MTracey podcast - "Today's News," 4/3/2026: My encounter with Epstein lawyers, "worst podcast" tournament continues

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

I’ll have more to come soon on my encounter yesterday with the famed Epstein lawyer consortium. David Boies himself spoke to me for a surprisingly long time. I even had a decently extensive chat with the man, the myth, Bradley Edwards. The only problem was you can’t bring any recording devices into the federal courthouse, so I had to scribble on some haphazardly assembled scrap papers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

All right, welcome to today's news, not the pedophile report, not private petal party. And I'm neither of those things. And I am Matt Taibi. I'm Michael Tracy reporting for duty. Like John Kerry, remember that? That's right. John Kerry reporting for duty. Boy, that was a weird campaign. With voting. Yeah.

So. I was just a wee lad when that was going. on. That's right. There was enough of a nerd at like 15 or 16 that I was still into it. That's right. I could watch the Democratic convention where the big moment was supposed to be John Kerry saying, I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty and he salutes. And then Carl Rove colloos with these guys who claim that John Kerry did not

legitimately earn his purple hearts. That was run by Jerome Corsi. You might recall later made a cameo in Rushagate. Yes. and not just the cameo, a major role. Yeah, major role, actually, a big cameo. And that wasn't the big moment of that convention, as it turned out.

The big moment, it turned out to be Barack Obama's speech. Right. In hindsight. And Zell Miller. Remember Zell Miller? No. Oh, sorry. No, no.

No, no. He was the, Zell Miller was in the Republican convention. He was the Southern Democrat from Georgia, I think. Senator, long-time senator, like in the Strom Thurman sort of class of people, end of his career. And he turns on the Democrats. in 2004 and endorses Bush because Democrats are weak on terrorism and Iraq and everything. Go back.

We should go back and watch that. It's like from a different millennium. Epic. Yeah. Epic, yeah. Epic is the word we're looking for. And we're going to have a callback, I think, to that convention, oddly enough later on in our final four.

Are we? Yeah. I think so. I'm not sure what you're referring to. So I'm going forward to the surprise. I think so, maybe. But we got to get to a couple of things first. We're doing this live today, folks,

because Michael yesterday was on assignment, actually reporting, so we didn't record, as we normally would. A very novel thing to do for journalists these days, I think. What, go out. Antiquated. Yeah, yeah, antiquated. Actually, go out and try to do some reporting. Pick up the telephone.

Yeah. Why she had to physically go to a courthouse, so it was even more complicated than that. Even more so, but even the whole concept of talking to people, I mean, I still remember a column that was in something like Vox years ago where there was some journalist talking about how he can't stand the telephone. And I thought, maybe, maybe this is not the right job for you. I don't know. We do have to update your methods as like a quote, millennial or Gen Z journalist because nobody picks up the phone anymore. That is true. So you have to be like just a preternatural textor and maybe like eventually goad somebody to get on the phone.

But it's not like people just pick up the phone these days and say hello and then be like willing to have a little chat. Right. You got to arrange the phone call and then you have the phone call. But back in the day, you used to just be able to make a call and like the presumption would be that somebody would pick up, right? Right. Right. Exactly. Hang on a second. 7 a.m. On the West Coast.

Yeah, on the West Coast. Yes. But we always, but we usually release the show. show earlier than this at 9 a.m. So this is, um, yes, it's live. It'll still be there later in the morning if you want to go look. Wake your ass up. You never hear you watch the breakfast, breakfast club? That's their intro. Is it really? It's a little just like soundbite that they play at the beginning of their segment saying, wake your ass up, the breakfast club. Oh, right. Yes. That's right. That's right. Um, all right. Well, uh, enough throw

clearing. Michael, you went to a hearing yesterday. Can you tell us what happened? Yeah. So in the past few weeks, there was a fairly expedited settlement that was arrived at, settlement agreement that was arrived at in principle between two opposing litigation parties in the matter of Jane Doe v. Bank of America, which is yet another Epstein-related lawsuit that was filed relatively recently in October of 2025 by the same consortium of lawyers who have already made a fortune on their prior class action settlements that they obtained by suing other major financial institutions, namely J.P. Morgan and DeWeish Bank. But they went after Bank of America. And the Virgin Islands and, and the, well, boys and Edwards. So the leaders

Oh, those two. Didn't sue the U.S. Virgin Islands, if I'm remembering correctly. The U.S. Virgin Islands was sued by, the U.S. Virgin Islands sued J.P. Morgan. Right, right. I'm sorry. Jeffrey Epstein's estate was domiciled in the U.S. Virgin Islands, so they did have to go to probate court in the U.S. Virgin Islands to broker the settlement program arising out of Epstein's estate. But to my knowledge, I'm not sure that Boyes and Edwards sued the U.S. Virgin Islands government.

although you know you always find something new on this story so it's possible but anyway it's been it's been it's been very successfully leveraged by these guys and gals into the unbelievably successfully successfully successfully yeah um where if you just tally up the jp morgan settlement and the dutch bank settlement that alone is already like 320 million dollars something in that neighborhood then you add in the Epstein Estate Settlement Fund that was around $130 million in growing, because there are still lawsuits being filed against the Epstein estate individually. And then there was even another class action settlement that was brought against the Epstein estate that settled in February shortly after the latest release of the Epstein files,

even though in 2020 there was supposed to happen to this definitive resolution in terms of any claims that could be brought against the Epstein estate for liability. vis-a-vis Epstein's alleged sex trafficking venture. But that was just overridden by the same crew of very ambitious, adventurous, and intrepid lawyers. So they got another, I forget the amount now, but it's something like maybe $60 million more in another Epstein estate settlement.

Now, on top of that, it's $70-something million from Bank of America that was just... 72.5. 72? Yeah, okay. So a notice was sent to the court maybe around two weeks ago, informing Judge Rakoff that Bank of America and the quote survivors lawyers had arrived at a settlement in principle through a mediator, a former federal judge who was appointed to mediate between the

parties. And so they were presenting this initial settlement proposal to Judge Rakoff yesterday in Manhattan and federal court. So I went. And it was very interesting. I do want to thank the New York Times reporter what was his name Goldstein whatever the guy's name if you like search New York Times like Epstein Financial Reporting stuff he actually does some

decent stuff but I forgot that you needed to bring a notepad to the oh so he let you a notebook so I guess he let me he ripped out a bunch of pieces of paper from his notepad and I also got I borrowed a pen from the one of the court

officers so helpful helpful assistance was provided. Is it Matt Goldstein? Let's see. I think that sounds right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Matthew Goldstein. That's right.

So if you're out there, Matthew Goldstein, thank you for the notepad paper. But I wanted to go to this because, for a number of reasons, first of all, just the fact that there is yet another gigantic settlement in the tens of tens of millions, that's being finalized or in the process being finalized now in 2026 related to Jeffrey Epstein is crazy unto itself.

I mean, we're coming up on six, you know, six and a half years ago, the guy died. And there's already been a slew of these same lawsuits. But the lawsuits because they were successfully obtained in the past, J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank in particular, they create a model where, Yeah, there's already a framework. So, and JP Morgan got, what, it was $290 million? Is that right? I think it was 270.

Okay. Something like that, 280 maybe. Oh, no, no. I'm sorry. Yeah. And then, and then Deutsche was seven. So it was around 90 million. 80 million, 90 million, something like that.

Okay. All right. Epstein estate, like it was 1201 million, I think. This is awesome. I'm sorry. We got to interrupt. At Korashamo, it says, this podcast should be called Zionism's

last stand. I love it. Let's do that. So, you know, my, my assumption as to why he's saying that, or she, or they, is that by... Or Zier. Matt, you know what?

Enough of the funny business around pronouns that is so 20-21. I'm sorry. You know what? I'm frankly offended. Because I, I would like to declare myself as gender fluid this morning. That was my whole plan, actually, from the beginning. I hit it from you.

I wanted to spring it upon you and just get your reaction. That was the surprise reveal of the show? That was a surprise reveal, yes. Okay. But what was I saying? The size of the settlements, the... Man, it sounded a good sign if I already lost my train of thought this early in the morning. I'm going to probably be senile by the end of the day.

Okay, so we were talking about the framework was Bank of America, Deutsche Bank. Now we have, I mean, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, now we have Bank of America. Yeah, so basically, because they have this pre-existing model, that actually originated more with the Epstein estate settlement. That was when this same administrator that has been used for all the subsequent settlements, and it's going to be used again for the Bank of America settlement. Simone Lelchuk was appointed, and I would love to speak to her at some point, but I've had difficulty.

And that settlement from the Epstein estate was itself modeled, the organizers said, on prior kind of holistic settlement programs that are kind of a novel invention of the past maybe 20 or 30 years having to do with 9-11 settlements when families of people killed in 9-11 would sue the property manager of the World Trade Center. Right. Or the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State in 2011, 2012. That also was addressed with a holistic settlement program where people could make essentially confidential claims and have those claims adjudicated in a non-adversarial setting where there's no downside reputational risk because if you embellish something or dramatize something, it's not going to be publicly exposed per the court-approved term. of the settlement. So that was adopted for the Epstein settlement program after he dies, right? So libel laws no longer applied to a deceased person. The estate has an incentive to come up with a comprehensive way in which to sort of solve this flood of litigation in a one size fits all sort of fashion. So they're not wasting away addressing every individualized claim.

the end of time. Which, by the way, is what always happens when you have a big scandal. Like, remember the robocining global settlement, right? The whole idea of that is to get, is to get all the financial crisis for a lot of tax securities or whatever, right? Yeah, where the, you know, take your pick. Is this Annie Mae or is that some other firm? No, no, no, that was all the different banks that had robots, whatever. It doesn't matter. But the idea is you have to, you want to, it's really for the wealthy people in the equation that you want to get all the liability dealt with in one blow and so that way you don't have to have which did not end up being the case with respect to the

estate in fact it backfired spectacularly on the estate I mean the guys that run the estate are now being hauled before the house oversight committee just in the past couple weeks I actually haven't even got a chance to watch it yet but the house oversight committee is doing these rolling depositions right, people who are seen to be implicated or involved in one way or another with Jeffrey Epstein-Naxwell. So they had Bill Clinton. They had Bill Barr last fall. They had they had a cost of back. They even had Hillary Clinton for some reason where Lauren Bobert was asking her about Pizza Gate literally. I mean, it's it's, you know, these people have made me come to sympathize with Hillary in a way that I would not have fathomed in the recent past. Because like I just,

you just have to watch her and associate yourself with her just like just so derisively incredulous reaction to Lauren Gobert trying to browbeat her with questions about PizzaGate and UFOs and things. It just doesn't even make any sense. So Hillary, I guess is my girl on this score anyway. And but regardless, so they also have hauled recently these guys, Richard, Darren Indy who was Epstein's in-house lawyer and is now one of the executors of the estate and also Richard Khan who had a similar role.

And, you know, they could be in some legal hot water because so I was able to speak to a bunch of these lawyers who have been in this main consortium that have been sort of generating this highly profitable industry for themselves. So David Boyes from the Boyceiller law firm, his associate Sigrid McCauley, who was basically the personal lawyer for Virginia Roberts Gouffre when she was alive. And then Bradley Edwards, who was the first guy to basically insinuate himself into the story back in 2008 when he first files a lawsuit or makes a complaint about Jeffrey Epstein's federal non-prosecution agreement supposedly violating the Crime Victims Rights Act, which was a novel

statute at the time. So we had to come up with some novel theories for that. And now, Bradley Edwards. By the way, that's a whole separate story. That's a whole separate story. I still, I've been meaning to actually do a full, I know all the information that's relevant to it, but I haven't like taken the time to sit down and actually synthesize all the problems with that, but I'll get to it eventually. Okay. And then Brittany Henderson, who is Bradley Edwards, former legal aid or like legal assistant for back in the day and, you know, Cupid arrived and they intended they ended up having a fling. and are now married happily. And Brittany Henderson was extremely pregnant. Not that that's particularly relevant, but she was and she was there. And Britney Henderson was, so I was asking Edwards, right, about this letter that was submitted to the court by the Bank of America lawyers a few weeks ago, where they were asserting, in part based on comments that Edwards made in a podcast in February, that there is an ongoing

federal criminal investigation into something to do with Jeffrey Evers, Epstein now, today, as of March of 2006. Because Bank of America was trying to argue that if there is a pending criminal investigation, that would necessitate the court granting them a stay for this ongoing civil litigation because you can't compromise, you know, per federal code or regulation, an ongoing federal criminal matter by way of a civil matter. That argument was rejected, but the lawyer, of America puts forward a at least tentatively plausible case that there is some kind of

active criminal investigation going on. Number one, they point to a truth social that Trump put out last year where he says, don't investigate me, investigate Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and XYZ, investigate Democrats, meaning, meaning he's ordering the Jay Clayton, who's the Southern District of New York, U.S. attorney to investigate Democrats for their association. with Epstein. Then on the next day Trump will come out and say, oh, I actually really like Bill Clinton. He's a good guy. I'm so I'm sort of ticked off that he's even gotten wrapped up in this whole mess. So like Trump's all over the map. But Trump did put out that statement. And then also Edwards goes on some like survivor oriented podcast and says that the federal government

have been asking him for information about who might be charged criminally further. So I want to ask Edwards about that to elaborate. He kind of hedged a bit. He was saying he wasn't referring to any specific investigative query, but just like a general offer or invitation or a request by government officials for him to provide information as he comes across it. Hold on a second. At Abaza Gah 67, Matt Tiabi and Mike Tracy belong in jail. What do we belong in jail for?

