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July 31, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

58:09

‘Family Man’ Forced To Acknowledge Seventh Grandchild

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	Well, the president of the United States is wildly unpopular, and a lot of people have attributed that to his policies.
	The fact that his policies are all about gigantic government spending or equity at the center of all things, or weak foreign policy, including the pullout from Afghanistan.
	But the reality is that the reason that Joe Biden has been sinking in the polls is because Americans don't like him personally.
	Unlike Barack Obama, where the polls showed they liked the guy personally, they didn't like his policies.
	With Joe Biden, the two are just intertwined.
	Joe Biden is not liked by personally. And the turning point for him was actually the
	pullout from Afghanistan. Until that point, there'd been a widespread perception that he
	was a kindly elderly gentleman who wasn't all there, but in essence was a fairly okay guy. But when
	he pulled out from Afghanistan and basically said, I don't care what happens there, when there
	are people falling off wheel wells and American soldiers getting blown up and his entire
	administration sitting there talking about what a wonderful job they were doing, that really sunk the
	perception of the American public about him.
	But he has now underscored that in radical terms because of his association with his son, Hunter.
	So the public mind with regard to Hunter Biden has shifted to, it started off with Hunter Biden
	Derelict.
	Bad guy.
	Drug abuser.
	Pornography abuser.
	Prostitute abuser.
	A bad person.
	But Joe, you know, decent dad trying to take care of his drug addicted son, trying to make sure that his son was okay.
	Sympathetic figure.
	And then, as all these corruption stories roll out, These stories about how Hunter was going around picking up giant bags of cash from foreign sources and Joe was in all likelihood benefiting from that.
	The documents on Hunter Biden's laptop in which Hunter Biden is bragging to his daughter about funding daddy.
	The documents from his laptop suggesting that Joe was taking part in meetings either by phone or sometimes even in person stopping by meetings and saying hello.
	Documents suggesting that Hunter Biden was saying to foreign officials That Joe Biden was sitting next to him as he attempted to essentially pry money out of them.
	You combine that with Joe Biden's treatment of Hunter Biden's illegitimate daughter, and things start to go bad for Joe Biden in terms of public perception real fast.
	So, lurking in the background of the Biden family story has always been this idea that they are incredibly tribal.
	That if you are a Biden, then you get to benefit from the sweetheart deals that are associated with the Biden last name.
	If you're Frank Biden, you can go around and pick up cash.
	Joe Biden's brother.
	If you are Hunter, you can go around and pick up cash.
	Because, of course, you're a member of the corrupt Biden family.
	But if they choose not to give you the name, if they decide that they are not going to extend the name to you, then you're basically cut off at the knees.
	And who better to apply that logic to than a small baby?
	So as we all know, at this point, Hunter Biden had a sexual relationship with a woman named London Roberts.
	London Roberts was acting apparently as his quasi-assistant, and by quasi-assistant we mean that Hunter was basically using her not just for her secretarial abilities, but for apparently other purposes and reasons, sexual in nature, and she bore a child by him whom she named Navy Joan.
	Navy Joan was born way back in 2019.
	It is currently 2023.
	For years, Joe Biden has maintained that he has six grandchildren.
	He does not.
	He has seven.
	He's had seven grandchildren for four years.
	And there's no real religious objection here.
	I mean, it's not as though he has differences with Hunter and therefore he's cut Hunter off from the family or something like that.
	This is some lady that Hunter got pregnant and a kid who obviously is Joe Biden's granddaughter, who he simply refused to give the Biden last name, which of course is the imprimatur of not only legitimacy, But also of moneymaking.
	In the Biden family, literally the only thing that matters is that last name.
	That's the only thing.
	It is not Joe Biden's magic political skill set.
	He has no magic political skill set.
	He ran for president 100 times before he latched onto the rising star of Barack Obama, and then rode that in his octogenarian years to the presidency of the United States over Donald Trump.
	The Biden last name is the moneymaker, and that is explicitly what was denied to Navy Joan.
	In fact, in the paternity hearings about Navy Joan, Joe Biden, presumably Hunter Biden, said in the final analysis that Navy Joan would be denied Hunter's last name.
	The only thing that Hunter would be giving to Navy Joan and her mommy were some finger paintings that Hunter Biden had created.
	Then presumably there'd be some sort of corrupt deal or somebody buys those paintings off of Navy Joan's mom and it's a money laundering operation essentially on behalf of the Biden family, yet again by big name donors who will buy Hunter Biden's paintings from London Roberts, and then that money will eventually see Navy Joan.
	But Navy Joan will be denied the magical Biden last name that has meant literally tens of millions of dollars flowing into family coffers for decades on end.
	So Joe Biden cares about his granddaughter so much that he literally refused to acknowledge her existence.
	At the White House, there was a Christmas stocking for his dog, you know, the one that was biting all the secret service agents.
	But there was no Christmas stocking for the granddaughter he refused to acknowledge.
	Well, over the weekend, Joe Biden reversed that.
	Well, the poll numbers must have gotten real bad because there was nothing that changed in principle here.
	It wasn't as though Joe Biden suddenly, it dawned on him that maybe he should acknowledge his seventh grandchild.
	No, what happened here is pretty obvious.
	The American people don't like it when this supposed kindly old family man, whose entire excuse for his really ludicrously soft treatment of his son has been that he loves his son oh so much, he's the beautiful boy, he's never done anything wrong.
	It turns out that that doesn't hold water when you are willing to disown a four-year-old.
	It's easy to make the claim that you love your kids so much that you let them get away with stuff when everybody in the family is treated with this level of warmth.
	But when you say, this four-year-old, who through no fault of her own, was born of your son, is not part of the family, but the son, who is a crack-addicted derelict, who runs around the world picking up bags of cash, he is in good with me.
	That appears a lot more like corruption than it does like family loyalty, because apparently to get kicked out of the family, all that is required is for your mom to be somebody that Joe Biden doesn't like very much or finds humiliating, but to be included in all family activities up to and including present day, even after pleading guilty to actual federal misdemeanors.
	All you really have to do is go out and continue to pick up bags of cash if you are Hunter Biden or have picked up bags of cash in the past.
	So, over the weekend, Joe Biden and Jill Biden put out a statement, finally, about this missing grandchild.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	So here's the statement that Joe and Jill Biden put out to People Magazine.
	To People, the greatest of all news sources, quote, Our son Hunter and Navy's mother London are working
	together to foster a relationship that is in the best interest of their daughter, preserving
	her privacy as much as possible going forward. You know what would have been a great way to
	preserve her privacy was not to make her the center of a political scandal for nigh on four years.
	That'd be an easy way.
