Speaker 1: Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the George
Speaker 1: Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong, Joe, Ketty.
Speaker 2: Arm Strong and Jack Katie and He Armstrong and Yetty.
Speaker 3: This is one of the most severe flu seasons in
Speaker 3: the United States in the last fifteen years. It's so
Speaker 3: bad in some states school districts are closing because so
Speaker 3: many students and staff are getting sick.
Speaker 1: Worst flu season in over a decade and a half.
Speaker 1: As you heard Jake Tapper say, there, how do you
Speaker 1: get the flu? How do I catch that? Somebody sneeze
Speaker 1: on me or.
Speaker 4: They live on surfaces for a long time the flu
Speaker 4: virus as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd rather not get the flu. Wash your hands
Speaker 2: a lot. Is that good idea?
Speaker 4: It can't hurt. Yeah, yeah, I try not to touch
Speaker 4: your eyes and nose. You remember what that idiotic was it?
Speaker 4: That the scarf lady j Burks who said, now don't
Speaker 4: touch your eyes and nose, and if she's given the speech,
Speaker 4: she's like dabbing in her eyes and the robin and
Speaker 4: we cried that that was one of the early signs
Speaker 4: that wait a minute, this is completely ridiculous. And it
Speaker 4: didn't get any better though. Oh even the lefty media
Speaker 4: now is admitting keeping the schools closed was a horrifying debacle,
Speaker 4: and we're struggling mightily to come back from that debacle,
Speaker 4: and it's not going well. Among many other topics we'll discuss,
Speaker 4: probably ought to get to the lead story today, Jack,
Speaker 4: of course, which is that the Westminster Dog Show, which
Speaker 4: is held every three weeks now apparently, yeah, exactly, has
Speaker 4: designated a dignified giant Schnauzer Monty is the nation's top
Speaker 4: ranked dog.
Speaker 2: What they didn't they had the show again?
Speaker 4: When yesterday? Every day cliche? Now, I know, I know,
Speaker 4: Hell how often do they hold that show? I don't know.
Speaker 4: I remember when I'd gotten the idea it was annual.
Speaker 1: Right, I always thought so, I swear it was like congratulations,
Speaker 1: giant Snaz how giant like the size of a school bus.
Speaker 1: It's like fifty feet long, like Clifford, an amazing dog
Speaker 1: cleaning up after it's no treat.
Speaker 4: Moving along. So, the question of falling fertility rates and
Speaker 4: reproductive rates and indeed coupling in general and marriage all
Speaker 4: over the industrialized West and the East and China and
Speaker 4: all sorts of places, I mean everything, but like the
Speaker 4: sub Saharan Africa, and those figures are not as easy
Speaker 4: to come by anyway. But populations are falling like crazy
Speaker 4: in the developed world. And this is a note from
Speaker 4: a frequent correspondent deep thinker, Paolo.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing this came in after did the thing yesterday
Speaker 1: from the New York Times where they did, like their
Speaker 1: monthly opinion piece about oh, is it okay to bring
Speaker 1: a child into this world with climate change and whatnot?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, and that is it responsible?
Speaker 1: And then they just jumped to the conclusion that people
Speaker 1: aren't having kids because of climate change.
Speaker 2: All right, if you say so. I don't believe that.
Speaker 4: But idiotic reasoning, idiotic conclusion just anyway. So this is
Speaker 4: an expansion of note Polo dropped us earlier with just
Speaker 4: kind of expanding on a theory which I think has
Speaker 4: nailed it beyond uh, you know, any scientist. Between Polo
Speaker 4: and our thinking, and we've been kind of going back
Speaker 4: and forth on this. You're talking about the falling birth
Speaker 4: and coupling rates and how people commonly attribute that to
Speaker 4: the world being such a horrible place that they don't
Speaker 4: want to bring a child into it. That just doesn't listen, right,
Speaker 4: I've never I don't think i've heard that expression. Well,
Speaker 4: doesn't sound right. It's a very on that. It's kind
Speaker 4: of clever as you point it out. The world is
Speaker 4: arguably the best it's ever been. And you know, we
Speaker 4: could certainly make that case or read Thomas Paker's Enlightenment
Speaker 4: Now in terms of life expectancy and health and just
Speaker 4: one hundred measures, particularly the best it's ever been.
Speaker 1: You pick any point in history, place or point in history,
Speaker 1: you can't really do better than being in the United
Speaker 1: States now.
Speaker 4: Our poor people are astoundingly wealthy by historical standards and
Speaker 4: global standards. Anyway, our response to perceived tough times, oh,
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, it's arguably the best it's ever been. Yet,
Speaker 4: the birth rate here in many other places is suicidally low.
