Macrodosing: Arian Foster and PFT Commenter - Senator Ted Cruz Joins The Show | Macrodosing - Sept 29, 2026

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Senator Ted Cruz joins Macrodosing to talk about the Protect College Sports Act and the future of college athletics. Plus, the guys get into Senator Eric Schmidt and the hawks vs hawkeyes debacle, the wild Air Dubai plane incident, an alleged hacker selling Auburn football information to other schools, Alix Earle admitting she’s never read a book, Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft game, and Manchester City’s massive financial fraud case. Enjoy! (00:02:35) Senator Eric Schmidt (00:16:50) America.gov (00:27:19) AI Getting a New Name (00:36:44) DoorDash Air (00:41:54) PFT’s Plane Corner (00:51:24) University of Auburn (01:01:54) Alix Earle Has Never Read a Book (01:06:06) Mike Tomlin (01:18:15) Chris Hansen (01:25:02) Manchester City (01:33:19) Ted Cruz Order Pardon My Cheesesteak on https://pardonmycheesesteak.com and use code AWL for free delivery. Start your free trial at https://SHOPIFY.COM/doseYou can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/macrodosing

Hey, macrodosing listeners. You can find us every Tuesday and Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon music. So, Senator, I was saying earlier in the show, I just became a full-time Washington Wizard season ticket holder, even though I live in Chicago, but grew up in D.C. And got some really nice tickets, like right behind the Wizards bench. Very excited to be using them. I like to invite you to a game with me.

And also, I'd like to invite, I said this earlier, I'll say it to you. if you can get in touch with Eric Schmidt, I would like him to go to a hawks game with me. When the Hawks are in town, him and I, we can go. He can wear a Iowa jersey. But like, I think it'd be fun. So pass that along to him, open invitation. Eric's a good buddy of mine. I may decline to pass on that invitation.

Welcome back to macrodosing. It's Thursday. It's October 1st. Hey, hey, Big T. wake up the guy from Green Day. Ah, nice. You know that one. Good one.

And it's today's episode is brought to you by part of my cheese steak. I had part of my cheese steak over the weekend. It was delicious. It's always good. Football's back. You've got the games. Now you just need to figure out what you're eating.

That's why you order part of my cheese steak. We've got a variety of mouth-watering cheese steaks, chicken tenders, loaded fries, desserts, all the good stuff that you want on game day. Delivered quickly straight to your door. Turn on the games. Crack open whatever you're drinking. and let part of my cheese steak handle the food.

You know what I like to do with my cheese steaks, Big Tea? What's that? This goes back all the way to elementary school. We'd have steak and cheese on Thursdays. Steak and cheese thursdays. I would put my fries right there in the sandwich. Nice. Combine them.

That's the elite way to eat a cheese steak. This season, make game day easy. Order part of my cheese steak on part of my cheese steak. Use code AWL. You get free delivery on part of my cheese steak. All right, welcome back to macrodosing. It is Thursday. It is October 1st.

We've got a lot going on. And we also have an interview with Senator Ted Cruz. And I'm excited about that. Unfortunately, Arian is on a flight back from Argentina, even though Ted Cruz is his senator from Texas. Got delayed. They share our hometown. Arian's flight got delayed.

And now he won't be back in time for the interview. But that's fine. We press on. I will get some questions from Arian that I will ask Senator Cruz. but again this is our long-standing policy of if you serve in Congress, we will have you on the show. I think we said Senate, it's 100% reps. It's not guaranteed, but very likely.

Very likely. So yeah, Senator, we will say yes to every time, or I guess the son of a president. Yeah. Right. We've got 3% of the Senate after this. That's pretty good. That's big. So, yeah, Corey Booker, Ted Cruz, Eric Schmidt.

Wait, did we interview Cory Booker? No, not Corey Booker. We interviewed Hakey Jeffries. That was, that was lightweight racist of me to confuse it. Who is in the House of Representatives. What about Pat Ryan? Pat Ryan. That's Congress person.

Oh, okay. Murphy, Schmidt, and Ted Cruz. Yeah, lightweight, lightweight a racial mix up on my part. Both Congress people from the Northeast that's about where the similarities might end.

both Democrats. Speaking of Senator Eric Schmidt, macrodosing alumni, in the news, in the news yesterday. We should send shirts out with that macro alumni. Macro alumni? I like that. I like that. In the news, write that down, Big T. Okay.

In the news, best I can tell, I did a little Google news search for Eric Schmidt and or I have Google alerts set up for all our recurring guests. So I guess everyone's talking about it because there was that cool profile of them that was out yesterday about how he might be a sneaky vice president pick for jd vans rough time to have a goof and then i read what else is going on with him um there there was a hearing on capital hill yesterday where they brought in uh the independent prosecutor special prosecutor jack smith to talk about um the cases against president trump for election interference as well as uh some of the other stuff that he was investigating, that he's not a lot to talk about, the documents case, classified documents

case. So Eric Schmidt, he asked, he asked Jack, or Jack Smith, can you tell us about any trips that you might have taken to Atlanta in the last few years? And he said, I don't recall going to Atlanta. And Senator Schmidt was like, well, what if I told you that we had texts from, you? your camp discussing plans in Atlanta the day after Fannie Wells admitted her affair with her subordinate. And Fannie Wells was also investigating President Trump in Atlanta for that case that she had going on down there. So Senator Schmidt was implying that there was some sort of collusion that Jack Smith was discussing with Fannie Wells in Georgia and saying, we have evidence of you making plans to go to the Atlanta Hawks game, which first of all,

that low-key arrestable offense, just attending a hawks game. They're playing the Warriors. Okay, all right. I take it back. Makes sense? I believe. I think they said Warriors Hawks.

Makes sense. And Jack Smith was like, no, I don't know what you're talking about. And Eric Schmidt was like, well, look at this big billboard that I had my AIDS print up. And it had like Fannie Wells on there and then like some blue dots or whatever, like an iPhone, iMessage thing. And he was looking at trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. And then Amy Klobuchar weighs in, and she was like, is it possible that this was a different game? And she's like, is this the Hawkeyes, maybe the Iowa Hawkeyes game?

And Jack Smith was like, well, yeah, I went to go see Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes play against the University of Maryland on that day here in the D.C. area. And so then Eric Schmidt got very upset. I was like, what are you trying to rehabilitate this witness? Why are you interfering? Blah, blah, blah. So I guess he's still kind of in spin zone damage control. He tweeted out later like who knew that he was a Caitlin Clark fan. So the spin zone that's coming out is like, well, there's so many things that he has done that are improper that it made sense that I saw Hawks game.

And I thought there might be something improper going on. So really it's his fault. I'm interested to know how that mix up happened between Hawks and Hawkeyes. There has to be other information. There has to be other text messages that we haven't seen behind the scenes where somebody refers to it as a hawks game. Well, and that's where I was going, PFT is.

Now, this should have never happened. You got to have your facts straighter than this. But Iowa does this and the Chicago Blackhawks do this and it annoys the hell out of me. They only say Hawks. Iowa's the Hawk Eyes. They called them the Hawks. Chicago is the Blackhawks.

They call them the Hawks. You're not the Hawks. Hawks. There's a team that is the Hawks. It's not you. So where would I see Iowa listed as being the Hawks? I think their fans call them that like all the time. So like I'm going to look up, let's just look up the college football scoreboard on ESPN. Well, they're not going to be listed as that on ESPN. It's like how, no, not. Sometimes they list like, you know, the team nickname. This is like the Vols. Yeah. Except there is no other team that's the Vols. It's clear who you're referring to. What should we call Iowa instead? The Kyes. I would just say the hawk eyes.

It's really not hard to say, I agree. And I'm looking at the text that they have on that board, because I was like, I would like to see where the confusion was. What they put on the board never says hawks. It just says, hey, man, is 109 row one reserved for Jack? Damn, thank you for saving, but we are good. Ask Harbock. And then someone else said, he's already down here, thanks.

Yeah. So I'm thinking that there might be something else, Because all that does not imply anything about what game it was. Right. There has to be, he didn't put the right text on the, on the board. Unless, if that's all they had, and then he looked up, somebody in his camp looked up, what basketball games took place on that day. And then the only one that they could find was the Atlanta Hawks. So I do believe I saw something that the only men's college or NBA game going on was the Atlanta Hawks.

night, yeah. Right. But there were women's games happening. Women's games and I think the men's games might have been earlier in the day, that day. So it might have been the only men's night game, professional or otherwise. Yeah, that, I believe I read that. But then that would, I don't know, that that would, it seems like too much of a coincidence that one team is called the hawk eyes and the other is called the Hawks for that to be the only thing that they looked up is like what games were happening. So I'm thinking somewhere along the way somebody had to refer to them as the Hawks or maybe the Hawkeyes and that was overlooked or what I think is actually a real possibility. I think somebody that was looking up what game this might have been online might have used,

whether it's Claude or Jim and I, some sort of AI engine that along the lines hallucinated and thought Hawkeyes met Hawks. Because that type of stuff does happen. If I were to speculate wildly, I would imagine Jack Smith asked, because this game was at Maryland, correct? It was near D.C. in college park. He asked an Iowa senator, congressperson, something.

Can you get me two tickets to the game when Caitlin Clark's coming? Someone texted him back, got you tickets to the Hawks game, you're good to go. he goes to the game someone sees that text and that's where the a native Iowan referred to them as the Hawks at some point in a text message and that is where the confusion came

that might that might make sense that is pure speculation Senator uh Senator Grassley isn't he the one that's like running this entire hearing he's from Iowa the like 90 year old guy I don't know well I know who Chuck is I don't know My money's on that guy. Yeah.

I'm assuming it's an aid of someone. Because so along in this made-up scenario. In this investigation, they've also uncovered a lot of phone records. So Jack Smith asked for the toll records for a bunch of members of Congress to determine who was on the phone with the president and the White House on January 6th and who was coordinating. So he got like the call records. And then from the National Archives, he got. some of the other records, including, I think, some text messages for members of Congress. So there's a possibility that this information was taken from that hall that is public record

that was taken from the National Archives and given to the independent prosecutor. So as a piece of evidence, that might be accessible to Schmidt's team. They saw that. And then they're like, oh, he was at the Hawks game. That's weird. that's right after the Fannie Welles thing happened. That might be what happened. But the lesson learned here, I think, from Senator Schmidt should be,

sometimes you just got to raise your hand and be like, hey, I fucked up. That's what you got to say at that point. Because as you try to explain, it makes you look worse. It's like, it's pretty obvious that you screwed that one up. Just say that you fucked up. Everybody fucks up. Like, okay, yeah, you got us. Sorry.

Go Hawks. That would have been a funny tweet. Yeah, go Hawks. He should, you know what? He should, he should buy hawks season tickets. Atlanta or Iowa? I think Atlanta. Yeah.

I think buy hawk season tickets, maybe give him away, maybe get courtside seats. Will, here we go. Will you attend Wizards Hawks with Senator Schmidt? I would like to invite Senator Schmidt to, can we look up when the Wizards play the Hawks? I'm on it. I would like to invite him to that game as my guest. Courtside. Oh, yeah.

Did you also see Katie Britt's reaction? Katie Britt just stood there with it. I don't know if she was like if she was daydreaming. November 4th. November 4th. Hawks at Wizards. What day of the week is that? That's a Wednesday.

Oh, yeah, it's going to be tough for me. And January 11th. Well, they should go back again, right? Of next year. January 11th. Okay. January 11th. What day? That would be a Monday.

Monday. Hmm. You know what? I think I'm going to the Monday game. the following week where they play the Celtics. We can figure out November 4th. We can maybe try to figure out November 4th. That's going to be right after Election Day, right?

Yeah, it should be the day after. We'll have a lot to talk about. Yeah. We do, macro goes to D.C. Live from. And you'd think because of midterms, no, we got Hawks at Wizards. Yeah, we'll have a ton to talk about with them. I don't know which way it's going to shake out.

That could be a great video. Be with him on election night. Pointing, well, no. And then at the game, just pointing out to. Just like pointing out, see that guy, that guy's on the hawks. Right. I should wear, I should wear Iowa jersey. Yes, you should.

You're Caitlin Clark jersey. Yeah. And I'll just be very disappointed that it's the hawks that are playing. Yeah. Sometimes you got to say you fucked up. You fucked up. And it also didn't help that he was so angry the entire time. While you can't be wrong and angry at the same time.

