Anxiety at Dep’t of Justice (DOJ) From Blunt Trump Threats, David Cay Johnston Joins 9/23/25

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And welcome in. Everybody. Please please, please please remain standing.
It's so very warming to be greeted in that way, said.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Menifin commonly known as Thailand.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
All.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Yes, that's the thing we'll be talking about in a moment.
Is it's easy to take and often easy to.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Say, but not always.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Known as Thailand. Fair. Let's face it, if you had
to just read it cold read, it might be difficult.
On the other hand, if you were president of the
United States and all you were going to talk about
was that thing, maybe you would be clear on how
to say us. You would have rehearsed. It is the point.

(00:47):
But anyway, we oddly may after touching on that, move
on to even more serious things, although that is quite serious. Indeed,
Kim will keep us on track today, are you and
Tony is here to make sure that everything gets on smoothly.
It's a big show today. I say that often, but
I really mean it today. David K. Johnston joins US

(01:09):
an hour two, and from the Rip Current Jacob Ward
joins US an hour one. I know, hang on tight.
Thanks for joining us into the chat first this morning.
I didn't even notice, did you see who was in first?
Kim Oh no, who was it. I don't know. I'm
saying I don't know. I'll look at six thirty seven

(01:32):
am zero sum joum yeah yeah a sas Oh, I
don't know what that. Okay. I'm now going to skip
right ahead to the newest offering in the at the
Thompson Estate, and that is this the Peacefully Resist mug.

(01:56):
Okesh is a gorgeous, gorgeous item in our get Mark
Merch store. Peacefully Resist. I love this mug and I
must tell you it may be.

Speaker 4 (02:10):
I like the.

Speaker 5 (02:11):
Size of it. And then it has a big handle
we can actually stick your fingers through.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Oh, it's a great big handle for our great big
mits and our big beautiful coffee. Getmarkmirch dot com is
where you've got it. The the website has been really
kind of buffed up with some additional offerings, this among them,
So check it out. The peacefully Resist mug I really

(02:38):
like and our logo is on the back and then
there's a different version of it also you'll see if
you like the old kind of square logo, thereat Tony's
got it the square logo on the black mug. But
the new big mugs are terrific born to Peacefully Resist
is the Uh yeah, I love that font. So we
have to order this stuff and I have to buy

(02:58):
it in order to see it. So the first stuff,
the font wasn't quite big enough. So the second stuff,
which is coming out like if you got now, it's
all exactly where we want it. But I just really
like it now now that alongside T shirts and other stuff.
But it's all get mark merch dot com. But I

(03:19):
mentioned it because of the today the mug is getting
its debut. Also, I wanted to mention something else. This
is sort of the lighter stuff before we get into
the heavy I was at a yard sale for friend
of the Show, former friend of the Show. She passed
away sadly. Ali Willis now Ali Willis. You may recall

(03:42):
she wrote September with earth Wind and Fire. She wrote
Neutron Dance with the Pointer Sisters. She wrote the theme
to Friends, the TV series. She's a brilliant creative force.
Was a dear friend of mine at birth in New
Year's Eve, and all I mean like that person you

(04:04):
always wanted around you as you celebrated stuff, you know.
And her home was a huge party house and she
had some of the most famous parties, using People magazine
all this stuff for these famous Hollywood parties. Sadly I
didn't know her then, but I was in the San
Francisco Bay area, I think when she was partying it up.
There is Ali. She wrote the Color Purple music along

(04:29):
with Brenda Russell, and she got a Tony Award for that.
So she's Grammy winner, Tony winner of course, all this
great stuff. So all of her stuff in her house,
a lot of it is kitch. She was the Queen
of kitsch, you know, sort of this of a time stuff.

(04:51):
And so they're having this yard sale to raise money
for her foundation that continues in sort of the legacy
of Ali. Willis two musicians who are coming up and
this Willis Wonderland that it's called. They had this yard
sale and so it's going on I think also next weekend.

(05:11):
But we went for opening weekend. I'll go next weekend too.
And they have all this cool stuff and they have
some political stuff all right, there is Ali. Yeah, and
I mentioned it because it's political, otherwise I probably wouldn't
even mention on the show. But they have these mystery bags. Okay,
so it's uh, you buy this for whatever it was

(05:33):
and it has mystery bag, and the mystery bag says,
this is gop pop stuff in here. Okay, so I
open up the bag, no idea what it is, of course,
and it's a Ross Parrot doorhanger, doorhanger, thank you. Yeah,
there is the Ross Paro doorhanger. And there is the

(05:56):
Ronnie and Nancy Reagan First Family paper doll cutout book.

Speaker 6 (06:04):
That's cute.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, that's when President Reagan was, of course in the
White House. Then there is this the Sarah Palin Wacky
Wobbler bobblehead. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I think it might

(06:27):
go up on the shelf.

Speaker 5 (06:28):
That's a good mystery bag.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
It's a very strong mystery bag. I agree. And it's
not done all. It's almost been the smoking donkey. You'll
note you push what does it say? You push down
the ears, See that's where you put and and the
cigarette appears right in the rear end in the ring. Yeah,

(06:54):
it's a very smoking donkey. So of course that's the anyway,
those are your political offerings from Oh and this not political,
but from I have this for the boomers in the audience.
This is the love means never having to say you're sorry.

(07:17):
It's like a what do you call that the music
box thing where you turn it in it? Yeah, yeah,
I just that's from Love Story, which is before your time, Kim,
before your time, Tony. But it was the it was
all the rage Love Story, the Eric Siegel novel that
then went on to be a movie with Ryan O'Neil
and Ali McGraw. Okay, and that I know you say, okay,

(07:40):
like okay, whatever, but it was a big, big deal
of the time, Kim. So uh, by the way, there
is and there was a big y. There is only
found it found a Donkey cigarette dispenser. Wow. Check that out.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
That is terrific. We're gonna have so many wonderful days.
You might have to.

Speaker 5 (08:00):
Start smoking cigarettes just because of that.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
I think I may. I think I may just to
shorten my life. Actually yeah, but it's a great addition
to the Thompson household. Thank you Tony for finding that.
The Sarah Hanan bobblehead. It will all be well appreciated.

Speaker 5 (08:18):
You can put any kind of cigarette in there.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
Right, Oh that's true. Yeah, that's right. Where are smokers at? Yeah?
Come on, roll me a roll me a reef baby.
Ricky obar One says for my reefer. Yeah, yeah, sorry
about that. So I know it's all boomer stuff, that's all.
That's my little boomer segment. Great to have everybody on board.

(08:41):
By the way, the chit chit Chit mugs are back. Yeah.
The new mugs at get mark Merch dot com will
include chit Chit Chit. It is rapture day though, so
get your merch soon.

Speaker 5 (08:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
You can't take it with you, at least you can't
all of it with you. You may be able to
take some of it with you, and definitely if you
get a chit chit Chit mug or any of the mugs,
you definitely want to see if you're allowed to take
it with you. Mark smoke a salmon gummy and a reminisce.
Oh I love the sound of that. Yeah, Nostalgia is

(09:23):
such a sweet thing, isn't it true? All right, well, look,
let's all take a tile and all and get on
with the show's it's a big day and there's a
lot to talk about. Mark Thompson Show. I want to
talk about the Justice Department, the weaponization of the Justice
Department in America. We'll do it with David K. Johnson.

(09:44):
An hour two primarily also probably a little bit with
Jake at the bottom of this hour, but I wanted
to start with just the last I guess it's been
twelve to twenty four hours, during which Donald Trump made
a MA announcement with his Health and Human Services secretary alongside.
I think doctor Oz was there and a couple of

(10:06):
others from the world of uh MA. Is it what
do they call it? Maha maha? Thank you Kim. Yeah, yeah,
So here was the announcement, a little bit on the
on the Thailand all issue, and then I'll give you
some reaction from the health community. Go ahead, this is
the presidency approaches the place said. I wanted the whole thing,
and Tony really gives her the whole thing him walking

(10:27):
up to the platform.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
If you're just I've been waiting for this meeting for
twenty years.

Speaker 5 (10:32):
Actually not the long wait, and it's not.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
That everything's understood or known, but I think we've made
a lot of strides.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
I wish it was that a long time ago.

Speaker 5 (10:44):
That's the tree.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
We're delighted to be joined by.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
America's top medical and public health professionals.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
As we announced that it's going to be coming in
later because they're not there.

Speaker 2 (10:53):
Autism horrible, horrible crisis. I want to thank the man
who brought this issue to the forefront of American politics
along with me, and we actually met in my office.
Is it like twenty years ago, Bobby, It's probably twenty
years ago, New Yorroach. I was a developer, as you

(11:15):
probably heard. I always had very strong feelings about autism
and how it happened and where it came from.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
And he and I, I.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
Don't know the word got out, and I wouldn't say
that people were very understanding of where we were. But
it's turning out that we understood a lot more than
a lot of people who studied it. We think, and
I say we think because I don't think they were
really letting the public know what they knew. Thanks as
well to the Director of the National Institute of Health,

(11:47):
doctor j Badicharia, FDA Commissioner doctor Martin mcairy.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
These are great people.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Administrator of the Centers for Medicine and Medicaid Services, doctor
memdaz Enacting Assistant Secretary of HHS, doctor Dorothy Things.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
He's okay through turn one now here comes turning very much.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
The meteoric rise in autism is among the most alarming
public health developments in history.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
There's never been anything like this.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Just a few decades ago, one in ten thousand children
had autism.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
So that's not a long time. And I've all, I
don't know, did something freeze up? I freeze up?

Speaker 5 (12:35):
I think Trump froze up.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
There is what I think anyway. Yeah, by the way,
the statistics that he offers are boys, of course, you know, concocted.
They just don't. In fact, if you want to, if
you want to say, okay, you got it a fact
I was gonna say, if you want to see how
off the statistics are, because oftentimes when this crowd comes

(13:00):
at you with the blizzard of statistics, you go wow, wow, wow,
that is pretty damning. I'll play for you a little
run where all the statistics are knocked down boom boom boom,
and done, of course in funny fashion by John Oliver.
I'll give that to you in just a second. Right now,
we're trying to get this back. I think Tony's working
on it. Tony I think is frozen. So mega we have.

Speaker 5 (13:22):
Here's how it felt to me when he started blaming
it felt like it was blaming women.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
Let me just say that.

Speaker 5 (13:31):
Other people will say, No, no, he's blaming Thailand. All
he's blaming is Ceedomnifon. But when he launched into this
diatribe about women, you know, you gotta suck it up,
you gotta tough out that pain, you gotta you gotta
be stronger type of thing, it's smacked to me of
blaming women for this what he perceives as this a

(13:52):
Cedamnifon tailanol problem.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Well, I don't know. I love that you make that point,
and I love that you're on the show just for
moments like this, because the moments yeah, exactly exactly, it
almost makes up for the dragular on the show. But
the point I'm trying to the point, No, but the
reality is that I really feel like, at moments like this,

(14:15):
you make a point that God past me. I was
so focused on the misinformation and the utter absurdity of
what he was saying that I missed the fact that
they're throwing this burden on women like this suck it
up burden. And so I'm delighted that you make that point.
But let me just I was going to say, he
makes a bunch of other claims that are completely false.

(14:38):
You know, he's just riffing away like there are entire
communities where they don't take any tile and all, there
have no vaccines and they don't have any autism, like
the Amage community. That's just not true. There is autism
in the Amish community. And he makes the statements about
Cuba about how Cuba doesn't have tile at all because
they can't afford it and as a result, well, they

(15:00):
don't have any autism in Cuba. That's just simply not true. A.
Of course there's tailanol in Cuba. Secondly, of course there's
autism in Cuba. And the last thing I would say
regarding tailan al I gause. I don't know if we'll
get Tony back. I don't know what the situation is.
It's quite clear that tailan al and autism have no relationship.

(15:21):
You can just go back to the beginnings of autism
and the first diagnosis, which are around the turn of the
last century, and then the development of tailanol, which didn't
happen for decades later. So the idea somehow that in
any way Thailand all could be the thing that provokes autism.
It's absurd and the data is just so manifestly clear

(15:46):
on all of this. So again, I have a bunch
of video for you on this, but if we don't
get Tony back, we just may not be able to
get it going today. But essentially, doctor after doctor knocking
this down. Now, the company that manufactures tailanol, they are
in a very difficult position, and they're in the same

(16:08):
position that many companies in America find themselves in relation
to the White House, and that is, we know this
is BS, total garbage based on nothing, and we have
the data to back up the fact that it is
total BS and nothing. But we don't want to take
on the White House by calling out it BS. Yet

(16:30):
we also don't want to endure the damage and the
smear that the White House is doing to us right
now by claiming somehow that this medication is producing this condition.
And so they put out a pretty tepid response I thought.
I mean, the reality is you could lawyer up here

(16:52):
and you could sue the government over this. It's indefensible.
What said. The data is all on your side if
you're the makers of tailan'l.