Speaker 4: Our response to perceived tough times is suicide. I think
Speaker 4: there's a more likely explanation for the low fertility rate.
Speaker 4: And then he quotes a paragraph from a scholarly journal
Speaker 4: slash article. Animals can change their reproductive output depending on
Speaker 4: certain environmental conditions, and one of those environmental conditions is
Speaker 4: population density. Notes this lead author, So, if you have
Speaker 4: lots of neighbors and you're competing for the same food,
Speaker 4: it can lower reproduction, and that's what we saw. At
Speaker 4: very high population densities. Female ground squirrels basically shut down
Speaker 4: their reproduction. Imagine the frustration of the male ground squirrels,
Speaker 4: and that was done in order to sustain their own survival.
Speaker 4: When lashes were better, they would start reproducing again, unless
Speaker 4: the male ground squirrels also have no interest, which might
Speaker 4: happen due because we're seeing it. Yeah, yeah, I'm not
Speaker 4: sure why they phrased it that way exactly, but yeah,
Speaker 4: that is the case among humans. But then we get
Speaker 4: to and I remember y'all probably do too. When we
Speaker 4: had had this discussion a couple of weeks ago, I
Speaker 4: made my usual joke. Anybody who thinks the world is
Speaker 4: overcrowded should drive across Nevada, or from Kansas City to Sacramento,
Speaker 4: say a long I eighty. It's a vast thousand mile
Speaker 4: stretches of virtually nobody but a handful of farmers anyway.
Speaker 4: But then Paolo jumps to what I think is his
Speaker 4: most brilliant conclusion, reached again in concert with the Armstrong
Speaker 4: and Giddy show, the degree to which we're interconnected. Think
Speaker 4: the Internet likely makes our animal brains think we're even
Speaker 4: more crowded than we are and triggers behaviors that limit
Speaker 4: reproduction vess winning interest in reproducing. This is what I'm
Speaker 4: always hammering going on on about, is our level of
Speaker 4: input or stimulus is one hundred times what it is
Speaker 4: designed to be. In the average day, the average human
Speaker 4: being would have so much less interaction, so much less
Speaker 4: input of ideas and arguments and anger and passion and
Speaker 4: poorn and everything else. They're just your brain is made
Speaker 4: to be bored or daydreaming for long stretches of time.
Speaker 4: That's what it's made to do. That's how it keeps
Speaker 4: itself sane.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is it, but that's a
Speaker 1: unique idea that I hadn't heard before. The one thing
Speaker 1: I am positive of is it's not a choice. I
Speaker 1: do not believe people are choosing, you know, with climate
Speaker 1: change and the rent, we're deciding I'm not going to
Speaker 1: get married or have kids.
Speaker 2: No, No, that's not you're not.
Speaker 1: There's something going on way deeper than that. And maybe
Speaker 1: it's this Internet. I think you're one hundred percent right.
Speaker 1: So anyway, and I'm sorry I didn't connect the dots
Speaker 1: completely for anybody who hasn't done it on their own.
Speaker 1: The condition of being constantly badgered by the Internet of
Speaker 1: our own free will most of our cases is extremely
Speaker 1: similar to that of a serious overpopulation, as if we're
Speaker 1: crammed into a Tokyo subway car in terms of our
Speaker 1: brain's perceptions. The only thing I don't know, while you
Speaker 1: got all kinds of examples with beasts, what was the
Speaker 1: birthrate of London when it was the biggest city in
Speaker 1: the world and you know, people were living hip to
Speaker 1: hip in the eighteen hundreds, where people still cranking out
Speaker 1: babies like crazy or not.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I don't know. That's a really really interesting question to
Speaker 4: test the premise. I suspect that the birth rates were
Speaker 4: lower than they were in less crowded places. And if
Speaker 4: you're used to twelve kids per couple and you go
Speaker 4: down to eight, that's still a lot of kids. I
Speaker 4: wonder if they have that's a decline.
Speaker 1: I wonder if they have numbers in Japan for what
Speaker 1: is like Tokyo as it grew into one of the
Speaker 1: biggest cities in the world through the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: the breath rates.
Speaker 4: Led the way in lowly productive rates.
Speaker 1: Sure, no doubt, But me this makes this makes more
Speaker 1: sense than practically any other theory I've ever heard.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, one hundred percent, and just I'll let them
Speaker 4: bring it home, just to credit his fabulous arguments. We
Speaker 4: don't recognize the real cause for these behaviors, so we
Speaker 4: try to formulate an explanations, such as the world is
Speaker 4: so awful that I don't want to bring a child
Speaker 4: into it, or perhaps it's just too expensive slash hard.
