Back to episode — Episode 2725 CWSA 01/19/25
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ng. But jogging and walking are good for everybody. Did we really need a study when you can kind of just look around and the people who exercise every day are clearly happier than the people who don't? Is that not screamingly obvious in your own life? That if you see somebody who's really fit because they exercise every day, they're almost always in a reasonably good mental health. Now some of th…
← Previous segment →it. But there are two possibilities out there. The Perplexity app, which is an AI app and a search engine. It's the best thing ever. I recommend it all the time. Jeff Bezos is one of the backers of that and they've offered to somehow merge with TikTok but not take the algorithm. So some think the algorithm is the expensive part and so they would pay less. They'd build the algorithm themselves. I don't know if that's going to happen. But at least it would be enough for Trump to say, oh well, somebody's noodling on a deal. That's close enough. So I'll give them 90 days to see if they can do it.
But also Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank star and entrepreneur, he's working with some group of investors and billionaire Frank McCourt and they put together a $20 billion cash offer, which I think TikTok has just rejected. Some people think it's worth 50 billion if you bought the algorithm with it. But here's the thing that's puzzling me. Senator Rand Paul, who in my opinion is almost always right and well informed unlike some of his peers, but he said that the real reason, to use his words, the real reason for the TikTok ban was censorship. Is that what you think?
Do we ban it for censorship? Meaning that, oh man, I just suddenly got really sick so I might have to cut this short. If I cut it short, wow, I'm having an event here live on livestream. All right, let's see if I can make that pass.
But Rand Paul says that the real reason for the TikTok ban was censorship. That's sort of true but it's not the big picture. The sort of true part is that the Israel stuff, when TikTok turned more anti-Israel than pro-Israel, some say that the Israeli lobby kicked in and got the Congress to ban it. I think that's true as the trigger. You know, that was like the final straw or something. But it's not the big reason.
The big reason is you don't want China to have a button they can push to change America's minds. And wow, apparently that has happened. There was a study that showed that TikTok was pretty anti-Israel in terms of the quantity of content, one direction versus the other. So I wonder, does Rand Paul not know that the real problem is the persuasion risk in the future? It's
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not so much that there was one particular issue about Israel and the propaganda on that. So I don't know what is up with Rand Paul. Why doesn't he just say it? Or does he not know? Is it possible he doesn't know that the real risk is future persuasion? You just don't know. And why would you equate a free speech platform that could be manipulated by your adversary with a free speech platform that…
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