Speaker 5 (17:01):
Decades worth of data.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
So the idea somehow that they're going to get away
with this is pretty wild. And again it's largely the
result of we don't want to take on the White
House because they can make our life awful. I mean,
you know, the FDA could literally have tialeranol taken off
the shelves if they wanted to. So they are walking
quite carefully onto these eggshells. But with that said, that

(17:30):
was the that was the statement from the White House,
and unless they modify it somehow, there may be some
kind of legal action. I mean, it just is a Again,
how much of the medical community do you need to
have come out and call this out as crap? And

(17:51):
the final thing I'll say is something about autism. You know,
autism is and we understand so much more of it now,
which is why the diagnoses, of course are much higher
today than there used to be, because we understand certain
neurodivergent manifestations as on the autism spectrum, and so the

(18:13):
numbers go up, right, they fall into the autism category,
and that's why you end up with many more patients
or many more people who are diagnosed as having something
on the spectrum of autism than you had many many
years ago. The truth of autism is that it is
that spectrum, though, and it can be this gift. Many

(18:34):
you have autism really embrace it. They're far more forward
about it, you know, like my friends who are neurodivergent,
go oh, it's my autism. I just can't stop researching
this one thing, or I mean, it becomes I just
can't stop getting the best travel deal because I just
you know, I'm up all night. That's my neurodivergency, you know.

(18:56):
So there is all of that at work as well,
and there is the full range. But make no mistake
about it, Autism on the spectrum where there's profound autism
involved is a heartbreaking thing. It's an incredibly difficult thing
for families to deal with. Where a child can't be touched,

(19:17):
where a child can't interact where I mean, it is
such an excruciating thing. And that's why when these guys
come forward with this stuff, this concocted mess of garbage
that masquerades as some credible medical opinion, it's disgusting. These

(19:43):
families really suffer, and that you could, just because you
want to make a proclamation of some kind, come out
and start riffing about Cuba and the Amish, and it's
just disgusting. And so families who wrestle with this every
hour of every day, who love their offspring, So it's

(20:06):
despicable that they have to have this throne in their
face in some way so as to wonder was it
something we did. It's a it's it's really a low
point in a series of low points coming out of
the world of the CDC, HHS, RFK Junior and all

(20:30):
of the fraud that is the American healthcare system. Now, Tony,
you're back, plain me a little bit of doctor Daniel
from the instagram. This is his instagram in response to
you know, doctor Daniel, friend of the show, does the
house calls for us? Here we go?

Speaker 4 (20:48):
Then Trump in RFK Junior today just announced that taiwanaw
use in pregnancy may cause autism. He said that the
FDA will be advising doctors to limit their use of
this amnifin to treat fever and pain in pregnant women
unless medically necessary. But here's the problem. They didn't present

(21:08):
any new scientific evidence today. The best data we have
comes from a massive twenty twenty four study of two
point five million children. It adjusted for genetics and environment
and found zero link between acetaminifin use in pregnancy and
autism and major medical groups including the American College of

(21:30):
Obstitricians and Gynecologists, the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine, the
American Academy of Pediatrics, and the United Kingdom's FDA equivalent
have all reaffirmed the same thing. Kyler remains a safe
recommended option for pain and fever during pregnancy.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
There you go, and women have so few options when
it comes to treating pain and pregnancy. It's so discomfort.
It's such discomfort, it's such a it's such a long haul.
I think the last few months are the really longest
haul they are. And I mean a seed of minifin
is a great help to them, apparently, so.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
I said, I said a menifin commonly known as Thailand.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
All. I'm excited about the bottom of the hour. We'll
get in just a few minutes. Our guest will join.
But before I do get to that, I wanted to
get to a little of the UN address on the
part of the President Donald Trump, no fan of the UN,

(22:34):
no fan of the UN Nations, was addressing the General Assembly.
We'll just needle drop a bit of the beginning. As
he was, he was in one of those moods, you
know where he was both riffing and by design focusing
on the deficiencies of the un go ahead.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
Tony Likewise, in a period of just seven months, I
have and did seven unendable wars. They said they were unendable.
You're never going to hit themselves. Some were going for
thirty one years. Two of them thirty one. Think of it,
thirty one years. One was thirty six years, one was
twenty eight years. I ended seven wars, and in all

(23:21):
cases they were raging, with countless thousands of people being killed.
This includes Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo
and Rwanda, a vicious violent war that was Pakistan.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
And India, Israel and Iran, Egypt.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
And Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Speaker 1 (23:48):
It included all of them. No president, by the way,
and that's just you know, I'd say that there have
been some ces fires brokers along the way. I don't
think that he's definitively ended six or seven wars. I mean,
that's massively misleading. I mean there's a ceasefire or a

(24:12):
de escalation in conflict. I've just made notes in Thailand,
in Cambodia and the Armenia isabery Jan situation falls in
that same category. India Pakistan, I mean India, of course,
disputes even that Trump was part of negotiating that cessation
of hostilities, and it is just that it's kind of
a ceasefire situation. And Israel and Iran, I suppose it's

(24:36):
a ceasefire. It was, as you know, we bombed Iran
and that's how you got again a cessation of hostilities there.
There was a Thailand Cambodia a ceasefire and there was
pressure and Malaysia hosted talks there. I look at the

(24:57):
Rwanda Congo situation. US did broker a deal there, but
you know, there were mass killings there weeks later. So
you know, it's kind of where you stop the music.
And I don't know. NATO troops are still involved in
Serbia and Kosovo, and I would say there is no

(25:21):
imminent end to that conflict. And Egypt and Ethiopia there's
a water rights dispute. I don't know what he's talking
about there with a war, but you know these are
this is all part of his riff there at the UN.
Continue Tony, but that's a little something he's been parading
that around. It's odd too. I'll just say one last
thing that he's you know, begun something with American policy

(25:44):
that's really problematic, like blowing these Venezuelan votes out of
the water, right, I mean, this is just it's crazy.
And then posting the videos. It's kind of like isis
or like a snuff film that you would show these
videos of these boats being blown out of the water,
supposedly drug boats. But anyway, point is at the same

(26:06):
time your petitioning, and he did it today at the
UN for the Nobel Peace Prize. So I'm you know, again,
there's a lot with Trump that just doesn't track. Play
a little bit more, if you would please.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
It's never happened before, There's never been anything like that.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
Very honored to have done it.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
It's too bad that I had to do these things
instead of the United Nations doing them, And sadly in
all cases, the United Nations did not even try to
help in.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Any of them. This is where he crap. I ended
seven wars.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
Dealt with the leaders of each and every one of
these countries and never even received a phone call from
the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal.
All I got from the United Nations was an escalator
that on the way up stopped right in the middle.
If the first leg he wasn't in great shape, she

(27:01):
would have fallen. But she's in great shape. We're both
in good shape. We both stood, and then a teleprompter
that didn't work.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
From the America tech took him up to the room
into the main hall. I guess was not operating. I
saw the video of it, so but he referred to
it a couple of times. I will wrap up, but
continue on if you would, Tony, and we'll rap o
the Nations. A bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank
you very much.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
And by the way, it's working now. Just went on,
Thank you. I think I should just do it the
other way. It's easier.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
Thank you very much. All right, so let's let's let's
call it there. I I it's.

Speaker 5 (27:47):
Always I mean, what he what? What even was that
he's at the United Nations. This is an international body,
and that's what we get. America should be humiliated. That's
what we That's the best we can do is that guy.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
Tony found the video of the President and the first lady.
So they're on the elevator. The escalator and stops almost
immediately and then they they walk up the rest of
the way. It is also kind of an important moment
for the United Nations their eightieth anniversary. It's a it's

(28:21):
a troubled institution, and without America, the United Nations has
serious issues going forward. We were the great underwriters of
the United Nations largely, and even though it is something
of a tremendously flawed institution, the notion of getting the
world's countries together and there being some sort of clearinghouse
for opinion, it's an important one. But Trump has never

(28:44):
been one to support the United Nations. And he smacked
talk the United Nations today while he was addressing the
General Assembly. It was one of the most incredible things
I've ever seen. I mean, he I just showed you
a bit of it. He was in their face at
how they're all misguided. I mean, if you listen to
that speech all the way through, and I did, you

(29:07):
got the notion that the biggest threat to the.

Speaker 4 (29:10):
World is.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
Alternative energy, is getting away from fossil fuels. All these
alternative energy programs and all of these different countries, they're
the biggest problem that face the globe. It was extraordinary.
We'll follow up on it, but that was a bit
of the madness and as he riffed it, it only

(29:33):
got worse. So that's it on Tail and All and
the United Nations. Now to our guests, here's the dude
from the Rip Current. You know him. He the correspondent
for NBC News. He's reported for Al Jazeera, CNN, as
I say, he does the Rip Current. Now, Jacob Ward, everybody,

(29:55):
what's up. Mark, thank you so much for having me.
I really appreciate you. Yeah, absolutely great. Did you see
any of this thing this morning that Trump did with
the is United Nations speech? I did.

Speaker 7 (30:05):
I did catch a bit of it. Yeah, we you
know that that Kim was mentioning, you know, sort of
what is this? And yeah, the ongoing narration of each
thing that's happening in front of him as it happens
is a is a it's a good reminder of you know,
what it is to be eighty one and speaking off
the cuff, it is a there's a there's a The

(30:26):
cognitive burden is huge, you can sort of see. But
the yeah, the language and and the you know, the
the insulting everybody and asked them to give them the
Nobel Peace Prize at once is a it is a
it is an amazing thing. I'm I'm amazed by his
ability to do those things at once.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
I mean there is a on abashed quality. I guess
that's what i'd call UH to Trump always. But as
you say, you know, you mix that with the uh,
the cognitive spill that is associated with his age, et cetera,
and you end up with this what we got today.
That's really true.

Speaker 7 (31:05):
Yeah, you know, yesterday he struggled so hard to say
a seed of minifin right, the generic name for tiland
all as he allowed this. You know, I'm a science correspondent,
so to watch this totally unscientific, totally conspiracy theory based
proclamation that pregnant women who desperately need as much pain

(31:25):
management as they can safely get, you know, should now
suddenly not take tailand all, you know, should not take
a seed of minifit. And you know he can't even
get the name of the word, you know, the word
the drug is saying.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
You know, I said a menifin commonly known as thailand all.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
And what I was making the point before, Jake that
you know, uh, maybe if you cold read that on
the street, you know, ten of us might struggle with.
But if you're the president and that's the thing you're
going to be talking about, I mean, that's the drug
they're saying to be expressly saying is better, you might
be familiar with it.

Speaker 7 (31:58):
Yeah, And it makes me wonder write like, the recent
studies show that, right, because only a certain number of
people in the country vote. At the moment, the number
of actual Trump supporters you know, is probably in the
like thirty two percent of the country range. And people
talking about that in the context of something like the
Jimmy Kimmel moment and the boycount of Disney that drove
its stock price down by two percent. You know, I'm

(32:21):
also thinking here about like I hope that I hope
that far fewer than thirty two percent of the country
takes this proclamation seriously because it is so unscientific, it
is so based on conspiracy theory, and you know, maybe
his stumbling over the words will will help people think
twice a little bit before they take health information from
this guy.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
And it puts the makers of Tonnel in this odd spot.
I was saying, you know, they on the one hand,
you know, they have all these reams of data that
are flying in the face of everything that this president
is saying, and yet you have this very official looking
announcement that essentially smears their drug. It's probably actionable legally.

Speaker 7 (33:00):
Yeah, I think I think it probably is actual legally.
I also think they, you know, the the we've been
living in this world in which we you know, like
I've been worried, mostly in my work reporting on AI,
about the ways in which technology is going to insulate
us in these very very tiny information bubbles. Already social
media has done that to us, but AI is going

(33:22):
to make that even worse. But when you combine that
with someone willing to say these absolutely untrue things from
the most important pulpit in the known universe, it really
doesn't help our case.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
I'd say, Mark, I want to doublege back to AI
and the siloing of information even more in a moment.
But I'm also curious, just because you do report on science.
One of the things he attacked was alternative energy. As
I was saying before, if you watch the UN speech,
which is though that's the greatest threat to the world,

(33:57):
the development alternative energy.

Speaker 7 (33:59):
Yeah, it's a weird thing, you know. I have to
assume that there is an over you know, that in
the ven diagram of the president's mind there is both
a kind of personal allergy to you know, Hippi dippy
alternative energy stuff, and also a business interest in you know,
I mean, the Saudis are pouring billions into his crypto

(34:22):
schemes and the rest of it, and so there's some
business interest there in trying not to upset them that
I have to assume, is it because if you actually,
if he sat down and looked at the numbers, right,
I mean, California has been, you know, recently producing you know,
it's like the solar and wind that comes out of
California amounts to like some of the largest energy production in.

Speaker 1 (34:42):
The world on some days.

Speaker 7 (34:43):
And so there are huge numbers of jobs, huge numbers
of you know, huge amounts of money being made in
this sector, and it just feels like nobody has gotten whatever.
The sort of PowerPoint to get is that they need
to get in front of him to convince him just
how important this could be for his legacy, how you know, popular,
it could make him politically, and that it might be
worth upsetting the Saudast. But he doesn't seem to have

(35:05):
that feeling about alternative energy at this point.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
I was always hoping that he would take that political capital.
This is in Trump the first season, the first term.
I thought, if he could use this political capital for
legitimate for example, infrastructure programs or a legitimate push, as
you say, toward alternative energy, Wow, what a great surprise
that would be. I mean, then give him the corruption

(35:29):
and all of that, I don't care. It would still
move the country in a good direction. But instead, and
I feel on some level on this one, Jake, I
think it's a Republican GOP thing. They have a death
grip on those fossil fuels, and they also have a
death grip on fossil fuel businesses such that they want
to see that continue into the future. Even as as

(35:50):
you suggest, the evidence for alternative energy is so profound.
I mean, it's the lowest cost energy available, and yet
still even cost doesn't seem to cut with these people.

