Speaker 1: Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio the George
Speaker 1: Washington Broadcast Center. Jack Armstrong and Joe Ketty, I'm strong
Speaker 1: and Jay and he I'm strong and Getty.
Speaker 2: We have fires almost almost three sixty around us here
Speaker 2: are different properties just on fire for hours. These winds
Speaker 2: definitely from when we first came here have picked up
Speaker 2: a lot. It seems like this has been burning just
Speaker 2: I think, I believe since last night. And so fire
Speaker 2: writers trying to do their absolute best. But as far
Speaker 2: as a reporter's perspective, out here, while we are safe
Speaker 2: and we do have protective gear, it is very difficult,
Speaker 2: very smoky out here, a lot of ash. You know,
Speaker 2: we have protective gear to cover our eyes and our mouth,
Speaker 2: but it is just impossible to be out here if
Speaker 2: you do not have here.
Speaker 1: That makes it tough.
Speaker 3: Thirty thousand people evacuated their homes so far in the
Speaker 3: LA area, starting yesterday morning and going all throughout the day,
Speaker 3: in the night and expecting the one hundred mile an
Speaker 3: hour winds to continue.
Speaker 1: Throughout the day.
Speaker 3: It says there on Fox, as I look at the
Speaker 3: TV screen with some giant mansion burning behind the guy,
Speaker 3: I mean an enormous house that looks to be burning
Speaker 3: to the ground.
Speaker 1: That's quite a deal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know where Fox is getting that number.
Speaker 4: The winds are very high and there are some extraordinary gusts. Anyway,
Speaker 4: Joe downplaying the thread of the fire in La No.
Speaker 4: Just the idea that they're one hundred mile for hour
Speaker 4: winds all day is just I don't think that's so.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I'm not there with a measuring thing, but I've heard
Speaker 3: it on like four different outlets so far today because
Speaker 3: I know it's.
Speaker 1: It's going to be very, very windy.
Speaker 3: Yes, So maybe you missed this during the two week break.
Speaker 1: This was.
Speaker 3: The moment that a whole bunch of MAGA people turned
Speaker 3: on Elon, and from what I can tell from when
Speaker 3: I dip into those circles, it has continued. And that's
Speaker 3: an interesting thing, and it's all around the whole immigration thing.
Speaker 3: As you know, Elon himself is an immigrant, came to
Speaker 3: this country as a rocket engineer, and he has talked
Speaker 3: at length about this and many many interviews and how
Speaker 3: he came here because it's a land opportunity where he could,
Speaker 3: you know, start a business and do its thing in
Speaker 3: a way he can't anywhere else in the in the world,
Speaker 3: and that's why the United States is the greatest country.
Speaker 3: Blah blah blah blah blah. And the guy that's working
Speaker 3: with him on Doge, vivivive Aramaswami, has got a very
Speaker 3: similar story. Also became a billionaire. And when Trump was
Speaker 3: talking about deporting people in the immigration situation and everything,
Speaker 3: Elon was talking about how we need, you know, talent
Speaker 3: here in the United States, so let's, you know, let's
Speaker 3: come up with a way to make sure we have people.
Speaker 3: And then there was a big pushback from some of
Speaker 3: the MAGA crowd because they want they don't they want
Speaker 3: to really restrict immigration a lot. So Vivek puts out
Speaker 3: this tweet, this really really long tweet that I won't
Speaker 3: read all of and then we'll discuss it a little bit.
Speaker 1: But it came out, I don't know, two weeks ago.
Speaker 3: The reason top tech companies often hire foreign born and
Speaker 3: first generation engineers over native Americans isn't because of an
Speaker 3: eight American IQ deficit, a lazy and wrong explanation. A
Speaker 3: key part of it comes down to the C word culture.
Speaker 3: Tough questions demand tough answers. And if we're really serious
Speaker 3: about fixing the problem, we have to confront the truth.
Speaker 3: Our American culture, I like him calling it our Our
Speaker 3: American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,
Speaker 3: at least since the nineties and likely longer. That doesn't
Speaker 3: start in college, it starts young. I gotta say before
Speaker 3: I get back to Viveks, we've been talking about this
Speaker 3: for a long time. It bothers me a lot. I
Speaker 3: think that's a huge problem we've got in the United States.
Speaker 3: Don't don't know how at least that part of it
Speaker 3: is controversial at all.
Speaker 4: Right, and part of it's the whole equity crowd that
Speaker 4: or disparate impact. If anybody does better than anyone else,
Speaker 4: that's absolute, irrefutable evidence that somebody cheated or wronged somebody,
Speaker 4: or there is racism afoot. And so that turned very
Speaker 4: quickly into demonizing or being suspicious of any sort of
Speaker 4: excellence or success, which is a terrible way to look
Speaker 4: at life.
