Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #491 - Babylon Bee Suspended For Calling Trans Gender Male a Man w/Louis Rossmann

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Tim, Ian, and Lydia host YouTuber, CEO of Rossmann Repair Group, and right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann to discuss the censorship of the Babylon Bee by Twitter, the VA Tech swimmer who aired her views about the transgender swimmer, but only after losing, Forbes smear of Dave Rubin, NYC's insanely high unemployment levels, and the way the right-to-repair battle is shaping up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Babylon Bee has been suspended from Twitter because they made a satirical article labeling a transgender male as man of the year after USA Today said this individual was woman of the year. The CEO of Babylon Bee is refusing to delete the tweet, thus it remains up, creating a very strange circumstance where Twitter has the power to remove the tweet they say is offensive, but they won't do it. There's an interesting question here we'll talk about. Why doesn't Twitter just say it violates the rules and it should leave? It should not be here. Why are they saying you have to be the one to take it down? That I think is interesting because I wonder how that will play into the law. If they find something objectionable, but they won't take it down.

And this question's there. So we'll talk about that. We also have this story about this NCAA female swimmer who is now speaking out against transgender male swimmer Leah Thomas. Though what I find interesting here is that this individual chose to support and compete against Leah Thomas and is only complaining after losing. So there's a lot of interesting cultural stories we have now, especially Forbes has written a hit piece on Dave Rubin because Dave Rubin is having a discussion with conservatives about being a gay married man with kids. And of course, we will talk a lot about what's happening in New York.

Seems to be falling apart. Revenues are not coming back. Unemployment is still really bad. Crime is through the roof. There was like a serial killer. And so we can talk about all of that stuff as well as right to repair and what's going on with technology and economics. And joining us to discuss all that is Louis Rossman. Thank you for having me on.

Do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, sure. My name is Louis Rossman. I run a repair shop in New York City and I do videos showing people how to fix things and I show them all the barriers they get in the way of people being able to fix their stuff and I just try to get people a little bit more invested in what we do by showing them what happens behind the scenes. I want people to kind of be in, actually want people like us to be able to do our jobs rather than just think that we're these shade tree mechanics where you don't really understand how we operate. They have no investment in it.

Cool, cool. Absolutely. We got some censorship stories, too, so we can talk a lot about the tech elements there as well. We got Ian wearing a weird hat. What's up, everybody? Luke Rutkowski sent Tim a beautiful birthday gift of this hat that I'm wearing and this golden beanie as well, which I haven't seen on Tim yet.

We'll see if we can get that on him tonight. And also we received these two dice. This is a D120, 120-sided die and a 48-sided die. I don't think they actually have the 128. It's too different. Do you want red or green? It's too different, weirdly numbered. Someone was like, these are the only dice you'll ever need

because you can decipher, you can roll the 120-sided one and act as if it's a D10, act as if it's a D20. I don't know. I haven't looked into it yet. Interesting. But thanks for sending them. They're pretty cool. I guess we collect dice now.

I'm being cross-legged if you didn't get that yet. And I'm also here. I'm seeing a lot of excitement in the chat for Lewis. Really excited to have him and hear what he has to say. But also, don't forget, go to TimCast.com and become a member if you want to support our work directly. As a member, you'll get access to exclusive podcasts from this show that go up Monday through Thursday at 11 p.m. This show's live at 8 p.m.

And we will have one of those episodes up for you later tonight, so you don't want to miss it. Don't forget to smash that like button, subscribe to this channel, share the show right now, take that URL, post it wherever you can. It's the most powerful way to help support the work we do. And let's read that first story and talk about the Babylon Bee. There's a lot here that I find interesting.

This is a story we have from TimCast.com. Babylon Bee locked out of Twitter for man of the year satire. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it, said the CEO of the Christian-based satire news site. So they received a notification from Twitter saying that their tweet has violated their rules against promoting violence, threatening, harassing other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

They said you can start your countdown and continue to Twitter, that's what it says, once you delete the content that violates our rules, one tweet, if you think we've made a mistake, contact us. So the CEO is saying he won't be taking it down. This is the post in question, or this is one of them. It says the Babylon Bees man of the year is Rachel Levine. Of course, Rachel Levine is a trans woman. Hence the joke they were making. Twitter says this violated the rules. So there's something interesting here in that, one, I think we can discuss the CEO's unwillingness to take down the post,

saying we're not going to do it. But also it's curious that Twitter, under Section 230, which grants this immunity to these tech platforms, it says that you can remove content that you find to be objectionable or lewd or lascivious or whatever. In this instance, and actually, truth be told, this is typically how Twitter does it. They make you remove it. So right now, this is where it's interesting.

Seth Dillon has said the tweet they say breaks the rules is still up, available to be retweeted and seen by everyone. And it's going viral as people keep retweeting it. Why would he take that tweet down if he believes in it? And why wouldn't Twitter take it down if they think it's going viral as people keep retweeting it why would he take that tweet down if he believes in it and why wouldn't twitter take it down if they think it's wrong that's that's what i find fascinating about the story other than there's the whole culture war aspect of one perspective is allowed in one perspective isn't but i'm curious if you guys have any it feels like a parent making a kid clean up their own mess as punishment that's kind of interesting

because it's not just saying we don't like what you said it's also almost like a form of humiliation because they're like you also have to take it down it's not enough that you be punished for this you have to do it yourself like one of those uh those what are they those classes where they get you to say something you don't believe until you start to believe it a struggle session yeah like a struggle session apparently they're doing that in prisons i didn't i don't like this you start to believe it. A struggle session. Yeah, like a struggle session. Apparently they're doing that in prisons. I don't like this because the terms say if it promotes violence against, threatens, or harasses. Now, this tweet does not promote violence against anyone or threaten anyone.

But you could say that it's a harassment thing. I think this is an abuse of the word harassment for the terms. Like, it's a one-off tweet. It's a public figure. I don't see any kind of consistent harassment for a claim, and the guy can always block it anyway. So I just feel like it's so heavy-handed. I think it depends on your definition of harassment.

I mean, if you're a trans person, it's being misgendered the same way as if I call you, I don't know, bad word for female genitalia or something. Right, right. If I'm using it and I'm saying something that you feel is insulting, is that harassment? But then again, if that's the rule, the reason I deleted Twitter is because that's literally all it is. Yeah, this is the first time in a long time I thought I might actually just delete my account. No, I deleted mine three years ago because pretty much it's just all that nonstop all day long. Just, yeah, we were talking about this on the show, what, like last week, that Twitter only exists to emotionally destroy people?

Yeah. I mean, back when you had only 140 characters to express something, it rewards negative impulsivity in the worst possible way. And when I started doing it, that's when I deleted it. I started my Twitter account in 2008, and I would make YouTube videos, 06, 07, and I was like, text is the devil. Do not rely on text for communication. Verbal communication is how we get along.

This text is, and people are like, Ian, you're such an idiot text is fine man twitter's cool and then all these people start tweeting and now you see the age of miscommunication and there's a reason for it because people are etching markings on a wall and expecting someone else to know what they meant yo twitter is the worst it's pretty bad it brings out the worst in people yeah and like for this i i would say okay you should be allowed to make a joke whatever but at the same time i look at it and i go what am i gaining from making that joke you know like i believe in the right to be able to say something like that but i just i wouldn't use it if it's just going to piss a bunch of people off and i don't gain anything from calling this person a man versus a woman or whatever well i'll say i think that the babylon

b is a christian site they have a perspective yeah it's also meant for humor and it's a satire site so they're going to say things that are shitposts that are going to aggravate people. Right, right. I mean, comedy is offensive. Or at least it used to be. It's supposed to be. I don't know what left-wing comedy is right now. There's this YouTuber guy, and someone posted this in response to Seth Dillon.

He's the CEO. And it was like, why conservative comedy isn't funny? And it's just like a weird thing to claim to like it's look i understand the left is going to pile on this dude who wrote why conservative comedy isn't funny like they're gonna they're gonna go and comment like we know we know it's so true conservative comedy comedy isn't funny and i'm just like yo it's subjective i've never watched liberal versus conservative commentary when you when you look at let's say bill bill burr i think would be more left than all the people here.

When you listen to his 2012 special on gold digging whores and beating women, I mean, would that come out in 2022? No. Nope, nope, nope. I'm surprised he hasn't gotten his head chopped off for doing that. Every now and then I'll watch that

and just laugh hysterically. Off with the woman next to me. I don't understand the idea of what conservative comedy is. That's the weirdest thing. The response from the left is like, you're not funny, so it's not a joke. I think you're talking about Greg Gutfield versus, what's the other guy, like Seth Meyers or something like that. But that stuff's not funny to me.

I don't enjoy either of them. Ideologically possessed comedy sucks in my opinion. Yes. Not necessarily. It depends. If it speaks to your ideology, you're going to enjoy it. That's why I say it's subjective. When there was a Vice special I saw

where it was a transgender comedian and they were explaining how to do comedy properly, you make fun of yourself, that you're not hurting anybody and there's no oppression. And it was a bunch of people in the audience

and the person on stage was like a tall, skinny trans woman who was constantly talking about how awful they were to themselves. And the audience was laughing like, no one's getting hurt because they're making the joke about themselves. They seem to enjoy it. I'm just like, I mean, I'm not going to rag on somebody.

Look, if you want to make a video game or a movie or a show and you want to go and you enjoy it, like, man, go do your thing. I got nothing to do with it. If I want to watch Dave Chappelle, don't get him canceled from Netflix because you don't like it. Like, you to do with it. If I want to watch Dave Chappelle, don't get him canceled from Netflix because you don't like it. Like you're offended by it. So, you know, Gutfeld, I think Gutfeld on Fox is more like a observational humor, but not, I wouldn't put comedy first. It's like a, it's a, it's a political commentary show with snark, which makes you laugh some, depending on, on his audience, you know, it's one of the biggest shows. Seth Meyers does the same for the left.

Maybe you want to argue that they're only laughing with the left, like they're being told to laugh or whatever. Oh, look, if people want to watch it and they get millions of views, they do. Same with Colbert. I had an issue a couple nights ago. I was watching the Epic Fails compilations on YouTube. You ever watch those where it's just like Epic Fails and you see people falling down and slipping on ice

and like tumbling into the ocean and stuff. And I was laughing, but it wasn't comedy. That wasn wasn't comedy it's people getting hurt and people falling down but i was laughing so i was laughing at something that wasn't comedy it's possible that what people consider comedy is actually not it might something or something that's funny isn't necessarily comedy i was i remember when i was little i was watching i think it was america's funniest home videos oh yeah i think it was bob saget and uh maybe. Oh, yeah. I think it was Bob Saget. And maybe I'm misremembering this because it's been like 30 years or something. But it was a guy skiing and he trips and starts tumbling down the mountain.

And Bob Saget was going like, oh, oh, like, whoopsie, falling. And I'm like, thinking to myself, I'm like, is that man very hurt? He's going to die, yeah. I'm confused. Like, what's happening? And it was something like that. Maybe I'm remembering it too harshly because I was like is that man very hurt? I'm confused like what's happening? And it was something like that Maybe I'm remembering it too harshly Because I was like a little kid

So I think that when people make fun of themselves in comedy It's kind of like that You're laughing because you see someone hurting themselves In front of you but it's not funny Well it's funny but it's not comedy At least in my opinion I don't like that self-depreciating stuff I mean it's alright, Rodney Dangerfield did it okay

Bill Burr was alright with it But Dangerfield would rip on his wife, too. So no one was sacred. I've been thinking about the pronouncement. The culture war is just getting so insane that

when we say there's no middle ground, there's literally, like, we're well beyond any kind of reasonable logic. So, you know, know i'm gonna bring it up because i i really want to but i had this tweet last like this weekend about going to a diner yeah it was like friday or something yeah where i was like i went to a diner with my girlfriend and we are we are they told us 20 they said it was a 20 minute wait and then uh they seated other people before us so i complained and left and like the point of my tweet was, one, I'm kind of irritable.

So that's not a positive statement about myself. But that it serves me well in my work and business that I don't tolerate any kind of impedance. So if they're like, oops, we seated someone else before you, I'll just be like, I'll go somewhere else. I got no issue. I'm not going to bother. I'm not going to leave. The weirdest thing is how this became a culture war issue. It became like on twitter on reddit the right can't meme it's like a subreddit where they just make fun of like right-wing people they screen grabbed it and they were like

i it was just like making fun of me for no reason on an inane tweet having nothing to do with politics and that's what i bring i wanted to bring that up because you mentioned well for one i wanted to bring it up but also you mentioned how it's just like negative impulses on twitter and i'm like i didn't i didn't talk smack about anybody like i i typically i i i was about to tweet about aoc last week and it was like nasty and so i like toned it way down like i want to make my point but i shouldn't insult her or anything like i i can i can you know criticize her without just being stupid and childish. But man, I think I think you nailed it when you said it's just it drives negative impulses.

I also think, as we mentioned before, it exists just to emotionally destroy people. The one area where I disagree with you is where you said that there's no middle ground in the culture war. It's either here or here. The middle ground is not on there and the tablet. It's out there. Every time I go outside and I talk to somebody in a line at a grocery store,

there was a date I was on two weeks ago with somebody who I thought would absolutely horribly hate me over their position. They said, you know, she actually asked me, she's a black person, she's more left than I am.

She said, what do you think of BLM? And I said, you're, okay, this is going to be fun. I'm a white store owner. White. That was like there with, activating a 400 watt air horn on my phone every time I heard somebody banging on the door June 2020. And it was actually a very, very reasonable conversation.

I heard where she was coming from. She heard where I was coming from. That doesn't happen on Twitter. That doesn't happen on Reddit. Oh, for sure. But like this happens at the line at the grocery store. This happens at the gym. This happens at a martial arts class.

It happens almost everywhere. It just doesn't happen on the internet. Because there's something about how people act when they're behind a screen that changes their entire perspective. And I think the fact that all the political conversations that we're having now versus 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years ago are not in person where there's always that thought of

I could get punched in the face. Wasn't it Mike Tyson who said that? That modifies people. And for the last two months, I've spent way more time avoiding my YouTube comment section, avoiding social media, and actually engaging with people in reality or sitting next to them in a steakhouse or a bar and talking. And it's a radically different world. There is a middle ground. Most people are in that middle ground.

It's just they're out there. They're not on the internet. Wow. So the problem is before you even get a chance to have that middle ground and that conversation, the internet is sort of gaining more and more ground, gaining more and more control. You don't know – if you see somebody's Facebook post where they say all this other stuff, it may kind of aggravate you already because you're like, wait, I don't agree with you here, this, that, and the other. And you're immediately going to be arguing instead of just asking questions. So what do you think of this? And then I give my perspective.

You give yours. You have a kind of a back and forth. You're already aggravated when you read somebody who's used their limited 140 characters to come up with the most douchey way to say that they don't like something. Yeah. Or a way to aggravate. Like there was this one article I read recently. It was about the, it was about lawn signs. And it was something on the lawn sign, you know, in this household, we believe that women's rights are everybody's rights. You know, no person is illegal, this, that, and the other.