You can be wrong and laugh and say, well, I fucked that one up. You can be angry. and right, but you can't be wrong and angry. And then John Kennedy in the back holding up the sign like he did something. John Kennedy, I mean, you talk about a quote machine. One of our best. Make me want to throw up in my mouth. I'm not saying you're the dumbest person alive, but you better hope the dumbest person alive

doesn't die. I got rocks in my driveway that are smarter than that. He does a great job of playing up the, oh, sucks, folksy little old me. And I think it serves him well because people underestimate him all the time. And he's one of the smartest people in Congress. Is he? Yeah, I think he went to Oxford and either Harvard or Yale. Wow.

But didn't like all? He went to Vandy, the University of Virginia and Oxford. Yeah. So pretty smart guy. There's, you can't accomplish all that by being dumb. So he, he definitely does a good job. It's a good technique to like make people think, oh, this guy, you know, He everything he knows about government.

He must run the farmer's almanac. But then he knows like law, procedure like the back of his hand. He was a Democrat till 2007 and then switched. I was first I'm hearing this. I was not, I was not super familiar with his. I'm not familiar with that lore. So wait, he was a Democrat until 2007. And then he switched into that.

He was like, I don't, I like the Iraq war. I feel like that's a time when. If you were switching one, most people were going Republican to Democrat. Kennedy served as a cabinet member and special counsel to Democratic Louisiana Governor Buddy Romer, Secretary of Louisiana Department of Revenue and was elected to the Louisiana State Treasurer. He's a Democrat in 2000. He also ran unsuccessfully as a liberal Democrat in the 2004 U.S. Senate primary endorsing John Kerry for president. Encouraged by figures like GOP Senator David Vitter and advisor Carl Ruff.

and noting that Louisiana was trending more conservative, Kennedy officially changed his registration to the Republican Party in 07. Okay. So it was just like, I can win as a Republican and not as a Democrat? That's what it sounds like, yeah. I mean, a lot of people, people always talk about California only voting for Democrats, but there are a lot of Democrats in California that are Republicans, but they just, they put a D next to their name and call themselves a Democrat because it's impossible to get elected if you're Republican. I think that happens a lot. I was unaware of this from him. What else we got on the news today?

A lot in the news. We got a lot. America.gov. Have you visited? I have not. I've not visited America.gov just yet. I think. What is it?

It is a, it's an AI powered. It's Gemini, right? It's Google's AI. I didn't know that. But it's a putting, I think they said, 29,000 government websites. into one place and it's supposed to be a catch-all for any interaction you may need with the government they said you're going to be able to do your passport 100% online starting next year okay that's great that would be great they said if you get married you can do do everything

to change your name online which as i've learned recently is a very ridiculously and unnecessarily arduous process i don't how is that going to be possible i don't know that's just what they said yeah in theory this is this would be great it seems like it's really good starting next year most Americans will apply for their passport entirely online a revolution in how government works

for the American people the Trump administration is making government simpler, faster, and more accessible that's what Marco Rupio tweeted okay I mean if all this stuff is true I haven't used it a bunch but I've seen I saw on MSNBC somebody saying that they used it and it was good

so I'll take their word for it for once it looks like it is yeah it's powered by Gemini by Google who built it for the U.S. government. I just don't know how you're going to be able to get things like a passport, change your name, things that require paper documentation. I guess we'll find out.

I guess we'll find out. I hope it works because, yeah, I mean, less line time, less visit to the DMV. I think that would be overall a good thing unless you work at the DMV, in which case that would be a bad thing. Yeah. How does one end up working at the DMV? Government job, secure. I think those types of jobs are... They smell bad, though. Even if you wanted to work at the DMV, it's a time portal.

It's like stepping back into the 1970s, at least here in Illinois. Yeah, I don't think that they worry that much about... Get your boy on that. My boy? Yeah, Alexi. Oh, Yanopolis or whatever? Yeah, I do need to get to work on that. they don't they you never like update a carpet at the DMV whatever carpet you put in when you build that building when the DMV moves in you can bank that that thing's going to stay there for 70 years

yeah I mean there's no incentive to spend money on it no it doesn't look nice um doesn't yeah the smell is kind of like a library have you been to city hall in Chicago I've not been there now Do you remember when we were at the university of Tennessee and before we walked into the humanities and social sciences building, I said, when you walk in here, it's going to smell like an elementary school art room. And you walked in and you were amazed at how correct I was. That's what Chicago City Hall smells like.

What does that smell? I don't know. Whatever they, probably some sort of cleaner that they used to, is there's a lot of like granite or marble? But it's not a clean smell. It's a must almost, but not a, it's not. remarkably unpleasant. They probably get the the cleaning supplies on the cheap that don't have the

added fragrance to them. It's like pine saw. I suppose that's possible. Pines saw minus the the pine. Just saw. But that's what Chicago City Hall smells like. I've not been there yet. But you're right, the DMV does have an unmist. I think that you get into, nobody has a passion for serving at the Department of Motor Vehicles, like as a child. I've never met someone who's, seemed happy to be working there. I don't think it's anyone's dream. Any public-facing job, I always like to give them the benefit of the doubt, whether it's at a restaurant or if it's at, like, the DMV, because you probably deal with more pissed off people in a day than most people deal with an entire year. Like, most people aren't happy to see you. No one's excited to go to the DMV.

And so I think after kind of going through that a lot, you kind of take on the mentality of I just got to get through the day because everyone's pissed at me. I had a waiter a week or two ago at Porter Kitchen. I forget the guy's name, but if you hear this, this guy was unbelievable. He was so, like, happy and, like, graded his job. I was like, it's crazy how much this elevated the experience just to have a waiter who was, like, happy and nice. Yeah, somebody who's, yeah. I was like, that guy rocks.

That's a guy that probably he enjoys his job, probably enjoys his job, probably enjoy like talking to people. I was talking about this the other day because had a bad, listen, they're not an advertiser. So I feel, I feel free to say it. Had a real bad Burger King experience the other week. What was the last time you ate at the King? I stopped at one when we were at camp

in Wisconsin because there wasn't a ton in town. Yeah. There was a Culver's, a Burger King. There was an ice cream place that was great. So yeah, that was the last time I stopped by the king. Yeah, I didn't have any options. This was a couple weeks ago.

It was late night. I was hungry. Been out to a bar. So I wanted to have a late night snack before I went to bed. And I ordered Burger King for delivery. And it was really, I think, the only place that was open. So I got a double cheeseburger and then some sort of chicken sandwich. And the double cheeseburger was, when.

it arrived, it was like the shape of a baseball. We're talking. That's typically not what you want. That's softball. I'll be honest. It wasn't that small. Well, still, you don't want it that round. It was somewhere between a baseball and a softball in terms of their size. It was like a perfectly round. The bun was like pressed into the side of it. I picked it up. I felt like I could have pitched with it. It was, um, it was like extremely spherical. And it didn't really look that good. I ate it. It wasn't great. I didn't really have any other choice. Then the chicken sandwich that I got was kind of deformed as well. Bad experience with Burger King.

Very bad. Got to get the chicken fries. Chicken fries, good product. The thing about Burger King, them and Domino's, they do the best job of like, once every 10 years, they'll have a commercial with a... We used to suck. They'll have a commercial with a CEO. Be like, listen, we fucked up.

That's the current Burger King commercial. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, the nuggets. They got new nuggets. They said, these things suck and taste like rubber. And Domino's did one pretty recently. Yeah. Domino's has done it like three times.

Yeah. Listen. We know that we suck. I'm sorry. We really screwed up. Well, remember they did that huge... But trust us. They did that huge rebrand.

They're like, we're not Domino's pizza anymore. We're Domino's. And we have sandwiches and salads and all this stuff. And then they did another one pretty recently. Yeah. Listen, guys, we know we screwed up. But just trust us. We're going to earn your business back.

So I don't know what part of that cycle we're in a Burger King right now. It was bad. And I was thinking about it. Why? If you work at Burger King, it's kind of the same thing. Like, nobody wants to stay working at Burger King. I don't think that's many people's long-term plans. They don't pay exceptionally well.

So people that work there don't care. They're like, okay, I'm going for my paycheck. See you. Hopefully I'll be gone in like six months to get a better job. In-N-Out. In-N-Out pays like extremely well. Every time an in-and-out opens up a new place, there's like a line a mile long of people applying for it

to keep people happy that work there take a little pride in their job the product's good Buckees same thing Buckees you can make a ton of money working at Buckees I'm trying to find the the hourly rates right now Chick-fil-A too so at Buckees

a team lead makes 20 to 23 bucks an hour department manager 25 to 33 assistant food service manager 33 to 42 and then if you're a full-time assistant general manager 125k plus food service manager 150 to 175 general manager 175 to 225 yeah 6% 401k match three weeks paid time off listen a lot people say like that we shouldn't pay fast food workers like 15 dollars an hour it's like because you don't want to encourage people to be like fast food work I disagree I think you pay somebody $15 an hour 20 an hour to work at a fast food restaurant, you're going to be getting, the consumer is going to get a hell of a burger out of that.

Well, that's not necessarily true. I mean, in New York City, they're paid $15 an hour. Right. I don't think that is always the case. Cost of living in New York City is definitely, like, it's different. $15 an hour, right? That does not, you can't get anything in New York City for that. But, you know what I'm saying? Like, if you, if you have people that like their job that feel like they're fairly compensated, they're going to stick around. There's, it's competition. They know that if they don't do a good job, there's going to be a line of people willing to take their job for them. Yeah. I was just thinking about that when it came to my burger because it was that bad. What time did you order it? That's the thing.

It was late night. How late? Midnight. Okay. I feel like it, after 1130, the quality deteriorates. And I accept it. If it was at 10 o'clock, I would still expect it to be fine. Yeah.

I accept the fact that I was not. looking for a perfect burger. Don't get me wrong. I know if I'm ordering burger king at midnight. I know. So given the expectations couched in, what would you read the experience? It was much worse than the expectations. It was like, I looked at it just like, what the fuck is this? Did you do, uh, express delivery or did, did, did you have the guy running all around town before he got to you? I believe I did express. I can check. That makes sense. I can double check, but I'm, I'm 90% sure I did express because, you know, I was hungry. Yeah. And it was a, you know, It was midnight. I've been drinking.

There's stuff open at midnight in Chicago. I was in Chicago. Oh, where we're... I was in Massachusetts. Got it. Yeah. Maybe they do differently in the Commonwealth. Uh, big tea.

PFT. I ran across a conspiracy that's somewhat related to the America.gov website. Okay. This, this might be like two out there. I don't know that this has crossed my desk. So I, this is something that I expect. Maybe, what are the lib news sites? Like Midas touch?

That's wonderful. For sure. Yeah. I expect them in the Krasenstein's to possibly cover this soon. Okay. So you're early on this. I think I'm early on it. So I don't know how true this conspiracy is.

But I'm very interested in it. So you remember a few weeks ago, for some reason Trump started saying we're no longer going to refer to it as AI. artificial intelligence. I vaguely recall something like that, yeah. It kind of came out of nowhere. And he's like, I've created a poll of what we should refer to it as and we will be taking votes. And it was like elite intelligence. No, no, no, that was my suggestion.

Extreme intelligence. E.I was one of the options. Okay. Super intelligence was SI. And I think super intelligence ended up being the choice. All right. A couple things. Number one, I just got to the point.

recently where when I hear AI, I think artificial intelligence and not Alan Iverson. Yeah. So we can't change it now. SI is Sports Illustrated. Right. If you want to do EI, that's fine. We don't have an EI right now. Oh, that's Nelly.

Adelae. My, I, E.A. E.A. O'O. Okay. You don't know, act like you don't know Nelly. I haven't heard. What song is that? Annele, Andlelea, Mama, Eia, E, uh-oh. I heard what you said.

What's the title of the song? I forget the name of that song. Put it in E. It might be just be EI. Let me see. Nelly Song E.I. It's called E.I. Is it really?

That's the Nellie. Yes. When I think EI, I think Nelly. Okay. Anyway, continue. Yeah, we're fret not Big T because EI did not win. S.I won President Trump's legally binding poll. He then signed a executive order mandating the change to superintelligence.

S.I. He loves to read it. naming stuff. He does. It's like his favorite thing. So I just thought this is, I don't know, like, one of the guys that works at Meta told him something about like, you know, AI is actually not really that great of a term for it. We should be calling it something else. And he's like, as president, I will, I will do that for you. But I saw this theory online from Adam Cochran. Don't know anything about him. He might be superlib, although his screen name is Adam S. Cochran. and then like an Ethereum address.

So he's a crypto guy. So what we've seen since Donald Trump signed that order and since he started doing the poll of what the name should be changed to is we've seen a lot of dot SI domain names be purchased and sold. Prior to this, dot SI is the domain extension for Slovenia. So every country has, you know, dot whatever their country's initial is at the end of it for their websites.