Speaker 7 (36:00):
That's right, Even if you evaluated it only on a
dollars and cents basis, if you're only looking at it in
the most mercenary terms, you could still make a great
business case for that stuff, not least because it brings
huge numbers of jobs like legit jobs. You know, you
hear people spinning people on. You know, the jobs that
come with a new stadium or a new mall. You know,
the jobs that come with installing a solar field or

(36:21):
a field of turbines are incredible. Those are real hardcore
union jobs, paying a pench in the whole thing. And so,
you know, just from an orsonary perspective, you can defend
it that way much less the larger abstract existential thing
we have to think about, which is that our planet
and our time on this planet is going to be
severely damaged if we don't do something about it.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
So I absolutely agree with you there. Yeah, it's funny
the last point that you're making. I thought, as he's
speaking at the UN I'm thinking, Dude, all these people
in this room, the majority of them, get the fact
that there's actually an existential threat to this continued greenhouse
gas emission program that we've been on for decades. I
get that there could be the end here. It's not

(37:02):
all about the bottom line.

Speaker 7 (37:04):
And it must be so discouraging. I know people who worked,
for instance, on the negotiations in the small you know,
Micronesian countries and these small countries that were literally seeing themselves,
you know, drowned, seeing their borders withdrawing as the ocean
eats their land. And you know, those folks pioneered the

(37:25):
idea that you could somehow negotiate on the basis of,
you know, no financial leverage, but just the idea that
it's the right thing to do to save a society
and save a country. If you're you know, Pakistan in
that room, or if you are you know, Indonesia, or
any of these countries in which the temperatures are truly
becoming unlivable and more importantly, from an economic perspective, unworkable.

(37:46):
You can't work in the kind of heat that these
places are going to regularly.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
See.

Speaker 7 (37:50):
To see the president of the United States, the most
powerful country in the world, saying these things based on
nothing about alternative energy, I just think the we just
had an earthquake here the other day, yesterday, two nights
ago here in San Francisco, where I'm based, and I
was describing to somebody else this feeling that you're kind
of like out of control, that the universe is just

(38:12):
driving and you're the passenger and you got no recourse.
I just think that if you're in that room in
the un and you're looking up at that podium with
him saying these things. Knowing what you know about the
fate of your own country, you must have that same
kind of tipping back in your chair of feeling that
I had during this earthquake.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yeah, I think that's a decent parallel. Now let me
ask you about AI. There's a sense that there is
this brilliant technology that is so brilliant that it's actually
escaped the bonds of humanity. To use the phrase in
terms of controlling it, it may literally be a technology

(38:50):
that's uncontrollable. Can you kind of give us a reset
on that? And then I want to speak what you
were talking about, which is the information siloing that you
were speaking of.

Speaker 7 (38:58):
Well, so, you know, so for many years I've been
covering AI since you know, I wrote a book about
it that came out about a year before chatgy BT did.
It was it was early enough that we were worried
about even putting the word AI on the cover of
it because we thought that people wouldn't know about it.
And now I feel stupid about that, But you know,
back then, my thesis and it continues to be is
that you're you know, the Terminator scenario that somehow this

(39:22):
thing is going to become self aware and you know,
enslave us all is not the one I am worried about.
I think, you know, maybe down the road there's a
possibility of that, but you know, the smart people that
I speak to, the analysts and the technical people that
I speak to, say we are not currently on a
technical path to that. The architecture of what we are
currently using every day in the form of chat GBT

(39:43):
is not something that's going to turn into a self
aware sky net that's going to enslave us all. What
I'm worried about, what I worried about in the book,
and I continue to worry about, is that this very primitive, fun,
cut and paste chat GBT and generative AI, you know,
image creators, these kinds of things are going to play
on our psychological vulnerabilities way before we get to the

(40:07):
place of enslavement. So I think it is much more
the movie Idiocracy that we've got to worry about than
the movie The Terminator, because what I am seeing left
and right and center is this tendency to ascribe sophistication
in these systems that they do not possess. They are
literally just creating. They're just guessing at what should be
said next based on the math of language that they've

(40:29):
read off the internet. That's all it is. And yet
we are in a world already where people are falling
into psychosis, falling in literally in love with these systems,
turning over their secrets to them. And you know, I
think it's going to have a profoundly damaging effect on
society if we continue to let the market just run
wild with this kind of technology, because we've already seen

(40:51):
the dangerous places it can go.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
It's really the magic trick associated with the language model,
isn't it? Because it is a remarkable thing. It feels
as though you're speaking with a friend.

Speaker 7 (41:02):
That's right, that's right, And it's a tremendous research tool. Right,
I can type in you know, you know, I have
a conference I'm going to in a couple of days,
and I can say to it, here is you know,
the agenda of the conference upcoming. Give me a backgrounder
on all of the people that are in attendance and
the best way to try to get in front of
them and get to something they might be interested in

(41:24):
talking about. And it's incredible at that. But it's not
because it knows those people, and it's not because it
knows me. It is only because it knows the mathematical
connection between different pieces of language and can put those
things together. It is truly, like you say, a parlor trick,
and you know, for me, like I just think, what
I'm discouraged about is that we are already talking about

(41:46):
the end of human therapy and the end of education,
and the you know, the end of jobs. Certainly because
we're so quick to believe that this you know, text
extrusion machine is to do all of our thinking for
us as a journalist, right for whom I mean, you know,
this thing like eighty percent of what I take pride

(42:08):
in as a journalist is something I think a lot
of people just feel, oh yeah, AI do that we
don't need humans to do that anymore. And to my mind,
that's going to be true across so many areas of
knowledge work, so many areas of human decision and agency,
and I just worry at the end of it that
we're going to be in a place where we don't
really like humanity anymore, that we've lost something really important

(42:29):
and fundamental about who we are.

Speaker 1 (42:32):
It's interesting too that there is an efficacy associated with
so much of what AI does, at least at this
snapshot in time. Specifically, you made me think of it
as you were speaking about humanity and about our interaction
with each other, that there are models you can even
do with chat GPT that are associated with psychotherapy, you know.

(42:53):
I mean, you can tell it your problems and it
plays back. In the case of psychotherapy, it kind of
does it well because psychotherapists typically say so little in
the interaction, and so they play back a little of
what you're saying. It's essentially what you're getting in a
live interaction with a human being, that's right, you know.

Speaker 7 (43:13):
And what we're seeing is that people, you know, I
think there are some I know, some founders, some technology
creators who are trying to build companies that are doing
this the responsible way.

Speaker 1 (43:22):
They're trying to create.

Speaker 7 (43:23):
Foundational you know, AI models that could in fact act
as a responsible form of therapy. But you know, we've
already seen I mean, there's this there's this case right
now in which the parents of a sixteen year old
are suing Open Aye because that sixteen year old committed suicide.
And they say that that chatchibt led him there, that
it isolated him from his friends, that it led him,

(43:43):
you know, at fostered emotional dependency, that it failed to
get into some crisis controls when it was clear he'd
gone off the rails.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Well, it told them, you know, it started to interrupt Jake,
but I was just going to say, it told the
young person, let's keep this between you and me. I mean,
there were certain moments where you know, you could have
directed you should maybe mention this to your mother. It
was specific about walling that off.

Speaker 7 (44:06):
All the nightmare stuff that you would worry a stranger
might do to your kid online. This thing which he
is going to you know, presumably as a sort of
you know, initially brought me to help him with his homework,
goes down this other kind of path. Now that's that's
what I would say, you know, open Aye. I'm sure
in court is going to argue this is not the
intended path here, and they are, i'm sure trying to
put in some controls to make sure that kind of

(44:28):
thing doesn't happen again. But there are other companies, dozens
and dozens of companies that are trying to create AI
chatbot girlfriends, you know, these sort of slightly pornographic, highly sexualized,
always available, pay to play kind of AI girlfriends, right,
and you're going to have a whole generation of young
men who grew up believing that those kinds of exchanges

(44:50):
are normal, that this kind of crazy sexual availability is normal,
that this you know, it's just I think in a reprogram,
a generation of young men, and those are people that
those are companies whose business model is based on that.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Right.

Speaker 7 (45:02):
So for me, there's this thing of I believe absolutely
that a product like chatbt used as like a research
tool or maybe someday even for booking your restaurant reservations. Okay,
I could see that. But when we talk about, you know,
trying to do immediately what the market wants to do,
which is try to make it a companion, you know,

(45:22):
something emotionally connected to you so you won't stop using
the product. That's when you get into really dangerous territory.
And right now, there are no rules about this mark.
There are no regulations in the United States that cover
this whatsoever. The states are trying to do it because
the federal government won't step in, and so that is
for me, the most discouraging part of this right now.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
Wow, I'm reminded of the Facebook testimony from years ago,
a few years ago, when Zuckerberg's there in front of them,
I think it was his first go round, and it
was just clear that the people who are supposedly going
to help craft regulatory legislation didn't know anything about the
Internet or Facebook or you know, add support and work

(46:01):
like this. It was as though or even email. I mean,
you're you're dealing with these fossils often, and it's not
just an age thing. I mean sometimes the older people
are the smarter people in the room. The younger people
are the eager people in the room who just want
to you know, let the let let the s fly. Right.
But you make a really great point when you talk
about it. Essentially, it's all it's open season now. And

(46:23):
I think those who might be in a position in
this administration to be in a regulatory position, they very
much have a buy in to not regulate.

Speaker 7 (46:31):
Well, that's right, And I mean that's been part because
it did them so much good politically, right because in
the last election, one of the things, you know, Mark
Andreesen speaking to The New York Times Ross South that
says it openly.

Speaker 1 (46:41):
We had a deal we in big.

Speaker 7 (46:43):
Tech Marked and Rees is a big famous venture capitalist
here in the in the Bay Area. You know, we
had a deal with society, which was you treat us
as heroes and and you know, will build beautiful things
for you. Leave us alone, and will build beautiful things
for you. And the Biden administration, he said, broke that deal.
And it's because they brought in things like the FTC
Commissioner Lena Khan, who was very anti tech and got

(47:06):
very smart about it. And suddenly you have senators stepping forward,
you know, Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon. Suddenly that's not
a fossil. That guy's really smart on this stuff, thinking
about it quite a lot. And so suddenly I think
it's no wonder that Meta, you know, just launched this
super pack called American Technology Excellence Project that's going to
try and counter these state level AI regulation efforts. You know,

(47:27):
they're they're they're no longer you know, And and Zuckerberg
is sitting at a dinner with all the other heads
of tech in front of Trump, right there's a reason
that they are turning that way, This illusion that once
upon a time the sort of the morality and the
intellectual discipline of tech would be enough to regulate itself.
You know, that turns out not to be true.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
So the future on some level is bleak when you
look at an unregulated AI community. I am a bummer
to talk to about this stuff. Market is absolutely true,
and we've already talked about the fact that alternative energy
is an endangered species, certainly in America. Is this snapshot

(48:06):
in time in terms of science and technology sort of
a grim one?

Speaker 7 (48:12):
It is a grim one at the moment, you know,
I've heard I've had many many people separately say like, man,
is this the end of the enlightenment?

Speaker 1 (48:19):
Right?

Speaker 7 (48:19):
The notion that you could sort of educate yourself and
on the basis of collective education, we can all sort of,
you know, improve society together. You know, there's some signs
of that. But I also would say that I have
seen some very smart people beginning to sue and to
my mind, I know that that, you know, lawyers have

(48:39):
a tough reputation in this country. What's that thing, you know,
the you know, what do you call ten lawyers in
a boat at bottom of the ocean? The start of
a good joke, you know, these are people hate lawyers
in this country. But I would argue that the lawyers
may be the solution here, because you are already seeing
lawsuits in which a lot of companies that do very manipulative,
very predatory stuff, not necessarily the big foundation AI companies.

(49:00):
They are not losing yet, but we've seen a push
in the courts toward trying to hold companies responsible for this,
for you know, for manipulative behavior, for taking away human agency,
for predatory targeting when it comes to marketing. And you've
also got the EU an enormous economic market, you know,
really strictly trying to regulate AI, as does China, you know,

(49:23):
So the United States is really one of the only
places that leaves the doors as open as we do.
And even here, the courts are starting to creep into
the pockets of these companies in a way that I
think is going to concern them. So I think just
in the same way that once upon a time you
and I would have been smoking cigarettes together market you
know on this podcast, you know, on your show.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
We're no longer doing that. It took a while to get.

Speaker 7 (49:44):
Back into a world in which we were holding companies
responsible for the death that AI is sorry that cigarettes created.
It took a while. We're slow in that world, but
we do get there. So I like to think that
we're going to get there.