And it's like, there's not really, that sign is an F you Republican sign. It's not an actual, I believe in all this. And it also doesn't necessarily invite discussion. The same way that the whole, you know, like, you owe me gas money sign with, like, Biden with neck, with, like, an Xi Jinping uniform and all that. That's, that memeing culture and all that, that doesn't open you to a discussion the same way that just, you know, you're sitting next to somebody in a xinping uh uniform and all that that's that that memeing culture and all that that doesn't open you to a discussion the same way that just oh you know you're sitting next to somebody in a state but that's that's not the intent the intent is to create a perception of majority so the biden stickers the goal of that is so that regular people will see biden being

made fun of and not want to be in the out group so if there's someone who doesn't follow politics and they go to a gas station and they keep seeing the Biden stickers, well, then they're more likely to be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I think Biden's dumb. Because the perception is if most people follow this, you don't want to be in the out group because the out group is dangerous. You lose access to resources and humans have that natural survival instinct. The same thing is true for putting flags on their porch or putting that sign. They want everyone to see the signs. And so that's one of the reasons I say there's no middle ground. There is, like you said, outside for the average person.

But what we're seeing more and more – like the reason I brought this up is that the conversations around politics have become completely inane. Like we're seeing more and more people being made fun of for things that aren't even political or conversations emerging on things that aren't even political or don't need to be. I think everybody is on edge to the point where they're just waiting for the smallest thing to tick them off to lose it. Yeah, I think that's true. Everybody is very, very on edge and walking just like vibrating with rage. Well, I think one of the issues is that you have people who – it's an addiction. It's a drug addiction. It's you want those hits.

You want those clicks. And you're trying to find a way to get that satisfaction. So you want that tweet that's going to get a thousand retweets or whatever. So you have a lot of people on social media who are constantly one-upping each other, taking it one step further, left and right, because they want people to react. They want people to share. They want people to respond. And there's no point where someone just,

like, people need to start toning things down. I certainly think that there are, look, my perspective and my bias is fairly obvious in this one. There's a reason why I think in polling, moderate voters and Republicans tend to agree on a lot of issues and Democrats are completely in the out group

relative to those two groups. Or I should say, Democrats are isolated in their beliefs. Independents and Republicans overlap massively on tons of issues. And I think it's because there's something just generally tribalist and cultish of the modern mainstream left and the things they're pursuing. You can get story after story that turns out to be false and they just end up believing it.

You get illogical statements like only white people can be racist and Candace Owens is a white supremacist, things like that that don't seem to make sense. I think economically a lot of people wind up leaning a little more left, but culturally they wind up leaning right because they think that type of stuff is crazy. When they hear that you cannot be racist if you're here, but you can be racist if you were born this way. Someone will hear that and go, what?

I think that same person would probably prefer Medicare for all to the healthcare system we have now where you fall off a bike and then you have a $5,000 bill for spending 45 minutes in a hospital that you weren't even awake for. Yeah, right. Or even choose to go to sometimes. But there's way more overlap than people think. When you read the Internet, you really think that, okay, because I've heard you say this one thing, I now know what you think about these other 42 things. But then when you actually go out in the real world, you realize that it's not like that. It's not just a clipboard where there's a checkbox of 42 different things in a list.

So as much as I would agree with you on a lot of this, one of the challenges I see is that the middle ground people aren't active. And so when we try and engage in things. They have jobs. They have lives. They have things to do. They're out there doing everything. This is what I explained to legislators. For sure.

When we try to do things, however, that we think are like good politically. I'll give you an example. A few years ago, we put on an event called Ending Violence, Racism and Authoritarianism. And the keynote speaker was a very, very famous black jazz musician who de-radicalized members of the Klan. Far-left groups threatened to burn the theater down and then showed up and protested it. The theater canceled our contract within two weeks, so there was not even an opportunity to have that middle ground conversation

in a public setting. We ended up having to move to a venue with half the seats. I think 100 and some odd people weren't able to attend because of capacity issues. So while there are middle ground people who are working and doing normal things, if we want to change things for the positive, but we're being shouted at and screamed at by the squeaky wheel demanding the grease, then it is eliminating any middle ground opportunities for conversations,

hyperpolarizing the conversation even in the real world. I can see if you're not allowed to have an event how that would be aggravating. Yeah. The naming of that event I took issue with when I was working with Bill. We were kind of formulating the idea, putting the event together. I didn't end up going to that event, actually. But I didn't like that it was ending violence as opposed to destroy evil as opposed to create good. Like, it's the phrasing.

What was the argument from the people that wanted to shut it down? I mean, to be completely honest, from any – if I was to make an assumption based on what I know about these people, they don't have one other than they must shut down any and all individuals who hold civil libertarian views. So these were anti-fuck, critical race theorist types, and their whole attitude is just prevent the conversation from happening. What was the conversation that you were looking to have that night? Ending violence, racism, and authoritarianism. So we actually had some – What is the conversation they thought you were having?

That's the conversation they thought we were having. Daryl Davis is very famous. I've heard of him. I saw the show with him a while ago. They don't look at our event and see a mixture of different voices across the political spectrum. And the headliner was this famous black man who de-radicalized Klan members who got a standing ovation. They don't see that and say...

From some ex-Grand Wizard of the KKK or something. There's a picture of him. Oh, no. 200 Klan members. It's still happening. He still gets emails and gets stuff in the mail. I saw a two-hour interview with him on Rogan a few years ago. He was just on last week with Bill. Yeah, so you have a speaker like that.

We had a mixture of some social justice activists, like left-wing individuals, as well as right-wing and libertarian individuals, and not a single white nationalist or alt-right or any of that. It was like a relatively centrist, libertarian, slightly center-right to actual far leftist speaking there with our headliner getting a standing ovation from the audience there's no way they look at that and they say these are white supremacists now that's what they told the press and the press uncritically publishes it then they go to the venue and say you have a bunch of white supremacists we want you to cancel it apparently they threaten to burn the theater down so the guy you know he calls me and he's like shut it down no business is going to want to be associated with that. That's the problem. And there's going to be very few that are going to want to deal with the aftermath after they've gotten your money for one evening.

So it sounds like, to go back to what you were saying about the middle ground existing, it exists in small, private, underground conversations that people can't find out about. I think it exists largely. It's just the people that were doing that are the type of people who were going to threaten to burn a theater down. They're not the majority of middle ground people. They're a very small minority that just so happens to be the loudest and the most active. The people that actually are in the middle ground, they have lives. When I have conversations with legislators, I'll often tell them, when they'll go, there are 14 lobbyists against right to repair, and only one person here. And I'll go, yeah, they're on a farm.

They're the reason that you have something to eat. They don't have time to drive two hours and then sit here waiting for three hours so they could speak for three minutes. That's not a good use of their time. No offense. I'm not trying to be mean to you, but this is not what they do. The middle ground people are out there making sure that we have electricity and food and water and computers and everything else. They don't have time for this shit. They don't have time to start to burn a theater down.

You're right. The issue is. They are the majority. What happens initially, and I agree, but what happens initially is that corporations and politicians only hear one voice. They hear the people who are the loudest, and they hear the people who are the most obnoxious, and the people who are the most obnoxious are often the people that don't have jobs, don't have lives, don't care about their reputation, and they threaten to do things like that. And so what these legislators do is they assume if regular working class people won't speak up for this

and won't have my back when I speak up for them, I won't. So we had a guy in here, Terry Schilling, just last week who said he runs an organization that's basically the NRA for families. And he was explaining how – I believe it was the governor of North Carolina. Is that what he said? I think so. There was a governor who said if you support a particular bill, all of these conservative groups were like, we will have your back. And he was like, okay. And then when it came to the politics, they all abandoned him. And so he was like, the only thing I see then is the is the left coming out and using force and actually following through.

So that's the issue I see is moderates don't really have advocates for the most part because, you know, moderates are moderate for a reason. They're like interested in hearing what you have to say or they're undecided. So you have, you know, a variety of right, a variety of left, and some centrist in between. And there's a conversation happening that, for the most part, the right is unwilling to stand up behind and the left is absolutely willing to stand up and yell about. So you'll end up seeing Amazon, Walmart, Xbox, all these video game companies publishing statements in support of Black Lives Matter and left-wing politics. Then when it comes to the vote, you end up with a 2020 that looks very much like it just

did with a Joe Biden winning. And now you have all the politics that come after it. I think for the most part now, what's happened in this country has become so irrefutable that regular people are like, I'm voting Republican. The general ballot, midterm general ballot polling is favoring Republicans by like, in 538 it has it at 2.4 and RealClearPolitics has it at 3.7, which is absurd because it's always Democrat up. So now that it's inverted, they're expecting it's going to be like a crushing defeat for Democrats. Ultimately, I don't think that'll solve anything. But the issue then becomes if regular people don't really pay attention because they're too busy with their lives, then all that really ends up happening is they'll say, okay, I'm not going to vote for the Democrat this time. I'll vote for the Republican. But the Republican is just Democrat light. It's going to be the exact same policies, the exact same play, the exact same corporatism. Or at the very least, they'll say, you know, we're going to pause things for here. And then once Democrats get reelected, they kick things back into high gear and keep moving forward. Yeah. I was just thinking about creating the reality we want with our words and how it's kind of disingenuous to say, like, things are they're not because it's like you're a realist i'm kind of an idealist in in this in this

description anyway we're both kind of moderate but there is something to saying like this is the way reality is just describing the way you want it to be even if it's not yet so that people start to believe it and start to work towards it but it's also disingenuous when because this is like no truth but power like you can't just say that something is and that it expect it to be like but if you don't say that it is it's never going to happen so i don't know man it's like you we need we need like an ethical person to manipulate people to the to the ends that we need that it's going to be better for the species. No, see, that's the ends justifying the means. Ethical manipulation sounds like a...

Yeah, it does. It sounds crazy, but that's what we do to each other. We're having a conversation and we're manipulating each other with our words right now. This is like what all of these big NGOs and global billionaire types, elites,

that's their mentality. I'm concerned that without a leader, it's just going to get... Manipulation has an element of negativity to it. I don't think you're doing it with a negative intent to it. Right now, I'm manipulating his hat. I'm holding it. I'm moving it around. I'm manipulating it. It's just a neutral phrase. When you're talking about manipulating a person, you're talking about

controlling them into doing things you want them to do. You're hugging your wife. You're manipulating her body. You're manipulating her. But it's not a negative sense. It can be moderate. It can even be good. If you're pulling someone out of a burning fire, you're manipulating them away from the fire this is a justification for authoritarianism well the thing is without a leader i'm afraid that the the good u.s constitution is going to get scrubbed and burned yeah man you know what the rock in the hard place the reality is that

people on the right be it you know and i I mean this as the colloquial culture war right, which includes centrist libertarians and like post-liberal types as well, that they don't stand up. They don't go out. They almost never protest. When conservatives go out and protest, they get smeared and slammed by the media and labeled as all the worst things in the world. And so for that reason, I think there's a good chance that, not there's a good chance, but the left, the cultural left, the critical race theorist left, all that, they've gained a lot of ground. That being said, I think if you look at the polling coming out of 538

and RealClearPolitics is the aggregates, Republicans and the cultural right have probably gained way more ground. And like you're saying, most people are probably feeling this way more in the middle than anything else, at least out there in the real world. The question is, if the perception is that the majority is on the left, people will be unwilling to speak out. So let me do this. Let me pull up this story and give you a really good example. We have this story from FoxNews.com. VA tech swimmer rips NCAA transgender participation policy.

Feels like the final spot was taken from me. Rekha Gyorgy. Am I pronouncing that wrong? Is it Gyorgy? Gyorgy. Gyorgy. Because Gyorgy sounds really bad. Yeah, it doesn't sound good.

Missed the cut for the... I'm not trying to do that. I just... I don't know. Missed the cut for the consolation final in the 500 free at the NCAA championships. So this swimmer ranked 17th and thus was booted out of the finals and then issued a statement saying it's not fair because Leah Thomas, who won first place, is a biological male and that's why she got bumped. I'll tell you why I take issue with this. And it exemplifies what I was just saying.

A moment ago I was explaining how the culture war right doesn't stand up. Or a better way to put it is the middle, the not super political individuals who are just working and living their lives don't stand up. So you were saying just a moment ago that regular people out there in the world are probably closer to the middle, but they have lives and jobs. The people at this in this competition, the NCAA Women's League, apparently, it's been reported privately, are all outraged that a biological male is competing against biological females, but not a single one of them publicly comes out and says, I am upset about this. I do not feel it is right to have me compete in this situation. They could at the very least say I am issuing a protest to the fact that we are being told

we have to compete against a biological male but I will swim they could do that, they won't even do that and only after the one person who just got bumped by one slot loses do they come out and say this is unfair here's why I find this fascinating where is the person who got 18th? Why aren't they complaining and speaking up?

Oh, because it didn't matter. They would not have won. If Laya Thomas was removed, they'd be 17th. They still would not have made the finals. Why isn't the person who's in 16th complaining? They made the finals. What do they care? The person who got 17th was bumped by one space, and they've got a scapegoat for what's upsetting them.

Now, if people in the middle actually did care about this, and apparently, like, look, behind the scenes, a letter was issued. Parents have been complaining. If they don't speak up and stand up for what they actually believe in and are worried about, then they're just going to lose. And what am I supposed to do, just assume their feelings and speak up for them? I mean, I will. But this is the main issue. Right now, this is a left ideological position that a biological male is competing against females. Leah Thomas is 6'4", broad shoulders, much, much larger than all of the other women.

Was actually, I think, ranked number 8 in the men's division. Now, a lot of people are posting a meme showing that Leah Thomas was ranked 462 or whatever. That was after hormone replacement therapy knocked Leah Thomas to the bottom of the rankings. And then everyone started saying, look, it's a bottom ranked male. Actually, before transitioning was actually one of the top ranked males and now is the number one female. But my point is this, if you're in the middle and you're not paying attention, you're not speaking up, this is what's happening. These people privately are complaining about it. Okay, well, if I know they're mad, at least we can assume they are, they're going to lose everything. These young

women are not going to win gold ever again, and it's their own fault for not standing up and actually issuing a complaint about what's going on. So here's the issue I have with people not standing up for women's sports. They specifically asked for a women's division. I remember learning about Title IX in high school. That was quite a while ago, but that's at the point. And I remember thinking, okay, I think it's cool that women have their own division that they can compete in, that they're only competing against other women. Awesome. If you fought for something like that, you need to defend it.

And women are highly agreeable. I see women just going along to get along. But I tweeted earlier, and I firmly believe that if women don't stand up against this, if women don't refuse to swim with this false swimmer, they deserve to lose. 100%. They deserve to lose all the time. They deserve no more gold

medals ever. They don't deserve their own league. Because if you're not going to stand up for what whoever came before you fought for, then you clearly don't think it's important. You don't think your scholarship's important. I got to add, many of the women in this league have actually spoken up in defense of Leah Thomas. Really?