	Like, if Joe had just said seven grandchildren the whole time, would that have been a controversy?
	Or would we know Navy Jones' name?
	Do you know any of Joe Biden's other grandchildren's name?
	Let me put it that way.
	Name another Joe Biden grandchild.
	Go, quick.
	Do you know?
	No?
	No?
	You've never heard of them?
	Right, because it's only a controversy when you refuse to name your grandchild because your son sired her off a former stripper or something.
	This is not a political issue, it's a family matter, said President Biden.
	Jill and I only want what's best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.
	A source familiar with the situation tells People the recently resolved child support dispute between Hunter and London has dictated how the relationship has played out so far.
	Okay, that source familiar with the situation would probably be the Biden family.
	Because who else exactly are they citing?
	You have to remember there were some fairly contentious legal proceedings between Navy's parents happening until just a few weeks ago.
	As grandparents, the Bidens are following Hunter's lead.
	They are and have been giving Hunter and London the space and time to figure things out.
	I don't understand, what the hell does that have to do with Joe acknowledging that Navy Joan is his grandkid?
	How does that impact a legal dispute?
	There is no dispute whatsoever that that is in fact the case.
	I mean, they literally did a paternity test in May 2019 to determine that Navy Joan is in fact Hunter's kid.
	So if Joe has just been saying this the whole time, he's like, yeah, they're in the middle of, I'm not going to comment on their legal situation, that's seen mommy and daddy in this particular case, but of course she's our grandchild and we love her.
	I mean, that's such an easy answer.
	Again, the reality is that there's only one thing that Joe Biden cares about in life, and that is the Biden name.
	He has made this absolutely clear.
	He says this over and over in public life, that the Biden family, I swear on the Biden family name, the Biden family name, because the Biden family name, again, is his only valuable tool.
	And it was only valuable, really, to everybody who was around him because he was able to parlay his situation as a senator into jobs and cash for his son, for his brother, for everybody else.
	And presumably, some of that cash came back to him.
	I say presumably because, again, we have documented accusations that that is the case from Hunter, from his laptop.
	Speaking to People, the source notes the situation is a family issue.
	Quote, thousands of families have faced similar circumstances working it out in private versus the spotlight.
	No, they haven't.
	How many families are there where the grandparents refuse to even acknowledge that they have a grandchild unless there is some sort of family dispute in which the parents of the child are estranged from the grandparents?
	Truly, it's a serious question.
	Does this happen a lot?
	Where the parents are not estranged.
	Not only is Daddy not estranged from Grandpa, they basically live together in the same room.
	I mean, Daddy is flying around the world and staying literally in the same room in places like Ireland with Grandpa.
	If he has an illegitimate child, is this a common thing?
	At the center is a four-year-old girl everyone wants what's best for her, including all of her grandparents.
	I don't think that's been proved by the record.
	Let's say that.
	It took until she was four.
	Okay, she's four years old.
	She's four.
	This is not a two-month matter.
	This is a four-year matter.
	Why does this matter?
	Well, because it goes to character.
	Because in politics, If, as the Democratic Party suggests, character matters, it matters so much so that Donald Trump should never have been president, he should never be president again because of his character defect.
	Well, the fact is that Joe Biden has portrayed himself in a way that Donald Trump never did.
	Joe Biden has portrayed himself as a generous, kind-hearted family man who only cares about the members of his family above all.
	So much so that he's purely sympathetic to his drug-addicted, booze-addled son.
	But when it comes to the grandkid, well, then that's off-limits.
	It's off-limits until we decide to say something, at which point it's on-limits for just a second to say once again what a great grandpa Joe is, and then back to being off-limits again.
	And of course, the media are lapping this up, because the media had no questions about this for a very, very long time.
	So here, for example, is MSNBC anchor Ali Rafa saying, all they want is to preserve this little girl's privacy again.
	If they wanted to preserve her privacy, you know it would have been the easiest way to do that, to just have Joe Biden say he has seven grandchildren, which he did.
	Alex, the president has never shared his reasoning for not publicly acknowledging this little girl, but a source familiar with the family's situation tells NBC News he's avoided doing so until now to give his son and the girl's mother the time and space to navigate this.
	The president, who's always made his family a very public part of his life, now asking to preserve this little girl's privacy.
	So at this point, it's still unclear whether the family dynamics change at all.
	So again, it's all about the preservation of the privacy.
	And then, if you actually mention the actual situation, then members of the media shut you down.
	So CNN host Casey Hunt had on a CNN analyst named Scott Jennings.
	And Scott Jennings is going pretty hard after Hunter.
	And immediately, Casey Hunt jumps in.
	She's like, we have to be respectful.
	Do we, though?
	Do we have to be respectful of Hunter?
	Who undoubtedly was acting as a foreign agent of multiple governments, and who sired a child by a person he called his secretary, and who then ignored that child for four years, and who has denied that child his last name.
	Do we have to treat Hunter with respect?
	Hunter is a terrible person.
	I don't feel any necessity to treat Hunter- and he is a public figure insofar as he was picking up bags of cash with his daddy's name on them.
	I mean, come on.
	But here is CNN going into defense mode and spin mode here.
	It's not Republicans with all due respect who made Hunter Biden into a complete scumbag on this and other issues.
	The ignoring his own daughter for four years and the President of the United States hanging up a stocking for the dog and not for his seventh grandchild.
	We can also have sympathy for people who are struggling with addiction.
	Let's keep this conversation respectful.
	I totally agree.
	And you know where I'm from, a lot of families deal with addiction.
	And you know who ends up picking up the pieces?
	The grandparents.
	And in this case, the grandparents would not acknowledge this little girl.
	It is offensive.
	But the bottom line is... But they have now.
	Oh, what a hero!
	I mean, the fact that she says that she jumps in and tries to stop Scott Jennings from doing all this is just demonstrative of everything that the Biden family relies upon, which is the acquiescence of the media in all these situations, which is really what so much of this is about.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second because, again, the Hunter Biden saga is, in fact, going to do serious damage to Joe in a way that nothing is going to do damage to Trump.
	As I've said before, This has been true for years.
	Donald Trump, when it comes to this race, is essentially a mud monster.
	The more mud you throw on him, the more he is made of mud.
	You cannot sully the frock of somebody whose frock is made of mud.
	There's no way to do it.
	But Joe Biden proclaimed that he is a decent, honest, hard-working family man.
	And it turns out that he actually is a pretty corrupt old politician who is willing to manipulate and use his drug-addled son to pick up bags of cash abroad while ignoring his grandchild.
	I mean, that's not quite the same look.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Okay, so.
	Meanwhile, the DOJ put out a super bizarre letter over the weekend.
	So the Department of Justice obviously attempted to cut a sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden.
