ou know, maybe you could pick 16 as your starting age. But is there anybody who disagrees with that? Now I guess there's a free speech element to it, but does that apply to children? Do children have free speech? I'm pretty sure they can't stand up in class and start cursing. You know, there are limits on what kids can do. So it's weird that this is even a question.

But I have a feeling that whoever wants to keep TikTok alive has a lot of power. Maybe it's our intelligence people. Maybe they want to keep it alive so they can eventually control it. I don't know.

Meanwhile, have you heard of the app called Roblox? If you haven't been around young kids for a while, you've maybe never even heard of it. But wow, Roblox is a sort of a social media game app where you can acquire building parts and build yourself a little home and get some furniture and interact with the other people. Now if you've ever seen a child who is playing Roblox, there's something completely hypnotizing about it. You should see the eyes of anybody who just played. The eyes are just completely hypnotized. I don't know what it is about it. I haven't spent even a minute looking at it. But wow, if you've seen any kid stand up and walk away from Roblox, just look at their eyes. There is something going on with that thing. I watched one person in particular, and I thought, I don't even believe what I'm seeing. The level of addiction was beyond anything I've ever seen on social media. It was a video game level addiction. It's pretty strong.

But the latest news is something called the Hindenburg report says that the app is a pedophile hellscape. So I guess if you build a platform where it's mostly kids interacting, you're going to get a lot of people who are not kids. So not a big surprise. This is the Post Millennial. The Post Millennial is reporting on this. So their stock plunged and they've got some financial problems anyway.

Well, I'm wondering if the reports or the allegations about Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris's husband, I'm wondering if those reports are getting to anybody on the left. Because if they had concerns about Donald Trump's interactions with women, they would really have a problem with the Doug Emhoff stories if they're true. Now keep in mind there is going to be a theme to today's show, which is that none of the first-person reports a month before an election are true, or at least you shouldn't give them credibility. I'm going to talk about a number of stories in the news that are all, well, somebody said. There is a report from an anonymous person. To be fair, I think we have to give the same treatment to Emhoff, which is I'll tell you what the allegations are because it's political, so therefore it's important to know what the allegations are. Are they true? Well, they would be within the lowest credibility domain. They might be true. Also some of the other stories I'm going to tell you about that I don't think are true might be. They might be. It's just you shouldn't believe them if the only evidence you have is that it's a month before an election and somebody who doesn't give their name is making a claim about somebody. I'm sorry, that is the lowest level of credibility.

But the reports coming in is that he worked at a law firm and the attorneys who worked with him said he was a misogynist and had men-only cocktail hours and he would flirt with all the women and he would revoke work perks for anybody who didn't flirt back and he hired attractive assistants because they were attractive. If I could summarize that, all that behavior, I'm going to summarize it all for you. And the summary is Doug Emhoff once worked at a law firm, which actually captures all of the other behavior. Does anybody work in a law firm? Do any of you work for a law firm? I want to see if you agree with my summary. He worked for a law firm. No, I don't think it's too far off. It's not too far off. I've got a feeling your law firms are not exactly the most polite places to work.

All right, well here's another thing that I'm trying to fight off the persuasive effects. I'm completely aware that the average citizen in the United States has never seen any news report about anything in our elections that looked like it was fraudulent. Probably the vast majority of citizens have never even seen one story of anything current where an election was a little bit questionable. But if you live in the right-leaning silo, as I do, you see them all day long. So I think I saw four of them today. Four different stories of either the election rolls had to be corrected or somebody's suing to make a change that they know needs to be changed but somebody's resisting. There's a door that needs to be unlocked because there might be some bad ballots back there but they won't unlock the door. There's a new lawsuit that got turned down for reasons that sound technical but maybe the allegation was true. And all day long I'm hearing this now, and they're different states. It's not like it's one situation. It's all different states, and they usually the swing states, etc.