Speaker 1 (49:57):
I like that parallel too, because that reference speaks to
sort of what we've been dealing with the last day
or so. Remember, there were doctors smoking cigarettes as they
were recommending you know, camels or you know, a pack
a day or whatever it was. And so the idea
somehow that we just dealt with this, uh, and the

(50:18):
medical community the quackery of the RFK junior world is
somehow speaking to tail and all. And you know, you
realize how you know, you got to you got to
pick your science and look at real data. You know,
that's right.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
I want to double back this my last because I
get these emails from members of our audience. We're very
much into tech, and they'll send me these videos of
robots that do all of these things, and they'll also
speak to AI. And of course, the idea that we'll
all have sort of personal AI agents, you know that
will my agent will speak to your agent, will set
up this conversation. Instead of using people to actually coordinate it,

(50:54):
it'll be my agent and your agent that will coordinate it,
like what could possibly be wrong with this speak to
do that, and how that either grows into a good
thing or how it also gets perverted into a bad thing.

Speaker 7 (51:06):
The stat that I keep coming back to is it's
represented in a chart that I post all the time
on the ripcurrent dot com where I do my substeck
in my newsletter, sorry, my newsletter on my podcast, and
this chart shows over time where the salary of your
average clerk in a retail environment, let's say a pharmacy,

(51:29):
how that salary since the nineteen seventies has been more
or less constant adjusted for inflation, it's the same amount
of money as ever, but the work responsibilities of that
person have gone up more than tenfold. And this is
why when you go into a you know, let's say,
you know, a small town hotel in the middle of
the night to check in, the person who greets you
at the front desk is usually the only person on

(51:52):
duty in that hotel right at that hour. You know,
when you go like literally the only person, we've been
in that position multiple times, or you know, when you
go into a pharmacy and everything is locked up. Part
of it is that there aren't enough people working in
that place to keep track of who's sealing.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
Stuff or not.

Speaker 7 (52:08):
So to my mind, the United States is the history
of how we use labor in this country is never.
If you get to a labor saving place, then we're
going to let everybody go and you know, paint water
colors in their garden. So the idea right that AI
is going to somehow free us up to have more time,
that has never ever been true. That's something called the

(52:30):
Jevons paradox that back in the nineteenth century, this guy
was figuring out that they were running out of coal
in England even though they were using coal more efficiently
than ever. And it's come to describe what it is
that when we make a thing that uses something more efficiently,
we just end up using.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
More of that stuff.

Speaker 7 (52:48):
So my worry is as we use more, as we
use our time more efficiently, you're going to have AI. Basically,
you know, push people into working ten times as hard
for the same money. I'll leave you with the same
atment of a few months ago said in a podcast that
he and some of his buddies have a text thread
going in which they are betting on which financial quarter

(53:08):
they will see a one person, one billion dollar company emerge.
That is the dream. No employees, just a single person.
I don't care how many gardeners you employ, You're not
going to be able to employ us all. And so
that is the direction that where we're going right now.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
Wow, Wow, it's so interesting, Jake, really love your podcast
and love your takes. And what is the paradox again?

Speaker 7 (53:32):
That Jacob, the Jevons paradox j E v O Jevs
William Jevons. That thing will blow your mind. Yeah, we
are not good at saving at saving labor, you guys,
we're going to use more and more of it.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
It's the ripcurrent dot com. There's also the substack. We'll
have links to everything there. It is look at you,
towny with the Jevins paradox there the hybrid car example.
That's right.

Speaker 7 (53:56):
We drive further and further the more efficient the car becomes,
rather than using it less, right, rather than do that
Suddenly we're driving more and more and more.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
That's right, very very cool. Loved our conversation. Let's do
it again soon, as I say, we'll have links to
your stuff under this video and beyond, and I look
forward to our next next go round. Thanks Jacob, I
so appreciate big ad Mara. Thanks be okay, all the
best Jacob Ward right on how smart is he? Yeah?

(54:26):
Really really cool. We'll have David K. Johnston joining in minutes.
I wanted to mention that you can smash the like
button if you would. It helps us in the YouTube universe.
I know it's a weird thing, but that thumbs up,
smash it like a boss, and it helps you to
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(54:47):
if you have enough thumbs up, there's some threshold. It
helps produce your feed into other feeds that otherwise don't
even know you're around quickly. Some comments along the way here,
Happy Rapture day, that's right Jim Slayton with a five
dollars super Chat. Thank you Jim, and a happy rapture
to you. I also think it's the Jewish New Year today.

(55:08):
Maybe you want to check on that, but I believe
that's right. I think that Happy New Year to all
the Jewish boys and girls. Can I trust Doctor Trump
or should I take to Thailand all and check in
the morning. Since Harry Magnan with a five dollars a
superhero Chat, Thank you, Harry. Yeah, when you start taking
your advice from Papa Trump, you're in trouble.

Speaker 6 (55:32):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
We don't have to worry about Thailand all or autism
because the world is ending today. Right. Oh yeah, that's
right again see point one. It is rapture day. Thank you.
But you know, then you take tail and all with
you with the rapture. I read as thiland all take
a couple for the rapture. You know, is Trump trying

(55:54):
to distract us from the Epstein files? Well it it is,
Uh offered often that a lot of these moves are distractions.
Two dollars from Harry Magnus says this is for the
kid who turned off the escalator at the US. Very good,

(56:16):
thanks for that, Harry. Chaplin Fred offers this, Hi, Mark
Kim Tony, I took my last til and off for liftoff,
and I'm ready to go rapture here I come. I
will send you some heavenly coffee bean, so that would
be nice. I'll bet they've got great coffee in heaven
or whatever they call it. I don't know. Here is

(56:37):
our peacefully Resist coffee mug. I'm gonna send one to
David K. Johnston. Peacefully Resist on one side and then
our logo on the other side. You can get them
at Getmarkmirch dot com and the Johnston family will get one.
I just received mine, That's why I'm so proudly displaying it.

(56:58):
But it is special edition. Get Mark Murch dot com.
Enjoy your rapture. Chaplain Fred and cousin Earl with a
six dollars super chat saying YouTube sent me an Ai
Christopher Hitchins compenting on current affairs and people were liking it.
I'd be interested to see that just out of curiosity.

(57:19):
Hitchins is so brilliant, you know. But of course he
passed away some years ago. Anyway, that's a little bit
of the of the story with the Rapture. Glad we're
all still around long enough to speak to our next guest.
He is a polit Serprise winner, best selling author. When

(57:39):
it comes to Trump, he has his history and the
ex's and o's like nobody else. He's the co founder
of dcreport dot org now professor at rit How about
it for David K. Johnston? Oh, Mark, Hello, sir, Wow,
it's been busy. I don't know if you saw much
of the address at the un by President Trump. We

(58:03):
showed a bit of it. He sort of smacked talk
everybody in the General Assembly, talking about how the UN's
been a profound disappointment, how he's ended seven wars without
any help from the UN, and he talked about one
of the greatest threats to the world being alternative energy.
It was a weird, sort of riff filled speech. That is,

(58:26):
you know, he's kind of off prompter for a while
and doing his thing. Maybe some comments on that, and
then I'm going to get to the Justice Department and
what's happening there.

Speaker 6 (58:34):
Well, maybe we could take up a collection to send
Donald to get a deal. Carnegie course and how to
win friends and influence people.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
He sure didn't follow his that which he claims is
you know his method of business, right, which is, you know,
making a deal, and you know he essentially alienated everybody
in that room, which is what you're saying, Yeah.

Speaker 6 (59:02):
Well, this actually is Donald's way of doing stuff, you know,
insulting people, insulting people, telling him that he's the only
person you know who can do anything. I mean, when
I've been telling you for years that Donald believes he
should be the world dictator, this is just like the
perfect proof of exactly that that Donald has this idea

(59:28):
that he is special and unique and the rest of
us or idiots, And of course it's absurd on its face.
But his attack on the UN and his saying that,
you know, he solves seven wars. The other day he
cited one of these wars. He named two countries where
he said he adjusted their border. The countries are hundreds
of miles apart. I mean, isn't even you know, he

(59:48):
says he settled the Pakistan India conflict. Well, you know,
the Pakistanis are like, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah, because
Donald gave them economic favors in the modion down And
I appear on TV in India a couple times a week,
are like, what are you talking about? Dudes? You never
even made a phone call. So Donald just lives in

(01:00:10):
this fictional world, and unfortunately we're the victims of his narrative,
which is getting more and more incoherent as we move along.
But also he's really getting drunk with power.

Speaker 1 (01:00:26):
I had.

Speaker 6 (01:00:26):
I had lunch today Mark with a retired FBI agent
who told me a couple of things I didn't know
that maybe in the public record, twenty three percent of
FBI agents have been pulled off their assignments counter terrorism,
gun trafficking, a gun running, money laundering, human trafficking, to

(01:00:48):
work on ice, arrests of people, and that puts the
country at severe risk, both from criminal conduct and national
security conduct. And you know, FBI agents follow a modo fidelity, bravery, integrity,
working with ice and wearing masks over your face. That

(01:01:10):
doesn't fit any of that. And I'm sure there are
many more who would leave right now, except you know,
you've got two kids there in college, you got a mortgage,
you're three years from being eligible to take your pension,
and apparently there's a lot of discussion my friend tells
me going on inside the FBI that Trump eventually plans

(01:01:31):
to cancel or get rid of pensions and possibly health
insurance for federal employees. There have been some hints of this,
and apparently it's being taken seriously by my friend, the
former fbis and tells me inside the FBI.

Speaker 1 (01:01:45):
Well, I mean it's the FBI, and then it extends
to other parts of the Justice Department. Right the Justice
Department being completely weaponized, they're out of the weeds on this,
and now it's quite openly discussed by Trump go after
these people, right, And the.

Speaker 6 (01:01:59):
Purpose mark of this is not to convict James come
or Hillary Clinton or any of these people of a crime.
It is exactly what Trump's Minister of Hate, Stephen Miller
said the other day, and the order in which he
said things before he gets the word law is important.
He said, we're going to take their jobs, we're going
to take their money, and then we're going to use
the law against them. And what they want to do

(01:02:21):
is force these people to spend the lifetime they've spent
building up resources and ruin their economic lives.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
And I'm seeing that more and more people at the
Justice Department are uneasy about remaining there and uneasy about
the bluntness of his threats. And there's more and more
reporting that people are beginning to look for work elsewhere.
These are oftentimes public servants. You've made this point before.
I think that you know these aren't particularly well paying jobs.

(01:02:53):
These are people who are drawn to public service, often
times as prosecutors there at the Justice Department and others
who government.

Speaker 6 (01:03:01):
Yeah, almost any position in the government requiring the kind
of education that until now the FBI is required. They're
lowering the standards for FBI agents. Almost all FBI agents
are lawyers. Justice Department prosecutors are lawyers, whether and just
department civil lawyers as well, and almost all of them

(01:03:21):
could go to private practice and make more money unless
there's a flood of thousands of them, and then of
course that doesn't work. But people don't go to these
jobs to get rich. And that's something Trump doesn't understand.
Donald who never did a day of public service before
January twenty, twenty seventeen, not one day of public service.

(01:03:43):
He has no concept to this, no idea of decency
and of dedication, of risking your life. I mean, what
does he say about soldiers who get killed or get captured?
You know, they're losers. And what I find troubling is
we have yet to reach the point where Republicans, especially
in the Senate, find a backbone. How bad does this

(01:04:09):
have to get? And one of the things I asked
at lunch today was, I said, you know, Pete Hegseth
announced that we are no longer trying to prevent the
Russians from breaking into Pentagon computers. And I said, my
assumption would be if any other administration was in power,
And the Defense Secretary said that they would have FBI
agents sitting them down in a room and by the

(01:04:32):
time they were done talking to him, a US attorney
would have said, put them in handcuffs. And the answer
I got to that was absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
And give me the I'm sorry, give me the problematic
nature of what Hegshid said.

Speaker 6 (01:04:45):
Said, We're no longer going to try and interdict Russians.
There are thousands and tens of thousands of efforts to
break into computers, whether it's City Bank or Disney or
the Pentagon or State Department. And higgsth declared that we're
no longer going to try and stop this by the Russians.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
And it's funny I heard that as uh, there isn't
any more of this. That's why there are no interdictions,
you know what I mean. But that's not but that's
not what he had intended. Look that land, Yeah, the
HEXA thing is just so full of incompetence. He's viewed
as an incompetent by many. Add to d O d

(01:05:27):
as you know, and uh, you know, there's all this
performative stuff, changing the name and then him showing up
on television and then alongside Trump and all of these
different places. So I feel as though in a way
he's a prop But on the other hand, he's in
charge of, you know, the biggest governmental agency in Washington,
although maybe Homeland Security is now yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 (01:05:50):
Without a question. But you know, the cover story the
Atlantic magazine did some months ago that showed a horse
drawn hearse and Washington, DC burned to the ground is
just that was spot on. And it's more and more
becoming very clear that in fact, the Trump people intend
to destroy the federal governments we've known it. They have

(01:06:13):
been busy handing out pardons to major league drug traffickers,
gun runners, money launderers, sexual predators who they or their
family or their associates have in one way or another
put money in Donald's pocket. May not be his personal pocket,
it could be his library for some day or wherever

(01:06:36):
he chooses. But you know, we have a president who
has criminalized the presidency.

