say, "No, it never happened. There was no transfer of money whatsoever"?

I don't know. They must be pretty confident that nobody can prove them wrong because it's binary. It's yes or no. It either exists or it doesn't exist. But I am willing to believe that the White House is correct and maybe it doesn't exist. It could be that they offered him the money and he didn't give a hard no, nor did he give a hard yes. So maybe somehow that got turned into well, he sort of took it even though he didn't take it. I don't know. Could be anything.

California is the first state to require masks on law enforcement and the border patrol enforcement people. And I feel like they made a little mistake with that law. So let me see if I understand this. It would be illegal for these border patrol or border enforcement people, ICE I guess, to wear masks, but there's no law against wearing makeup, right? Can the women wear makeup? I think they can. No law against that.

Would there be a law against somebody wearing a fake beard? Well, a fake beard is not a mask. I don't believe that's covered. How about somebody who put a fake nose and glasses on so you couldn't see their eyes or their nose? Well, I don't think that's really a mask, is it?

What about fake boobs? Suppose all the guys put in fake boobs and makeup and eyelashes and then they said, "Oh no. We're not doing border enforcement. We're running a trans event." It's a trans event because they'd be wearing boobs and fake eyelashes and makeup, but then they'd say transportation. Wink wink.

So I'm just saying that ICE could find a workaround. Just turn it into a dress-up trans event. Transportation. All right, I'm being silly.

Well, as you know, Trump and RFK Jr. had a big announcement yesterday of what they found out so far or believe they know about autism. And boy, did this get interesting.

So there are several things. First of all, they said that Tylenol is not as proven safe as they would like it to be. And so some studies say that if a pregnant woman takes Tylenol or the acetaminophen, so there are other companies that make it besides the Tylenol company, but there's a bunch of studies that suggest that it's correlated and therefore causation. But there are other studies that say nope, there's no correlation at all.

But I think it was a Harvard group looked at all the studies and found out that there was at least in their opinion more evidence that there is a connection than that there isn't.

Do you know what it's called when you look at a whole bunch of studies instead of just one? You look at the bunch of them? What's that called? That's called a meta study.

What if I told you about meta studies? They're not a science. A meta study has too much opinion baked into it. Even though you don't think so. The way the opinion is baked into it, a meta study, which is a study of all the other studies, is that you have to make a decision about which studies to include.

So for example, if there was one study that was much bigger than the others, they sort of weigh all the studies by the number of participants. So if there's one that was like 100 times bigger than all the other studies put together, well, you don't really need to look at all the other studies because the one would bias the total so much.

Then let's say there was one study that went one direction, another study that pointed the other direction, but you as the researcher said, I don't think this one study was done with high enough quality. So in my opinion it should be left out of the bunch and then because you left it out, it biased it in the other direction.

So was that science or was there something about your opinion that decided what was in the studies and really you're measuring your own opinion of what should be in the studies and you're not actually measuring any kind of average of the studies.

So in general meta studies are in my opinion not terribly reliable but to the credit of the administration they're not saying we have proven the connection. So I like that they're not saying they've proven the connection. What they are saying is it's a sort of scary indication of what we're seeing and if I were you I wouldn't be taking Tylenol if I were pregnant.

Although the doctors, a lot of them not all of them, some doctors I don't know what percentage disagree because the risk of not taking a painkiller might be could turn out to be worse than the risk of the painkiller. For example if you don't treat something with Tylenol and the other painkillers are also not allowed when you're pregnant. So it's your only option.

If your only option to beat back the inflammation and the pain is Tylenol, then you've got this tough choice because the inflammation and the pain might cause its own set of problems. It could be the same as it could cause autism. Some people speculate.

So it could be some say that it's not that what you're measuring is not so much the Tylenol, but what you're measuring is that they had an underlying condition that required Tylenol. How would you know the difference? Suppose there's some fever or inflammation problem that's common enough and that people would normally take Tylenol for it. Wouldn't it look like the Tylenol was the problem, but really it was the underlying inflammation because the people who didn't need the Tylenol also didn't have that underlying inflammation thing.

So there's all kinds of uncertainty. But Trump in his Trumpian ways is basically saying don't take Tylenol, don't take it. He admits that his administration does not say that. He's just telling you as your leader, as your president, which I kind of like as long as he's clear that this is me saying this, this is not the medical people. The medical people are saying use your judgment, use it when you need it, use it at the lowest amount, talk to your doctor. And those are all the responsible right things.

Trump's giving you the common sense, don't do it. But like I said, your doctor might say in your specific case it's worth a little risk. So at least they're honest about leave it to your doctor.

There's also a new drug that's being rolled out for I don't know if it's every kind of autism but some. And we don't know if that'll work yet but it's approved. There's a new approved drug for autism that looks like it could help some if not all patients.

And then I guess Trump suggested spacing out and delaying some vaccinations that are common vaccinations that typically everybody gets. The science behind the spacing of it so you don't get them all at once also I believe is not proven. But Trump again is being common sensical and saying if you don't have to give them all at the same time, can't you reduce one risk by not doing it at the same time?

Well, there is a counter to that. The counterargument is if you have four vaccinations that are really good ideas that we know individually are good, if you don't give them at the same time, the odds that they don't get the second dose goes way up. So if you say well you only have to get one shot, you could probably talk parents and the kids into it even though it's a combination of lots of different shots with unknown directions. So you could get higher rate of people getting the shots if you combine them, but you have a higher unknown.

I shouldn't say risk. I should say there's a higher unknown. But there is science whether it's valid or not that shows that even combining the shots doesn't make a difference. Of course there is some study that showed it made no difference for autism. Is that study valid? We cannot trust any of the studies in this domain. I wouldn't trust any of the studies. That's why you have to look at 46 of them and use magic to try to figure out which ones are real.