Yes, 100%. And even in this woman, Rekha Georgi, she actually stated in her complaint, I fully stand with and respect Leah Thomas. She's no different from the rest of us who wake up every day and train hard. It's like, okay. I think, to be completely honest, and I mean this legitimately, Rekha is only complaining because she

lost and she got bumped and she has a scapegoat. I think you're right, and this is exactly a case of women being too agreeable. You can't give someone a foothold like that. You can say, I respect them as an athlete, fine, but they should never compete against other women. But why are you assuming they're opposed? If they publicly say they're for Leah Thomas,

why would anyone assume they're opposed to it? Well, they wrote the letter. They talk behind the scenes. We really don't like being in a locker room with this guy. It's obvious that this makes them uncomfortable and they know there's something wrong, but they're not saying, I will not swim with him. So we'll operate under that premise.

Behind the scenes, we have seen letters issued by the parents complaining, saying their daughters are upset, and they feel like they're being cheated or whatever. Okay. Well, the issue is if publicly they won't fight for it, they lose it. Yeah. So we're operating the assumption they're upset. It's all happening. But these are the regular people who are working, who are going to school.

Deep down, many of them know they're being slighted, being wronged. They're upset. But they won't do anything about it. So what do we do? Look to Caitlyn Jenner, one of the sages of our time. If you're going to talk to anybody about transgender in sports, Caitlyn Jenner is the person. It used to be Bruce Jenner, biological male, transitioned to Caitlyn. Bruce was an Olympic athlete.

I think he won gold medals. I think so, yeah. He was super famous. On Wheaties boxes. Yeah. Of course, the father in the Kardashians, now has transitioned Caitlyn Jenner, and speaks out against this. Says, I have the balls to stand up for women and girls in sports.

Oh, my gosh. Caitlyn Jenner actually said that. I have a tweet. I'm looking at a tweet right now. I retweeted it. Pretty snarky. She says that she's not about to stand up for transgender rights. She's here to protect women's sports.

That's the point. And transgender rights, yeah, you're going to get transgender rights. But women in sports and women's sports is a unique, it needs to be protected. I think that Caitlyn is a perfect person to speak out about this because Caitlyn used to compete at the Olympic level and then transitioned to try to be more feminine. So here, let's look at the tweet. Oh, my gosh. Caitlyn Jenner was responding to Pink News, who said, Caitlyn Jenner launches in another disgraceful attack on trans athletes without a hint of irony. And Caitlyn Jenner said, no, I just had the balls to stand up for women and girls in sports.

And I didn't believe that tweet was real. No, yeah. And a bunch of other people were responding to screenshots of it saying there's no way that's real. That's real. But it's real. That's real. But it's real. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, look, I don't know. You know, going back to what we were saying before in the previous conversation about

just everything that's been going on in the culture war, if most people are upset about what's happening and feel like they're in the middle ground, but none of them actually speak up, then it's just going to get worse. I would even say that that's proof that they're Caitlyn Jenner's part of the middle ground. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. She probably disagrees with somebody like Ben Shapiro on The Daily Wire on certain trans

issues, but she also obviously disagrees with the idea of somebody who was born as a biological man competing with a biological woman in a sport. But I think the issue is that what we would refer to as the right in the culture war incorporates post-liberal all the way to far right, actually. So you have this massively eclectic group of people with varying different opinions. Caitlyn Jenner would absolutely be considered

on the right. Blair White, whose trans is considered right-wing. Who else? Jimmy Dore. They call him a leftist with an asterisk. Because they're like, well, sure, he's a socialist, but, you know, he just espouses right wing talking point. So he's right wing. So so the issue is what Caitlyn Jenner would be. I mean, it is called right wing. So they're not part of the left wing argument in the cultural debate. The middle ground, if you're actually talking about how people feel, the middle ground is right-wing. That's another reason why I would say there's no middle. Because if you come out and say,

like me, for instance, I say I support progressive taxes. Admittedly, I think it's a problem just to take money and give to the government. But I think income inequality is a huge problem. I think systemic racism is a problem. I'm pro-choice. They would say I'm still

right wing, even if I hold those positions are clearly social left. You know, right now, right now, I mean, we'll get into the story in a second about Dave Rubin and conservatives. But if I say things that are clearly economically left and social left, doesn't matter. Because my view of the world or my ideas on civil libertarianism don't sync up with the left, they would say it's right wing. So then if my positions are not in the middle, then what's the middle? It depends on where you're standing. Yeah.

It's all relative. Yeah. No idea. No, I think it's intended to be obfuscatively confusing. Well, the issue is that the left, the far left, is controlling all of the institutions. So in a perfect world, we could just ignore all of this and say, well, 99% of people are in what would be considered the middle by the far left. They're not really right. They just don't agree with the far left.

There's a meme about it. There's a meme, the political compass, where the top authoritarian left says the left and everything else is far right. Yeah. Is it the left that controls every institution or sir or would it be a neoliberal kind of people like would you consider somebody like sergey brin you know somebody that you know the ceo of apple or the ceo of google or the ceo of facebook are those leftists or are those people who are more neoliberal who will tweet the right thing at certain times but never actually stand so the so the issue is when we're speaking about, at least when we do, it's hard to define our words. Here on this show, the left includes leftists and neoliberal establishment.

And the reason is that the leftists tend to align with, support, or vote for the neoliberals. Biden being a good example. So I'll say ContraPoints, for instance, is a prominent trans woman and leftist YouTuber, but made a video saying you have to vote for Joe Biden. That being the case, you'll see many of these people on the left, like Vosh, we've had on the show, will call me a conservative.

He clearly sees himself contrasted with me, even though he comes on the show and we agree on certain things. Granted, he's been accused of harboring very abhorrent views himself, whatever. What he believes is entirely unto himself. The issue is that it's more like, it's like what matters most is tribe, not principle or fact. So I can come out and be like, I think Donald Trump represents

the worst of American culture, but I certainly think he was the better choice to vote for. Whereas the left is like, we don't care about all of the corruption we've complained about three years ago with Hillary Clinton. We're going to vote for Joe Biden anyway. Or they make up some reason to hate Donald Trump or leftists agree with the mainstream media's narratives

even though they've been lied to 800 times in the past 10 minutes. So at that point, you can see the distinction between the spheres of influence. There's a bunch of different ways to define the different factions. But in the right, you have people who are skeptical and discerning of news and demanding of facts. And on the left, you have the media reported this time, so it must be true. Oh, that was wrong.

But this one, the media reported, so it must be true. Are they? Because I've seen a lot of right-wing Facebook people that I know, and they don't seem very discerning of a lot of the garbage that gets posted on Facebook. Yeah, I mean, if we're talking about regular laymen, you're going to see a mixed bag of people who believe random nonsense. I get a lot of news articles in my comments from somebody who says, hey, check this out, look at this, and then I'll check out the article, and I'll say, oh, that's a lot of interesting stuff that they didn't cite, and then I'll Google it, and it'll just all be BS, clarify, too. I specifically mean among the leaders of talking, sharing ideas, writing articles. You'll see on the left they repeatedly fall for every single hoax. The right certainly does fall for some. We had this conversation last week, but I can go through the whole list of every Black Lives Matter protest that turned out to be a false narrative,

like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery is a really good example, just over and over and over again. Then you can look at the Covington kids. You can look at Jesse Smollett. You can look at Russiagate, Ukrainegate. All of these stories proven to be false. The laptop being the most egregious. And the issue is when you have leftists and neoliberals either pretending to believe

or genuinely believing stories that keep getting proven false. I think Trayvon uh jesse smollett would be different categories altogether one is an area of fun of somewhat disagreement on how something should have gone and the other was i just made this up well no no no trayvon martin was the media edited the 9-1-1 call from from george zimmerman to make it seem like oh okay that's what it is you're talking about also where they made george z Zimmerman look whiter by photoshopping him. Yeah, so what I mean is that people keep falling for me.

I understand for that. Yeah, the corporate press will put out a lie, and then one group of people just says, that's true. And then six months later, they're like, well, it was wrong, but this story's true. I remember seeing when they edited the way that he looked, when they edited his facial color, that was kind of aggravating. Well, they edited the 911 call, where the 911 operator asked his race. They cut that part out. So it sounded like he was just saying he's suspicious looking because he's black. But what really happened was he says he looks suspicious.

And they said, how tall is he? He's like 5'10". And what's he wearing? He's wearing a hoodie. And what's his race? I think he's black. They edited all that out. So Michael Brown hands up, don't shoot.

Now you have don't say gay. Just media lie after media lie after media lie and these people just keep believing it at a certain point I have to say they're probably not believing it they're probably just lying the problem with doing things like that that erodes people's trust is that they're willing to go to the other side and the other side

can lie to them as much as they want because they have gotten because they just don't like this side as much as they do and it happens people who just all of a sudden are like my political belief is now you know been swayed because i'm hearing an argument from someone who's been honest to me about these other issues when somebody's honest to you about these things that you've been lied to it's very easy for that person to lie to you about everything else and for you to be less critical and then for the pendulum to swing in the other direction and go back and forth yeah so you know the way i see it is at a certain point people will see like

10 stories in the mainstream press that are all lies. And then they'll turn to a conservative and say, tell me the truth. And they'll say, well, you know those things are lies, right? Okay, now this was a truth. Here's the truth here. And they'll say, okay, I believe you. Because I don't know who else to trust, right? If you're honest to me about these issues, you're probably honest about this one. And so, you know, ultimately, therein lies the big problem, which is the middle ground, I guess the right,

are people who just don't trust the establishment anymore. Is that one way to put it? It's like the media reports it, and you're like, I don't believe it. I kind of see it a little bit more as weak-minded people and strong-minded people. You get weak-minded people on any side, extreme leftists, extreme rightists, people that just buy the bull. And that's the matter. Not everyone's always weak-minded people on any side, extreme leftists, extreme rightists, people that just buy the bull. And that's the matter. Not everyone's always weak-minded.

Sometimes strong-minded people become weak-minded because of bad diet, not enough sleep, stress. Sometimes weak-minded people get strong-minded because of adversity. They struggle through adversity. But that's more of a category as I split these people. Let's pull up this smear. Oh, boy. Forbes publishes an article titled, Dave Rubin is being rejected by his own audience.

Oh, all right. All right. Well, a lot of people have criticisms, uh, criticisms of Dave Rubin, but,

um, I don't think this headline actually fits what is being accused of Dave Rubin. It's the weirdest. It's clearly a lie. And this is once again, the game being played. The story is I'll simplify it and then we'll go through it. Dave Rubin and his husband are having two children through surrogacy.

Prominent Christian conservatives say, I disagree with gay marriage and I disagree with birth through surrogacy. Therefore, you know, we'll issue statements of criticism towards Dave Rubin. That's very, very different from saying that his own audience has turned against him because like a handful of public figures who are Christian conservatives are having conversations with him where they say they disagree and they don't like his lifestyle. You know, if his audience turned against him, you'd expect like he's losing millions of subscribers or, you know, tens of thousands. He's getting disliked like crazy.

And that's not happening. So here's the point of this article, in my opinion. They've not written an article to inform anyone of anything. They've written an article to just rile up people who already hate Dave Rubin so they can be like, ha-ha, I was right the whole time. Dave Rubin's a bad person. I don't genuinely know if anything is to be gained by media doing things like this. And so I'll do a throwback.

When you said that Twitter is just negative impulses, I think that's where the entirety of the media is at. Well, if I read Forbes' own description of themselves, the first reaction that I have to this before I even care about the story is they say Forbes is a global media company focusing on business, investment, technology, entrepreneurship, and leadership. And like you're writing about a dude that decided to have a kid while he's gay with husband. Yeah, that's right. Slow News Day. I mean, why don't I don't care. I mean, why? Yeah, maybe what we need. There's a lot of money to be made

in making people think the world is worse than it is, the world is more divided than it is, and we hate each other more than we do. And I think everybody's looking to get in on it as much as humanly possible, and I find it disgusting.

Not everybody, but enough people are that it's raising an alarm bell. I would say there are certainly the grifters, as we call them, who want to get in on it. I wonder if also people are genuinely just in that world, it's making it worse and it's making it more pronounced. So the more stories like this come out, the more people get riled up, the more they talk about it.

I genuinely think there are a lot of people on the left who truly believe what they're saying. And every day they come out saying, you know, the Republicans are worse than the Nazis or whatever. I think they really believe it. I think they justify it in their own minds. I certainly think there are people on the right who do the same to the left. However, I think the tendency on the right is they tend to know what the left is thinking. So they have a more balanced view of what the culture war actually is. And the left just keeps one up, one upping everything and getting more and more absurd. Yeah, that's definitely true. And I think one of the things that I have observed with the right is that people say, oh, well, one of the things I've noticed that the right is constantly more well-versed in what the left thinks than the left is in what the right thinks, because we are

constantly exposed to what the left believes, because as I said earlier, the left is in charge of the institutions, especially journalism. And that's why I think that such a majority of Twitter is so left-leaning is because most of them are journalists. How do you define that, though? I mean, when I hear somebody say the left, that could be almost anything from Michael Bloomberg to Vosh. I mean, that's a very, very large spectrum. It does include. Yeah, it is a spectrum. Yeah, for sure.

So the challenge when having conversations, actually, someone super chatted this. They said there's no middle ground. There's only uninformed people or something like that. And so the issue is. I would disagree. I think that person probably has 40 different things that they most likely down a checklist like this, this, this, this, this. And if somebody disagrees with them on one of them. It depends on where you're at, right?

So if you're an economic left on like health care and you go to a health care convention where there's like a bunch of conservatives talking and you're arguing for universal healthcare, they're going to call you a leftist. You know what I mean? So if it depends on which issue you're particular, you're specifically on. Yeah. But, uh, to back to my earlier point though, uh, that point I made earlier, if you're in the middle genuinely and you stand up and speak out, you're instantly right wing. So for instance, these, uh, the reason the NCAA swimmers won't speak up about the biological male in the competition is because, as they've stated privately, they're scared they'll be

ostracized or kicked out and won't be able to compete, or they'll lose all their career opportunities, they'll be kicked out of school, or generally just have their life ruined. These are people who are in the middle. I mean, these are people who are not pronounced one way or the other, who can't say a word because they'll be called far right. If someone, if I went to give a speech and someone started calling me a name, like, hey, rightist, hey, you're far left, hey, you're a centrist, I would see that as them deflecting what I'm talking about and avoiding the conversation. It's just kind of like a placation. It doesn't... People try to figure out who you are so they

can figure out whether they should dismiss your beliefs without engaging with them. What a crazy world we live in. I understand that you do want to discern. I don't want to go smell the poop to know that it stinks. I already know it stinks. I don't need to know every piece of poop to know that poop stinks.