So dot SI is from Slovenia. That's apparently where Melania is from. And Baron Trump is, I guess, is he a partial citizenship? I don't know how that works. I have no idea. So Trump on September 19th started doing this poll. And it turns out that going. back to June of 2026, a whole bunch of people started registering domain names at .SI.

So there were about 55 per day that were being registered between 2023 and 2025, but in 2026, the numbers picked up to more than 400 per day. So that would be one, two, three, four, five, eight times, right? eight times as many registration started to happen in the summer of this year before Trump put out that poll. And then that spiked to more than 7,000 new domains registered in one day in July. And then they started buying and selling the names on the aftermarket. So you buy, for example, like, I don't know, health.s.I. And imagine if you, back in 1995, you bought health.com.

You could probably sell that for a significant amount, right? So if you bought health.s.i right now for maybe a couple thousand dollars, or back in July, a couple thousand dollars, if we officially adopted dot SI for everything that was artificial intelligence related, you would think that. Health. That. health.s.i would be worth a ton of money in the near future.

So build SI is now available for $14 million. I'm looking at macro.jsi right now. Yeah, what does it say? They want five mil for it. But I'm looking at the bottom. You see there's a ticker. They want five mil for everything. But you can put an offer.

What should we offer for macro. Dot us. 20 bucks. Off from 20 bucks. Email. I'm going to put Madeline's email. I want to couch this by saying that I don't know anything about this. Adam Cochran guy.

He's got charts and diagrams and shit. They might all be made up. He might have just done all this with like Photoshop, but it doesn't look like it. So he said that the registration started to tick up way before the official announcement. So over the summer, as we said, they started to increase. And now he says the last few months have registered more than 10,000 AI related terms. Many are for sale in the millions. And he found around 12,000 AI-related or MAGA-related domains that had been newly registered or changed hands before the announcement.

In the months prior to July, 95% of all .SI domains had been non-English. That's kind of strange. That part's weird to me, whereas, like, before July, it was all from Slovenia. And then starting in July, the vast, vast majority of them are all. English-based and all some really related to to Donald Trump. By the way, it won't let you put a number less than 500,000. Oh, really? Well, they can jump off the cliff.

Can't go less than 10%. I don't get out of bed for anything less than 500,000. All right. So this guy says that in the executive order, well, I have the executive order right here. Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to replace the term artificial intelligence with super intelligence in the executive branch to recognize the continuously advancing technological frontier and the limitless promise it offers the American people. The order directs all departments and agencies to use the term superintelligence

and SI in official correspondence, public communications, policy documents, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch and to no longer acknowledge the terms artificial intelligence or AI. So what he's getting at here is that somebody connected to Trump bought up a shit ton of dot SI domains and are now trying to flip those because the U.S. government will be using the term S.I. So what's the point?

To make millions of dollars. What do you mean? What's the point? Just of the whole S.I thing. So that's a great question. In this case, this person is hypothesizing that the change to SI is strictly 100% being done just to make them money. I mean, that sounds plausible. It does sound plausible. In which case, like, everything that the guy would write, I would start to think, like, well, what's his angle on this?

The SI thing was weird. Like, AI, why are we changing AI? Was this like something that everybody was clamoring about? Like we don't like the term artificial intelligence anymore. I do. I could see Trump is a big, you know, I mean, he's, he's in bed with every tech CEO. He has a favor. He sees the AI backlash.

And he's like, well, it's not AI anymore. It's SI. Yeah. We love SI. AI's bad. We love SI. That is true. So I could see that being part of it.

Yeah. That is, that's a good point. I guess that's what I thought too at the time. And that also still might be true because I don't know whether or not to trust this guy. But if this guy's right, that is a hilarious, hilarious grift. Yeah, I tried to get macro as I. Wouldn't give it to us. Won't do it.

Something just came across my desk. Okay. Have you seen DoorDash Air? This goes to our conversation earlier. We're talking drones? Yeah, they got drones now. Fuck that. Really?

I believe DoorDash has their own AI now, if I'm not mistaken, that I might have gotten God. So this guy's the CPO of DoorDash. He said, as a pilot, I can tell you, wouldn't build a plane and then ask if it can carry cargo. So we built DoorDash Air from the ground up designed around what was 13 years of deliveries have taught us what people order how much it weighs and how far it has to travel. Our drones are as silent as a passing car and early test show. We've gotten flight delivery times in under five minutes on average so you can get your Chipotle and Popeyes, our first partners and local favorites write to you fast. The first deliveries will be in Northern California. Is this, that's real? Yeah. From what I saw, and again, I could have been getting gagged, but I saw that their AI is like, you can type into their AI, order me Thai food that's under $30.

And that'll show up at your house. Like, the AI gets to pick what you are getting. Or it'll be like, what's a, you know. Once your own AI agent knows you well enough. It will pick the best food for you. Do you think that your agent will ever be good enough to just know what kind of food you're in the mood for? I don't know if that's possible. This is the ultimate like Wally Giff of the fat people ordering food on the computer.

It's like, and again, I use Uber Eats a lot. Like you're not, you're too lazy to make your own food or go get your own food. And also you are also too lazy. You have to have AI pick the food. Yeah. Except I don't I don't think people would like it because sometimes I, I don't even know what I want. And then I order it and I'm disappointed.

I'm like, I shouldn't have gotten that. If like an AI agent does that for me and they get it wrong, I have no one to blame. I'm going to blame the AI agent. I'm going to be like, you don't know me at all. This is a bad program. But AI isn't real. But if I, but if it were me making the same choice, I would just deal with it and be like, that's fine. No one to blame but yourself.

Nobody blame but myself. You know an unpatched hack? I can't the, it's still unpatched. you, on Uber Eats or DoorDash or whatever, they have, you know, deals like buy one, get one free, whatever, to try to get people to pick their restaurant. But you can do the same things for pickup. So I've been passing a restaurant, pull into the parking lot,

I'll get a free thing or whatever, and then you just walk right in and grab it, and you don't pay the delivery fee or anything. Oh, wow. Still unpatched. So what kind of stuff do you get? Whatever the, you know, if McDonald's has free. Free fries?

Yeah. you can just get it, you don't pay the delivery fee or anything like that, you don't tip, and then you just walk in and get it. That's a great idea. I might try that. But Seamless is doing drone delivery? DoorDash. Is Seamless still around?

Yeah. I think they both owned by the same company? Seamless is owned, I think, by Grubhub. I feel like Seamless is the Skype of food delivery. They were around first and somehow got lapped. Yeah. Custom built drones. What? DoorDash Air Plan's drone deliveries with Chipotle and Popeyes. So I have to walk all the way to my front door? Can they not? If you have a chimney, maybe you could. Like Santa? Yeah. Or a wind. That'd be awesome. Yeah. Leave a window open. Just fly into my house and drop it into my mouth. Can it chew it for me? Yeah. I mean if I- Send a drone out to Baby Bird, my part.

Popeyes and just spit it into my mouth. Trying the DoorDash air, if this had been around four months ago when we were in San Francisco, I would have loved that. Is that where it is right now? Yeah, it's a northern California. Call me old fashion. I don't like the idea of robot helicopters flying around the city. Do you think this is another Pokemon Go situation where it's AI mapping out the entire

landscape. I don't know about that because we can already do that. We get satellites. Yeah. But are you saying like, what if it's a Chinese company that? No, I'm just, I'm just thinking out loud. Pokemon Go was looking back. Actually, no, not, fuck that, not looking back at the time.

I think people are still doing it. I know, but at the time we're like, this is really stupid what we're doing. Yeah. This is really dumb. But there might be a Pikachu nearby. What if so, you use DoorDash Air? and now it has your address, knows where you live, and then every once in a while,

like a drone just shows up at your house and they drop off a little treat, be like, oh, if you want more of this, this is new at Chipotle, this is the new Carnay Asada. Yeah. You got to order from DoorDash Air. That's like that credit card that would randomly pay for your items.

Oh, yeah. Is that scam still going? I doubt it. Speaking of drones and things in the sky, we got a real quick PFT's plane corner. some breaking news that happened. I don't know if it was overnight or like very first thing in the morning.

But there was a flight that was going, I believe from Dubai to Tel Aviv, Israel, on fly Dubai Airlines. It had to be diverted to Saudi Arabia to land. There was some sort of issue that happened on the plane. And it looked like it almost crashed. Are you going with the New York Times altercation? Well, I'm going with we don't know any of the facts yet.

It seems like we know some of them. You'd be surprised when it comes to like these types of airline incidents, how like facts change once you find out from like... Do you agree one of the pilots was stabbed? Yeah. So I'm saying what it looks like right now is one of the pilots stabbed the other pilot. The flight plummeted. 17,000 feet. I'm seeing it descended more than 14,000.

thousand feet in under 30 seconds, which is enough to make you like puke and and probably pass out. It tore part of the the rudder off the plane. I saw the tail of the plane. The rudder was gone. So kind of a mirror, first of all, kind of a miracle that the plane didn't break up midair undergoing those types of forces because the planes are designed to undergo a lot of shit. They're not designed to descend 14,000 feet in 30 seconds. Like that's pretty much a straight on nose dive down. And then to pull out of that, that the extreme amount of stress that airplane was, they'll probably need to just ground that plane because the airframe's probably fucked on it. I would hope so. It probably bent every single beam inside of that airplane.

But credit to whoever designed it because it survived. So they pulled out of this big dive. And the two got there were there were two pilots on the plane. Yeah. Went up to the cockpit and landed it. So that that's to me, big tea, that's where I want to wait and see exactly what happened. Right. Because if you game this situation out, let's say you and I are pilots, right?

And we're flying. We're going to Tel Aviv. I'm on the left. You're on the right. And the door is shut and it's locked because of the safety protocols. So we're flying. I get up and I stab you. I start stabbing you and I push the nose of the plane down.

Yep. How do you then, in turn, number one fight me off pull the plane out of the dive in under 30 seconds and communicate with somebody in the cabin like come help me and unlock the door to the cockpit so I I'm assuming that guy unlocked the door

because it was passengers who went in there and overwhelmed the guy who was stabbing him that's what we're hearing but well there is a video of of the exact moment of overwhelming Of passengers running up to the cockpit, yeah. Okay. So I assumed that the guy who got stabbed was able to unlock the door. Okay. Is what you would guess.

And then they overwhelmed that guy. And reportedly there was another crew of pilots on the plane. Yeah. Who went in there and got it back up in the air and landed it. Yeah. So there's, there's, I'd like to know how all that shook out in like 30 seconds. Because that's crazy that they were able to do that. And I, I, it looks like.

like that could be what happened, but we don't know. Maybe the door was unlocked already. But it looked like this was attempted like mass murder slash suicide by one of the pilots. Or it could have been maybe like one of the pilots got up to go to the bathroom and then a passenger went on there, stabbed the pilot. We don't know. But they're all lucky to be alive because that's like a crazy, crazy incident that happened. They've identified the pilot who got stabbed.

His name is Smeat Makhar. And the veteran pilot reportedly fought back against his treacherous first officer and alerted the crew and passengers aboard the plane who managed to intervene. Okay. Where are you reading that? New York Post. Two off-duty pilots took control the plane and landed it safely in Saudi Arabia. It's pretty insane that they were able to do that in 30 seconds.

17,000 feet in 30 seconds is... Would you use... not pass out? I think a lot of people probably would. Um, so when you go down like that, you're going through like negative Gs. So it exceeded the maximum speed that the plane should ever go. Yeah. So number one, when you go straight down, that's how when you see the the flights where people are like training to be astronauts and float around, that's a plane that's diving like in free fall. That's what makes you kind of weightless. Um, then if you try to like pull, like, pull up out of that, that's what slams you into your seat and you feel like your 900 pounds.

And it's hard to even like get up. That's why I don't like, I don't know if you're in the middle of a dive. I don't know how it's possible for people to get up and walk through the aisle of the plane. If it's in mid dive, that would be impossible to do. And even if it's like as you're pulling out, that would be impossible for a group to like make their way to the front. So there had to be some moment. Maybe that's a pilot fighting the guy off.

and like holding them off and just controlling the plane that bought them some time because if it's in that that deep dive, nobody's getting up on that plane. Nobody's walking anywhere. But that's a crazy story. Yeah. They're going to take a look at the black box

and the cockpit voice recorder, all that stuff. So we'll find out the full story in a little bit. Yeah, nuts. So yeah, either was a hijacking or just, like straight up, we want to crash this plane because there's Israelis on board. I don't know. There was also a United flight out of Houston that had its first officer windshield shatter after takeoff at 13,000 feet. That's pretty crazy too. Yeah, I don't like that. No. There's a story of some flight where one of the windows just busted

open and either the pilot or the co-pilot got sucked out of the cockpit but it was the pilot was still kind of strapped in barely by a seatbelt so the plane was just going like 400 miles per hour up at 30,000 feet and the pilot was halfway hanging out of the flight and then they had to like try to descend because he's out there like negative 30 degrees with no oxygen by the time they got down he was just I think he was dead but that's that's a pretty shitty way to go I was going to say, is that top one worst way? It's pretty bad. Yeah. I mean, I guess getting sucked out completely and falling.