Speaker 1 (01:06:43):
You know, the criminality is actually something I would be
okay with if there were any competence about the rest
of the administration. And I say okay with It's like, okay,
I get it. The guy's corrupt and he's lining his pockets.
But at least he's hired good people, and they're doing
good things. The wall to wall incompetence, the utter self
enrichment that is informing everyone from Christy Nome and her

(01:07:07):
boyfriend Lewandowski and the way that they are awarding these
ice contracts, to what's happening at the FCC to Vessent
and his crew, the crypto billionaires who have moved in
and are just beginning a process that makes Trump so
much wealthier. As you've pointed out, he's now legitimately probably

(01:07:27):
close to five billion dollars, largely as a result of
some of this stuff. So I want to go first
to the FCC. Then, and this threat that was made
openly on that Benny Johnson podcast when he's basically threatening
Sinclair and next our stations with FCC pulling of licenses
if they don't pull Kimmelman, it was all clearly implied

(01:07:50):
in that statement. Was and it was Mobsterville.

Speaker 6 (01:07:52):
Oh yeah. And this is an absolute example of the
government violating the First Amendment. The government doesn't apply to
your show. It doesn't apply to my I mean, the
First Avenment doesn't apply to your show. It is that
Congress shall pass no law restricting Well that's been clearly
interpreted as it should be by the courts to mean
that the administration can't either, because after all, the executive

(01:08:16):
under our constitution is simply the water boy who carries
out the directives of the Congress. And the FCC has
been incredibly timid in the past about licenses. I got
a whole broadcast chain forced to go out of business.
They didn't technically lose their license, they got told instead

(01:08:37):
of a normal three year renewal, you were going to
get a short license a two year renewal, which was
a signal sell your stations and go out of business
so you don't have to go through the ignominy of
having your license revoked. And that was for really serious,
decades long manipulation of the news for the personal, financial
and other benefits to the cont trolling owner of the chain,

(01:09:01):
called gross telecasting. Here, it's very plain that the message
is you will only air that which the president approves,
or we will come after you. And with Sinclair, I
don't think that'll be a problem. These are the people
who invented swift voting. They took a military tactic invented

(01:09:22):
by Lieutenant Sorry. The Democratic Party candidate for President, Carrie
I'm sorry, Lieutenant John Kerry. That saved We don't know
how many, but many, many American sailors lives in the
Vietnam War by creatively changing the direction and orders that

(01:09:46):
he had and turned him into, you know, a sniveling
coward who shout a little boy in the back. There's
no regard for fact or truth at Sinclair. Those people
are ideologues, and yet the SCC has never gone after
them for their outrageous abuses. Now, you can't touch Fox
and OAAN and these others because they're on the internet

(01:10:08):
just like you are. But TV stations the broadcast over
the public airwaves, you can go after them. In the
case of the network CBSMSON, NBC and ABC, they are
not licensed, but their owned stations are O and O
stations KABC, KCBS, and KNBC in LA for example. And

(01:10:33):
this going after them and saying you will only see
what dear leader wants to show is flat out unconstitutional.
My guess of what will happen if this somehow gets
into the courts. The Supreme Court will put it on
what's called the shadow docket, the emergency docket, and they
will say, well, we will let the litigation continue as

(01:10:55):
to whether the administration improperly censored CBS, say by taking
away their television licenses. But in the meantime, those stations
will remain off the air. And of course that's not
the way the court has ever worked. The irreparable harm
theory in law is you got fired, you were blocked

(01:11:17):
from doing something. You have a grant to do cancer research.
You're a four year old child who's getting treatment. We
will leave you in place, because if we take that away,
you die, you lose your fortune, you lose your job, whatever.
Through the shadow docket, they've completely turned that upside down.
And that's just I can't think of a milder word

(01:11:42):
than despicable.

Speaker 1 (01:11:43):
Well, it's so relevant too to the last twenty four
hours because the FTC firing was just upheld by the
Supreme Court. And of course you know.

Speaker 6 (01:11:51):
And on those very grounds you exactly keep suing. But
you're out of your job.

Speaker 1 (01:11:55):
Sure, sure, I mean I didn't know about this irreparable
harm law. That's why that's why you're a law professor.
But it's very relevant, as I say, in perfect perfectly
relevant to this administration. So we come back to Kimmel,
which is just of a kind because the statements on
a broader level, as you know by Trump, and we've
detailed them and run them here have been. There's been

(01:12:15):
ninety seven percent negative coverage about me on the nightly news,
which is of course just a ridiculous statistic that he
just pulls out of whatever. And you know what is
negative coverage? I mean anyway, but anyway, in any case,
and he's saying, I think we ought to look at
those licenses as a result of that, I mean, you know,
he's realizing you kind of said it, drunk with power

(01:12:36):
that he can put all of these stations on the
griddle and next star that wants to expand their footprint,
they want to acquire more stations, they need FCC approval
for that. Sinclair, as you say, they're already right wing,
they're happy to you know, sing through from that hymnal.
So this is really a moment in time where he
can leverage all of that.

Speaker 6 (01:12:55):
And there's an economic component to this. The rule used
to be that you could own seven stations, seven TV stations,
seven AM radio, seven FM radio. We now have Clear
Channel I believe at one point owned eight hundred radio stations.
We have markets where there may be sixteen stations, but
like fourteen of them are owned by the same company.

(01:13:16):
And this is part of another long term fundamental problem
that has led to where Trump is. As you reduce competition,
then you have fewer and fewer jobs that are in
management and supervision and producing and serving customers or manufacturing goods,
and that weakens the position of labor. It enhances the

(01:13:38):
profits that go to the people at the top. And
to the extent that these are profits that don't make
market sense, they're what economists call by the stupid name rents.
You know, we think of rent as that's what you
pay for your apartment every month, but rents in this
case means unearned profits. Profits you should have. Those are
also what's known as a dead weight law to the economy.

(01:14:00):
So if you have a billion dollars of dead weight loss,
the people who collect the billion dollars, they're better off.
They got a billion dollars. But to the rest of us,
this didn't create more jobs, it didn't circulate money through
the economy. It's as if we each took our share
of the billion dollars and put a match stick to
dollar bills. The inability of Donald Trump to understand this,

(01:14:25):
even though he was awarded an economics degree that he
didn't earn by Penn. Is at the heart of this,
and this will continue to get worse. The threats to
our national security. The murders Donald Trump has committed. We
know fourteen so far. Yes, the two boats leaving Venezuela,

(01:14:48):
eleven people on one and three on the other. And
it's not me saying they're murders. It's former military lawyers
saying across the board, there's no authority to do this.
That's not what you do.

Speaker 1 (01:15:00):
I was Pea talking about that today, David in the
U at the UN he says, you won't you know,
it was you won't see any more drug votes coming
out of Venezuela. You know, we took care of that.

Speaker 6 (01:15:08):
And this will get worse until some of the Republicans
find their spines. I mean this is it is appalling
that none of the Republicans will stand up to him
because they're afraid they're going to be voted out of office.
At some point, they're going to be voted off out
of office anyway, assuming we continue to have elections and
they're not rigged. But you know where where's I mean,

(01:15:33):
even Mitt Romney, you know, proved to be mostly a
rubber spine. You know, he'd say things, and he voted
to convict on impeachment knowing that Trump wouldn't be impeached
I wouldn't be convicted upon impeachment the second time around.
And it is if you had written a novel in
two thousand and five about what's going on in twenty

(01:15:54):
twenty five, and it was it turned out to be
exactly accurate, no one would have bought that novel, no
one would have published it. It was beyond belief that
we would see an entire political parties leadership, ignore their
oaths of office, ignore the principles they've stood by for years,
and sign on to this racist, misogynist, fake Christian administration

(01:16:17):
run by a career criminal.

Speaker 1 (01:16:21):
Well that's so well said. I want to because you
do mention fake Christian turned to the Memorial Service over
the weekend. I mean the Charlie Kirk effect, the political
animation of young people turning Point USA, I think had

(01:16:42):
more to do with the victory that Trump had than
did the Joe Rogan manisphere. Not saying that Joe Rogan
manisphere wasn't part of the two in terms of getting
worried out, but really as a political organization, turning point
USA was the real thing. Kirk, who I agreed with
on almost nothing, I can't, but I certainly agree with
him on free speech. He was a big free speech
opponent proponent if he was.

Speaker 6 (01:17:03):
If he wasn't going to kill you over your speech.

Speaker 1 (01:17:05):
Right, that's true? There is that, Yeah, I mean he
really had said some things that really, you know, despicable,
but I again, his answer to it, uh is more
free speech, and certainly his his violent end is horrifying
and awful. It was a revival, it was The Memorial

(01:17:26):
service was a It was like a religious revival, and
it was filled with a political Uh. It felt like
a political convention as well. As you saw Trump get
up there and make points. Miller I thought was even
more acoustic, wasn't he. I mean, Miller was just a
He was an angry that.

Speaker 6 (01:17:46):
I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot, because he's
about as strident as the word can be applied.

Speaker 1 (01:17:50):
Yeah, we're not going to let them take your country
from you, and that it was all it was. It
was as though this wasn't a crazy wacko who'd taken
out Charlie Kirk. It was some normal liberal lefty who
had taken them out. I mean, this is you know,
these people who assassinate political figures. They're crazy, They're crazy,
radicalized people. They don't represent almost anybody. But I worry

(01:18:14):
that rhetoric that I heard at the Charlie Kirk memorial,
some of that will animate that kind of call to arms.

Speaker 6 (01:18:22):
You know, David Well, that's exactly what they're doing, and
there will be more acts of political violence. And of
course they're whitewashing everything they can, removing references to slavery
from national parks and monuments and museums. They are trying

(01:18:44):
in every way possible to create this US versus them mentality.
And they're not a majority. They're not even close to
a majority with this kind of belief system. A lot
of people voted for Trump because they want tax cuts,
they believe that he'll be tough on the border. They
didn't sign up for the rest of this. So far

(01:19:06):
this year, China, which typically buys one in four bushels
of soybeans from the US, has ordered exactly zero soybeans,
and farmers are now saying, gee, we need to bail out.
So remember Trump is also because he did this before
in his first term. Trump is also a socialist if

(01:19:26):
that word the way he throws it around. Because you're
not going to sell soybeans to China, I don't care,
and now we'll tap you and I as taxpayers to
make up for these farmers. And the farmers don't want
to collect payments. They want to grow their crops and
sell them. But because of the retaliatory tariff China put on,

(01:19:46):
you hit us with all these tariffs. Fine, we're going
to hit you where it hurts. We have a selective tariff.
We're going to hit your soybeans, just like the Canadian said,
We're going to tariff Canadian Kentucky bourbon. You know, people
are pushing back around around the world about this, and
people have got to stand up. Now. There's apparently a

(01:20:11):
big rally, another No Kings rally, people trying to organize.
If you can't get twenty million people to show up
for this, there's probably no point in holding it. The
crowd sizes have to be a lot larger. People have
to decide, you know, this is more important than watching
the Saturday afternoon football game. To go to this and

(01:20:32):
absolutely peacefully. They're going to try really hard to provoke
people to create incidents because that will help Trump, who
wants to be able to declare martial law. And I
don't know, Almost fifty years ago I broke the story
that when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, the National
Guard Training Center in San Luis Obispo was teaching California

(01:20:55):
police officers how to impose martial law, but they weren't
teaching how to re turn civilian control. And the answer
I got to that was, oh, it was an oversight.
It's an oversight, yeah, right. But more importantly, years later
somebody else wrote a story and pointed out they never
corrected the oversight. It has long been a dream on

(01:21:16):
the right among some elements, the ones who are around Trump,
the Charlie Kirk types, especially the Stephen Miller Cash Battel types,
to get rid of democracy. And Donald even said the
other well, you know a lot of people saying maybe
we ought to have a dictator. That'd be a good idea.
I don't know anybody is actually saying that the public sphere.

(01:21:37):
But of course, Donald, as you said, just pulls those
things out of somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:21:41):
And you know, he states it over and over as
he does these facts that are completely concocted. You know,
on the tailand hall thing. Yesterday he was talking about
Cuba not being able to afford tiland all. That's why
they and look at them, they have no autism. Look
at the homage community. They have no inoculations and they
they don't use any medications and as a result, there's

(01:22:03):
no autism there. Of course, there is autism in the
homage community. Cuba can certainly afford tilent all. They use
it down there, and there's autism down there. And plus
the data reams of the decades of it really speak
against the notion that there's any link between tailent A
and autism. It's absurd.

Speaker 6 (01:22:19):
There's a guy I follow on Facebook called doctor Knocknoc
and he is a scientist and he does a very
good job in planning of explaining things, and on the
issue of the tail and autism, he pointed out that
they didn't even read the studies they cited because they
say the exact opposite of what they say in one case.