COVID for me was one of the best examples that there was somewhat diminishing middle ground in public discourse. For instance, I'll get all of these comments that say, you know, the reason that this stuff still exists is because idiots like you were wearing a mask in the beginning. The more you, if you comply, you will never stop. People in the store were wearing masks back when the television

told us that you were a hypochondriac if you did that. We did that because I told them very clearly, if everybody gets sick at the same time, payroll here is $20,000 a week. Rent is $12,000 a month. Here's how much money is in the bank. Here's how much I can afford to pay you all if you all get sick and we don't have any money. So everybody decided to wear one just because we didn't know what the hell was going on yet.

So let's just say, I didn't close my business. I'm not going to close my business and just not make anything for that entire time and just economically destroy myself. So people who were a little bit more left would say, I got hate mail under my door for April of 2020, consistently. For being open. Yeah, because I was staying there to finish the shipping because the shipping person and the receptionist were staying home. So I was doing the job of both.

So I would stay a little late and I would go to the bathroom after closing the lights and come back and I'd see hate mail under my door after 8. But they would say, how dare you? You're some evil capitalist staying open. And then people that were on the right would say, you know, you pussy. Why are you wearing a mask? And it's like, I mean, I'm not saying that you should have to close your business. I'm not saying that you should have to close your business.

But I'm going to do the basic things that I can do just to, if there's any chance of it, increasing my likelihood of surviving and increasing likelihood of the business surviving. Why not? And it was just one or the other from so many people, and it was very boring. So the person said there's no middle ground. I think there is middle ground. Even on an issue like COVID, I am not going to say, it's usually either this doesn't exist, this is a hoax, you're an idiot, or be afraid until 2030.

And it's like, there is a middle ground of, I will live my life. Here are the minor modifications I will make that don't have a cost. Here are the modifications that have a great cost that I'm not willing to make. And I weigh it and I do it that way. But is the middle ground having an impact on policy? Is the middle ground having an impact on policy? Yeah, I think the answer is no. Well, I did see the CBS has did an article about Hunter Biden's laptop.

It's on CBS now. I think that us being kind of a middle ground, I feel like a middle ground force pushing this Hunter Biden thing. It's broken through. It's affecting policy. Only after it doesn't matter. It's policy. It is. It doesn't matter. I mean, just to get that knowledge out into the mainstream is important because it may in 2024 end up being a bigger deal than we realize. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. But I wonder if that has anything to do with the middle ground. I mean, the conversation on Hunter Biden's laptop needed to happen in October, and it was shut down by big tech and the corporate press. I don't think the middle ground has as much of an effect on policy.

If it did, again, in New York, you had mask mandates, business closures, and everything else. In other states, they're saying if you want somebody, if you, let's say, if you ask the schools to make people wear masks, you know, we're not going to give you money. So it's literally one way or the other. It's the radicals on each side that have an effect on policy. But see, so here's the issue I take with that is if in Florida they say schools can't require masks, that's the government telling the government it has restrictions. If the government tells a private individual they can't open their business,

that's the government imposing on private individuals. One's bad, one's government restriction. I would rather err on the Florida side than the New Yorkork side just to make it obvious where i am there but uh i didn't even know if our that order applied to repair shops because they actually edited on march 20th 2020 when cuomo did the pause order it read as if the only places that can stay open are places that are doing technology repair for the government and then they edited the website to make it sound like it was anybody that are doing technology repair for the government. And then they edited the website to make it sound like it was anybody that is doing technology repair. But I still stayed open. I would err on the side of Florida before the side of New York.

The other thing is, in terms of the COVID response at the governmental level, the left would say, like, oh, Trump's failures or the Republicans' failures led to X deaths. Whereas you had, you know, Cuomo, Wolf, you had, what's his face in New Jersey? What was it? was it murphy murphy yeah you had um um man whitmer you had whitmer and and who else did it who else what was the other governor some i think uh illinois did it they all literally murdered people right yeah right so they so during covid they they actually with knowledge put covid patients in nursing homes resulting in mass death. Cuomo, for instance,

was warned by his chief of health or whatever. If you put sick people in nursing homes, you will kill people. He doesn't strike me as the type of person that likes to be told no by anybody. So think about what that means. I mean, on the right, it's like we're not going to... the government will not intervene, but then people will die if you don't.

Well, it's your responsibility to figure out for yourself. The government's not going to impose on the private establishments. Though they do for a lot of reasons. In this instance, they were limited. And then in all of these big Democrat governorship states, they were like, oh, I mean, we'll literally kill people. They didn't have to.

In New York, they had the Javits Center. They could have put sick people in the Javits Center and only reached 30% capacity. They used that. I think, didn't they have the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers build a hospital in the Javits Center? They did. And it was at 30% capacity. But instead of putting patients there, Cuomo said, you know, he'd rather just kill elderly people in nursing homes. I know they sent the USS Comfort, but there were a lot of complaints saying that they were not allowed to take a bunch of different patients.

So it kind of wound up, they claimed it was more of a PR stunt for Trump than it was actually helping. I only read one article on that, so I'm not as well informed. But I know that the Javits Center was supposed to be built to be a hospital. Yeah, and it wasn't. It wasn't used. I mean, 30%, I think, was as high as it got. 70% of the real estate in that city probably isn't even used. I mean, they could have built a lot.

So therein lies the main point. Once again, back to what we were talking about, if you go to the middle and ask them, they'd say, put the sick people in the Javits Center. But the Democratic establishment was like, no, kill the elderly in the nursing homes. And it was done in like five different states. Was that the Democratic establishment or was that Cuomo being a dumbass? If it was just Cuomo, then you would have seen it with Whitmer, Murphy, Wolf, and Newsom. All of these different Democrat governors all doing the same thing. Did they all have a nursing home scandal?

Because I didn't follow every other state. The only thing I know about Whitmer was the Walmart thing where you're allowed to go into aisle 11 but not 13. Right, yeah. Let's triple check, though. You want to pull that up? I'm pretty sure they all did the same thing. Yeah, I believe so.

And in fact, one of our- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In Pennsylvania, it was Rachel Levine, the transgender admiral- She took her mother out. Who took their parents out of the nursing home before they did it. So, I mean, they knew what they were doing. Well, one of our friends, Charlie Lee Duff, is actually suing Governor Whitmer over this stuff.

Right. Yeah, so I know it happened there. And it wasn't as big a scandal as it was with Cuomo, but it was a very real problem for them. Yeah, it was almost like an afterthought from the Cuomo thing, but it is a big deal. Yeah. You got it too, Jim?

So all of these governors did the same thing, and the people at the highest level knew what was going on. Clearly. Now, it's possible it wasn't coordinated, but they were at least communicating as to what was happening with each other and taking actions. Meanwhile, regular people were seeing their parents die in nursing homes. So again, you go to an average person in the middle,

and they'll be like, hey, this is really, really bad. But if you come out and say the things we're saying right now, they'll call you right wing. Maybe I can talk about this later. I'm just looking at Rachel Levine. All right, we'll save it for the after. The health minister of the United States. That's who that is.

Let's talk about New York. Let's talk about New York City. We got this from the Daily Mail. NYC has worst unemployment rate in the U.S. at 7.6 because Manhattan workers and international tourists still haven't returned to crime-ridden city post-COVID. I don't think it's the crime. I think it's the expense. I mean, if you have a business that was, most people don't like change. Most companies don't like change. So if you have a company that's massively profitable, why would you want to switch your entire management style

and take a giant risk by having everybody work from home? But if your arm is twisted and you have no choice, it's either A, you go out of business, or B, you figure out how to make people work from home, you'll figure out how to make people work from home. And then once you figure out how to make everybody work from home, now you can say, you know what? Instead of paying $300,000 a month in rent for the entire floor of this office, what if we just paid 10 for a satellite office? You're saving $290,000 a month. And if that's the case, why are you going to have everybody return? What's the point? I've walked home several times to my old apartment in Bed-Stuy from Manhattan on 27th Street. Maybe it's just because I'm used to it or I grew up there or I'm missing something, but

I haven't felt any fear of crime on my walk home, more than at least what I've ever felt. But it's just all these places, all these office buildings, all these stores, they all save for rent. I think that's the reason. It's just if the office workers haven't returned, if the businesses haven't returned, then there's going to be less work for people. Think about this, too. If you're a business based in New York, let's say you're like BuzzFeed, right? And all you really do is you have people sit around writing articles about stupid garbage. But they could write those garbage articles anywhere. Yeah.

Now, cost of living in New York is high. It's very high. I think it's the highest in the country, right? I think so. It goes up every year. It goes up every year. And plus, New York City has the highest taxes, highest income taxes. So New York State plus city taxes makes your income tax the highest.

California as a state has the highest, but I think New York City having like a 3% city. It's like 3 or 3.5% for city, 6 or 6.5% for state. And I think it's slightly lower if you make less but that's approximately what it is i don't even think it's the tax that does it i think it's just the sheer well not having to come back to work no no the point i'm making i'm what i'm pointing out with the with the taxes is that the cost of living is high the average person needs to make like six figures to have a middle class life i think new york state's like 150 to 175k you need to make to be considered middle class

because of the cost of living being so high. Like $3,000 on average for rent. I think it's gone up to like $4,000. So you're BuzzFeed and you're like, if I want to hire someone in New York to come in the office and write about Brad Pitt's junk or whatever, I got to spend $175,000 for mid-tier talent.

Well, in rural, upstate or even in central PA, where the cost of living is low, they can do the same work. We can do virtual meetings, you can metaverse or whatever. We can pay them $60. Alright, hire the guy in PA. So now the dude who's sitting in New York, whose

talent tree includes writing about Brad Pitt's junk, is sitting there being like, I can't get a job anywhere. Do you think that California making it, I think that what they did was made it illegal to have people not be employees but to be contractors for writers and vloggers. Was that a good or a bad move? Bad move. It wiped out so much of their digital industry. It's a laugh.

It would be bad. It was the unions that pushed for this bill. Did you hear about this in California? I haven't. So this was, I think, like two years ago or more longer. The unions pushed for this bill that said companies can't hire contractors for a certain amount of tasks. And so this would result in like Uber having to hire people. I think Uber may have got an amendment that defeated it or something.

But it meant that if you were a writer, a freelance writer, you could only write like 30 articles per year or something like that. It was like a month. Yeah, it was a really low amount per month. Yeah, so like the average person might write like five or six articles per day. Now you can only do 30. Well, the company, the California company just says, okay, your contract is terminated. There's a guy in Arizona who can write the same thing for me and he can work all day every day because Arizona doesn't have those laws. Or actually what it was is companies in New York fired all of their California contractors and freelancers.

Just overnight. It was like SB Nation, a Vox company, like terminated all of their California freelancers. Yeah, it just doesn't synergize with the COVID narrative of work from home. Well, this was before COVID. Yeah. It was before COVID. I wonder if it was like a prep for this kind of contingency.

I don't know, man. The working from home thing changed my life. I used to work always on location, and then in 2010, I started working with mines, and we just kind of worked from our laptops from a Starbucks or wherever. And man, the commute is really draining. I don't know. You say you take your electric bike to work now. That might be kind of refreshing, 20 minutes on an electric bike.

It's fun. But still, even if I didn't actually have to make that 20- or 30-minute trip, why would I? Exactly. And especially if I could pay $1,000 in rent instead of $12,000 in rent, then why would I not do that? I think a lot of this is driven by economics more than it is by crime. But you have a physical location in New York City, right? Unfortunately. So people have to physically walk in and hand you something to fix.

I mean, you could theoretically do the remote. If what, you bought something in the middle of nowhere and said, ship me your phone and I'll fix it. Yeah, but that would still require the employees to commute to that location to do the job. I just mean for like New York City, like your job requires you to be a service on the ground in New York City for people of New York City. Some things we're not going to be able to, you know, automate or remote or whatever. Some things are never going to really be remote, fully remote.

But a lot of stuff is. Does this, you know, has it forced you to spend more money or I'm sorry, charge more money for your services in New York City? Like the fact that industry, you know, all these buildings are shut down, less people are working on appointments, very, very high. You having to have a physical brick and mortar location, I'd assume costs are going up, right? My costs went, all of my prices went up in 2012 when I opened a real store rather than just, you know, work out of the park or anything like that. I haven't raised my prices anymore now because when people lose their jobs and everything else costs more money, they tend to not want to spend more money on their repairs. If your grocery bill is twice as much and you just lost your job

from COVID, you're probably not. If anything, people were asking for discounts nonstop in 2020 and early 2021. But have your costs gone up now in the past couple of years with the pandemic? My costs haven't gone up as a business. They went up not because of what happened, but because I moved in 2019 at pretty much the worst possible time. I almost tripled my rent at the worst possible time because business was doing this. And then I move and then it's like... But food prices are up as well.

I mean, food and gas and everything is up. That's got to have an impact on your business, right? Personal, yes. For the business, not really. I just feel like in the long run from this, all of it points towards certain things are going to become more expensive. Certain things are going to become cheaper.

Things that have to be physical will probably get more expensive and things that don't have to be will probably get cheaper. I don't see how rents can get any more expensive in New York City, but it continues to. I know. It's going to get to a point where they're like, hey, no one lives here anymore. Let's just drop the rent back down to a thousand bucks. I don't think anything there is supposed to be rented. This started as a – I didn't even intend for this to be like a real video series.

I just was looking for a new store in 2019, and I was so aggravated that every time I'd see a place they lied about it, I said, I'm going to buy one of those little laser measurers, and I'm going to record the next time. What did they lie about? Well, they would say it was 1,800 square feet. I would show up and it would be 800. I have my camera and I go, okay, so this says 800. You said 1,800. Why? And that video series

is probably the most successful thing I've ever done on YouTube. 99% of my channel probably doesn't even know that I fix MacBooks. They just see me as the real estate person because of that. But a lot of these places, they would say, if you don't rent it, it will be rented next week. We have all these clients lined up and then I'll show up a year or two or three years later and it's all empty. So why don't you lower the price like a little bit? You have spaces that are the size of my store, which was 12,500 when I first rented it. They

were going for 75,000 a month and it's the same size as my location, just two blocks this way. And they still won't be rented three or four or five years later. And more and more of the city looks like this and the prices never go down with anything. The office prices stay like that and they stay empty. So this was happening before COVID. The fact – there was just something needed to happen to kind of prick this little bubble. So has it gotten better or it's still getting worse or what? No, I mean I still walk by these places every day.

Are they owned by megacorps that are writing off the losses on their taxes or something? I have no idea. The best thing that I can imagine was this gentleman I'll quote on Reddit, Laminar Flow, who was saying that a lot of these properties, let's say the mortgage will be owned by a bunch of investors as a commercial mortgage-backed security. And I'm probably misphrasing this because I read it a year and a half ago. But you can't simply – if you lower the rents in the property, the value of it goes down. If the value of it goes down, well, your collateral is the actual building, which means that the

owner of the property would have to give up that amount of money or just default on the mortgage. You'd write off your losses. You could save money on taxes by doing that. No, you can't. If you actually advertise the space at a lower rent, it winds up saying, meaning that the building is worth less. If the building is worth less, then your own...

