tter where to put them? I mean, Disney knew where to put the roads and what kind and when they needed them, and it was their priority. So wouldn't you prefer Disney build the roads to make it exactly what they wanted and built for the customers' impact?

All right. So he says you're really trying hard, Scott. You know, when somebody says that, like, I know I've sort of made some inroads. Look for how many generic criticisms I get on this topic. Watch how generic they are, and that'll be a topic coming up.

All right. So the first thing I would say is that the reason that Florida made the deal with Disney is not because Disney was so clever that they put one over on Florida. That didn't happen. I mean, there's no evidence that that happened. The evidence is that two sophisticated entities, Disney and the government of Florida, got together and they said, all right, what's good for you? What's good for us? How do we make a deal that's good for all of us? And by the way, when you decide how long a deal lasts, you know, if you decide it's sort of a forever deal, that's part of your initial calculation, right? If it's a bad deal, what happens? Well, in my view a deal is a deal. So that's a bigger factor for me than it is for some of you, and I'll talk about that in a minute.

So let me start with that. It's easier. I'm going to go to the whiteboard. So would you agree that some of you have different opinions than I do about the Disney-DeSantis thing, right? Starting with the fact that we have different opinions of it. But why is it? Because of the logic or some knowledge? Probably not. I think how you come down on this has to do with your priorities. In other words, there are a lot of things in play. So some people have sort of an anti-corporate power bias. You know, it's just sort of a filter they see the world in. And so they say, hey, why should Disney have a special deal? Maybe that's a high priority for you. It wouldn't be for me, but I could see why that would be for somebody else.

Parental rights. Now of course this is the central issue, right? The parental rights. So I would say that for many of you this is the number one thing, and whatever it is that gets to support that, even if it's a little extreme, even if it's breaking a deal, it's just the most important thing. So you might say to yourself, you know, I could be kind of flexible about everything if I can get this one thing. I just want to have parental rights about how to raise my kid. Reasonable. And I don't have any pushback on that. Anybody who has that opinion, I'd say it's a good opinion.

Some people say that it's about winning. You know, it's more important to win. Other people say it's deterrence. By the way, I was debating the word retaliation, and I said that if retaliation is what you're doing, like just retaliation, you should be impeached because you don't hire people to retaliate. That's not really the job. But here's what I realized. The comments are going crazy because you want me to use the word grooming to make you happy. Yes, if you believe that the issue is grooming, I'm putting that under parental rights, right? So I acknowledge that the issue is that people thought that their kids were getting groomed, but that all comes into the category of you want control of what your kids hear, right? I mean, wouldn't you? Do you agree that's the catch-all for that?

Somebody says I'm wrong. Where am I wrong? Issue is Disney lying. Okay, so there are other issues. People say Disneyland. I would say that if you use the word deterrence instead of retaliation, then I'll agree with you. Watch this. Watch us all agree. You probably didn't think I would, that we could find a way to agree, but watch this. If I asked you to replace the word retaliation with the word deterrence, DeSantis pushed back in what you could call an unrelated area to create a deterrence for not only Disney but anybody else who would get into this realm and maybe interfere with parental rights or be promoting grooming or whatever it is you think is happening. Did that work? Right? As soon as I said deterrence, you all said, okay, that's what I was thinking, right? But it was just retaliation that wasn't working for me as a word. And so I think we were not disagreeing on the concept. I think we only disagreed on the word. And so I would blame the journalists. Well, no, I blame myself. Allow me to take responsibility for my own opinions. I blame myself for being, let's say, a little bit duped by the journalists calling it retaliation.

Now keep in mind that the word retaliation was used on both sides, right? CNN and Fox News have both used that term. So it wasn't like I was biased by one side. I was biased by both sides and the way the journalists chose to treat it. But as long as you say the purpose of it was to set up a precedent and say, look, if you mess with parents or you mess with politics in a way that the people on the right don't like, there will be consequences. You won't like them, and they'll be fairly immediate. And that would form a counterbalance to the fact that the left is really good at getting pressure on corporations. So corporations already have pressure from the left. They have had far less pressure from the right. DeSantis is creating the first, let's say, memorable counterbalance. Because keep in mind from a persuasion perspective, it doesn't matter so much that he's doing it. It matters that you remember it. It's the remembering it that's the important part. That's right. You can do stuff all day long, but if people don't remember you did it, it will have no future effect. So if you're looking for a deterrence, you're looking for a future effect. You got to remember it. And has DeSantis pulled that off? Would you say that DeSantis has succeeded, at least for the people who pay attention to politics? I'm not sure everybody's paying attention to this. This is probably like a 10 at tops. But wouldn't you say that he succeeded totally? Right? The people who have any kind of political memory will always go back to this example. And the very next time a corporation speaks out, everybody's going to say, whoa, you better pull that back because you saw what happened to Disney. You saw what DeSantis did to them. So I would agree this works as a deterrence.