Yep. At least you might pass out before you hit the ground. You definitely would pass out, yeah. I think. Oh, that's, I don't want to hear anything that goes wrong with planes. That did happen one time. I think it was over the Pacific. I want to say it was a flight coming back from, I don't know, some island.

But there was like an explosive. decompression on the plane. Maybe it was a door that busted open. And like five people, I think, immediately, boom, sucked out. I can't. I can't. The first 30 seconds I'm on a plane every time I'm I'm terrified. Buckle up. Once we get like 500 feet in the air, I'm fine. You're like I can't. Ever since that plane, whatever will be will be. Well, once you're in the air, you're good. Yeah. Other than if something went terribly wrong landing. Yeah. But it's takeoff that I'm, but once we get in the air, I'm good. But it's, Since that video of that plane that got like 300 feet in the air and then just everything shut off and it just crashed straight to the ground.

Or something like the one in, uh, was it Louisville, the FedEx flight? No, it was this was it wasn't in America. Was it India maybe? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The Indian one that just like pulled up and then all the fuel got cut off. Yeah.

That one might have all that. That's a weird investigation that we have to look into more too. Was that one on purpose? I think so. that's the other thing is like if you if you just get somebody that decides you're going to die today yeah you're going to die yeah that I think there's some like discrepancies in the investigation that's going on with that one

where uh the Indian government does not want to admit that one of their pilots did that but there's like no way that you can just accidentally hit that switch and you'd have to hit it twice too to of them cut off the fuel but yeah I guess maybe I haven't just like stayed up to date on that investigation I'll look into it yeah I just I planes work flawlessly as far as I am concerned and statistically they do I understand that just a couple blips in the radar yeah they're bad blips all right uh what else we got here are you familiar with the Auburn uh Benedict Arnold that has been arrested I wanted to talk to you about this because there's nobody that would know more about this than you, Big T.

Well, there is because I'm, I mean, I've got the gist of it. Okay. So it was a former employee of Auburn University? Yeah. So I think, I'm, I think he was a student, but he's now, his Twitter lists him as a student at the University of Tennessee. But this, this happened like earlier this spring. Okay. He was somehow affiliated with the Auburn football program. and I guess sent out emails to, I believe it was a dozen other SEC schools with Auburn's recruiting boards and stuff.

Like definitely information, a program wouldn't want out there, but also it's not like the craziest thing. You have access to all the stuff. Like Auburn and Tennessee have scouted the same guys and they probably have them rated pretty similarly and that, you know, whatever. And I guess immediately like most of the teams just to, called Auburn and we're like, hey, you've got a guy sending us your stuff. And he was arrested in, I believe in Tennessee.

And he, is that against the law? It's not always against law. It's a felony, theft of trade secrets. So it's against the law to tell like a different state. Hey, our state thinks this guy's fast. Yeah. That's awesome. I love college football.

An anonymous Don Julio email. I think that's what he. referenced himself as. Okay. Was sent to roughly 11 schools with 12 attachments. 10 contained Auburn recruiting evaluations and notes on 2027 to 29 prospects, with several schools forwarding the material back to Auburn. Have you seen a picture of this kid?

I did see the picture. And that's a real picture? Yeah. He looks kind of like Jeff Dahmer. Like psycho. With some Dwight Shrewt mixed in as well. He's got the Dwight Shrewd bangs a little bit, the facial expression. not

you know what I love it's a great college football story but I think that college football serves a very important peacekeeping I guess how would I put this without college football

you'd have guys like this and Connor Stallions working on real stuff working on stuff you don't want to know about stuff that would kill millions that's probably true but because they're fixated

on getting revenge against Auburn, or was he a double agent? So this guy was a Tennessee fan. We don't know. Oh, so the Auburn Police Department arrested him. He's from Franklin, Tennessee. So I guess he was still in Auburn, but his Twitter lists him as a student at UT.

Okay, so he... I don't know how that worked. I think at one point he was at Auburn because he would have had to have access to that information. He worked as a player personnel scouting student assistant under Hugh Freeze and was kept on when Golish became the head coach in 2026. He got fired in the spring. So after his dismissal, that's when he sent this out. Like a scorned lover getting back at Auburned.

$15,000 bond. That's, you know what? I think it should be more. What do you have to do in Chicago to get a $15,000 bond? I don't know. I don't know what you... There might not be anything. Yeah, probably.

So he is currently in jail. He turned himself in on Monday. Or did he bond out? I've just seen that there was a $15,000 bond. Yeah, if it wasn't for college football, this guy, Connor Stallions, they would be... Idol hands are the devil's play thing. I'm glad that they care this deeply about college football.

I really am. I think we all should be. theft of trade secrets and computer tampering both felonies if you're going to be a felon that's not what you want to waste it on i almost think you know how we have court marshals and like maritime law if a crime's committed at sea sure there should be college football law all's fair in love and war well i know not all it's fair but it should be governed like the the judge the uh police should be employees of college football. Right. It's not a legal matter. Yeah, that we're going to take care of this. This is a college football problem that requires a college football solution. I agree with that. We don't need to, we don't need to have this kid listed as a computer hacker. I mean, we kind of operate that way in sports when it comes to like, I mean, the infamous Adam Schaefter assault tweet. Assault, yeah. Like, you can get in a fight on a football field and

we don't treat it as if you got in a fight on the street. Yeah, hockey. Yeah. Every day. Every day in hockey. Well, some of those are probably mutual combat states where if, like, I agree to fight you, you agree to fight me, then it's fine. But we do let things go in sports that would not be acceptable at 10 feet outside the stadium. But I got a uniform on and there's people watching us. So it's all good. Yeah.

No, it happens. Yeah, you're right. It happens all the time. This guy, I don't think, should be branded as a computer tamperer. He should be branded as being like a traitor. Yeah. Like he is a traitor to Auburn football. He should have to wear a shirt every day.

Yeah. That says just traitor in big red letters on it. Yeah. Yeah. He should be required to live and work on Auburn University campus and wearing a shirt that says traitor every day. I don't know that you want that. Every day. I mean, he's going to steal more stuff.

Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. But I'm glad that he has, he's obsessed with college football about something else. That's all I'm getting. Yeah, I agree. And it comes on the week that Auburn's play in Tennessee. Interesting timing. That is. Do we know what school turned him in? No, it said several of them. Okay. So I assume there were some that didn't as well. So they turned him in and then how did he get caught? Well, those schools called Auburn. And I guess Auburn told the cops. Auburn told the cops

like probably here's a list of people that would have had access to that information Yeah maybe Or I don't know if the schools like The ones who got it were able to figure out who it was Just I don't know So I'm reading that they investigated the emails for two months And obtained warrants

Then he turned himself in And by the way This is an all-time dumbass move Not just from what he did But also like There is an honor amongst these in college football. Like, less so now than, you know, when Aryan played,

when, you know, there was all sorts of stuff going on under the table. But, like, as long as schools understand when something is egregious and what is acceptable and permissible under what they've all virtually agreed to. And this is just being a dumb ass. Like, he deserves to be in jail even more so than what he did for being so stupid. Because if any of those schools had that. happened, they would hope that Auburn would do the same. Like, they're, they're not going to, you know, that's not something that's tolerated. Yeah. So I guess the question is going to be was this,

were these actual trade secrets? Again, I don't think if you're going to do, there are things he could have sent that I imagine there are schools out there would not have called Auburn and said, hey, we've got this. But since it was something so relatively trivial, they were like, what are you doing? Like, do you think that they would be able? It's not worth them being involved in the cheating. Right. What he had.

Right. If he had, if he had Auburn's game plan for this week and he had the script for the first 15 plays and he sent it to Tennessee, I don't know that they call Auburn. I don't think that they would. And that's not saying anything bad against Tennessee. No, that just happened who they have to play. Well, counterpoint, somebody sent Al Gore the videotape of George W. Bush preparing for their debate. and Al Gore instructed his office to contact the FBI. Really?

And wouldn't look at it. Wow. Yeah. I mean, you've got to look at that tape, right? I'd probably look at it. Yeah. But yeah, I agree, though, the big T, like, if it was real shit, you probably don't raise your hand. But also, it's going to be interesting to see if his lawyers, if they argue in court that this was not, like, proprietary trade secrets that,

only Auburn knew and only Auburn was using to like succeed based on Hugh Freed's record. If they look at his track record recruiting and coaching, be like how valuable is this information really? It's also just like I can go on On3.com right now and get a pretty detailed evaluation on any recruit I want. It's likely going to be pretty similar to what Auburn had. Right. Like what I just don't understand the thinking there. 11 schools. He really went scorched earth on that, huh? Also, I imagine, I haven't been when you get to jail. Some guys ask you why you're there. Terrible explanation to give. Let's see your papers. Yeah. Let's see your papers, buddy. And I think he looks like a guy that they would want to see. Make sure what he's in there for. Also, I'm guessing that he got arrested in Auburn. There's probably a lot of Auburn football fans there. Yeah.

And what are you in jail for? Undermining Auburn football. Yeah, not how you want to spend your time. I mean, they probably hate Hugh Freeze, too. Yeah, but it's the program. It's the program, yeah. Like I hate Jeremy Pruitt, but if I found out that there was somebody who was sending Tennessee information

to Alabama and Georgia and Florida, under Jeremy Pruitt, I would still hate that guy. Yep, true. Good point. Also in the news today, this is a big story. Actually happened right as we started. started to record. Alex Earle has made a bit of news today by saying that she's never read a book. Alex Earl claims she's never read a book.

You were very excited to talk about this. Somebody said, what's the last book you've ever read? She said, I've never read a book. Maybe Dr. Seuss. Big team. In fairness to her. Credit to her for saying that and not doing a LeBron. Oh, you know, I just started.

I'm on page four of whatever. That's true. Credit to her for telling the truth. That's true. She didn't lie. I actually think that deserves a lot more credit than she's getting. Now, at some point, you'd think she'd have read one, but credit to her for telling the truth. Yeah. But I mean, no, yes, credit to her for telling the truth, but also she went to school.

Did she go to college? It doesn't matter. She went to Miami. That's how she got famous. Pretty good school. Yeah. But also there's other, like, high school. That's what I'm confused by.

Yeah. You had to read a lot of books. You can get through high school without reading a book. Like, did you not even read The Hunger Games? Like of mice and men? I've read plenty of books, but I got through high school. Probably without reading a book I was required to read. I didn't do a lot of reading myself.

Like, if I could get away with it on a test. But I'm guessing that in four years of high school, I probably read at least at minimum 12 books. That's kind of a lot. Three books a year? Of required reading? Yeah. I would venture to say most kids don't read the required reading. At least all the way through.

I was doing a lot of skimming. Well, also summer reading. Again, required or on your own? No, required. So there's always at least one book that you had to read over the summer. I don't know that I ever had that in high school. Yeah, so she's never read a book since Dr. Seuss. What about listening to book?

Would you allow if she had listened to a book on tape? Does that count as reading? Yes. But don't think she's doing that. I think it does. And I think she would have said that as well. She would have counted it. Yes.

I'd like to offer her a free copy of part of my book. Wow. To break the streak. That could be big for the book. Alex Earle's first book. Yeah. Literacy matters in America. Yeah. One step at a time, one brain at a time.

We're trying to change the world. Self-help. So it is a self-help book. So that goes like with her brand a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Self-care. I'm going to send her a copy of the book.

Yeah. She has a BA in marketing from the university in Miami. At some point you have to read a book though, right? If you graduate from college. I don't think I read any in. college. Definitely not. And I was a journalism major. Did I read books in college? Yeah, I don't think I read any. I don't think I was like taking reading. I mean, yeah, textbooks. I definitely read. I had to, I was an English lit major. Oh, well, that's different, yeah. But I didn't.

I was reading articles. To be fair, there were some books that I didn't read that, that I was supposed to read. But I would not have been able to graduate my C plus B minus average if I had not read. Any books? There was a lot of, it wasn't Spark Notes. It was a different summarizing book website. Chegg. Cliff Notes? No, it had like a, was it Cliff Notes?

No. Did you all use Wolfram Alpha? Do you remember that? No. Oh, kids were big on Wolframm Alpha. This was before AI. It was a website that you could just put any math problem into and it would give you the answer. Oh, no.

No, I've never heard of that. It was revolutionary at the time. No. And kids are probably too young for that. I've used it. I'm older than you. I know. No.