If you have a mortgage on it, your collateral is the building. Let's say the building is worth $3 million. Now it's worth $2 million. You, as the building owner, need to now give the bank $1 million in collateral, in cash, or in something else. I don't think that's true. I have mortgages and stuff. I did read this on Reddit. i do think it is possible for mortgages to call in if the value

of the house drops too low and the bank panics but i'm but i'm not sure exactly how that works i don't know how it works with commercial mortgage-backed securities it was the closest thing that sounded like it made any sense but i can't pretend i know i think what might be happening right now is prices because uh demand is low, prices actually are dropping. But the reason you see the rent going up is because inflation is actually outpacing the rate at which the building should be decreasing in value based on supply and demand.

You know what I mean? A lot of these spaces are still going for $100 to $500 a square foot. Yeah. And it's like, that doesn't make sense. That didn't even make sense before COVID because before COVID, these spaces were all empty empty so after covid what if people have left then it definitely doesn't make sense well before covid it's just new york prime real estate you're going

to hold on to it because it's valuable during covid everything was you know decreasing in value but inflation was actually getting really really bad and it's been consistently bad every month at for the past what six months every month it's like inflation is at a record. Inflation is at a new record. It's like inflation hasn't been this high since the 80s, since the 80s. And it's going up a little bit. If you actually do the calculation based on the 80s numbers, then inflation right now is actually the worst it's been since World War II. Then you also see the accusations. I think it might have been Thomas Massey who said this. Nancy Pelosi included a 21% congressional budget increase. Either that means she's giving everybody

like a big raise during a crisis or to cover the cost of inflation for their congressional budgets, they just did a 21% increase, which says a whole lot about what inflation might actually be. So if the actual demand for these places is non-existent or gone down dramatically, then it should go from $100 a square foot

to maybe $30 a square foot, right? Then inflation hits and it spikes right back up because it's New York and things are just getting crummy. Even if it was 20% inflation, if it went from 100 to 30, then it should only go up to, let's say, 36 or 38 or 40. But I mean, New York has, 36 or 38 or 40. But I mean, like New York has a substantially higher cost of living. So going from 100 to 30 was just maybe hyperbolic.

If it goes from 100 to like 85 and then it jumps up another 16, it goes back up to 100. So inflation, I mean, maybe. I'm just speculating to be completely honest. I honestly don't know where we're going to go from here because I think almost all work we're seeing now from most of the millennial generation and lower is just not real work. To be completely honest, what we're doing is work. I read the news all day every day, so I know stuff and I read all this stuff. But, man, it's kind of crazy to me that we sit in a room talking about things and it generates revenue. And I can buy food with it. Man, I don't make bread.

I don't farm anything. That's wild. There are people who work at BuzzFeed who, like I said, write about Brad Pitt's junk or whatever, and they make $60,000 a year. And that's crazy because the dude loading the plane, I swear, I think we're very close to some kind of, you know, Occupy-style revolt or whatever. Maybe this will be a catalyst in the Civil War or something like that. That the people who load planes so that you can travel around get paid probably 15 bucks an hour at this point. Yet the dude sitting in an office in New York with a finger up their nose wondering like how can I call Trump racist today is getting paid $40 an hour. That is mind blowing to me. Something doesn't make sense. Certainly I think working

class people are going to lose it and just be like, I am done with whatever this is. I mean, think about this. Let's say you work at an airline. I say this job because I did it. And we got paid $10 an hour back in 2008. Let's say you're working that job and you're getting $15 an hour right now.

Or maybe even $20 still. And then you're doing this job and you look up in that plane and you're getting $15 an hour right now, or maybe even $20 still. And then you're doing this job, and you look up in that plane, and you're thinking to yourself, like, you know, truth be told, when you work for these companies, you get to fly for free. You have to pay the taxes on it, but you get non-rev flights standby. But you're wondering, like, what is that guy up there doing, that 25-year-old dude with those thick black-framed glasses? What does he do for a living that he gets to fly on this trip to Nassau to go to the Bahamas, man? I wish I could do that. Here I am doing all of this

hard backbreaking work, 50,000 pounds per day, loading these planes. And I don't make enough money to go on these vacations. And who's that guy? I wonder what his job is. Now, these guys are probably assuming like must be a tech guy, must be a finance guy. And then the dude up there with the black frame glasses is like Brad Pitt's junk was seen in a movie today and he's making all that money so he can fly to the bahamas like this system is broken if you were to ask me yeah i have a feeling that the megacorps are coming to buy all the land not all the land but a lot of property and like black rock um state street they're gonna buy up a bunch of property and then there may be a revolt an american revolt against the corporate land owners because it's like you may own it on paper but if you're not there

you don't really have control of the property um they'll have private security and then it's up to is the american government going to support the corporations and the the law that says that they own it or are they going to support the people and the freedom against corporate monopoly because if you want to print 80 trillion dollars and then give it to BlackRock to buy $80 trillion worth of property before inflation and then destroy the economy, BlackRock doesn't get to own that property. You will own nothing and you will be happy. Well, I suspect what's more likely

to foment a revolution, because this infuriated me and I'm incredibly patient, was something like the Bloomberg opinion talking about ways to save money. Some of the things you can do are not treat your pet if they have cancer. Take the bus and eat lentils instead of meat. So did it actually say not treat your pet if they have cancer?

Literally said that. Pets are a luxury. Insane. Look, sooner or later, you all will realize you will own nothing and you'll be happy. Also, lentils are banging, by the way. That's fine. Yeah, lentils are fine. I don't care about that. Let's talk about owning nothing and being happy. Yes. We have this story from Wired. It's actually from a month ago, but it gets into the core of right to repair.

It says, a fight over the right to repair cars turns ugly. In the wake of a voter-approved law, Subaru and Kia dealers in Massachusetts have disabled systems that allow remote starts and send maintenance alerts. Now, I'm not super interested just in that because I want to talk about the bigger picture, but I think this shows an interesting issue as it pertains to these big corporations and the rest of us who will eventually own nothing and be happy. I'd just like to point out, like your iPhone, what is it? You don't actually own the software on it. You have a license to it, and they could brick – oh, you can keep the phone, but we'll brick it remotely because we own the software and you lose your license to it. This is a problem because we're losing ownership in things. We don't own movies anymore. We don't own the software and you lose your license to it. This is a problem because we're losing ownership in things. We don't own movies anymore.

We don't own the software on computers. And when it comes to you actually buying a phone, you can't even fix it without the company, what, they're denying your warranties. So, Louis, you're actually the right-to-repair guy, right? Yeah. I try to be. All right, so tell us what's going on with this.

And, yeah, what's up with what this means? There was a 2012 law that was passed in massachusetts where the the automotive manufacturers would have to give independent dealer independent mechanics access to what's needed to be able to repair your car so diagnostic software and everything else you'd have to make that available to them and there was one loophole in it with regard to wireless so there was so if you are doing all this stuff wirelessly then you won't have to deal with that law. So they were trying to close that loophole before everything winds up being done wirelessly so that they don't get locked out. And there was a ballot initiative, and I believe it was 75 percent in favor, 25 percent opposed.

And a group called Coalition – To get rid of the wireless loophole or what? Well, to pass this so that there wouldn't be any sort of loophole so that you'd still be able to. And the idea that they're saying is that people now, if you allow these independent mechanics to be able to use diagnostic software on the car, and also they were going to create some sort of open data protocol so that they would be able to access it, that they would then be able to follow you to a garage and sexually assault you. Wait, what? Well, there were a bunch of commercials done where there was a woman walking to her car

and it was a nice, very, very dark blue lighting. And she's getting into her car and this scary music is playing. And right as before she opens her car window, she looks behind herself and she's about to get smacked by some dude. And the implication is that that dude is the car mechanic. Like the car mechanic was kidnapping women.

And then there was another one where this car mechanic is slowly walking up on the garage. This woman is slowly closing the garage door. He opens it up and then he walks into her home. And you hear the scary music playing in the background. The implication is that's the dude that fixes your car. This was paid for by Ford, Honda, Nissan, General Motors, and

Toyota. They each contributed $4-5 million for those commercials. They were all scrubbed from the internet entirely because why would you want to be associated with this after you lose? But I archived them on my channel and that's what they were doing to try to get people to vote against it is there a way to search for this real quick while you're talking it's on my channel i think it's a right to i forget the title of my own video which is really really remember it's somewhere on my channel but if you look for uh if you if you just look for the ballot

initiative actually what do you search for? I don't know. Right to repair sexual assault probably is what it was. How long ago was it? This was in August of 2020. Okay, so not too long ago. Yeah, this was August 2020 that I made that video. And I put the video there, and you can't find it anymore.

And their website is completely scrubbed. They were trying to scare your average voter into believing that if independents were able to work on your car, that they'll be able to assault you in a parking lot and break into your home. It's called lobbyists imply right to repair helps domestic abusers push racism. Yeah, that's it. They also said it was racist.

Lobbyists imply right to repair. If you search that, you'll find it. They also said it was racist, which is something we got accused of in this very state. The right to repair was racist? Yeah, yeah. I got accused of that literally two weeks ago. It's in this video, so if you fast forward to a minute, you go there you go let's play this all right personal data stored in your vehicle domestic violence advocates say a sexual predator could use the data to stalk their victims pinpoint exactly where you are whether you are alone even take control of your vehicle

vote no same thing with OnStar she should be looking behind herself the whole time she's walking through that place alone firstly you'd hear footsteps they're looking to overturn that ballot initiative and they've been in court for this entire time

and the judge is actually starting to get kind of aggravated with their arguments and what they were saying because they said it's impossible for us to comply with this yet then kia and subaru complied by simply disabling their wireless systems altogether which is it's a discussion as to whether that's complying with it or evading it but it aggravated the judge so the judge is likely gonna there's a good chance that this winds up getting held up and uh yeah i mean if you buy a car you should be able to fix it you should be able to get access to the diagnostic tools. This shouldn't be something where it's like dealing with Apple where if you want to be able to diagnose it, you have to wait for somebody to get a stolen schematic off of a truck in China somewhere so that you could fix the $40,000 car that you own.

I just want to point out the absurdity of them trying to play the racism angle where it's just like they're probably sitting in a room like, how can we get people to not be okay with this? Ooh, call them racist. That actually worked. What, really? Yeah, in March of 2020, there was a right-to-repair bill hearing in Maryland. And there was one person who said, you know, this bill talks about making source code available, which it doesn't. It doesn't mention source code once. It's never in the bill.

And I said, you know, and he said that, well, you know, by the way, viruses don't just appear out of nowhere. They appear because people have access to the source code. You could immediately hear every single person who was a Linux developer or systems administrator who knows that over 60% of the Internet is run on Linux, which is open source, like just banging their head against the wall listening to this. So I did a video saying with the testimony because I went there to record it. And I also testified in this hearing to explain why this was wrong. And I listened to that video. I've listened to that video like 100 times since I did it. I don't hear anything racist in it.

I try to channel my own like Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo to try to figure out what I could have said or done that was wrong, and I don't see it. Even my comments. I read through it. I had 300 comments at the time. It was this is who's stopping right to repair in Maryland from March of 2020, and there's nothing racist in it. There are a lot of comments saying this politician is a moron. Wow, I can't believe this guy got elected. What an idiot, which is normal political discourse in our country regardless of race.

But he had said – so when we hired a lobbyist in that state, they said that that was a racist video, and that's why they weren't going to consider right to repair. So then the lobbyist said, well, listen, my client is willing to personally come down here on a trip, come to your office and apologize and discuss anything with you he's like no don't worry about water under the bridge then two weeks ago they say oh yeah there was a very racist video that was done and i'm not i'm not going to consider this bill and it's like like really and i've i've literally read through every single comment every single one of the 300 comments because you'll see there there are comment sections on youtube where they'll say you know oh that like look look at that set of

runners where the runner means jogger and jogger means n word for somebody that doesn't actually want to say it none of it it was it was clean as can be we're just idiot dumbass whatever they're lying bro and and but the thing is it worked right because that bill is gone now but this is what i was talking to you about middle ground people you think average middle ground people would if you talk to them and explain to them what happened, they'd be on your side? I don't know a single left-wing person that watched that video of what he was claiming that even agreed with him. Even people that I know that are very left-wing, it was like, that's full of it. What was the actual claim? So who was the politician who's, like, not getting on board?

C.T. Wilson. He's a Democrat or a Republican? He is. All right, well. The thing is, Right to Repair has been screwed over by Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians in almost every single state. Libertarians? Yes. What?

That's surprising. No, in Nebraska. Republican I get, you know. Democrat I get. In Nebraska in 2017, there was a Senator Bob Crist who agreed to meet with all of us the day of the hearing. And then he called off the hearing. And then he wasn't interested in it. Mueller Roback, Kim Roback, who was an AT&T lobbyist, donated $3,000. I thought that's nothing.

Maybe the cost of living is different in Nebraska and that's all it takes. But he was going to meet with us. He called it off last minute. You go to followthemoney.org and that day you see Kim Roback, the AT&T, who used to be lieutenant governor, who was an AT&T lobbyist, who testified against the bill, gave him money. Ernie Chambers, this is interesting. Ernie Chambers, who is a very left-leaning Democrat, and if you go to followthemoney.org, actually there's no company giving him money.

He is purely fundraised by his neighbors and everyone going door-to-door knocking and people giving him a dollar. He said, and I quote, to consider this bill, strike all contents from the bill and write in the following. Better luck next year. And then he started laughing at us. Then he started laughing at us. Laura Epp, who was a libertarian, sat next to him, also laughed. By the way, she was voted out of office by Tom Brandt. She was beat out of office by Tom Brandt, who is a Republican, who is a farmer, who won an election based on right to repair. In Washington state, the Democrats voted for it.

Every single person who voted against right to repair who didn't want it to move forward was a Republican in Washington State. The interesting thing is in Nebraska this to say, like, are they trying to actually get the rural vote and say, listen, you guys see us all as city slickers. They're voting against you being able to fix your own tractor. We don't even know what a tractor is and we're voting for it. So why don't you consider voting? But in every state, it's been very eclectic. Who supports it and who denies it? It's a total coin toss.

You know, I'm willing to bet it has a lot to do with, you know, for farmers. You've got a lot of these big companies. It's not so much the farmer as it is the politician. And they say, we're going to run ads against you and make you look as bad as possible to every one of your constituents. You know, the amount of money we will dump into destroying you, you will never compete with. And they say, okay, I'm not going to bother. That's another thing that's been very interesting is figuring out who is for this and who is against this. So when I started actually, when I did the fundraiser last year, I wanted to do a ballot initiative in the state of Massachusetts. That was my goal,

to try and get it passed by people and just bypass this entire disgusting process altogether. I said, if I raise three to six million, I'll do it. If I don't, I'll just do traditional lobbying to try to get something passed in the state. So there was a state where I am, we introduced a bill that does not exclude farm equipment. And there was someone who was asking to be excluded from farm equipment, and it was a farm bureau. So I had to have a conversation. So I get an email that's from my lobbyist that I would have not shared, but at this point I don't care because I got called racist by senators in the state and the bill got killed anyway. He said you probably shouldn't share this because if you share stuff like this, do you want to get a bill passed or do you just want to stir up stuff? Well, I didn't get a bill passed doing it your way anyway.

