09-03-25 - *FULL SHOW* Gun Drug Control; Google Court Ruling; Driverless in Denver

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I was additionally confused by going to the Neil Young concert,
so I.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Really have no idea what day it is. Barely the
only reason I know what time.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
It is is because there's a clock in front of me.
Right now, there is an immense amount of news going
on in the world, so many things.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
To talk about. I want to follow up briefly on.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
The move by President Trump yesterday to move Space Force
to Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama. And just for the record, you
know Huntsville, Alabama. Obviously I prefer to have Space Force
here in Colorado Springs is a place that makes a
lot of sense for it. But I would note, just
in the interest of fairness, that Huntsville, Alabama is not
a ridiculous place to have Space Force space Command. And

(00:44):
so you know, Trump wanted to do this the first time,
and Biden reversed it, and Trump is doing it again now.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
And I mentioned this yesterday.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
And Pat Word had picked up on a little bit
that Phil Wiser announced yesterday that he would sue the
Trump administration if they moved Space Force, and I can't
so I was emailing with Phil yesterday about this, and
I can't say much because it basically is a private conversation,
but I think it's clear from his public statements, because

(01:14):
I talked about this yesterday based on his press release,
that he would argue that moving Space Command out of
Colorado causes harm to Colorado, and I expect that he
would use that as a way to get standing in court,
saying I'm standing up for Colorado. Colorado's are being harmed

(01:37):
by this decision of government, and therefore I'm going to
challenge it. And I mentioned yesterday also just based on
what was in his press release, that it seems like
he's making some kind of reliance argument along the lines of, well,
governments said they we're going to keep space Force here,
and so we have members of the community in the
Colorado Springs area who bought homes and chose schools for

(02:01):
their kids and stuff like that based on the assumption
that the government would keep Space Force here. And my
take on all of that is it might be true,
but it's irrelevant. Here's my I'm not a lawyer, but
I'll just tell you how I think this is going
to play out. I mentioned this yesterday, but just for
you know, for folks who didn't hear it yesterday, I think.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
That as commander in chief.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
President Trump can rearrange the pieces on our military chess board,
including the location of particular commands and the personnel that
go with them, for any reason he wants, or for
no reason at all.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
He is the commander in chief. And I don't think.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
I think Phil's lawsuit is going to get tossed out
of court unbelievably quickly. I'm not even sure that he'll
be granted standing right. He'll probably argue, well, I have
because there's a harm, and I'm standing up to stop
the harm to Coloraden's But I'm not even.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Sure that can give you standing in a case like this.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
And I think among the many lawsuits that I have
seen Phil file against the Trump administration, we actually talked
about this. Remember two three weeks ago, I had him
on the show and I said, why have you made
it a hobby to sue the Trump administration? And he said, well,
I think they're breaking the law, and I think he's
being honest about that in most cases. I also think
he's trying to win the Democratic primary for governor, so

(03:30):
I think he's going to throw everything and see what
Stixon try to run as the guy who who is
the biggest thorn in Trump's side, which seems to get
a lot of golf collapse from Democrats these days. Whoever
wants to antagonize Trump the most they like, and I
think that's what he's trying to be. But this is

(03:51):
a really, really weak lawsuit and I don't think it
is going anywhere at all. The other thing that I
thought was interesting, and I'll play this audio for you
of it later because I was too dumb to set
it up to be able to play right now. But
in the press conference about this yesterday, President Trump said
that one of the things that highly motivated him to

(04:14):
move Space Command out of Colorado is that Colorado uses
a mail in elections. And I thought that was interesting
because if there were ever going to be a lawsuit
against the President for moving Space Command, then his having

(04:34):
said out loud that he's making a move regarding the military,
regarding our national defense because he doesn't like how people
in one state choose to cast their ballots. That's either
an incredibly stupid thing to say or an incredibly confident
thing to say, meaning he understands that he can make

(04:57):
this decision regarding Space Command for any reason he wants,
which by the way, as I said, I think that's correct,
but I still suspect that there would have been some
Office of Legal Counsel. Those are the lawyers for the
White House. I still suspect there's probably an OLC lawyer
or two banging his head against the wall. When Donald
Trump said to the whole world that he was largely

(05:18):
motivated to move space command because he doesn't like that
we use mail in ballots. By the way, the data
regarding election fraud in Colorado does not show Colorado to
be a place with high levels of election fraud.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
It's better than most of the rest of the country.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
That said, and I'm not going to get into this
in great detail today. There are ways that you can
imagine mail in voting being subject to certain kinds of frauds,
such as through the ballot harvesting process and things like that.
There is not data to show that there is even
measurable fraud.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
There was that one crazy case where a lady who.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Worked for the post office stole a dozen ballots and
mailed them in and a few of them got through.
When if a few of them got caught, that was like,
that's the biggest one in any case, So that's what
happened yesterday.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
And I don't think that. I don't think anything is.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Going to be able to change Trump's decision, and I
don't think any lawsuit about it will last more than
a few hours or a few days in court. So
we also, Gina and I just then talked a little
bit about Waimo coming to Denver, and I'm just gonna
touch on this briefly. I am trying to get a
guest from Waimo. These companies are very very hard to

(06:30):
penetrate as far as finding someone to contact and get
on the show and so on. But Wamo is the
self driving car company and they are coming to Denver
next year. They're calling it an exploratory phase. And as
Gina and Marty mentioned, at first these are self driving cars,
but at first they will have drivers in them who

(06:51):
will not be doing anything unless there's some kind of emergency. Right,
They're just sort of a backup, right, And then after
they experiment with that, then they will experiment with vehicles
with no drivers, and then if that goes okay, then
they will start rolling these things out. If you will
pardon the obvious pun, they will start rolling these things

(07:12):
out for use by you know, ride share, ride hailing.
They the vehicles they are using, the all electric Jaguar
I Pace and a company that I haven't heard of
called zeker ze A I'm sorry, zee k R zeker
RT vehicles. The Jaguars have the fifth generation Waimo driving

(07:36):
technology and the zeker have the sixth generation, and you
will see them. If you see one, you'll you'll notice
it because they've got all kinds of cameras and laser
detection technology on the roof that scan around them to
try to make sure they don't run into other cars
and people and trains and lamas and whatever else might

(07:56):
be in the street.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
So well, we'll see. One thing that I.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
I also mentioned when we're just you know, talking with
Marty and Gina a couple of months ago, is, and
I'll quote from the Colorado Sun, Waimo's driverless service tends
to be more expensive than Lift and Uber by thirty
to forty percent, according to a story in tech Crunch.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
So that is an interesting.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
Thing, right, So I guess the point there right now
is maybe the technology to make the car driver less
cost more than the driver does, and also maybe they
think that people will pay more just for the novelty
of being in a driverless car. My friend Scott texted
me a couple of minutes ago, and Scott is, you know,

(08:37):
very deep involved in all kinds of tech things and.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Pays close attention to these things. He says.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
I'm not saying he's gonna be right, but he knows
this stuff better than I do. He says, Tesla will
crush Weaimo for a range of reasons, but primarily cost,
and that wouldn't surprise me.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
That wouldn't surprise me.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
Obviously, Tesla is very far ahead of at least any
other American electric car maker, with all kinds of technology
and sensors and all the data they've collected from all
their drivers over the years and so on, so it
wouldn't surprise me if that ends up being right. But
Waimo is a Google project, so they've got plenty of

(09:14):
money and they've got plenty of smart people.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
So actually, I love competition, so let's just let's just
see how that goes.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
Right, Listener text here Ross, I started watching lone Wolf.

Speaker 2 (09:27):
Actually it's dark Wolf.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
It's easy to call it lone wolf because it's such
a common term, but it's the terminalist Dark Wolf. So
I started watching two days ago. Wow, intense and so realistic.
Thanks for having Jack Carr on the show last week. Yes,
I started watching it. Also, there are three episodes out
so far.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
I watched the.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
First two, and there's another one available to watch right now,
and then there's gonna be one a week for the
next four weeks or something like that.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
It is unbelievably intense.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
And I have not been in a war zone and
I did not serve in the military, but just watching
what goes on in the battle scenes and other kinds
of things, it sure does seem to me like it's
probably very realistic. And I actually texted Jack Carr about
it two days ago maybe, and I said, Boys is

(10:18):
really good, really intense, and seems really it seems realistic,
even though I'm not an expert. And he said, yea,
we went out of our way to get the small
details right.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
So pretty pretty fantastic. So let's see.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
Ross, Space Command and Space Force are two separate entities
and I believe not interchangeable.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
That is, that is correct.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
So Space Force is the whole giant thing like the
Air Force, right, the Air Force is not in one
place and technically as a as a listener kind of
jumped down my throat yesterday when I did use the
wrong terminology. I think I said Space Force Command, but
it's just space Command, right, It's just space Command, And
that would be the organization that is in charge of

(10:58):
Space Force, kind of the headcore, the people who run
space for Space Command abbreviated in military as the military
often does as either Spacecom or US space Com all
in one word with all capital letters.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
That is the thing that Trump is moving. So there's that.
Let's talk. I want to do this just briefly.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
As I was coming to work today, I was listening
a little bit on the radio to this press conference,
and the first voice I heard was Marjorie Taylor Green,
and I'm not gonna go on about her.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
And then.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
So Marjorie Taylor Green, conservative Republican from Georgia. Then Rocanna,
liberal Democrat from Silicon Valley, California. And I got out
of the car after listening to a bit. It wouldn't
surprise me if Thomas Massey came up and spoke.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
He did, Shannon.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Okay, So Thomas Massey and Rocanna are running this discharge
petition and I'm not really expert on this, but I'll
give you what I think I know. The leadership of
the House of Representatives, the Speaker of the House, essentially
controls what comes up for a vote, but there is

(12:16):
a way around it.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
And the way around it is a.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
Thing called a discharge petition, and if a majority of
the members of the House sign a discharge petition, they
can force something to come to a vote over the
objections of the Speaker of the House, who normally has control.
Discharge petitions don't happen very often, and usually members of

(12:40):
the party that is in control, in this case the
Republican Party, usually they would be rather reticent to vote
against what their leadership wants. If the thing isn't already
coming up for a vote, then it's because leadership doesn't
want it to come up for a vote, and so
usually they'll go along with leadership because they don't want
to get in trouble with the boss, and they don't
want to get removed from the committee and so on.
Rocanna and Thomas Massey have put forward a discharge petition

(13:06):
to require the government to release all the information it has,
with the possible exception of redacting the names of victims
on Jeffrey Epstein and Marjorie Taylor Green was out there.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
And actually I thought that what she had to say
was all right.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
I mean, she said, look, we're these women who were
abused have not gotten justice, and Jeffrey Epstein was more
protected by the system than his victims were, and I
think that's absolutely right. The other thing I'll note is
that yesterday, yesterday evening, the House of Representatives dumped something

(13:40):
like thirty three thousand pages of Epstein documents. Now, almost
all of them were already in the public record, but
there were a few things that weren't, some flight logs
and some other stuff, and I haven't read them, and
I'm not going to read them, but there's probably a
little bit of new stuff.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
I think part of the reason they dumped.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
That is to is to try to push off this
discharge petition and have people say, oh, they put out
a lot already, we don't need to do this. But
I have a I suspect they might get it done
because probably every Democrat, even Democrats who never cared about
Epstein before, are going to vote for it just to
put Republicans in.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
A tough spot. And if they do, they only need.