Speaker 3: Back to Vivek, A culture that celebrates the prom queen
Speaker 3: over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the
Speaker 3: valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates. Now,
Speaker 3: you're not going to get all these references. I only
Speaker 3: get some of them. A culture that venerates Corey from
Speaker 3: Boy Meets World, or Zach and Slater over Screech and
Speaker 3: Saved by the Bell, or Stefan over Steve Erkele and
Speaker 3: family matters will not produce the best engineers. Fact, I
Speaker 3: know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the nineties who
Speaker 3: actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV
Speaker 3: shows precisely because they promoted media I and their kids
Speaker 3: went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates. Then he
Speaker 3: mentions a couple more movies, TV shows and cartoons that
Speaker 3: he doesn't think is good for our culture. We need
Speaker 3: more weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons, more books,
Speaker 3: less TV, more creating, less chillin', more extracurriculars, less hanging
Speaker 3: out at the mall. Most normal American parents look skeptically
Speaker 3: at those kind of parents. More normal Americans could view
Speaker 3: those kind of kids with scorn. If you grow up
Speaker 3: aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve. Now
Speaker 3: close your eyes and visualize which families you knew in
Speaker 3: the nineties or even now, who raise their kids according
Speaker 3: to one model versus the other, be brutally honest. Normalcy
Speaker 3: doesn't cut it in a hyper competitive global market for
Speaker 3: technical talent, and if we pretend like it does, we'll
Speaker 3: have our asses handed to us by China. This could
Speaker 3: be our spotnik moment right for Vacan, then I will stop.
Speaker 3: We've awakened from our slumber before and we can do
Speaker 3: it again. Trump's election hopefully marks the beginning of a
Speaker 3: new golden era in America, but only if our culture
Speaker 3: fully wakes up, a culture that once again prioritizes achievement
Speaker 3: over normalcy, excellence over mediocrity, nerdness over conformity, hard work
Speaker 3: over laziness. Tremendous amount of pushback to that, I mean,
Speaker 3: people went crazy interesting. I didn't really follow the pushback
Speaker 3: over the criticizing of American culture that way. And then
Speaker 3: it got into the H one B visas and all
Speaker 3: that sort of stuff, and then you get down to
Speaker 3: the nitty gritty where it's very, very complicated, and I
Speaker 3: don't know much about it, but we have had many
Speaker 3: people tell this over the years whenever this topic has
Speaker 3: come up. Hey, businesses, hire these people from other countries,
Speaker 3: because there's all kinds of tax advantages to hire in
Speaker 3: the foreigner over the American with the same qualifications, and
Speaker 3: you can't get rid of them where they can't leave,
Speaker 3: so you have all kinds of leverage over them because
Speaker 3: of the way the visa system works.
Speaker 4: And I remember it was about a decade ago there
Speaker 4: was a big controversy over this in Silicon Valley and
Speaker 4: we got the word directly from a bunch of people
Speaker 4: who worked in that Look, these guys will work for
Speaker 4: half what an American engineer will work for, and they
Speaker 4: will live in a dorm with eight of their fellows
Speaker 4: and sleep in a bunk bed and blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: That's whither so attractive. It's not that they're better or
Speaker 4: work harder, it's that they're cheaper. Now, that was a
Speaker 4: while ago. I haven't heard directly from anybody for some time.
Speaker 4: That is certainly a factor. Yeah, an EH one B thing. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I just found this out yesterday.
Speaker 3: Part of the agreement with the H one B thing
Speaker 3: as you stay with your employer for a certain amount
Speaker 3: of time or something like that, so you're stuck there,
Speaker 3: so you know they don't have to give you raises
Speaker 3: or whatever. Another advantage you can't quit.
Speaker 1: You can't. So that's a separate question from a separate question.
Speaker 1: Greater point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they all got tied together and just a
Speaker 3: lot of people being butt hurt, I guess over American
Speaker 3: culture being disparaged.
Speaker 1: It doesn't bother me. I think it's absolutely true.
Speaker 3: I worry about it with my own kids, and and
Speaker 3: I know plenty of my kids have friends who are
Speaker 3: growing up with parents from other countries, and they are
Speaker 3: way more serious about edge than I am with my kids,
Speaker 3: and I am embarrassed by that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's funny.
Speaker 4: I was thinking about this in a different context, specifically
Speaker 4: the Mark Zuckerberg Facebook fact checker censorship thing, and how
Speaker 4: everything's either got to be entirely good or entirely bad.
Speaker 4: I'm either for it or against it. In our politics
Speaker 4: a lot too, there's very little recognition that everything is
Speaker 4: a trade off. Everything in life practically and in this
Speaker 4: deal in Vivex screed, there's a good deal of truth there,
Speaker 4: a whole lot. Now, is that some sort of I
Speaker 4: hate America and every kid should be a hard driving
Speaker 4: tech student. Well, no, of course, not take it with
Speaker 4: a grain of salt. Seek the truth that's in his statement,
Speaker 4: and the part you don't like you can toss, but
Speaker 4: you don't have to hate him for saying it. I don't, Well,
Speaker 4: everybody's so mad all the time.