I mean, I agree. for pedophilic sex trafficking for working with Elon Musk that's interesting well I never worked with him but I guess I'm I guess I'm inculpated now as a co-conspirator of yours working with him

that's an interesting way of Associated you were tied to him you had connections I guess so Mike Tracy belongs in jail for trying to cover up the Epstein story I agree you belong in a jail for misspelling both of our names somehow

yeah exactly well anyway we'll come back to So when you learn to spell our names, we'll return to that. Anyway, so Edwards gives sort of a little bit of a hedging answer on that, but then Brittany Henderson, his now wife, I believe, interjects and says, look, we got to go, but there should be prosecutions,

even if we can't confirm that there are any that are ongoing. And say, okay, so who should be prosecuted? And you would think that the Epstein Maximilus would assume that the people who she would imagine ought to be prosecuted would include these VIP people, you know, Prince Andrew, Teeter Thiel, whoever. But she says Epstein's accountants and lawyers. So she's talking about these Richard Kahn and Darren Indyke,

who are now, who are hauled for like four, I think Indyke or Kahn was there for something like six hours or four to six hours, some, a long time, okay, where they're making statements on the record being questioned by the House Oversight Committee, The material from which could easily be used by an enterprising prosecutor to bring some kind of charge against them, I do think there is an outstanding legal liability here because it would make sense politically for the Trump administration, right? They've got this big ongoing problem with the public perception being that they've covered up the Epstein files or they're not prosecuting anybody. And there obviously is so much prosecutable conduct that they could prosecute, but they're just choosing not to because they're on the cover up.

right but you know why not get a you know get somebody's head a low-hanging fruit for them i think would be this lawyer and or the and the lawyers and or accountants that work for the epstein estate and that's who brittany henderson suggested to me ought to still be prosecuted so we should be mindful that there could be i mean this is not this is not an inactive story in terms of potential further legal developments and henderson and her hubby, Brad, they're in constant contact with the DOJ. They were conferring all the time with the new acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, and also Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney who's saying we're going to investigate something in New York

on behalf of their alleged victim clients, on whose behalf they were demanding the imposition of the most sweeping possible redactions to the Epstein files. And so, you know, they're not. There's a bunch more material that I got from this thing. I had a surprisingly lengthy discussion with David Boyes. It's still probably one of the most prominent lawyers in the... Was it on the record? Are you able to talk about it?

Yeah, yeah. I don't want to give too much away yet because I'm, you know, working on something. But let's just say that the argument that has been made for why Bank of America owes these purported survivors, something like, what was it, 72 million? 71.5? Yeah, 72.5. It's even more laughably hazy than the arguments that have been made against Bank of America and Deutsche Bank, in part because, and I will pretty give this one away as a little treat for the listeners who tuned in so early, especially the West Coast listeners who are tuning in at the crack of dawn. Dave Boys, right? So in their initial complaint against Bank of America last October, they assert, boys and Edwards assert that, that they.

there were thousands of victims, thousands of women and girls, they say, that were victimized by Jeffrey Epstein over the course of his orchestration of what they call a sex trafficking venture, because that's what it has to be classified as under the federal anti-trafficking statute, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which is another can of worms. That's from 2000, where trafficking was still conceived of as modern-day slavery, meaning it's a form of enslavement, mainly. that's what if you look at bill Clinton's signing statement when he signs that bill into law at the urging of both feminist groups and Christian evangelical groups interestingly enough he's talking about it as we like we need the government needs new tools in its toolbox to go after this modern day slavery scourge where which conjures images of like little girls being

held in captivity in you know sex slave dungeons in Thailand or something and then being transported to the United States or Europe. Like we needed, the prosecutors needed more methods to deal with that. Just to back up for a second. There is actually a thing like the, you know, the old white slaving concept. It's not always white people, but there is a thing where people are transported from country to country, have their passports taken away by, you know, like a mob, a mafia group. or in some cases, you know, it's like domestic servants, right?

They're not sex slaves. They're domestics who are essentially controlled. Like, that does happen. There is a thing like that. But they, you're right, they massively expanded the concept of. Yeah. I've always said, I'm not comprehensively familiar with the lay of the land in Thailand or India or Bangladesh, where I would not be surprised at all if stuff that is akin to what people had traditionally conceived of as sex trafficking does go on.

But in the United States, where I happen to live and be a citizen, more familiar with the lay of the land. And despite this almost now ubiquitous belief that there's this widespread chronic child sex trafficking, if you actually ever drill down into the details, there's virtually never. Oh, yeah. An instance of when that's actually taking place at scale. Like you could find like a handful of outlier incidents now and then like, remember this guy in Ohio who was found to have like kept these girls in his basement for like 20 years or something and they escaped in 2016. I forget that his name now. So every now and then like an outlier thing like that will come up.

In terms of like a systematic wide scale organized child sex trafficking ring, it just doesn't happen to any appreciable degree in the United States. I'm not making any statement about India or anyplace else. Remember the story about the couple that kept a young woman in a box under their bed? A box under their bed? Keep going. I'll find it. Refresh my memory.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so, so anyway, it's amazing. Like, if you want to talk about concept creep, this is like concept creep on steroids and then poured with jet fuel and lit on fire. and then sent in a rocket to Mars or something in terms of how the contours of what it's understood to be sex trafficking have grown over the years. And I had the meeting to write something on this. I have something that's half written on this that I'll put out eventually. Because you can find the most just mind-blowing examples in recent years of sex trafficking getting charged as sex trafficking for conduct that no sane person would have ever even had the faintest notion could constitute sex trafficking. in the past. Just one quick example. Okay. So this trafficking victims protection act, which is the main

federal statute that gets evoked. By the way, the Mann Act also sometimes gets invoked. That's the white slavery law from like the 1920s or something, 1910s maybe. That was the big federal crime that the FBI used to. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. But it got sort of supplanted by the TVPA as of 2000, which is what Congress routinely updates and adds amendments to and whatever. So a couple of years ago, Harvey Weinstein was sued for having supposedly committed a sex trafficking offense. And what was the offense that was alleged against Harvey Weinstein? It was that one year he attended the Cannes Film Festival in France. And a lady who was an aspiring actress was invited to his hotel room and came to the hotel room.

she alleges that over the course of the hotel room liaison, something sexually untoward took place. And she sued him for sex trafficking because she claims that he had suggested that he could help her get a movie role. And therefore, a thing of value was exchanged for what she had alleged was an untoward sexual act. And how is that out of solicitation? Good question. this was a novel theory that was introduced by her lawyers, I think it was in federal court in California that this action was filed to assert that this could constitute sex trafficking

or an offense under the federal sex anti-sex trafficking statute. But the judge ruled that the lawsuit could proceed. So he validated the theory that that set of facts could rise to the level of sex trafficking. So that's what we're talking about now in terms of what could be legally characterized as sex trafficking and I can give you a million other examples of increasingly more absurd cases. So anyway, back to the Bank of America thing yesterday. That's sort of the context because now in 2026 all bets are off in terms of like anything you could throw at the wall and see what sticks and it's sex trafficking.

But this is even more, I think, instructive as to the Epstein story because one thing I was trying to drill, trying to pinpoint these lawyers on is, okay, I mean, we're now, we're all being told constantly that we're in the throes of the most world historic pedophilia crisis that ever bedeviled mankind. But my understanding is that in the time period when the claimants can say that they were victimized by Epstein and then file a claim pursuant to the class action settlement. So from June of 2008, when he pleads guilty in Florida, up to when he's arrested federally in July of 2019, there was never even any allegation made. forget validated or verified never even an allegation made in any kind of formal process including civilly when the standards are obviously astronomically lower than a criminal right that epstein ever victim ever had any illicit sexual contact with anybody under the age of 18 between 2005 and 2019 right so this

Bank of America settlement covers the period of 08 to 2019 so I was asking them okay so you said in your complaint that thousands of women and girls were victimized by Epstein and that's that's what's giving you this impetus to file this action against Bank of America and yet none of the even conceivable victims that we know of could have been minor i mean forget forget like actual children even minors right even statutory minors uh during this period when you're saying that this that Bank of America was culpable for facilitating somehow Epstein sex trafficking venture and Edwards and boys both pretty much confirm that, although they say, look, we don't know the full scope of the victim, so maybe some more will come forward.

But they don't have any evidence that any victimization took place in the United States of a person under the age 18 during the period that is covered by this Bank of America settlement. Now, when it gets reported in the media, what's the instant association that people make with, okay, breaking news headline Bank of America settles for this big amount of money? that must mean the pedophilic predation was much more was even more rampant than we ever could have imagined right and this was this was jed rakeoff is the judge in this case right yep so he's one of the best judges in the country or has a reputation yeah not that's what's so weird uh he has a reputation of being a very strict fair uh exacting jurist he's kind of funny too like he made some wisecracks and stuff that I actually chuckled out during the hearing. But to allow this, and he also, he's famous for. Do you hear the wisecrack? Okay, so this is, like, the transcript takes like 60 days or 90 days to come out, so you're not even going to get this unless you were in the room.

The wisecrack that was, so they were scheduling the next hearing for the next phase of finalizing the settlement. It was for August, August 20th, I think it was. And David Boyes says, Judge, I apologize, but. But I'm scheduled to go to Africa with my family on August 20th. Can we schedule it for a week later, perhaps August 27th? And Judge Rakoff says, although I can't endorse you going on. I can't endorse your sojourned on an African excursion.

I will entertain the request. And everybody laughs. And then he asked Bradley Edwards if he's available for August 27. The judge Rakoff says, like, you won't be in Antarctica that day. we'll do. That's pretty good. That's very judgey humor. It was.

It was. Yeah. Inoffensive, but still, you know, clever enough to make you sort of smile. So, okay. Why is your understanding of why he's seen as a very good judge? So, among other things, during the financial crisis,

he got fed up with the banks getting off too easy. on a lot of these settlements. Remember, there was this period where they were doing settlements that were like, uh, sort of back, sort of side room deals between plaintiffs and, uh, and the banks. And they would go into effect and, and the judges wouldn't even have to sign off on them, essentially, right? Or they would, or they would blindly sign off on them. Uh, and-

How could the judge not have to sign off on them? Well, normally the judges in the middle of the negotiations and at the end at least approves or disapproves under the eric holder uh era they did a bunch of deals that were just sort of ex parte agreements okay yeah and just went through there's like an independent arbitration that the court presumptively affords with enough credibility that they don't have to weigh in on each step Right, right. And in one case, two parties got together and they, it might even have been Bank of America or Citigroup. It was one of those. It was one of those banks. He got pissed off and said, no, this, this is too, too good a deal for the bank. And I want you to go back and rework it and come out with a real, a real agreement that sort of fits the numbers more. more closely. And he had a lot of criticisms for how, you know, the problem of, for instance,

a company gets caught committing fraud, promises never to do it again, does the same thing again, two weeks later, gets the same penalty, promises not to do it again, right, like the same small penalty. He didn't do that. He wrote a book about this. He was sort of briefly in the limelight as I think he's a, is any a professor of Columbia or something like that? So he's, he's pretty, he's a pretty, uh, public facing in terms of expounding his jurisprudential, uh, thoughts. Yeah. I've talked to him much of times.

He's, you know, as judges go, he's, um, a smart learned guy, obviously. Affable. Yeah. Um, but, but, in this case, though, but the, the problem is exactly what you're talking about, uh, you, you have these gigantic headlines and people will presume that certain kinds of conduct happen when they didn't. And I just don't understand why judges would sign off on that without looking into the particulars or demanding that the language be changed or Yeah, well, well, I mean, one thing, one one area where I will give Ray Koff some very

partial credit is that he did make a point to stipulate that he takes very seriously his obligation to monitor the reasonability of the pool of class action claimants and monitor it so that it doesn't go beyond the limits of what has been rightly settled. So in other words, and then he actually said because of the political notoriety of this issue, he says there could be a temptation. for anybody who was ever remotely associated with Epstein to have claims filed against them, against them,

even if they were not complicit in the sex trafficking venture. Because if you look at the wording of the settlement language, it is as generic as saying anybody, I could pull it up. Yeah, I should pull it up. Why don't you pull it up? And I'll make the point quickly while you do that. Okay, I got it. You got it? Okay, go ahead.