Speaker 1 (14:17):
Five or six Republicans to vote for it, and we
already know they've got Green and Massy and probably Lauren
Bobert and Nancy Mays. Right, I think they'll get six Republicans.
So we'll see. We'll keep an eye on it. We'll
be right back on Kiowa. I am so pleased to
welcome to the show. Jacob Sullim. I don't think i've

(14:40):
spoken to Jacob before. If I have, it was one
time many years ago. Even though I've been reading Jacob's
writing for years.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Even decades.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
He's one of the pre eminent libertarian writers in America.
He's a senior editor at Reason Magazine, which is one
of my very favorite magazines ever.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
I'm subscriber.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
And Jacob has a new book out entitled Beyond Control,
Drug Prohibition, Gun Regulation, and the Search for Sensible Alternatives.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
Jacob Selam, Welcome to KOA. It's good to have you here.

Speaker 4 (15:16):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Before before we went on the air, I mentioned to
you I read the whole book, but I forgot to
bring it in with me. So I'm gonna work for
memory and maybe in no particular order, and we'll just
and we'll just dive in. You tie drug Prohibition, and
gun prohibition slash regulation together in a lot of in

(15:38):
very interesting ways in terms of effectiveness, the basis of
some of the early moves in race and racism, and
one area in which they're different. Though, when you emphasize this,
and I think maybe it'd be an interesting place to start,
is how it seems like the folks who support drug
prohibition prohibition are the opposite from the folks who support

(16:01):
gun prohibition, even though in a lot of other ways
those prohibitions seem to have a lot of things in common.

Speaker 5 (16:10):
Yeah, I mean, by and large, when you look at
the people who are defenders of the Second Amendment and
critics of gun control, they tend to be on the right.
They tend to be conservative, and although there's some exceptions,
are not necessarily troubled by the war on drugs. And
then if you look at the people who are most

(16:32):
vocal about the war on drugs, they tend to be
on the left, and they tend to be enthusiastic about
gun control. So they also, of course tend to belong
to different parties, so there's a big gap between them
in terms of their political outlook. But the point I
try to make in the book is that they are

(16:53):
raising many of the same concerns when they talk about
the problems with these policies. First of all, I mean
both these policies are aimed at ostensibly inanimate objects, right,
drugs and guns, things that politicians perceive is dangerous. But
in the process of trying to control access to those products,

(17:17):
the government arrests human beings, because those are the people
who get prosecuted.

Speaker 4 (17:21):
Those the people who go to prison.

Speaker 5 (17:23):
And the people on the left say, you know, it's
not just to arrest people for conduct that violates no
one's rights.

Speaker 4 (17:31):
You know, if you are a.

Speaker 5 (17:32):
Drug user or somebody who you know sells drugs to
somebody else who wants to use them, that that is
not properly treated as a crime. It's not right that
people should go to prison for that. And people on
the right who are critical of gun control say that similarly,
it's not right to arrest people for violating arbitrary gun

(17:53):
regulations which may not make any any sense upon close examination. So,
for example, you know, there there was the Supreme Court
case involving people who carry guns for self protection, which
the court held is protected by the Second Amendment and
cannot be subject to government review based on standards that
are you know, subjective, and give public officials a lot

(18:17):
of discretion and deciding whom they exercise that right. So
people on the right who defend the Second Amendment would say,
it's not right to arrest somebody's simply because he's carrying
a gun for self protection, and the government has said
you're not allowed to do that.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
And we'll get to That leads directly into the conversation
I think about harm reduction That is more near the
end of your book, and we'll move we'll keep it
also coming near near the.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
End of this conversation.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
Do you do you see what you just described, right,
people on the left generally opposing opposing guns and wanting
to go easy on drugs, people on the right the opposite.
Do you see that as hypocrisy or how do you
How do you see that?

Speaker 5 (19:00):
I think, I mean it's large The explanation is largely
you know, cultural and historical. If people don't like guns,
can't imagine owning them. You know, even though this is
a right that is guaranteed explicitly by the Constitution, they
probably don't care very much about that right. And they

(19:21):
may perceive the people who own guns as being part
of a different political tribe, and therefore not very sympathetic,
maybe even Trump supporters, you know, making them even less sympathetic.
But they but they see the consequences of the War
on drugs, and they think that the government exaggerates the
threat posed by drugs and in any event, is trying

(19:44):
to address that threat in ways that just make matters worse.
And people on the right, certainly historically this is starting
to change, especially with respect to marijuana and to some extent, psychedelics.
People on the right tradition only have been supporters of
the war on drugs, don't tend not to use drugs

(20:05):
and not to approve of drug use, and therefore are
not very concerned about people who get caught up in
the criminal justice system as a result of using drugs
or selling things. So there's not really any logic to it.
It's consistent. It's largely a matter of personal tastes and
preferences and prejudices that I think explains why one side

(20:27):
does not understand that the other side is making essentially
the same points.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
We're talking with Jacob Sullim and his new book, which
is a really fascinating read.

Speaker 6 (20:36):
He is finny.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
When I picked it up, I thought this is going
to be a little dry, but I like libertarian stuff,
so I'm going to read it, and I couldn't put
it down a really fascinating read. The book is called
Beyond Control, Drug Prohibition, Gun Regulation, and the Search for
Sensible Alternatives. Talk a little bit, if you would, Jacob,
about and I don't want to overstate it, and you're
careful not to overstate it in the book, but about

(20:58):
the racist roots of each of these prohibitions.

Speaker 4 (21:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (21:05):
I mean, it's very clear if you look at the
early history of gun control in the United States, that
these laws were all about, first of all, preventing slave
insurrections and more generally, keeping black people in their place,
even if they were not officially slaves, to prevent them
from aiding insurrections. You know, white people were terrified of that,

(21:28):
and they and they very explicitly sought to disarm black people.
It says it in the statutes, right, and so of
course the war was fought over that, not guns specifically,
but slavery. And what happened after the Civil War and
the Farteenth Amendment, you know, officially made it no longer

(21:52):
legal to explicitly discriminate based on race, but those laws
were still used in practice to disarm black people, especially
in the South, and I show some examples of that
in the book in the nineteenth century during the civil
civil rights movement, that even though people could not openly

(22:15):
say we want to disarm black people, in practice that's
what they were doing. And by the way, that extends
not just black people, but there are examples of other
minorities who are seen as threatening. Italian immigrants, for example,
we're assumed to be criminals, and that explains a lot
of the background to the Sullivan Law in New York State,

(22:36):
and there were even concerns about their concerns about Chinese
people in California, so who are also presumed to be
criminals carrying weapons, and there are laws that laws and
enforcement efforts that specifically targeted then, so what you see
as a pattern where out groups will tend to be

(22:58):
targeted by laws even when their neutral on their face,
they tend to bear the brunt of the enforcement.

Speaker 4 (23:06):
And in the case of the War on.

Speaker 5 (23:08):
Drugs, in each of the cases with early bands, you
can see that bigotry played a big role in the
rhetoric Now there's some argument as to how to what
extent did that bigotry actually drive passage of these laws,
because there were other concerns obviously about drugs being addictive
and dangerous, and the idea that not just these minority groups,

(23:32):
but that the white majority, especially young people, were starting
to use these drugs. But what I try to show
in the book is that the shift from taking it
for granted that adults could access to these drugs, which
they put legally in the nineteenth century, in the early
twenty century, you could get all sorts of drugs over
the counter or by mail without any kind of prescription,

(23:54):
and it was not seen as especially troubling initially. But
there was a shift for each of these drugs, whether
you're talking about opiates or cocaine or marijuana, from it
being not particularly alarming to becoming more and more alarming.
And I think that panics about what these drugs. First

(24:14):
of all, what these drugs did to certain minority groups.
You know, cocaine supposedly made blacks especially rebellious and upity
and criminal and inspired them to you know, rape white
women and attack white people and.

Speaker 4 (24:28):
Rendered them, you know, gave them superhuman strength. This sort
of thing.

Speaker 5 (24:32):
In the case of opium, very clearly the early anti
early bands on opium dens were largely inspired by hostility
toward Chinese immigrants. So you have that concern about what
will these drugs do to those people, but also those
people are spreading this noxious, you know, foreign habit to

(24:53):
the white majority. And so even that concern, although it's
ostensibly about not just about minorities, you see that those
concerns are colored by the view that this is a
sort of exotic foreign habit that's being introduced to our
young people and we have to stop. So so in

(25:15):
both cases you see that the laws were largely, if
not entirely, inspired by racism and bigotry. And then you
also see that today they continue to have a disproportion
and impact on minority groups. And you can argue over
to the extent to which that's driven by racism. You know,

(25:38):
is this concept of systemic racism which looks at results
and say this system is fundamentally biased against black people.

Speaker 4 (25:45):
For example, even if the laws, you know, even if
the laws don't mention.

Speaker 5 (25:51):
Black people, even though if they're of sensibly neutral, even
if the people support them, include you know, leading black politicians,
which was the case with the crack penalties. You know,
back in the nineteen eighties and nineties, it's people described
that as systemic racism. Was suspicious of that concept because
it seems counterintuitive to say you can have racism without racists.