But, yeah, I was doing a lot of summary reads in high school, but I still read a lot of the books. I feel like. I do really, I will admit I only read now if it's a TV show or a movie that I've watched or want to watch and I'll read the book first. you and I aren't into the romanticcy of it all I don't read fiction I exclusively read nonfiction Too much junk food for your brain I just it I can't

It doesn't It brings me no interest Like I can't find any Way to care about a fiction book I'm very interested in learning about people And things that have happened in real life But currently reading Lane being Lane New Lane Kiffin book.

That does sound interesting. A lot of good stuff in there. Speaking of football coaches, are you guys excited about Mike Tomlin tonight? Oh, it's Minecraft City. Yeah. I actually really am liking Mike Tomlin on the sideline. He's been good.

I didn't think he was going to be good. Is he with Maria Taylor? Yeah. I really like them together. I think he's like kind of funny. Yes. And I didn't, I never saw that side of him. No.

He was always kind of pissed off and, using a lot of words to really say nothing at all. He kind of has that football coach brain where he has no interest in anything outside football and I guess now Minecraft world building. But it is funny to me how he interacts with outside life. Right. Like he's kind of like an alien. Yeah.

Yeah. But I find it like a tad charming. Yeah. No, it's like a well-meaning alien, like a funny alien. And this is coming from a Browns fan who, like, hated him for 20 years. But, like, he, there is part of him that is charming. And especially I think Maria Taylor does a good job interacting with him. Teach me the ways of your world.

Yes. Tell me about the Minecraft thing, though, because I've never played Minecraft before. Don't know anything about it besides just what I've heard people say. So how much time would he have had to spend building like his whole city? You're asking the wrong. No idea? Didn't it say it was like a 12-year project? He said that he, yeah, he did it over the course of his tenure as a coach.

I have no clue. I've never opened Minecraft.com. Me neither. I've only seen videos of Minecraft overlaid with like stories from Reddit on TikToks. I might have to do a deep dive, like how to get started at Minecraft to see just how, how impressive this is that he's been able to construct this thing. I mean, even with whatever hours he spent on it, having it for 12 years and that's a commitment in itself. For sure. Yeah.

I'm sure it's like hundreds of hours, I would assume. Good for him. Good for it. Oh, 12 years way more than hundreds. No, but I've got 100. I've put it in hundreds of hours on a game in a year. Oh, okay. It's important to have hobbies. It is.

Did he say he did it with his kids? I think so. His one son is spreading the truth on TikTok. Oh, no. About what? Have you guys not seen his son on TikTok? No. Oh, his son will, like, call out people on, like, football coaches on TikTok for, like, sucking.

Oh, yeah. No, his son is all over it on TikTok. And that, like, he's kind of not like Mike Tomlin at all. And he's like, it's so fucking stupid when, like, XYZ does this, like, calling out bad behaviors of people. It's very interesting. But I see him on my 4-U page sometimes. And he talks like Mike Tomlin. but in a different, he has the same voice but not the same cadence,

so it kind of throws you off. But yeah, his son is all over TikTok. He said he started playing with his kids 12 years ago, love the game and kept the same world across PS3, 4, and 5. I don't know how that works. Yeah, I'm going to have to watch this tonight. Appointment viewing. Sorry, baseball.

Good luck tomorrow night. Tomorrow night being Thursday, Mad Dog. Thank you, Game of the Century. Stealers. Game of the Century. The Steelers don't win on the road, and they don't win on the road on Thursday nights. It's been like 20 years.

We are, I think we've won our last seven or eight Thursday night football matchups. Assault. The assault game. That was one of them. James, the interview. I was going to say the last one was against the Steelers, and it was that James interview in the snow.

Yep. And I believe also on top of that, that we are 3-0 against Steelers on Thursday Night Football or something like that. Like, we have a pretty good record on Thursday nights against the Steelers. Yep. Which is a very specific stat to have. Yep. If we win this one, I'm taking a victory lap.

We? Yeah. Until we get to six, I'm all, I'm with the dog pound. I mean, this is huge. This is huge, Big T. I mean, this would, it's game of the century. Dare I say this would lock it up. You don't want to say that.

You don't want to say that with the Browns. But dare I say it. Dare you do. Dare not. Dare not. Because I think at 3 and 1 I think we're cruising. Dare not. Don't say cruising.

No. His Achilles are still right there. But guess what? Shador. Then Shador time. Well, no, no, no. This is all banking on. I was hoping that Shador, he was going to get in for one play and throw a touchdown pass.

And then take him out. And then everybody would be like, whoa, controversy. If we win this one, it's the Jets next week, bro. Oh, it's fries. If we win this one, it's fries. I don't know. Hey, the Jets are, they're frisky. They still play the Titans PFT. If we win this game, it is fries.

Isn't fries bad? I think it just means like it's over. Oh, okay, okay, okay. It might be fries. Don't quote me on that. That's just what I think. That's just what you think. I think that's what I think.

I think it's more commonly used to say it's over in a bad way. But I think Big T, I think that's acceptable. Yeah. I mean, we'll see. I'm hopeful. I mean, I always love beating the Steelers. That's quite a lovely. day for me um i mean obviously everyone knows my feelings on to shan i don't have to reiterate them

once again but um everyone else is starting to kind of pick up as well around him yeah i think because he didn't even have that like a good game on sunday it was okay like he but he wasn't like this miraculous player yeah and everyone else really is i think having a pretty good season thus far i think Jared Verst is really falling into our team, and he seems to really like the dog pound. I was on this, man. Mason Graham had one of the best games ever. Yeah. How many sacks did he have something crazy?

I forget. He's so good. Yeah, he's really good. And people don't talk about him a ton. Yeah, so, I mean, that would be great. And then having the Jets and then the Titans, that's a nice cushion to have. Falcons late in the season as well, they'll have packed it in. I mean, this happened they already?

This is the season. I was, you know, I'm getting ready. I'm doing like my weekend preview stuff where I start to look up like trends and and just kind of catch up on all the news around the league. And I was thinking about Kirk Cousins. Kirk Cousins, he wasn't bad for the Falcons until he got injured, right? He was solid. And then after he got injured, everyone was like, oh, this guy sucks into his career.

So like when an old guy gets injured, it's like, like take him out back and shoot him right but when mike pinnox gets injured it's like you it's only his third acl it'll be fine you poor thing yeah yeah it's the you donkey yeah the the gordon ramsie meme yeah sweet thing so so pinnicks obvious and you know i understand that because he could have a long fruitful career so we weren't willing to like cast him aside but we did kind of do that with kirk cousins and now i think he's he's healthy and he's back to being what you get with kirk cousins which he will beat the piss out of bad teams. And he's an above-average quarterback.

I don't know that the Raiders are going to win many playoff games this year, but he's better than serviceable. He's a fine player. He's a fine player. Like, this is what we saw his entire career, whether it was the Redskins, the Vikings, the little bit of time that he was on the Falcons before his elbows got shredded up. That's kind of who he is.

And so it's just more of the same from Kirk. we're just surprised about it now because he was hurt in Atlanta. Yeah. Good for him, though. Also in quarterback elbow news, Jaden Daniels is practicing. He flew over to London with the team.

He's got a brace on. I think he's going to try to play this weekend, even though they're not saying anything about him playing, but I don't understand why he would make that flight and practice if he wasn't going to play this weekend. And it's the opposite of hindsight for me. This is a pre-sight that I have right now. This is a terrible idea.

we're doing a bad idea. This is bad. Paying him a lot of money. I get that you want your best players to play. I get that he wants to play. Dan Quinn will be fired, deservedly so. He should be fired on the spot if Jaden gets hurt in this game. Like do not pass go.

Don't get on the plane. You're British now. Turn in your badge and your backward hat, Dan. You're not coming back. Because this is such a bad idea. I'm not even talking about the elbow, obviously, might dislocate again. That sucks. I sure hope that it doesn't.

But if you've got one part of your body that you're overcompensating for, he's going to be, he's going to not want to fall on his left side. So he's going to be moving around differently than he would if he was completely healthy. That dramatically increases the chances of injuring something else on your body. I'm just saying this is a bad idea. I've seen this movie before. I've seen a young quarterback wearing a brace, returning before he really should, overcompensating for an injury and injuring something else. It doesn't end well.

Yeah. It does not end well. And maybe that's my fault. Maybe that's I've got PTSD from Robert Griffin. And I carry that with me. Did we discuss on this show Robert Griffin, the third, asking why guys like Robert Griffin the third aren't playing for the Falcons? I don't think that we did, but he makes a great point. Great point by him.

Also, the Bear Bachmire thing. Odd. We talked about it on Wake Up Barstool with this quote, but Robert Griffin III was doing a BYU game the other week, and he said that he was talking to Bear Bachmire and how his family eats dinner naked together. And then that obviously made a lot of news, and everybody was like, whoa, that's kind of,

crazy and then you look up what the story is and it's his dad made fun of him for being fat one day and so he took his shirt off and he was like look at this dad i'm not fat which is a way different story than the bachmire's all eating dinner to get naked together remarkably so and then he responded to one tweet being like oh i was i was like sharing a lighthearted story people took it and really ran with it's like no no you you ran with it and they showed the family on tv as he said it yeah you He was like, these people eat dinner nude. Yeah, you ran with it. You are the depth.

You found out one thing. Then you ran with that. Yeah. And then we just, we, we, we didn't run with it. We just stopped and watched you run. I'm like, damn, you see RG3 run? You really ran with that. Bear Buckmire, nice player.

Nice player. Weird number. I like it. You liked 47? Yeah. It's unique. All right. What else we got to get into today?

Good luck, Big T, with your, uh, Thank you. Your bravos. Thank you. We need one more. Just real quick. Have you been following the Chris Hanson discourse? Another alumnus of this show.

A little bit. Yeah. We got to go see this movie, right? I think so. So there's a movie that's coming out or it's out already. It just came out on Friday. And it's about Chris Hanson's career with To Catch a Predator. Right.

And perverted justice, the group that was working with Chris Hansen on that show. It is. My understanding, and this isn't really a secret, that perverted justice was under fire for a lot of their techniques, that while they were useful in bringing to light neighborhood perverts, they were also harmful in that they were unusable for law enforcement. Like the stuff that they would do would not be useful for a prosecutor in convicting the pervert. of being perverted. Am I off on that at all? I think that's accurate, but I think the movie goes further than that

to paint him as like a very narcissistic doing this only to become famous type deal, which has created a lot of discourse just about him like generally. Okay. My thought on him is that that's probably not totally incorrect. he did use this as a vehicle for his career. Yeah.

But also if it's not a bad thing they were doing. Right. It's also a good thing to highlight and shame those people. Right. I think what I've seen out of the cast interviews is they are highlighting the intersection of law enforcement and the entertainment industry and what happens. This is a direct quote from Merritt Weaver who's in the movie.

Like what happens when the wrong. force takes hold of that. Right. A.k.a. the entertainment industry. Right. And where they're doing, they're doing everything to generate higher ratings, add revenue. Right. And when these two industries interlock, what happens next? I think that's a fair thing to examine. I also believe it is, or I know this for fact, it is based on a book, I believe, or an

article written about the episode of which the, the predator kills himself on camera. The DA. It was on camera? You don't know, you don't remember that? Well, they didn't air it, but that's why the show ended. I had heard, I had heard about, um, a situation like that. I didn't know that it was on camera, though.

It was while they were filming. It was, catch the guy and he is the assistant DA or the DA. And then he shoots himself. Uh, Bill Conrat Jr. a Texas assistant. District Attorney who shot himself on November 5th, 2006, during a law enforcement raid filmed by the NBC show. And I think that's why they stopped it. I believe that was the last episode they filmed. I don't think, I don't know if that part is in the movie specifically, but that is the, the source material for the script of this movie.

And then they go from there and take whatever creative liberties, but I haven't seen it yet. I also don't think he likes how he's portrayed. He does not like how he is portrayed in the movie. So I think that has a lot to do with the discourse. Yeah. But I'm hearing Rob Pattinson buzz for the Oscar on this. Really? So.

It is, he did kind of lay the groundwork for the next generation of streamers to just be like, if we need to, if we need to get our numbers up, let's just do one where we like beat up a pedophile. Yeah. Robert Pattinson's one of those guys where if I'm watching him try to be Chris Hansen. I just, I can't. I'm like, you're Robert Pattinson. You need an actor I've never seen before to be Chris Hanson. Yeah.

The thing about Chris Hansen is after the fact he's like on cameo and he's doing the, take a seat. Like he's doing that. You see how this looks. Yeah, you see how this. He's doing that as his like catchphrases. Like really leaning into it. I mean, he was on our show. I know.