Okay. So on March 15th, 2026, the parties reached a settlement and principle of this litigation. The negotiated settlement terms included the following settlement class definition. Quote, all women who were sexually abused or trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein or by any person who is connected to or otherwise associated with Jeffrey Epstein or any Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking venture between June 30th, 2008, which happens to be the date that he entered his guilty plea. I got a whole theory as to why that date was chosen. and that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. And July 6th, 2019, which is the date of his arrest, right? This includes but is not limited to, and this is the same language from the previous settlements,

girls under the age of 18 who engaged in sexual contact with Epstein and or a person connected to or otherwise associated with Epstein and received money or something else of value in exchange for engaging in that sexual contact. Two, women aged 18 or older who were forced, coerced, or defrauded into engaging in sexual contact with by Epstein and or anyone connected to Epstein or otherwise associated with Epstein by, for example, using physical force, threatening harm or legal action,

making a false promise or causing them to believe that not engaging in sexual contact would result in harm. So just so the people would think of themselves intuitively, okay, yeah, using physical force or threatening harm, that seems more defensible, right? That seems fairly sort of on the surface anyway, defensible. But then, the inclusion of the making a false premise, making a false promise clause there, that's the kicker, because that's so nebulous now. And it could be asserted in hindsight, right? So actually, I asked David Boyce about this.

Does the purported victim have to have had any contemporaneous consciousness that a false promise had been made to them that had then impelled them to engage in some kind of sexual activity? As an adult with Epstein and or one of Jeffrey Epstein's associates or somebody connected to him. Or a venture. Or a venture, yeah, a venture, like it's a, I don't know, a laundromat or something. Right. Or a surf band. But anyway, go ahead. But, and Boyes clarifies that, you know, by its very nature, there couldn't have been contemporaneous knowledge of the false promise. Because you'd only discover that the promise was false well after the fact. So they set this up where it explicitly,

enables the proliferation of all these claims with, you know, outrageous, high hindsight bias, because people can say, oh, look, there's money available. Now I can sort of recast things that happened 10, 20, or 25 years before as having been a false promise. And what could a false promise be if he has something as sort of mild as, I'll get you a job at X. Or not even that. the impression could have been vaguely given the alleged victim claims that Epstein was going to do something for them. Right. Including, you know, it could have included like, you know, paying for a college tuition, which he did. Which he did do, yeah.

Which he did. Or, you know, subsidizing their living expenses, which she often did. But, you know, maybe some girls had different experiences from others and maybe it all didn't come the same way exactly. But or even it could be like a personal thing, like they thought that they were going to be his girl. friend or something. Right. Right. Right. So that that clause is structured such that it is intended to, it's designed to expressly, expressly enable this sort of retrofitting of decades old events. Okay. But Michael, help us out. How do you get from that to Bank of America? What's the claim against Bank of America?

It's hard to even follow. I'd be shocked if Judge Rakoff but he could even follow it because, you know, actually, the initial lawsuit was filed again, you know, simultaneously against both Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon.

So they sued two banks in October of 2025. Judge Rakoff actually tossed out the Bank of America portion, sorry, Bank of New York portion because it was so, it was so untenable that it didn't even meet the bare minimum standards that would have been necessary to kind of authorize further action against one of these institutions in the name of getting justice for Epstein victims, right? And then he also tossed out like the majority of the claims that have been made against Bank of America, but he let like two of them proceed. And that was enough to give rise to the settlement.

So the idea is that it's like a personal bank accounts. Yeah. were created. This is even like the J.P. Morgan thing where Jeffrey Epstein actually did have a like a sort of a VIP account at J.P. Morgan for a number of years and also Deutsche Bank. This is alleged victims apparently opening personal bank accounts, like checking accounts with Bank of America. And money would be transferred to them by somebody associated with Epstein.

They would deposit the money in the account. And for some reason, Bank of America should have been privy to that being in furtherance of a sex trafficking venture because they should have known. This is why they dated to June 30th, 2008 when he enters the guilty plea. That's the date after which it's asserted that Bank of America should have known or should have done due diligence to discover that continuing to allow accounts to be open or in any way connected to Jeffrey Epstein was in furtherance of a sex trafficking venture. And these bank lawyers are such squishes, and they don't care. They have such like cash reserves available for litigation. Exactly. Exactly. This is the part that people don't get, but go ahead. Yeah, that they barely even tried to contest it.

I mean, they did sort of a perfunctory motion to dismiss. They did send that letter where the lawyer asserts that there's this ongoing criminal investigation, and that's why the litigation should be stayed. But they pretty much give up in pretty short order. It was actually a much more truncated process than the, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, which is ironic because the case is much weaker for Bank of America than it would have been for JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank,

although I think those cases were pretty weak as well. But who wants to prolong litigation about the supposed culpability of Bank of America in enabling the widespread pedophilic rape of vulnerable children, even though we're not talking about any children at all, But that's how it's going to get portrayed, right? And then it's going to generate probably regulatory interest, interest in Congress. Because you've got all these ongoing panels and investigations going on, right?

It's Ron Wyden and whoever else. And so they just cut their losses and settle. And what was amazing to me is that so Bank of America had two lawyers there. And they didn't seem like senior lawyers to me. They seemed like women maybe in. I've seen that too. Yep. their late 30s, early 40s, probably, probably.

And they were outnumbered like threefold by the consortium of lawyers in the Epstein Survivors Inc squad. So what does that tell you in terms of like, I'm not, balance of power about that might not be quite the way to put it, but like in terms of, I don't know, like where like the actual litigating energy is. They just, it's almost like it was a, they just almost like throw. it's almost like Bank of Mergers just threw a bone to them and dispatched like maybe some more junior

lawyers to just see what they could do but like time limited it to like two or three months and then whatever happens happens and so because of the fecklessness of these banks and I'm not a fan of Bank of America by any stretch right no it's just that in settling they perpetuate what is fundamentally in my view

a fictitious and hysteria fomenting narrative that has all the political and legal and cultural downside repercussions that we've discussed before. Yeah, and look, most of the biggest banks in the world

could not exist if they didn't, if they weren't doing lots of business with plainly illegal ventures. If they weren't acting as depository institutions for individuals

and or companies that have shaky records or have connections that they're supposed to send a sars suspicious activity report about this is something that I learned when I was covering HSBC a million years ago. And Wyden's complained about that, not having been done adequately vis-a-vis Epstein's banking habits. Right. Wyden's complaining about it?

Yeah, Ron Leiden has this, his own almost personal investigation that he's actually, you know, to his credit, has been going on even pre-Trump. So I think he started in 2023. with respect to Epstein just in terms of him trying to like track down the financial transactions or whatever. Yeah. And this is the last thing I'll say on this is it is true that the, the bank's compliance with the AML, the anti-money laundering, the anti-crime responsibility that they have. Like they're supposed to review all their accounts and make sure, at least do some superficial investigation. into where the money comes from. And they don't.

They basically pretend to like a they have these big centers where people look through the accounts, but they really don't do a whole lot of work. This has come out in multiple whistleblower complaints over the years. But the problem is when you settle for something like this, you're admitting to conduct or implicitly that now allow that now fuels more headlines. So yeah. So anyway, I'll be following the Bank of America. shambolic little thing

and we'll see where it goes. Matt, I wanted to ask you, were you devastated when you heard the news that Pam Bondi or as Laura Lumer, very rudely used to call her, Pam Blondie, was unceremoniously ousted by her favorite president, Donald J. Trump because I know my very first incident

because I heard about it on the way out of the court. Did you open to your shirt? Well, my first instinct was to tell Grock to make an AI image of Jeffrey Epstein smiling down from heaven. So I instantly tweeted out just an image of a very sort of heavenly looking. We have to get that. Can I, am I able to the screen share on this thing? Yeah, you are. Send it to our producer.

I don't think I still am. Okay. Mr. producer or Mr. Streamyard should figure out how I can actually screen share, because I don't think I'm I still think I'm not an administrator that gives me screen sharing privileges. And you want to make sure that you see everything on my screen. So I'll send you the memes that I. Yeah. So my favorite part of that story was that was the way Trump did it.

I think it's time. In the limo. While they were in the limo on like, you know, the two-minute drive from the White House to the Supreme Court where Trump for some reason decided who was going to be the first sitting president, I think, ever. or in recent history anyway to attend a Supreme Court session on his birthright citizenship order. Yeah, he wanted to look menacing, I guess, in the gallery.

But yeah, somebody who became famous for saying, you're fired, has added two words. There we go. There we go. I don't know. And then there's one more. And then there's one more. He needs to be looking down a little bit more.

Go ahead. I know, I know. You take what you can get with the AI. image generous i mean that's that's pretty funny enough and there's there's one more that i just sent uh mr producer if you wouldn't mind let's see by felicia yeah i mean look it's a little weird that uh the the order of some of these firings i'm not not sure quite sure i understand the political uh reasoning behind some of them i mean if if they were going to try to disassociate

themselves from the Epstein thing. I would have thought she would have gone earlier, but whatever. Who knows? There was also the matter of his speech this week. The political timing is weird in a number of ways, right? Because he finally gives this long-awaited speech on the Iran war where he's going to spell out in prime time the objectives

and what the reason is that the U.S. is even doing this and what's going to be accomplished. And then the next morning, he just kind of preempts that and decides, hey, today will be a good day to fire by Attorney General. Yeah. Okay. Let's look at at SOT 11 here and see what, let's look at the speech part for a second. But you're right. That is weird.

Maybe it's a little bit burying the lead with Bondi. I don't know. Well, let's see. As we speak this evening, it's been just one month since the United States military began. Operation, Epic Fury, targeting the world's number one state sponsor of terror, Iran. In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. Victories like few people have ever seen before. Tonight, Iran's Navy is gone.

Their air forces in ruins. Their leaders, most of them. terrorist regime they led are now dead. Their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is being decimated as we speak. Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed, and their weapons, factories, and rocket launchers are being blown to pieces.

Very few of them left. Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered enemy suffered such clear and devastating large scale losses in a matter of weeks our enemies are losing in America as it has been for five years under my presidency is winning and now winning bigger than ever before okay all right winning so much retired of winning so a couple he's getting the bratsby old man biden like voice and this is at 9 p.m so maybe it's getting a little late for him remember Biden would have his uh his schedule coordinated so that he would only be doing stuff between like 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. or something.

Yeah. Well, they have to do. The industrial strength uppers routine. I'm sorry, I can't say that. Fictionally, if we were, if we were to have a president who was sundowning, that would be the right time to do it. And, you know, because, you know, I mean, Trump is the oldest president ever elected. as a vote. So Trump was the oldest president ever elected in 2016. Then Biden became the oldest president ever elected in 2020. Then Trump again became the oldest president ever elected again, once again in 2024. And he's closing it on 80. He's going to turn eight the big a O in June. So, you know, that that seems like as we saw with Biden, that's right around the time where if there's going to be a precipitous decline, that would probably be it for somebody in their elder years. I think that's worth being mindful. of obviously it's impossible to psychologically diagnose really much of anything beyond what we can observe. And it's even harder to like connect it necessarily to like a military action, for example. But it does, it is a bit of, I think, necessary context because so much of this seems to be personally driven by Trump, whether you want, whether it's megalomania or his own preoccupations

or grudges or he thinks the Rahm was trying to assassinate him, whatever it might be. It definitely flows from Trump as the principle. And the second administration was organized in such a way that it would be tailored to enabling him to best, like, fulfill his truest desires, unlike in the first administration, right, when there was some bureaucratic roadblocks and personnel issues that were sort of hindering him. This is like pure Trump to the degree that it could ever be achieved. And if it's all, if the war planning is, if like the extent of the war planning is basically just whatever's bouncing around inside his adult brain on any given day, then you do unfortunately have to take into account what could be going on in terms of his,

aging process, but maybe a little bit more substantively in that speech, first of all, he says, we're going to bomb Iran to the Stone Age. Okay. That's what he says. Then Hexeth, you know, of course, dutifully tweets, bomb them to the Stone Age. Like, they're just like super excited about bombing Iran to the Stone Age. And they're excited about talking, they're excited by talking like their 13 year old boys, you know, shooting the shit and behind the high school or something. And Trump also says at one point, you know, you other nations who use the straight of Hormuz far more than the United States does, because we only have a very small amount of our fuel that ever gets transited through that straight. You other nations that are more reliant on it, it should be very easy for you right now, just go and take the straight of Hormuz. But then he says in like almost the same breath, because like now he's contradicting himself almost within the span of the same sentence sometimes.

then he says, although the street of Hormuz will just open up naturally. So maybe you don't have to go and take it because it's going to open up naturally, I guess just by the force of our overwhelming military victory. And I don't know. I don't know if you saw Seymour Hershey yesterday. Yeah, what would he say?