	Like, a real sweetheart deal.
	So much of a sweetheart deal that, as we explained last week, when it was exposed to the light of day, they immediately dissociated themselves from the sweetheart deal they attempted to cut.
	Basically, they had two sets of charges.
	One was the tax charges, one was the gun charges against Hunter Biden.
	In the tax charges, they didn't say anything about waiving further investigations and charges with regard to, for example, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which Hunter Biden clearly violated.
	He was acting as an amuse on Burisma's board and trying to lobby politicians on behalf of Burisma.
	Hey, Burisma is a Ukrainian energy company.
	He was doing this also on behalf of Chinese companies.
	So there's no question that he violated the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act by any available measure.
	And so the question is, are there further investigations that are going to bear fruit not only with regard to Hunter, but maybe might just touch Joe?
	And the DOJ was eager to basically get all of these claims off the table.
	And so there was this kind of bizarre open battle that was happening between the DOJ and Hunter Biden's legal team, where Hunter Biden's legal team would go on national television, and then they would say things like, well, by our understanding, all charges are now off the table.
	And the DOJ would be like, no, they're not really.
	And he would say, yeah, you know, they really are.
	Well, it turns out that Hunter Biden's lawyers had reason to think so, because these tax charges, which were publicly available, those did not waive further charges.
	But you know what did?
	It was a diversionary agreement on the gun charge.
	It said that anything related to the tax charges, including presumably FARA violations, would be waived.
	Well, the judge saw this, and the judge immediately was like, uh, this seems corrupt and bad, like they're hiding the deal.
	And the DOJ was like, we never made a deal.
	What are you suggesting?
	And so they had to back off of it, which is why the plea agreement is still in limbo between Hunter Biden and the DOJ.
	I mean, that's really, really corrupt stuff.
	OK, well, over the weekend, the DOJ also sent a letter to Devon Archer's attorney.
	Devon Archer is the former business partner of Hunter Biden, who is now testifying today behind closed doors before Congress, talking about Joe Biden and how Joe Biden would get called into meetings and how the big guy was Joe Biden and all of this sort of stuff.
	It really could be devastating stuff for Hunter Biden, as well as Joe Biden, because again, Joe proclaimed that he knew nothing about Hunter Biden's businesses, which is weird when you're getting called by Hunter Biden's business partners on the phone and he's putting you on the phone with them.
	So he's lying, in other words.
	Well, he's supposed to testify to that before Congress today.
	Well, literally two days before that happens, a letter is sent from Damian Williams, U.S.
	Attorney, The government respectfully requests the defendant be ordered to surrender at a date and time determined by the court to a facility designated by the Bureau of Prisons to commence his term of imprisonment.
	The government has conferred with counsel for the defendant about this request and asked that counsel propose a date for the defendant's surrender.
	Counsel responded with the following position.
	Mr. Archer believes it is premature to set up a report date in light of his anticipated continuing appeal, as well as the newly discovered sentencing error the government has now concluded.
	Counsel for Mr. Archer will put in a response to the government's request by Wednesday.
	The government disagrees with the counsel's position a report date should not be set.
	So in other words, there is a dispute between the attorney for Devin Archer, he's been convicted in other crimes, and the DOJ literally sent a letter over the weekend saying, we would like to set a date for him to come in and turn himself in.
	So, this was interpreted by some, including the New York Post's Miranda Devine, suggesting that they wanted Devin Archer to turn himself in to jail before he actually was able to give his congressional testimony.
	Apparently that's not the case, but the letter itself is still kind of weird.
	I mean, a letter that you send publicly, right?
	It's now publicly available.
	A letter that you send to the attorneys of the person who's about to testify before Congress.
	From the DOJ, run by the father of the person with whom you were business partners, saying, you ready to turn yourself in for jail yet?
	What's the story?
	You ready to go to jail?
	When are we going to find out?
	That's a little weird.
	It raises two specific issues.
	One, publicly, it again tries to label Devin Archer an untrustworthy, unreliable source because it reminds the entire public that the guy has pled guilty to crimes.
	And second, it reminds Devin Archer who's in charge, namely the DOJ and you remember, like, Joe Biden.
	Archer's counsel, again, rejected the notion there's any connection between Archer's tiff with the Justice Department and his potential imminent jail time.
	He said, we're aware of speculation the DOJ's weekend request to have Archer report to prison is an attempt by the Biden administration to intimidate him in advance of his meeting with the House Oversight Committee.
	To be clear, Mr. Archer does not agree with that speculation.
	In any case, Mr. Archer will do what he has planned to do all along.
	He'll show up on Monday and honestly answer the questions put to him by the congressional invest— What else do you think he's going to say?
	If he's actually being intimidated by Joe Biden's DOJ, then he's going to be out there being like, I'm being intimidated by Joe Biden's DOJ who has complete control over my sentencing.
	Or is he going to go out publicly and he's going to say what he's expected to say, thus achieving the purpose of the letter.
	So we'll see what Devin Archer has to say behind closed doors, but that is definitely super weird.
	Meanwhile, you have people who are very much involved in the Trump impeachment, like Representative Dan Goldman saying, the process on the DOJ, this is all fully above board.
	The Hunter Biden plea deal was fully above board and great.
	Were you surprised to see the judge in Delaware reject the plea deal?
	Not reject it, but not accept it?
	Well, this is a fairly typical process that goes through.
	This was an unusual agreement, in part because it's a 24-month agreement, and there's the possibility that Donald Trump will be president.
	And we know from his presidency how much he weaponized the Department of Justice to go after his enemies and to favor his associates.
	And so Hunter Biden's lawyers are concerned that Donald Trump, if he were to get the presidency, would weaponize the Department of Justice.
	And so there is an added calculation to this.
	But the fact of the matter is that this is a Trump-appointed U.S.
	attorney, a Trump-appointed judge.
	This is a very Independent and thorough investigation.
	And I think that whatever happens in the Hunter Biden case, we can rest assured that it was done based solely on the facts and the evidence and that there was nothing else to it.
	Oh, there's nothing to it.
	It's all wonderful, according to Dan Goldman.
	Mm-hmm.
	Head of the impeachment management for Donald Trump.
	Yes, I totally believe you, Dan Goldman.
	In just one second, we'll get to the other side of the race.
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	Okay, so naturally, the outcome from the media when it comes to Hunter Biden's corruption and Joe Biden's potential involvement in that corruption is that there's nothing to see here.
	Chuck Todd over on NBC says, you know, the Republicans are going to go after Joe and Hunter, whether there's anything there or not.
	OK, so first of all, let me point out you guys set the standard.
	You did.
	It is the way politics works.
