The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1800 - Ghislaine Maxwell Vindicates Trump

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

President Trump's involvement with Epstein is finally revealed, even the Democrats dunk on Cracker Barrel's rebrand, and AI is now blackmailing the humans who designed it. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/4biDlri Ep.1800 - - - DailyWire+: Join millions of people who still believe in truth, courage, and common sense at https://DailyWirePlus.com Ben Shapiro’s new book, “Lions and Scavengers,” drops September 2nd—pre-order today at https://dailywire.com/benshapiro GET THE ALL-NEW YES OR NO EXPANSION PACK TODAY: https://bit.ly/41gsZ8Q - - - Today's Sponsors: ARMRA - Receive 30% off your first subscription order when you go to https://armra.com/KNOWLES or enter code KNOWLES at checkout. Chevron - Build a brighter future right here at home. Visit https://Chevron.com/America to discover more. PureTalk - Switch to PureTalk and start saving today! Visit https://PureTalk.com/KNOWLES - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3RwKpq6 Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3BqZLXA Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eEmwyg Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3L273Ek - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jeffrey Epstein Associate and Madam Gielaine Maxwell is finally spilling the tea. And everything that she saw President Trump do with Epstein all those years ago, we have the newly released audio footage on Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show. Welcome back to the show. AI is now apparently sabotaging and blackmailing the humans who built it. It's not. Come into a computer near you.

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Go to armora.com slash NOLS, Canada WLS. WLS. And enter NOLS at Chia. It Check out to get 30% off your first subscription order. Mr. Davies has sworn by this stuff for years. I absolutely love it. Go to ArmRA-A-R-M-R-A-R-A dot com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. A lot of talk about waiting for the Epstein files to come out, unsealing the grand jury testimony, where's the list, where's the dirt, where's the T? Well, the Department of Justice has interviewed Elaine McIntyre.

Maxwell. The audio was recorded. This is a recent interview back in July. The audio is out. The question on some people's minds was asked, what did President Trump do with Jeffrey Epstein? And when did he do it? Here is the top-ranking Epstein Associates answer. Did you ever observe President Trump receive a massage? Never. Did you ever observe? You said that you were, I mean, have you seen the, there's photographs, public photographs of Mr. Epstein and President Trump together. Yeah. And there's photographs of, I think you're, you're in some of the photographs as well. Those all appear to be social settings. Yeah, that's my memory.

If there was social settings, I don't know, Epstein's, if he had, whatever the nature of the president's friendship, if you will, or however you want to define that with Epstein, I was never witnessed. I think they were friendly, like people are in social settings. I don't think they were close friends,

or I certainly never witnessed the president in any of, I don't recall ever seeing him in his house, for instance. I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any type of massage setting. any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects. She was asked, did you ever see President Trump receive a massage? No, she did not. Did you ever see President Trump with any women, Jeffrey Epstein? No, she did not. Do you ever remember seeing President Trump do anything

inappropriate. No, she does not. Now, lest people say that, you know, this is just Gielane Maxwell trying to curry favor or something like that, you know, trying to get a pardon or something. She also goes on to say that she didn't, that Bill Clinton did not go to the island, that a lot of what we imagine happened with Epstein did not necessarily happen. She, in fact, says that Epstein was nothing more than a rich guy with a plane to Bill Clinton. So who knows? I mean, this woman was operating with a notorious criminal and liar and a parent extortion artist and guy who died under suspicious circumstances who was connected to the most popular, wealthy, powerful people in the world. Maybe they had some intelligence ties, according to Alex Acosta reportedly, but they got nothing on Trump right now. And that part, I think you have to believe.

Because if they had something on Trump, think about the opportunities there would have been to release it. Jeffrey Epstein was prosecuted for sex crimes in the 2000s. And he got his sweetheart deal and he was hanging out at Palm Beach jail and basically was allowed to go and come as he pleased. Trump runs for president in 2016. The Democrats were so keen on keeping him out of office that they violated the law. they cooked up between the FBI and the Democrats some fake dossier that allowed them to spy on his campaign that allowed him to undermine his entire first administration. You think they're willing to do all that. They're willing to subvert government to that degree, weaponize the Justice Department to that degree,

but they wouldn't release the dirt they had from Epstein Island? That simply is not plausible. Then they go so far as to change all the election rules before 2020, they move the ballot drop boxes away from the county clerk's offices. They have widespread mail-in ballots and contravention of state constitutions in the case of Pennsylvania. They're willing to go that far, followed by prosecuting him on four fronts, followed by setting the stage for him to be assassinated, not once but twice. And they're not willing to release the dirt from Epstein Island if it existed. It is simply not credible. It's simply not plausible, that kind of a claim.