So I see an email saying it's still a tough issue to address. Our problem isn't a non-ability to repair our own equipment, but more a lack of service providers in key times of the year. Key part, most farmers don't have or care to have the knowledge or the equipment to repair their own equipment. So it's a service provider issue. Tell that to a farmer. Tell that to a farmer that most farmers don't have the knowledge or the ability to repair their own stuff. So it's a service provider issue. Tell that to a farmer. Tell that to a farmer that most farmers don't have the knowledge or the ability to repair their own stuff. Well, farmers are all dumb, so. No, but this is somebody that represents farmers that is saying this. This is somebody from a farm bureau. So I say, listen, I can't let this go. I know I'm supposed to let this go. I can't let this go. I give the guy a call. It's like, yeah,

you emailed my lobbyist who I hired. I know that you know that he was going to send this to me. I am, you know, I grew up in Brooklyn. I've never been on a farm in my life. So if I show up to a state and I start advocating for right to repair, and then we remove agriculture from the bill, that's going to look like this New York City slick or whatever is trying to screw over farmers. Do you understand how it looks for me? Now, you're the one who's asking to be removed from the bill. And you're saying if you're not removed from the bill, that you're probably going to ask to be removed, and that's going to be awkward. So we should ask to be removed so i need you to understand how bad this would look for me if i was to remove it can you explain why you want to be

removed from this bill and can you explain how i can explain in a pr friendly way why it is you're asking to be removed when you're saying that you support farmers and can you please explain this line that you told me most farmers don't have or care to have the knowledge of the equipment to repair their own equipment and the answer that i got was, in my opinion, garbage. So there's... This is politics, man. Look, if you play it honest and honorable, you'll get stampeded over and crushed by the

people who are willing to lie to you. I got stampeded. I absolutely got stampeded. And the thing is, the idea, you can't share this. If you share that, then you'll look bad. I didn't share. I did exactly what I was supposed to do. And then, you know, this is... Did anything win? No. I didn't share. I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Sharing is caring. Did anything win? No. It wasn't going to win anyway.

I like sharing the details. I like letting people know. I want people to know exactly who screwed up. I'm doing that at every single chance that I get in every single state. With Nebraska, I pointed out, by the way, here are all the people that are endorsed by the Farm Bureau. Here are all the people that voted against it. Do you see that all the people that voted against that are endorsed by the Farm Bureau. Here are all the people that voted against it.

Do you see that all the people that voted against it are endorsed by the Farm Bureau? So what you're proposing is simple, that people who, say, buy a tractor are allowed to fix their own tractor. I'm saying that make available the diagnostics, the schematics, and the tools at a fair and reasonable price that you make available to your own dealers or technicians. So if you sell the software package to a dealer for $5,000, let them buy it for $5,000. If you sell this schematic for $500 or this manual for $500,

sell it to the independent for $500. Right now, I rely for my business on stuff that fell off the back of a truck. The process that I go through to get access to screens and chips, my customers think that I just go to Mouser.com and I just buy everything that I want. They have no idea the Nicolas Cage, Lord of War, supply chain, ridiculous nonsense that happens in the background

so that I can get them a computer screen. But there's, yeah, like this plays into phones and stuff as well, right? Like, it goes, yeah, it's with almost everything. And, you know, one of the things that drives me nuts is when people say just don't buy Apple and it'll go away. I talk about Apple products because that's what I fix. But show me a smartphone where you can get the schematic from the company. Even Fairphone, who says they support right to repair, will not

give you a schematic for any amount of money. What about Freedom Phone? Freedom Phone, yeah. I think the only thing that would give you... Because they buy it third party. I haven't double-checked if this is the case, but I think PinePhone will. But if you use it, it is... They're a great company. It's a bit far from the experience that you'll get if you buy an S10e or an iPhone 10 or anything like that.

They're getting there. But like there's no – if you want to have access to things like this, you really have to give up the ability to live in a modern society. You can't get a schematic to your monitor. You can't buy – like you can't buy chips to a lot of the things that you want to. Is the challenge though like copyright? A lot of the things that you want to. Is the challenge, though, like copyright? A lot of it. Yeah, what they'll say is they'll say that it is an intellectual property issue. But here's the actual issue I think it is.

I don't think it's an issue of if we release the schematic, somebody else will reproduce our product. Because if you go to venafix.com or Notebook Squad or any of these places, you could spend $20 and get access to all the schematics you want. Well, not just that. I'm pretty sure every major phone company buys every brand new phone and just opens it and goes, oh. I think here's the issue. They're afraid if the schematics get out that it won't be that users or other companies will copy their technology, but rather it'll show up that they were already copying everybody to begin with. I think that's a part of it. So, for instance, let's say you pay a company, and this is my speculation based on what i've heard from people in the industry that i

don't want to give their name out because they they were probably doing this but they let's say you ask a company in china uh you know we want a lot we want a laptop motherboard with these specifications and this chipset and this blah blah modem and blah blah blah that company that's actually doing everything in taiwan or korea or china are they going to start from scratch to make it just for you? Or are they going to say, well, Dell or Lenovo contracted us to make this, Control-C, Control-V, here you go. So there's a lot of technology out there where it probably is a direct copy and paste of somebody else's thing. Especially in China.

Yeah, because they're doing it because they don't care. But here our laws say that we care. So if you keep the schematic and everything private, you can't really see that. Versus if you make it public, then maybe it's a little bit more easy to see that, wait, you copied my Bluetooth circuit, you copied this circuit, or something like that. That's my best case. But you used to be, if you bought a radio, or you bought a television, you bought any of this different stuff, you would open it, and there'd be a schematic on the back of it that shows everything's put together, and you could buy manuals to it. I mean, even for computers back in the day,

they used to come with schematics and manuals that show you how to fix everything. And the argument that gets used now is security and safety, that we would be less secure and less safe. But were people blowing themselves up fixing their toasters 50 years ago? No. We had a much more freedom-oriented mindset back then. Did you say that OnStar? I felt like I talked over you when you were talking about it.

Did you say that OnStar can track where people are in their cars and like you were saying with this propaganda commercial that if a woman's walking to her car in the middle of the night, people from OnStar know that. Yeah, I mean if I'm going to, like, I'm not going to spend $5,000 for all these different tools. If I want to abuse my wife, I'm not going to do all of this. I'm probably just going to toss an air tag under the

mattress or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not that I do that. Not only that, I mean, a lot of these, there's a million and one ways to track vehicles. There are so many ways to track people that are easier than hacking into the open data system in your cars. That's one of the most complicated ways to track

somebody. No, it's ridiculous. And again, this is designed to scare you. And the thing that a lot of people don't get is a lot of people will say, Tesla is anti-repair in many ways. True. However, who funded this? Ford, motors toyota nissan and honda and the reason that all this stuff is scrubbed from the internet right after they lost is because they don't want to have that anti-repair reputation they don't want to be known as the company that associated being sexually assaulted with uh with having a car repaired but they should be because they paid for this yeah tesla open sourced all

their patents i don't know all our patent are belong to you, Tesla.com from 2019. Elon's a weird guy. He's a funny dude. Also, he does a lot of good stuff, but he's also a very strange man. I love him. Opensourceecology.org. Have you guys ever seen this? I think it's pronounced Marcin Jakubowski is his name.

But he's basically created all this farm equipment and he's open sourced all the patents of how to build them, repair them. But you can build them and do them yourself. Very, very cool. Maybe, you know what's funny is we often make fun of the great reset, you will own nothing and you will be happy. You've heard that, right? I have. Yeah.

What if the you will own nothing is because everything's open source and available for you to create your own? You know what I mean? Molecular printing. Well, let's think about that. I guess in that reality, you would own stuff. You'd own what you made. I don't think that was meant as nefarious

as they said it when they actually said it. I think the part of it was, you used to have a record collection. Now you're going to be happy with just, you know, you search for a song, like you just type it in and it automatically starts playing for you, that type of thing.

But that's bad. But that coincided. Really bad. The thing is that statement and that trend of you just having access to everything immediately at your fingertips your fingertips whether it's an uber for a car or music just so happens to coincide with a second separate trend where every single company is doing everything they can to make things unrepairable because there's more money to be made by buying a new one it is nefarious to say you used to have record collection now you have it on your phone

because they can say you're a naughty, so we've banned you from music forever. You could, you know, use their record collection, they could come out and be like, you're a jerk, and nobody likes you, so you can't come to the record store anymore. And they'd be like, well, I got a big old pile of records right here, I got those. Now, Spotify will just be like,

we're gonna ban you. Like, I'll tell you this, man, Lee Camp, right? You ever hear of Lee Camp? No. He's like a lefty guy. He worked for RT. He had a podcast, a personal podcast. It wasn't through RT, and it got deleted from Spotify because he worked for RT. That's Redacted Tonight? Redacted Tonight was deleted off of YouTube.

He had another show on Spotify that got purged for working for a Russian outlet or whatever. But the point is, that's a different kind of suspension. You could be booted off iTunes, and then you have no music on iTunes, and you say, okay, maybe Spotify. But if they all coordinate like they do with Alex Jones, it is a really, really bad thing for them to be like, you will own nothing and you

will be happy. Yeah, you're happy until in that, what was it, Black Mirror, where they blocked someone in real life, and they just saw a silhouette walking around. I think that what they meant with that statement is that you're going to use more services than own things. I would prefer to own things than have services myself. That's my preference. But I think that's a separate thing than what's happening now, which is everything that you buy winds up becoming disposable. But I'm glad that that statement exists and that so many people are aggravated at that statement because it's going to cause people to be more sensitive to when you buy

something and there's a $5 chip in your $3,000 MacBook that dies and they tell the company that makes it not to sell it to anybody. Do you actually own what you buy if you cannot buy any of the components necessary to repair it because the company goes out of their way to stop you from doing so? If I go to Intersil and I try to buy a chip that I could have bought 10 years ago, I'm not allowed to. They'll say, we can only sell to people who are on this approved vendor list. Renaissance Electronics will say, we can only sell on this approved vendor list. Same with Texas Instruments. If that's the case, do you actually own anything?

I think it's – Are you leasing it? Are you leasing that tablet until it dies or do you own it? Technically, you own an unrepairable piece of machinery, I guess. Because the life cycles of a lot of this stuff. I mean, you know, a lot of these devices will die within a year or two. That's intentional, this planned obsolescence thing? Are they doing this on purpose?

I think some of it is just the way people use things now, but also the fact that, I mean, if you plug a charger into a MacBook and there's something weird with your electrical circuitry in your house or something, it'll just blow a CD3217 chip and it'll be dead. And you didn't do anything wrong. You don't even have to use a knockoff charger for it to happen. This is a very, very common repair. We get it every single day. Really?

Yeah. And there's something that I have to do to get that chip that I can't say on stream. But it's stupid. That's nefarious. Not what you're doing, but that's nefarious that you wouldn't be able to talk about it openly. I mean, or if it's a proprietary fix, you mean that you do? No, it's not even a proprietary fix. I can't say how we get access to some of these things.

Legally? It's not legal. That's incredible. But it's really, like, it's just dumb that things have to be that way. Wow. And the thing is, people will say, well, you're only advocating for right to repair because it helps your business. It's like, no, it's the opposite. When you have one million YouTube subscribers, you can say, you know, oh, man, if only I had this chip, I could do this repair and I will get a box with no return address or whatever

with a spool of chips and say thank you for the YouTube videos. You could say, oh, someone rid me of this priest and the priest has just gone. The people who started where I did 10 years ago, they can't do that. Where I started 10 years ago, they can't do that. They don't have the ability to say something like that and just have some contact reach out to them that allows them to get access to all the things that I can.

I'm doing this for the people that started where I did because I want them to have a path to get where I am now. I started doing this when I had $200 in my bank account, $1,000 in credit card debt, and I just dropped out of college. And I was able to start a store and get 12 employees, have a decent quality of life. And I want everybody else to be able to do that. But that path, that bridge that I crossed is slowly burning away behind me. I agree, man, completely. I want to believe that if you just work hard and you dedicate yourself. But, I mean, looking at YouTube, they're pulling up the ladder behind us, everybody.

They're making it harder and harder for people to have. People of merit aren't going to be able to make it in. I think, you know, kind of just to do a quick shift before we go to Super Chats, when it comes to pulling up the ladder behind it as far as it goes with media, I think when YouTube started, when the internet was prominent, meritocracy was the law of the land.

If you made good stuff that people wanted to see, you would do well. And meritocracy doesn't mean good content. People like started posting boobies all over YouTube and it worked really well for their channels and made them huge. YouTube eventually started getting rid of this and saying, nah, we should just choose who wins and who loses. That way we have control of the situation.

So the ladder's been pulled up behind everybody. That's why I recommend people now, if you're going to start a channel, start it on Rumble. Or Mines. Some new network. Yeah, you've got a real chance at meritocracy on a new platform that you want on YouTube. Are people actually using them, though? That's the biggest problem with new platforms.

Yeah, they are. Like a bunch of people would suggest that I use Library, and I do. But when I actually opened up a Library channel, nobody watches it. But Rumble, if Dan Bongino got more views and has more subscribers on Rumble than he did on YouTube. That's interesting. And that's one of the reasons he's probably an investor in it, because he was driving a lot of that growth for sure. But, you know, he's

got a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast that helped him build that up. But I'm saying, you know, for you right now, you've got 1.7 million subscribers or whatever. If you were to jump over to Rumble or Mines, you wouldn't have as big of a platform. But if someone right now has nothing, has no followers whatsoever, I'd say Rumble. You know, in addition to... Or Mines, you wouldn't have as big of a platform. But if someone right now has nothing, has no followers whatsoever, I'd say Rumble.

You know, in addition to what you're saying about the right to repair and access to open source machinery, schematics and things, how do you feel about software code? Like with proprietary networks, for instance, Google, YouTube, something like that. I've never thought of the idea of mandating that everything be open source. I like open source software. I like when people make it available, but if you're going to make a device that requires let's give an example. So there was

a microwave recently that I forget made by Electrolux, and because it was given a software update that didn't work, that microwave now thinks that it's a steam oven and it doesn't turn on because it thinks it's a steam oven. Now why you have a microwave that connects to Wi-Fi is beyond me. Why anybody would like... Like, they perfected the microwave over...

Everything that you could have in a microwave, like, 40 years ago, and they put a clock in a microwave, I think that was the last update that you needed. But if something happens like that, even if you don't have access to the source code, should you be able to have access to the ROM? Because you need a service technician to come out to your home to fix that. Why can't you fix it yourself?