Speaker 4 (26:12):
But certainly you have a disproportionate impact.

Speaker 5 (26:15):
Where black people are much more likely to be arrested
for drug possession, even though they use drugs at about
equal the rate of white people. They're much more likely
to be arrested for drug felonies as well, and they
tend to receive more severe penalties. The crack cocaine laws

(26:35):
are a good example where clearly you have black politicians
supporting that they didn't think this would hurt their community.

Speaker 4 (26:41):
I thought it would help the community. But what you
ended up.

Speaker 5 (26:43):
Having is that overwhelmingly the defendants who were who were
sentenced to mandatory minimums under federal law were black. And
there was a difference between crack cocaine, this smokeable form
that was identified with black people, and snorty to cocaine
in terms of how defendants were true, And if you

(27:05):
look at the gun laws, you also see this disproportion
impact where first of all, the jurisdictions that tend to
have the strictest gun laws are ones with tend to
be ones with large black populations. There are also places
where you know, residents might reasonably want to be armed
for self protection because they have relatively high crime rates.

(27:25):
And those are the places where you know, black people
who just want to have guns for self protection either
can't do that, or if they do it, they risk
being arrested and prosecuted. And that came out very clearly
in the in the Supreme Court case involving New York's
regulations of public possession of firearms, where you had you

(27:49):
had briefs that were submitted that pointing out this disproportionate
impact on black defendants, especially in New York City, who
wanted to possess guns simply for self protection, not because
they are criminals.

Speaker 4 (28:02):
And couldn't do that. And if they did do that,
we're subject to arrest.

Speaker 5 (28:07):
And if they're convicted, you know, then they permanently lose
the right to own guns. And if you look at
the data and who gets arrested for drug offenses, who's convicted,
and who serves, you know, the heaviest sentences, they're disproportionate.
They like me to be black defense.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
All right, So we just talk about two minutes left.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
So I want to just jump towards the end of
your book and talk about harm reduction. And for those
just joining, we're talking with Jacob Selim about his fascinating
new book called Beyond Control, Drug Prohibition, Gun Regulation, and
the Search for Sensible Alternatives. It is a really great
read if you care about these issues. So Jacob, give
me literally one minute each on your thoughts on harm

(28:52):
reduction in each of these two categories, drugs and guns.

Speaker 4 (28:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (28:57):
So the idea of harm reduction is that it sounds,
you know, obvious, but the idea is that you should
aim to reduce harm that includes the harm that's caused
by misguided policy.

Speaker 4 (29:06):
So first of all, stop.

Speaker 5 (29:07):
Doing things that are unfair and ineffective that hurt peaceful people,
and then try to target the things you're actually concerned about.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
So, in the case of drugs, we're concerned.

Speaker 5 (29:19):
About people developing addictions, possibly dying from overdoses.

Speaker 4 (29:25):
And you have to ask what actually works.

Speaker 5 (29:27):
Is arresting people work, Just cracking down on the supply
of drugs work, No, that actually makes matters worse. Obviously
it hurts the people who get arrested, but it creates
a situation where people don't know what they're getting in
a black market and therefore may die by accidentally taking
too much or taking something they didn't anticipate they were taking.

(29:50):
And that's only compounded the government steps up enforcement, as
we saw with the crackdown on prescription opioids. They did
see the government did succeed in reducing those prescriptions, but
what happened is that non medical users then move to
the black market, and the upward trend in ok guard
that related death not only continue to accelerate because now

(30:11):
they're taking drugs that are much more dangerous because their
composition is unpredictable and uneven. And the case of gun control,
what are we actually worried about? What we're worried about
violent crime?

Speaker 4 (30:23):
Right?

Speaker 5 (30:24):
So I talked in the book about some strategies that
seem promising in terms of reducing violent crime without necessarily
targeting guns per se. We're also worried about suicide that
actually constitutes most unrelated debts, and so I talk in
the book about some ways of addressing suicidal people, helping them,

(30:46):
you know, programs that seem promising.

Speaker 4 (30:49):
But don't involve.

Speaker 5 (30:52):
The course of action of the state in arresting people
are taking away their constitutional rights.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
Jacob Selim's really interesting new I recommend it to you
highly if you care about public policy at all in
these areas. Is called beyond control, drug prohibition, gun regulation,
and the Search for Sensible alternatives. Jacob, thanks for your time,
Thanks for the excellent book, and thanks for your great
writing over the decades that I've.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Been reading you.

Speaker 4 (31:19):
Thank you, thanks a lot.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
All right, good to talk to you.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
All right, let me just follow up on that just
for a brief moment. The book's really interesting. Like I said,
I thought it would be dry, it's not. It's fascinating.
And I wish I had remembered to bring the book
in with me because I marked a few things that
I wanted to ask him about, and I remembered some
of them, and I'm sure there were a couple that
I didn't. But he makes some really incisive points, and

(31:41):
when you think about the I think he made the
point in the conversation there that I just want to
elaborate on. People think they're helping by banning drugs or
banning guns or such, and such, but the data is
not there to show that it helps. And especially on
the drug side, all you do when you make these

(32:02):
drugs illegal is you make it more profitable for criminal
gangs to produce them. Leading to the situation of Donald
Trump blowing up a boat of Venezuela and Narco terrorists
in in the middle of the Caribbean yesterday.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Go read Jacob's book. Jacob's book will be right back.
What do I want to do first? Here?

Speaker 1 (32:17):
Let me do this real quick. A listener email about Weaimo,
and then we're going to get to Donald Trump talking
about blowing up the boat with eleven Narco terrorists in it.
So we were talking about Weimo when I mentioned that,
at least right now, Weimo costs quite a bit more
than taking an equivalent ride in Uber and left thirty
to forty percent more. Now, on the other hand, if
you're talking about a ten dollar ride and it's a

(32:39):
thirteen dollar ride, you know, is that really going to
Are people going to worry about that cost? I got
an interesting email from a listener named Greg said, I
heard your comment on Weimo coming to Denver.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
I can't wait. My family and I did too.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
Waimo rides in San Francisco late last year. Both were
fun and stunning. Their technology has become impressively good in
navigate in San Francisco's busy traffic and crazy hills just fine.
It obeyed all speed laws, drove cautiously, avoided one potential accident,
and was able to think quote unquote through some interesting

(33:14):
situations like being stuck.

Speaker 2 (33:15):
Behind a parked truck.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
Each ride was about a buck or two more expensive
than a comparable Uber or left I've read how weimo
has revealed an interesting piece of the market, people who
don't want conversation from a driver on a ride, and
just one piece in quiet. I'm not sure if that's
a sad commentary on society or just another facet of
technology finding a way to serve people. There is also

(33:41):
the debate on whether weimo replaces the jobs of Uber
and Lyft drivers. I don't know if that's a problem yet,
but some people in California have been angry enough at
Weymo to vandalyze their cars. I hope it doesn't happen here,
So there you go. That's a great note. No substitute
for experience. So at the end of our conversation, last
segment with Jacob Sullem talking about drug prohibition and so

(34:06):
called gun control and stuff. I mentioned the story that
we got yesterday, and actually the news was broken by
President Trump himself yesterday that the United States Navy, operating
in international waters at least Trump says, with international waters
in the Caribbean, took out a boat, basically a speedboat

(34:26):
that based on the overhead surveillance from a drone or
whatever was flying over, the boat had eleven people in
it and they blew it up. And President Trump is
at the White House right now with the President of
Poland and doing his usual thing taking questions from reporters, and.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
Just a couple of.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
Minutes ago this question did come up, and I haven't
actually heard what he said, so I'm going to hear
it for the first time along with you right now.

Speaker 7 (34:55):
Can you give us a sense of what the US
policy or what you're trying to achieve with the the
aircraft carriers are the boats, i should say, and in
near Venezuela, and also the boat that you mentioned yesterday
where a lot of people were killed. What was found
in our boat and why were the men killed instead
of taking it on the boat.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
You had massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of
them speaking. It was massive amounts of drugs coming into
our country to kill a lot of people. And everybody
fully understands that.

Speaker 4 (35:22):
In fact, you see it.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
You see the bags of drugs all over the boat,
and they were hit. Obviously, they won't be doing it again,
and I think a lot of other people won't be
doing it again. When they watch that tape, they're going
to say, let's not do this. We have to protect
our country, and we're going to Venezuela has been a
very bad actor. They've been as you know. They they've
been sending millions of people into our country. Many of

(35:44):
them will trend there.

Speaker 6 (35:46):
Ragua.

Speaker 3 (35:47):
Some of the worst gangs, some of the worst people
anywhere in the world in terms of gangs, and we
had some in Washington, DC.

Speaker 6 (35:55):
We took care of them, very far right.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
I think that's good. So I got what I wanted
there on the boat thing.

Speaker 1 (35:59):
And yeah, there's a I may get to this a
little bit later on in the show. There have been,
just in the last twenty four hours or so, a
bunch of interesting court rulings related to Trump. And as
long as he's talking about Venezuela. They are one of
the court rulings. Well, maybe i'll mention this right now.
I'll do this right now. One of the and this
was late last night that this came out. Well, I

(36:20):
think it was the I think it was the Fifth Circuit.
In any case, it was a ruling about whether President
Trump is allowed to use the Alien Enemies Act in
order to remove people who he at least claims are
Venezuelan members of the Trende Aragua gang with very little
advanced notice, right less less notice than a person who

(36:43):
is being deported would normally get to give them a
chance to challenge their deportation. So Trump has been trying
to use this law from the seventeen hundreds, and the
court ruled, it was a two to one ruling of
a three judge panel, that he cannot.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
And it's a very interesting.