But you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Definitely an entertainer is what I'm getting it. An entertainer at heart. Yeah. And it would not surprise me to learn that he had, you know, a lot of this was ego-driven on his part. But I think that he is seeing this as a very dirty representation of him, possibly because it might be partially true. Yeah.

And that's hard to come to terms with. Yeah, I cut too close to the bone. Did you see the video of him coming out of the theater after he saw it? No. Oh, he went. I believe it's the regal in Times Square where I used to go because people don't go see movies in Times Square and there was never anybody in there. And he's like doing interviews and taking pictures with a bunch of people and just talking about how much the movie sucked. Oh, no.

Yeah. I think he contains multitudes. He's a complicated individual. All right. What else we got? I think that's about it. That husband from American Idol that killed his wife got found guilty.

Nice. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Super guilty. Justice works. Super freak. Super guilty.

So if anyone was following that, Tip City, Ohio. I thought you were doing the song there. Super freak. He killed his wife. But yeah. And the jury only deliberated for two. hours. They said, we think we've got what we need here. I've always, how does it take two hours? Like, if you all walk in there, like, yeah, we,

he did it. You think it'd be quicker than that. Maybe they had free lunch. First of all, you're going to take advantage of the cold cuts. Right. Second of all, there's paperwork. Yeah, because they, and they had three charges against him. So I think they have to go through and make sure every charge they agree he was guilty on. Like long, I understand, really short, I understand two hours is where it's I think that's short. I think two hours is short. It is probably the shortest it can be.

Yeah. I mean, we can talk for two hours about a random ass topic and we have no legal tie to it. Yeah. I think they just, yeah, they got to make sure everything's in place. Also, there might have been a free lunch involved.

There's a really good market in that area. I'm sure that was doing some catering. Oh, one more thing I want to talk to Big T about. Big T. Can you explain to me what's going on with Manchester City because it sounds like they have committed no no no you've got it all wrong wait what team do you root for man city okay wait wait wait wait but the prosecution gets to speak first okay okay go it sounds to me

like Manchester City has committed the most egregious flagrant violations in terms of uh revenue disclosures um advertising disclosures transfer fee payment disclosures in the history of organized sports in the entire world. Here's the thing, PFT. And I believe one of the quotes I saw yesterday was like, as much as they were charged with, they were found guilty of all of it. And they were found guilty of a lot of stuff that they weren't even charged with to begin with. Here's the thing.

They did a little bit of fraud. But here's the reason why. An unjust rule is no rule at all. Okay. The way the Premier League is set up. You put the system on trial. It is, though. It is. They have rules that, to the best of my understanding, you can only spend money commensurate with how much you bring in, right? So if these Middle Eastern trillionaires buy a club that has historically hasn't been very good in a long time and isn't making a lot of money, even though they have a ton of money to spend, they're not allowed to spend it because the club isn't making money, right? In order to get the club to a point that it is now,

Like now it's self-sustaining. They don't have to do any of this because the club makes a ton of money. So they probably stopped doing it a long time ago then, right? Yes. No, that is true. A long time ago. Pretty recently. In the not so distant past.

They don't need to do it anymore, but they committed a little bit of fraud and misrepresented a few things so that they could be able to spend the money that they already had, right? This would be like if Jeff Bezos spot the New York Yankees, and obviously the Yankees don't have this problem in that they make a ton of money. but MLB was like, you can't spend all your money until we deem that one until we tell you you can. That doesn't make any sense. It's his team. He bought it.

It's his money. But I mean, let him do what he wants. In some sports, you have a salary cap. Baseball doesn't. That's why I use that specifically. Luxury tax. Right. But that's not, you know, he doesn't care.

The point is they misrepresented a few things. Should they inflated a few numbers? Would that be their problem then for buying a team in a league that has those rules? I would assume most of the big leagues have that. I'm not positive on how that works in the Middle League, Germany or whatever, but... You understand that constraint when you purchase the team. Well, I think they knew they could get around it. It's a bad rule.

It is a bad rule. Okay. Because if Newcastle United, for example, has owners, I believe, richer than Man City. I think Saudi Arabia is Newcastle. And they're still not very good because of these rules that preclude you from spending the money that you want to spend. Yeah. Which I find to be anti-capitalist.

I find it to be un-American, un-British, if you will. And I don't like it. And I think that I think it's unjust. Do you think they're going to be relegated? No, I don't. It sounds like they're like just egregious violations, repeated. That's a strong word. I think the Premier League does not want to

I mean, Man City is one of its biggest brands. Do you want to Oh, no, then they could banish them to the shadow realm? Also, UAE could come back and say like, we actually have more money than the EPL. So see you in court. Well, this has been in court for a long time. Now there will be more appeals and stuff. Probably for, yeah, with the punishment.

Yeah. Whatever they decide that's going to be. But I heard the Holland thing, the transfer fee that they paid for him on the books, what we were told was like 50 million. Something like that. And in reality, it was closer to 200 million at the paid for him. Who knows? Okay.

All right. Who's to say. I mean, the court. Courts say a lot of stuff, man. They do. Listen. And it sounds like they were making up. They were inventing contracts.

Listen. And I saw, I saw one where like some company. Those 11 guys had to go step out on the pitch. That's true. And they kicked ass for a decade. I saw one that they had. An ad deal with some company, and I forget how many millions of dollars it was for, but when somebody looked up who the CEO of that company was,

they found an image that was just like a shutterstock placeholder on LinkedIn, like a fake LinkedIn account for the CEO. There was a little bit of fraud. Okay. No one's disputing that. It was in service of rectifying an unjust law. Got it. So if you are an American, you would agree with the fraud.

You would say this fraud was necessary. It's good. Good trouble. Yeah, exactly. The UAE got in some good trouble with John Lewis would say. All right. Yeah, I mean, hey, that makes more sense. If I were to guess what happens, I think the punishment process goes right until like the end of the season.

And Man City will be given a large points deduction that will coincidentally allow it to finish 17th. Okay. So they're going to see how many they can take away. I think that would be a realistic course of action. Okay. I mean, how bad, financially, how bad would that be for the ownership if they got relegated? It'd be disastrous. I assume every player at a club like Man City has a clause that if they get relegated,

you can get out of your contract because there's no chance that would ever happen. Right. Unless. Right. So, yeah, it'd be terrible. it would be funny. Yep, that's my point. To watch them play a year in like League 1.

Because even though a bunch of the players would leave, they still have enough homegrown talent that they would absolutely lay waste to the rest of a league like that. To the champion, or the, the EPL, is that the championship? Championship is below, then League 1, then League 2, then the National League, and then you're in non-league. I mean, that's like a, that's a Mighty Ducks movie.

Yeah. Or Ted Lassau. I do not anticipate Manchester City being relegated. I think there's too much money at stake and we're dealing with forces that are bigger than the EPL. Yeah. Like Marech was telling me that England, the United Kingdom. Moresh, quite biased on this as well, by the way. United Moresh.

Yep, I'm aware. But he was saying that he doesn't think that they're going to get relegated because he thinks that, well, he was telling me that. England imports a lot of energy from UAE. I think it would be foolish on multiple fronts. And UAE being the owners of this, like, that would, that would, that would rub that relationship the wrong way. Yes. So when we say forces that are bigger than the EPL we're talking about, like the entire

nation of England. Yeah. Yeah. That's why this makes it such an interesting story. All right. We're going to get into it with Ted Cruz. We're going to talk about the College Sports Act that just passed through the Senate and more. And he's brought to you by Shopify.

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Start your free trial. Shopify.com slash dose. That's Shopify.com slash dose. And now here is Senator Ted Cruz. Okay, we welcome on a very special guest. It is Senator Ted Cruz of the great state of Texas joining us to discuss the bill that was just passed through the Senate. It's going to be fed now to the House. Who knows what it's going to look like after they're done with it. But as it stands right now, it has passed through the Senate. We've talked to a couple of your colleagues about the bill as well. But right off the bat, I think a good place to start would be if you could share with us and our listeners why you thought that the federal government should get involved with college sports. Sure. It's good to be with you guys. Thank you for having me. There's a very simple reason why

Congress needed to get involved, which is because Congress screwed it up in the first place, that right now the world of sports is the Wild West. There are effectively no rules, and that's because the courts have struck down the rules under the federal antitrust laws. And so it was the federal laws that caused the problem in the first place. And the only body, that can change those federal laws is Congress. And look, I mean, you guys love sports, sports, college sports in particular is an amazing institution in America. And I think it is really valuable and worth saving. And so this is designed to bring order to the chaos we have right now and bring some common sense back and preserve the incredible programs we have all across the country.

Yeah, go ahead. Well, you mentioned the antitrust rules. this bill would give an antitrust exemption to the NCAA, which I do understand why people would argue that needs to exist so they can enforce their rules that, you know, just get struck down in court every time right now. But does an exemption kind of feel like an undue reward for them given that they kind of created their own messed up system to begin with? Well, Big T, I don't think that's the case because it doesn't provide a broad exemption. What it does is it sets the rules. then it gives the NCAA the authority to enforce them. So, for example, as you guys know, the transfer

portal is nuts. Right now, you've got athletes transferring two, three, four times. You get to the end of a season and half a team or more can leave. And that's terrible for the athletes. You know, you look at student athletes who transfer multiple times. The chances of them graduating college plummets that they don't end up getting a good education. And so what this bill does is it puts in a rule that every athlete gets one free transfer. And after that, you can transfer in limited circumstances. You can transfer if your coach leaves. You can transfer if your program is canceled,

or you can transfer if you're a victim of sexual assault or sexual harassment. Other than that, if you transfer a second time, you have to sit out a year. You have to redshirt. And as you guys know, that used to be the rule until the court struck it down. So there's limited authority to enforce the rules, but it's Congress setting the rules. Likewise on eligibility. Right now, there are basically no eligibility rules. People are playing

six, seven, eight years. You've got 27 and 28-year-olds competing against 17-year-olds. You have pros coming back to play college ball. This bill says every athlete gets five years eligibility, and that ends at age 24. There's a hard limit. And it also says no pros. If you played in the NBA, if you played in the NFL, you're not going back to play college ball. It also enables enforcing eligibility rules for gambling. You know, you look at like what happened with Brendan Sorsby, which was ridiculous. But it's not hard to get a friendly local judge, particularly an elected judge, you know, whose incentive is to say, yeah, the star can play for our team.

But it makes no sense. And I think it's a real danger to the integrity. of sports if if players are allowed to gamble. So all of these are common sense rules that that we got bipartisan agreement on. And so the NCAA just has the authority to enforce those rules. Yeah. And that's what I do like about the bill. There's a lot of common sense stuff in there, like you said. There are a few questions I did have about it. When it comes to transfer, and when you're saying that we're going to limit the number of transfers that an athlete can have. Yeah, as a fan, I can understand it's, it's, you know, kind of a pain in the ass to figure out

who's on each team at the start of every season. There's no continuity there. We used to love watching players, you know, grow through a program. And the identity with that team was, was so much stronger. But also, I don't understand what, like, what harm having an athlete transfer multiple times. Where is the harm in that to the point where it had to be included in the bill? So there are lots of harms. And look, this bill took four years to write. And I spent four years talking to colleges and universities all across the country, particularly Texas colleges, talking to coaches, talking to commissioners, talking to everyone involved in college sports. And the transfer portal, that chaos ends up, it's bad for everybody.

Let's start with the athlete. You know, my philosophy looking at this bill was I didn't worry too much about the superstars. I didn't worry about the Michael Jordan's or the Archmannings of the world. They're going to do great. They're going to make millions of dollars. I would put Archmanning in there just quite yet. I know you're Texas guys. Sorry, Biggie. I didn't mean to bring upside his game. You saw one win. Let's listen, Arch didn't play that well. We just couldn't score. Let's not include him next to Michael Jordan yet. Yeah, look, and I, and I will mention Clay Travis is a good buddy of mine so I've already talked some smack about the game with with clay and uh that's okay we're we're coming we're coming yeah i so i i understand like i think that to me there's there's a lot that's in

this bill and overall i do think that there need to be more more rules put in place it does feel like it's more in talking to senators on both sides of the aisle it does feel like it's more written in favor of the coaches and the schools where the students themselves don't necessarily have a seat at the table. And my worry as a fan is that we're just going to end up in court with lawsuits coming from student athletes that that feel disenfranchised by this rule or that rule, since they were not given the opportunity to bargain as a collective unit going into this entirely new structure. So like, you look at the cap that was in place. There's a relatively stagnant cap over the course of the next nine years or so, which you probably wouldn't find

in any other collectively bargained document. So that to me, there's a few things that my fear is by not giving the athletes a seat at the table to help write the bill, it's not going to actually be a permanent solution that works for everyone. So PFT, with respect, that's just not true, what you said. And let me talk about the principal beneficiaries. People are getting the main benefit here, are the student athletes, because they're getting screwed right now. If you look at, as I was saying, I didn't worry about the superstars. I worried about the 99% of college athletes who are never going to play in the NFL, never going to play in the NBA, but sports is their ticket to college. And without sports, many of them would not be able to go to college. They wouldn't

get skills that set them up for success in life. And what we have right now, because of the chaos of the transfer portal and no rules, is we've got a spending spiral that's out of control. And so what it's happening, almost every athletic department in the country is losing millions of dollars. Many of them are losing tens of millions of dollars. And so every week, you see another program being canceled. You see women's sports being canceled. You see Olympic sports being canceled. And I think if Congress does nothing, in five years, we have 30 to 50 competitive college programs. You basically have a mini NFL of the richest schools that could afford to compete and everyone else goes broke and is out. And if that happens, it's not just football that goes away.

but football pays for every other sport, which means the other sports go away too. And I think there would be several universities that go under because a sports program also brings in alumni donations and brings in applications. And so if we do nothing in the next five years, we would see hundreds of thousands of roster slots and scholarship positions go away. That's terrible for student athletes. This bill is designed to preserve and protect what we got so that you can continue to have a half million student athletes every year getting that experience. And that's good for the student athletes.