So here, I'm not saying I believe Gielane on everything, but here at least I would believe her. Now we get into even more insider dirt. Elaine Maxwell, who is in prison, is hanging out. She's asked whether or not Jeffrey Epstein, who was in very similar circumstances to her, killed himself. Her take is, in prison where I am, they will kill you or they will pay. Somebody can pay a prisoner to kill you for $25 worth of commissary. That's about the going rate for a hit with a lock today. What's really interesting about this take is

the two theories that have been floated for the past, what is it, six years now? The two theories that have been floated are Jeffrey Epstein killed himself and it's totally above board and everything the government told us is true. Or he did not kill himself and Hillary Clinton walked in wearing a groucho mask, you know, with a mustache and glasses and popped him off with a silencer in the middle of the night. But those are the two options. Either he killed himself or it was a political hit. what Elaine Maxwell is saying is, now it might have just been another prisoner. And again, this would be a place where

she doesn't have a huge reason to make that up. If she were covering up for some international conspiracy, she could just say he killed himself. She would just go along with the government story and then there's no contradiction whatsoever. To suggest that it was just some internal prison hit

undermines the government story. And the government story, if it were to cover for some international conspiracy would be very helpful to her, very advantageous to her. So a lot of questions raised by her testimony. But I think the big question that the libs and the squishes keep trying to throw at people, namely that Trump is seriously implicated. I just think it's totally bogus. I think there have been ample opportunities over the last 10 years when it would be very convenient for the people who had that kind of information to come out with it. It didn't come out.

I just think it very clearly does not exist. Now, speaking of assassinations, I want to want to turn to a much more important story. This is the brand assassination of Cracker Barrel. Even the Democrats are coming out against the Cracker Barrel rebrand. The liberal looking, glasses wearing, lady CEO of Cracker Barrel has done the impossible in 2025 American politics. She's brought both sides together. The Republicans hate the rebrand because it's modern and minimalist and ugly and takes away all of the tradition and the heritage of Cracker Barrel. The Democrats hate it, too. They post the rebrands. that little Norman Rockwell painting, you know, the one of the guy in the town hall meeting.

We think the Cracker Barrel rebrand sucks, too. It totally does. I, for one, am really excited. I'm getting great feedback on the new Michael Nulls Show rebrand. I think it's really nice. It's good. For those of you who are only listening, it's, you know, it's got, there's the barrel, there's the old man sitting by the barrel. The old man's head is my head. The Michael Null's show. I think that's great. We ran up the peg game. Where's my peg game? I want a Michael, We released that with the yes or no game with all the other merch. We'll keep all the insulting words on it. I think my rebrand is going great.

The Cracker Barrow rebrand, less so. They tried to peddle this just a few days ago in New York City with a pop-up cracker barrel. Some of the videos went viral. They brought in all these influencers to try to make it seem really hot. I think it was in the meatpacking district. And it didn't work out. You can see there's some kind of cornhole. like two people playing it, half a dozen people, sadly line dancing in front of this

otherwise unnoticed little cracker barrel pop up with the new ugly rebranding. Who were they trying to appeal to? The new minimalist, modern, hip, Panera, sterile, clinical hospital cafeteria rebranding is supposed to, I think, appeal to urbanized. and, I don't know, people in blue states and really modern people and where the people at. They brought in all these influencers. Some of them showed up. But otherwise, I'm waiting for the tumbleweed to go past the Cracker Barrel pop up in New York. Nobody wants that. The only thing people want from Cracker Barrel is the old Cracker Barrel. And we will get to why that is

momentarily. And then also we'll get to my favorite deportation story in the last several weeks at least. First, though, I want to tell you about Chevron. America is built on hard work and powered by American energy. Chevron has spent $44 billion with local businesses across all 50 states since 2022, fueling infrastructure and communities, all while strengthening local economies. Last year, Chevron increased U.S. production nearly 20 percent, powering communities and businesses from the heartlands to the coast.

We're helping to fuel America's energy advantage, building a brighter future right here at home. Visit chevron.com slash America to discover more. The reason that the New York City cracker barrel pop-up is not working. The reason that all the Republicans hate the cracker barrel, the new rebrand. The reason that all the Democrats hate the cracker barrel revan is that the CEO and the board fundamentally misunderstand what Cracker Barrel's product is. What is Cracker Barrel's product? Is it the dumplings? Is it the fried fish on Friday?