And you know, here's another one. Oregon, according to Fox News, mistakenly registered hundreds more voters, and then the last minute they cleaned it up. They've cleaned up over about 1,600 mistaken registrations. Now that's just the stuff they caught. If all day long I'm hearing stories about, well, we caught a thousand in this state but we fixed it, and then the next day, well, there are 20,000 that were a little questionable but we couldn't fix it. And if you hear that all day long, you wouldn't possibly think that our elections are secure and accurate. But if you've never heard any of these stories, you'd say, well, I would have heard if there was a problem. Somebody would have told me. I'm sure it would have been in the news. It is in the news, but not your news.

So I don't have any opinion about this specific report. It's just that there are a lot of them. But on the positive end, yeah, I'm going to give you this recommendation again just because I like boosting the independent news. But if you're not following the account on X called George, just one word, George, his handle is Bizzy Tweets. Anyway, he does some of the best reporting every day. I don't know exactly how he's doing it or if somebody's backing him or what, but almost every day I tell you some story that I only heard from him.

So here's one of them. There's a project called Move the Needle, and it's in Milwaukee, where people are going door to door in black neighborhoods specifically, trying to, quote, I don't like this word but "educate" black voters on why they must vote for Trump. I would have used a different word than educate, maybe persuade or something. But here's my take on that. I feel as if people are wising up to the fact that 100% of election or political stuff they see on their glowing screens is absolute... would you agree? So even the things that agree with me, you know, especially this month, even if it's something to be positive for Trump, I add it and go, yeah, yeah, but you know, in context, right? So it's not like the stuff that agrees with you is true and the other side got everything wrong. We don't live in that world. We live in a world where most of what you see is out of context or it has any political element to it. And certainly anything involving a war, you completely nonsense reporting.

But here's my take. If people do give up on the glowing screens and the internet and the news being the persuasive things, in-person is stronger. So if you can get a human being to stand in front of you and you allow them to talk for a little while and maybe you're undecided or you have some confusion about what's true and what's not, it could be super persuasive if the people doing it are trained to be persuasive. And so I have two comments on this. Number one, it's an excellent experiment to find out if it worked. Because if it does work, you could easily imagine that the election process is just armies of people trying to persuade other people. Now there's always some of that, but we seem to leave it to the news to inform. I think we're going to lose that model. I think the foreshadowing that you can see already is that people are going to say, I just need to talk to another person who's done the work, and then I can ask some questions of the person. And that probably works. So I'd love to know if it is successful. But if they're well trained, it probably is.

And I would like to add this point. Correct me if I'm wrong. Compared to let's say 2015, Republicans have grown an army of trained persuaders. True or false? The number of Republicans, specifically Republicans, who have learned persuasion well enough to apply it in the political context successfully is way different. Because people like me are literally training people. I've probably personally trained a hundred thousand Republicans on how to be more persuasive, but also how to recognize propaganda, how to identify lies, but mostly how to persuade somebody. So what happens if I train a hundred thousand persuaders and they go out and just have conversations with a hundred thousand people? It probably makes a difference. Probably makes a difference.

I remember in the first Trump election, after the election, I asked how many of you changed your vote to Trump because of something I said. And even though this was a highly unscientific, it was just a poll on what was Twitter, I think 1,500 people responded and said I changed their vote. Now keep in mind that if 1,500 people said yes, that wasn't an opinion. They weren't giving an opinion. They were saying yes, I was going to vote the other way. You changed my mind. 1,500. And that's only the ones who saw the poll and responded. Now what's the real number? Well, I don't know, but it's probably in the tens of thousands. I wouldn't be surprised if I moved a six-digit number of people over 100,000. Maybe. No way to know. But yeah, the Republicans have a major advantage in that there are people like me who are literally training them how to be good persuaders. That's not happening on the other side. And it might not be able to be possible on the other side, because if Democrats were trained on propaganda and persuasion, they would recognize that it's happening to them. But the Democrat persuasion is sort of standard political stuff. So even if you see it, you just say, oh, I get it. Trump is exaggerating again. It doesn't mean anything. But if you were a Democrat, you'd be finding out that the Democrats made up entire stories and got all the press to sell them, like the fine people hoax. So if Democrats find out how the game is played, they're going to abandon Democrats. If Republicans find out how the game is played, they're going to say, oh, my side tells some tales too, but I'm just going to, you know, that's just sort of normal business. But the other side just got the intelligence community to sign something that was a lie. That's a whole different level. These are not the same. That's not the same. Trump says his crowd size is bigger than you think it is, and compared to the Russia collusion hoax that lasted years and tried to remove a president, these are not the same. No. 51 intel people signing the hoax letter about Hunter's laptop. No, no Republican's ever done that. There's nothing since at least I've seen nothing since 2015 at least in which anybody Republican has done anything like that. The whole fine people hoax, just nothing like that on the other side. There are some stories on the right that are generally believed, but they're not like made up as a hoax. It's just people come to believe things that they come to believe.