Well, he was actually on pretty much on the mark predicting the timing of Yeah, he was. Yeah. hammer bombing in June last year. He didn't get the full scope of it quite right, but like he was directionally right. He says that as of yesterday, April 2nd, his understanding is that the ground operation

has been initiated in some form or fashion. So there you have it. Well, that's, we should definitely take that. But Trump says it's just a, it could be another two or three weeks at most, which is what they said two or three weeks ago. Yeah. And look,

that whole thing about how no country has ever suffered as much in such a short period of time. Dresden comes to mine. I don't know. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, like, not sure about that statement. Just how about the fighting? World War II, of course, gets valorized and mythologized. And I'm not one of these kind of like weird sort of crypto, whatever revisionists where I'm doing it because I want to like make a point about world jewelry or something. But, you know, I do think there's been a lot of mythology around World War II, and it still gets invoked constantly to justify whatever the U.S. military is doing in the present day because they want to ascribe the current military operations with the same kind of moral unimpeachability as people remember World War II to have had. But look at the bombings of the fire bombings of German cities. That's what I meant, Dresden. Yeah, Dresden. And there were a bunch of other cities that people can't even call to mine. I forget the names now. If you asked me three years ago, I would have remembered.

There were more casualties in the fire bombing. The totally unnecessary in terms of achieving military objects is fire bombing of Tokyo than there were that caused by the atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So, I mean, give me a break. I mean, this stuff is crazy. Actually, Rubio says that Rubio brought up his own World War II parallel recently on Hannity, where, of course, he's like the, he's the Henry Kissinger hybrid role of national security advisor and secretary of state remember when they when trump like reshuffled mike waltz

out of the national security advisor job into the u.n and the thought at the time was that there's going to eventually be a standalone appointment to the national security advisor position and then like a year later and i think trump seems pretty content with rubio in his hybrid role uh but rubio was on on handy saying what iran's doing with the state of hormuz is just like what the nazis did in world war two meaning he said the nazis would tariff target commercial shipping in the North Atlantic. Yeah. Yeah.

And so like that's basically, that's the same moral prison through which we should now view the Mullahs in Iran. As of the United States, then I also target commercial shipping over the course of World War II. I mean, I had seen this before, but I pulled it up. There's like a, the military itself does studies of its own activity in theories of war. And they tallied up after World War II, all the commercial vessels that they, they destroyed on the high seas. But,

but I, but I, that's only something that the Nazis do and we should tie the Nazis to Iran. Oh, wasn't he talking about the pre-war, uh, uh,

attacks on, he didn't really specify. I don't think. Because I always thought that was, that was, well, it wasn't the reason. Maybe it's what he's referring to,

but in any event, it's like, either way, hodgeent analogy, uh, in terms of a historical substance. So, Two things quickly.

He also said, this is a classic Trump quote, I also want to thank our troops for the masterful job they did in taking the country of Venezuela in a matter of minutes. Taking it. So it's now ours. Yeah. It's the property of the United States. Property of the USA, like, you know, on the shipping containers.

Right, right. Yeah, you could put a little stamp with that font on it. At Steckman 7 says, Watergate seems so mild compared to what has happened since January, 2025. You know, I'm going to slightly disagree on that one. Watergate wasn't, it's now popular to say was an inconsequential scandal. I don't think it was. It was consequential.

Yeah, when the, when the president of the United States or when the party in power wiretaps the other party, I think that's pretty significantly bad, right? And then he tries to get like the CIA and FBI to sort of, maneuver against one another to like, you know, sweep it under the rug. You know, I read the biography a few years ago of Spiro Agnew, who was Richard Nixon's first vice president. He was the former governor of Maryland. Yep.

And he was actually a very prolific and talented writer after he had to resign the vice president. So was G. Gordon Liddy, by the way, but go ahead. Well, I hadn't known this about Agnew until, for whatever reason, I got into a rabbit hole a few years ago. and I read his biography. And after he resigned the vice presidency for like just kind of rehash tax stuff from back when he was governor of Maryland and like kind of local, you know, possibly real, but like sort of run into mill corruption claims about, you know, favorable contracts being handed out to political cronies and whatever. Like not something that was particularly mind blowing in terms of the actual conduct. but it ended up getting resurfaced by this one of these independent prosecutors who you know who did have like a vendetta again political vendetta against the nixon administration

sort of like the southern district new york having a vendetta against trump and the first administration under like pre pahara or uh jeffrey burman um but anyway nixon according to agnew's telling of it nixon throws agnew under the bus meaning requires you know tells him he must resign because he thinks that's going to cover his own hide. Nixon does. And Agnew is anguished about this because he had for the longest time said that he wanted to give Nixon the benefit of the data as to Watergate. He thought maybe the media really was overhyping it or there was politically driven.

But he came to the painful conclusion that it was more serious than he had entertained. And he's pretty scathing about it, including some of the underhanded tactics that Nixon used to kind of like prod him out. and so it's actually pretty interesting. I forget the name of the book now, but you could easily find it. It's for free on the Internet Archive website. But, yeah, so I mean, I agree in that.

I mean, Watergate's complicated. Some aspects of it are exaggerated, just in terms of like what the folklore conception of it. But I do think it's worse than Watergate's, the cliche that should be retired. Like during the Bush administration, John Dean, who like nobody knows as having accomplished anything in life other than when he was in his early 30s,

he was this staffer in the White House under Nixon. And he's always declaring something as worse than Watergate and like selling books with the subtitle, worse than Watergate. So I remember he would be like on Keith Olfman constantly with like 04 or something, 05 with, you know, screaming something under Bush. Like Abu Ghraib or something was worth worse than Watergate, which maybe it was on some level. I mean, it's hard to make a one-to-one comparison. But like it's a cliche that maybe just in general, like let's get a better sort of frame of reference for stuff that's going on in 2026. Well, the reason Watergate is the paradigmatic scandal is because it's the,

only one that's actually well i guess because of the suffix now that gets thrown onto everything yeah and and it chased a president from office um pizza pizza pizza gate i mean like that it's because of watergate that we think all this thing pizza gate or signal gate or uh party gates rush gate uh what was the what was there was there what was some of the oh travel gate i think travel gate yeah that was that Yeah, that was Clinton. It's endless. Yeah. Before we move on to the tournament, we just show the clip of Todd Blanche on Jesse Waters last night because Todd Blanche is now the new acting attorney general.

My suspicion is that Trump is actually going to eventually want him to become the permanent attorney general, I mean, he's going to go for the confirmation hearings and get confer and get voted on to be the permanent replacement for a body. But now he's the acting attorney general. And this was an amazing exchange last night, if you haven't seen it. Do we have it? Yeah, yeah, it's up. It's up. It's up. Okay, here we go. Now, the Epstein Files, you'd agree not handled well? And I don't, first of all, I have never heard President Trump say that the Attorney General was anything that anything to happen to her had anything to do with the Epstein Files.

And so, look, the Epstein Files has been a saga that's lasted for the entire, for the past year. And what happened when the president signed the Transparency Act? is the Department of Justice has now released all the files with respect to the Epstein saga. And the Attorney General Bondi and I appeared in front of Congress voluntarily a couple weeks ago to answer any questions they had. We have made every single congressman, senator, available to come and see any document redacted, unredacted that they want. And so I think that to the extent the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward. Okay, well, I mean, you've combed through these files, right?

Who was Epstein spying for? Look, everything, I don't know that he was spying for anybody. Nobody's ever said that. No? You don't think he might have been a spy for a foreign country? I have no idea if he was a spy. All I know is that we don't have any evidence in the Epstein files that the FBI collected over 15 years that suggests that, Jesse.

I wasn't, I don't know. I wasn't part of the original prosecution team, neither was Attorney General Bondi. And I can tell you this, there's only one president that's held Mr. Epstein accountable, and that's Donald J. Trump. During his first administration, that was the administration that prosecuted him. And during this administration, it's the administration that's been totally transparent and released all the files. And no matter how much criticism people want to make about the Epstein files, that is indisputable. It's undisputable that nobody talked about the Epstein files for four years during Biden.

Biden four years. And so when President Trump said, let's release the obscene files and the law was passed that allowed us to legally do it, we did it. Okay. I'm not sure you totally get what people feel about that, but I want to move on. I don't know I sure you totally get what people feel about that? Vibes. You're not getting the vibes. You know what's so amazing about that clip? I mean, I've always thought, oh, okay, never wrong. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, I just, you know, Jesse Waters usually doesn't do that. I know. That's why it's so weird. Fox News, based on everything I've been able to glean, very seldom brings up Epstein in relation to Trump. When on occasion, something will come up in relation to a Democrat, they will go wild over it.

Like when Bill and Hillary Clinton gave depositions a few weeks ago, it was big time coverage on Fox News. They still tend not to leave planet Earth in terms of what they're talking about. I know, I know. Right. So Jeffrey, so Jeffrey, so, I was going to say Jeffrey Epstein. Jesse Waters clearly doesn't believe Todd Blanche there. And not then for, and Todd Blanche chose to go on to Jesse Waters to give his first interview as acting, the new acting attorney general. He gets perhaps blindsided, although, you know, he can confidently answer the question well enough with questions about Epstein, right off the bat.

and not just any questions, but Jesse Waters asked him, okay, so who was he spying for? So, Jeffrey, so, Jesse Waters is presuming that it's established that we just know that Jeffrey Epstein must have been a spy for some foreign country. He doesn't specify which one, conspicuously enough. We all know which one he's talking about, but go ahead. Perhaps, I mean, perhaps, I mean, I assume he's maybe consumed some Tucker content still

his former colleague. And then Blanche has to give this sort of haphazard answer where he says, I don't know that he was spying for anybody. Nobody has ever said that. Well, hold on a second. Record scratch. There are a lot of people who are saying that,

meaning there are a lot of people who are influential in the media who are saying stuff to that effect. So maybe he's saying nobody ever said that in terms of like the government? I heard that as nobody in nobody. nobody in the government i know but i'm just like noting that you know if we want to be a little bit literalistic about it lots of people are saying that which is why the question was asked by jesse waters like sure you want to know this um and so i just wrote a little piece that's not yet up for um for unheard where i'm just sort of making the point that like okay so top lanch is more personally competent than

bandbondi no doubt about it bondy okay you could you could you could cancel me for sexism but she she She was just a bimbo. I mean, it was a shambles of a tenure of attorney general. But a little bit of a modest improvement in PR performance is not going to solve the underlying problem for the Trump administration because they can't actually forthrightly address the fallaciousness of the premises that are underlying the public anger or fascination with the Jeffrey Epstein story because then what happens? They'll get accused of defending. It's just politically untenable. So instead, Blanche just has to resort to making these weird statements about nobody's ever said.

Nobody who suspects that Jeffrey Epstein was a spy for Israel or any other country is going to be convinced by that answer that Blanche gave. Not least because it is true that Blanche was previously Donald Trump's personal attorney, personal criminal attorney in the New York Stormy Daniels, quote-unuch trial and so forth. So everything that he says is going to be seen through the prism of, his personal subservience to trump whether fair or not. And so my point is that they haven't solved the problem at all just by making maybe a minor upgrade from somebody who was bubbling around constantly without knowing what she was doing to somebody who's a bit more seasoned and professional in his presentation. Okay. I mean, I would say, what would you,

how would you want an attorney to answer that question? Because that's about how I would expect. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The only thing you could really say is we don't have any evidence, or I haven't seen any evidence that he spy for anyone, right? But what's interesting about that moment, though,

is, you know, when Jesse says, I don't think you're in touch with how people feel about this, the idea that you're supposed to play along with... How do you feel? well everyone you know everyone knows that this became a you know it becomes a thing in scandals now where people just sort of assume and you're supposed I guess officials are supposed to just play along with it because otherwise it's dangerous from a media standpoint but um I've got a feeling I'm feeling Epstein files oh yeah I love Michael's musical internet

I can't help myself. I have like, I have like Tourette's. You got, do you play guitar at all? We got to get you something. A little bit. Or with the harmonica. That's what we need. We need to get you in guitar, a little bit of keyboard, but nothing. I'm not going to be going on tour. All right. Well, maybe, although I would like to perform that paying taxes to pedophiles song. You know what? Country Western band. If we didn't play that, actually, we got to play that at some point. Totally, totally. And maybe you can play the keyboards. I'll play the drums. It'll be, it'll be the worst performance in history. I think you should play the flute and I'll play the accordion. Hey, not. My hero, Weird Al Yankovic would not approve of joking about the accordion.

All right. So this is a good segue into the penultimate round of March Media Madness, America's Worst Podcaster. We have two matchups left. We have some crazy, absolutely crazy fucking video from this week from the podcast. I think we're going to say. Podcast creatures were lively and active this week in their little habitat. There was some particularly loony stuff.

But we're going to start out. Commenters gave us more examples of gate suffixes that I'm surprised we forgot. inflate gate which is obviously oh yeah and then billy gate which deflate gate yeah oh deflate gate that's right yeah yeah the commenters are inflate gate but you're right it was deflate gate um and then billy gate which i think was jimby carter's brother right yeah yeah his brother with arm or whatever yep some business holding that he had so those billy billy beer those were good ones um shit there's more that we're we're forgetting we should we should look uh and see what they're doing but But okay, so the two matchups are breaking points versus Don Lemon and Megan.