Speaker 1: I don't have any way of knowing how true that is.
Speaker 3: I do know some people from Asian countries where it
Speaker 3: is absolutely completely true. They've explained it to me on
Speaker 3: how you are the rock star of the school, if
Speaker 3: you're the math kid, the science kid, to whatever, you're
Speaker 3: the coolest person in the school. We all know that's
Speaker 3: not true in the United States for the most part,
Speaker 3: but I don't know is that true in Europe or
Speaker 3: is that limited to like Vietnam and South Korea in
Speaker 3: places like that. I don't have any idea of that.
Speaker 1: I don't either.
Speaker 4: I'm thinking about Europe probably Europe has its own problems
Speaker 4: culturally speaking, certainly don't want to imitate them.
Speaker 3: A high school in France. Are you better off being
Speaker 3: the soccer star than the math nerd or like the
Speaker 3: United States?
Speaker 1: Or is it more like in.
Speaker 3: Other countries I was mentioned were it's an academic thing.
Speaker 3: I don't know the answer to these things.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 4: It is odd that that's what we have gravitated toward.
Speaker 4: And I wasn't familiar with some of those pop culture
Speaker 4: references either. I didn't watch that stuff very much. I
Speaker 4: was too busy studying my physics and computer sign learning
Speaker 4: to code.
Speaker 1: But I tell you what does ring true, and it's
Speaker 1: food for thought. At least.
Speaker 4: What rings true is the idea that in popular culture,
Speaker 4: the quick witted, wise acre guy and I do it
Speaker 4: for a living. So believe me, I'm not denigrating communication
Speaker 4: ability or certainly leadership ability, the ability to draw people
Speaker 4: around you, the ability to charisma. In short, it's not worthless.
Speaker 4: But in popular culture that person is revered, and the
Speaker 4: fairly shy may be socially not as capable technical wizard
Speaker 4: is an object of mockery. I don't know how much
Speaker 4: that means, but it does mean something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it bothers me a lot. Like my son, my youngest,
Speaker 3: we play chess a lot. He's pretty good at chess,
Speaker 3: and I've been really pushing him.
Speaker 4: It's actually not pronounced chess to Michael. There's no tea there,
Speaker 4: and I've been pushing him to try to like get
Speaker 4: into chess.
Speaker 3: And I happen to live in a town where they're
Speaker 3: like chess coaches and stuff like that. And he said, dead,
Speaker 3: every TV show you ever watch, every movie, the chess
Speaker 3: kid is the nerd. I'm not gonna do that. And
Speaker 3: I just I hate that that's the culture. I've been
Speaker 3: trying to talk him out of that, but I just
Speaker 3: I just hate that that's the case.
Speaker 4: Which brings us back to my grand unified theory of
Speaker 4: the modern world, and that is that ninety nine percent
Speaker 4: of everything we observed which formed our thoughts and beliefs
Speaker 4: in all of human history up until like ten minutes ago,
Speaker 4: was direct personal experience, your eyes, your ears, your senses.
Speaker 4: And then once in a while you'd get a letter
Speaker 4: from your aunt in New Jersey and that would be
Speaker 4: the only significant input. Maybe maybe maybe you'd watch the
Speaker 4: evening news and you'd flip through a newspaper, But the
Speaker 4: vast majority of your experience was your personal experience. Now,
Speaker 4: the vast majority of it is virtual, it's elect And
Speaker 4: so how I think about different sorts of people and
Speaker 4: where they are in the pecking order is affected in
Speaker 4: an outsized way, in an unhealthy way, through the very
Speaker 4: stupid pop culture we're talking about, in a way that
Speaker 4: it wasn't in you know, the twentieth century, even.
Speaker 1: All I know.
Speaker 3: Is this the idea of a meritocracy? I am one
Speaker 3: hundred percent for I want the smartest, best people to
Speaker 3: be on a different track. And who cares if that
Speaker 3: makes your kid feel bad or my kid feel bad.
Speaker 3: My kids aren't going to be that at least so far.
Speaker 3: Take the best talent prize them from all countries and
Speaker 3: in our country, anybody that wants to come here, that's
Speaker 3: the best, smartest people, let them come.
Speaker 4: I can't imagine being against that. Yeah again, you get
Speaker 4: back to the visa thing. It gets a little commentated. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but yeah, excellence. We've got to get back to saluting
Speaker 4: and respecting excellence of this country or we will be doomed.
Speaker 4: We will become, as we've been saying for a very
Speaker 4: long time, Europe.
Speaker 1: We don't want to be Europe.
Speaker 3: If anybody wants to weigh in on that with your experience,
Speaker 3: our text line four one five nine five KFTC.
Speaker 5: Well, guys, the country is still dealing with freezing temperatures
Speaker 5: as millions of Americans are getting slammed by an.