	We all may wish that it worked where one side acted above board and the other side was scurrilous.
	But here's the reality.
	If the rules only apply to one side, they ain't rules.
	And so if you go after Donald Trump for four long years with bullcrap investigations about how actually he was a member of the Russian oligarchy, And you have Adam Schiff trotted out on places like Meet the Press routinely to talk about how they have a smoking gun hidden behind clothes.
	They can't show it to you now.
	They can't show it.
	But sooner or later, they will emerge from behind the Price is Right curtain and they will explain to you exactly how Donald Trump was working hand in glove with Vladimir Putin.
	And it turns out all to be false.
	Well, guess what?
	When the shoe is on the other foot, Things are going to be kind of... Now, here's the reality.
	We currently have more documented evidence that Joe Biden was receiving benefit from Hunter Biden's foreign payoffs than that Donald Trump was receiving foreign payoffs.
	That evidence is much better for Joe than it is with regard to Donald Trump.
	We still have yet to see what is the documented benefit that Donald Trump received from, for example, the Russian government.
	Where is it?
	Well, we know full well, Hunter, I keep coming back to it because it's so perfectly obvious.
	Have you ever texted your child, your adult child?
	Let's say that you're 40, 50 years old.
	Have you ever texted your adult child that you are paying grandma's bills when you're not actually paying grandma's bills?
	Hunter Biden literally texted his daughter saying that he's been paying for everything in the family and for pop for years.
	Do you think that was just made up?
	Even if Hunter Biden was high on crack at the time, did he just come up with that out of nowhere?
	Really?
	Here is Chuck Todd proclaiming, well, it's just unfair.
	They're going to go after him no matter what.
	Well, here's the thing, the media will defend Joe Biden no matter what.
	So yeah, I mean, that is going to be how this goes.
	Do you think it would behoove the president for him to come out and say, hey, I had no business dealings with my son.
	My son's issues are my son's issues.
	Do you think he needs to say that more directly?
	Because there's a lot of people that believe something, something else would happen.
	Well, let's be clear about that point, Chuck.
	There's been a five year investigation, five years by a Trump appointed U.S.
	attorney.
	This investigation started during the Trump administration, and they've come forward with not one shred of evidence.
	I'm tying President Biden to any of this.
	I am encouraged that in sharp contrast to President Trump, you've just detailed his mountain of legal problems where President Trump is fighting and pushing back and obstructing.
	Hunter Biden's come forward, taken responsibility, paid his late taxes.
	As you just discussed with Chuck Rosenberg, I think the hiccup in the Delaware District Courthouse will get ironed out pretty quickly.
	And I don't think President Biden needs to say anything more than he has.
	House Republicans are going to accuse him.
	They are.
	They're going to make the accusation.
	They're going to accuse him of all sorts of stuff.
	Perhaps whether they have the evidence or not.
	Correct.
	Whether they have the evidence or not.
	I love that Democrats are saying whether they have the evidence or not.
	Four years of accusations that the 2016 election was stolen by Putin on behalf of Trump with zero evidence.
	Four years of it.
	They've still maintained it, by the way.
	Fairly amazing stuff.
	Okay, meanwhile, Donald Trump is of course using this as the impetus for his campaign.
	So this campaign, you gotta say, Donald Trump is one of the luckiest SOBs ever to live in politics.
	Because when the dice are down, they tend to break his way almost always.
	And this is particularly true when it comes to the way this race is shaping up.
	So right now, it is shaping up for the Republican side as a referendum on Joe Biden's corruption.
	And so that is going to break very much in Donald Trump's favor.
	Because again, Donald Trump, as he himself has proclaimed, with the inerrant instinct that he has, and this is the magical benefit of Donald Trump, truthfully.
	Donald Trump is not an intellectual.
	Donald Trump is not a person who thinks through policy positions.
	Donald Trump isn't a person with policy positions.
	Donald Trump is a series of impulses, but his instincts are inerrant.
	When it comes to targeting people, when it comes to destroying political opposition, the dude is a genius.
	He really is.
	I mean, he's really good at this.
	Or I should rather say he has a genius for it.
	Because it doesn't come from, I think, IQ points as much as it comes from just, he has a gut-level understanding of where to put the knife in.
	He's been great at this since the 2015 campaign, which is why the nicknames that so many people dismissed as, you know, dumb or a waste of time, including me, they resonate, obviously.
	He does have a capacity to speak to the 7th grade side of people that is really inerrant.
	And it's also true when it comes to kind of capturing the political id.
	When it comes to a person who sums up the political id and is able to capture it in a way that no other politician in my lifetime can, Trump is that guy.
	So Trump understands the momentum in the Republican Party with regard to Joe Biden is all about the corruption.
	It's not about his policies.
	It's not about what a bad politician he is.
	It's about his personal corruption.
	And so over the weekend, Trump really went hard at Joe Biden on this.
	And in fact, Trump, he loves campaigning as an outsider.
	It's his favorite thing to do.
	Donald Trump was the president of the United States.
	He has an extraordinary level of loyalty inside the Republican Party, and he's still campaigning as an outsider because it allows him to be as free-willing as he wants to be.
	The minute you're burdened with the feeling of being an establishment, Figure, the moment you actually have responsibility for your own party, well, then people can hold you accountable for failures, right?
	This is what started to happen in 2022, after Trump endorsed a slate of candidates who all lost in the Senate.
	There was just for a brief moment in time, Republicans were like, wait, doesn't he bear some responsibility for those losses?
	Maybe we shouldn't nominate him.
	And then he went right back to being the freewheeling, sort of free radical actor.
	And everyone, oh, well, he's not responsible for any of that.
	He's only responsible for what he himself does, not for anybody else.
	So he is, Again, when it comes to this, he does have a genius for this.
	So, Donald Trump over the weekend, he aimed at Joe Biden, but he simultaneously aimed at all of his Republican opponents.
	Again, free fire zone from Donald Trump.
	Always, always, always.
	No discretion in the fire, but just fire in every direction.
	So he says that not only should Joe Biden be impeached, which, you know, the evidence may very well indicate that he should be impeached.
	I said this last week.
	But he also said that if people don't vote to impeach Joe Biden, regardless, he's going to then primary them.
	Which is a way of declaring his political virtue to Republican members of the base who really, really don't like Joe Biden.
	So again, I may think this is bad politics.
	If you're in a purple district and you vote for Joe Biden's impeachment, you may lose your seat.
	But Donald Trump doesn't care about that.
	Again, he bears no responsibility for the Republican Party.
	Donald Trump doesn't care whether the Republican Party wins or loses.
	He cares about whether he wins or loses.
	This has been perfectly true since he was running in 2015-2016 when he refused to endorse the idea that if he lost the primaries, he'd even vote for the other guy who won.