Because you don't have access to the software. So should that stuff service technician to come out to your home to fix that. Why can't you fix it yourself? Because you don't have access to the software. So should that stuff be made available for devices that require it? That's an important question. Well, how about we go to Super Chats? If you haven't already, smash that like button, subscribe to this channel, share the show if you really do like it. It's the best way to help. And don't forget to go to

timcast.com, be a member. We're going to have a members-only segment coming up after the show. Let's read some of these Super Chats. We got Archa Magiris Sankti says, Here's a Jackson for Lewis and Clinton. Lewis is the man, sub to his channel. That's my cat. Oh, there you go.

Not the politician. Clinton is your cat? I was just going to say, wow. Named for Bill? Named for Socks. Named for what? That was Bill's cat, Socks. Oh, no, but you named your cat Clinton?

Yeah. After Bill Clinton or what? Well, when I got him, his name was Thunder, but he was sexually harassing all the other cats. Oh, yeah. So they put him in his own room with stuffed animals, and he wouldn't stop humping the animals. So you called him Clinton? I called him Mr. Clinton. All right, then.

Perfect. Good name. I love it. All right. BS Production says, Lewis is the G of the right to repair world. I got my phone fixed at a small repair shop because of his message. Right on, man. Thank you.

All right. Chloe Small says, Trans woman here. Terrible tweet. Should the Babylon Bee have been suspended for it? No. You think every joke a comedian makes will be hilarious? Same with satire websites.

I stand with hate speech. Oh, interesting. The interesting thing about that tweet is that when they say that they're asking them to remove it rather than removing itself, Apple did something similar to me six years ago with one of my videos that had a schematic in it. They didn't file a DMCA claim, and they totally could have because it's copyrighted, and it says literally in the schematic, do not do this. Do not share this, and it's on my video, but I think part of the reason they asked me to remove it is because they didn't want the negative PR from removing it, so I told them,

I have no problem removing 100% of my YouTube content. All I ask is you file a DMCA claim so that people don't think that I did it. So if Twitter asks you to remove it, then it doesn't look publicly like Twitter deleted it for you versus you just deleted it yourself. And I think that's why it's important to not delete your own stuff if somebody else wants you to. The crazy thing about it is if it's against the rules, why would Twitter allow it to stay up? They're saying this broke the rules. You can't say anything until you

get rid of it, but we will leave it up. It's not a popular rule. The rule that... All of my YouTube videos could be DMCA claimed by Apple in a day, and my channel would be gone. That could have happened six years ago, but the thing is, it's a rule that doesn't have popular support, and if they were to actually enforce that, then a bunch of normal average everyday people that large moderate middle that we were talking about that don't actually do anything would rise up and

do something and they don't want that to happen i think it may maybe it's the same thing with twitter i you know again with the tweet like again i try i avoid misgendering people because of why i i gain nothing from it but i wouldn't ban it there was a story about this uh this couple in the uk i think they're protesting mcdonald's and then mcdonald's sued them and won and the I gain nothing from it. But I wouldn't ban it. There was a story about this couple in the UK. I think they were protesting McDonald's. And then McDonald's sued them and won. And the stock damage to McDonald's was substantially worse than any of the damage. It was like two people were protesting and handing out pamphlets in front of McDonald's.

So they sued them, won. And the PR blowback was massive, saying this big corporation went after these two random people handing out pamphlets. So I forgot what the story like was called but since then there's been like a corporate doctrine never to be uh goliath going up against david because it'll it'll hurt you more and cost you more money it looks bad even if the rule exists you you shouldn't if the majority of people would not agree with that rule existing if it was in for invoked then it's best to not invoke it yeah and just only invoke it when it's not going to get you in too much trouble.

All right, let's read this. Murph says, Ian, I agree with you 100% that text is ruining our culture's communications. Would you put texting in that category as well? Yeah, it's kind of like we used to mail each other letters when we had the post office back in the 1800s and now, then we invented the telephone

and then we invented video chat. But I see people reverting to mailing letters to each other, email, digitally now. It's very disturbing. Yes, I consider text the exact same thing. So go back to video chats with your friends. Well, see, the thing about text messages, though, is that if you send something over text that was misconstrued, you just press call and say, here, I meant this.

Now with Twitter, you can tweet something and people just either intentionally or ignorantly don't understand what you are saying. The one thing I learned from YouTube is that there are many ways for other people to interpret what you say and yet there's so much work that has to go into it that doesn't go into it when I'm speaking to people that I know well. I think it's the internet in general, to be honest. Because we were talking with Andrew Heaton on the show, and he mentioned that other people had talked about,

oh, Tim Pool, oh, man, I've seen clips of him. And he's like, yeah, but have you watched a show? And they're like, no. So the other day, Ian made a comment that I'm not going to repeat because I'm not foolish enough to repeat it. But you were making a hypothetical argument, and you said someone might actually say, have their political opinion of I believe X is good, and then

I was like, you shouldn't have said that. Everyone laughed. Because now what's going to happen is someone who hates Ian will take the clip of that and then publish Ian saying something and they'll attribute the quote to him instead of... It feels like it's like we're in a constant of culture shock. I remember before the internet, it would be very rare to meet someone that I didn't agree with about anything

or that didn't agree with me because I was from Cuyahoga Falls and those were the people I knew. Then, now, I would start to put my oil onto the internet's water and you just see these reactions from the first moment. It's never stopped. I've just become more used to it now. But it's still this constant culture shock. Every day, all these new

people are responding from God knows where on earth what their childlike was like. I'm going to read this because I'm confused by it, but let's read it. Pizza Makes My Belly Hurt, I'm sorry to hear, says, I seen Christopher Titus this weekend. He was talking about white supremacist named dropped Kyle Rottenhaus, Tucker Carlson, and Hannity. People groaned, and my group and others left. This was in Chicago.

People are waking up. Wow. Interesting. I saw there's someone I knew a long time ago and I looked him up on Facebook and like the last post they have was like ranting about white supremacy and all these issues. And I'm like, man, what happened to you? Yeah. That's weird.

It was fun to be at work the day that the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict happened because I have a workplace where everybody can discuss it and there's no consequences. That's great. Like there were two people that agreed with it and the rest disagree with it but they all talked about it and there was no consequence. Nobody got fired. And it was just I found that day enjoyable. It was crazy how many people cried.

Like one person that thought that he should have gone to prison said it and there was no and the other people that thought that he did nothing wrong said it and there was no like none of them had to worry about losing their jobs none of them had to worry or care we you know we admittedly there was 45 minutes where no work got done that day because they were all talking about it but it was in i like the fact i know that there's a bunch of companies where that could never happen and i was proud to have a company culture where that could happen and nobody nobody hated each other because of it.

I believe there is a greater than chance probability that people who thought Kyle Rittenhouse should go to jail just didn't know anything about the case or had limited understanding of what happened. It was surprising how many people thought that he was shooting black people. Exactly. And then, you know, with this story, it was interesting because I know a bunch of people who personally cried,

mostly women, to be honest, like no disrespect, but a lot of women were like crying. And I was seeing people, even dudes, tweeting like I'm on the verge of tears, man. My heart rate skyrocketed as the verse was about to be read because we all knew the case and we all knew that he was innocent and was defending himself. And that's how important it was that he was found. found also shout out to a social democratic political youtuber that is on the left destiny who actually followed the entire case stuck with the facts regardless of people that were very angry at him and followed facts and logic over it i enjoy his channel for that he got a twitch ban for defending for he said kyle rittenhouse was the clearest cut clearest cut case of self

defense he'd ever seen and so twitter punished him for it he always i'm sorry twitch yeah he tries to avoid following specific bias as often as possible, and I have a lot of respect for him for doing that. Yeah, we've had him on. It was fun. Yeah, good conversation. I love him. Yeah, let's read some more Super Chats. Alright. Archie McGeary Asante says,

I love old things because they're well-made and I can maintain them. Lewis is fighting for the massive cause of carrying that philosophy forward in the 21st century. And it should be, I think the only people who would oppose that are massive corporations who like planned obsolescence.

I think the new group that's opposing it, it wasn't just them. It was also people that identify with the brand. So a lot of people nowadays, they don't just, you can't just vote for somebody

and say this was the less crappy option. You have to identify all the way and defend every single thing they do even when it's bad. Or they buy a product and it's not, I bought this just because it does what I want. It has to be I love the company.

I love the brand. I will defend them all the time. And when they see somebody attack Apple or attack Tesla, they don't think I'm attacking Tesla because they treated their customer poorly in this instance. They think I'm attacking Tesla. I'm attacking you personally and your identity because you chose to buy it. So they have this reactionary way of defending the company and becoming simps for them when it makes absolutely no sense. Well, I am outraged at Elon Musk.

Where's my Starlink, bro? They said it was going to be the end of last year, and now we're still sitting waiting to get Starlink. Seeing where you are streaming out of, I was very surprised that you could actually stream out of this location when I saw just how far out of the way you have to go to come here. Yeah, we had to get them to actually lay like a mile of line. Very expensive.

No, like when I saw you had the chickens that were like walking around outside, I figured they were just carrying the packets. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on. Oh, yeah. They carry them manually? Yeah. In order to get internet out here, we have – I mean, look, we're not that far away from D.C., so there is cable,

which is not that fast. Then there's satellite, which is also not that fast, but we've used these as defaults. And then we actually had a company come and lay down fiber. They had to actually dig and you see those trucks outside and they're laying it down for like a mile plus from the main hub or whatever backhaul.

It's very expensive. People knew how expensive it was to make sure this happened out here. But it's better than being in the big cities, and it all ends up being really, really worth it. But once we get Starlink, it could theoretically reduce our costs dramatically. I've heard that you want to get multiple Starlink bases,

if possible, so that you can have multiple networks, because one network won't be enough. Jeremy the quartering was going through this right now. He actually just got Starlink set up. Really? He was in the process of getting it set up, yeah. Elon! Elon! That's not fair! I tweeted at you. He actually just got Starlink set up. Really? He was in the process of getting it set up, yeah. Elon! Elon!

That's not fair! I tweeted at you. He didn't tweet back. He didn't tweet back, darn it. All right. Howard says, Star of the Beast. Bitcoin equals love and peace.

Quit the dollar and starve the war machine. Roll a 20. I'm a big fan of Bitcoin myself. Who wants a 20-sided? Did you roll a 20? No, I rolled a six. Oh! It's the devil's number.

All right. That's good. Let's grab some... Oh, this is funny. Seriously, JK says, New World Order is trending on Twitter and the posts and comments are pure gold. Yeah, because Biden said...

Yeah, what the heck was that? Bro, did you see what he said? Yeah. Joe Biden was like, you know, he's like, we created a liberal world order or something and soon we're going to have a new world order. And it was like, he's like, every three or four generations you know and it was like i think he said i can't remember exactly what he said but didn't he say something like after world war ii

we created a liberal economic order and then you know soon we're gonna have a new world order oh he laid it all out he's like okay you know you know hey man much respect to the guy for blurting it all out yeah i want to see maybe he's at that age where he's lost his filter you have to be very careful when you're a president and you speak in vague terms because you never know how people are going to take what you say. I'm not threatened by a statement. I'm not surprised or anything.

Just tell me more. My first reaction rather than jump to something would be tell me more. I was deeply offended when he had the nerve to say Trunananashabata Pressure. Yeah, me too. Do you remember what he said? Did he say what?

He said, true nana shabba to pressure. Huh? That's what he said. Profound. I know. He said, true nana shabba to pressure. I think he was trying to say, true international cooperation under pressure.

And it just all got merged into one sound. True nana shabba to pressure. And also, he didn't follow through with that, as you can see in Ukraine. Biden, true in... Oh, there it is. International. True nana shabba of pressure. And also, he didn't fall through with that, as you can see in Ukraine. Biden, Truin, oh, there it is.

Truin on a shot of pressure. Let's see, here we go. Is it going to play? I'll be worse when I'm 78. I'll lead an effective

strategy to mobilize Truin and Nash over to pressure. I'll lead an effective strategy to mobilize Truin and Nash over to pressure. I'll lead an effective

strategy to mobilize Truin and Nash over to pressure. Truin and Nash. I knew lead an effective strategy to mobilize True and Inanash suffer depression. True and Inanash. I think there's an extra Inan that I'm missing. True and Inanash have no pressure.

50 years from now I'm probably going to sound worse. No. He also said Batacath care. Yeah, Batacath care. Keep meditating.

Was it cath or calf? Calf. With an F. Batacath care. Yeah, Batacath care. I have no idea what he was trying to say there. Better health care.

Oh, yeah. Better health care. It's a portmanteau word. I have no idea what he was trying to say there. Yeah, curious. Better Health Care? Oh, yeah, Better Health Care. It's a portmanteau word. It's okay. It's a portmanteau. You're allowed. Well, I was deeply offended. That was a slur. Oh, yeah?

Yeah, to beanie-wearing podcasters, that's a slur. Yeah, it's like Cuomo. It's Cuomo. All right, let's read some more. Joseph Henson says, question to get Lewis going. Do you really own a thing if you aren't allowed to do what you want with it within reason? I don't think you do. I think the definition is going to have to be updated at some point.

That's a good point. What is that water? It's metal. Do you own it? I think I do. But what if I said you can't open it and pour the water on the ground? Is that not within reason? Sounds like you own it? I think I do. But what if I said you can't open it and pour the water on the ground? Is that not within reason? No, literally I mean it's saying it's not within reason. I don't think that's within reason. Right. It would be unreasonable to do. Yeah, that'd be cool.

And that's the perspective that when I speak to more right-wing people about it who tend to be against any sort of legislation whatsoever because that would be government doing something. I mean, what is the government's job? Like, what was it there for? One of the ideas was to protect property rights. And if you don't have property rights, if you can't, like one instance, one example. If you import something that's counterfeit, you're not allowed to do that.

Fine. But if somebody takes apart an iPhone in China and all the parts have Apple logos and they bought it at an Apple store in China and then it gets shipped to Florida, if it goes through a certain customs port, anything with an Apple logo just gets tossed out. So you could literally have an iPhone that somebody bought in China. They sent all the individual parts and flex cables over, and that could get confiscated. That's a way of keeping you from fixing your stuff. So, I mean, one of the government's jobs, even from a small government conservative perspective,

is it's there to protect property rights. And part of your ability to protect property rights is to protect your ability to fix things. I don't think that any of the laws that – one of the things I liked about Andrew Yang's campaign is he said that every time we come up with a new piece of legislation, we are going to write down, here's why we're doing this. Here's the problem we're looking to solve so you know the interpretation of it. And I think – I strongly believe when they came up with all the laws that we have now regarding customs, intellectual property, copyright patents, none of that was intended to keep you from being able to fix what you own.

And I think that if they did know that it was ever going to be used that way 50 or 90 or 200 years later, that there would have been something written in there to ensure that you have the ability to fix what you own. Because this – No, go ahead. Because, I mean, even John Deere, they were advertising in the 30s and 40s and 50s in their own literature. This is how easy it is to fix our product. That was the primary advertising point of a lot of their own. You ever hear the story about public drinking in New York? When they first passed the bill, the idea was that they wanted to stop drunkards from milling about and causing problems. And so there's a quote, and it could be apocryphal, but this politician said, or a judge was like,

never let it be misconstrued that this bill would bar a construction worker from enjoying a beer with his lunch. Quite literally, that's what it does. If you're in New York City and you have an open drink, they're going to give you a ticket for it. Especially depending on where you are. I guess if you're drinking wine in Central Park.