(01:22:40):
In another case, the n that is the number of
cases that were examined was nine thousand. There's another study
where the n is nine hundred thousand that shows no
noticeable effect from thailanol on pregnant women. Why would you

(01:23:01):
cherry pick the one that says one hundredth of that
number plus the finding was well, there might be just
a minimal effect, but it's not statistically significant. This is
just made up stuff. People are going to die if
they don't get vaccines. And then Donald comes in and
says over the weekend, well, you know, we've got to

(01:23:23):
stop this having these multiple vaccines at one time, mumps, measles,
and rubella MMR is given it at the same time
in one shot. You know, I'm not a biologist, but
I know that every day your body deals with thousands,
probably tens of thousands of pathogens that get into the body,

(01:23:43):
things that might be damaging, and it deals with all
of them at the same time. And we know from
decades of experience. I mean, I couldn't grow a beard
when they started handing out MMR vaccines like that to
giving them to little kids, your body could deal with
the vaccine that has forty different vaccines. Donald doesn't know anything.

Speaker 1 (01:24:05):
Well, he gets fragments of information and on the MMR thing,
that was one of those things that was knocking around
that the MMR putting them all together is bad. That's
been knocking around for a long time, and oh yeah, it's.

Speaker 6 (01:24:14):
Among people only have no idea what they're.

Speaker 1 (01:24:16):
Talking about exactly, and it's only because it has been
repeated so long that there was this shadow around it.
And now they do break them all out. So it's like,
but they don't break them out for any scientific reason.
They break them out because there was such public recoiling
from the notion of them all together based on the
propaganda that you're talking about, and.

Speaker 6 (01:24:33):
By the way, that further raises healthcare costs. And I'm
in the process right now signing up for my benefits
from my employer rit for the next year. And healthcare costs,
Prump said, they're all going to come down. Drug prices
are going to go down fifteen hundred percent, which is
a fabulously wild mathematical concept. Everything's going up, going up

(01:24:59):
a lot. Richard Eisenberg, the former editor of Money magazine,
says his Medicare Part D for drugs is gone up
eight and a half time, So every dollar he pays
this year, next year he'll pay eight dollars and fifty cents.

Speaker 1 (01:25:15):
The last thing I want to ask you quickly is
related to this that we're talking about, and that is
it struck me as he was speaking yesterday about this
Tailanow thing, knowing that there are volumes of data that
are clear about no link between talent and autism, that
there is a legal case here. I mean, you know,

(01:25:35):
if there are real damages here now because of who
Trump is in his disposition toward the way he's handling business.
You saw the makers of Talannow kind of walking very
carefully in their response. But it strikes me that, you know,
if they wanted to lawyer up and show real damages,
they could.

Speaker 6 (01:25:55):
I'm sure they could. Where they would have standing and
who they could go against is not entirely clear. What
I'm sure they will do at some point is file
to try and block the regulations, and if it isn't
done by Johnson and Johnson, which owns produces title in all,
by and large, it will be some medical group society,

(01:26:19):
the College of American Pediatricians or somebody like that to
try and block these things. And again I predict what
will likely happen here as a trial court will say, yeah,
you litigants are correct, the administration is wrong, and appeals
court will hold it up, and the Supreme Court, in
the shadow docket will say, well, Trump's policy remains in
place while the litigation goes by turning the principle of

(01:26:43):
irreparable harm on its head.

Speaker 1 (01:26:45):
Yeah, and there you go, see the earlier point about
the shadow docket. David, So appreciate your time. Thank you.
I'll look forward to next week.

Speaker 6 (01:26:53):
Thank you, talk to you next week.

Speaker 1 (01:26:55):
Jos all right, thank you, sir, Thank you. The Mark
Thompson Show. Who's Mark Thompson? It's unbelievably offensive.

Speaker 5 (01:27:22):
I think you know what the problem is just as
well as I do.

Speaker 7 (01:27:29):
Heymar it's Georgianso's here. A lot of people are telling
me you're a liar.

Speaker 6 (01:27:37):
That's pure speculation. There's always been in this country. Thirty
five percent idiots morning.

Speaker 1 (01:27:51):
Where are my weed? Smokers at.

Speaker 6 (01:27:56):
Your are like to ask for a recess? Then you
let him finish.

Speaker 5 (01:28:00):
Sir, you cannot say you love your country.

Speaker 6 (01:28:07):
That was very inappropriate.

Speaker 2 (01:28:09):
Don't talk to me that way.

Speaker 1 (01:28:12):
What do you think I'm going to say to you?
Whoever is reducing this thing has no idea what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (01:28:20):
So you're ready to be a piss cash right on everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:28:25):
Thank you for being here, thank you for joining the conversation.
You can join us live on YouTube with different comments
while the show's going on. We're on live every day
from two to four in the East. Shout out to
the East coast. We get the rapture on the West
coast three hours later, you see, Yes, it's not carried
live on the West coast, we are, and from eleven

(01:28:48):
to one and then all around anytime you want to
check us out on YouTube and then as an audio
podcast on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on iHeartRadio, and on
Google Podcasts and anywhere better podcasts are carried. So really
interesting conversation with David K. Johnston and appreciate that. A

(01:29:10):
quick note on some comments for those who have fallen
into our comments section. I'm a first time viewer. Welcome
John Stalins. Well, welcome John. Do we have anything for
John as a first yati in.

Speaker 5 (01:29:31):
The rich tradition of the Mark Thompson Show.

Speaker 1 (01:29:33):
We do have a rich tradition, and I'm sorry there
is nothing for you, John, except for our enduring affections.
Can the guests speak about the TikTok thing. Oh, that
would have been good. Although I have to tell you
I don't think you need to know too much about
the TikTok thing. I think it's all kind of being
played out in plain sight as usual. There's very little

(01:29:54):
sleight of hand. And when I say the TikTok thing,
and when you refer to the TikTok thing, I presume
that you mean the take over at TikTok by a
large share here in this country in addition to a
Chinese interest. And so you have the Ellison crew taking
over along with this small consortium of the billionaire boys club,
that is, those are the tech bros around Donald Trump,

(01:30:17):
and the platform is going to completely change. They say
that the algorithm is going to remain the same, but
they're dry cleaning it up a lot of politics and
news and any kind of dissenting opinion. The Ellisons are
very much in bed with Trump's and so you end
up with a TikTok that, if it does do politics,
will likely do the kind of politics that is okay

(01:30:38):
with the Trump crew. But I mean, that's the future
of TikTok. It It seems clear, Mark. I guess I
thought it was clear that Ai creations of dead people
are a bad thing. It's eerie, not Earl. Good Lord Mark,
get it right. Cousin Eerie. Thank you, cousin er, I

(01:31:00):
love you. Thank you. Big shout out to my favorite cousin,
cousin Erie. Big shout out. It's eerie. How I read
it as earl for so long? And I posted this before,
but I just wanted to because it echoed with Kim
was saying, what the talent all thing? The way Trump
spoke about women when he addressed talentall and taking meds,
et cetera. It made me ill, says JT. You know,

(01:31:21):
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(01:31:43):
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(01:33:33):
Coachellavalleycoffee dot com. Trevor Starr has noticed that with a
ten dollars ten cent super chat, thank you for that
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(01:33:56):
That's how that works, right, how dare you, Trevor Starr?
I mean, how dare you? These are the finest credibility
glasses that money can buy? And I am and I
love them so but nonetheless, thank you for the super chat.
All right, speaking of TikTok and and stuff, when do
we bring Jefferson Grahama now? Or do I do your

(01:34:17):
news now and then bring him on? What's what you
do here?

Speaker 5 (01:34:19):
I leave it up to you. You get to choose.
It's the Mark Thompson choice to.

Speaker 1 (01:34:22):
Me, I like making him wait. Honestly, why don't I
make him wait and then and then Uh yeah, I
don't know. I mean he's kind of like comes through
when he's around, when he can manage it. I don't
really see a lot of dedication, particularly in Jefferson Graham. Yeah,
I'm just saying that. If I couldn't you know.

Speaker 5 (01:34:43):
What to say, We're lucky to have him whenever we
get him.

Speaker 1 (01:34:47):
I could say that, yeah, but.

Speaker 5 (01:34:51):
I don't want to hear you.

Speaker 1 (01:34:53):
Making a point about Jefferson Graham. All Right, it is Tuesday,
it is the Rapture, so we better get to him
before years ago. Here's a guy who definitely won't be
saved with the rapture. Nope, nope, we're leaving him behind.
He's one of the baddies. How about it for Jefferson
Graham on Tech Tuesday?

Speaker 3 (01:35:14):
Hello, Hello, Hello.

Speaker 1 (01:35:16):
No technology, who's going to save you from the Lord's wrath?
My friend? And welcome. Nice to see you.

Speaker 3 (01:35:22):
Do you remember the time that I was in Montana
in front of a diner using the Wi Fi from
the diner and you said.

Speaker 6 (01:35:28):
I can't hear you. I can't hear you I can't
hear you.

Speaker 3 (01:35:30):
So that's why I come in and out because sometimes
I have a signal and sometimes I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:35:36):
I love you, and don't take my good natured disparagement
of your participation in the show is anything more than
just good natured joshing you. Thank you. I want to
know about a couple of things. Yeah. First I want
to respond to something that a listener viewer was remarking on,
and that is TikTok. Yes, I think it's kind of

(01:35:59):
open and shut now the future of TikTok, But maybe
you have a thought.

Speaker 3 (01:36:02):
Well, first of all, I was out this morning. I
just came back. Did they make it official? Did they
make the lessons official that they're owning TikTok?

Speaker 1 (01:36:13):
Kim? I turned to you on that whether the Ellisons
have been an official But it doesn't. It's it's a
it's pro format at this point. I mean, it's foregone conclusion.
I think, isn't it that that's what's going to happen.

Speaker 3 (01:36:23):
I don't know if China has signed off on this thing.

Speaker 1 (01:36:26):
Well, China has signed off on it. In In I
was reading something maybe it was two nights ago, about
how China had kind of shigned off on this deal
preliminarily anywhere anything on that, Kim or No.

Speaker 3 (01:36:37):
No, Well, as far as I heard what you were
saying about, there will be no politics unless it's right wing.

Speaker 6 (01:36:45):
How how are they're going to police that?

Speaker 3 (01:36:47):
If I sit here and make videos, they're not going
to be shown. And you know, I mean it's how.

Speaker 1 (01:36:54):
They're going to release that. I mean they can agith,
the algorithm can play down anything that it finds it
all objectionable, you know that, right, Yeah, but.

Speaker 3 (01:37:02):
It's millions of videos, you know, I think that's a
hard thing to say, Well, we're only going to allow
such so many videos. So on Twitter, I should say X.
They did change the algorithm and they push a lot
of the right wing stuff to the front, but there's
still the left wing stuff is still there.

Speaker 1 (01:37:22):
It's still there, right, right. I don't think it was
the expression tend to do anything but push it down.
In the case of Twitter.

Speaker 3 (01:37:33):
Yeah, so, I mean not a good thing as far
as TikTok goes. Independent always better, Uh, but you know,
so that's that's my take.

Speaker 1 (01:37:44):
Yeah, it's not great, right, And you think that they
won't be able to you think they won't be able
to polish it the way that.

Speaker 6 (01:37:52):
I think it's too hard. I think it's too hard.
And look at YouTube.

Speaker 3 (01:37:56):
YouTube has all stripes because people are pushing stuff there
all day long. Now, maybe it becomes a silo so
that you only see what you want to see, which
is how Facebook has become. But you know, I saw
a lot of stuff there in the last two weeks
that they were not my friends, and they were showing
up with a different point of view than I have.

Speaker 1 (01:38:18):
And you know, yeah, I'm seeing TikTok dealer. This is
from Forbes. Looks like it's close to again, it's all close.
President Trump and the White House have signaled a deal
between TikTok's Chinese ownership and the US, expected to be
completed later this week, placed in the hands of possibly
a trio or more of the world's wealthiest and all

(01:38:42):
Trump supporters. Again, then it's all about the band and
Bite Dance and essentially the having to turn over a
big portion to Ellison and crew.

Speaker 3 (01:38:54):
But yeah, the scarier thing is if the Ellison's by
Warner Brothers and they also Kiktok and Warner Brothers and Paramount,
and what is that fifty percent of the of the
Hollywood output at that point, because the rest of it
is Disney and Sony.

Speaker 6 (01:39:14):
That's what's scarier.

Speaker 1 (01:39:15):
Thank you for mentioning this, because it's to me one
of the great issues of the last couple of decades,
this expansion of media and into a handful of hands.
And you know the Warner Brothers thing. That is right,
Ellison's got his eyes on that, and it's likely to
be approved from an administration that's friendly and disposition toward him.
I mean, there you go, giving TikTok likely to the

(01:39:38):
Ellison crew. And then you have the same thing happening
with the Next Star stations. That's one of the things
behind Jimmy Kimmel. Next Star wanted this approval to expand
their footprint beyond the FCC permissible number of stations owned.
And to get that FCC approval, they have to play
ball with this administration. And the FCC chairman has expressly
described Kimmel and all of these ways and essentially threatened them.

(01:40:02):
And so you had Sinclair, which is already a right
wing crew, and next are agreeing to do the bidding
of the FCC chairman, and they drop Kimmel. In fact,
as Kimmel returns tonight. He won't be on the next
Star stations or the Sinclair stations. So you know, the
Jimmy Kimmel Show will be seen by a handful of

(01:40:24):
stations that are in between, but a lot won't be
seeing Jimmy Kimmel tonight, so returns. Let me jump in
on that.