Speaker 1: Arctic blast alcohol.
Speaker 5: It's so cold this morning, President Biden had chains put
Speaker 5: on the tennis.
Speaker 1: Balls of his walker's should. Chain them up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I left something out of the big dust
Speaker 3: up that happened over the last two weeks that most
Speaker 3: of you probably didn't even know about, over immigration and
Speaker 3: top talent from around the world coming here. And some
Speaker 3: of you, I don't know if it's you, but some
Speaker 3: people on the right seem to be anti anybody from
Speaker 3: other countries coming here. And I definitely not with you
Speaker 3: on that. I want the best talent from all countries
Speaker 3: to come to the United States.
Speaker 1: That's the way we dominate.
Speaker 3: You gotta sign on to our beliefs though, Yes, and
Speaker 3: you got to have a fair playing field for competing
Speaker 3: for jobs. You can't have some sort of advantage over
Speaker 3: You know, my kid who grows up wants to be
Speaker 3: an engineer. But Elon a different attitude on the H
Speaker 3: one B visa. This tweet is what turned a lot
Speaker 3: of people on Elon a week or so ago. The
Speaker 3: reason I'm in America along with so many critical people
Speaker 3: who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that
Speaker 3: made America strong is because of the H one B.
Speaker 3: Take a big step end in all caps after yourself
Speaker 3: in the face. I will go to war on this issue.
Speaker 3: The likes of which you cannot possibly compremend comprehend. And
Speaker 3: he spelled out the word so it was spelled out
Speaker 3: yourself in the face and all caps.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's you know what, that's rude.
Speaker 3: So a lot of people are a lot of the
Speaker 3: maga wites split on that, and it was all f
Speaker 3: you in the face, elon over this, no more, blah
Speaker 3: blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: So it's it's that's some harsh rut rick.
Speaker 4: Right right, Yeah, online is just not where you go
Speaker 4: for Well, that seems harsh and I don't understand his
Speaker 4: point of view, but I have respect for him, so
Speaker 4: I want to find out.
Speaker 1: What he means. I mean, that's just that practically doesn't
Speaker 1: exist on Twitter. No, no, it does not.
Speaker 4: And all anger hitting back to the thought of you know,
Speaker 4: excellence and that sort of thing, and this, I guess
Speaker 4: this has something to do with race, I suppose, but
Speaker 4: not at its core. I came across these statistics medical
Speaker 4: school acceptance race. These are your doctors who are going
Speaker 4: to be trading you. Okay, trust me. When you get
Speaker 4: a little gray in the the hair, it becomes a
Speaker 4: bigger part of your life. But these are and I
Speaker 4: won't tell you the actual MCAT scores. That's the grad
Speaker 4: school score for getting into medicine. But in the below
Speaker 4: average range, only six percent of Asian people and eight
Speaker 4: percent of white people in that range get accepted six
Speaker 4: percent and eight percent Black folks in that range, fifty
Speaker 4: six percent get accepted. In the average category. If you're Asian,
Speaker 4: twenty one percent you get in, twenty nine percent of
Speaker 4: white people, eighty one percent of Black people get in,
Speaker 4: and it actually continues in a lesser way in the
Speaker 4: upper ranges. Of course, my problem with this always is
Speaker 4: that this is a band aid on the terrible wound
Speaker 4: of lack of black achievement in schools and the reasons
Speaker 4: for it, and the idea that you attack it at
Speaker 4: the level of medical school as opposed to in neighborhood schools,
Speaker 4: kids sociological problems which exist. You want to blame it
Speaker 4: on racism or slavery, fine, let's talk about the sociological problems.
Speaker 4: The idea that you solve it at the end by
Speaker 4: promoting people who are clearly not qualified is idiotic.
Speaker 3: Well, that's bad for society. And then just on the
Speaker 3: level of we want the best people, we want the
Speaker 3: best people. I don't care where they came from or
Speaker 3: what color they are. It's crazy.
Speaker 4: Mark Zuckerberg censorship fact checkers.
Speaker 1: We will discuss next day, Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 5: Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will no longer fact check
Speaker 5: posts on Facebook and Instagram, and users will now have
Speaker 5: to correct any false posts themselves.
Speaker 1: I'm a little concerned.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is like Chipotle announcing that it's ending
Speaker 5: health inspections.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: If you're keeping tracks, fact checking is gone from Facebook
Speaker 5: and Twitter right now. Wikipedia's like, how did we become
Speaker 5: the responsible one?
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, Joe didn't. Don't like that joke? No,
Speaker 1: I didn't. Last part was all right, But yeah.
Speaker 3: Before we get back to the Facebook thing, one stat
Speaker 3: we've left out of.
Speaker 1: The fires.