I think we screwed up with the matchups last week because we said it was Don Lemon versus Megan Kelly. I think we were like misreading the bracket structure. Yeah, probably. So we are so disappointing because I think they were eagerly anticipating the Don Lemon versus Megan matchup and we're not throwing them for a loop. Yeah, is that how it's supposed to go? I don't know. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

We're going to do breaking points v. Megan. And then we're going to, I'm not sorry, breaking points v. Lemon and then Megan Kelly, who really is through the final four through no fault of her own. It was sort of a seeding accident. She's up against Joe Rogan. So we'll start with breaking points. Crystal and Saga were actually on relatively good behavior this week. but they had a couple of things to say that were interesting.

So let's start with SOT 7 here. I do have to level with people on it. This will not be easy. It will not be easy. He's prepping them all for Christus ahead, but he's still saying, we're not joining the war. And he keeps saying, I just, all I ever wanted was a leader who would say thing, and I'm not even sure he means it, when he's like,

I will always act in Britain's national interests. Why is that so hard to find here in the United States? And to see the euros saying stuff like this, again, the most globalist people on the planet, you're like, wow, what exactly have we done? But it's- Well, they have no choice. Exactly. They really have no choice. They don't have a choice. They can't join the war.

I will note on this one, I could see it both ways as a UFO post. The drone swarms over nuclear bases is like UFO, like, it goes back for decades. This has happened multiple times, a strategic air command, specifically the nuclear arsenal seems to be monitored. But when you combine all these things together, the fact that we're in a time of war, you also have to ask the main reason why normal national security officials who are not UFO people at all, ever got involved in the story, people like Rubio and others, is people in the Air Force and in the Army kept coming to them and go, no, you don't get it. Like, there are drones hovering over our bases. There are things that are just monitoring what we're doing. And they're like, oh my God, this. could be Russia or China. Now, the more they dig, it's not Russia or China. This one, I actually could see a situation where this one is Rush or China specifically also because they're the ones who were helping Iran. Remember the whole Chinese weather balloon situation? It's not like

you would put this out of character for all of them, but if you put it all together, it's very mysterious and it's scary. And for those two think I'm a kook, it doesn't just have to be UFO related. Do you know how many nuclear scientists that we've killed in Iran with the Israelis? The Israelis are bragging about it right now, how they've killed two missing nuclear scientists already. Didn't I just read earlier in the A-block? We hit a specific part of Tehran University. We don't have blocks, Michael. What's what's that's for?

It's from military-related research. So this is a campaign, which, I mean, it's very Manhattan Project, kind of Oppenheimer, where it could be UFO-related. It also could be related here. Wait, sorry, I might have zoned out for a second. We don't have what? Blocks. What does he say?

No, no, no. He said, he mentioned an A block. It's a TV thing. Oh, A block. Okay, got it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right. We should have just like totally arbitrary and unnecessary blocks. Yeah, we don't have commercials. Just to be more professional seeming. More podcasty. Okay, so that was a pretty, that was a pretty mild measured performance there from Crystal Tucker. It's almost like they got a last minute steel with the clock winding. down and they they're making a direct lane for a layup to tie the game. Right. So you do you do the pointless windmill. Right. It's going to come down to maybe a free throw exchange where you foul the guy. Did they allow that in NCAA? Maybe they don't actually. Yeah.

Well, sometimes I don't even remember if they do one and one anymore. But anyway, go ahead. Yeah. So, but I'm sort of violating, I guess, like the putative rules of this whole tournament. And I'm making a totalistic assessment. rather than one that's hinged specifically to the past week because I feel as though that's just what my journalistic duty is. Okay, all right.

Well, we'll get to that in a minute. And also the thing on Starrmer, he's pining for somebody in the United States to say, I'm doing something that's in America's national interest, just like Starmor said, because he's saying he's going to keep the UK out of the war with Iran, which, by the way, Starrner hasn't really done because he has enabled the U.S. to use Basing

its basing access in the UK for missions. And they're calling them defensive, but of course, that's always fluid. What's defensive versus offensive? Like, in the beginning of the Ukraine war, the United States would initially say that it was only going to give Ukraine defensive weaponry as though, like, firing a rocket for defensive or offensive purposes, puts it in like a different phenomenal, phenomenological category. So it's always like a spurious distinction that they try to draw up to make it seem as though the involvement in the war is more limited than it actually is.

But you can find Donald Trump or any, but JD Van, I mean, J.D. V.S. Bloviates about this constantly. We're only doing it. This is common sense, folks. We're going to do America First is what's doing within America's interests. Sager just can't reconcile that according to the America first concept that is now being embraced in the Republican Party from Trump on down. it is an America's vital national interest to do what they're doing in Iran or to take Cuba or to seize Greenland or to take the oil from Venezuela or whatever.

Trump sees that as part and parcel with his notion of what best serves America's national interest. And he's the guy who introduced the slogan, right, America First or whatever. So you have people who are sounding these notes if you really want to hear them and play a tune to them. it's just that he thinks that Starmer now is like doing the better version of serving Britain's national interest even though they're such globalists what does that even mean? I mean is the United States

not a globalist is it not globalism to be to be in there'll be waging some kind of war on the other side of the world because we have to potentially open up the straight of Hormuz well yes no of course

but but I think what he means is you know compared to I mean these are are like anti-Brexit types, right? So they're into like international institutions. Right.

W.E.F and all that. The super national institutions like the European Union or yeah, the W.EF or, uh, etc. The United Nations, obviously. I think that's what he's short-handing there, basically. I always felt that that shorthand was sort of silly because it like arbitrarily narrows what would constitute globalism to just this handful of like multi-national institutions that these guys don't like

anyway. Yeah. Where other stuff that could be, you know, easily understood to be globalistic, right? Like, I don't know, having military bases all around the world or doing like economic sanctions on, you know, a million different countries to spread American primacy.

Like, that could be seen as globalistic in a way. But to them, globalism is always this like weak and sniveling sort of liberal thing. No, no, I think what they mean by globalism is, uh, sort of not nation-state driven, right?

It's the exercise of power, but outside the, you know, I can only remember the Russian word. I'm looking for outside the Ramki. So, poverty or outside the confines of sort of national structures, right? That's funny that sometimes you have a mental sort of snafu

where you still only recall the Russian word. Yeah. No. Oh, you want to random anecdote? I got a haircut for the first time in a while yesterday. Everyone's complimenting you.

Yeah. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. I was pressured into it by a female as usual. That's the only reason I ever get one. And the barber, right, was a Russian tartar. Uh-huh.

Who came to the U.S. after the war started in 2022. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it was just, you know, really interesting. conversation because you know he was saying that just recently he was first of all he was impressed that I knew that the former Russian defense minister

Shoygu was a Russian Tartar like he wouldn't think that the average customer coming into the barbershop would be aware of that was he was he was he a Crimean Tatar or from from Tatarstan from Tartorstan so like Central Asia Russian whatever but he left because like his he's got friends and family that

died and you know were sent to Ukraine and died in the war and he had a young son who was six who was actually with him who he's saying like I'm not leaving my at the time two year old to go to the Dombas and you know he hates Putin for like when he's like a he's like sort of like a you would in the American context he would almost be like right wing coded right right right and so like but the American right wouldn't think that this guy would despise Putin but he definitely did um and so it was just it was just interesting and uh I don't have like a great payoff for that

story but it was like you just interesting barbershop anecdote. That's cool. Was he, did, with his son, did he speak, uh,

Tatar or Russian? Yeah, I'm not sure. I should have asked. His son was named Habib after the, uh, UFC guy.

He was in the barbershop because they're on spring break this week. Right. Right. So he was, um, he was just glued to his tablet. I had a, I had a very good,

uh, Tatar and friend who, um, let's just say we went to the casino a lot together. He, he was, He was a chess master who was very good at certain card games. I actually did a good job with my hair.

I said, you know, you shouldn't even bother because my hair is going to look like a disaster no matter what you do. No, he did great. But I'd say, okay, just work your magic and it actually looks surprisingly presentable. Last thing on the breaking points thing, you're right. It was relatively normal, but. The main streaming of this UFO thing has gotten pretty weird for me. I mean, between that and the mentions of Satan or the devil or demons,

it's become a thing that like sort of almost everybody now agrees that we have, that UFOs are among us. But anyway, I mean, look, it was, I mean, a turning point was in 20, 2017, the New York Times reported, I think this was December of 2017, that Harry Reid had had an earmark passed to establish within the Pentagon this UFO monitoring entity that happened secret for a long time. So that was revealed. That was true. That was actually reported as something that was factored. So that kind of mainstreamed it where it was validated by every conceivable authority of source as something that actually was a function of the government. Right. but then as the years went by and it got even more mainstreamed and especially like once Marco Rubio started glomming onto it back when he was still a senator and he just appeared recently in this documentary

that finally came out I think he was a senator at the time when he did the interview when he's talking about the UFO thing and he's like no they're basically my spidey sense for the Sam Harris term went off when the guys who were into this would couple it with an extortation that the growing presence of these alleged UAPs or UFOs or unidentified objects

shows we have to hike defense spending or hike military spending or hike, you know, our surveillance capacities or invest more in the defense industrial sector so we can ensure that we're not being threatened by China or Russia with these

drones or even Iran. Like remember when there was the drone craze over New Jersey in December? Yeah, no, it was right over my house. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah. I mean, I saw one. I for sure saw one. I saw one hovering. I don't know. Look, I mean, I could be confirmation bias too. No, it's true that I was primed to like want to see one because I went out like driving around to see if I could see one around the Picatinny Arsenal. The military base in New Jersey. But like for sure, as best I can like trust my own eyes, I saw one hovering in the sky stationary. And I had never seen that before. I don't know if it was what it was. But like I saw what people were saying that they had seen. Right. but at the time, I don't know if you recall this,

but Jeff Van Drew, who is the Republican congressman from South Jersey, like Cape May. Yeah, yeah. He complained about it, yeah. Well, not only that, he said, he put out the claim in official letters that he had reason to believe

that these drones were coming from an Iranian mothership that was parked off the coast of New Jersey. Yeah. Yep, you didn't mention that. Look where we are today. Yeah. And I called a couple of sort of town offices. Remember there were some mayors who came forward?

Well, they all gathered. The governor called a meeting at the state police headquarters in Trenton. All the mayors went and they were incensed to how little information they were getting. But it's weird. They had like a mayor. They were all conclave at the state police HQ in Trenton. I think they just built a fancy new facility there actually. But yeah.

But like obviously there was something. some mayors who were like trying to make a political thing out of it. And I don't know if you're called, but Trump, this is when he was president-elect, right? Yeah, no, he said, shoot down the drones. Did he say that? Yeah, he posted on truth social, shoot down the drones.

And then, you know, like a month and a half later, he comes into office and he puts out a statement through Caroline Levitt saying, whoops, don't worry, go about it. Yeah. I looked into it. Don't worry, move on. Yeah, he didn't give us any information about that. That was one of the first,

moments from me where I thought, okay, so this term is going to be like that. But, okay. All right. So, but I do think that the UFO is odd. Like the UFOology is different than actually being empirical in like what is known about UAPs or like something that's a little bit more rigorously empirical like the New York Times thing or that there's been other stuff that like moderately interesting to me. It's not going to become like a worldview of mine, I don't think. but there is a UFOology now that's so predominant that you even had J.D. Vance basically spout the Tucker theory

in an interview last week with Benny Johnson that he did from the White House where he's asked about UFOs, of course, by Benny. And J.D. Vance unveils his theory that these UFOs, first of all, he hasn't gotten a chance to go to Area 51 yet, he said, but he's going to do it eventually.

He's just been busy with national security and the economy. But he'll get around to it. that's what he said and but then but then he just recycled this Tucker theory

this like podcast brain theory essentially that in his estimation these UFOs are spirit beings and he believes that because that's unexplained phenomena

have been a feature of many world religions where they're attributed to some demonic or satanic force so now we have a convergence of UFOs and the demonology thing that the vice president apparently thinks is something that's in his political interest to promote. So unfortunately, it seems like we kind of like cross the Rubicon with this UFO stuff. We have to at least be aware of how it's functioning in the popular mind. But my problem with it is that I'm not sure how much of it is coming from real information

and how much of it is a podcast-driven 1947-style media. War of the Worlds? Well, that was when there was a UFO mania that started. That was in New Jersey, too, wasn't it? Yeah, it's, War of the Worlds was, yeah, for sure. But there were a number of UFO incidents after that where people started seeing the cigar-shaped objects and everything.

