and lampreys. I'm not even kidding. And C-Sysel, they're selling this shit. Sucks to milk those, by the way. It's just like, they just move all the time.

They put those things in a fucking cider press or something. Like, they just, like, fish them out of the ocean. You got to reach your hair. You got a gloves on and you just milk the spice. It's fucking awkward. This shark is like, okay. The shark is just smoking. Buy me dinner or something.

Dude, thousands of dollars for this supplement. I'm not even exaggerating. Thousands of dollars for this entirely unregulated, unproven. No clinical trials, no clinical evidence. But like, there are people who are desperate, right? And so when you're desperate. Yeah, man. And you see something.

And the other thing that hurts all of us is the ubiquity of seeing it. You see it once, twice, five, seven, ten, 30, 70, 50, 100 times. You see this same messaging from these different places. You're not even trying to see it. You're scrolling past it. Oh, I just got a little taste. I didn't even think about it. Now it's embedded in the back of your fucking head.

And it becomes something that the background, like, effect of your mind, quote-unquote, knows about. And it builds a credibility. so they can build background credibility for their bullshit without ever having you truly engage with it just by volume, just by volume, that ubiquity is insidious. This shit is scary.

This is how we move the needle. I was thinking about this when I was listening. People are often like, oh, I'm not moved by advertisement. I'm not moved by advertisement. If advertisement didn't change people's minds, it would not be the massive industry it is and has always been since its inception. It absolutely changes behaviors.

It changes your behaviors. And there's a reason we call it Kleenex and not tissue paper. And Xerox. Or Xerox or Coke. Like there is a ubiquity to branding and to marketing that becomes embedded into who we are and how we think that we take for granted. And that's what they're counting on. They are counting on building something that you didn't think about, that you didn't consider.

It's scary. And they can do it for fucking next. to free. I am surprised that the answer, the easy answer for many of the ways in which to grift is flood the zone. Yeah. I'm surprised that that's the answer, but it shouldn't be a surprise, but it really is the, that's the methodology that they use when it comes to disinformation. And that just plays over into other places where you're trying to use disinformation to influence people. And this is another example of that. They are flooding the zone with this misinformation, it's not missing, it's blatant disinformation

that they're creating specifically to try to convince people to give them money to trick them. And what needs to happen is there needs to be serious regulations on our social media places, because there is no argument. I don't care what your argument is about making this less safe for people's money and people's well-being.

There's no good reason to have this stuff or these tools that allow this stuff to happen and these companies need to take a better role in the things that they are allowing to distribute and allowing to push. The fact that you can, in some cases, pay to have these things out in your feed and like, you know, pay money and these things can show up in people's feeds and there's no process for anybody to look at that. That's just you just not willing to fund the process to look at it. That's all that is. That's just you saying, I don't want to do that work or pay someone to do that work. I just want to do that work. I just want make the money off of it and then it doesn't matter what happens with it there should be very strict

rules behind that but if they if they put that tightening regulation on there these companies make more money and they howl baby they howl when they make the tiny the tiniest bit of downturn on their on their stock portfolio is a huge deal to them and they howl so you can't we can't ever stop them from doing this there needs to be massive regulation on these people in order to fix do you think AI companies should be allowed to give tools a way that look this realistic? I'm not smart enough to make these decisions. I don't know how to handle this and how to regulate it. This is a subject that is so fast and so quickly evolving that I'm not sure I have a good voice that could give you an idea on whether or not it's good or bad for people to have or whether or not the barrier should be money. but I will say this.

I'll say that there needs to be really smart people that sit down in a room and figure out ways in which human beings should be allowed to have this technology now. And so we don't wind up with a situation where it is the Wild West like the internet like it is with this advertising, where nobody's in control of it

and these companies can just make money hand over fist and then these other grifters can use those companies that they're making money off of to make money off you. and the only loser is you. The only loser in this whole situation is the regular person and somebody needs to stand up

for the regular person to stop so that any of this grifting happens to regular old people. I guess like, I will just say like for all of human history until 2024, we got along just fine

without being able to create hyper realistic fake people for no cost and money. Yeah. And like maybe the cost here doesn't outweigh the benefits. And somebody needs to fucking triple check that math. Because I'm not sure that we get more from being able to create entirely hyper-realistic videos

of people that are saying and moving and behaving as if they were actual people indistinguishable from reality. I'm not sold. That's a high bar that that's better for society than all of the everything else we did prior to 2024. Well, somebody's smarter than me and it's to sit down with a bunch of other people smarter than me and figure this out because I do not see a good road away. Because we know what happened with social media.

Like, we know that they've never taken any fucking, any responsibility for the shit they do. Not a single time. And they're not going to in the future. So we're already down that road. We can't go down another one like this. All right, that's going to wrap it up for the show this week. There'll be a patron show out Thursday. We were going to put it out this last week

because we recorded it a little early, but Ian's away in Australia this week, so he's going to do it next week. And so we'll have a Thursday show for you, patrons, and then we'll be back Monday with 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-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double, bubble, toil and 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,

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