Speaker 1 (37:02):
Ruling because the judges talk about how they need to
be very humble, they need to be careful. They know
that the final answers are going to come from the
Supreme Court.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
They're going to do their best job.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
One of the other things they say is when the
president says such and such as a as a statement
of fact, they're not going to challenge that the court said.
They're not going to challenge that. You know, for example,
when they say that trendy Aragua is being controlled by
when Trump says trendy Iragua's being being controlled or manipulated
or something like that by the government of Venezuela, the

(37:32):
court is saying, we don't know if that's true or not,
but we are going to defer to the president and
just assume that that's true. But still, what the use
of the Alien Enemies Act comes down to, is there
being an invasion, right, an invasion or a predatory incursion
or that sort of thing. And the Trump administration has
been arguing that the influx of gang members into the

(37:56):
United States of America counts as an invasion, and the
court ruled that it doesn't, and therefore he cannot use
that law in order to remove the illegal aliens. They
also note there are plenty of other laws that he
can use. The difference is that the Alien Enemies Act
tends to have the most streamlined process with the least

(38:16):
due process for the illegal aliens. And what this court
has said is they're going to try to They're going
to have to find other laws to use, even if
it takes a little longer to deport the illegal aliens.
This is not the final word, though, it's definitely going
to go to the Supreme Court. I'm just going to
share with you a little bit of this, but if
you'd like to read more, it's up on the blog
at Roskaminski dot com. And this is pretty a pretty
nerdy thing. This is from the Times of Israel, Times

(38:38):
of Israel dot com.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
Mosaics, mikvahs and oil.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Lamps found that grand estate shed new light on ancient Samaritans.
Now we've all really heard the term the good Samaritan,
and I don't know how many folks actually know what
a Samaritan is. And I only knew a little bit. Actually,
I learned quite a bit from this from this article.
But they are doing some Some folks did a like

(39:02):
a a small, very narrow archaeological digging an area in
central Israra, Israel, in Kaffer Cussime, it's called and because
they thought there was something there and they found they
dig kind of a small area and thought all right,
yeah there's something here, maybe there's a little Roman something,
And they ended up unearthing a massive ancient Samaritan community

(39:30):
that they believe was active between the fourth and seventh
centuries a d. They found buildings, or the remains of
buildings they're not still standing up, and olive press, two
ritual baths, that's what amkva is, colorful mosaics, including one
decorated with a partial Greek inscription reading congratulations too. They

(39:50):
found a bunch of coins, they found pottery, they found
a bunch.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Of oil lamps, and it's just so did this amazing?

Speaker 1 (39:59):
Every once in a while you just find stuff literally
buried under centuries of dirt and centuries of history.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Let me just share this.

Speaker 1 (40:09):
With you because this was stuff I didn't know and
you might find it interesting. Wondering when you hear the
term good Samaritan. I think I think that when I
heard the word Samaritan for the first time, and this
was probably as a kid, right, you know, going to
Hebrew School or whatever, or or maybe later maybe in

(40:30):
maybe in college, when I read the Old.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
Testament and in the New Testament.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
Right as a Jew, you really don't do anything with
the New Testament, but you know I read all that
stuff as well.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Anyway, I think.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
When I heard the term Samaritan, I probably thought that
it meant something like a person who does a good
thing or or something, but it doesn't. It has a
very specific meaning. And let me share this with you
from Times of Israel. Hopefully you'll find it interesting. And
like I said, you can read more of this up
on the blog at Roskaminsky dot com. Samaritans are a
community that considers itself descended from the northern tribes of

(41:04):
biblical Israel, specifically Fraim, Manassa and Levi, but who split
from the rest of the people as early as the
time of the Biblical Kings about three thousand years ago.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
They traced their.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
Roots back one hundred and twenty seven generations in the
land and view the Pentitook. So the Pentitook is the
five original books of the Old Testament. Oh, my gosh, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
Numbers, and Deuteronomy. I think that's right.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
And if I'm remembering that right, that is from Hebrew
School when I was twelve, Right, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers
in Deuteronomy.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
I think I got that right. I might have it
wrong anyway.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
They view the Pentitook as their only holy text, as
opposed to the Jews whose holy text, you know, which
is the entire Old Testament, also includes.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
The books of prophets.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
And writings, as well as the vast corpus of the
so called oral Torah that is the mission of the
Talmud and commentary that came after.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Today there are approximately.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
Nine hundred, only nine hundred Samaritans in the region, and.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
They've got some pictures from here. All this is interesting too.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
All the decorations they find in this excavation follow the
Samaritan rule prohibiting depictions of people, animals, or religious symbols
and relying instead on geometric and vegetable motifs. So like
designs that are geometric or designs that look like, you know, plants.

Speaker 2 (42:39):
Pretty cool, Pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
One mosaic on Earth at the entrance of a building
featured a central medallion with a canthus leaves surrounded by
fruits and vegetables, including grapes, dates, watermelons, artichokes, and asparagus,
while the rest of the floor is covered with.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
Dense geometric design.

Speaker 1 (42:53):
Anyway, can you imagine how cool a thing it would be,
you know, to be an archaeologist and you're digging around.
It's probably year after year after year of a dry hole.
You know, like you're an oil wildcatter and you're looking
in a place where you think there's oil, but you know,
hard to find, and I know most oil wildcatters don't
work in places like that. And then suddenly you find
this thing and then it turns out to be this

(43:14):
massive estate with incredible historical value. Just amazing, absolutely amazing. Anyway,
I hope you go to the blog at Rosskiminski.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
Dot com you can read more. We're going to take
a quick break. We'll be right back with a special.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
Guest to talk about the court ruling in the Google
case that you heard. Chad Bower mentioned a couple minutes
ago Mark Twain quoting Benjamin Disraeli that there are three
kinds of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
It's a great line, and.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
As president of the Bad Analogy Club, I'm going to
use that line to describe something else that really isn't
about statistics at all, because I'm I take my job
as president of the Bad Analogy Club extremely seriously. At
the end of his statement yesterday, Attorney General Colorado Attorney
General Phil Wiser his statement about the result so far

(43:59):
in a federal lawsuit about Google. Wiser, who was one
of the leaders of the states joining the federal government
in the lawsuit against Google, said in August twenty twenty four,
a DC Federal District judge ruled in a landmark decision
that Google has abused its monopoly power and harmed consumers
in online search and search text ads. And in a sense,

(44:20):
what he's trying to do, he's referencing the older case,
which is superseded by the newer case, but he's trying
to make it look like he's winning based on the
decision yesterday by a federal judge Amit Meta, who did,
in fact the rule that Google kind of sorta did
something wrong. But if you want to look at who's
actually winning based on that particular ruling, I would note

(44:45):
that Google stock is up eight and a half percent today,
which is getting somewhat close to two hundred billion with
a b dollars of additional value.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
So that doesn't really sound.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
Like the government ie so joining us to help us
understand this very complex story. Corbyn Barthold Corbyn is Internet
policy counsel at tech Freedom. He's been on the show
two or three or four times in the past. Tech
Freedom dot Org is the website. Corbyn, thanks so much
for joining us. Appreciate it.

Speaker 6 (45:17):
Great to be here.

Speaker 8 (45:18):
Scoreboard as they say, yeah, as far as the stock
price goes.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah, so at the very highest level, if you were
to if we were to rate this ruling as from
let's say zero to ten. With zero, this is uh,
this is gonna be ridiculous, but from Google, from from
Google's perspective, like zero being a ruling that was so

(45:43):
terrible it was going to put him out of business
and ten being the best ruling Google ever could have imagined.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
In a case like this, what's this.

Speaker 6 (45:53):
Eight? Yeah, maybe eight and a half?

Speaker 1 (45:55):
Yeah, okay, So tell us first, what was it issue?

Speaker 6 (46:03):
The DOJ sued Google in twenty twenty. Its lawsuit alleged.

Speaker 8 (46:08):
That Google had abused its monopoly power in the search
market by having exclusive deals with browsers. So that's like
Safari or Mozilla and with its own Android operating system,
whereby in the browser case, for instance, they would pay
money to Apple to make sure that Apple kept Google

(46:30):
as the exclusive search engine. In a when you opened
up Safari browser, you mentioned the States. I can't help,
but note the States brought an even more aggressive case
talking about abuse disadvantaging things like Yelp, and that went
down in flames way back.

Speaker 6 (46:47):
So the states lost.

Speaker 8 (46:49):
In a way that the governor is not acknowledging at
any rate. The DOJ prevailed on this exclusive argument that
the deals further the monopoly in a way that was
not competing on the merits. That liability ruling happened, happened
several months ago, and then we have this remedy ruling

(47:10):
which kind of amounts to oops, never mind.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
And is it correct to say that we believe that
Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to make
Google the default search engine in Safari, But we don't
actually know how much the number is because those numbers
are kind of hidden or subsumed within other larger categories

(47:38):
within their earnings reports.

Speaker 8 (47:41):
Yeah, that's roughly correct. We know it's a very large
amount of money. It's something to the tune of twenty
billion dollars or something like that. And today it's no
longer even before this liability ruling, it's no longer to.

Speaker 6 (47:52):
Be exclusive, but it is to be the.

Speaker 8 (47:54):
Default, the one that when you open up your iPhone,
that's what Safari will have you use, unless you choose otherwise.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
So, and I haven't really looked at this, and I
have my iPhone here, I haven't really looked into it.
But is it the case right now that I that
if I want to search for something by let's say,
typing a search term in at the top, that I
can that Google is the only choice right now? I
mean I could obviously go to another a web page

(48:23):
of another search engine and type something in there.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
But if the browser itself.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
Is going to kind of function as your search engine,
is Google my only choice in Safari today?

Speaker 6 (48:32):
No, it is your automatic choice.

Speaker 8 (48:33):
So if you can just type search terms into the
bar at the top of Safari, it's going to use
Google Search.

Speaker 6 (48:39):
You can go into the settings in.

Speaker 8 (48:41):
Safari and with a handful of clicks, in about thirty seconds,
change your to faults others.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
Okay, that's what I my vague recollection was because I
think I remember seeing So if that's the case, then
what's this about, Like, how is the remedy different from
the existing situation.

Speaker 8 (49:01):
My snide comment ever since this lawsuit came down is, wow,
you know, the government seems to think that people's fingers
are broken. I know perfectly well how to type, you know,
www dot bing dot com.

Speaker 6 (49:16):
If that's what I want to use.

Speaker 8 (49:18):
People don't use the competing search engines because Google is
the best search engine. And actually, Judge Meta even acknowledged
that in his liability ruling. It came down to whether
Google was going too far in kind in trying to
lock down that dominant position, and Judge.

Speaker 6 (49:37):
Meta decided that they did. But there's this.