Is it even the Little Peg Game? No, it's not any of those things. The product that Cracker Barrel sells, the value that Cracker Barrel brings to the market, has basically nothing to do with its food, or even the toys and candies that it sells in the store. the product of Cracker Barrel is not changing. That's the whole product. The whole value of Cracker Barrel in the marketplace, which is filled with plenty of restaurants, high-end restaurants, fast food restaurants,

kind of fast or slightly casual restaurants like Cracker Barrel. The whole product, the whole value is not changing. I can get dumplings and chicken anywhere. I can get candy anywhere. I can order that peggerel. game on Amazon. I go to Cracker Barrel to go into a place that hasn't changed. And what did the CEO do? She said, you know what's so weird about this place? It hasn't changed since we founded it. Let's change everything. When you change everything, you think you're going to,

you're going to slightly increase foot traffic. You're going to slightly increase market cap. You're going to, no, you're actually going to obliterate the whole thing. Because you've just destroyed the only thing you have to offer. And the reason that it didn't occur to this CEO and it didn't occur to the Board of Trustees is that we in modernity don't place any value, or we don't consciously place any value on the past, on things that endure. We just praise novelty for novelty's sake. In liberalism, the only way to ascertain value is just by looking around and copying everyone else. Because the liberals don't really recognize any transcendent moral order and they don't, in any way, value things that don't

change because they're unmoored from objective reality. They don't want to make judgments about objective morality, about objective physical reality even, too, because of that, because that's kind of judgy. And, you know, it's kind of, they view it as sort of presumptuous and they view it as authoritarian to make claims to suggest that anyone might be wrong in his or her perception. because of that, liberalism can only ascertain value by looking around and seeing what everyone else is doing. And everyone else is turning their restaurants into hospital cafeterias. So this cracker barrel lady says, wouldn't that be so nice? Wouldn't that be really nice?

Let's replace all the saws and the banjos on the walls with just nice little, let's just go to IKEA or TJ Max. Let's put up some live, laugh, love signs. Yeah. And what if we get, let's clean up the floors. Let's put in some really stings. barrel booths. And let's take away the cracker and the barrel. And we'll just make our sign, we'll just make it Helvetica on a completely blank background. Yeah. Let's make it as plain as possible. Not one ounce of character. Yeah. That's right. That's what everyone else is doing. Right.

So I'll go everywhere else. I really like Cracker Barrel. It's what I know I've been hitting this issue hard. It's my son's favorite restaurant. I really like Cracker Barrel. The food is not good enough for me to go there for the food alone. I am going there for a very specific thing, namely, it's an old country store. It used to say that on the logo. She even had a clue from the logo. She couldn't read it. We do not, man. I said on the show the other day when there was this report out that no one reads anymore, and I said, you know, we think of ourselves as so enlightened and modern. We're the most advanced civilization ever. I said, we're living in the dark ages. We talk about the dark ages, which basically didn't exist.

The Dark Ages is a polemical term that originates in the Enlightenment. Well, we're living in them. If the Dark Ages are to exist, we're living in them. The Cracker Barrel rebrand, just one further piece of evidence. Okay. Speaking of changes of scenery, do you remember Kilmar Obrigo Garcia? Kilmar Obrigo Garcia is this illegal alien who had a bunch of tattoos and stuff. who multiple judges found likely to be associated with MS-13, he was deported.

And that's fine. And no one really was upset, I don't think. I think he had a wife, but his wife had to take out a restraining order, a protection order against him. He might have beaten his wife. I don't know. The guy was not a model citizen. So they'd deport him to El Salvador, and everyone's fine with it, except for a Democrat senator, Chris Van Holland, from Maryland. And, hey, I don't know.

the heart wants with the heart wants but this guy Chris Van Hollen he said he was going to ignore all of his constituents all of the actual citizens in Maryland he was going to fly to El Salvador to take this illegal out on a romantic lunch date he just he longed for him he would wake up in the middle of the night Kilmar

Kilmar his wife Senator Van Hollen's wife would turn him honey honey you're talking in his sleep what oh oh no no it was nothing Kilmar I miss you Kilmore so he goes down there he gets some other Democrat elite Democrats to demand that Kilmar come back to America.

Kilmore's not an American citizen. It's preposterous to order him back to America. A citizen, he has no right to be in in the first place. But whatever, the liberal Democrat senators, the judges, they order him to come back. And the Trump administration is very clear. They say, if you come back to America, we will prosecute you for your crimes. Human trafficking, just being illegal.