And I would also agree with the people who are saying that the right had not yet established a mutually assured destruction that would keep the corporations on the sideline. And if you think that that's a good thing, and many of you do, and that's a reasonable opinion, right? If your politics aligns with the right and you think the right has been bullied and pushed around and you see DeSantis as essentially landing a blow for your side but also creating a deterrence, then I accept that as a trade-off that makes sense.

But let me tell you where you and I are probably different. And it's not in the logic of it, and it has nothing to do with, you know, I don't have a different opinion about parental rights. I'm pretty sure we, I think probably all of you watching for the most part have a very similar opinion. You know, the parents have to be in charge, you know, as much as is practical. They need to be in charge. But here's where you and I differ. I have an, perhaps irrational if I were to look at my own thinking, perhaps irrational, but it's there. Keeping a deal is a big deal to me. It's a big deal. And here's why. I'll give you the rationality, but maybe there's some irrational thing that's driving me for this. It's the only thing that holds society together. The reason the United States works relative to, say, some country that the government never works is that in the United States you have a reasonable expectation of people keeping their deal. And if not, then yeah, there's some consequences.

I was always impressed that China, as much as I criticized them, I always was impressed that they just waited for the 99-year lease in Hong Kong to run out. Because clearly they could have forced the issue earlier, right? Clearly. But they just kept to the deal. And what about the UK, right? They owned this thing for a hundred years, had this great value, and they said, deal's a deal. So I always appreciated that because every time you have a big example of somebody keeping a deal even when it's really not cool for them, it's just really hard for them, but they kept the deal. That's what keeps everything together. Like it's the most basic glue of society, is that you keep your deal.

So does that apply to this special case? I think a reasonable person could say, Scott, I get what you're saying that that's important to keep your deals and that that's the glue that holds America together and really makes us special. I would say because our court system will chase you if you don't keep a deal. We do have that working more or less better than other countries. But if you said this is a special case, I would say, oh, you got me. Because I'm always willing to treat anything like a special case. I'm never the person who says there's no special cases. There's always a special case. And would this be one? If you're going to pick a special case of all the reasons you could pick a special case, this special case would be if you think you're protecting your children, right? Isn't that the ultimate special case?

Well, a deal's a deal. Normally, normally I would not be in favor of somebody grooming my child, but a deal's a deal, and I don't want to go back on a deal because it's a very important principle. It holds society together. No, you're going to break any deal if you think your child's well-being is at stake, right? You'd break it immediately. So I think I have some irrational connection to this for this topic. So if you and I disagree and you want to say, Scott, you're being irrational, here's where I'm being irrational in the deal's a deal. That really bothered me. I have to say, strangely enough, it really bothered me that anybody would. Now let me say it another way. It bothered me that the government would break a deal. That bothered me the most.

Now if you say, hey, the deal was made when it made sense, but now time has gone by and Disney is doing so well that they don't need that special deal, okay. But I don't know if anybody did the analysis. Did DeSantis do the analysis and know that they really make money on this deal? Does the state of Florida really come out ahead because they're going to be paying for the infrastructure now instead of Disney? Do they? I don't know. Did anybody do that math?

All right. Well, here are some of the answers that I got when I asked people, be specific, what do you think DeSantis got in terms of the benefit? And here are the things that people answered. And I want to show you how sort of muddy people's thinking is. Everybody who said he created a deterrence, I think is a clean thinker. That's a clean answer. You could disagree with it. You could say I don't think it was enough of a deterrence or something like that. But it's a clean, specific answer that that's a benefit. Everybody would understand what that means, and it can be explained in one word: deterrence. So that's like a good answer.

Here are the other answers. So these are people who maybe are feeling something about the issue but the thinking process hasn't gelled yet. People said that the benefit that DeSantis got was it's a principle. You know, he's upholding a principle. He said obedience keeps Disney out of politics. But does it? I don't know. Will it keep anybody out of politics? Because remember the left is pushing people to be in politics. So corporations are going to be damned if they do and damned if they don't. I don't know. It won't keep anybody out of politics, but it might actually be a little deterrence.