Speaker 4: The world was a lot harsher place hundred year ago,
Speaker 4: thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago. Lucky for us,
Speaker 4: our ancestors viewed things differently than we do, and likewise,
Speaker 4: he points out that the very sparse population of our
Speaker 4: distant ancestors was probably strong motivation of mate like bunnies.
Speaker 4: Not to mention, it's just kind of fun. I think
Speaker 4: this is important.
Speaker 1: We're gonna figure all this out too late, though, Whether
Speaker 1: it's the plastics in our brain or oh it's the Internet,
Speaker 1: it's social media that's keeping us from having babies. There
Speaker 1: will be no you know, we'll be at the point
Speaker 1: of no return on population and our brains will be
Speaker 1: full of plastic we'll have no sperm count whatsoever, couldn't have.
Speaker 2: A baby if we wanted to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I'm not a particularly religious fellow, but I
Speaker 4: always go back to the Book of Genesis and the
Speaker 4: apple from the Tree of Knowledge. And that always confused
Speaker 4: me as a kid, because here I was being sent
Speaker 4: to school five days week and doing homework and reading
Speaker 4: and the rest of it, and I think, Wow, knowledge
Speaker 4: is fine, it's great. In fact, it's great. In fact,
Speaker 4: if I don't get my daily knowledge, my parents yell
Speaker 4: at me. So I always found that somewhat mystifying. But
Speaker 4: the older I get and the more I see, the
Speaker 4: more I think I understand that it's simply a message
Speaker 4: that man's abilities and lusts will be man's undoing.
Speaker 1: Yes, well, you can't blame Elon Musk for not having kids.
Speaker 1: As he was in the Oval office yesterday with his
Speaker 1: cute little kid on his shoulders as he talked about
Speaker 1: trying to gut the federal government because he's part of
Speaker 1: a dictatorship of volig arts or plutocrats or something.
Speaker 4: Oh, he's unelected.
Speaker 1: We got from that press conference and a bunch of
Speaker 1: others the Westminster Dog Show, Giant Snauger wins.
Speaker 4: It's no, I'm good. We're looking dog though. Boy, this
Speaker 4: word to god, we had a different winter two weeks ago.
Speaker 4: Do you want to hear the announcement.
Speaker 2: I suppose for a best in show at the ninth
Speaker 2: and I hope it's the Giants.
Speaker 4: Sinster Kennel Club dogs.
Speaker 2: I choose the Giant Schnauzy to three years of fires show.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, the Giant Schnauzer bounded to accept the awarden, crushed
Speaker 4: five people and under its mighty pause.
Speaker 1: Well you didn't see as a cameras panned away, but
Speaker 1: there was a middle aged woman in sensible shoes who
Speaker 1: kicked her beagle.
Speaker 4: You ugly beagel, You suck jack. Many in the crowd
Speaker 4: were disappointed that were they. Crowd favorite German Shepherd Mercedes
Speaker 4: did not win the crown, snubbed again this year. It's
Speaker 4: been a tough couple of years for Mercedes the German Shepherd.
Speaker 1: This year, and by this year, we mean this week,
Speaker 1: because we have this show every week.
Speaker 2: I think something's gone wrong there. I gotta watch beston
Speaker 2: Show now.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I think the German Shepherd also carried with it
Speaker 4: some of the guilt over World War two.
Speaker 1: German Shepherd lifted I ever forget looked reminiscent of Elon
Speaker 1: Musk's signal to the ground.
Speaker 4: That's what I oh wan The Norman Shepherd w bad dog,
Speaker 4: bad dog.
Speaker 1: We got a lot more in the way. Stay here, Hey, getty,
Speaker 1: Joge's for organst. It is all the rage. Somebody texted
Speaker 1: that Marjorie Taylor Green is on the floor of the
Speaker 1: house right now. They wrote this, making a great case
Speaker 1: for why we need to cut spending and shrink our debt.
Speaker 1: She's hitting a home run, a crazy blonde, sort of bitchy.
Speaker 2: Home run, and everyone knows it.
Speaker 4: Wow. Meanwhile, Jack, I've discovered what I believe to be
Speaker 4: the we Shall Overcome of twenty twenty five, The we
Speaker 4: are the world of the twenty first century. Ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 4: I give you, which side are you on? Which side
Speaker 4: are you on? Which side?
Speaker 2: Are you a side?
Speaker 4: Are you? Which side are you on? We'll fight against
Speaker 4: joh Well fights no way lanscap within our walls, will
Speaker 4: fight from dong to dusk. Which side on you w
Speaker 4: shide on you? I'm on whichever side I'm sure's I
Speaker 4: never have to hear this song again.