Speaker 3: In the LA area that are completely out of control,
Speaker 3: and we personally know people who have had to flee
Speaker 3: and their homes may have burned down already. All of
Speaker 3: those fires are zero percent contained, zero percent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and growing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, whipped by the winds at least through today and
Speaker 4: probably endo tomorrow. It could be cataclysmic. Let's certainly hope
Speaker 4: it's not. At least the lives are spared, If not,
Speaker 4: the structures. So, yeah, getting back to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
Speaker 4: Maybe you heard the announcement yesterday. Probably we talked about
Speaker 4: it a little bit. They are abandoning quote unquote professional
Speaker 4: fact checking, which is a phrase so repugnant I can
Speaker 4: barely get it to come out of the same mouth
Speaker 4: I used to kiss my wife and going with community notes,
Speaker 4: much like Twitter does. I refuse to say X, here's
Speaker 4: Berzerkerberg yesterday clip ad Michael.
Speaker 6: We're going to get back to our roots and focus
Speaker 6: on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring re expression
Speaker 6: on our platforms. More specifically, we're going to get rid
Speaker 6: of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar
Speaker 6: to X starting in the US.
Speaker 3: So his new look is he wears a T shirt,
Speaker 3: he's let his hair grow out, Yes, but he's wearing
Speaker 3: a million dollar watch with his T shirt and his
Speaker 3: long hair. Yeah.
Speaker 4: It was funny back when he was getting grilled by
Speaker 4: the Democratic Congress and ordered to around by the White House,
Speaker 4: which we'll get to in a minute, he was going
Speaker 4: with a very close cropped suity look. But now that
Speaker 4: the pro business Republicans are in charge and the pro
Speaker 4: free speech types is like, all right, I'm gonna let
Speaker 4: my freak flag fly.
Speaker 1: Interesting anyway, I don't want to spend too much time
Speaker 1: on that.
Speaker 4: Here's his spokesman, Joel Kaplan, who's talking a little more
Speaker 4: about the policies than we'll discuss eighty two.
Speaker 1: Michael, there's a number of changes we're making.
Speaker 7: But if I could and just highlight three, yep. First is,
Speaker 7: as you heard, we're eliminating the third party fact checking system.
Speaker 4: You know, Michael said too much of what we've already covered. Apologies,
Speaker 4: let's go with eighty four.
Speaker 7: So the second one is about the rules the governed
Speaker 7: content on our platform. They've just become too restrictive over
Speaker 7: time about what people can say, including about those kind
Speaker 7: of sensitive topics that you mentioned that people want to
Speaker 7: discuss and debate immigration, trans issues, gender. We want to
Speaker 7: make it so that bottom line, if you can say
Speaker 7: it on TV, you can say it on the Flora Congress,
Speaker 7: you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook,
Speaker 7: Instagram without fear of censorship.
Speaker 1: So we're changing those things.
Speaker 4: I would freaking say so, well, yeah, that is an
Speaker 4: absolutely undeniably reasonable thing to say. Jack, would you like
Speaker 4: to briefly characterize some of the mockery that's taking place
Speaker 4: on the right on social media of all places around
Speaker 4: this move.
Speaker 3: Well, it's the idea that now that there's a Republican Congress,
Speaker 3: Republican government, the winds are blown that way, and Trump's
Speaker 3: going to be president that all of a sudden, he's
Speaker 3: a free speech warrior and wants the truth to come
Speaker 3: out hilarious, and because they can do serious damage to
Speaker 3: his business model, like could ruin him.
Speaker 1: Sure, right, Katie, did you have a thought?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Babylon b headline, guy who said Facebook was not
Speaker 4: suppressing free speech announces Facebook will stop suppressing free speech.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. Love that.
Speaker 4: So here's here's the deal. And lord knows, snark makes
Speaker 4: my world go round. I'm not anti snark. Everything Cynical
Speaker 4: said about this is one hundred percent correct. But there's more.
Speaker 4: There's more, and the more, I think is more important.
Speaker 4: Because Mark Zuckerberg is a force for evil on the planet.
Speaker 4: He is a monster. I have called him satan, I believe.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: Watch The Social Dilemma, the twenty twenty documentary.
Speaker 1: I beg of you. I still haven't seen it. It's
Speaker 1: a crime that I haven't seen that. Damn you sir,
Speaker 1: I am I allowed to say that? Or will I
Speaker 1: be censored?
Speaker 4: Michael, No, we allow free speech and talk radio anyway.
Speaker 4: So watch that and understand how evil big tech is
Speaker 4: and how and as Jack has said many times, there
Speaker 4: could be no more effective indictment of them than these
Speaker 4: tech giants won't let their kids use their own products.
Speaker 4: Thing kidding me, sorry, folks, anyway, having said that, bind
Speaker 4: yourself in the face, like Elon says, Oh no, no,
Speaker 4: this has gone too far. You don't know when to stop.