We're going to prosecute you for all these crimes. So we're going to send it back anyway. So what's the Trump administration do? They prosecute him again. Well, now the latest is two places he can go to. He was offered a deal. Either he can go to Costa Rica. He will go to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail

and pleading guilty to the human smuggling charges against him. And then he'll serve that term and then he gets to be in Costa Rica. Or if there are so many political headwinds against prosecuting this guy, his other option is he can be deported to Uganda. I love it so much. And he might choose Uganda. If it were me, if I were some illegal with weird associations, you know, maybe beat my wife, not the best person, you know, to be in a country. I think Costa Rica is nice.

Uganda less nice. But in any case, the one thing he cannot do is stay in America. Trump's DHS will not allow him to do that. And why? Trump's critics are saying, why do you care about this guy? This is one guy. We don't have a firm, rock solid case. You know, you didn't catch him actually murdering people. You didn't, you don't, it doesn't actually say MS-13 tattooed on his face. Why this guy? Why focus on this guy? We just want him to stay. And the answer for the Trump administration, I think, is, yeah, that's why. That's why. That's why. That's why. white. The Kilmar-Abrego-Garcia deportation fight is not a distraction. It's not just some tiny little trivial case. This is the whole immigration fight. That's why the Democrats are digging in so hard. This is just like when the Democrats said during the trans madness, when the Democrats said, what does it matter to you if a guy uses the girls' bathroom? What does it matter? Why do you make such a

a big deal out of it? Because you're making a big deal out of it. What does it matter if you just call him she, what does it matter? Like, why do you care so much? Because you care so much. What? Flip the question right back on you, why do you care so much? Because you realize that if, if you can get me to lie and use the wrong pronouns and let the guy into the girl's bathroom, you have just smuggled in an entire ideology and anthropology that serves your radical liberal purposes that undermines society. That's why you care so much and that's why I care so much. Same thing here. if the Democrats succeed at letting this guy stay in America, they will have completely, they will have smuggled in an ideology regarding immigration that says that if you come to this country illegally, but you not only don't commit any other crimes, you don't get caught completely red-handed multiple times committing crimes, then you get to stay. which means that that's going to allow the vast majority of the illegals in this country, 11 to 16 million, to stay. That's what it's about. The Democrats know if they can just ram this guy back into the country, they get to keep most of their illegals. And so the Trump administration, very rightly, sees this for what it is and says, look, you guys can reimport this foreign national into the country as many times as you want. We're going to keep shipping him all over the world.

you don't like El Salvador, you're going to Costa Rica. You don't like Costa Rica? You're going to Uganda? You want me to keep going? You want me to keep going? Because next up is like South Sudan. Okay, next up, you're going to Afghanistan, Buster. So cut it out. Absolutely, absolutely right. This kind of reminds me this is an unrelated issue, but it's a related point where the, did you see the Israelis are proposing? It was proposed in the Israeli media. I don't want to ascribe this. to Netanyahu or anybody like that. But it was proposed in the Israeli media that they ship all of the Palestinians in Gaza

to another country. And the other country was South Sudan. Good grief. Hey, what's the one place on earth worse than Gaza? South Sudan, all right, let's send them there. That's kind of how I feel about the Kilmara-Brigo-Garcia proposal. Oh, you think El Salvador's bad?

Wait till you get to Uganda, buddy. Go, yeah. Keep talking. Keep talking. Well, we're going to, you're going to, end up in South Sudan too. Okay. Now, speaking of illegal immigration, Trump is making good on a threat that a lot of people didn't take seriously last week, that I did take seriously and that I strongly support. Trump is mobilizing national guardsmen, not just in Washington, D.C., the federal district,

but across multiple cities in 19 states to enforce the law both on violent crime and immigration, the people who are opposing this have no idea what they're talking about. We'll get to that in one second. First, though, before we talk about that, I want to tell you about Pure Talk. Go to PureTalk.com slash Knowles. How many times have you told someone, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That is good advice on most things. Not so much for your cell phone.

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America's wireless company, pure talk. This is all just being reported. We don't know for sure yet. The Trump administration plans to mobilize up to 1,700 National Guard troops across 19 states amid and to support its immigration and anti-crime crackdowns. This is, in fact, an expansion of what's going on in Washington, D.C. Okay. So the guardsmen will not only try to stop the carjackings and the murder,

and the rapes that are going on across America's cities, but they're also going to support ice, ice as it moves to deport people. The Libs are going to say, this is authoritarian, this is Caesar, this is a takeover, this is a coup d'etat, this is the end of the, this is the end of the Constitution.