	So here's Donald Trump in Erie, Pennsylvania over the weekend.
	They play a different game.
	These people are corrupt as hell, and they play a different game.
	They play a much tougher game of hardball, and the Republicans have to play like these two guys and these three people.
	Actually, four people that we have.
	They have to play tough.
	And they have to be, and honestly, and if they're not willing to do it, we've got a lot of good, tough Republicans around, and people are going to run against them, and people are going to win, and they're going to get my endorsement every single time, and they're going to win because we win almost every race when we endorse.
	I mean, put aside the fact that that is 100% not true in the major top-of-the-ticket Senate races, where his record was abysmal.
	But that doesn't matter, because again, this is Donald Trump being able to run against anyone and everyone at the same time, which is the benefit of being Donald Trump.
	Every other candidate has to worry about attacking Trump.
	Trump doesn't worry about attacking anybody.
	He'll go after whoever he wants.
	Donald Trump will go after primary opponents inside the Republican Party.
	He will go after congressional primary opponents.
	And again, because he channels that political id for the Republican Party, we all feel, in the Republican Party, a lot of people feel like he'll do that to the Democrats too, which is true.
	He will.
	I mean, so long as they're on his wrong side.
	If they start to wheedle him and if they start to massage him a little bit, then that may shift and that may move.
	And then Donald Trump continued to aim at Joe Biden over the weekend.
	He said he's talking about Ukraine.
	And now he's making the suggestion he's trying to come again.
	This is the guy.
	I've said the word genius here a few times, but it is true.
	There is a growing sentiment inside the Republican Party that the war in Ukraine is somehow an element of corruption.
	Now, you can believe several things at once.
	One, the Ukrainian government is corrupt.
	It is.
	It has been for decades.
	Two, the war in Ukraine against Russia is in America's interest in the sense that it degrades the Russian military, prevents them from invading further countries, maintains the reliability of NATO against foreign aggression, sends a message to China that if they invade Taiwan, there will be actual consequences for all of that, and prevents Vladimir Putin from consolidating resources on behalf of an anti-American alliance, right?
	All of those are real American interests.
	But you can also hold that With the position that obviously all money that we spend over there, we have to know where that money is going.
	We have to assume that some of that money is going to bad places and all of the rest.
	But Trump understands that there is a rising sentiment against the funding of the war in Ukraine.
	And so now he's going to blame that on Joe Biden's corruption in Ukraine.
	So he's linking two issues now for the Republican base, like a heavy chunk of the Republican base.
	Issue one is Ukraine, which again, for probably a plurality of Republicans at this point, or at least verging on a plurality, the Ukraine war is unpopular.
	He's merging that position with the anti-Joe Biden position to create a sort of iron nexus that is very useful to him politically because he's the only one articulating it.
	Here he was talking about how the suggestion is that we're in war in Ukraine specifically because Joe Biden wanted to pick up cash.
	But the weapons stockpiles to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ, and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden crime family's corrupt business dealings.
	We have to know, and the public deserves to know.
	In addition, Congress should immediately vote to block Joe Biden's recent call-up of reserve forces.
	We're sending now troops over to Europe to fight.
	OK, so it is not true, by the way, that we're sending troops to Europe to fight in Ukraine, that that is not actually true.
	But again, this is smart politics from Donald Trump.
	Now, the problem is, does Donald Trump actually have any sort of plan to win the actual election?
	So all of this plays inside the Republican primary, where everybody hates Joe Biden.
	Everybody knows that Joe Biden is corrupt and a lot of people don't like the Ukraine war.
	But an actual election between Joe Biden and Trump, that's a risky strategy, because the reality is that the Ukraine war is still a majority proposition in the United States.
	The reality is he's going to stack up Trump against Joe Biden.
	We'll get to Trump's flaws in just one second.
	Again, I've praised his inerrant political instinct because they really are quite good.
	But by the same token, a lot of the things that he's preparing for when it comes to the actual general election are not going to materialize.
	We'll get to that in just one second first.
	Not a big fan of the veggies over here, as you know.
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	Well, Balance of Nature actually sent a bunch of product down to the studio for the team to try.
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	Okay, meanwhile, now again, because the campaign against Joe Biden is coming down to not his policy so much as sort of personality, corruption, and all of the rest, this really benefits Trump, because this is the area where Trump really excels in tearing people down.
	For literally years, he's just been dragging people down into the mud with him, and the idea is once they're both in the mud, then he's competitive.
	And that, by the way, is what the polls are showing right now.
	What the polls are showing is that he's very competitive with Biden, not because he is popular, but because Joe Biden is unpopular.
	With that said, The thing that Trump would then need to do is run an actual concerted race with regard to, you know, expending resources to get the votes.
	So over the weekend, Donald Trump suggested that all of his primary opponents should drop out so people would stop spending money on his primary opponents and give the money to him.
	And then he would spend it on things like ballot harvesting.
	Any Republican that doesn't act on Democrat fraud should be immediately primaried and get out.
	Okay, and then he came out and he suggested that he was going to spend all this money that he
	raises from his primary opponents getting out. He was going to spend all that on ballot harvesting.
	Now, there's only one problem with this.
	You'd be kind of foolish to believe him.
	He didn't do it in 2016.
	He didn't do it in 2020.
	He had no ground game in 2016.
	He really didn't.
	I mean, this is well-documented.
	His campaign was run basically from 30,000 feet, and then he relied on Hillary Clinton's under-turnout to actually win the election.
	Again, my favorite stat from the 2016 election is that in 2016, Donald Trump won fewer absolute votes in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney won in 2012.
	But Donald Trump won Wisconsin and Mitt Romney lost Wisconsin.
	The 2016 election was just as much, I think more, about lack of turnout for Hillary as it was about additional turnout for Donald Trump.
	In 2020, he didn't have a ballot harvesting operation.
	He actively told people not to vote early.
	And then he did that again in 2021 in the Senate runoff race in Georgia, both of them.
	That he ended up losing.
	The Republicans ended up losing, then handing control of both the Senate and the House to Joe Biden, who proceeded to spend six to seven trillion dollars.
	So do you think that Donald Trump is going to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a ballot harvesting operation?
	An operation to actually get out the vote?
	I have doubts.
	The reason I have doubts is because we now have a story that Donald Trump has spent from his campaign super PACs, or his campaign super PACs have spent on his behalf, tens of millions of dollars on legal fees.
	Now that's not what you're giving money to.
	You're not actually- Donald Trump is a billionaire.
	Now, I think that a lot of the legal problems that Trump is facing, some of them are of his own making, like the classified documents nonsense down in Florida.