Speaker 4: We should have stopped anyway. So all of that snark
Speaker 4: about Zuckerberg is one hundred percent true. But here's the
Speaker 4: part that's missing. You've got to remember the enormous, unconstitutional,
Speaker 4: unholy pressure these guys were under from the forces of
Speaker 4: the progressive.
Speaker 1: Lat That's a good point.
Speaker 4: The government was trying to do an end run around
Speaker 4: the First Amendment by strong arming guys like Zuckerberg, who again,
Speaker 4: I got no love for Zuckerberg whatsoever, but I do
Speaker 4: have a love for free speech and free enterprise, and
Speaker 4: they were getting absolutely mobster style. It'd be a shame
Speaker 4: of something happened to your social network. If you don't,
Speaker 4: I don't know silence doctor Marty mckery. You don't silence
Speaker 4: doctor Batticheria, who are saying, you know, I think young
Speaker 4: strong people don't need the vaccine, you better silence them.
Speaker 1: That's the really unholy part. You're right.
Speaker 3: That would be the profile encourage that I'd like to
Speaker 3: see out of Mark Zuckerberg. He come forward and say, Hey,
Speaker 3: the reason we did what we did about not allowing
Speaker 3: people to discuss Hey, kind of weird that the virus
Speaker 3: came out of uh wuhan right next to the lab.
Speaker 1: Kind of weird. Huh.
Speaker 3: The fact that we wouldn't allow that conversation is because
Speaker 3: the Biden administration hinted strongly they were going to ruin
Speaker 3: us if we allowed that kind of talk.
Speaker 4: God, I wish he would say that out loud. That'd
Speaker 4: be fantastic. And you know, I could give you a
Speaker 4: long list. I'll touch on a couple of things. JOHNS
Speaker 4: hopkinsurgon Marty mckery was talking about the pace at which
Speaker 4: Americans would develop her community that was flagged taken down.
Speaker 4: They targeted the Wall Street Journal's review of a book
Speaker 4: by a guy who's a climate contrarian and like suppressed
Speaker 4: that you couldn't even hear the review of that guy's
Speaker 4: opinion because of the progressive censorship by proxy. And that's
Speaker 4: the really really ugly part of it to me. So
Speaker 4: and actually interestingly, Zuckerberg prior to that said some great
Speaker 4: stuff about free speech. I mean, like he stole it
Speaker 4: out of my mouth. And again, I'm not a fan
Speaker 4: of the guy at or all. Don't think he's particularly smart.
Speaker 4: That's been my take for a very very long time.
Speaker 4: I think he's probably a great computer programmer and that
Speaker 4: sort of thing.
Speaker 1: I just don't think he's that smart guy. I don't
Speaker 1: think he.
Speaker 3: Understands the big issues on a lot of this stuff,
Speaker 3: or cares he cares.
Speaker 1: I think this possible. I've always felt he kind of
Speaker 1: got lucky. Oh hell, yes he did. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: If you build a this is how we're gonna get
Speaker 3: laid app college and it turns into what Facebook is,
Speaker 3: that's an accident.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I wouldn't I wouldn't go that far to
Speaker 4: underestimate the guy. To assemble a great team and help
Speaker 4: it function is a gift.
Speaker 3: Okay, maybe this is the wrong word. I know a
Speaker 3: bunch of very successful business people. They have no knowledge
Speaker 3: about issues like free speech and that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: Zero.
Speaker 3: I know so many really successful business guys that have
Speaker 3: never read a.
Speaker 1: Book and are proud of it.
Speaker 3: I know a handful of millionaires who are proud of
Speaker 3: the fact that they've never read a book. They've got
Speaker 3: one of our talent that is about business, but they
Speaker 3: just have no like And I don't know what word
Speaker 3: you should use, smart, knowledgeable, wise, I don't know what
Speaker 3: it is, but yeah, it's broad ranging knowledge.
Speaker 4: Yes, that characteriziction, the characterization of him. I will sign
Speaker 4: on to Here's the part I wanted to get to. Oh,
Speaker 4: this is still the Is that still the editorial? Yeah,
Speaker 4: which is excellent. In the Wall Street Journal, the editorial
Speaker 4: board is saying all the right things, and they go
Speaker 4: into detail how the so called fact checking became a
Speaker 4: tool to censor it was just a way to get
Speaker 4: your preferred political outcome. Is completely funny. But so it's
Speaker 4: funny because often the editorial board and a paper is,
Speaker 4: you know, there's a high wall between them and the reporters,
Speaker 4: at least when papers function the way they're supposed to.
Speaker 4: But I'm looking at the Wall Street Journal's coverage of
Speaker 4: the story and they go through the fact but then
Speaker 4: who are these I would like to personally it's a
Speaker 4: list of journalists who worked on this piece. But they
Speaker 4: quote all sorts of different people in this story about
Speaker 4: whether there's a good move or a bad move. And
Speaker 4: then they quote Alex Mahedeven, who's director of Media Wize,
Speaker 4: a digital media literacy project at the Points Are Institute.