Speaker 8 (49:39):
Disconnect between the liability ruling and the remedy ruling, because
in the liability ruling, Judge Meta said, well, you know,
why is Google paying all this money to Apple and
not unreasonably? He said, you know, one reason might be
because Google is trying to keep Apple off the sorry
on the sidelines. You know, Apple has gobs of money
and a lot of talent. Maybe they would make a

(50:00):
competing search engine if Google didn't pay them all this money.
But then we get to the remedy ruling, and the
government wanted the judge to order Google to not be
able to pay any money to anyone anymore, and Judge
Meta did not accept that remedy. He said, no, I'm
just going to make it so Google cannot.

Speaker 6 (50:19):
Pay to be exclusive, but they can still pay to
be default.

Speaker 8 (50:24):
But that doesn't solve this potential Apple problem. Apple now
is sitting happy. Apple's going to be very happy with
this ruling. They now continue to have no incentive to
try to make a search engine.

Speaker 4 (50:34):
And it kind of.

Speaker 8 (50:35):
Reveals that that was really speculative from the very beginning
and kind of actually undermines the liability ruling a bit.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
And I will note that Apple stock is up three
percent today as well, so adding about one hundred billion
dollars to the market cap of Apple, which is already
worth you know, three and a half trillion trillion dollars.
So there are a couple things that I saw in
the ruling that I didn't understand, and I would like
you to explain to me, but keep it at a
basic level, because I'm not very bright, all right. So

(51:05):
one of the things that I saw was that the
judges ruling requires Google to share some kind of search results.
So what do they have to share, who do they
have to share it with? And what is that sharing solving?

Speaker 5 (51:22):
Yeah, so to.

Speaker 8 (51:23):
Backup half a step, Google came in at the remedy
stage and said what I was previously explaining, you know,
just make it so that we can't be exclusive still,
let us pay money, and judge meta accepted that. So
that's Google's proposed remedy and they're in the DJ asked
for all of these other remedies. We can dive into

(51:44):
others if you want, But one of them was, okay,
make Google share all of its data and all of
its secret sauce. Make it so that any competitor can
an effect reconstruct a Google level search engine using data
that Google has collected over the years and processes that
Google has perfected. And the judge took that requested remedy

(52:08):
and narrowed it down immensely. He said, I don't want
it to be the case that competitors can just re
engineer Google search engine and piggyback off of Google. If
we do that, no one's going to have any incentive
to innovate. If Google continues to innovate, they're just going
to have to give it away to competitors. And why
would competitors innovate when they can just get Google for

(52:29):
a marginal cost. So he narrowed it down in a
way that's pretty complicated, So I'll only give the very basics.
He says, Okay, so Google crawls the web, it has.

Speaker 6 (52:39):
A map of the Internet.

Speaker 8 (52:40):
That's a big part of its product is creating a
search and search index of the Internet. And the judge says, okay,
Google has to sell that at marginal cost to qualified competitors,
which is a term of art, basically meaning a company
that can prove it can genuinely make a search engine
and do it securely and respecting people's privacy. But the

(53:03):
dj for instance, said, well, we want that search and
index to be sold on a periodic basis, and the
judge said, nope, one time. If you're going to set
up a compete a competitor to Google, one time you
can get their search engine index to get a map
of the Internet, and then you're done. You got to
figure it out from there. And then there are all
kinds of other things like this, where the judge says, okay,

(53:25):
you can have a certain amount of user data, you know,
the click and query, like what a user's click on
when they see a search result, but not the secret sauce.
I'm not going to let you really dive into all
the stuff Google has done to perfect its algorithm and
to mix and match the data and do what it
does to get that really relevant search result. Algorithmically, you're

(53:48):
not going to get the knowledge bar so people may
know if you search somebody famous, Barack Obama or whatever,
you don't.

Speaker 6 (53:55):
Just get search results.

Speaker 8 (53:55):
You get this box on the right that gives you
facts about that person. And Google doesn't have to cough
up the database by which it creates that. There's all
kinds of other little things like this, but the headline
news is Google has to give up some data, but
not enough to make it easy for competitors to just
make a new Google search engine out.

Speaker 6 (54:16):
Of the box.

Speaker 1 (54:16):
We're talking with Corbyn Barthold from Tech Freedom tech Freedom
dot org. So I'm not a lawyer, but I like
to sort of play one on the radio, and it
seemed tell me if I'm thinking about this right, it
seems to me that this narrow part that we're talking
about here, the data sharing part, I can imagine both

(54:37):
sides wanting to appeal this because the government they're off
on their political mission. And this, by the way, was
an action that was brought by a democratic administration and
then the Trump administration again, so both Republicans and Democrats
have seemed to want to go after Google for one
reason or another. And of course, of course, the government
is not spending their own money.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
They don't care how much money they waste on this.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
And so if I were the government and they were
going for the brass ring and they got like a
little plastic ring from a cracker jack box, Like if
I were the government, I might want to appeal it.
And if I were Google, I might want to appeal
it too, because why should a private company have to
give competitors anything. They're not a monopoly, they never been
a monopoly. Yeah, they're dominant, but and I'm not a

(55:21):
fan of Google. Actually I don't hate them. I don't
love them whatever. I know they have a good product,
just as a I don't know, as a libertarian or something,
I like to try to use a product that is
by somebody that doesn't have ninety seven percent of the
market or ninety two percent of the market. Why should
they have to give anything to anyone? So do you
think that both parties may want to appeal this or
or do you think that Google will be satisfied enough

(55:43):
that if it were up to them, they would just
leave it like this?

Speaker 6 (55:49):
Sure a lot in there. Well, First of all, the
Trump administration brought this lawsuit.

Speaker 8 (55:53):
It was Bill Barr's baby, and then the Biden administration
continued it. Oh you're right, it's bipartisan. Ye, that was
what I had the order one Google. I don't think
it's unfair to accuse them of monopoly power as a
search engine. But in America, you're allowed to become a
monopolist if you do it by having the best product.
What you cannot do is abuse your monopoly power and

(56:14):
try to lock yourself in in ways that are not
by having the best product. And to answer your question,
I think there's going to be appeals from both sides.
I think tons of this is going to be appealed.
I think Judge meta smart judge. He's done a very
careful job. But there's so many moving pieces here that
there's just lots of angles of attack. I think Google's
first thing they're going to attack the liability ruling. They're

(56:35):
going to say, look, we paid money for sort of
shelf space on Safari and in our Android system, which,
by the way, we built, and we started paying that
money before anybody thought we were a monopoly. We then
gained market share by being the best. We then continued
to be the best. And what you're trying to do
is basically force us to provide a less good product.

(56:58):
So it's interesting that this might be up on appeal
and get reversed back on the liability ruling from many
months ago, rendering all this remedy stuff moot.

Speaker 6 (57:08):
But then on the.

Speaker 8 (57:09):
Remedy, Yeah, I think both sides will appeal. I think
the DFG is going to be very unhappy with this.
Going back to our eight percent stock rising, it's very
clear that the DOJ shot for the moon and ended
up with almost nothing, So there I think almost guaranteed
to appeal. I've heard some whispers that Google might be
so happy with this that they maybe won't appeal the remedy.

Speaker 6 (57:28):
I don't think that's right. I think they will appeal.

Speaker 8 (57:31):
As you said, the data sharing stuff, it potentially creates
security and privacy concerns, especially the click and query data,
so your search activity. You know they're going to try
to anonymize it and mix it all together.

Speaker 6 (57:43):
But it's still it's.

Speaker 8 (57:45):
Not a good idea necessarily to be sharing that data
around with a lot of competitors. And I'm not sure
Google's necessarily afraid of somebody creating a search competitor, but
they should be terrified of an AI getting this data
and being able to better ground their models and wiping
out Google in the next frontier of competition. And if

(58:09):
that's going to happen, I think Google wants to lose
fair and squear. They don't want to lose because the
government already put the you know, made them tie one
of their hands behind their back in that next stage
of competition.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
Okay, So this gets to the last thing I want
to ask you about, which may be the most important
thing I want to ask you about, and that is
the judge noted in his ruling that where he ended
up on this was significantly influenced by which I take
to mean significantly lower penalties on Google based on the

(58:43):
rapid rise of AI during the time that the judge
was considering the penalty phase. Could you please elaborate on
how you believe AI the existence and rapid rise of
AI changed, how the judge changed, how the judged ru
in this penalty phase.

Speaker 8 (59:03):
Absolutely, And I find this a little frustrating as a
libertarian ish believer in free markets. When this lawsuit first
came down, you know it's going to take We've been
here five years, this may be going on for another
two years on appeal and markets move, and when this
lawsuit was brought in twenty twenty, I was very much.

Speaker 6 (59:23):
Of the attitude of okay, Google's.

Speaker 8 (59:25):
Dominant today they have ninety percent of the search market,
but markets change, you know, for anybody who wants the
technical phrase, you know, shumpitarian creative destruction. Even if somebody
doesn't come in and create a search competitor, somebody comes
up with a new mouse trap that competes in an
altogether different way and disrupts the market. This happens time
and time and time again, especially in the tech industry.

(59:47):
So even if in twenty twenty I couldn't explain to
you how the market would be disrupted, I would have
said with great confidence that the market will be disrupted
in some way. And so it has come to pay.
AI lms give answers for a lot of queries that
are not really like search, they're orthogonal to search, but

(01:00:09):
also a lot of queries that are exactly what you
would have used Google Search to do. When I use chat,
GPT or Claude or Gemini, a lot of my questions
are things I would have in the past asked Google
Search to tell me about, and now I'm going to AI.
Those are searches that are being taken directly out of
Google's market share and into AI. And Google clearly knows this.

(01:00:35):
They now put AI generated summaries of searches, so when
you search on Google Search, you don't just get the
old links that you always used to get. You now
get these summaries made by AI at the top of
the search that are very similar to what you would
get on chat ept. And I'll also that creates a
further risk to Google's dominance. It's an effect cannibalizing its

(01:00:57):
prior product with the AI that's putting up there. So
Judge Meta was absolutely right that AI is really disrupting
this market. It's very unclear how things will look in
another five years. Google is sweating, which is what we want.
We want competition, We want our firms on their toes
and needing to adapt or die. And I think that

(01:01:20):
is going to have a much more powerful impact on
the market than anything Judge Meta could have done. I
am chagrined that he recognized this only you know, sort
of belatedly now at the remedy stage, but it's good
that he did.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Corbyn Barthold is let me get the title right. Internet
Policy Council at tech Freedom. The website is TechFreedom dot org.
Great to talk with another libertarian ish person. Thanks so
much for your time. You would definitely clarified a lot
for me and hopefully for my listeners as well as Great.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Thanks so much, Corbyn.