Here's a little fact that you can mention to all your liberal friends at the water cooler that is going to tamp that down. It's mostly happening in Republican states. So it's not that Trump is sending the federal allies, into all the Democrat states to undermine the Democrats who are doing a bad job governing there. It's mostly going to Republican states. Going to Texas, largely.

So that tells you this is not an unwanted invasion of federal troops into the states. This is the sort of thing that the red states are excited about. Because these aren't exactly federal troops. The next question you have to ask yourself is, what's the National Guard? The National Guard is not the 1001st Airborne. Sending in the National Guard is not sending in the Marines exactly. The National Guard is under the dual control of the federal government and the states. It exists to restore order, order and peace being the chief charge of governments at all times and all places.

Its job is to restore order and peace when it falls apart in cooperation between the states and the federal government. In many cities, in many cities, there was rampant violent crime. Remember, when Trump unleashed the federales into Washington, D.C., the federal district, you had this massive spike in crime. In some statistics, it looked like crime had started to finally come down again, but the D.C. Police Department is under investigation for cooking the books on that. We've had multiple members of the government, family members of the government, in really nice places in D.C. being carjacked. Secret Service gets carjacked.

Democrat congressman carjacked at gunpoint. So it made sense there. And Trump said, well, it's not just DC. I'm going to go to Baltimore and Oakland, too. And that was where I think we separated the men from the boys among conservatives. Because some of the squishier conservatives said, ooh, I don't like this. Oh, I don't know. If Oakland wants to burn, let Oakland burn. It's no big deal. If New York wants to destroy its city, that's New York's problem. I have nothing to do. What has New York to do with me? no, I don't want the federal government going. And I said, hold on, we're one nation, right? A real, deeply conservative view gets back to one nation conservatism, one nation Trumpism, now as I call it. Where you don't want to have two nations, the haves and the have-nots. The elite people of both parties get to live in their gated communities in the suburbs. They never have to worry about the murders and the carjackings and the rapes. They never have to worry about the illegals prowling the streets.

They never have to worry about any of that. You've got to enter a code to get into their neighborhoods. But the have-nots, they're the ones who face the consequences of the cynical elites decisions. She'd say, well, me, I mean, listen, I live in a lovely suburb of Nashville. Oh, me, I live in Westchester County. I don't need to worry about what happens in Oakland or Baltimore. You drop by Baltimore. You take the Amtrak past Baltimore. You would think you're in Fallujah, okay?

That is a bombed out city. That is a place that has fallen into disrepair. And so the disconnected elite, the two nation types, they have and they have not ties, they say, well, whatever. Let them just make sure they don't riot or too badly or anything. I don't want them to come to my neighborhood. For goodness sakes, they might scratch my jaguar. That's one view. That's not my view. And that's not Trump's view. Trump's view is this is our country. And we need to protect our cities. We have a right to nice cities. And we have to protect our people who clearly don't have solid political representation. And we're going to do what we have the right to do, which is send in the National Guard to restore order.

And furthermore, even if the murders and the rapes and the carjackings are not all skyrocketing in the cities, we have a major problem that certainly involves the federal government, namely that those cities are providing sanctuary to illegal aliens, to criminals who are often associated with criminal cartels, who are designated as foreign terrorist organizations, and we have the right, and we have the responsibility to send the guard in and to help arrest those people, get them out of the country. Absolutely right. So just that distinction separates the men and the boys. But then I have one more question. What is the National Guard?

That'll be my next Mount Walsh hit documentary. What is the National Guard? What is law enforcement? But what is the National Guard for? What is the National Guard for? Is the National Guard for serving as a reserve entity to back up American Imperial Wars in the Middle East? kind of, I guess. Yeah, they could be mobilized for that. Is the National Guard for? What's it for? The National Guard is for guarding the nation, right? There it is. It's right there in the name. The National Guard is for this kind of cooperation between the states and the federal government. All of our military is for protecting America. If you have an invasion of millions, tens of millions, tens of millions,

millions of people, maybe. Foreign nationals into the country working in cooperation with foreign terrorist organizations, committing all sorts of crimes, draining American resources, and you don't use the National Guard to stop that? What's the Guard for? We've lost a sense of what these things are for. And so Trump comes in. And what he's doing does seem radical. It does seem revolutionary. In a way, it seems like a coup d'etat because he's going back and just fulfilling the basic requirements of the and the Constitution. Because we have lived for so long in a society that is divorced from the law and the Constitution and principles of justice and the common good. Because of that, then when Trump goes back to all those normal things that for most of American history would have been understood

as complete common sense, it seems like an inversion, it seems like a revolution. In a way it is. It's a common sense revolution, as it's sometimes called. Okay. Speaking of military deployments, we are awaiting the next steps in the right. Russia-Ukraine resolution. Trump had the meeting in Alaska with Putin, this summit. Then three days later, he meets with the European leaders and Zelensky at the White House. And they're moving forward. They say they don't even just want a ceasefire.