Speaker 1: Hang on, I'll reveal something in a moment, he says.
Speaker 4: The generalists say, researchers say the program has shortcomings and
Speaker 4: should not report professional fact checkers. Notes take time to appear,
Speaker 4: blah blah blah. And this guy says, since it's based
Speaker 4: on finding consensus, it can't work at scale. This is
Speaker 4: the guy who runs the outfit that runs PolitiFact, a
Speaker 4: fact checking website quote unquote that is one of Meta's partners.
Speaker 4: There could be no more divorce from fact partisan hack
Speaker 4: outfit in the world than PolitiFact. The idea that the
Speaker 4: Wall Street Journal is quoting of his experts quote unquote
Speaker 4: is hilarious, Well.
Speaker 3: Fact check the term professional fact checker is hilarious. How
Speaker 3: do you say that with the straight face? M Okay,
Speaker 3: who's paying you to do this? And what are their
Speaker 3: wants and needs?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 4: Exactly you've got a child's perception of what fact is
Speaker 4: and is not, particularly when you're talking about controversial issues.
Speaker 4: That's the whole point is different people are sure they
Speaker 4: know different things from the other people. Anyway, I found
Speaker 4: this so interesting, and this is the perfect time to
Speaker 4: drop this in because the Wall Street Journal, which is
Speaker 4: my favorite big paper publication website these days, along with
Speaker 4: the Free Press and a couple of others, but among
Speaker 4: your traditional outlets, I should say Wall Street Journal is
Speaker 4: my favorite. Quoting quote unquote experts. I'd come across this earlier.
Speaker 4: It's it's uh, and I'll just briefly summarize it. This
Speaker 4: story and Twitter thread makes the point that so called
Speaker 4: experts are drawn wildly disproportionately, not entirely, but mostly from academia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: And they make the point that, for instance, in we're
Speaker 4: talking about communications now right and on you know, well,
Speaker 4: communications in short, one hundred percent of professors and communications
Speaker 4: that were polled, and they polled thousands of professors were
Speaker 4: Democrats one hundred percent in communications. Likewise, in anthropology, in
Speaker 4: real life religion, it's just under ninety nine percent.
Speaker 1: I could keep going.
Speaker 4: Sociology is ninety eight percent not surprisingly music theatre classics
Speaker 4: ninety six and a half percent Democrats.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we did this a couple of weeks ago. I
Speaker 3: think you were out for an hour and I did
Speaker 3: this topic. But it is everybody should know this, right,
Speaker 3: It's obvious once you hear it. But of course all
Speaker 3: of the views you hear are left leaning when they
Speaker 3: go to the expert. When you look at who's an expert,
Speaker 3: and the fact that they're in some cases, as you
Speaker 3: pointed out, one hundred percent one direction politically.
Speaker 4: And as I'm sure you pointed out, you've got to
Speaker 4: get down to engineering to get to a modest Sixty
Speaker 4: two percent of the professors are Democrats. So if you
Speaker 4: ever hear a quote unquote expert quoted, the chances are
Speaker 4: overwhelming they're going to be a lefty man.
Speaker 3: That'll change my perception of that for the rest of
Speaker 3: my life. It's obvious in that Dan wall Street Journal Arm. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I had never thought of it before. Speaking of experts,
Speaker 3: how are you doing on your diet? We're eight days
Speaker 3: into the new year. Uh, experts say the four signs
Speaker 3: that you're not gonna make it. You're gonna fail on
Speaker 3: your diet. Oh, I thought you meant not gonna make
Speaker 3: it at all. No, you're gonna fail, and you've got
Speaker 3: to get my affairs in order. Here are the key
Speaker 3: the key things to watch out for us. We'll have
Speaker 3: that coming up. I was just watching a video of
Speaker 3: them loading seniors onto buses at the Senior center that
Speaker 3: burnt down in Pasadena. Uh, with the flames, you know,
Speaker 3: coming down the hill really fast. Wow, that had to
Speaker 3: be a pressure situation. Wouldn't be easy to do to
Speaker 3: move people in that age group either. The most common
Speaker 3: New Year's resolution is to either eat better, exercise more.
Speaker 3: Combination of those two things generally lose weight, get tracked together,
Speaker 3: that sort of thing. And I saw this thing in
Speaker 3: the New York Post, red flag for you know, the
Speaker 3: fact that you're going to fail, And I thought this
Speaker 3: would probably be kind of jivy and stupid. It's actually
Speaker 3: pretty good. It's the sort of stuff we've been saying
Speaker 3: for a long time. It's like more common sense than
Speaker 3: anything else. It says here eighty percent of people fail
Speaker 3: in their New Year's resolutions. I don't know if that's
Speaker 3: true or not. Probably close to right.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 3: One of the things that says, if there is one
Speaker 3: pill or ingredient or something like that that you're using
Speaker 3: to change everything that's probably not gonna work. Doing sense,
Speaker 3: take a look of whether or not you have time
Speaker 3: to do what you're planning to do. Like how you
Speaker 3: know you're going to start going to the gym or
Speaker 3: running or whatever it is you're going to do.