It's good for the schools. It's good for the fans. It's good for everyone. And that is what this bill is designed to do. You'll find no argument for me about any of those things. I think those are all excellent points. But my point was specifically that the student athletes themselves had no part in negotiating this. And so that's actually not, we talk to a lot of students. We brought in students as witnesses. We brought in students to talk in round tables. We engage very closely with the students. Sure. I'm sure that there were conversations that were had. But I mean, you're a smart guy. You understand that typically when it comes to a labor negotiation, you have one side is going to be the labor. And so it doesn't necessarily sound that my concern here, Senator, is that we're going to end up in a spot in three or four years where this whole thing is back in the courts again.

So except for the fact that student athletes are not employees. So they're not employees. There's not a union. I recognize you guys had Chris Murphy on. Here's what Chris Murphy wants. I said Eric Schmidt on. Yeah. Yeah.

And Eric's a good buddy. And look, I know Chris. But yeah. You know, I work with Chris. Chris wants a world, number one, where the trial lawyers sue every college and every conference and make millions of dollars. And number two, he wants a world where every student athlete is an employee. They're in a union.

and that union's giving millions of dollars to Democrats. That's what he wants. And I get, as a partisan Democrat, why he wants that. But that's terrible for college sports. And if student athletes are treated as employees, you would see a lot of these programs shut down because they can't afford it. It's much more expensive to treat them as employees.

And so you're asking, well, why didn't we bargain with their union? Because they don't have a union. Like they're not employees. It's not the same thing. as say the NFL or the NBA, those guys are employees. Those guys do have a union. It's very different for student athletes, particularly people. Look, I mean, they are students. They're there to get a college degree and 99% of them are never going to play pro ball. And so the value of going to college is hugely valuable for those men and women. So there's a ton on the player side and

we've talked about some of that. One of the striking things to me in this bill is when it comes to hiring a coach. And you can correct me on this. If you are allowed to hire a coach before the end of the season, but they can't do any work for that new school, is that correct? No. So we wrote what we call the Lane Kiffin rule. It's pretty obvious what we were trying to solve. And we prohibit hiring a coach during the season or during the playoffs. And so you can only do that during the offseason. I think what happened to those Ole Miss players was really unfair to lose their coach right in the middle while they're playing. And that's actually the rule the NFL has. So the NFL's rule, you can hire a coach during the off season, but you can't hire someone during

the season. And that, I think, is a much more fair rule for all the players and the fans and the schools. Well, so I would just say about that in the NFL, we talked about the portal and stuff, all that is going on. Like, if you're going to work at a new school, you need to be on that as soon as possible. So is that going to limit job opportunities for head coaches, even more so coordinators from teams that are playing now late into January? Look, I think you will have, you know, limiting the coaches to moving during the offseason, you're going to have recruiting, you're going to have the portal that's going on. But we also provide that an athlete can transfer a second time if their coach leaves. And so you're going to have some coaching movement. but I think it is more fair that it not happened right in the middle of the season when everyone's

counting on that coach to be there. I think that's fair. There was one provision in the bill that I noticed, which is there's going to be a waiting period if a school wants to transfer if they want to transfer conferences. So it was originally going to be you have to spend five years as an independent. That got reduced to three years, correct, this week? Right. So it's my understanding, some of the ACC schools, schools,

did not want that. Which schools wanted to reduce the number of years? So you had a few schools that were speaking out. You had Florida State and you had Miami and then you had Clemson and UNC. Those were the four who were the loudest. And they've been pretty vocal about potentially wanting to jump ship. Look, look, one of my real concerns and one of the purposes of this bill is preventing a Super League. You look at the SEC and Big Ten. you've got two-thirds, almost 70% of the eyeballs and the revenue in all of college sports is the SEC and Big Ten. And I'm a Texan. I love the SEC. But if the SEC and Big Ten were to combine and perform a Super League, you would have essentially everyone else go away.

And that would be the mini-NFL. And I think that'd be terrible, terrible for sports. Let's use the Texas analogy. UT and A&M, they're both so big. They have so many wealthy donors. Those programs are going to survive regardless of what happens. In any circumstance, if there are 30 schools left, UT and A&M are going to be two of them. I don't know that another school in Texas survives.

I don't know, look, you could see TCU and SMU and Texas Tech and U of H and Rice and Baylor all going under. And I think that'd be a terrible outcome. I love the Longhorns and Aggies, but I don't want them to be the only schools in Texas with competitive athletic programs. And so the rule about the power four was designed to prevent all the power going to the SEC and Big Ten and everyone else being left with no revenue and no hopes of having a competitive program. Yeah. I certainly understand that. There was a part of the bill that was centered around the NIL and kind of putting guardrails in place because I think there's a thought out there right on and there's some truth to it that a lot of NIL funds at various big schools

are just means of transferring money to the player with no actual transaction of I'm going to be the face of your car dealership or anything like that. Right. So what's being put in place right now is there will be a board that determines what is and what is not a legitimate NIL deal for the athletes. Do we know who's going to be on that board? So it's a board that is existing now. It has been appointed. It's adjudicating whether you have real N IAL deals or not. But there are very little teeth in it. And so some of what we tried to do in this bill is have real constraints and put teeth in them. And so listen, this bill, number one, protects NIL. And I think it is a much more fair system that athletes can be compensated for the incredible value they produce as a conservative. I think you ought to be able to reap the fruits of your labor. And if you're generating, if you're producing millions of dollars,

you ought to be able to be making that money. The old system, I think, was really unfair, where the athletes produced a lot of the value and got none of the money. That was not right. What this bill does is, number one, it protects genuine NIL. So if you can sell millions of tennis shoes,

you ought to make millions of dollars. And anything that is legitimate, you're selling your name image and likeness, you're doing advertising, you can do that, and that is protected by statute. Number two, it allows schools to continue with revenue sharing, and it creates three different buckets of revenue sharing. The first revenue sharing is the $20 million that was agreed to by the players and by the schools in the House settlement.

That's the first piece. The second piece is it creates a $22.5 million retention pool. And that can't be used to recruit new players, but you can use revenue sharing to pay your existing players to stay where they are. And I think that will be good for the players, but also good for the teams, that you have. You know, I want to see athletes hopefully go to a program where a coach develops them and they get better and they develop skills. I think that's much better for everyone. And so the retention pool makes that easier to have happen. And then on top of that, there's an additional $5 million that can be spent on women's sports or non-revenue sports.

And it doesn't count towards the cap. So all that together, you have essentially a cap of $47.5 million and then it ratchets up with inflation. And that cap, the number there was a result of really extensive negotiations between the conferences. It's higher than a lot of conferences have right now, but it's lower than some of the big SEC and Big Ten schools and we tried to have that be a real cap and put teeth in it, but have it high enough that that you can have some parity in competitiveness and not drive a bunch of the schools out of college sports. So that's what I was kind of pointing to earlier. If you look at the NBA salary cap or NFL salary cap, it seems that this cap, the increases that go along with

inflation, as you put it, they seem extremely low compared to what's in place for any of the major sports out there. So that's really the one thing that I looked at because I think most of this bill is a lot, like you said, a lot of common sense to protecting Olympic sports, protecting women's sports. I think there's a lot of good stuff in there, but that's the part I zeroed in on and a lot of other people have looked at and said the increases in the cap are just not at all in line with what you see with any of the other sports that we deal with. And that feels like it's more tilted in favor of the schools, the conferences, and less so in the direction of the players. So that is a fair point, but I'll point out that both the cap and the rate of increase

was actually negotiated with the athletes. So the House litigation, you have lawyers representing athletes who agreed to that settlement. I didn't negotiate that settlement. They did. And the athletes' lawyers agreed and wrote the terms of the increase. And all we did in the bill, was adopt their agreed to settlement. That was litigation between the conferences and the athletes. We also put in the bill, though, that the parties to the House settlement can change it. So if they want to raise the cap faster than that, they can go and modify the House settlement, and they're entitled to do that.

So we deliberately gave them the flexibility if they want to sit down, the parties to that litigation, and say, you know what, we need to raise these caps higher or we need to change them somehow. they could agree to do that. And I think that was a reasonable and fair way to approach. And which settlement was that that you're talking about? It's called the House settlement. It was the main litigation that agreed on the 20 million cap. And it set up the system for enforcing that. And so those are athletes, student athletes. Yes, it was the lawyers for the student athletes. They could raise their hand and say, we'd like the cap to increase more.

you'd say, okay. If the parties agree, we said whatever the parties agree, we have an existing settlement that the parties agreed to. If they go to the court and say, we want to modify the settlement, the law says, okay, you can modify it however you want. You want to grow at a different rate? You can agree to that. I mean, that would be a great deal if the athletes say, hey, yeah, we'd like to get paid

more. I feel like that would be a good deal for them. One thing that I saw in here, too, you mentioned it. The national championship game can be played no later than, what, January, 8th? Yes, but it also says, I think the language was or as practicable. So it's trying to not have it just go on and on and on, but it does give some wiggle room to be able to move. Okay, yeah. So as a sports fan, I like that. And I also think that what we ran into last year with Lane Kiffin moving around and all that stuff, it's a result of the academic calendar

being tied in. And it's not always lining up with the athletic calendar. So sometimes it doesn't make, You'll see guys that might be playing in the college football playoff, but they have to enter the transfer portal because that's how it works and they have to set up what they're thinking about doing next year as they're still on the field. So can you just explain how this bill touches on that? Yeah, and this build is not designed to alter that. And so that's still there other than just to move the championship game earlier. But as I said, we gave some wiggle room as soon as, as practical, I think,

is the language we use. Got it. Okay. Well, Senator, one thing you and I have in common is we're both big soup guys. I love soup. It's one of my favorite things in the world. I'll eat soup probably six days a week in the wintertime. And I read a story, and you can maybe elaborate on this.

You might know where I'm going with it already. I do. Yeah. So when you got married, you went to the store on one of your first trips. You got back from your honeymoon. You go to the store and you came back with literally 100 cans of Campbell's chunky soup. Is that true? So it's pretty close to true.

I'll tell you, so I got married when I was 30. We've been married 25 years. Congrats. And look, you know, I was 30. I'd been a bachelor for a long time. And I like chunky soup. It's like quick and easy. You throw it in a bowl, nuke it for two minutes, and it tastes good and it's fast.

Yeah. So when I got married, I had, and I don't know that it was 100 cans, I had a bunch of cans of chunky soup in the pantry. And my wife, she was just offended at having all that chunky soup. And so she took it all back to the store. And this, in 25 years of marriage, is the only argument I've ever won. I'm proud of this. I went to Heidi and I said, she does not cook. Neither of us cook.

We're lousy cooks. And I said to her, I said, sweetheart, if you decide you want to cook, I will happily eat what you cook. That's great. I'm good with that. But if you're not going to cook, would you let me feed myself? Like, I like this stuff. If you want something else, you can make it. if not, let me nuke my chunky soup. And it's funny, Heidi talked to her mom. We were newlyweds.