Speaker 2: Play it, Michael, play it, damn it trying. Did somebody
Speaker 2: tell you turn it off? For unions?
Speaker 4: He wants us so to fame, he.
Speaker 6: Wants us to bow to him, but we want him
Speaker 6: in jail.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't forget who wrote this or said this,
Speaker 1: and I thought it was really good. One of the
Speaker 1: problems we got going on in America is we we
Speaker 1: had this period in the sixties where there was a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of late fifties mid sixties particularly where we
Speaker 1: had all kinds of this sort of thing, songs and
Speaker 1: protests and you know, the look at the Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: movie and the Civil Rights Act and all these different
Speaker 1: sorts of things where there was like a real major
Speaker 1: issue to be dealt with and and people rallied around
Speaker 1: and there was a which side where you're on?
Speaker 4: And people it was righteous, It.
Speaker 1: Was righteous, and people want to relive that all the time,
Speaker 1: even if that issue doesn't exist right now. And you
Speaker 1: can't like put that level of intensity on dose. He's
Speaker 1: trying to cut spending by a few percent and shrink
Speaker 1: the government.
Speaker 2: Which side are you on?
Speaker 4: Which side? Musk?
Speaker 2: Thanks for asking you.
Speaker 1: It's about the moral question of our times, as you
Speaker 1: exactly as you point out.
Speaker 4: It's just so nakedly a strategy of we've got to
Speaker 4: change these incremental cuts that aren't nearly enough to have
Speaker 4: bloated federal workforce into the civil rights issue of our day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good luck with that.
Speaker 4: I mean, you want to talk about trying to make
Speaker 4: a silk purse out of a sell's ear, that's like
Speaker 4: a silk press out of the pig's crap.
Speaker 1: Never mind it's ear this it's not gonna work. The
Speaker 1: singing the lyrics was that a Saturday night live bit.
Speaker 1: Good Lord, do take government by.
Speaker 3: Translies Heaven God a chance unless organize.
Speaker 4: No pretending that the Union is standing up for goodness
Speaker 4: and righteousness, when indeed they're just standing up for continuing
Speaker 4: to have way too many workers paying way too many
Speaker 4: dues to enrich themselves. Hi, we're onto you, friends.
Speaker 1: I sure hope I'm right about this, and I think,
Speaker 1: but the vast majority of America doesn't look at government
Speaker 1: jobs as sacropyged protected by all that is good. They
Speaker 1: should never go away under any circumstances. The way they think.
Speaker 4: We do well. They have managed to jam through every
Speaker 4: bit of wasteful spending and redundant taxation and similar stuff
Speaker 4: for years and years, and we're most familiar with California,
Speaker 4: but by by always it's the teachers and the firefighters.
Speaker 2: If there are any cuts, it's.
Speaker 4: Gonna you know, the firefighters are gonna have to fight
Speaker 4: fires with Dixie cups full of water. And the teachers, well,
Speaker 4: they're just going to be in prison apparently, if we
Speaker 4: don't pass this tax increase. Well, now it's extended. Like
Speaker 4: all government workers who are sacrosanct and sacred and so
Speaker 4: valuable to society, we dare not question them for a minute.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The great civil rights issue of our day is making
Speaker 1: sure mid level government employees who do something that you
Speaker 1: can't even tell what it is, don't lose their jobs,
Speaker 1: all right, no matter how unnecessary their jobs are. Right,
Speaker 1: And there's also the issue in that I don't think
Speaker 1: Elon's been hammering this enough, although he has many times
Speaker 1: in his Twitter threats. There are important jobs and important
Speaker 1: agencies that are gonna have to go away if you
Speaker 1: don't have enough money. It's like if you're broke, you
Speaker 1: really really want to do this or that, but you can't.
Speaker 2: You just flat don't have the money.
Speaker 4: And you better eliminate the not necessary stuff before you
Speaker 4: have to eliminate all of it.
Speaker 1: Speaking of Elon, he was in the Oval office, did
Speaker 1: kind of a press conference yesterday.
Speaker 2: It was pretty cool.
Speaker 4: Some highlights of that on the limp, Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 7: And we're going to be signing a very important deal today.
Speaker 7: It's aid DOGE and I'm going to ask Elon to
Speaker 7: tell you a little bit about it and some of
Speaker 7: the things that we found, which is shocking billions and
Speaker 7: billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. And I
Speaker 7: think it's very important, and that's one of the reasons
Speaker 7: I got elected.
Speaker 5: I say we're going to do that.
Speaker 7: Nobody had any idea it was that bad, that's sick,
Speaker 7: and that corrupt.