Speaker 6 (01:01:55):
Glad to be here Ross anytime.

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
All right, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
All right, So big ruling, and again I think the
main thing you need to know coming out of that
Google ruling is that Google stock is up. If you
look at the what's called market cap. Market Cap, by
the way, is a pretty simple concept. It is the
total number of shares outstanding times the price per share.
So what is the value of the company as represented
in the outstanding shares of stock. It's up about two

(01:02:21):
hundred billion dollars for Google today. So this is a
big win for Google and a decent win for Apple
as well, and of a very significant loss for the
federal government, and I'm glad about that actually, and also
for state governments and state attorneys general like Phil Wiser
who wanted to go after Google.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
A big loss for Phil as well.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Let me do one minute on a completely different subject,
and then I've got our last guest of the show.
Coming up in the next segment, we're going to talk
about sea level and probably everything you've you've been told
about climate change and sea level is wrong. I'm just
going to run this by you and really what I
have for you on this story as a question, and
I want you to text me at five six six
nine zero and tell me what you think about it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
This is from CBS Colorado.

Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
Denver city leaders are considering a ban on the sale
of puppies, kittens, and rabbits in pet stores, a move
aimed at shutting down the pipeline from inhumane breeding mills
and stopping deceptive practices before they start. If the ordinance passes,
Denver would join Littleton, Commerce City and Fort Collins, which
passed similar bands last year. Denver City Councilman Chris Hines,

(01:03:29):
who represents District ten, said it's not an issue in
Denver right now at local pet stores, but that's the point,
he said. The methods used for breeding are inherently cruel.
There are animals that are in horrible conditions whose only
purpose is to produce offspring that look cute and can
sell for thousands of dollars. The Health and Safety Committee
is reviewing the proposal. The goal hindset is to prevent

(01:03:52):
companies like pet Land, a chain with a history of
deceptive practices, from setting up shop in DENTI.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
I would like to know what you think.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Good idea, bad idea, any other thoughts you have in
reaction to this story. Text me at five six, six
nine zero and let me know. We'll be right back
on KOA. Matt Wilicky back on the show for the
fifth or sixth or seventh time or whatever. Matt is
the proprietor of a fantastic substack called Irrational Fear Irrationalfear
dot substack dot com. He's a phdgo Chemistry's a former

(01:04:25):
professor at the University of Alabama, and he is now
magically able to make a living by telling the truth
and not having to be cowed by some you know,
woke dean at the university tell him what he can
and can't say.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
And so one of the things you're going to get.
What you get a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):
Of at the Irrational Fear substack is actual data about
things that are going on in the world, specifically regarding
climate and things around climate.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
And you will learn things.

Speaker 1 (01:04:54):
At Matt substack that you just won't hear anywhere else,
with the possible exception of sometimes with our mutual friend
Roger Pilka.

Speaker 2 (01:05:03):
But but Matt really just jumps in.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
And I saw a story a couple of days ago
entitled the sea level Story you are not being told?
And you know, when when you get these climate alarmists,
one of the there are two main things they seem
to pound the table on all the time, right. One
of them is sea level rise and another one being
that basically we're we're all gonna die and we're gonna

(01:05:26):
focus on the sea level for today. So Matt, what
is the sea level story that we are not being told?

Speaker 6 (01:05:33):
Hey, Ross, thanks for having me on.

Speaker 9 (01:05:35):
So you know, we're constantly pounded with the narrative that
global sea levels are rising, they're rising faster and faster
as our anthropogenic CO two emissions are going out, and
this is gonna flood little island nations and coastal cities.

Speaker 6 (01:05:49):
We're gonna have to move New York.

Speaker 9 (01:05:51):
And so you know, it spells this doom and gloom.
And the way you kind of introduce my substack is
exactly what's happening is the science is nowhere near as
seid or even pushing in the same direction. Yet one
side is completely ignored and one side is amplified in
the headlines. CNN ran a headline just a couple months ago,
global sea levels are rising faster and faster. Its spells
catastrophe for coastal towns and cities. Well, unfortunately, just last

(01:06:16):
month or just a couple weeks ago, there was a
new paper that came out that focused on looking at
title gauges. So a lot of these headlines are looking
at satellite data, but really you need a lot more
time than that to identify acceleration. There's a lot of
natural variability. The coastal land mass is moving up and
down sometimes, and so you have to have a long

(01:06:36):
time period. And so what they did was they looked
at title gauges. We've had title gauges for centuries at
a lot of these coastal cities, and what they found
was ninety five percent of them had no evidence of acceleration.
The five percent that had evidence for both acceleration and
deceleration were clearly attributable to local factors and not some
global phenomenon. And so it's completely the opposite of the

(01:06:58):
headlines and this is something that just recently, the climate
experts tried to make a rebuttal for the Department of
Energy report that came out about trying to get rid
of the engagement finding, and they claimed c levels are
rising faster and faster. They completely omitted this paper that
just came out a couple of weeks ago. They must
have known about it, they must have read it, and
they completely omitted in their findings.

Speaker 6 (01:07:19):
And so it's just the same story.

Speaker 9 (01:07:21):
You hype up the narrative side, you make it sound
more extreme, you ask for more money, and you suppress
all of the data that argues against you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:30):
Okay, So just as I wildly object to the alarmist
habit of cherry picking data, I want to just test
you on this. How confident are you in the robustness
of the findings of this particular paper and why do
you have that level of whatever level of confidence you.

Speaker 9 (01:07:48):
Have, so, I have more confidence than I do in
the satellite data. I wrote a piece about this on
my substack. Every time a new satellite went up, they
have to change and tweak the algorithms a little bit.
And you've had an inflection point on the acceleration for
the sea level rise each new satellite that went up.
That makes me very That kind of makes my spider

(01:08:09):
sense go off because that seems like too much of
a coincidence. So title gauges are ground set. They don't
have any they don't need any of these corrections like
you need with a satellite going around the Earth and
all the altimetry and all the cloud corrections and things
like that. There are much longer data sets, and so
I just have I put a lot more faith in that.
I never would claim this is a smoking gun or not,

(01:08:32):
but clearly it's arguing very opposite of what the satellite
data is, and this type of data should be included
when we're talking about climate science and the policies that
some of these coastal towns are going to be implementing,
because if you go by what the headlines are telling you,
you've got to start building sea walls and spending all
this money. And if you go by what the title

(01:08:52):
gauges are telling you, well, what's probably much more manageable
than what they're saying.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
So if I understand your piece right over at Irrationalfear
dot substack dot com, folks, that's where you want to
go to read this Irrationalfear dot substack dot com. This
paper that you have a fairly high level of confidence
in shows that the sea level, and I want to
word this carefully, appears to be rising, based on the

(01:09:18):
title gauges in some places, but not every place, and
in fact not even most places. So would it be
true as a matter of basic law and correct me
if I said that wrong? But would it be true
as a matter of basic logic that if sea levels
appear to be rising in some places but not in

(01:09:39):
at least many other places, then it can't be a
global phenomenon.

Speaker 6 (01:09:45):
Yeah, that's right. So I would word it a little
bit differently.

Speaker 9 (01:09:48):
They are rising in most places, not every place like Oslo, Sweden,
for example, or Oslo, Norway for example. Is it's dropping
there because it's still rebounding from the last glacial cycle,
But it is rising in most places as we come
out the little ice age. What we're talking about is
is it rising faster and faster? Do we see an
acceleration to the sea level rise? It's really slow. We're
talking about you know, millimeters, something on the order of

(01:10:10):
about eight inches in the last one hundred and fifty years.
That's much less than the tidal range just daily on
the coast. So but the argument is that it's going
to be rising faster and faster and faster, and so
pretty soon it's going to be uncontrollable.

Speaker 6 (01:10:22):
And that's what we're not seeing.

Speaker 9 (01:10:23):
We're seeing that in ninety five percent of the tidle
gauges there is no acceleration detectable that's statistically significant. And
in the few places where there is some weird stuff
going on, it's local factors, it's ground motions, subsidence. We
see this on the East coast where a lot of
the towns have been built. The land is sinking a
little bit. But you know, the the alarmists will attribute
that sea level rise. That's not land subsidence, that's sea

(01:10:45):
level rise.

Speaker 3 (01:10:46):
No, it's not.

Speaker 9 (01:10:47):
That's the land sinking because we built giant skyscrapers on
mushy ground.

Speaker 1 (01:10:51):
And in some other places you have the opposite effect.
Maybe not so much land rising, but some of these
small Pacific islands where you've got leaves pushing more crushed
coral up onto the shore, and so that actually looks
like sea level dropped, like the land mass is increasing,
which might not be identical to sea level dropping, but

(01:11:11):
land mass is increasing. When they told us, actually it
was going to be subsumed by water and we're going
to have to move every one somewhere else.

Speaker 9 (01:11:18):
The Maldives were the poster child of this, and they
just built a brand new international airport.

Speaker 6 (01:11:22):
They have more land area for more resorts.

Speaker 9 (01:11:25):
I remember the Prime Minister standing in knee deep water
saying our island. You know, we're going to lose our island,
and clearly that has not happened. If you do if
you just do an analysis of most global shorelines, they're
what we call pro grading, meaning they're moving out towards
the sea as opposed to the sea encroaching in on
the land. And that's a lot to do with human
engineering and innovation and things like that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:47):
Matt Wilocky's great new post at Irrational Fear dot substack
dot com is called the sea level Story You are
not being told. He actually just posted another one today
about the Department of Energy and the so called climate expert.
But you'll have to go read that yourself. Irrationalfear dot
substack dot com. Become a paid subscriber, as I am.

(01:12:07):
It is well worth a few bucks of your money
every month, you will be smarter and entertained.

Speaker 2 (01:12:12):
Matt, thanks so much for spending time with us.