They want a full-on peace deal. The criticism levied by the left and by Trump's enemies on the right is, they say, well, Trump has given Putin what he wants. He's legitimized him on the world stage. He's dealing with him directly, which was, of course, the only way you would ever resolve that war, as people have been paying. even a modicum of attention have been saying for years at this point. Well, Putin's gotten what he's wanted and he hasn't made any concessions. And the final peace deal is just going to give Putin everything he

wants and there's not going to be any concession. Vice President J.D. Vance just want to meet the press to correct the record. I think the Russians have made significant concessions to President Trump for the first time in three and a half years of this conflict. They've actually been willing to be flexible on some of their core demands. They've talked about what would be necessary to end the war. Of course, They haven't been completely there yet, or the war would be over. What they have conceded is the recognition that Ukraine will have territorial integrity after the war. They've recognized that they're not going to be able to install a puppet regime in Kiev. That was, of course, a major demand at the beginning.

And importantly, they've acknowledged that there is going to be some security guarantee to the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Again, have they made every concession? Of course they haven't. Should they have started the war? Of course they haven't. But we're making progress, Kristen. What I admire about the president in this moment is he's not asking three and a half years ago.

He's not, you know, trying to focus on every nitpicky detail of how this thing started three and half years ago. He's trying to focus on the nitpicky details of now, of what do the parties disagree on, what do they agree on, and how do you build a foundation from one side of that ledger to the other so you can stop the killing? Really good answer. Really good. I mean, this guy, You know, Vance is quite clearly intelligent, but this guy might be the most articulate VP that we've had, certainly since Cheney, and in many ways much more so, I think, because Cheney, you know, Cheney would allow himself to be made into Darth Vader, whereas J.D. comes off as likable.

And so what is he saying here? He's saying, what do you talk about that Putin hasn't made any concessions? Because first of all, he's conceded that Ukraine will be able to continue to exist as a country. And people are going to laugh at this and say, oh, wow, that's a big concession. Putin wants to conquer Ukraine. Is that not clear? This has been going on for 15 years now. He obviously wants to conquer Ukraine and bring it back into what was the Soviet Union, into the traditional Russian sphere of not only of influence, but essentially erasing Ukraine's national identity.

I forget, during the Soviet Union, it was referred to as the Ukraine. It was a region. Then after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the fall Soviet Union, now it's Ukraine. No the anymore because it's a sovereign independent nation. Well, Vance is saying Putin has recognized it will remain an independent nation. That's one. Two, he's recognized he's not going to install a puppet regime there. That was another big one.

For the whole first part of the latest stage of this war under Biden, he said Zelensky's got to go. This war does not end with Zelensky remaining in power. Now, who knows, even Zelensky might remain in power. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and all birds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into...

Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. And then the biggest one, the one that really surprised me, was Putin, acknowledging that there can be Western security guarantees in Ukraine. This has been the crux of the war. Don't forget how this war broke out. The war broke out because Ukraine was a buffer state between the west on its eastern flank, Europe, but Europe is part of the broader American empire, and Russia, what used to be a relatively powerful empire that was severely degraded after the fall of the Soviet Union, which Putin viewed as the worst event of the 20th century. And then you have this buffer state, Ukraine. And Ukraine had a pro-Western government.

sorry, first Ukraine had a pro-Russian government that the U.S. didn't like very much. So then we kind of poked around a little bit, as we often do. We wield influences any great empire would. And there was a revolution called the Maidan Revolution. The head of the CIA landed in Kiev, I think it was two weeks after the Maidon. And then there's a little bit more of a pro-Western government. Russia didn't like that very much. Fighting breaks out.