Speaker 1: Yes, he ran on he was going to cut waste,
Speaker 1: fraud and abuse. He had Elon on stage all the time.
Speaker 1: The term doge was out there for months. The idea
Speaker 1: that this is some sort of unelected, olive arc takeover thing,
Speaker 1: I don't know where that comes from. You left out
Speaker 1: coup and constitutional crisis. You can be against it if
Speaker 1: you want, but you're you're making stuff up. If you
Speaker 1: claim that the president can't appoint people to advise him
Speaker 1: on things that the executive branch then enacts.
Speaker 4: He's unelected. You full, can we save time and just
Speaker 4: call it a constitutional constitutional acoustus. Oh, that's pretty as.
Speaker 2: Time saves, because I know how you like combining words
Speaker 2: to save time. Eight.
Speaker 4: I'm very busy.
Speaker 1: So Trump's there behind the desk, Elon is standing next
Speaker 1: to him, wearing his dark Maga hat with his cute
Speaker 1: little kid's cute little kid factors in here?
Speaker 4: Oh, so the UH at a high level?
Speaker 6: If you say, what is the goal of dose or
Speaker 6: and I think a significant part of the presidency is
Speaker 6: to restore democracy. Let'spa say, seems like, well, aren't we
Speaker 6: in a democracy? Well, if you don't have a feedback
Speaker 6: with okay, we'd have to if you're sorry until your
Speaker 6: gravitas can be difficult sometimes.
Speaker 2: So how old is that kid?
Speaker 4: He's a little I would guess four or five.
Speaker 2: And he's dressed in a little suit. Very cute.
Speaker 4: His name is X.
Speaker 1: Spend a lot of time on dad's shoulders. But it
Speaker 1: Elon's an interesting dude. And I don't want to get
Speaker 1: sidetracked by this. He's four, by the way, he's four,
Speaker 1: thank you, Michael. I don't want to get sidetracked by this.
Speaker 1: I mentioned it many times. He's got a dozen kids,
Speaker 1: how does he choose which one he's hanging out with
Speaker 1: on any given day, with a number of different women.
Speaker 1: And then since this is actually a pretty big policy
Speaker 1: discussion and point of attention, I mean, it's been leading
Speaker 1: the newscasts for a week of the three weeks.
Speaker 4: Of the world's leading superpower, of leading superpower.
Speaker 1: Yes, maybe you have one of the moms or a
Speaker 1: sitter or somebody hang on to the kid and you
Speaker 1: know of an iPad in the other room during the
Speaker 1: press conference.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's an interesting move. I'm so pro kid and
Speaker 4: pro family. And though his family structure is not one
Speaker 4: I am familiar with or approve of, I like dad
Speaker 4: being with the kid. It was it was cute, but
Speaker 4: it was it was odd. Yeah, but utterly irrelevant to
Speaker 4: the gigantic questions which confront us.
Speaker 2: Yes, let's roll on with Elon Musk press conference.
Speaker 6: So if if there's not a good feedback loop from
Speaker 6: the people to the government, and if you have rule
Speaker 6: of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, and
Speaker 6: then what meaning does democracy actually have if the people
Speaker 6: cannot vote and have, they will be decided by their
Speaker 6: elected representatives in the form of the President and the
Speaker 6: Senate in the House. Then we don't live in a democracy.
Speaker 6: We live in a bureaucracy. So it's incredibly important that
Speaker 6: we close that feedback group, we fix that feedback loop,
Speaker 6: and that the public, the public elected representatives, the President
Speaker 6: of the House and the Senate decide what happens as
Speaker 6: opposed to a large unelected bureaucracy.
Speaker 2: I can understand a monster. It's a constitutional crisis. I agree.
Speaker 1: I can understand why people are so frightened when you
Speaker 1: hear that sort of talk straight out of Hitler.
Speaker 4: Tribalism will ruin us the inability of a significant chunk
Speaker 4: of the population. It's less than half, but it's significant.
Speaker 4: To reject his words before they've even heard them for
Speaker 4: purely tribal reasons is troubling. There was nothing he said
Speaker 4: there that was not not only uncontroversial, it was patriotic
Speaker 4: and fantastic.
Speaker 1: So there's some dude, there's words in front of it
Speaker 1: on the TV, somebody with the Project on Government Oversight.
Speaker 1: So he's in the DOGE so DOGE subcommittee. Anyway, he's testifying.
Speaker 1: He looks like he's twenty two and he's wearing sunglasses.
Speaker 1: I feel like Doge doesn't help themselves sometimes with their
Speaker 1: little too cool, little too young, little too you know,
Speaker 1: Elon renaming himself on Twitter yesterday Harry Balls, I don't feel.