It was a satanic panic-style thing that happened in the fours. in early 50s. And I think we're new. We should maybe go back and study. I mean, I've read the Wikipedia page on this, but it's kind of bare bones. There was a, during the Middle Ages, right? There was this phenomenon where I think it was mostly women. It might be men and women, but I think it was driven by women would come under a trance

where they would dance in public for like days and weeks at a time until they essentially died. or they died from exhaustion. Like that was one of these crazes in the social contagion crazes in the Middle Ages. But I don't know, I want to find maybe some crusty old book in some

ancient library to maybe see if we can get a bigger, a better rundown of what actually went on in medieval France with those crazes and see if we can draw anything. Well, the whole St. Anthony's Fire thing, that was all ergot-driven. I always thought that was interesting. What's that? St. Anthony's Fire?

So there were there were these, we're getting far afield, I apologize, but, but there were peasant uprisings in France in the late 1700s that were driven by, they were eating rye bread that had ergate, which is the fungus that contains LSD, but it's a much worse experience, much more intense. You don't, you want to chill and look at your hand and think about stuff. Right. No, no, you want to reach for something sharp kind of a drug. So, okay, all right.

We're moving up. I guess we're being hurried along. All right. So here's Don Lemon. Is this five? Yes. All right. If it's five, let's run it.

My mentors will say, why do you want to take a pay cut? But it's not about money for me. So do I ever think about it? Yes. Could it happen? Hoover's mentors, like Dr. King? If the opportunity presented itself, the right opportunity presented itself. Look, if I wanted to, I know people are going to think I'm crazy.

This is going to be the headline and people are going to laugh about it. I think I could be president of the United States. I could definitely run this country better than Donald Trump. Or towel roll could, but yes. Yeah. You would be a market improvement. As an independent, though, there would be a hard time for me to run for anything because, you know, the way the system is set up, I'd have to choose a side. And so, you know, I probably would, I probably

would have to become a Democrat. And, yeah, so, you know, am I at the point, that point now? No. And I know people are going to say, Don Lemon is crazy. But yeah, that's, look, why can't I think about running for office? Why can't I think about being president of the United States when look at what we have, when anybody, did anybody think Barack Obama, as he says, this guy with a funny name is from a mixed background. Did anybody ever think that? Well, can we pause that for a second? Yeah, actually a lot of people did think that.

Everybody thought Barack Obama was, was, oh yeah, the 2004 convention, the keynote. This is my call back to that. Like, the instant that happened,

I said, this guy's going to be the next president. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Every, I mean, people thought that maybe he couldn't, he would have a tough time

dislodging Hillary. Hillary, yeah, yeah. quasi incumbent also. with like a grip on the Democratic Party machinery, but nobody had any illusions that he was an extremely ambitious politician who was probably going to seek the presidency. And that was when he was still a state senator in 2004. Right, exactly.

That's right. Yes. Yes, he was. And but the fact... He was in the Illinois state legislature. He hadn't even been elected to the U.S. Senate yet. Yeah, and the fact that they gave him that platform at the convention was a major signal that. that the people in the party thought he was a potential. Yeah, like giving a keynote address at the convention

to an ambitious younger politician has been accustomed at both parties' conventions. Like, Bill Clinton got it, I think, in either 84 or 88 or something like that. 88, I think it was. Yeah. Back when he was the DLC frontman back then, but yeah. Yeah, well, he would, but anyway, he seems like this is the next generation of Democratic Party talent, right?

And that they wanted to showcase maybe because he was a lit, more exciting, at least on the surface, than Walter Mondale or whatever. Yeah, or Poltonga, yeah. I'm trying to think who the other keynotes have been. It's kind of less of a custom now because people aren't consuming the convention as much anymore by like watching a nightly news broadcast

where they can show a speech at 9 p.m. or something, and that's the keynote. I think Reagan was another one. But that, but he... Reagan definitely gave like the main speech endorsing Gerald Ford after he had ran against Ford. That's right. But they had to give him a slot because he had run.

That's why I'm sorry. Ted Cruz kind of got that in 2016 with Trump, although he said, vote your conscience. But Obama's the prototypical example. That was the prototypical example. Yeah. So he's completely wrong.

Everything he said in this thing is wrong. But go ahead. I think actually Dwayne the Rock Johnson might have gotten one at the Republican convention in 2000. I don't know if he was the keynote. But that is funny. Dwayne, Dwayne the Rock Johnson spoke at the 2000 Republican convention.

Look it up. I don't have an asper. to become president, but I do think that I could run this country a lot better than Donald Trump. Do you know what else I think that I could run better than most people? And I actually talked to my husband about that last night, a news organization. Because I was there, I'd been in the game for so long, and I'm not interested in being, you know, the anchor out front. I could come in and fix the bulk of their problems and lickety split in no time flat. Now, a commenter says that Don should found the lemon party.

The lemon party? If you don't know that reference immediately, then we should just move on. I don't. I'm not even going to explain it. Oh, come on. Now you can't do that to me. What's the lemon party? Okay.

There was like a handful of, like, early memes in the 2000s. in the early 2000, so pre-social media on like e-bombs world in these early websites where there would be like shock memes, right, where you would send somebody something or show somebody something and they would be like some outlandishly grotesque sexual act pretty much. Ah, okay. Sorry. One where the guy was like stretching out his anus.

I don't know if you remember that one. Yes. Lemon Party, which of course like, you know, guys in high school with like, just like, you know, just try out of nowhere, just blast this in your face. So I didn't seek it out ever consciously. but I did end up seeing it. Lemon Party, it was some gay thing

with a group of maybe Asian guys. I can't remember exactly, but that was Lemon Party. So this commenter saying, Don should found the Lemon Party to run. Matt, don't Google that. No, don't. Okay, whatever you do, don't Google it,

meaning everybody's going to Google it right now. So, so, he should find the Lemon Party. I just want to quickly say, Although I am gonna- Another one somebody I reminded me tub don't don't Google that either There's like a tub girl No no I'm definitely no no I'm telling Matt you have been warned

Three guys white old men sucking and kissing Oh yeah I thought for some reason I remember them being Asian but maybe they're a way I think I think I have seen the old guys fucking and sucking video It's just an image it's just an image It's just an image. All right. That was back when, you know, it wasn't so simple on the internet to, like, send videos around. Right.

So the go-to would have been these shock images that, you know, people would be like phony links, like, click here for the latest video game news or something. And you click it and you get blasted with Tub Girl or a Lemon party or whatever. So, so we're going to laugh at Don Lemon, but I'm going to, I have to make this clear ahead of time. The two things that he said in there, he could be president. he could run a major news organization. I think that absolutely could happen. Like both of those things could happen

and I would not be surprised. I'm just saying it's hilarious from his point of view that he thinks that that's appropriate. Somebody who doesn't know what a misdemeanor is. I mean, you got to think that in 2028, there are going to be selling,

like the roster of candidates now who are being, preliminarily discussed can't be the sum total of it, right? Because they're only talking about senators and governors and the more conventional candidates. There's got to be at least a couple of enterprising novelty candidates who, you know, quote unquote inspired by Trump on some level throw their hat in the ring, right? So, you know, Stephen A. Smith was talking about it. Don Lemon, might as well. Go ahead, Don.

I can't wait to hear you. But at the human rights, whatever it is. human rights agency, the LGBT groups where you're giving an impassioned plea about how we have to protect the trans youths or whatever. Human rights campaign. One of these like dopey DC, you know, LDPT organizations that like no longer really have much of a reason to exist, but have to keep the drabby train going. Right. Yes, exactly. All right. Who wins in this matchup?

Again, this might disappoint the purists out there who are looking for a more like methodical. evaluation of their performances in the past week. I simply must go with breaking points because it's my personal sort of bugaboo. All right. I'm voting for Don, so we're going to have to ask the Magic 8 ball. Okay. Should breaking points, and I'll show it on screen, should

breaking points be the winner of this competition? I want a, hold on, I want a neutral referee present for this Magic 8 ball shaking. It's a no. Wait. I can't really read it. Shit. It was my instinct was no, but that's all right. Hang on.

You just read it. I mean, I can't. I will take you out your word to be faithful to the, to the results of the magic eight ball. Fuck. You know what? I'll just vote with you. Man, you don't have the courage of your convictions. Well.

You'll make better TV. Okay. Breaking points. Congratulations. Bump-up. Breaking points. You move ahead. All right.

So our last two, the other matchup, this is like Indiana State versus DePaul in 1978. Okay. That's a, you got to explain that one or I'll just kind of, I'll just assume that what you're saying is a good parallel because that's. In 78 or 79, 78 it had to be. What was a fierce matchup or was an upset or what was that?

that about that was the uh two look like low lever schools the the most famous uh college basketball game ever was michigan state versus indiana state that was magic versus larry uh in the end and it was preceded by a game in which indiana state played uh depal if i remember correctly depal was a completely like in chicago yeah they were stacked they had like mark a wire terry Cummings, all these guys and Indiana State called that. Yeah, yeah. The baseball player? Mark Aguire. Not McGuire. We said Mark McGuire.

The home run king. Sammy Sosa, 98 or 99 was it? Yeah. Two girls, one cup. Okay, that's another one of these grotesque sexual memes, sexual revulsion memes that were popular in the early 2000s. Two girls, one cup. Okay, that's another thing you should

I'll look up. Two dons, one lemon. How about that? Two, two don't one lemon. I like that. But no, Crystal and Sager are on to the finals. Who could have seen that coming?

This thing has been rigged from the beginning. It's been rigged from the beginning. So, all right. Our last matchup is Megan Kelly versus Joe Rogan. So with Megan, let's start with Megan. And she didn't really have, Let's just go with SOT4 because the other one is, you know, well, let's just, let's start with the video. Let's go with number four first.

Single man with no wife or children or grandchildren has now been spotted in multiple photos. Here's one where he's pouring, I don't know, coffee, water. And there's another where he is walking around with a bubble wand, Stu. A bubble wand. How old is Lindsay Graham? 70? There he is in the middle of Disney with a bubble wand. I'm sorry, but motherfucker.

Look at him. He's pushing all of our troops and put them in danger so he can get off because he hasn't been getting off, at least not with a woman that's obvious for his life. And now he goes to fucking Disney World while they deploy. to Iran and he's blowing bubbles. I'm just angry about his influence over president's dropping that I have to look at pictures of him with his bubble wand. And I'm angry.

I have to pretend he's not gay when it's very clear he is. Why doesn't he? Why does she have to pretend like in my humble opinion? He's an insult to the gays. Gays tend to be fabulous. Why is he more fabulous? I don't understand how he didn't get the memo. And I'm sick and tired of seeing this man's influence over our national politics

in our troops. I mean, I do think that the, look, I mean, I've never been a fan of Lindsay Graham. Yeah, not. Mildly, but the low blow, I think these are some pretty harsh low blows about the personal life stuff. I doubt, I mean, we could always just ask.

I mean, Megan Kelly could send a query to his office as she was really that interested as to why he was in Disney World. And it is funny that TMZ is now doing more political reporting, where they're actually saying they're going to set up a bureau in D.C. And they're going around catching politicians, you know, on some little holiday or, you know, relaxing when there's a partial government shutdown. That's the whole, that's a premise beyond those photos. But the low blows about the personal life and like just assuming that he must be doing something like sexually suspicious at Disney World when, I don't know,

it seems like in one of the photos, like he's with some group with the woman and the young child and maybe, I don't know what the relationship is. But like, really, I mean, that's what you think Lindsey Graham is going there to what, to what, to what trawl for, to, for, for, new while, young boys to like meet up in the bathroom with or something. Is that like the implication? So it's it's been an in joke in political media for jokes about Lindsey Graham, suggestive jokes about Lindsey Graham have been a thing in political media for a long time. Yeah, yeah.

Right. But he's a lifelong bachelor. He's a he's yeah, he's what in England they would call a confirmed bachelor. Right. but he could just be asexual I mean he could just go into his like job as a senator and like

wanting to bomb Iran that I don't know there are some people who are just like pretty much asexual and whatever there are a little bit gay I mean who knows and who cares that much really exactly and there are also some other politicians who have some things that haven't been reported on because

they're more in the realm of rumor or whatever he doesn't have like a scandal that I know of. Yeah, he wasn't like one of these people who were married and got caught like liaising with somebody, right? And that, you tried to cover it up and it came out, whatever. Like there's no indicia of him ever doing anything sexually at all. He's almost like in the priesthood, but it's the U.S. Senate.

This is a good comment at Gregor Ray. Lindsay does have a good Paul Lind and Mayberry delivery. That's pretty good. I have to say that's a, that's a, um, explain that to me, maybe, uh, Andy Griffith show. Oh, Andy Griffith. Okay, got it. And Paul Lynn. I didn't know Paul Lind. I thought, yeah. At the same. He, he, he, he, he was, um, and, uh, and he was also the, the, the, the, the, Hollywood squares. Okay. I would have screwed up that, uh, trivial pursuit. He, he was, he, he was the fabulous comic relief in Hollywood squares. Okay. Gotcha. Uh, okay. Oh, okay.