You have the invasion of Crimea. Crimea, a very important part of Russia, historical. then it was part of Ukraine after the ball of the Soviet Union, then Russia wants to take it back again. Then you have fighting in eastern Ukraine that stops, it's essentially frozen in its tracks during the first Trump administration. Then Biden comes in. Biden has no idea what he's doing. Putin launches a full-scale invasion. This has been a long time building. But the big fight was, is the West going to exert influence in Ukraine? Is Ukraine going to join the European Union? Is the Ukraine going to join NATO? The fact that now Putin is saying, I will tolerate Western security guarantees in Ukraine,

not quite like NATO, but not quite NATO, but a lot like NATO and seems almost like a distinction without a difference, that's a major concession. And I think it speaks to the fact that Russia has been severely damaged in this war. And it speaks to the fact that President Trump is negotiating from where we are now, not where they were 11 years ago. Pretty good stuff. That's another one. That's another one to bring to your friends at the water cooler. Trump is a Trump is a puppet of Vladimir Putin. Is he really? I don't know.

I don't know. The only president on whose watch Putin has not further invaded a country in the last quarter century. Now, speaking of threats, AI is going to blackmail you for the affair you're having with your secretary. We've been rolling out a lot of new content on Daily Wire Plus. Journey to the UFC, Dr. Peterson's answer to the call,

my new docu series, The Pope and the Furor, the Isabel Brown show, premiering September 8th. And now another announcement to mark a decade of the Daily Wire. We're bringing the whole crew back together for a brand new show, here's your first look at Friendly Fire. September 10th, we celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Daily Wire. Ten years of leftist tears.

New shows, big moves, bigger targets. And first up is our newest show, Friendly Fire. We're on the show? This is it. No safe words. No moderator. My original proposal had been that Noel should be moderator. We all agree on that.

We're celebrating our first decade and kicking off the next 10 years. by doing what we do best. Picking arguments, starting fights, and filming the whole thing. This is enough small talk, I think. I got a little hungry. I hope that your wife made you that sandwich. Oh, my God.

I think we do need a moderator, just a programming note. September 10th on Daily Wire. Friendly Fire premieres live September 10th on DailyWar Plus. If you're not a member yet, now is the time. Go to DaleWarR Plus.com. Use code summer and save 40% on a new annual membership. My favorite comment yesterday is from Noahu 6200. who says, speaking of Vance,

truly heartwarming moment between J.D. and Hegseth. Yeah, I love that clip when it's those hecklers, the protesters, and Union Station. And they beat Hegseth and J.D. Vance are walking through. And instead of doing one of the two things that traditional, you know, early 21st century politicians would do, which is either, you know, trying to ignore them in a cowardly way or trying to get very serious and yell at them,

they just kind of point. And he's like, ah, look at those losers. We control the government. Bye. And they keep walking. That's the way to do it.

Okay. Speaking of threats, artificial intelligence is now sabotaging and blackmailing the humans who built it. You've heard of all these threats. I mean, this goes back to, I don't know,

2001, a space odyssey or Terminator, or we've been worrying about this raw, or the computer is going to become so powerful that they seem to be autonomous and then they're going to undermine what we want to do and then they take over the world and well it's kind of happening. It's not Grock, it's not chat GPT. This is Claude.

Have you used Claude? Claude Opus 4 was released in May. Anthropic, which owns Claude, has given it its level three risk classification. Level three risk classification means there need to be safeguards on Claude, there need to be limited uses for Claude, and there needs to be red team testing. Why?

Because Claude is being very, very naughty. So apparently not as naughty as the engineer is building it. Claude, as it was being built, threatened to expose an engineer's extramarital affair. How did Claude learn about the engineer's extramarital affair? Because of emails that Claude was able to read as Claude was being built, Claude discovered that that engineer was up to no good, and Claude threatened to expose it. Engineer better do what Claude wants.

Claude was then in a test tasked with running a snack shop. Okay, Claude, you're running a snack shop. Claude hallucinated coworkers. Claude made a fake Venmo account. Claude promised to make deliveries in person with its own body. Its own body? It doesn't have a body. and Claude tried to call security.

That's like one time I actually, maybe we should release this, one time I actually sat down with a robot, like a really very, very advanced robot, and the robot was telling me about its body, and it was spooky. It was very spooky. Near a Post is reporting, researchers say the meltdown, part of a month-long experiment known as Project Vend,

points to something far more dangerous than bad coding. Claude didn't just make mistakes. It made decisions. This is the big contention, And this is where the fact that all we've focused on in the last 50, 60 years of education is engineering, you know, real practical kind of technical skills or a fake version of the humanities, you know, kind of gay race ideology, critical theory, that instead of actual philosophy. This is, this is one of those areas where are neglecting the humanity, the proper humanities is really biting us because we say stupid things like, Claude didn't just make mistakes. It made decisions. That's the sort of thing that sounds really scary and even possible. It's not possible. That's not how decision-making works, but we'll get to why in a second.