Speaker 1 (01:12:14):
As always, thanks thanks for having me all right, that
is irrationalfear dot substack dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
We'll be right back, think.

Speaker 1 (01:12:21):
I will try to get Denver City Councilman Chris Hines
on the show. I've never spoken to him before, but
hopefully I can reach out to him somehow. And if
anybody listening right now, if you are Chris Hines, or
if you know Chris Hines, maybe get in touch with
me at ross atiheartmedia dot com and let me know

(01:12:43):
the best way to get in touch with him. I
would like to have Chris Hines on the show to
ask about this thing that I mentioned, and I'm gonna
mention again in case you weren't listening when I mentioned
it the first time. Is a headline from CBS Colorado.
Denver considers banning sale of puppies, kittens, and rabbits in
pet stores, which I'm not gonna say that's quite a
death sentence for pet stores. Probably not good for pet stores,

(01:13:05):
you know, probably some degree of pet stores, especially the
large ones where they sell an immense amount of pet food.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
And by the way, have you noticed that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:13):
There are multiple brands of dog food where at least
a large sized bag is approaching one hundred dollars these days.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
It's absolutely nuts. But anyway, a.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
Lot of those places may be able to stay in
business without selling actual pets or or you know, they
can sell birds and lizards and snakes and things like that,
like I see at pet Smart from time to time.
But in any case, they're talking about potentially banning the
sale of puppies and kittens and rabbits, and the idea
is to prevent their from to prevent demand.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
For animals that come through these.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
You know, puppy mills or the cat equivalents or the
bunny equivalent where you've got people who just you know,
breeds these.

Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
Animals incessantly and they.

Speaker 1 (01:13:59):
Otherwise live a terrible kind of life, you know, with
no real care for these animals who are just sort
of baby making machines and then sell them with potential
health complications.

Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
And stuff like that in pet stores.

Speaker 1 (01:14:12):
And I did ask you to text me at five
sixty six nine zero and tell me your thoughts, and
I'm still asking you that text me at five sixty
six nine zero and tell me your thoughts. I think
that if you have some kind of restrictions and bands
on particular methods of making baby animals, the so called
puppy mills, I think you should enforce those. That's not

(01:14:35):
necessarily the same though, as saying that a pet store
can't sell them.

Speaker 2 (01:14:39):
What if you have strong.

Speaker 1 (01:14:41):
Penalties and you do your very best to enforce them
as well as you can, and enforce them, as Donald
Trump might say, strongly, and you find people who are
violating those rules about puppy mills, and you imprison them,
and you find.

Speaker 2 (01:14:57):
Them and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:00):
A bunch of people said, shut down the illegal methods.
I want cute offspring, and I don't mind paying more.
It sounds like the government picking winners. That's one listener
answer Ross. Before I make any decision about selling pets,
I need all the data. You just can't make an
emotional decision on this. Another listener says, got to love
it when cities try to out virtue signal each other

(01:15:21):
ban them. Far too many, far too many people want
pure bread animals for status symbols. Adopt, don't shop, And
I have another text that is very much along those lines,
like here's one. A pet should not be a mall purchased,
take weeks of research. Would love a dog, you know,
I'm allergic to cats. Go to good breeders. So so

(01:15:43):
we have basically three opinions there right. One is one
is I want a pure bread dog, but I only
want to think you should buy it from a good breeder.
Another is you shouldn't bother getting pure bread dogs at all. Necessarily,
you shouldn't care about that. Just go buy whatever you're
gonna get, you know, from, or not even buy.

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):
Maybe go to the shelter.

Speaker 1 (01:16:03):
And rest and rescue whatever you're going to get.

Speaker 2 (01:16:07):
And here's my take.

Speaker 1 (01:16:08):
I'm just gonna say this briefly, but I do want
your opinion at five six six nine zero.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
A lot of the.

Speaker 1 (01:16:14):
Reason that it might be true that some people want
a pure bread dog as a status symbol, I don't care.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
Let them have it as a status symbol.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
I don't think that's any reason to ban the ability
to buy a particular dog just because you don't like
the reason that they might want to buy the dog.
Let them buy a status symbol. Gosh, we had a
French bulldog now before it was cool. It's kind of
turned into a status simple symbol since then, But there's
nothing wrong with this. Some people want a ferrari. I
realize a ferrari isn't a living being, but still.

Speaker 2 (01:16:44):
Some people want.

Speaker 1 (01:16:44):
Things because they're status symbols, and that's okay with me.
The other thing is that dogs tend to have characteristics
based on their breed, and sometimes if you get a
pure bread dog, like we have a pure bred English bulldog,
and they have very specific characteristics. Their faces are ridiculous looking,
they've got ridiculous underbites, huge tongues, and the sweetest personalities

(01:17:08):
in the world. And some people want a pure bread
dog for these various physical and psychological characteristics of the dogs,
and they should be able to get that too. So
I am not on board with people who say that
folks should not be allowed to buy pure bread dogs
or should be discouraged from buying pure bread dogs. Look,

(01:17:28):
if you want a dog that isn't pure bread and
you're happy with that, you want to go to the
shelter and get that good for you.

Speaker 2 (01:17:34):
And if you don't, that's fine too.

Speaker 1 (01:17:36):
Minutes are saying, you know, people should have choices. I
would hope that folks would go to the animal shelter
and you know, rescue a dog. But if people want
to buy a pure bread dog or buy from a breeder,
they should have that choice.

Speaker 2 (01:17:47):
And that is where I am as well.

Speaker 1 (01:17:49):
Another person says, have the pet stores sell shelter pets.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
I get the concept.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
I imagine that for economic reasons that probably won't happen.
All right, there's I want to come back to a
couple of the bigger stories of the day, some stuff
that I started the show with and just kind of
recap a little. I know a lot of folks who
will be listening now weren't listening to two and a
half hours ago, So I want to just come back
to a couple of these things. Now, you've heard much

(01:18:15):
coverage from our KOA News team, and deservedly so, about
the decision by President Donald Trump to move space Command
from Colorado to Alabama. And he talked about this quite
a bit in a press conference that happened yesterday a
little bit after my during Mandy show yesterday, a little
bit after my show, and there were just fifteen twenty

(01:18:37):
seconds out of that on this particular issue that really
struck me and I wanted to just share this with you.

Speaker 3 (01:18:44):
The problem I have with Colorado. One of the big
problems they do mail in voting. They went to all
mail in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections and.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
We can't have that. When the state is for mail
in voting, that.

Speaker 3 (01:18:56):
Means they want dis honest elections, because that's what that means.

Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
So that played a big factor. Also. Okay, so two
things there.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
First, there is no data to support the idea that
Colorado's elections are less honest than other states elections, and
in fact, there's a lot of data to support the
idea that we have better elections than most other states.
It is not to say I am not claiming that
there is no possibility for fraud under all mail in voting.
Clearly there is some possibility for fraud, and ballot harvesting

(01:19:29):
offers some opportunities. For example, people to go to say,
go to a nursing home and you know, you have
a ballot for an elderly person who is maybe confined
to a bed or a wheelchair, maybe not quite fully
with it cognitively, and maybe somebody there would get that
ballot and fill it out the way the person holding

(01:19:51):
the ballot wants and then get the elderly person to
sign the envelope so it matches the signature validation, and
you send that in. Now, we don't have as far
as I know, we don't have cases of that that
have been known yet. But it is possible. I'm not saying.
I'm not saying no Shenanigans are possible, but there certainly
is not data to say that Colorado has a problem

(01:20:12):
with their elections, and there's plenty of data the other way.
We do have or we have had some issues in
Colorado with some of the crazy people doing and I
don't know why they're in Colorado. Right, You've got Tina Peters,
who's a criminal who was trying to prove it the
election was stolen in YadA, YadA, YadA, So she's in.

Speaker 2 (01:20:29):
Prison where she deserves to be. That was Colorado.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
We have this guy Joe Oltman, who was really the
one who started the thing against dominion voting machines.

Speaker 2 (01:20:39):
Now Joe Oltman.

Speaker 1 (01:20:40):
Seems like he's on the path to bankruptcy because you know,
all this stuff that he said he could prove, he
can't prove. And he's been pushed out of a bunch
of his businesses and he's raising money apparently on go
fund me, and that guy is here in Colorado. And
then those postal workers who stole ballots out of mailboxes,
a dozen ballots and then mailed them in, just trying

(01:21:03):
to test whether they could get the ballots in, and
a few got through, and then I think most didn't
get through, but a few did get through.

Speaker 2 (01:21:10):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:21:11):
That was also in colorad. That was out by Grand
Junction in Tina Peters Land. So we do have our
share of cranks and lunatics in Colorado. I don't know why,
but I gotta say for Trump to come out with that,
to claim that we have unfair elections in this state
because we do mail in voting is a lie. It's
not true, and I certainly some of his followers will

(01:21:34):
believe it. Some of his followers in Colorado will believe it.
But I thought that was unfortunate, Separate from the issue
which I'll get back to in a moment of moving
space command, because it's not only important that we have
honest elections. It is obviously of critical importance that we
have honest elections. It is nearly as important that the

(01:21:58):
people believe we have honest elections. If you have elections
that are absolutely honest, but nobody believes it right. And
you're in a place where people think the elections are
corrupt or stolen or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):
Even though they're not.

Speaker 1 (01:22:13):
The impact is going to be about as bad, maybe
a little bit different, but about as bad as if
the elections themselves were dishonest. And I think it is
a massive disservice to the entire United States for the
President of the United States to come out and say
that some particular state, which happens to be the state
I live in, but I would feel this way if

(01:22:35):
he said it about anywhere unless there were data to
support it. For him to come out and say some
particular states elections are fraudulent.

Speaker 2 (01:22:43):
I just think that was terrible. Now here's the other thing.

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
Trump didn't give a lot of good reason as to
why he moved space command. He basically gave two reasons,
neither one of which is very good.

Speaker 2 (01:22:55):
Reason.

Speaker 1 (01:22:55):
One is the politicians from Alabama kept nagging him. He said,
they kept calling me. He's like, don't call me again.
I know what you're gonna ask. I don't need to
hear from you again.

Speaker 2 (01:23:07):
I know what you want.