Disney loses its monopoly power. I don't even know what that means. Something about losing their special control. Some people pointed out that Disney should lose that deal anyway, so it doesn't matter that it's being used as a deterrence. Should lose it anyway. There's things like fairness and attention and blah blah blah. So I think the bottom line is that we probably are closer to agreeing on this than that.

Fox News asked some people about Biden's accomplishments. Before we do this, let me tell you something I wasn't sure if I was going to talk about today, at least in this forum. So last night I decided that I would see if I could recreate an experience that I had in my twenties. And it was an experience with mushrooms. And I've talked about it often. And I said it was one of the most, well first of all it was one of the most enjoyable days of my whole life. I mean just off the charts. But secondly I said that I felt it changed me permanently in a positive way. And I wasn't sure if I were to do it again many years later if I would feel the same. Because I thought to myself, what if the benefits of this first experience sort of settled in and just became who I am? Would I then be immune? In other words, would the experience just try to make me what I already was and I would just sit there saying I don't think anything's happening? Or would I just have another profound experience? I had no idea.

So first of all, kids, don't do drugs. So you're going to get a cautionary tale here. If you think this is going to end with a delightful story of how much fun I had, well it didn't go that way. Did not go that way. Here's what I think happened, but I'm not positive. The specific form was in chocolate, right? It was an edible and it was sort of packaged and professional-looking thing. And I thought, well that's going to be safe because I knew people who had experienced exactly the same product from the same box literally. And you have nobody had an especially bad experience. I think one mildly bad one, but basically. So I knew this was a relatively safe kind of thing relative to things that are not safe. It's not safe. Let me be clear. It's not safe. It's just a little bit safer than it could have been. You know, if you just found a mushroom in the forest and started chomping on it, I guess that would be the least safe. And so you're contradicting yourself all the time now. What would be an example of that?

All right. So here was my experience. I had no cognitive, let's say, psychedelic experience. I took the low end of the highest dose and I felt physically uncomfortable. Like I couldn't sit down and I didn't want to be touched. You know, it just, I just needed to be standing and walking. And a stomach ache like a digestive problem that was actually pretty bad. So he says the dose was too low. Well if the dose had been higher, wouldn't have. No, I didn't have an empty stomach. So I intentionally ate food beforehand, like right beforehand. So here's the thing. If you think that I had a mushroom experience, I disagree. Because having experienced it once, I can tell you that this wasn't it. So I don't believe this was actually mushrooms. I think that, and I did a little Googling to find out, sure enough there are counterfeit mushroom chocolate products. Now I don't know if I had one, but I do know that I know what it should have felt like and it wasn't it. It wasn't like a small version of that. There was nothing. So there wasn't any psychological effect except that I was uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable with my physical feeling, which I guess had a mental effect, but there wasn't any cognitive change. It just made me unbalanced and it felt like a stimulant actually. If I had to guess, I would say a stimulant. And I don't think mushrooms ever act like that, are they?

No, I wouldn't do that alone. So you know I was in a safe environment, blah blah blah. Yeah. So did they have any memories from the old types? Yeah, I have a very specific memory of the first time and I could tell you that was dramatic. The experience is not subtle. So here's my only warning. The toughest thing with anything in this category is you don't know what you're getting. That's the problem. Yeah. If somebody said fentanyl. And I actually, that's one of my suspicions. I have a suspicion that it was something that would make you feel like you wanted to do it again. Yeah, I'm actually wondering if the only people who would do it twice are people who would never experience the real thing. Because if you experience the real thing, I don't think you would do this again. But if you hadn't, you might say to yourself, oh I got some. Basically intoxication was out. I would describe it as intoxication and stimulation at the same time. It was a bad combo. Somebody says the dose was too low. Well that's the problem is you don't know what the dose should be. I mean if you follow the directions it was on the high end, but I did expect, I didn't expect it to be like some effect. There really wasn't any.

Anyway, Fox News asked about Biden's accomplishments and so if I act a little loopy today I've got like two hours of sleep so I'm probably gonna go to sleep as soon as this is done. People ask about Biden's accomplishments and it's funny because if you see the professional Democrats answer the question what has Biden done, usually they go to infrastructure. Oh he got the infrastructure bill passed. But the public at large doesn't even know what that is. So Biden's biggest accomplishment is something that literally 95% of his base doesn't know about. It's just he passed the budget. It just sounds like h