Okay, okay, okay, yeah, yeah. With Bruce Valanche? Yeah, Bruce Finch? Bruce Valch on Hollywood's careers. You never saw that? He was like the heavyset guy with the big beard and hair, and he was like on every night. Bruce Falun.

I don't know, look it up. I mean, maybe it's a different area of Hollywood squares. Maybe, yeah, yeah. I'm older than you by quite a lot. So, okay, all right. So Megan did that, you know, crossing lazy i mean that's my problem with it it's sort of just like lazy and knee jerk there's nothing like that especially outrageous about it i guess but it's just sort of i it's sort of

like boring and by the book like it doesn't it just like does not suggest any original insight because i saw people on x saying because like when the tm z put out the photos of lindsay Graham trotting around Disney World. The instant thing that everybody was saying on, on X was, oh, this guy's childless, and yet he's sending our boys to Iran and how horrible is that. Okay, I mean, look, if you want to make that point, make the point. But the point is with Megan, she's not, it's not as though she formulated an original insight and came up with that.

Yeah. And sort of crossing the red line of openly saying something that you're not supposed to say, whatever we can debate the morality of that later now we get to Joe Joe had Theo Vaughan on this week

so that's thank God we delayed this stream one day because we would have missed we would have missed this last minute entry into the tournament so these are the two top if I'm not mistaken these are the two top rated podcasts in America now last I checked yesterday on Spotify

Joe Gogan is number one overall and Theo Vaughan is number six. Okay. All right. Candice fell out of the top ten. I think maybe Apple and Spotify use slightly different metrics or something, but like Candice was hovering around 10 on Apple podcast last I checked.

She's now down to 11. I think there's some new podcast. I forget by who some woman comedian that skyrocketed recently. But number one is Joe. He's the guy to beat, probably unbeatable. and Theo Vaughan is now a number six But Theo's up there Okay

And top ten I mean please Yeah and and boy did they talk about some shit In this episode Um What Joe seems to think that Theo Vaughan Is undergoing some kind of mental health crisis

Really? People are with yeah I mean Joe says like You're losing your marbles man And he's only like half joking You didn't see this? No I missed this part Can the producer show the clip that I

I sent in of them yesterday because that kind of sets the scene here. Oh, no, no, we do have that. I'm sorry. We do have that. We do have that. Yes. I missed that. Okay.

So we'll get to that. That's our kicker. Let's go to SOT one. Because, well, folk, you'll see. And you know who is a big opponent of Israel getting nuclear weapons? JFK. JFK. JFK.

Yeah. That's a lot of people. led back into the left. Oh, yeah. Before they killed him, who? And people are also scared because no one's getting in trouble for things. Like, no one's getting in trouble for the Epstein files. No one's getting in trouble for...

Yeah, that's almost disappeared, kind of. What is it that, like, Israel holds over America that we do those things? Well, first of all, there's a lot of people that donated to the Trump campaign that have significant influence over him. Yeah. That lobby for Israel. Right. And they're very beholden.

Maybe that's what happens. Maybe some of these guys get into office and they're like, look, we're going to kill your family. We're going to kill this. This is all the things that are going to happen unless you play this game. Do you think that kind of stuff happens? I think it has happened for sure. I think to say it doesn't happen, it's pretty naive. I think House of Cards is probably really close to what the government's actually like.

Go back and watch that show again. Who knows if he did it or I didn't do it. I'm not saying he did it or I'm not saying he didn't do it. But I am saying that the story of him climbing up there with a disassembled gun, assembling it, making that shot, disassembling it again, climbing down. If that's the narrative, that sounds like straight horseshit. And the video of him hopping down does not look like he's a rifle when he's hopping down.

So what's happening? If that's the narrative. And I don't know if they're still sticking with this story, but that was what they were saying at first, that he disassembled it and reassembled it. Reassembling a gun does not make it accurate. That's firearms expert, Joe, who lets us know that Tyler Robinson.

Couldn't have killed Charlie Kirk. The clip that I made up is even more bonkers. We got two more. Okay. Okay. So let's go to number two. But while we're waiting, the whole... I remember watching Oliver Stone on Joe Rogan years ago,

where they're talking about JFK, because Oliver Stone made the JFK movie. He had some new documentary out, I think, on the JFK assassination that he was promoting on Rogan, and Rogan was super into it. Never once did the idea that Israel engineered the assassination of JFK come up. But now, because he's absorbing stuff from the slop peep, Joe Rogan is just of the mind that like lots of everybody has always believed that Israel must have killed JFK

because JFK was against the Israeli nuclear program. By the way, I know, like I have to maybe do a deep research dive on that. But like the stuff that I do know about the U.S. policy posture toward Israeli, the Israeli nuclear weapons in the 60s, which kind of cast JFK as this guy who was boldly and courageously standing up to it and opposing it and maybe that's why he got killed. I don't think that theory holds water factually,

but I got to look a little bit more into it because JFK was very solicitous of Jews as a democratic constituency, including by, you know, I pulled up a newspaper archive thing a while ago where for the 1962 midterm elections, right? JFK's White House had a sort of note transmitted to the Jewish Democratic Party organizations in New York that they should all vote Democrat or they should galvanize Democratic votes in the 1962 midterms because if he had enough political support behind it from that demographic,

JFK would for the first time authorize the provision of military armaments from the U.S. to Israel, which he then did. But he was dead, but he was, you know, bitterly opposed to the nuclear program or something. And that's why they killed him. Like, it doesn't make any sense. It's just, people don't read a book and come up with these theories, right?

They're looking these fragments of nonsense from- But don't you see how awesome it is on another level, though? Like now we get to have, so we have UFOs. Well, we'll get to UFOs. But now we get to have the JFK assassination attached to all this shit. Well, of course. Right? So it's, it's, it's, it's.

Before Epstein, that was like maybe the one mega narrative or like that was that was a biga narrative. I'm like, look, I'm not saying, you know, just believe at face value. Everything in the Warren Commission or everything. It just, you know, it becomes a sort of self-perpetuating mythology just like Epstein has, right, which is sort of divorced from. Because like look at this new layer that people have added on to it with, you know, after October 7th when people are now in search for anything that could be sinisterly, attributed to Israel, but in my view, there's more than enough to actually do so that's reality

based. If you were interested in being remaining reality base, which most people clearly aren't, but, you know, it's not just like the U.S. provides too much weaponry to Israel and then doesn't constrain them and their pulverization of Gaza and they're now invading Lebanon or whatever. Like, that's not good enough for people. Now it's got to be this whole, this totalizing narrative that ropes in JFK and I guess, you know, ropes in Epstein, Israel killed Charlie Kirk, Israel maybe was threatening to kill Donald Trump, and that's why he's at war with Iran right now. Israel deceived Trump into going, attacking Iran, just like they deceived Trump into, deceive George W. Bush into invading Iraq.

And, oh, by the way, Israel kidnapped the Lindberg baby and, oh, by the way, Israel kidnapped the Lindberg baby and sunk the lost city of Atlantis. Right, right. And the Lusitania and the Titanic. All right. We've got two more of these things. This is a fast one. Do you think we're being visited?

This is great. Do you? Do you think a lot of its lies, too? Do you think the government's, the big governments? Now that was funny. What do you mean? What do you mean? Do you think the upro-reston people have met the visitors?

And there's some other thing going on because something's, there's something, it feels like something's going to happen soon. Perhaps that's possible. Perhaps. But if I was from another plan, I don't check in to see who the president of the lake is. I just show up, trick those dumb motherfuckers with fake fish, pull them out by their lips, take a picture of them, drop it off back in the water. Because they're a bass. They're so below me. Right.

I don't think like who's the leader of the bass. Right. So the idea that aliens come down here and who's the leader of the people. Good point. I highly doubt they they talk to Trump. Yeah. He's out there building a ballroom and shit.

They're like, leave that guy alone. I'm not interested in him. Theo Vaughn, okay, Theo Vaughn actually can be funny. He's got this weirdly unique talent. His brain is wired in a certain way where he comes up with these absurdist non sequiturs that are legitimately funny. I have laughed to him. I don't know that I ever actually laughed authentically at anything Joe Rogan has said.

Like, It doesn't seem like he's that funny of a guy, really, even though I guess he's a comedian. Like, he's a talented podcaster. But Theo Vaughn does have a way about him, which is really, like, genuinely amusing. It's very idiosyncratic. It's good. No, no, he can't, he absolutely can be funny. But that whole thing was really funny.

Like, you know. Like, was that a bit? Do you think that was a bit? No, that wasn't a bit. That was definitely, well. You don't think that's like a partial bit? You could tell the, you could tell the producer was, was having a little fun with it with the cuts back and forth. But, um, but, um, but no, they were there, you know, do you think so?

Like when he, when he takes the, when he takes the comedic beat of a pause, right? And then says, do you? You don't think there was any part of that that was a bit. Pre-rehearsed? I mean, not pre-rehears, but like, you know, just them having a comedic banter where they're like, oh, just going with the flow. It could be. It could be. They're both comedians, you know.

Improvization. Improv. Improv. but it's that was perfect timing it was it was perfect timing but it's exactly how shit happens now uh so i say because i don't know i mean i'm uncertain because in the next clip which hopefully will play yeah we'll play joe does seem to think that theo is losing his marbles and needs to get off his psychotropic drugs yeah let's go to let's go to sot eight i guess yeah i don't know man everybody just feels scared and it makes well they should because

A lot of things are getting exposed right now. You know, there's a lot of fraud and you're seeing at the highest levels of government. And people are also scared because no one's getting in trouble for things. Like no one's getting in trouble for the Epstein files. No one's getting in trouble for. Yeah, that's almost disappeared kind of. Well, part of what happens when there's some sort of a big social thing, one thing that's in the past that leaders have used to cover up problems at home is a fucking war.

I'm not saying that that's why they bomb. Iran, but that would be a way to do it. I'm not saying. That's psychotic. And if you were thinking about doing it anyway, you might be able to justify it. It's all just a cat and mouse game. People are like, well, like the Democrats next time, it's like, but it's all the same

shit has been happening forever. They haven't been helping anybody forever. They're letting fucking politicians slurp on kids. All of our fucking money goes to Israel and they're using it to fucking genocide people. It's like everybody is scared out of their wits right now. It's like our religious leaders are afraid to speak out. And it's like the, it's a time where it's like Satan is amongst us. And our religious leaders are fucking talking about bullshit at the pole.

It's just like, what is going? I don't know, man. You got to get you up. The present son. You're losing your fucking marbles. You think I am? Come to hang out with us. Just chill out.

I'm here. Just chill out of the mothership tonight. I do have to pee in a little while, but you can pee. I'm going to pee in a minute, man. We'll let you. But no, people are just scared, dude. This is shit that I hear from people. They won't let you pee until you give them your guns.

Really? I mean, I can't tell if any aspect of it is a bit, or if Joe might be genuinely alarmed at his parent mental state. Because there's a point where he does kind of manic saying, look, people are really scared. This is all people are telling me this. Like people are telling him that they're scared about politicians slurping kids and Israel something. Slurping on kids. Slurping on kids. Right, like a slurpy.

But like, either he's a really good actor, which is possible. What would the Dairy Queen kid slurpy? be named. Either he's a really good actor which is plausible or he has a I don't know he's got sort of a a look in his eye that you kind of associate with somebody who needs to get their bearings mentally. I don't know. I mean, I watch the entirety of, you know, this stuff. And I, my first selfish thought is I can't compete with this. No, I mean, that was pretty good. I mean, a Theo Vaughan is talented,

although he bombed doing stand-up not long ago, which is strange. Because maybe he's kind of like just too sort of accustomed to the easy rhythms of the podcast. Are they both joking? No, I don't think they're both. I think my sense is that's kind of like a partial bit, meaning there's a kernel of truth as they see it to what they're saying. But they're kind of, you know, amping it up a bit for, comedic effect. No?

Yeah. Yes. They're playing around with it, but the root of the joke is that it's true. Yeah, yeah. Right? So, you know, we got back to the ambiguity of it is something, it's like to their credit, because we're like, we're discussing right now, like what we can actually understand it to be.

Partial bit. Okay, there you go. Yeah. I mean, I, the, the, the issue that that we have is exactly. what you were talking about with JD fans before. At least this is the issue for me is that there's so much of this in the ether now, this podcast slop, which as we see, it all merges together. It becomes one big thing, right?

So Israel is responsible for JFK. We got visitors coming down. They're a giant toilet flushing and they all end up in the same drain pipe. Right. We're just like bass to these aliens that are coming down. and, you know, they just put hooks in our big fat. Yeah, they're like different specks of shit on different parts of the toilet bowl. But once you get really strong flush, everything swirls around and melts together.

And then everything gets united as it gets, you know, thrusted into the, the sewage system. Here we have, here we have this isn't a bit. Hold on a second. Trump has prepared speech on extrastrial life. Laura Trump says that's Alan Collins. the outstanding student loan activist. Bigfoot is next. We haven't had Bigfoot.