You can get away with it. It generates more revenue to make the ticket than it does to not generate the ticket. Exactly. Ultimately, they were like, we'll make money not generate the ticket. Exactly. Yeah. You see? So they found, ultimately, they were like, we'll make money enforcing the law. New York really likes revenue. Yeah. Yeah.

They sure do. I've learned that lesson the hard way. All right. Let's get some more. What do we have here? Jess Bischoff says, my name is Patrick Gibson. I thought your name was Jess Bischoff. I beat Mike Phelps three times until we were 13.

Do you have any clue of the world records I would have if I competed against biological females? It's so wrong. I've known Mike Phelps since we were both five years old. If he chose to do this, it would be awful.

But it says Jess Bischoff. Is Pat Gibson just using Jess's account? No, no. Is that a pen name? That's Michael Phelps the swimmer, by the way. Mary M says Twitter just suspended that second-placed the swimmer, by the way. Mary M. says, Twitter just suspended

that second-placed woman swimmer due to her tweet about Leah. Happy? Actually, Rekha was not second. She was 17th, and that Twitter account was reportedly not really her,

and that's why it was suspended. Additionally, I will state this again for those that may have missed the earlier segment. The woman who came in 16th place, who's in the finals, did not complain. The woman who came in 16th place, who's in the finals, did not complain. The woman who came in 18th place,

who would not have placed in finals with or without Leah, did not complain. It's the one woman who did compete only after losing and missing it by one position say, that person shouldn't be in this race. I'm getting the feeling that people encouraged her to complain. It just feels like that.

I don't know why. I encourage all of them to complain if they're genuinely unhappy about it. But they don't care. Look, don't wait until after you lose to complain. It's the same thing how the Republicans started arguing about the election stuff after the election. That's not true. Secure it beforehand if you're going to do something.

That's not true. The lawsuits were being filed before. They had years before. I mean, they did it in the months leading up, but they had years to prep for that kind of thing. Well, and truth be told, the Republicans actually passed a bunch of the laws that they end up getting mad about in the end whoops all right chaos a turn them says freedom trucker here the only coverage we get is from ish spreaders the propaganda is unreal they don't want us in their backyard i think he he yeah the truckers have been going around the D.C. area for some time now, right? Yeah, they have. Yeah? Right on.

Oh, this is good news. RB says, congratulations to Indiana for becoming the 24th constitutional carry state. Whoa, that's two states in three weeks? Yeah. Ohio and then Indiana? Yeah, 24th. It's in two weeks, I think, last week. Yeah.

Just think, once we have nationwide constitutional carry, you can, like, cross state lines with a weapon. That's awesome. Yeah, not right now, though. What do you think about constitutional carry? I support the Second Amendment. I'm lines with a weapon. That's awesome. Yeah, not right now, though. What do you think about constitutional carry? I support the Second Amendment. I'm fine with it. All right, then. It's just in my old state, they only allow it for criminals.

Yeah. I really have never had a problem with people having a gun. Yeah. I think people should have guns. I don't know how that would work in New York because you'd be introducing it. Everybody in New York City is vibrating with some sort of anxiety or aggravation. And it's only when I come down from New Hampshire to visit the store and walk around a bit that I realize the difference. And it's just how would reintroducing guns to 8.5 million people in this tiny little space the size of Knoxville, Tennessee be like compared to

areas where they're already accustomed to the culture? In Texas, they're accustomed to it. In Tennessee, they're accustomed to it. New Hampshire, Florida, they are. New York, that would be interesting. I'm not sure how that would go. I think there's a problem with the more dense a population area becomes, the more rights get stripped away because everyone's anxious and on edge

and kind of pointing the finger. It's weird. In Florida, they respect the Second Amendment, and I love traveling to Florida. In New Hampshire, they have a very high ownership of machine gun owners per capita, and I have no problem going to New Hampshire, they have a very high ownership of machine gun owners per capita, and I have no problem going to New Hampshire. I'm not threatened by it at all. If you said that everybody in New York City could have a gun tomorrow, I don't know if I'd want to be there.

I don't know if I want to be there for the culture shock period. Yeah, I think the issue is that people are extremely tightly wound in places like this. Not to mention there's a lot of arrogance, a lot of arrogance in a place like New York. So you'd have a lot of people thinking like, oh, I know what I'm doing. I don't need to take a class

or get training or any safety or anything like that. And then they, you know, you'd have problems. But, you know, ultimately my position is

Second Amendment exists. If you want to change it, you better amend the Constitution. And if you can't, people can have their guns. Although we had a conversation with even Luke. You know, Luke said this. We were talking

about owning guns in a building and I was saying someone brought this up. What if you had a.308 rifle in an apartment in New York City and someone broke in and you fired at them and it went through. Luke said this is Luke Rutkowski of We Are Change. I want to make sure everybody knows this is Luke. He was like maybe we don't allow those kind of

bullets and I was like aha! That's not a real Second Amendment then. Well, he was like, well, okay, no. I think he admitted he was wrong. A bullet that was not going to go through the wall of a crappy New York City apartment is probably going to be a Nerf dart. Yeah. I don't know.

Like your paintball gun penetrates four walls and you're like, wow. Can't even have a BB gun. There's no paint. Yeah. It gets lodged in the fourth drywall. All right. Key J says, if I'm pronouncing it right, Ian is right.

I see all human interaction as manipulation. Everything someone does has an impact in their world regardless of size. The question is, where does one end and will another begin? And are you aware that you are manipulating other people? You've got to be able to keep aware. Well, I'll tell you. Here's my issue. If you are aware that what you do is manipulating someone, you're considered wrong.

It's considered bad. Oh, no. If you're accidentally doing – so I'll put it this way. Let's say you're a guy. I thought about this when I used to work for nonprofits. There were people who naturally had the gift of gab and could get people to sign up for nonprofits like that. They didn't need to be trained or learn any practice. They'd just walk up to someone,

say all the right things, and they would nail it. There were other people who were like, I need to figure out how they're doing that. And they would map it out and then go through a strategy of manipulating someone into doing it. Mapping it out was considered wrong

because you're manipulating them, but just naturally being good at it is considered fine. And I'm like, I don't know, I think they're both fine, I guess. If you know how to communicate to someone and get them to do something, whether you learned it or not, it's fine. Yeah, if you have good intentions and if you're not trying to harm them,

you want to help them. I mean, the problem is, if you want to help someone and you turn them in the wrong direction, you've got to be careful. But just be aware that everything you say to a person is manipulating them, their thoughts, everything. I really like the you do you and I'll do me because when you end up screwing up, I don't want to be responsible for it. That's a big key part of my libertarian ethos.

It's like if I don't assert authority over you to do something and then you get hurt, that was your choice and your fault and I am not responsible for your decisions. Now there's certain circumstances where I have to assert authority over someone. They have to do this and then I'm responsible for it and boy do I not like that. Yeah, welcome to fatherhood. Welcome to running a business. Yeah, that too. You have an employee who does something and then it's like it's your

company and it's like yeah, alright. Alright, Howard says yep, bye bye as the petrodollar goes btc love yeah as goes btc equals love peace if you want to uh if you want ripple centralized ledger i don't know what that means do you get into crypto lewis no i so much of it just seems like a consensual ponzi scheme to me like the u..S. dollar. Kind of. A little bit, yeah. But that's the power of Bitcoin is it's decentralized and there's no federal Bitcoin reserve. So as much as the dollar is a Ponzi scheme where they just keep printing more money and propping the system up,

Bitcoin is kind of inverted. No centralized control and there's only a finite amount that can exist. So then entropy will actually remove coins over a long period of time, generally increasing their value so long as people use them for trade. I'm a big fan. I like the utility tokens that actually do things. I understand people that want to own land, houses, or let's say companies that do something. It's hard for me

to understand people wanting to go from fiat currency to Bitcoin. I understand owning something that produces something or owning something that has a fundamental intrinsic value, like you can live in this, this company produces oil, this company produces food, this land produces something. What if you only have like 500 bucks? What can you invest in, a hard asset to help protect you from inflation? I'm the wrong person to ask.

Oh, Bitcoin. I screw up all my assets. I'm not telling anybody to go do it, but gold, silver, Bitcoin are hedges. I look at the price of silver and gold and i don't see them tracking very well so i think they are still decent to have because you want alternatives but bitcoin has has been remarkable for people trying to store and protect their value if you invested in bitcoin right at the start of the pandemic bitcoin was around 4500 five thousand dollars you did well if you invested once everybody's promote in when it was 60k then

you're like it's at 40 right now yeah so if you if you bought it everybody FOMOed in when it was 60K, then you're like... It's at 40 right now. Yeah. So if you bought in at the start of the pandemic... Then you're doing very well. Yes. And it was a lot of people who saw like, hey, right now there's a crisis. They're going to print money. It's going to be a disaster.

Currencies are going to go wild. You need to put something somewhere. The thing about Bitcoin is the average person, what can they buy as a hard asset with only maybe 50 bucks or 100 bucks? You're screwed. Nothing. Bitcoin. You can buy Bitcoin. But is that a hard asset with only maybe 50 bucks or 100 bucks you're screwed nothing bitcoin you can buy bitcoin but is that a hard asset yes well i mean you can call it liquid but bitcoin is an asset

where you get your you get value out of the dollar and then bitcoin is only going to go up granted bitcoin fluctuates i think it's just based on speculation bitcoin going up it's weird because i agree with much of what peter schiff says philosophically even though he's been 110 wrong on price every single time. When it comes to price, his mutual funds perform as badly as his take on Bitcoin has when it comes to price. But from a philosophical perspective, what is this based on, I agree with him.

You don't know why Bitcoin's price goes up? It's predictable. So there's things called halvenings, where I'm probably going to butcher this, but the general idea is the amount of Bitcoin you get as a reward for mining a block gets cut in half or something to that effect. And so that means if you're spending X amount of dollars in electricity to mine a Bitcoin and then the Bitcoins all get halved by reward, now it's basically saying it's twice as much electricity to generate one Bitcoin, so it's going to force the price to go up. So it's actually – you can see the ripples and it's all entirely predictable. Because it's predictable, you need only confidence in it.

And because there is substantial confidence and institutional investment in it, people are basically like, Bitcoin can only go up. The last halving was May 11th, 2020, right after the pandemic. I wonder if that's part of why. It goes up. So miners are generating all this bitcoin and they're spending electricity to make it they're spending money on electricity to get it they like to use renewables because then you can it's cheaper for you in the long run but then you hold the bitcoin and then what happens

is there's like a happening then there's a big sell-off from all the miners which causes a price fluctuation and then like a spike happens because now the amount of energy to produce bitcoin is going up and there's supply and demand. I didn't know that. I learned something. Well, I'm probably butchering it. I should read up on it because then I'd learn something. But much of the price increases are rather predictable because of the code. You can see it's open source.

But again, ask somebody who probably knows way more. Generally speaking though, my view of it is, know uh what was it november of like 2019 we had bill here and he was like buy ethereum and i was like okay so i bought a bunch of bitcoin and a bunch of ethereum and then took off the pandemic happened and uh i have never in 10 years regretted buying bitcoin i have regretted every single time I sold it. So, yeah. But right now, my investment in Bitcoin is substantial. Not like I have a lot of Bitcoin, but that I invested a little bit like eight years ago. And now I just like I have no reason to sell it because like it's just –

Even if it went down 80%, you're still ahead. Yeah, like I bought in at like a grand. You're ahead regardless. So I'm like not worried about it. I like how you said that utility is key. If you're going to invest in something, you want utility out of it, like a house, something you can utilize that. Some cryptos have, they're called utility

tokens. They actually do something. If you go to mines.com, you spend one mines token, you can get a thousand views. It's like advertising. So there's utility in the token. It's not just a piece of paper. So I really think that the future of utility in crypto is going to be like smart contracts and being able to cut out the middleman that's the guy who's getting the paycheck

and then making sure the button gets flipped. It's just going to – the paycheck is going to make the button flip for you. And those cryptos are going to become very valuable, chain link, things like that. Let's read one more here. The Wrong Writer says, Drunk Super Chat. Show idea. Ian should review fast food.

I miss you, Ian. Love you. Oh, I used to love Taco Bell. And I don't mean it like it was good for me. Love it. It's delicious sometimes. It would be hilarious if there was a YouTube show of Ian reviewing fast food. But that would mean Ian eating fast food every day.

What's that guy? The Machinist. Didn't he lose's that guy? The machinist. Didn't he lose all that weight for the machinist? Christian Bale. Yeah, that was so gross. But there's already that food review guy. What's his name? Review Bro? The one? Is that meme where he's like my... What does he say?

I don't know. Something like my dissatisfaction is in my... Oh, yeah. And my day is ruined. Yeah. Epic Meal Time. My Disappointment. Epic Meal Time. They did it. They took unhealthy food and would gorge. And man, that show burned out.

I don't know if I could do that for very long. It's just so gross. It's like putting plastic in your stomach. Yeah, I don't know about that. All right, everybody. Smash that like button. If you have not subscribed to this channel, share the show with your friends. We're going to go over to TimCast.com to record that members-only segment, which will be up

at around 11 p.m., so you don't want to miss it. Those are always fun and unfamily friendly. You can follow the show at TimCast IRL everywhere, except TikTok, who banned us. And you can follow me at TimCast. Lewis, you want to shout out anything? I don't have anything in mind. Social media? You got a Twitter or

a YouTube group? I have a YouTube channel, Rossman Group, and that's about it. Nice. Okay, right on. Help people fix things and get people involved. That's how you change the world. What's the best way for people to get involved? If they know how to fix something and they know somebody that needs something fixed, get them involved and get them to see how they can save money and get them to have that little kick a dope me when something works again. It's not about watching my YouTube videos or giving money to my nonprofit. It's about getting as many people as humanly possible to feel that kick a dope me when something works again and when they save some money,

because then they'll naturally support it. And then they'll see through slander from companies, from politicians, from lobbyists and anybody else. Hey, all right. Well, hey,

I'm Ian Crossland. Check me out at iancrossland.net. I'll see you guys later. And the quote from that review show is my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. So if you want to see Ian review stuff now, just kidding. I'm not going to make Ian review fast food. All of that would be hilarious. If you've never

seen the dude actually say it, it's one of the best videos ever. I need to watch that. Because it's like deadpan. He's just like, he's not very enthused or like excitable. He's just totally flat. I love it. I had to look it up because I was really curious what the full quote was. Anyway, you guys can follow me on Twitter and minds.com at Sour Patch Lids.

We will see you all over at TimCast.com in about an hour. Thanks for hanging out. Bye, guys.