	That's of his own making.
	He could have just handed those documents back to the National Archive and none of this ever would have happened.
	But many of these legal troubles are not of his own making.
	That'd be like the Manhattan DA going after him for Stormy Daniels nonsense.
	It's of his own making in the sense that he shouldn't have shook Stormy Daniels and then paid her to be quiet.
	But it's not of his making in the sense that it's a legally specious case.
	But even assuming that there are tons of bills that are being incurred by Trump on a personal level, That are frivolous and that shouldn't have to be incurred?
	When you give money to Trump's campaign, do you think you're paying his legal bills?
	Or do you think you're paying for the ballot harvesting?
	Because his legal bills, that didn't help you win the election.
	Also, he's a billionaire.
	Presumably, he can pay his own legal bills.
	And then, he can use the money that you are giving him, the small donor.
	He has tons of small donors.
	And he can use that to defeat Joe Biden.
	But that's not actually where the money is going.
	According to the New York Times, the political action committee former President Trump is using to pay his legal bills faced such staggering costs this year, it requested a refund on a $60 million contribution it made to another group supporting the Republican frontrunner, according to two people familiar with the matter.
	The decision signals a potential money crisis for Trump, who has so far refused to pay his own voluminous bills directly.
	He's also avoided creating a legal defense fund for himself and people have become entangled in the various investigations related to him.
	So he could have created a legal defense fund and you could have given money to the legal defense fund to spend on his legal bills.
	But no, he knows you're not going to give money to his legal defense fund.
	He knows that you want to give money to his campaign, so he'll beat Biden.
	That's the reason why you care about Donald Trump, presumably, is you don't want Joe Biden to be president anymore, not that you care about how Donald Trump handles paying his big-ticket lawyers.
	The refund was sought as the political action committee Save America spent more than $40 million in legal fees incurred by Trump and witnesses in various legal cases related to him this year alone, according to another person familiar with the matter.
	The numbers will be part of the Save America Federal Election Commission filing expected to be made public today.
	That $40 million was in addition to $16 million that Save America spent in the previous two years on legal fees.
	Since then, of course, Trump has been indicted twice and has expanded the size of his legal team.
	His two co-defendants in the case related to his retention of classified material work for him, total legal spending $56 million.
	So when you donate money to Trump, do you think that's going toward ballot harvesting?
	I have doubts.
	I am not certain that that is the case.
	And that is a problem.
	Because, again, you can elect Trump in the primaries.
	Data suggests that a lot of people do like Trump in the primaries.
	The current state of the race, if you look at the latest polling that is out today, suggests that Donald Trump is a New York Times-Siena College Poll of likely Republican primary electorate.
	it. 54% for Trump, 17% DeSantis, 17% others, 13% no answer.
	So DeSantis is the closest person and he's not within 30 points of him.
	you And so the primary base seems like they are cruising toward Trump.
	And not just that.
	Trump's base makes up more than a third of the likely Republican electorate.
	So you have 37% saying that they are the MAGA base and will vote for Trump no matter what.
	And then you say there are 37% who are persuadable and 25% who are not open to Trump.
	So, the MAGA base is 37 according to this poll.
	The not open to Trumps are 25.
	That means that the remaining 37% would have to split in favor of one other candidate, not in favor of like 10 other candidates, in favor of one other candidate by essentially a margin of 2 to 1 in order to defeat Trump in the primaries.
	0% of the MAGA category say that Trump has committed any serious federal crime.
	Only 2% said he even did something wrong in his handling of classified documents.
	So nothing is changing right there.
	And again, when you look at the remaining half, the two-thirds who say that they are persuadable or not open to Trump, well, even among those members of the Republican electorate, they disagree on the issues.
	They're fractured.
	It's gonna be very difficult for anybody to consolidate this, according to Nate Cohen looking at the data over at the New York Times.
	DeSantis' support right now is split between those who are still open to Trump and those who are not.
	Overall, DeSantis holds just 32% of voters who aren't considering Trump.
	Right, so that means that you'd have to assume that all 25% who say they're not open to Trump would shift into the DeSantis category.
	Right now, they're split, with Chris Christie, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy each attracting between 5% and 10% of that vote.
	So once again, it looks like the field is very, very split.
	So Trump has an advantage in the primaries, no question.
	The problem is, does that translate to an actual general election victory?
	Is anybody even thinking about, is Trump even thinking about that at this point?
	What is the case that Trump is making for why he will do better in 2020 other than Joe Biden's failures?
	By the way, this is exactly the same case that Joe Biden is making about Trump.
	The case that Biden is making about Trump is I can be as terrible as I want to be.
	I can be as corrupt as I want to be.
	I can be as foolish and out of it as I want to be.
	I mean, there's a picture of Joe Biden that's floating around the internet of him on the beach in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware over the weekend.
	It is not flattering.
	He's an 80-year-old man walking around in his swim trunks and no shirt with sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap, and it looks just like how you'd imagine.
	He is very, very old.
	He is very, very dodderly.
	He is not with us anymore.
	But his entire case is, I am not Trump.
	And meanwhile, Trump's entire case is, I'm not Biden.
	So, I mean, that is a hell of a dynamic, going into a presidential election.
	Which, by the way, is why so many people have worried about no labels, or RFK, or Cornel West, or some of these third party candidates.
	Now, in the end, will it end up being a binary vote?
	Almost certainly it will.
	But, is there any guarantee how that goes?
	For either side?
	No guarantee at all.
	So, again, is that the best way to run a campaign?
	I have serious doubts.
	Okay, meanwhile, there's a lot of uncertainty out there about the economy and you sense the sort of growing warmth in the press for the idea that we're going to escape a recession because the inflation data came in last week and it's coming in, you know, kind of close to normal.
	We're now back down toward the 2% number that people are looking for from the Federal Reserve.
	And it seems as though the economy is sort of defying gravity at this point because the GDP is still clocking in at 2.4, 2.6%, which are good numbers, right?
	According to the Wall Street Journal, recent good news on inflation has ignited a debate over how much central banks' interest rate increases are responsible.
	The answer matters for where inflation and interest rates are headed.
	The Federal Reserve and European Central Bank in the past week lifted their benchmark interest rates to 22-year highs and left open the door to additional increases.
	If higher rates were not responsible for progress on inflation today, that suggests central banks could be able to lower them before a painful recession sets in.
	So this is really the question, is whether the reason inflation came down is because of the increases in the interest rates, or whether it's supply chains basically healing themselves.
	If it's because the supply chains are healing themselves, theoretically, if we start to go into recession, then the central banks could theoretically lower those interest rates again without jacking up the inflation, if it is from the low interest rates in the first place, and that's what created the bubble.