Speaker 2: Like it helps his cause.
Speaker 4: You know, do you think he had any idea that
Speaker 4: that is a suggestive nickname? Wait a second, and thought
Speaker 4: of that the sunglass young man isn't named Hugh g.
Speaker 4: You can guess the rest is.
Speaker 1: He Let's hear a little more of Elon Musk plutocrat.
Speaker 6: Does not to say that the good There are good
Speaker 6: people who uh are in the federal bureaucracy. But but
Speaker 6: you can't have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to
Speaker 6: have one that's responsive to the people. That's the whole
Speaker 6: point of a democracy.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 6: And if if you looked at this, if you asked
Speaker 6: to look at the pound US today and said, what
Speaker 6: do you think of the way things have turned out? Well,
Speaker 6: what we have this unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of government,
Speaker 6: which is the bureaucracy, which has in a lot of
Speaker 6: ways currently more power than any elected representative. And this
Speaker 6: is uh, there's not something that people want, and it's not.
Speaker 6: It does not match the will of people. So it's
Speaker 6: just something we've got and we've got.
Speaker 2: To fix again.
Speaker 1: Like I said, I don't know two weeks ago when
Speaker 1: people started screaming about who nobody elected, Elon Musk, we
Speaker 1: have this unelected You know how many unelected people are
Speaker 1: controlling your lives right now?
Speaker 4: Come? All of them? Yeah, practically all of them. And
Speaker 4: the counter argument to what he just said is that
Speaker 4: the president is in no way in charge of the
Speaker 4: executive branch, which he is the head of. It's absolutely nonsensical.
Speaker 4: And oh you want to talk nonsensical, then we've got
Speaker 4: some more great clips to play. But this is so
Speaker 4: great the New York Times. It's just even when it's good,
Speaker 4: it's bad. Here's your headline, and then subhead appearing with Trump.
Speaker 4: Musk makes broad claims of federal fraud without proof.
Speaker 2: Here's your subhead.
Speaker 4: The billionaire whose federal cost cutting team has been operating
Speaker 4: in secrecy, asserted that he had uncovered waste and fraud
Speaker 4: across the bureaucracy without offering evidence.
Speaker 1: Are you trying to insinuate you don't think there is fraud?
Speaker 4: In the related story, Elon Musk suggested without evidence that
Speaker 4: rich white guys play golf disproportionately, and suggested, without citing
Speaker 4: proof that they have cocktails after what the.
Speaker 2: Hell more elon.
Speaker 6: And they're also going to address the deficit. So we've
Speaker 6: got a two twelvey dollars deficit and if this, if
Speaker 6: we don't do something about this deficit, country's going bankrupt.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's really astounding that the the interest payments
Speaker 6: alone on national debt exceed the defense department budget, which
Speaker 6: is shocking because we've got our larst We spent a
Speaker 6: lot of money on defense, but and if that just
Speaker 6: keeps going, we're essentially going to bank up the country.
Speaker 6: So what I earlier to say is like, it's not optional
Speaker 6: for us to reduce the federal expenses.
Speaker 4: It's essential.
Speaker 6: It's essential for America to remain solvent as a country,
Speaker 6: and it's essential for America to have the resources necessarily
Speaker 6: to provide things to its citizens and not simply be
Speaker 6: servicing vast amounts of debt.
Speaker 4: That is the most important thing that's been said politically
Speaker 4: in the United States in the last fifty years. And
Speaker 4: whether it falls on deaf ears or is heated is
Speaker 4: the pivot point for the next.
Speaker 1: Fifty years for US history and maybe world history, if
Speaker 1: we can't continue to be the hyper power that we
Speaker 1: have been. Some of my favorite pundits are like really
Speaker 1: critical of this elon being involved thing. But if you
Speaker 1: had your typical gray man blue ribbon committee appointed.
Speaker 4: Nobody'd be paying any freaking attention.
Speaker 1: It's been done over and over again, and they came
Speaker 1: up with great recommendations that Washington felt more than free
Speaker 1: to completely ignore and shove under the dish cabinet over there,
Speaker 1: never to be thought of again. Right, that's the problem.
Speaker 1: The politics part of it is where it really makes
Speaker 1: sense to have somebody of Musk's profile so he can
Speaker 1: get people's attention.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I am.
Speaker 1: First of all, I can't even imagine his life. I mean,
Speaker 1: how many hours has he put into this project? It
Speaker 1: sure looks like it would take a tremendous amount of
Speaker 1: effort to be doing what he's doing now while you
Speaker 1: run one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet,
Speaker 1: while you're running the top electric car company on the planet,
Speaker 1: while you're running the most effective rocket company in the planet.