However, hepatitis B, they would wait, ideally not give it to kids until they're about 12 because it's a sexually transmitted disease. And unless you got it from your mom at birth, which can happen, you don't need to be protected. And it's routine I believe to screen the pregnant mother for hepatitis B so you could know in advance whether that newborn needs a shot or not.

So those are all the things I think are generally in the right direction. But I'm going to give you an alternative view that you can make your own opinion on.

So this is from an ex-user named Cremieux, a French word, creme. Now I mentioned him before because his analytical abilities are incredible. And so when he has an alternative point of view on something in the news, it's definitely worth listening to. Doesn't mean he's right.

So here's a long list that I printed out from his X account of his argument for why it might be that there is no increase in autism but we only think there is.

Now before I give you this wonky nerdy explanation of why he thinks maybe the data is all wrong, I will acknowledge that if you talk to any school teacher today they would say there's at least one autistic kid in every class now. Every class of 30 people, there's at least one. And when people like me were children we believed that that was not the case. We believed that that was rare. I mean I didn't even know any when I was a kid.

So the lived experience of the people who are closest to this world, teachers are 100 percent sure, oh yeah there's a gigantic increase. And I feel like you see it in your own life, right? Don't we observe it directly?

So even though I'm going to give you a wonky argument that maybe it's not a big increase, there's a very compelling case that it is. You know it's not like RFK Jr. didn't look into this.

So I took all of these reasons why maybe it's not a real increase and I fed them into Grok so that when I talk to you today I could go down the list and say Grok says this is BS. Grok, debunk this. Grok says no.

Do you know what Grok said? It said true or mostly true or partly true for every one of these. So just remember when I read these off to you I'm not saying they're true because remember this is a domain in which there's just no way to know what's real. So I don't claim that I know.

All right, so here are the claims. Autism is being diagnosed more and more with each year. Grok said yes. Autistic traits are not any more common than when the DSM-3 first introduced modern diagnostic criteria in 1980. Grok said yes, true. Older prevalence estimates are based on inconsistent diagnostic criteria. So we can't really compare the past to the present because they didn't measure the same things. That doesn't mean it's going up or down. It just means you wouldn't know.

Here's the one that stopped me cold. When researchers go out and attempt to diagnose everyone who has autism, they find equal prevalence estimates for youth and adults. Now if that's true, there is no increase in autism. If you simply went out and said I'm going to get a random sample of people, some of them were 70 years old, some of them were 8 years old, and then you just looked for symptoms of autism, you would find according to Cremieux and whatever study he's referring to that's not mentioned, he claims that you would find that the 70-year-olds and the eight-year-olds have roughly the same amount of symptoms.

If that's true, then the only thing that's different is diagnosis. Because there's no way that the 70-year-olds and the 8-year-olds would have roughly the same autism symptoms unless it had always been here because they're not getting it at 70, you know what I mean?

Familial control studies show us that no vaccination has any causal relationship with autism. So Cremieux believes that vaccinations have not been correlated with autism, which would go to the point that there's not an increase because of vaccinations. If this is true. Now if you're just joining, I'm not claiming anything I say here is true. This is Cremieux's argument and he's very good at arguments and data. So he's a good source.

He says that the rise in autism has overwhelmingly been due to non-severe varieties. Non-severe varieties. So if you had a little bit of it you could probably function in the world and get along. In the old days life was simple. So let's go way back. Let's go back to the farming days of our early American experience. If you were a farm hand and you didn't even have to own the farm or make the hard decision, you're just a farm hand, how hard would it be for someone with a minor non-severe version of autism to simply spend a lot of time alone, not make a lot of conversation, do their job, get paid, and nobody would think anything of it. You just say it's a different personality.

So it seems to me that in the modern complicated world if you had a little bit of autism it might really trip you up and people would really spot it because there'd be things you don't do or things you can't do. But back when everything was simple and all you did was milk a cow and mow some grass, nobody even noticed, would they?

Driven by classifying people with other conditions as autism, some of that. And apparently if you add a monetary incentive to schools if they have people who are autistic suddenly the number of autistic people at the school jumps by 25 percent in a single year because the funding follows the autistic kids. So if you say you have more autistic kids you get more funding for those kids. So of course follow the money would give you a 25 percent increase without any real increase in the condition.

No environmental toxicants have been found. Adoption studies indicate that there's no apparent parental influence on kids' autistic traits, but there is parental influence on a child's likelihood of receiving a diagnosis. So the kids, who your parents are will not make a difference about whether you have it, but it will make a difference about whether you get diagnosed. What's that tell you?

So that's the basic idea. Now when you heard those explanations did they sound compelling to you? Does the alternate explanation that no you're just measuring it wrong, does that sound compelling? It would sound compelling to me if there weren't so many teachers and parents who can tell you there's no way there's not more of this. It's just everywhere all the time now and every group of 30 has one.

So I'm inclined to think that there is something real that's happening. But I have to admit that's a pretty strong argument and it's coming from somebody who's not wrong a lot. So I just put that out there to show you that all data is fake. As I tell you often, all data is unreliable.

So the autism medicine is called leucovorin. And if you happen to have cerebral folate deficiency, which I guess must be a partial cause or maybe an effect of autism, supposedly it can help. And then the National Institute of Health is going to launch a big autism data science initiative so they can learn more. And that sounds good.

I'll tell you what I like about this the most. You could argue all day long about whether what Trump and RFK Jr. have done so far is the right answer, done enough, should they have done something else, are they looking at the right studies, blah blah blah. Those are all good questions and concerns.

Sorry, I've got to get rid of something. There we go.

I have an update and correction on the Charlie Kirk magic bullet question. Yesterday I told you with great confidence incorrectly that he probably almost certainly had a metal chest plate and th