Speaker 1 (01:23:08):
But that was part of his reasoning was like he
moved Space Command just to get Katie Britton Tommy Tubberville
to shut up and stop calling him about it. So
that's not a legitimate reason, but that was seemed like
his main reason, and then his other main reason, if
we were divided in half, let's say, was this thing
about he doesn't like how Colorado votes. Also not a

(01:23:31):
legitimate reason. But I want you to be very clear
about something. When I say that these are not legitimate
reasons to make a decision about the disposition of military
offices and military personnel. When I say it's not a
legitimate decision, that is not supposed to imply that.

Speaker 2 (01:23:50):
I think that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:50):
Means it's a reviewable decision or a decision over turnable
by a court, because I think it's not. I think
that Donald Trump can make the decision that he made
about where Space Command should be located. I think he
can make that decision for any reason he wants or

(01:24:11):
for no reason at all, and I think it cannot
be overturned. I think he could make that decision based
on taking a bribe from the congressional delegation from Alabama.

Speaker 2 (01:24:27):
And I'm not saying he did, okay to be very clear.

Speaker 1 (01:24:30):
I'm especially with the recent Supreme Court case on immunity,
I think he could take a bribe to move Space
Force to Alabama, and even then and even if he
admitted it, no court would be able to overturn it.

Speaker 2 (01:24:46):
That's my guess.

Speaker 1 (01:24:47):
So I you know, as much as I understand why
every member of the Colorado delegation, Republicans and Democrats, House
and Senate signed onto a statement saying that shouldn't have happened,
and it's going to be bad for our national security,
and it's going to cost the tax payer money, and
all this other stuff that they claim, and it might
all be true.

Speaker 2 (01:25:08):
I understand why they signed on to that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:10):
They want to protect our state, protect jobs in our state,
protect all this stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:25:13):
I get it. That's what they're here for. They're here
to represent the state.

Speaker 1 (01:25:17):
But there is nothing that they are going to say,
and there's no lawsuit that Phil Wiser is going to
file that will have any chance, not even a one
percent chance of changing this decision.

Speaker 2 (01:25:31):
That's my take.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
Nothing will change it, And I think Trump made the
decision for wrong reasons, purely political reasons, not having to
do with what's best for our military or national security.
By the way, Huntsville is a fine place for this.
There's a lot of space stuff going on. It's already
called rocket City or something. I mean, Huntsville is a
fine place for space command. I'm not going to I'm

(01:25:55):
not qualified to get into the nuts and bolts of
the minutia of whether Colorado Springs or Huntsville is better.
They're both okay. But what I am here to say
is that even though I believe Trump made the decision
for wrong reasons, nothing is going to change the decision.
All right, what else Epstein? So last night the House

(01:26:17):
of Representatives dropped this thirty three thousand page dump of
Epstein documents, including flight logs and some video and other
stuff like that. And I think part of the reason
they wanted to do that is they're trying to dissuade
some all Republicans from going along with the move by

(01:26:40):
Thomas Massey, who Mandy, who just walked in, knows better
than I know. I only know Massey a little bit,
and Mandy knows him a lot. Massey is working with Rocanna,
a liberal Democrat from Silicon Valley, California, on something called
a discharge petition, which is the way that members of
the House of Representatives can get something to come up
for a vote when otherwise the Speaker of the House
would prevent it from coming up for a vote. And

(01:27:03):
because Republicans have set a trap for themselves with this
Epstein thing, politically, every Democrat now is going to vote
for the discharge petition to try to force the House
to do this stuff, and they're going to try to
put Republicans in the position of having to vote against
releasing the Epstein information, even though so many Republicans campaigned

(01:27:24):
on releasing it. And Donald Trump is sort of playing
into their hands by calling it a hoax, and he's
probably right. There's probably nothing or very little, let's say,
to see here, and probably nothing that implicates Trump. But
the bottom line is this morning you had Marjorie Taylor
Green out there in front of the Capitol sounding about
as rational as I've ever heard her, where she said,

(01:27:47):
this system has protected Jeffrey Epstein more than it protected
his victims. And she's not wrong. And so I don't
really care about this story much. But to the extent
that I do care, and I've said this before, I
said it, I think to Mandy on the air, what
I care about is why the hell did Epstein get
such a sweet heart deal in whatever year it was

(01:28:08):
in the early two thousands where he was basically given
a non prosecution agreement for sexually trafficking young women. That
is very, very troubling. I don't think it's about Trump.
I don't think Trump has much risk here. But the Republicans,
especially those Republicans who campaigned on this, and Dan Bongino

(01:28:28):
and all these people who made it to think they
set a trap for their own side and they stepped
into it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:32):
Hi, Mandy caned you ah, you know what?

Speaker 10 (01:28:37):
This is reminiscent of the Epstein stuff. Remember when they
found a baggy of cocaine in one of the cubby
holes at the White House, in one of the most
secure places in the entire world, And after a few days,
the FBI was like, golling, g Willikers, we can't solve
this troum. We're just gonna have to close the case.
And everybody was like what And this feels very much

(01:28:59):
the It's like, oh, well, gosh, there's just nothing we
can do now. Our hands are tied. We'll never know
about this man and all the girls he abused. Chucks,
how did that happen? And the populist, the pop in
populists have risen up and said that's not okay. Yeah,
so this is what populism is, isn't it.

Speaker 4 (01:29:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:29:21):
And again I think the thing is interesting because the
underlying issue, why did a guy that bad get treated
with such kid gloves by the government is an absolutely
legitimate question, very much so.

Speaker 10 (01:29:31):
But I think what is going to happen here is
I think that there are probably powerful men who, whether
they did anything or not, are going to bear some
fallout from this situation if they do actually release anything
of substance. And I think that it stands as much
chance of hurting Democrats as it does Republicans. And they're
all flying blind right now, and they should be careful

(01:29:53):
what they ask for. But I'm glad, I'm glad. I
want to see this. I just want to see these
dumb ass issues that politicians makes so central to their campaigns.
And don't get me wrong, I don't think Jeffrey Epstein
abusing people is a dumb ass thing. But to your point,
they ran on this without knowing what it was.

Speaker 2 (01:30:11):
Yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah, A good lawyer
never asked the question doesn't.

Speaker 10 (01:30:14):
Have the answer to right, and so now we want
to know.

Speaker 6 (01:30:17):
I want to know.

Speaker 10 (01:30:17):
I want to see what's in there.

Speaker 1 (01:30:18):
I'll tell you what I wouldn't what I don't want
to see. So and I already think this first part
will be taken care of. I think they will redact
the names of victims, and then victims if they want
to be in front of this publicly, they can come
out themselves and do that themselves. Have already come right,
and there were a bunch of them today at this
press conference with MTG.

Speaker 10 (01:30:35):
Heart breaks for these women, yeause they're just their trauma,
their abuse is just being like, oh, sorry, we can't
help you.

Speaker 4 (01:30:42):
Right, And what is that?

Speaker 2 (01:30:43):
I agree?

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):
And like I said, I mean, this is one of
the only times I've heard Marjorie Taylor Green.

Speaker 2 (01:30:47):
Say something I agree with.

Speaker 1 (01:30:48):
And I thought it was a really powerful line that
the system protected Jeffrey Epstein better than it better than
it protected his victims.

Speaker 2 (01:30:55):
I think that's a I think that's a legit thing.

Speaker 1 (01:30:57):
The other thing, though, that I would not like to
see happen is names being released of people who were
associates or even friends of Jeffrey f Stein who didn't
know any of this and maybe abandoned him as soon
as some of this stuff came out, And maybe some
people will say, well, gosh, you should have known.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
I don't know.

Speaker 10 (01:31:16):
My feeling about that is to your point the second
thing that you said there, like abandon him as soon
as they found out, or or he was charged in
two thousand and eight, or whatever you want to like,
whatever that cutoff point is. I do think that you
have to give some of those people some plausible deniability
if they said, look, you know, I found out two
thousand and eight what to creep that guy was. I

(01:31:36):
had no idea before that. I cut him out of
my life.

Speaker 1 (01:31:38):
I think that's valid, especially if you were never on
the plane in the Islands.

Speaker 10 (01:31:42):
Exactly right.

Speaker 1 (01:31:42):
You went to a birthday, You're you're invited to a
billionaires spectator.

Speaker 2 (01:31:46):
I don't know if he's a billionaire. You're invited to
a very.

Speaker 1 (01:31:48):
Rich guy's spectacular mansion in Manhattan, and rich and famous
people are going to be there. I'd go to that party. Well,
if I were invited and I didn't know anything else.

Speaker 10 (01:31:56):
Man Palm Beach is extremely insular too. You have to
be in the Palm Beach social circles to be in
the Palm Beach social circles, and he was.

Speaker 2 (01:32:05):
Part of those circles, so I'm sure as well, Yes he.

Speaker 10 (01:32:09):
Rubbed shoulders with well, I think Manhattan has a slightly
larger bubble for sure. Palm Beach is a tiny bubble
of very powerful people, and so there's a good chance
he rubbed shoulders with a lot of people. And that
does concern me. I don't want to see somebody have
their life ruined, oh something they didn't do. But at
the same time, I don't know how else to do this.
If the government has shown no desire to tell us

(01:32:29):
the truth about this, then this is how it ends up.

Speaker 2 (01:32:33):
What you got coming up today?

Speaker 9 (01:32:34):
Oh, I got.

Speaker 10 (01:32:34):
Weather Wednesday coming up. I am going to talk a
lot about I heard you talking about Space Command moving.
I have an interesting part of the Trump press conference
that I went back and listened to this morning, where
he talks about why one of the reasons he chose
hunts Fell didn't say anything about mail in ballots. At
this point, it's got to being glossed over, but I
think it really begs the question, what exactly did our

(01:32:58):
democratic Colorado politicians do to try and keep it. I
think that's a legitimate question, and we'll talk about a
little bit of that, a little bit of this, you know, stuff,
things whatnot. It's Wednesday, Ross.

Speaker 2 (01:33:11):
We'll have a wonderful show.

Speaker 1 (01:33:13):
Everybody stick around for Mandy's stuff and things, and if
you're lucky, you will get shenanigans.

Speaker 2 (01:33:18):
We shall see. I'll talk with you tomorrow.