Speaker 2: And he got twelve kits. But I just I don't
Speaker 2: even understand how he functions.
Speaker 1: But I wonder point because he does this a lot
Speaker 1: where I mean, he gets really energized for things, he
Speaker 1: gets super into him and then I don't know if
Speaker 1: he gets bored with it or what, but he turns
Speaker 1: his attention to one of his other projects.
Speaker 4: And I wonder when that will happen with this. And
Speaker 4: he has good people to mind the store in his way, certainly,
Speaker 4: but this is an exaggeration, but just barely, given the
Speaker 4: utter obviousness of our deficit and debt problems, and as
Speaker 4: he pointed out quite eloquently that we are now paying
Speaker 4: significantly more just interest on our death than we are
Speaker 4: in national defense, which is astonishing and troubling given how
Speaker 4: obvious and undeniable this problem. Is the fact that a
Speaker 4: significant chunk of our media and population are acting like
Speaker 4: this is just Trumpian stupidity and or a constitutional crisis
Speaker 4: and we don't have to listen, and we're not going
Speaker 4: to listen, and we're not going to help, and the
Speaker 4: rest of it. I think the exaggeration that says if
Speaker 4: Trump cured cancer, these people would go ahead and die
Speaker 4: of cancer rather than take the cure. We're getting close
Speaker 4: to it. What was a reductio ad hit lorum.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: The longer an online discussion goes, the more likely it
Speaker 4: becomes somebody references Hitler. I think we are getting close
Speaker 4: to the I'd rather die of cancer point in our
Speaker 4: national quote unquote conversation. It's just bizarre. And that's not
Speaker 4: to suggest that Trump is incapable of missteps or or
Speaker 4: or even doing bad things. Some of his recent pardons
Speaker 4: I think have been inexcusable and indefensible, for instance, and
Speaker 4: I'm happy to talk about them. But on this trying
Speaker 4: to rein in the federal.
Speaker 1: Deficit, well, this is just it's it's undeniable. Well, the
Speaker 1: fact that Trump and Biden and every president for a
Speaker 1: while now has said our entitlement programs are off limits,
Speaker 1: nobody can touch them is ridiculous.
Speaker 2: The fact that you're up there talking about our.
Speaker 1: Two trillion dollar annual deficit and our debt uh and
Speaker 1: not talking about that because they're off limits is insane.
Speaker 1: You're gonna pair it with significant tax increases, right, But
Speaker 1: that's that's what that is.
Speaker 2: Something voters have asked for.
Speaker 1: At some point, some leader has got to stand up
Speaker 1: and tell the voter something they don't want to hear,
Speaker 1: we got it.
Speaker 2: We gotta do something about this. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mentioned a great Thomas Soul quote I came across
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks ago in which he explained that
Speaker 4: I got a paraphrase because I don't have it in
Speaker 4: front of me. But the fact that our politicians are,
Speaker 4: you know, in large numbers congenital liars, is partly our fault.
Speaker 4: Because if we the electric continually to demand that which
Speaker 4: is impossible to deliver, for instance, a dollar thirty worth
Speaker 4: of government for a dollar, year after year after year,
Speaker 4: the only person who can win an election is a liar.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, that's where we are on that, all right.
Speaker 1: I've seen the giant Schnauzer enough. What the hell is
Speaker 1: that dog? That dog shouldn't be What is that thing
Speaker 1: with its hair?
Speaker 2: You know what that is? Michael, see, I'm in tellivision.
Speaker 4: What the hell? I had no idea?
Speaker 1: What the hell is that? I walk into your house
Speaker 1: and you got one of those run up at me?
Speaker 1: I shriek and pepper spread.
Speaker 2: What is that? That's not a Is that a dog?
Speaker 2: That's an alien?
Speaker 4: The hairless cats an unnatural creature shouldn't exist.
Speaker 2: God doesn't want that.
Speaker 1: God doesn't want that you have any thoughts on Elon
Speaker 1: and that press conference or anything else. And we got
Speaker 1: more on the way text line four one five n
Speaker 1: KFTC Arrayetty. Now the disruptor in chief, Elon Musk, who
Speaker 1: apparently has adopted the alias at least he changed his
Speaker 1: social media handle to Harry Balls. What Elon at least
Speaker 1: briefly changed his Twitter handle to Harry Balls and they
Speaker 1: had to announce it there in Twitter. Of course, he
Speaker 1: responded on Twitter with laughing, lol, how funny he thought
Speaker 1: it was that the media was reporting it.