Speaker 1: Do you have free time? Now?
Speaker 3: If you don't, then you got to pick something specific
Speaker 3: that you're going to eliminate to allow time, which is obvious,
Speaker 3: but maybe you don't think about that.
Speaker 4: Well, no, I don't have time, which is why I'm
Speaker 4: taking massive doses of turmeric. It's all about turmeric bills.
Speaker 1: But it makes sense.
Speaker 3: If you're already like busy every single day and now
Speaker 3: you're gonna start going to the gym, there isn't gonna
Speaker 3: be magically another hour added to the day.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to cut something out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, which strewing around wasting time.
Speaker 1: Watching TV pretty damned obvious. Get down to business.
Speaker 3: Also said, uh, and we've talked about this for years.
Speaker 3: You got to kind of ease into modest expectations as
Speaker 3: opposed to you know, I'm gonna lose fifty pounds by
Speaker 3: by January twentieth, I'm gonna start working out an hour
Speaker 3: and a half every single day. Oh my god, nobody's
Speaker 3: gonna change your life that drastically.
Speaker 1: Nobody. He's into it gradually.
Speaker 3: I thought that was a good idea, but that that
Speaker 3: time of thing really struck me as.
Speaker 1: So incredibly obvious. But I don't know.
Speaker 3: At least, it's something I've never thought about many times.
Speaker 3: If I'm gonna start anything like my playing the piano, Okay,
Speaker 3: how much do you want to practice? You're already busy.
Speaker 3: What's gonna give to allow this to happen?
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 3: Whether it's watching less TV, sleeping less, I don't know, eliminated, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: But it's got to come from somewhere.
Speaker 4: Right and at some point you although actually I was
Speaker 4: going to say, you have to rest your brain in
Speaker 4: your body, although I think most of us get plenty
Speaker 4: of rest for our bodies, and if you're working out,
Speaker 4: that is.
Speaker 1: A good rest for your brain.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I don't know this speaking and working out.
Speaker 3: I had the classic trying to quit a gym thing
Speaker 3: happen over the last couple of weeks. We had a
Speaker 3: gym that we started like, well, it was the last July.
Speaker 3: I happened to know exactly because they claim I signed
Speaker 3: up for a year, even though I know I didn't.
Speaker 3: And the hardest thing to do in the world, everybody knows,
Speaker 3: is quit a gym. They've come up with all kinds
Speaker 3: of different ways to make sure you can't quit and
Speaker 3: they can keep you around. And I went to quit
Speaker 3: this gym. I went into the first of all, they
Speaker 3: said you have to come in to do it.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's funny.
Speaker 3: I could sign up on the phone, but to quit,
Speaker 3: I have to come in. So I drive to where
Speaker 3: it is, fill out the papers, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 3: Then credit card thing shows up in my email. I
Speaker 3: got billed again for another month. I called them up
Speaker 3: and they said, well, we have you here that you
Speaker 3: signed up for a year. No I didn't. I would
Speaker 3: have never signed up for a year. There's no way
Speaker 3: I knew I wasn't gonna be there for a year.
Speaker 3: There's no way I signed up for a year. Well,
Speaker 3: we have you down is signing up for a year? Well,
Speaker 3: whoever was there when I came in, Let me quit.
Speaker 3: They said I could quit, and I signed a piece
Speaker 3: of paper. Oh, we don't have any record of that.
Speaker 3: Here's the number you call for the main office, and
Speaker 3: it's a big national compan Same thing happened to me
Speaker 3: yesterday with a coffee company.
Speaker 1: And I won't mention the name because I don't want
Speaker 1: to be sued.
Speaker 3: But they I was on there automatic send me the
Speaker 3: pods thing, and I decided I didn't want those anymore
Speaker 3: and I quit it. And then I got sent more
Speaker 3: pods and I contacted them and they said, well, it.
Speaker 1: Takes forty five days for that to go through. It's interesting.
Speaker 3: I can sign up immediately to spend money and get pods,
Speaker 3: but if I want to star send them out the
Speaker 3: next day. The fine print is it takes forty five
Speaker 3: days to process your ending your commitment.
Speaker 1: How do you like that?
Speaker 4: How sad is clearly what it is. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 4: everybody knows what's going on there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll let you. I tell you what. We'll let
Speaker 1: you quit without argument. You take one more shipment, that's
Speaker 1: what they're saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we can get We know we can get
Speaker 3: one more shipment out of everybody this way, and so
Speaker 3: we do.
Speaker 4: Now the health club is saying, you're gonna burn a
Speaker 4: thousand calories to get out of this deal.
Speaker 1: We're doing you a favor.
Speaker 3: If you miss a segment or no howur get the
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