Anyway, there's a report on MSNBC that Trump tried to weaponize the IRS against Comey and McCabe when he was back when he was in office. Now this comes because of General Kelly said that Trump said behind closed doors to use the IRS to go after them. Now here's the test to see if I've successfully trained you for spotting propaganda. And it's remember you have to know who the players are. Remember rule number one: the story is not the story. It's never the story. And indeed even people who want you to hear the wrong story might be accurately giving you the details of the story. But the story is never the story. It's the people involved that's the story, right? Because depending who's involved, it gives you a completely different image.

All right, let's say that the story that Trump wanted to use the IRS to go after his political enemies, let's say that came from Don Jr. and he said it out loud in public many times. Well, if that happened, which it did not happen, I would have said, oh well, because of the source that looks pretty reliable. Like I don't know why you'd be saying that, but it must be true, right? Because the source would tell you everything. Now know that it's General Kelly. Now do you believe it? Do you believe it's correct and in the proper context? Well, you shouldn't. You shouldn't, because he would not be, within the context of this story, he's not a reliable source. Now it doesn't matter that this one is bad for Trump. If you reverse this and it was something on the other side but you knew that the character it came from couldn't be trusted or had an ax to grind with the person they were talking about, you shouldn't believe it at all.

Yeah, so I would say it's coming from MSNBC. They are a propaganda platform pretending to be news. And by the way, when I say that, that's not an exaggeration. MSNBC is a propaganda platform by design. By design. They didn't accidentally drift into it. And they're pretending to be news. That's what makes the propaganda work. And then the person that they're using, you know, it's somebody said something behind closed doors and I can't prove it. Yeah, no, you should give this zero credibility. Now I don't know if it's true and I can't know. There's probably no way to know if it's true, but I would treat it like it's not because it's coming from the lowest credibility kind of a source.

All right, what else we got going on? Apparently there was no wrongdoing found by some inspector general. So you've got the report of this badness, but then some people looked into it and said no, we didn't see anything. So it's kind of the weakest of the weakest reports. And it's exactly the kind of thing you could have predicted because I did. I did predict it that you would see all these anonymous or sketchy reports of something that somebody heard behind a closed door. Those you're going to get more of those, probably.

All right, let's talk about the hurricanes. You know, Hurricane Milton coming toward Florida and Helene messed up the center of the country there, North Carolina. And Milton, so bad this got like almost a mini hurricane in front of the real hurricane. There's like a storm in front of the storm. And it's been as high as a category five. I think it's down to four, but it's still super dangerous. It's going to bring gigantic flooding. And the real question that everybody keeps asking me is, Scott, do you think that bad people made these hurricanes worse or aimed them using their secret hurricane technology?

And sure enough, just like the UFO stories, there's a credible-sounding person who's willing to talk to Congress to say that he's a whistleblower and he knows for sure that the United States can manipulate the weather. And there's no doubt about it that Helene was manipulated and aimed and intensified so it could tear up North Carolina. So what do you think? And the story is that we have, I guess the CIA or somebody, Defense Department, somebody has some secret technology for rapidly intensifying hurricanes. And we've seen them rapidly intensify in ways that we haven't seen before. So clearly it's that.

Now I don't know if this is just the story that's trying to counter the fact that it might be climate change. You know, i