Speaker 4: And I'm sorry, this is the same Fellows in charge
Speaker 4: of the most important governmental reforms in the last one
Speaker 4: hundred years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's a couple Quinn doing a hell of a
Speaker 1: job at it. A couple quick tweets before we get
Speaker 1: back to Harry Ball's laundry listing the government waste out there,
Speaker 1: so ao.
Speaker 4: We call him Harold. At least Harold.
Speaker 1: AOC had tweeted out LMAO at a billionaire earnestly trying
Speaker 1: to sell people on the idea that free speech on
Speaker 1: free speech when it's eight dollars a month to have
Speaker 1: a subscription on Twitter, Elon said, your feedback is appreciated,
Speaker 1: and now pay eight dollars.
Speaker 2: But this is what I really like an idiotic. It
Speaker 2: is Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1: We must demand that the extremely wealthy pay their fair
Speaker 1: share period. Elon's response was, I keep forgetting that you're
Speaker 1: still alive.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, oh my, oh my.
Speaker 2: This is generation X in charge. It really is. It
Speaker 2: really is a nark.
Speaker 4: Of the grew up with Watergate and then the Vietnam
Speaker 4: and it's in Stern, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's the Letterman and Stern generation. Here's a little more, Elon, And.
Speaker 7: Also, could you mention some of the things that your
Speaker 7: team has found, some of the crazy numbers, including the
Speaker 7: woman that walked away with about thirty million?
Speaker 6: Right. Well, we often we do find it's sort of
Speaker 6: rather odd that, you know, there are quite a few
Speaker 6: people in the biocrasy who have ostensibly a salary of
Speaker 6: a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow managed to accrue
Speaker 6: tens of millions of dollars in that worth while they
Speaker 6: are in that position, which is, you know what happened
Speaker 6: to usaid, we're just curious as to where it came from.
Speaker 6: Maybe they're very good at investing, which case we should
Speaker 6: take their investment advice, perhaps, but just there seems to
Speaker 6: be mysteriously they get wealthy. We' don't know why, where
Speaker 6: did it come from? And I think the reality is
Speaker 6: that they're getting wealth to touch by expense.
Speaker 4: That's the honest truth of it.
Speaker 1: So Elon being pretty measured. There Trump the politician, he
Speaker 1: knows where the gold is. What people want to hear
Speaker 1: the laundry list of wasted money, and that's what he
Speaker 1: was prompted Elion for.
Speaker 2: Here's a little more of that.
Speaker 5: I can't paign on this.
Speaker 7: I can't paign to the fact that I said government
Speaker 7: is corrupt, and it is very corrupt.
Speaker 5: It's very very it's also foolish.
Speaker 7: As an example, a man has a contract for three
Speaker 7: months and the contract ends, but they keep paying him
Speaker 7: for the next twenty years, you know, because nobody ends
Speaker 7: a contract.
Speaker 5: You get a lot of that. You have a contract
Speaker 5: that's a three month contract.
Speaker 7: Now, normally, if you're in a small in all fairness,
Speaker 7: it's the size of this thing is so big.
Speaker 5: But if you have a contract and you're in.
Speaker 7: A regular business, you end the contract in three months.
Speaker 7: You know, it's a consultant, here's a contract for three months,
Speaker 7: but he goes on for twenty years, and the guy doesn't.
Speaker 5: Say that he got money for twenty is.
Speaker 7: They don't say it and just keep getting checks month
Speaker 7: after month. And you have various things like that, and
Speaker 7: even much worse than that, actually much worse.
Speaker 4: Or the guy tried fifteen times right to contact the
Speaker 4: federal government say hey, you gotta stop paying me. And
Speaker 4: the response to all this from The New York Times
Speaker 4: is appearing with Trump. Musk makes broad claims without proof,
Speaker 4: offered no evidence that the federal government is bloated and
Speaker 4: overspends and corrupt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've heard from people over the years who like
Speaker 1: tried to send their check back that they weren't supposed
Speaker 1: to get, like their husband died and they're still getting
Speaker 1: the Social Security check and he tried to send them
Speaker 1: back and you just get nowhere.
Speaker 4: He claimed without proof that ice cream parlors are generally
Speaker 4: not jammed with thin people.
Speaker 2: Come on and.
Speaker 1: Trump hitting on really the core thing that there are
Speaker 1: people out there who it's just playing the scam and
Speaker 1: fraud from the beginning. They're trying to slip one by
Speaker 1: the goalie. But a lot of it's is just so
Speaker 1: big nobody can keep an eye on everything.
Speaker 4: Right right, which is a perfectly valid point. George Washington
Speaker 4: warned us about factionalism. He said, it's the only thing
Speaker 4: that can kill the country. And if you are so
Speaker 4: factional that you're not for saving taxpayers money, I don't
Speaker 4: know how we can work together.
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