And her mom said, the guy's got a point. And so she relented and I went back and bought the same soup. It may not have been 100 cans, but it was a bunch of cans. Okay. You know, chunky soup will last 10,000 years. Oh, yeah, that's stuff. I mean, you buy 100 cans and yeah, you'll be good probably for the rest of your life. What's, what's each you guys top soup? Yeah, what's your top soup? Oh, good call. Look, I like chicken jambalaya. I like split pea and ham. I like. beef and barley. Okay. I like ham and noodle. They're, they're all good. They're all good. They're all kind of mix them up. They're all good. Yeah. I, sometimes I like to, I eat soup after dinner sometimes because it fills in the cracks. Yeah. Give it a shot next time. It's a, it's a good

instead of dessert. Yeah, bring out, you know, a bowl of the broccoli cheddar. I wash, I wash down my ribs with one of those things. Yeah. Nice. Big T. What were you going to say? I will just, just, just one more point on the bill. Part of the, the, the, the proposition for it, It says it's to promote competitive balance. And I do totally agree. There's a ton of stuff wrong with college sports right now, and it is a mess. I do think if there's one thing the current system has done, though, it has given, I mean, Indiana just won a football national championship.

There's schools in basketball that are good that haven't been good in a long time. Like, it has promoted competitive balance. And I do think if you go to the system this bill would create, would we not go back to a time where it's Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State? everybody else. Yeah, so I don't think so. I mean, look, Indiana won a national championship after spending a crap ton of money. Yeah. And we've got a system where if you get one, you know, super donor who writes a $50 million check, you can suddenly have a competitive team. But it comes down to just unlimited cash. Take a look at something like March Madness. You know, you look a few years

back when Baylor won it all. I don't think that could happen, absent some giant risk, guy coming in and writing an enormous check, you know, you look at the last couple of years, the final four has been number one seeds. I mean, how boring is that? I mean, what's fun is the ability of, you know, an underdog, a Cinderella story to win. And so I think by establishing more uniform rules where you have parity and competitiveness, who wins is going to be dependent less on who can find the billionaire with the biggest checkbook and more on who's got the best coach, who does the best recruiting like all of the traditional factors that led to who wins. Yeah, I mean, in basketball, it's been, we like Cinderella upsets, I think, in the early

rounds. But if you look at the final four, you know, with the exception of the year, NC State got in, there was that one year where it was, what, Miami and San Diego State. Usually it's, yeah, usually it's the best teams that end up in the championship game. So you mentioned Indiana. I'm a big Kurt Signetti guy. I went to James Madison, so he was my coach, took pretty much our course. to Indiana than won a national championship with him.

But it also sounds like what you just said, maybe a little allusion to Mark Cuban. How much of this is like you just wanted to shove it up Mark Cuban, be like, hey, you can't buy any more championships, Mark? Oh, not particularly Cuban. It's trying to save the system because, you know, it was four years ago when I became, at the time, I was the ranking member of the Commerce Committee

because Republicans were the minority, but I became the top Republican on the committee. and I started having, you know, just about every big school in Texas come to me and say, we are in crisis and we need help. And that's when I started diving into this. And I want to preserve, you know, one of the fun things about representing a state like Texas is I get to go to a lot of games and cheer on. And I have, I have elaborate rules on who I cheer for. So in college sports, I will cheer for any Texas team against any non-Texis team. But if you have two Texas teams playing each other, I'm neutral.

So when UT&M play, I wear a shirt that says Switzerland, because there's just, there's no upside for me. I represent the whole state. I ain't get in the middle of that. Well, I mean, Switzerland. Just because Switzerland's neutral like in wars. It probably should have picked aside, though, I mean, if we had to say. But yeah, I know what you're saying, yes.

But interestingly, I have a different rule for pro sports. So for pro sports, I represent every Texas team and cheer for every Texas team against every non-Texis team. But in pro sports, I root for Houston, just because I'm a lifelong Houstonian. I grew up going to Astros games and Rockets games. And so, you know, I mean, I bleed Rockets Red. And so if it's, you know, when we had the World Series a few years ago, or we had the ALCS of the Astros versus the Rangers, I was rooting for the Astros. Right. But then the Rangers won.

And in the World Series, I have. happily rooted for the Rangers once they're not playing the Astros. Sure. I'm a Nationals fan. I'm from DC originally, so we had a, we had a nice world series. That was a great series, but it was painful. I, uh, weird series where the road team won every game. Is there anything to bill about banging on trash cans and, uh, and telling your opponent what pitch is coming? Is that, did you think? It's mandatory. We, we actually require it. Okay. Yeah. That's, that sounds by right. What are your thoughts on Arian Foster? Arean's not on this show because he's currently in the air flying back from Argentina right now. His flight got delayed. so he couldn't make it, but any comment on his career or if you owned him on your fantasy team?

You know, I did not, but hell of a player and I don't know him, but I assume great guy. Great guy, wonderful guy, world-class human being. So this bill passed the Senate, and now it's going to the House. When is the House going to vote on it? So we don't know for sure. The vote in the Senate was a huge vote. We got 77 senators voted for it, and actually 78 because Dan Sullivan and also supports the bill, but he was just in Alaska. He wasn't back for the vote yet. To get 78 senators, you don't get 78 senators for anything. And it was a huge, the minimum you need to pass a bill in the Senate is 60 votes. But I said from the beginning, I didn't want to just squeak out with 60 or 61. I wanted a really big bipartisan vote so that would go to the House

with momentum. I think that's where we are. My hope is, so the House has adjourned until election day. campaigning because every House member is trying to get reelected. Maybe I'm just naive. That's crazy that it's not even October yet. They're just taking five weeks off? Yeah, it's pretty typical. And it's not taking that time off because they're out campaigning every day. It's part of the job that in election season, usually the Senate will probably wrap up today because we got a third of the senators that are running and on the ballot. And so you spend the last month out on the campaign trail. I'll tell you from having been on the campaign trail, many times you're working a lot harder on the campaign trail than you are when the senator house is in session. So that's,

that's been typical for a long time that the month of October, you have members back in their state's campaign. That's crazy. That must be nice. October's the best month to take off. It can be nice, but it's also a lot of work because you'll do like, you know, when I'm, when I'm on the ballot, I'll be on the road. You know, I did a 50-stop bus tour all across Texas, will you do six, seven, eight events a day where you're doing rallies and interviews and you're going from early in the morning till late at night? It's fun. I like campaigning, but it can be exhausting. Yeah, as a sports fan, I mean, if I had to pick one month to take off, I think it would be October. You got NFL, you got college, you got the baseball playoffs

going on. NBA starting. You got the World Series, which, you know, as I said, I'm a diehard Astros fan, so I've been to most of the home playoff games for the past, decade and it's been a pretty amazing run. Well, this year's looking a little bumpy, but maybe we'll pull it out. So, Senator, I was saying earlier in the show, I just became a full-time Washington wizard season ticket holder, even though I live in Chicago, but grew up in D.C. And got some really nice tickets, like right behind the Wizards bench, very excited to be using them.

I like to invite you to a game with me. And also, I'd like to invite, I said this earlier, I'll say it to you. If you can get in touch with Eric Schmidt, I would like him to go to a Hawks game with me. when the hawks are in town. Him and I, we can go. He can wear, well done. He can wear an Iowa jersey, but, like, I think it'd be fun. So pass that along to him, open invitation.

Eric's a good buddy of mine. I may decline to pass on that invitation. Fair enough. He's a hell of a baseball player. I'll give him that. I'll tell you, that catch. Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, he made number five on Sports Center.

And I actually had Eric on my, I do a podcast three days a week called Verdict with Ted Cruz. and Eric was my guest on today's podcast, and we were laughing about that for him to be number five on SportsCenter. I am confident I will never make SportsCenter, and that's okay. Yeah, do you not play in the baseball game? Now, I was not, I played basketball in high school, so I was not a baseball player. I was kind of, I was a mediocre high school basketball player,

and I actually still play twice a week. I'm still probably a mediocre high school basketball player. Is there a basketball game, like a pickup game that goes on in the Senate? Yeah, yeah. I do one every week. In fact, so I don't know if you guys know, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, played hoops at Princeton. And he actually made the tournament.

He played in March Madness. Only played a minute, but hell, that's a minute longer than I played. And so when Pete got confirmed, I challenged him. I said, hey, come play us hoops. And he ended up, he came, and he brought three guys from the Pentagon with him. and I put together a senator's team. Actually, Eric Schmidt played with me. And then John Hustead, who played college football.

And so he's a good athlete. And then I had another guy on my team. Actually, two other guys that plugged in. We're doing four-on-four. One who played D-2 basketball and another who played football at Arkansas. And so we played two games of four-on-four to 15. And it was a brutal game. but we ended up beating Pete both times.

And I told the press afterwards, I said, oh, Pete was just engaged in a little lobbying and he threw the game to make the Senate feel happy. That was a total lie. He did not throw the games. Pete was pissed that he lost. And he's a hell of a ballplayer. And I will say, we won in part because Schmidt's 6-6,

and he knows how to post up, and I play points so I could feed it into him. But you had those guys, I mean, beaten the living crap out of Schmidt. I mean, they, because Hegg Seth was not happy he lost the first game, and I'm pretty sure he tore them a new one. Yeah. And I will say, Pete stole the ball from me, and it was impressive because we play on a tennis court surface. It's a terrible surface. And he dove on that tennis court surface, ripped up his knee, so his knee was bloody. And look, he stole the ball because he wanted it more than I did. I wasn't going to dive on a tennis court

surface. Great. Yeah. And I told him. him afterwards, I said, Pete, you know, I'm proud that our Secretary of War is hungry enough that you're bloody and you wanted that ball. That makes me feel safe. Yeah, he's probably on that, on that gear. He was on the testosterone stuff. You check what that could be. Yeah, check how long you spend in the bathroom. Maybe that's some crazy work to be doing that pickup games. Well, okay, well, we appreciate you having, we appreciate having you on the show, Senator. I'd like to have you back on when Aaron can join us. Unfortunately, he couldn't this time. You are his senator. So, I mean, he still lives in Houston and he's taxpayer there as he reminds us frequently.

That would love to do it. Yeah. So, Big T, do you have anything else? Yeah, real quick, last one. I think on this bill, people for it and against it, whatever, but I do think a lot of people are happy to see that it's at least something that is pretty bipartisan. You said you got 78 senators on it. Are y'all working on anything else that is that level of bipartisan in Congress right now that people would want to hear about?

Oh, yeah, look, there are lots of bills. So, I mean, I've passed over 100 different pieces of legislation, and the vast majority of them have been bipartisan. This bill, we got every Republican except two voted for this bill in the Senate. And we got more than half the Democrats who voted for it. So, I mean, it was very bipartisan. You know, I'm working with a number of senators right now on AI legislation. And I think that's important. It's difficult. We're trying to find what are the right. rules to address the risks from AI, but also ensure that we have, that America leads and that we have the jobs here and not going to China. And so that, that, that's an area where I'm spending a lot of time doing, doing negotiations with Democrats and trying to move in a bipartisan way. S.I. I don't mean to correct you, but you should know that somebody might be, somebody powerful might be watching. The S.I might be listening. Here's my question on S.I. So does it have a swimsuit edition?

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's what PICT said earlier. I said. Yeah, I just got over AI being Alan Iverson. we can't be switching it right now. That's high sports. Yeah. Actually, one last question before you go, you triggered my memory. A lot of us are confused about data centers. Are they good or bad? We hear both.

Yeah, look, some of both. I mean, you need data centers. We want to make sure, because data centers drive all of AI, and we've got a race with China. One of the others going to win. And whoever wins, you're going to see trillions of dollars of investment and millions of jobs. And I want all those jobs in America.

I don't want them in China. So we want to win, but I think people have very reasonable concerns about data centers. They don't want a data center to come in and consume a bunch of water. And so I think you ought to put rules, and I support rules saying that data centers, there's ways to build them where the cooling is what's called closed loop, where basically they use the same water and just circulated around so it consumes very little water. I think we should be mandating that. And the other big concern people have with data center is power.

They don't want their electricity rates to go up. I think they're exactly right. And I have long advocated that if a data center comes in, they ought to generate more power than they consume. And in fact, I've urged the company's building data centers. If you come into a small town, you ought to tell the residents of the town, we put this data center in. And for the rest of your life, your electricity bill is free.

We're going to pay your power bill. And you couldn't do that in a big city like Houston or Dallas, but a little town that had three, four, five thousand people, they could do that. And I think that's the right balance where you address people's concerns about data centers, but you also make sure we're investing so we have the jobs we need going forward. Yeah, you and I, you and I, well, I spent some time in Texas. I lived in Austin for about 10 years. We both know how strained that electric grid can be at times.

And so I feel like that's, I would love it if there was a way to make it so they would pay for themselves or the electricity would pay for somebody's electric bill. I'm skeptical about all that. That's another conversation for another time. But I appreciate having you. I appreciate you coming on the show. And yeah, hopefully get you back on so Aaron can talk to you at some point. Awesome.

Thanks, guys. This was fun. All right. Take care.