	Then lowering the inflation rates, lowering the interest rates right now would create another secondary bubble of inflation.
	But there's a more significant problem on the horizon.
	And the more significant problem...
	is economic stagnation.
	So, last week, there was a lot of talk about the GDP coming in, and the GDP stat came in, and everybody was very, very excited about how it came in.
	Analysts had suggested it was going to be a lot lower than it actually showed.
	Apparently, the Gross Domestic Product grew at a 2.4% annual rate last quarter, while analysts had been expecting a reading of 1.5%.
	And so a lot of people were saying that, well, soft landing might now be possible.
	Here's the problem.
	GDP is a bad stat.
	The reason GDP is a bad stat is because it is about consumption.
	GDP measures the amount of consumption, end-user consumption, in an economy.
	You pay a price at the store to buy a product, that goes into GDP.
	The government spends a crap load of money on things, that goes into GDP.
	Well, the problem with that is it doesn't actually answer for how business dynamics works.
	It's a Keynesian model of how the economy works.
	It assumes that the more consumption there is, the better the economy is doing.
	It assumes that if you buy a bunch of hamburgers, the economy is doing amazing, and if you buy fewer hamburgers, it's because the economy is doing poorly.
	It also imagines that if the government spends a crap load of money, like unprecedented amounts of money, that that means the economy is doing great, because all of that gets counted in the GDP.
	The better statistic is something called gross output.
	So gross output has been a statistic that's been in semi-wide use since about 2014.
	There's an economist named Mark Skousen who wrote about it in 2014, when the Bureau of Economic Analysis started using gross output as an alternative for GDP.
	And he explains it this way.
	He says, in many ways, gross output is a supply side statistic, a measure of the production
	side of the economy.
	GDP measures the use economy.
	That's the value of all final or finished goods and services used by consumers, businesses
	and government.
	The measure of an economy's gross output has been around since the 1930s.
	Gross output essentially measures the amount of business investment.
	It's the make economy, the total sales from the production of raw materials through intermediate producers to final wholesale and retail trade.
	So instead of just looking at all of the product that is bought by you at the store, it looks at the product that is bought all the way along the chain.
	And so if you're buying a chair, it looks at who paid for the wood, and then who paid for the planks of wood, and then who paid for the screws and the planks of wood to put them together, and then who paid for the varnish to make sure, right?
	It includes all of that.
	So it's a broader measure of the output of an economy because it includes actual business investment.
	So Skrusen says, Why pay attention to gross output?
	For starters, research I published in 1990 shows it does a better job of measuring total economic activity.
	GDP is a useful measure of a country's standard of living and economic growth, but its focus on final output omits intermediate production and, as a result, creates much mischief in our understanding of how the economy works.
	In particular, it has led to a misguided Keynesian notion that consumer and government spending drive the economy rather than saving, business investment, technology, and entrepreneurship.
	So if you look at GDP data, GDP data always suggests that consumer spending is the number one element.
	So this is why you get statistics about consumer confidence.
	When consumer confidence is low, the economy must be about to tank.
	When people are spending less money at the store, that means the economy is about to tank.
	And then the next biggest measures of the GDP would be government expenditures and then business investment third.
	But in reality, when you flip that and you look at gross output, what you find is that suddenly it's only about 40% of the economy.
	Business outlays are substantially larger than consumer spending in the economy.
	They make about 50% of economic activity.
	So, in other words, government spending is not a giant, giant chunk of gross output.
	It is a giant chunk of GDP.
	And government spending that goes to direct benefits that then is spent, that is a huge part of GDP, but it's not as big a part of gross output.
	And gross output matters.
	Why?
	Because the reality is the way the economy works, and this has been the biggest argument in economics for at least 150 years, is whether economies are driven by consumers, by you buying a product, or are they driven by people making the product.
	The Keynesian demand-siders basically suggest that because you spend money, someone makes a product for you.
	Supply-siders say you generate new, better, innovative products, and that makes people want to buy them.
	So the argument in favor of supply-side economics, which is something I subscribe to, because number one, I think it's truer, and number two, it pushes for a more liberal, free-market view of the economy, is that when people are allowed to keep their own money, they produce new and better services.
	What a consumer-based economy cannot do is create new product.
	It is the supply-sider who creates new product.
	The entrepreneur who creates new product.
	This is also why you see a gap between how Democrats talk about the economy and how Republicans talk about the economy.
	Conservatives very often, when they talk about the economy, they talk about the value of the entrepreneur.
	Which is really a credit to Joseph Schumpeter, the Viennese economist, who really talked a lot about what he called creative destruction.
	The entrepreneur comes along and, yeah, breaks old products and makes amazing new products.
	It's always some entrepreneur.
	It's an Elon Musk or a Henry Ford or Thomas Edison.
	Somebody comes along, makes a new product available to you that you never would have thought of, but now you need it.
	20 years ago, would you just as a consumer have thought up the iPhone?
	Even if you had, could you have made the iPhone?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	You see a product on the shelf and then you want to buy it.
	Who made that product?
	It wasn't you.
	You're buying it.
	So what's more interesting about that?
	The creation of the new product or who buys it?
	So GDP tends to measure economic strength by who's buying the phone, as opposed to measuring economic strength by who invested in the phone, who's putting money into the phone, who's creating the phone.
	Because the idea is that supply In essence, we'll create demand for a new and better product, right?
	As Henry Ford suggested, if I had listened to the consumer, I just would have come up with a better horse.
	A faster horse.
	But instead, he came up with a car because he was the entrepreneur.
	Okay, so here's why this is important.
	When you look at gross output right now, everybody's looking at GDP as, ah, the economy's going great guns.
	Gross output?
	Not so much.
	So according to GrossOutput.com, the U.S.
	economy is resisting recession but is flashing red.
	Business spending has dropped 9% in real terms over the past two quarters.
	Today, the federal government released first quarter gross output, the top line in national income accounting.
	Geo measures spending at all stages of production.
	Real gross output rose 2.7% compared to 2.0% in real GDP.
	Consumer spending is still robust, rising 6% during the past two quarters, but business spending is floundering.
	Nominal business-to-business spending has been flat since September.
	In real terms, it is down 9%.
	Recession is still in the near future.
	So again, I like looking at gross output.
	I think it is a much better measure of where the economy is because how I spend as a business person is going to matter a lot to my employees.
	It's going to matter a lot to the consumers of this company, right?
	That's true for everybody who has lots of employees and lots of consumers.
	So when you're being given happy talk about how the economy is going great because of GDP, Number one thing to check, check the gross output number, which has been basically flat for the last couple to three quarters.
	Okay, meanwhile, why does that matter?