Speaker 3 (01:40:31):
First of all, Jimmy Kimmel has more viewers on YouTube
than he does on broadcast television, so he's more.

Speaker 1 (01:40:38):
He has more. He has more viewers for his clips,
but the entire show isn't shown on YouTube.

Speaker 3 (01:40:44):
The entire show is shown on YouTube in clips. You
can watch the clips. Okay, thank you in clips.

Speaker 1 (01:40:50):
But but the way, but the way advertisers would typically
work right as they buy in the broadcast, wouldn't they
He'll still get YouTube revenue. But you you know what
I'm saying. If your Dodge, if you're you know, yeah,
you get it. Yeah, if you're McDonald's, you're buying in
the show. Typically.

Speaker 3 (01:41:09):
The other thing is that there are some major markets
that they will not be showing the Jimmy Kimmel Show,
and that's Seattle is I think the biggest one, and
I'm not sure if it's Portland or it's somewhere in Oregon.
You don't think that people are going to be calling
the station and screaming and yelling at them. And you know,
how does the station respond to daily, you know, harassment

(01:41:31):
from their viewers. I don't think they can keep it up,
certainly in the major cities. I don't think they can
keep it up.

Speaker 1 (01:41:39):
Now, let me ask you about the new iPhone. There's
a new iPhone out. I guess. Yeah, it's super thin.
Is that the thing? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:41:48):
Okay, So you know what people ask me at this
time of time of year, Should I upgrade?

Speaker 1 (01:41:54):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:41:55):
And I have an answer for him. Bigger, faster, more
powerful than a locomotive, better camera.

Speaker 1 (01:42:03):
Should you upgrade?

Speaker 3 (01:42:04):
No? No, no, no, no no no. If you have
the fifteen or sixteen, it is a firm no. If
you have an earlier one, maybe maybe. I've been doing
some camera tests and the differences I see them, but
I think most people will never see them. The new
selfie camera is a little wider, and it's a little wider.

(01:42:28):
It's not a lot wider. It's a little wider.

Speaker 6 (01:42:31):
That's good. Is that worth twelve hundred dollars for you?

Speaker 1 (01:42:35):
What's happened to the iPhone prices as a result of tariffs.

Speaker 3 (01:42:39):
Only this one went up by one hundred.

Speaker 1 (01:42:42):
Dollars and this one you're holding up the new one.

Speaker 3 (01:42:45):
This is the seventeen pro Max that went up by
one hundred dollars. I think Tim Cook groveling to Trump
saved the tariffs for the American people.

Speaker 1 (01:42:57):
Wow, is that right? Yeah? So Apple has a carve
out or how does it work?

Speaker 3 (01:43:03):
Yeah, there's no, there's no terroriffs on him. I mean
the prices are I don't know, I'm sorry. The prices
are what they are. The entry level iPhone is seven
ninety nine. They could have said, well, it's going to
be a thousand dollars, but they didn't. And you know,
Tim Cook gets a call and says, mister Trump wants
you in Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 6 (01:43:24):
Come be there.

Speaker 3 (01:43:26):
And he goes And then where was the other trip?
There were two trips that he went on.

Speaker 1 (01:43:30):
Yeah, it's been kind of a part of Trump's merry men. Yeah,
you know, accompany him everywhere. Yeah, so you're saying that
suck up tour worked.

Speaker 3 (01:43:40):
Apparently for the for the American for the consumer, Yeah,
currently worked.

Speaker 1 (01:43:44):
The actual cost of making an iPhone, Jefferson Graham. It
beats me.

Speaker 3 (01:43:49):
I think it's three to four hundred dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:43:52):
Maybe what's the actual price of making an iPhone? Kim google?
You google it. What's the actual price of producing an iPhone?
Let's let's have some guesses in the chat while Kim
finds the answer. The actual cost of producing an iPhone?

Speaker 6 (01:44:13):
Yeah, not six hundred dollars.

Speaker 3 (01:44:15):
That's good.

Speaker 1 (01:44:16):
Yeah, it's fifty bucks, says public Domain Now ninety nine
says j T. Two hundred ninety nine dollars, One hundred
and seventy five dollars says Tammy. Gregory says twenty five dollars. Well,
fifty dollars says Diana eleven, seven hundred and eighty sister

(01:44:39):
Henfred star h five hundred and sixty eight dollars. I
love the specificity of that, guess d Man two hundred
dollars from Nancy. Less than three hundred dollars, says Gordon.
The actual price of producing an iPhone Kim McAllister will

(01:44:59):
now share the answer with us Tony will or Kim
will here it is the total cost of producing an
iPhone can vary depending on the specific model. However, it estimates.
I can't, right, Okay, can you get over to see
the rest of what? Just tell us what it is?
What does it say?

Speaker 5 (01:45:21):
Somewhere between four hundred and seven hundred dollars?

Speaker 1 (01:45:24):
Wow, that's unri, I don't believe it's that high. Yeah,
it's there's no way it's that high. The total production
cost of producing an iPhone given labor.

Speaker 5 (01:45:34):
And here's they even give you a graph back here
of all the components, what all the things cost? Estimated
cost of all the components. You can see it.

Speaker 3 (01:45:45):
There is this from I tear it down or I
fixed it or something.

Speaker 5 (01:45:48):
So you can add in labor, and at the end
it's about between somewhere between four and seven hundred. That's
what they say.

Speaker 1 (01:45:56):
I just what's the source?

Speaker 5 (01:45:57):
Skim simply mac dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:46:00):
Okay, what do you think, Jeff? You think it's closer
to one hundred dollars.

Speaker 6 (01:46:06):
I think it's closer to four hundred dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:46:08):
Oh wow, you do? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:46:10):
Okay, yeah, I mean there are a lot of parts
in there, but I can't see Apple making only three
to four hundred dollars on the top of the line, Mark.

Speaker 1 (01:46:20):
I think they make more.

Speaker 3 (01:46:20):
Money and they have to pay for the you know,
they have to pay for the Apple stores that you
all that sort of there's a lot of a lot
of costs in there.

Speaker 1 (01:46:27):
Wow, But that's still that that information that Kim has
is still kind of in the neighborhood of that. You
what you're talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:46:33):
Yeah, the average, the average is that you sell a
product for five times it's cost.

Speaker 1 (01:46:38):
Wow. Wow. Yeah, but you're saying that's not the case here, I'm.

Speaker 3 (01:46:43):
Saying for the average retail five times the thin one,
the thin one. This is the iPhone Air and it's
the world's thinnest iPhone, or at least the thinnest iPhone
that Apple's ever come out with.

Speaker 6 (01:46:56):
And it's nice, it's nice.

Speaker 3 (01:46:58):
The only thing is it has only one camera lens,
so I'm knocked out. You don't get the wide angle,
the ultra wide angle.

Speaker 1 (01:47:05):
In this one.

Speaker 3 (01:47:06):
So I'm myself, because I come from a photo background,
is I'm interested in the one with three lenses, not
the one with one.

Speaker 1 (01:47:14):
Interesting, So why would they why would they drop the
other two lenses? That was kind of one of the.

Speaker 3 (01:47:19):
Selling because it's the world it's the world's thinnest iphon.

Speaker 1 (01:47:23):
I see, I see yeah, And.

Speaker 3 (01:47:25):
If you want to go thin, so uh for two
hundred dollars more you get three lenses.

Speaker 1 (01:47:31):
Huh, jeff where are you? Uh? Your photo Walks TV
is something that we we mentioned we plug. It's your
big thing. It's how you make money. It's how you
keep your kids in clothes and your you know, your
your big bloated lifestyle going. It's how you pay for
your Bentley and your you know all the other stuff.
Where where were you with the photo Walks TV? Regionally?

Speaker 3 (01:47:52):
There's a Monorway episode coming right up. It could be
as soon as tomorrow where it's going to be in
Chicago this weekend and up Barcelona the week after.

Speaker 1 (01:48:02):
Wow. I love it. I very much love it. Check
him out Photo Walks TV. Jefferson Graham joined us on Tuesdays.
Thanks man, appreciate you, always appreciate Jefferson Graham everybody. I
must tell you that we are desperately short on time,
but I'd like a quick overview of what's happening in

(01:48:25):
the news. I wonder also if you could get rid
of the Jefferson Graham Photo Walks TV banner which still
sits there in the screen. Thank you. I'm wondering though,
can we get a quick rundown because there's a lot
of stuff going on. Didn't quite get to a couple
of things. And I want to also mentioned tomorrow the
Professor John Rothman stuff through. We have a conversation with

(01:48:49):
Tom Hartman, and we have I believe a conversation with
Ambassador of Francis Rooney. So there's a lot of stuff
going on tomorrow as well and coming up later this week.
So a smashed the like button like.

Speaker 5 (01:49:02):
You made it with your iron rod.

Speaker 1 (01:49:05):
Do it with your iron rod? Baby? Ain't that the
way it ought to be done? Kim's News and we
continue the Mark Thompson shown.

Speaker 5 (01:49:21):
On the Mark Thompson Show. I'm Kim McAllister. This report
sponsored by Coachella valleycoffeet dot Com. Kim Jimmy Kimmel will
be returning to his late night talk show.

Speaker 1 (01:49:32):
Yeah Jimmy, Come On.

Speaker 5 (01:49:34):
It was sadly suspended indefinitely last week by ABC after
comments he made about the kirk assassination and the Trump
response to it. But some local stations will not see
Jimmy Kimmel Live as Sinclair Broadcast Group and next Our
Media Group are both planning to preempt the show as
both remain in talks with ABC.

Speaker 1 (01:49:56):
No. That's what I was talking to Jose and Grahama. Yeah, anyway, continue,
please start the man No.

Speaker 5 (01:50:04):
President Trump says NATO nations should shoot down Russian aircraft
that enters their airspace. He made the comments as he
met with Ukrainian President vladimir's Lenska at the United Nations today.
It marked the fourth time the leaders have met since
Trump has returned to office, as they look for an
end to Ukraine's war with Russia. The manicutes of trying

(01:50:25):
to assassinate President Trump in Florida has been found guilty
on all charges. A jury found Ryan Routh attempted to
kill Trump while he was playing golf at his Palm
Beach golf course when running for reelection last year. Routh
reportedly appeared to try to stab himself in the neck
after the verdict was read in the courtroom. So that
was high drama there. Voters are casting their ballots today

(01:50:48):
in a special election in Arizona expected to narrow the
Republican's majority in the House. The race pitting Democrat at
Alita Grihalva against Republican Daniel Buirez for the state's seventh
congressional district seat. The winner replaces Adelita's father, Raoul Berhalva,
who passed away earlier this year with complications from cancer.

(01:51:10):
Speaking of elections, California voters will receive ballots in just
under two weeks for a special election focused on Proposition fifty.
The initiative proposes changing the state's congressional district maps midway
through the decade. Governor Gavin Newsom is pushing the measure
to help Democrats potentially gain five House seats against President

(01:51:30):
Trump and GOP seat gains in Texas.

Speaker 1 (01:51:33):
Two points on that one is in California, it's thought
that there just is a kind of a melee's maybe
not an awareness about this Prop fifty, people not knowing
what it is. They're a little worried about its passage.
But more to the point, even if it passes, California
is the only state that's really stepping up to try
to get additional seats in Congress to try to again

(01:51:56):
play this jerry mender back and forth, and there are
a multiple red states doing it. So it's very likely
that even if they come up with five seats in
California that has Prop fifty passes, and you know whatever
meleees there is and lack of awareness there is. You
put that to the side and they actually get in
a pass. The finish line that it'll still because of

(01:52:16):
all these other states having successfully gerrymandered, it'll still leave
Republicans with essentially a lead pipe sine to control Congress.

Speaker 5 (01:52:25):
Again, well, it's very being fought hard. More than about
ninety million dollars has been raised for the competing campaigns.
There's heavy advertising for both signs, so a lot of
money being poured into this.

Speaker 1 (01:52:38):
You know who loves this? All the local TV and
radio stations across Bring me to California. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:52:46):
The Department of Homeland Security says it will not be
complying with California's ban on masked law enforcement officers. The
DHS making the announcement today, calling the ban unconstitutional. Governor
Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law last weekend. It
bans most law enforcement officers from covering their faces while
conducting official business. This comes after the past several months

(01:53:08):
of immigration raids in the Los Angeles area, where many
federal agents covered their faces while making mass arrests. The
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Christy noamsays a recent post
from California's Governor Gavin Newsom panicked her family and her friends.
It comes after Newsom's office wrote in a post on

(01:53:28):
x Saturday that Nome is going to have a bad
day today. You're welcome America. During an interview, Noam referred
to the post as menacing, shared that cartels and criminals
have threatened her as well as her family before. The
post ignited some pushback from President Trump's administration officials, including
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin and White House Communications Director

(01:53:51):
Stephen Chung' nobody happy about it.

Speaker 1 (01:53:54):
There's more stuff on Christin Naum. We should do a
whole segment on her. You know, it's just a mess.
I cannot believe this is incompetent fool is in charge
of well, you know it's again you go administration by administration,
you go, you know, government agency by government agency, you
find it. But uh, she is someone who seems yeah,

(01:54:16):
that's that's that is that's a reference. I think Christie
Noman is gonna have a bad day to day. The
Newsom post is a reference to the to the mask thing,
isn't it. I mean, it wasn't that what that was
a reference.