That's true. Yeah, I mean, my belief is that the Loch Ness Monster killed Charlie Kirk. The Lockmess Monster. Could Lockmess Monster hold a 30-odd-6? Or what do you, that's not the right weapon anyway. Think about it. Take some of the St. Anthony's fire stuff and think about it. Right.

And do we have the... the palm gun we showed that already right the the palm gun bit that you that you found uh oh no i don't know if we show that from the wrestler yeah from the wrestler um which one is it uh the big volbowski valvinus his name is the big velvowsky his official name as a wrestler was valvinus valvinus um and he's out as a as a semi-retired wrestler now he's gotten a lot into like the legal marijuana industry. So I think that may explains a little bit of where his

it's at. Hold on a second. So Michael Tracy is such an op. I'd like to know, I would be curious to know an op for what. Like, whose interest am I advancing here? Israel, really? Okay. Is there anything else that you think I'm an op for? Like what? Everything is always an op.

Everything's a sciop. Like life is a sciop for these people. Hold on a second. The universe itself is just a siop. The monster does not have a posable thumbs he's ruled out. That's probably a good point. He's a plesiosaur, right? Can we get back back up on screen? Let's just watch it. Take a look at this man right here, folks. This is Charlie Kirk's security guy. He appears to have a harm gun. Okay, this is Val Venus from the WWF or WWV. Whose whole stick was that he was a, like, he was like a dirty ladies man. I don't know if we

have the intro clip that I gave you of us, like his entrance music, but like he would show up in a towel in the ring. And then he would do this like, gyrating wiggle dance thing where he would be like, you know, doing a sexual sensual dance to and his catchphrase would be, hello ladies. Yeah, here we go.

With that almost like gross sounding saxophone? I love it. He's in the shower. Okay, yeah. Let's hear his political analysis. But like I just like want people to be aware that this is now political analysis, or I guess the criminal logical analysis. Yeah.

We're getting us from that gentleman. Yeah. Let's watch the thing. Folks, this is Charlie Kirk's security guy. He appears to have a palm gun in his right hand, and he aims it at Charlie Kirk. And squeezes the palm gun firing off around directly into Charlie Kirk's neck. I suspect he was aiming center mass. and the bullet may have ricocheted,

maybe off the cross or something else that was hard, and ricocheted up into his neck area. As you can see, folks, in the right fist, between the middle finger and the ring finger is the barrel of the palm pistol. You see him squeeze the palm pistol, firing off around into Charlie Kirk, murdering Charlie Kirk. Now, if you pay attention to that right hand,

it's going to go. And that thing's got like 3 million views. I don't know what to say But look My obvious vote is going to be for Joe I feel bad I like the guy I do But this is

What's happened to information And to news in this country Is it's so interesting Because We've had partisan waves of mania Uh Sort of back and forth Going back quite a while now

but this thing now where all of the major outlets ascribe to essentially the same outlines of the same weird stuff, it's so bizarre and it's accelerating so fast that I just don't know how to keep up with it anymore. It's all about before the master algorithm. including the vice president. I mean, maybe Donald J. Trump is the only one who's amused to it. See,

that's the thing, though, it goes into the brains of Trump, Vance, whatever, right? And I guarantee you,

it'll be in the brains of Don Lemon or whoever runs on the Democratic side next time. I mean, it's... I just saw something about, you know,

Gavin Newsom, he was an early contestant in this tournament. There was a New York Times article. I didn't get a chance to read it yet, but here's the headline, right?

This is from March 31st. New York Times headline. Newsom's new attack on political enemies, colon, you're gay. Well, that's, that's, that's, that's the Candace thing. Right. Well, I'm saying he's, he's getting that from somewhere, right? Right. Yeah.

Like, what's, what's the Candace? What's the Candice expression? Uh, hang on a second. Like, she, she's, but she uses some. Newsom is, oh, yeah. Newsom is getting that from basically like the right wing based youthful, internet sphere where they would just like call each other gay they're kind of like bring back how you know guys in the locker room with you know heckle each other and

call each other gay they wanted to bring that back and it's they wanted to you know not succumb to PC where you can't just like say people are gay or whatever or say retard and I guess you know Gatham Newsom I guess is like truly enough recognizing that that's the that's the state of things online and you say okay I guess I can just appropriate that for my own purposes and who cares if these um you know uh anachronistic so LGBT groups might issue like a nominal statement saying that's offensive nobody cares what they have to say anymore yeah no can't candace i think her is there is everyone in gavin newsom is like homophobic he's the first mayor to perform same-sex marriages

in like 2003 or something wasn't he in san francisco right of course but but we're now it's become this meme right like uh where you had can i think can this big quote was space is fake and gay. Yeah, something like, yeah, that's a little sort of, yeah, it's a cliche that they like to repeat. But now, now, everything is fake and gay. Everything is fake and gay. So now we've got, we've got everybody doing here. I don't necessarily disagree with. That space is fake and gay. Everything is fake and gay. Everything is fake and gay. But to be serious for a moment, unfortunately, that's our stick. It's our deeply unsaleable schick. Is that the, maybe, This is, it's unstoppable.

It will take over everybody. It's like a slow moving tsunami or something. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a highly contagious and, uh, it will, it will take over the entire, it already has taken over pretty much most of the internet. And, um, it will take over politics. Right.

Right. In accordance with that. Yeah. So, even though I think, It was funny having him sit there saying, you know, with regard to the alien question, the way I look at it is, you know, if I were an alien, if I came down, would I talk to the head bass? No, they're just all bass to me. Like, that's kind of political analysis now, right? Like, and, and you should do a one-man show with that as like the starting premise. I mean, I like that as a premise, but it's not news, right? And so I'm not. He's a comedian, bro. He's a dummy. I'm not a journalist.

What do you want from me? I just have the largest audience on the internet. I have no attended public obligations at all. And the funny that stem from this absolutely mammoth platform. And I'm just thing out. I'm just shooting the shit. So, yeah, I have this, I have another guy on who's saying, yeah, politicians, we know for sure. It's been proven, right?

That politicians are going around slurping on kids. Slurping on kids. And then demons walk among them. us. The devil walks among us. He's among us. Um, and those are the ravings of like what you would have considered in the past to be a mentally ill person. Totally. Right? They need help. Like we should have empathy for them. Yeah. I don't know if Theo Vaughan is mentally ill. He doesn't, I don't know. I don't think he's diagnosed too much. But like Joe Rogan is the one who tells him he's losing his marbles. He has to get off his antidepressants. Come hang out and we'll have some kind of like

recuperation session or something. But, it's not classic mental illness. It's just this is just what people are say, right? And it's just hugely influential. I used to defend all these podcasters when people would say, hey, they need to

tone it down a bit. And when they would say things like, we're now newscasters, I agreed for a long time. But they're leading the news right now. I semi agree too maybe at the time. I'm not sure exactly. Like there was like an annoying liberal critique

maybe five, six years ago of Joe Rogan. I think we might have talked about this where again, he was always called. He was a platforming something that was. Yeah, yeah. No, no. The move on, do the whole thing against him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I guess like my instinct was sort of like almost to circle the wagons to some degree when that was the main critique. But like that's not the critique. I'm making it. I know he's not a journalist. I think that's kind of part of the problem.

I'm not saying he must transform somehow into a journalist, right? That's just not possible. I don't know what to do about any of this. I don't think there anything is to do. I'm just sort of like, you know, throw my hands in the air, just sort of not describing it. Yeah, because it's not his fault. Right. You know, he's just doing a podcast.

The problem is you have huge numbers of people who are tuning in. And this is where they get their information from. And he's the most sought after political. endorsement in the United States, right? So it's not just like, not even just that he's got a big audience on online. That would be significant enough. Yeah. But it's like this is what there was a whole, you know, one of the main narratives of the

2024 election was is Kamala going to go on or is she isn't? Is Trump going to go on? What is it going to go on? Is he going to endorse? Who's going to endorse? Et cetera. It was like this, you know, World of Morgan. And by the way, I agree that she made a big mistake not going on, you know.

she might have wanted everything within reason i mean that's what you see now gavin newsom trying to fix hold on a second uh at david uh david in san francisco 78 19's uh lockness monster is massad clearly uh do we think do we think he is um yeah it's a lockness monster with a dradle that that is a long range um that that that is a long time horizon op nests And the Loch Ness monster in the Loch Ness doesn't actually eat sort of the particles from the algae or anything. He eats matzah. Right. Just in time for Passover.

Why is this night different from all other nights? Because the Loch Ness monster has assassinated Charlie Kirk. What a great segue to our have a happy Passover weekend. I'm sorry. That is really funny. He is risen, meaning Charlie is. I don't want to be too sacrilegious because I know people get very upset about that, especially on Easter.

I was going to make a joke about either some combination of Charlie Kirk or the lockness monster being resurrected from the dead. Right, right. Okay, so here we have a good, it's not the podcaster's fault, it's the lack of critical thinking among too many listeners. Yeah, that's probably, um, probably it's mutually reinforcing. Again, I feel terrible about all this because on one level to me, this is all kind of funny.

Like, I'm fully in favor of Americans being completely reading crazy shit. Like, that's what the internet was originally for. But, I mean, also, I don't, I don't put the blame on the average citizen who gets served up this stuff on their algorithm and just kind of habitually listens to Joe Rogan or whatever. Just like this, because, like, most people have normal lives, right? So they're just like, this is just sort of escapism, or just some light entertainment while they're, you know, jogging or going to the supermarket or picking up their kids, whatever. Just like I wouldn't blame the people who, you know, in the 1960s,

sat around every night watching the evening news and maybe didn't absorb that information with the high degree of critical scrutiny either. So I think that's kind of a constant, right? I'm more, if I am going to allocate blame to any party, it's going to be the guys who have made a commercial. behemoth out of this stuff and, you know, and have this gigantic outsized political and cultural influence and just refuse to accept that there could be any possibly public-spirited obligations that could be attended to it. So I'm going to take a, and this is my last comment,

because we're running long already. At Jacob 6908 says, well, the problem is left-wing media and journalists have lied so much. I would say just media have lied so much over the years. People want to believe anyone other than the New York Times. If I were to place blame anywhere, it would be on the conventional media because the collapse in belief, especially after the WMD episode, I think it really started there, but it's been accelerating steadily since that moment. And what's happened is people, you know, it started with people going to the Daily Show for the news to me, right?

You remember that moment? And it was sort of widely, it was, it became a kind of hot media story for a little bit. That would have been around probably 04, too, right? I mean, I know the Daily Show started like 96, but it became like a juggernaut into the bush years. Yeah, more in the bush, in the bush years, mid to late Bush years. like 0405, something like that. 0405, yeah, maybe even 06, right? And then there were suddenly the, remember Fox launched a Dennis Miller?

The slacktivists, right? The slacktivists? Is that what it was? I remember like daily show watchers were like they were stereotyped as like stoners in their dorm room who were, if they were doing any activism wasn't real activism, it was slactivism, which is why you needed the rock the vote guys to go out to their campuses. and get them registered and stuff. Right.

That was a whole thing. You don't really see that sort of that typology as much anymore. Right, right. Because everybody's like, everybody's presumptively hyper politicized in the Trump era. So it's not about trying to activate any sort of, you know, slackers to understand why it is that they should, you know, vote for John Kerry or something. Right. But the presumption that you were not going to get the, the actual truth on the news,

uh, started around that time. And, you know, there's a reason why Joe Rogan's endorsement wasn't, was important. It's because look what happened in 2016. What,

what was the, the endorsement numbers for, in the newspapers? In the newspapers. It was like, Trump got endorsed by the National Enquirer. He got endorsed by some, like,

uh, town newspaper in rural Nevada with like a circulation of 200. and there's maybe one or two more. But everybody else endorsed. Yeah, it was like, it was like 97 to 2 or some ridiculous number like that, right? Like almost all the major endorsements came from went Hillary's way and it had no impact, right?

Whereas Joe Rogan had a huge impact, I think. So, all right, so the finals are... I think that's probably mostly, I don't know if mostly, but it's largely a function of just technological change. Of course, like nobody cares with the local newspaper, which is probably going out of business endorses in their, you know, anachronistic editorial page,

but people are getting Joe Rogan beamed into their phones all day. Right, right. All right. So we got our final. It's Joe Rogan against breaking points. Yes. And we'll probably do some kind of coronation

that that's time to the final game. I think we should invite some guests. Oh, that's a good idea. We should do like a Howard Stern whack pack thing where like we'll get all those anis. We should get some actually mentally ill people to participate. I know some. I want people babbling and drooling and like sticking

crayons in their eyes and stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, okay, that's our task over this Passover slash Easter weekend or whatever it is. Salaam al-a-qum. Asalam al-a-qum. Have a good weekend, everybody. Thanks for hanging out. Michael, thanks for doing your hard work yesterday and coming out today, and we will see you all next week. Bye-bye.