	It matters because when it comes to a general election, yeah, Joe Biden's personal corruption is going to matter.
	Yeah, Joe Biden's personality is going to matter.
	But you know what's going to matter even more?
	If we are in recession, Joe Biden is in serious trouble.
	If we are not in recession, Joe Biden probably fails to re-elect.
	Very, very difficult to lose a re-elect when your economy is good.
	It looks like the economy is going to be bad.
	You know what would be great?
	Somebody's able to argue against that.
	This is why one of the great frustrations is that many of the things that make Ron DeSantis an excellent governor also make him a politician who doesn't have the pizzazz or sizzle of Donald Trump.
	Namely, he just does the thing, right?
	Governor DeSantis' great win as governor of Florida Yeah, there's been all the talk about woke and all the talk about fighting education.
	All that matters.
	Matters an awful lot.
	But he's also really good at, like, the bread and butter.
	Florida is the number one incoming state for tax revenue, according to the Daily Mail.
	California and New York have lost a combined $640 million in tax revenue due to people moving out of state.
	That'd be me.
	As conservative Florida and Texas see a boost of $23 billion after an influx of movers.
	The number one state for incoming money?
	Florida.
	$12.4 billion in net income migration to the state of Florida.
	That is because it is a well-governed state.
	It is a good place to live.
	It's a well-governed state.
	And that's a boring message, but it's also one that tends to win general elections.
	The message that is a lot more controversial is the character message, especially when you have character flaws of your own and when you're in the middle of legal battles that will likely culminate in actual trials with you in the dock in May of 2024, which is what's very likely to happen right now.
	Ron DeSantis talks like you actually want a politician to talk, like, about the things.
	But is that what people want in a primary?
	That's sort of it.
	So here is Ron DeSantis, for example, over the weekend talking about the drags on the economy.
	That's the kind of thing that for me is actually great.
	Like this is what I wish our politicians were talking about, but they are not.
	Here we go.
	I think the biggest drag on the economy is the administrative state and the bureaucracy.
	And yes, I mean, I want lower taxes.
	I'll go as far as we can on that.
	But when I talk to small business people, I almost never hear about that.
	I hear about the growth of government and what government's doing to choke off their ability to just run their businesses the way they see fit.
	And the bureaucratic state, the administrative state, that gives an advantage to the big guys.
	Because the big guys can handle it.
	They've got lawyers, accountants.
	It's those small, small businesses, medium-sized businesses.
	So getting that off, in addition to the energy, that is going to be a huge, huge thing.
	The Fed, getting that reined in, I think is very important.
	Reducing federal spending, very, very important.
	Yes, it's super boring.
	And also, let me remind you, it's super important.
	This is the sort of stuff where if you're on the middle, you're on that fence in the 2024 election, and it's somebody like DeSantis versus someone like Biden, and Biden's run the economy to the ground, and you have somebody else on the other side saying, here are the things I'll do to fix the economy, that might actually matter an awful lot.
	Because it turns out number one issue for most Americans when it comes to presidential elections, the state of the economy.
	Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a couple of things that I hate.
	So, Things that I like over the weekend,
	I was reading a really fun novel by Andrew Weir.
	Andrew Weir is the guy who wrote The Martian.
	The book is Project Hail Mary.
	And it's, Andrew Weir, he's a delight, just as an author.
	He's a delight because he's actually having fun with the reader.
	And he's obviously having fun writing this sort of stuff.
	So, basically, it's about a middle school science teacher who back in his academic days
	had written a paper about alien life.
	And it turns out that the sun is actually declining in the amount of energy that it's releasing
	because there is alien life, but it's living on the sun and it's sucking away the energy from the sun.
	And he has to somehow figure out a way to fix all of this.
	And I won't spoil it for you.
	I'll just say it's a really fun read if you liked The Martian.
	Actually, The Martian is a very simple, high-concept premise, right, which is, you know, man on Mars trying to survive.
	This one is even a little bit more high-concept because it is save all humanity by journeying to a foreign star and then hooking up with alien life.
	It's really, it's a really enjoyable book.
	Again, you can tell he's having fun writing it, and so it's a lot of fun to read as well.
	So if you're looking for like a summer beach read, That'll teach you something about physics and about chemistry and about science generally.
	This is a really fun book, Andy.
	We're great for if you try and get your like 16 year old in school interested in science, this would be a really good book for them to read.
	Okay, time for some quick things that I hate.
	Okay, thing number one that I hate.
	So, can we stop normalizing people who are totally insane?
	Like, stop normalizing insanity.
	You have to treat everybody with respect, but I'm not going to treat it with respect when a man spends $14,000 to transform himself into Akali.
	This apparently is a thing.
	A Japanese native has now transformed himself into a canine after forking out more than $14,000 for a custom-made Kali costume.
	The private citizen says the unusual garment has helped actualize his dream of becoming an animal.
	Ah, we have reached the end of expressive individualism.
	Robert Bella predicted that expressive individualism, the idea that what is inside you is the most important thing in all humanity, that that is the end of the individualist era.
	That's where we are.
	Men dressing up as dogs to roll around.
	I mean, I'm not sure you could get any more literal with the man returning to the animals sort of metaphors that we, the biblically minded, tend to use.
	But here we are, a man who spent $14,000 to dress up as a dog so that he can roll around on the streets with other dogs and presumably smell their butts.
	Here we go.
	This is, uh...
	And then this crazy lady who's walking around.
	And then this crazy lady who's walking around.
	This man dressed as a dog.
	That is a human being in a Kali costume and everybody is pretending that this is somewhat normal.
	Look at these little kids in the background who are like, look, a doggie!
	A doggie!
	And they get up there and it's a creepy, creepy human.
	This is so horrifying, I can't even tell you.
	The Island of Dr. Moreau type of stuff.
	It's like people doing it to themselves.
	I don't even know how the person got into this costume, nor do I want to know.
	That sounds terrible.
	Man.
	This is, uh...
	And the breeding is just going to be horrible.
	Apparently he wrote in the clip, Do you remember your dreams from when you were little?
	You wanted to be a hero or a wizard.
	I remember writing in my grade school's graduation book, I wanted to be a dog and walk outside.
	He had a vague dream of becoming an animal ever since he was a child.
	When I fulfilled that dream, this is how it turned out.
	He chose to become a collie due to the negligible size difference between that breed and humans.
	So he said, I rarely tell my friends because I'm afraid they will think I am weird.
	My friends and family seem very surprised to learn I became an animal.
	You didn't.
	You're a crazy person who is wearing a dog suit.
	And then we're supposed to pretend that that is perfectly normal.
	Well, why not?
	Alrighty, guys.
	The rest of the show continues right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be jumping into the mailbag.
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