Speaker 5 (01:54:31):
To or not sure what he was referencing there, I
don't I don't know, legal decision.

Speaker 1 (01:54:35):
I don't know. It was weird, yeah, the legal but uh,
I mean, by itself, it does look I kind of argue,
I discussed, she discussed me, okay, And in every way
I've just told you, she's incompetent, she's corrupt, she's I mean,
and that agency, you know, with these no big contracts
associated with ICE, et cetera. Uh, she is someone who

(01:54:57):
I have no love for. But I do think this
is a medicine post, so I'm not a fan of
the post. But that said, I'd like to just in
thirty seconds, I would just say that she is she's
such a mess that, you know, half the job she's
doing is cleaning up the mess she makes. And one

(01:55:18):
of the things she's really concerned with is publicity. That's
why there's so much in the way of spots out
there showing ICE arrests, et cetera. And there was a
picture of her with a you know again, it's a
is it a semi automatic rifle or whatever it is,
assault types or whatever, the military grade rifle, and she's
holding it alongside two huge guys who are there, you know,

(01:55:41):
as ICE agents, and she's pointing it right at the
agent's head to her left. It is became this controversial
post because it was sort of there. It is, thank you, Tony.
It's like, what you know, anybody who is around guns,
they always tell you don't point a gun. And I

(01:56:02):
don't know a lot about guns, but you know, they
did train me on this part. Don't have the weapon
pointed anywhere that you're not okay a bullet going you know.
In other words, you need to always consider that that
that weapon could go off. That's why you don't hold
that weapon like that right. So again, this was something

(01:56:25):
that the firearm community noticed, you know, those who are
into firearms, and so Christy Gnome. Again, though she's performative,
this is costplay for her. Yet it is it's gross
because all of this stuff just is of a kind
And I cannot believe that she's in charge of the

(01:56:46):
largest department in all of government. Department of Homeland Security
is bigger than even the Pentagon, as we were saying before.

Speaker 5 (01:56:55):
So yeah, that picture makes her look very unsafe. California's
lawmaker or is approving legislation to further provide a pathway
for reparations. Assembly Bill sixty two, first of its kind
in the United States, aims to help those who lost
homes and businesses due to government racial discrimination. The bill
would allow people to seek compensation. Supporter's point to examples

(01:57:17):
like Germany's compensation for Holocaust survivors. They emphasize reparations can
restore dignity and stability. The bills sitting on Governor Newsom's
desk waiting for his signature, but he vetoed a similar
bill last year due to design concerns, so we'll see
what he does at this time.

Speaker 1 (01:57:33):
And that's the end and the yang of it. On
one level, they're dry cleaning the history from Smithsonian, from
other museums, from any kind of official website, Slavery and
all of the struggles of minorities in America. It's all
getting dry cleaned. And at the same time, California is
considering reparations for those who've been screwed as a result

(01:57:54):
of racial profiling.

Speaker 5 (01:57:56):
Donald Trump's future presidential library will be housed in down town, Miami.
Trump's team has been eyeing Florida as the location for
the library for months after Eric Trump and top advisor
Steve Whitcoff made trips to the state for site visits.
The formal location will be housed on land currently owned
by Miami Dade College, adjacent to the Freedom Tower and

(01:58:18):
located on the city's downtown waterfront.

Speaker 1 (01:58:21):
There's never been anything like this.

Speaker 5 (01:58:24):
I don't know where they're going to put the plane.
I'm not sure is it going to fit on the
waterfront whilst maybe they'll float it on a barge right
in front of the museum.

Speaker 1 (01:58:33):
God, that plane is just crazy, unbelievable. How how you
could be okay with that? It's crazy, absolutely crazy.

Speaker 5 (01:58:43):
Artistic renderings are being released of the UFC areas slated
to go up on the White House South Lawn for
the America two hundred and fifty celebrations in twenty twenty six.
The stadium will accommodate about five thousand spectators, and it'll
be crowned with a massive arch that will be covered
in lights, framing the White House and the Washington Memorial Area.

(01:59:06):
At its center will be an octagonal area where UFC
fights will take place. See look at that right in
front of the White House on the south line.

Speaker 1 (01:59:15):
There you go.

Speaker 5 (01:59:16):
There's never been anything like this, you know, Hello, Hello America, Welcome,
Welcome aboard. Amazon is on trial for allegedly tricking millions
of Oh look at that, how picturesque. Amazon is on
trial for allegedly tricking millions of customers into enrolling in
its Prime subscription service and then making it really hard

(01:59:37):
to cancel. The Federal Trade Commissions suing the e commerce
giant in twenty twenty three, claiming it was using manipulative
interface designs to get people paying for the one hundred
and thirty nine dollars a year service. Trial started in
federal court yesterday, where the government is also alleging a
canceling Prime required a four page, six click fifteen option process.

Speaker 1 (02:00:00):
Yes, oh my god, let me say that again.

Speaker 5 (02:00:03):
Canceling Prime required a four page, six click fifteen option process.
That makes it really hard to get rid of it.

Speaker 1 (02:00:12):
That is really gross. By the way, I think the
same thing is true if you try to unsubscribe to
next Store. Have you ever tried to get off of
next Door? Oh my god, I'm still trying to get
off and I can't. It will not be you know,
it's stuck to me.

Speaker 5 (02:00:26):
I hate next Door.

Speaker 6 (02:00:28):
It's horrible.

Speaker 5 (02:00:30):
Robot umpires have been approved for Major League Baseball and
food part of a challenge system. Major League Baseball's eleven
man Competition Committee has approved use of the automated ball
stripe system in the major leagues in twenty twenty six.

Speaker 1 (02:00:47):
I love that love it should have done. It should
have happened years ago.

Speaker 5 (02:00:52):
Lastly, a Missouri woman who tried to put Elvis Presley's
graceland a state up for auction will spend nearly five
years in federal prison. I mean, this was quite the
ballsy crime. Lisa Findley pleaded guilty to one count of
mail fraud earlier this year and was given a fifty
seven month sentence with three years to supervised probation. According

(02:01:15):
to authorities, Findley forged the signatures of Elvis Presley's late daughter,
Lisa Marie and a Florida notary to claim Lisa Marie
Presley did not pay back a nearly four million dollar
loan from a purported company that listed Graceland as collateral.
As part of a plea deal, prosecutors agreed to dismiss
one count of aggravated identity theft that was previously filed

(02:01:38):
against her. But again, this woman will spend nearly five
years in federal prison for trying to steal Graceland. And
that's just well, no, you can't steal graceland. Come on now,
I mean, what would you try to steal a property though?
I mean, all eyes are on this property. It's not like,
you know, some obscure house down the road.

Speaker 1 (02:02:00):
Well, I mean, maybe that's it, she thought. Maybe she
thought nobody would ever think that, you know, anybody would
do it. You know, I don't know. It's pretty crazy,
by the way. Yeah, there, it is crazy. I've never
been inside. I've been out there in the gates, but
never inside it. Have you been there? No?

Speaker 5 (02:02:16):
I haven't.

Speaker 1 (02:02:20):
Yeah, something I told you. I went down there because
there's a They sent me down there because I was
on a show called Encounters, which was like sixty minutes,
but it was all UFOs and ghosts. Okay, so the paranormal,
but imagine sixty minutes, but every story is paranormal. So
they sent me down to Graceland. There it is. It

(02:02:41):
kind of has this nineteen seventies look to it, which
is really cool. I would love to have gone in.

Speaker 5 (02:02:49):
It's stuck in time.

Speaker 1 (02:02:50):
They sent me down there because I guess the house
that's adjacent to it is haunted with Elvis's ghost. It
was pretty funny, but it was a hugely long shoot,
so it started early in the morn morning. I went
to Graceland. I could see the gates were not yet open,
and then I got a bunch of stuff from the
gift shop. But by the time we got done with
the shoot, I couldn't it was already closed. So I've

(02:03:10):
never been in there. I would love to go.

Speaker 5 (02:03:13):
This report is sponsored by Coachella Valleycoffee dot com. That's
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(02:03:35):
good options Coachella Valleycoffee dot com. And should you find
something at the website there that you enjoy or might
want to try, please use our checkout code that'll save
you ten percent. The exclusive code is are you ready
mark t No spaces, no spaces marked TA.

Speaker 1 (02:03:54):
Here's the exclusive code.

Speaker 5 (02:03:56):
Yeah ready are you ready? Are you ready for it?

Speaker 6 (02:03:59):
Mark?

Speaker 1 (02:04:01):
Not a no, no, no no. It's letter T, the letter
T like T and Thompson. Right, that's right, very good.

Speaker 5 (02:04:15):
I'm Kim McAllister. This is the Mark Thompson Show right on.

Speaker 1 (02:04:19):
Kim loved it. Very nice job, Kim, very nice job.

Speaker 6 (02:04:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:04:25):
There it is The Encounters the Hidden Truth. I'll just
tell you this one thing. The lady whose home it was,
it claimed her place was haunted by the ghost of
Elvis Presley. She said that she'd go to sleep at
night and the radio would come on in the middle
of the night playing an Elvis song. Okay, so we
did recreation on that. And then there was a there

(02:04:48):
was this glass that was kind of fragmented. You know
how heat and cold over time can sometimes cause a
glass to fragment or you know, and if you looked
at it a certain way, looked like Elvis with the
cape and everything, the kind of So that was her
big thing. And but this is the big one. She
said that she would go to Bennett night. It was

(02:05:08):
a woman. She was living in this home and it's
right adjacent to Graceland and it was owned by one
of Elvis's good friends. And the toilet seat is always
down because she is a single woman. But she would
come in in the morning occasionally and the toilet seat

(02:05:30):
would be up. I know, yeah, could it be? She
said it was the ghost of Elvis and that's why
I was there. But anyway, I know.

Speaker 5 (02:05:42):
And you never even made it to Graceland.

Speaker 1 (02:05:44):
It was Mark Thompson show. The whole thing was to
get to Graceland. Maybe other Blue states are looking at
California as a test case to sec writer. Maybe on
the on the Jerrymander thing doesn't look so far like
it would be that way. No mention of the Maddow
Harris interview Mark from Champagne wishes I didn't see it.

(02:06:05):
To me, I saw a little bit of it. I
saw a clip, but I don't know. Did you check
it out? Kim Kamala Harris on.

Speaker 5 (02:06:12):
I knew she was going to be on, but she's
been on a tour.

Speaker 1 (02:06:15):
Yeah, she's on a book tour.

Speaker 5 (02:06:16):
Man saying the same thing over and over again.

Speaker 1 (02:06:19):
What Kim said that goes.

Speaker 5 (02:06:20):
To, I mean, there's not going to be anything earth
shattering there that I know of, because it's the same
spiel that she's giving to get people to buy the book, right.

Speaker 1 (02:06:28):
Ding ding ding Ole Hansen says the plane, the Trump Plane,
will never fly. He will rebuild it into a restaurant
and souvenir shop. Wow, he's only throwing a billion dollars
at its refurbishment. By the way, I don't think it
will be at his library though. I don't think it
will be there. I think he'll keep it. I just
think he'll keep it to use, to use, to have. Yeah,

(02:06:51):
your tax dollars on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. Yeah,
the Miami Herald. I saw this before. It's funny. I
was going to mention this on the show. I was
talking to Anthony Davis about before the show. The Miami
Herald is reporting that about two thirds of the eighteen
hundred immigrants who are held in the Ice Jail in July,
this is the notorious Alligator Alcatraz, have gone missing from

(02:07:13):
ICE's online database. Their families are unable to locate them.
This is a big story and we'll give you more
on it tomorrow. But yeah, I saw that story as well.
They have disappeared these people apparently. And Stella Luna on
next door. I said, it's hard to get rid of it.
She says, I'm on next door every day, unfortunately, in
case someone finds my kitty. Oh no, someone ever finds

(02:07:37):
my kitty. That means so sad. You know. I'm sorry, Stella,
and that makes me very very sad. And I hope
that that there's some good news in kitty Land. We're
big kitty people here, you know, love our cats. Speaking
of cats, David Katz joins us later this week tomorrow.

(02:07:58):
As I mentioned, the brilliant John Rothman also, as I say,
a conversation with Ambassador Francis Rooney, a conversation with the
brilliant Tom Hartman and Belinda Weyman tomorrow too. So it's
quite the show, Tony. It wasn't the show we planned,

(02:08:18):
but it worked out.

Speaker 6 (02:08:20):
Still.

Speaker 1 (02:08:20):
We always do it right. Yeah, somehow it all.

Speaker 5 (02:08:23):
Fall forward, fall forward, that's all I gotta do.

Speaker 1 (02:08:25):
It all came together. Thank you, Kim, Thanks everybody for
supporting the show, for sharing the show, and continue to
do that on Facebook and across social and help us
grow this show and now the great show Stevens for
the Mark Johnson Show. Bye Bye, Kim's after Party's going
on to the after party lot show Hi, Bye bye

(02:08:46):
all the time, Bye bye, Thanks everybody until tomorrow, Bye bye.

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