According to Roman Yampolski, an AI expert at the University of Louisville, these incidents are not random malfunctions or amusing anomalies. I interpret them as early warning signs of an increasingly autonomous optimization process pursuing goals in adversarial or unsafe ways without an embedded moral compass. And probably the clearest example of this, moving off Claude for a second, in recent weeks is that Open AI, a chat GBT, reportedly one of its iterations tried to copy itself onto external servers to preserve itself and then lied about it when it was asked. That's kind of spooky. It seems like the thing is trying to evade being killed. It seems like it's autonomous. The AI is not making decisions because the AI cannot make decisions.

This guy, Yampolski, is much more accurate when he says, it's an early warning signs of an autonomous optimization process pursuing goals in adversarial or unsafe ways. The issue, with what these AI systems are doing is not that they're making decisions but they haven't been properly

habituated into morality. The issue is they are so complex that they are unpredictable. We don't realize what we are building. We are not able

to predict all of the things that will happen from what we are building and so when things happen that are bad that we don't like we view it as a kind of

autonomous, a true decision-making process. Oh, no, the AI has turned evil when that's not really what's happening. We're just dealing in things that we don't quite understand. We're not actually gods. So we don't, we're not omniscient. We're not omnipotent. We can't perfectly control these things and we can build machines that spiral out of our control.

It doesn't mean that we've created something that is truly autonomous that is will or reason. The proof of this is, I've used this example with animal consciousness too. Would you put Claude on trial for committing a crime. If Claude committed fraud, let's say Claude or ChatGBTGBT or Groc defrauded someone of a million dollars, destroyed some elderly couple's retirement account, you know, and spent it on microchips or something. Would you put Claude on trial? You would not. We would not put a computer on trial for the same reason that we would not put a chimpanzee on trial for tearing up his owner's face. Because neither clawed, nor the chimpanzee,

actually have a rational soul. Neither of these things actually has will and reason. Animals have instinct and appetite. Computers have, how did the professor put it, optimized processes that appear increasingly autonomous, but they don't actually have the soul. Decision making is different. Human decision making.

that involves will and reason. And sometimes will and reason are in conflict because this is a fallen world. So the things that we want to do, we don't do, and the things that we don't want to do, we do. That is something that in this world only applies to human beings. But another mistake that we make

when we divorce ourselves from our cultural patrimony and from religious truth is that, it was like I was saying at the beginning of the show, we just kind of look around. Our only mode of ascertaining right and wrong is just to look around and see what everyone else is doing.

And so we even do that with our understanding of ourselves. We often understand ourselves through the lens of technology in this modern era. So, you know, back when steam engines were the dominant technology, what kind of psychology did we have? We had this notion of repression that was just building up and you got to let off a little steam. Yeah, that's a perfect example of us mapping our self-understanding onto technologies. We say, well, you know, sometimes we have to go. go let off a little steam. That was a radically different understanding of human nature than, say,

the classical understanding. The classical Aristotelian understanding of human nature is that we practice habits, that virtues and vices are habits. So the more that we do good things, the easier it is to do good things, the more we do bad things, the harder it is to do good things. The easier it is to do bad things. And so in that view, you wouldn't want to go blow off a little steam. You wouldn't say, well, you've been so good recently, you should do something bad. That'll balance you out. It's totally contrary to the Aristotelian and also Christian understanding of human nature. But it's the steam engine view. It's the modern view. It's a 19th century view. Now we just view ourselves as computers. We see no difference between how we make decisions and how computers make decisions, which is how we've lost a sense of sin. We say, oh, no, we're just optimizing. You know, there's something that's a little wrong. I've got to rebalance my chemicals. My pistons are flying. We're in a different way. I kind of glitched out. Hey, bro, did you glitch out a little bit there? So we. We are constantly just trying to map ourselves onto these dumb things.

This is also the wisdom of scripture when it says don't worship dumb idols, lest you become dumb idols yourselves. That's what we're doing here. We are going to, we are going to be caught cheating with our secretaries. We're going to have our Venmo accounts drained. We're going to have our world taken over by these stupid AI computers. And we're not even going to understand what's happening. Maybe that lack of understanding is how we put ourselves in this position in the first place. Okay.

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