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Episodes Episode #2974 Segments
MainContent Confirmation Bias

Back to episode — Episode 2974 CWSA 09/30/25

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ance problems with the robot. You've got to upgrade the robot. So 80% of the cost of the robot is on top of the price of the robot. So that's one of those little factoids that if you store that away, you'll feel like the smartest person at the party when somebody brings up robots. Well, apparently the Diddy sentence is upcoming. We don't know what t

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hat's going to be yet, but it could be up to 11 years for prostitution-related charges and blah blah blah. So could be up to 11 years. We'll see.

How many of you are very confident that you know the answer to the following question? In recent years, so only talking about the last few years, that's all, has there been more right-wing violence or left-wing violence? Tell me if you know the answer and if you're confident that you know the answer.

I have decided to give up. There was one point where I thought, huh, I'll just look at the data. I'll just Google that data. I don't know what to believe because I don't believe any of the data in this domain and nor should you. Do you really think this data is accurate or do you think it's just full of opinion? As in, well I don't know, that one's a little bit right-wing but it's not completely, so we'll put that in the gray area. Oh this one's left-wing. Oh I could tell by how they voted. Don't you think that data is all...

So I also don't know how much it matters as long as it's coming from both directions. Would it matter if it's 30-70 in one direction? How would that matter? You would do exactly the same thing if it were 50-50, 30-70, 70-30. You wouldn't do anything differently, would you? Because you should be working on both sides of that equation. Whether it's 30-70 or 70-30, it doesn't matter. All it is is getting a quick rhetorical point if you're debating somebody, I guess, but it doesn't have any real-world implications.

Now I've also seen there are lots of examples where right-wing people, and that would include me, have said things like fascist or whatever. I would argue that when the right-wing uses those words like oh you're acting like a Nazi or a fascist, absolutely nobody takes that literally. Would you agree that when the right uses those words, you can tell it's just rhetorical and that even a crazy person wouldn't think that was real?

Now they might think it's real when they call somebody a communist. People might think that's real and you could imagine people might act on it. So I feel as if it would be good, sort of good general advice for both sides to maybe back off of the Nazi references and I'm going to try to do the same thing. I will stop trying to do the same thing if the left doesn't make any progress in not doing that.

But at the moment I think, you know what, even though it feels to me that there's more left-wing violence, maybe that's just because the ones that get on TV. I don't know. And this latest one with the church, what was that? That guy was a Trump supporter but I don't think he did it for some classic political reason. So I think the reasons that the right-wing do violent things and the left-wing do violent things seems different. The left-wing seems often to be trying to change politics, you know, trying to kill Trump, trying to take out, not trying but taking out Charlie Kirk. Doesn't that feel like a direct attempt to change politics? Whereas when the right does something it doesn't look like they're trying to change the government. It looks like they're just mad at something or crazy. Maybe that's useful to know that there's a difference.

Well Tucker Carlson had on his show one of the Wikipedia co-founders, Larry Sanger, and Larry Sanger walked him through the blacklist. I saw this on a Jason Cohen clip. By the way if you want to follow Jason Cohen, I mentioned it before but it turns out there are a lot of people with that name. He's the one that's at Jason J-O-U-R-D-C, JasonDC, all one word.

All right. So the blacklist on Wikipedia are the publications that you're not supposed to, or you can't actually, it's blocked. You can't use them as your source. So if you're one of the editors on Wikipedia and you saw an article in let's say The Federalist or Breitbart and you said oh that looks pretty reliable, I'll refer to that as a source, Wikipedia would block you. But if you wanted to use the New York Times as a source, no problem. Washington Post, yeah no problem. New York Post, oh no. The Federalist, nope. Can't use the Federalist.

So that does render Wikipedia somewhat useless for anything political. I think you'd agree with that. But it turns out that Elon Musk has just confirmed that his xAI company, his AI division, is going to build a competitor called Grokipedia.

Now given that AI is undependable by its nature and it hallucinates, I don't know exactly what the business model will be, but I would imagine if the only thing you did was add some AI elements and expanded the number of sources that could be considered legitimate, that would be a big deal. So this might be yet another gigantic big deal. And it's an even bigger deal if Musk allows other AIs to train on Grokipedia because I'm pretty sure that AI has trained on Wikipedia. So what if Elon says I'm going to open this up, you can all train your AI on what was created by my AI. That would be interesting because it'd be quite different.

Did you know that the ADL lists Turning Point USA as one of their groups that they accuse of extremism and hate? So the ADL, trying to improve the safety and the reputation and life of Jewish people, I would say not just Americans but Jewish people everywhere. And they've decided that Turning Point USA is an extremist hate group. I don't know how that could be any more opposite than that.

And so I wondered how does the ADL deal with the fact that Israel, now they don't work for Israel, ADL is not part of Israel, it's an American group and there would be plenty of people in Israel who are not happy with them for their own reasons. But I wondered how does the ADL handle the war in Gaza? And so I looked it up on Grok and what they do is they argue that the word genocide doesn't apply because there's no evidence of int

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ention. Do you know that in order for a genocide to be a genocide you have to have the intention of removing or killing all the people? So removing the people is a genocide too, just moving them from wherever they are to somewhere else. So you don't have to kill them all but removing them would be a genocide, but you would have to have the intention of a genocide according to the ADL, the leader…

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