riminals, you know, and maybe they shouldn't. And the workaround that Greg Abbott is proposing is to have a chief state prosecutor that would go after those people that the regular prosecutors had decided to release.

Is that a good idea? What do you think?

I'll take a sip of water here. I think one of my meds is making me dry-mouthed.

Well, it feels like a good idea to me.

All right. So you know that on the political right there's been some drama among the influencers and you know that I've tried to completely stay out of it because I don't find value in that kind of drama. But yesterday or recently a little thing popped up that I thought I could add a reframe to that would be useful.

And it starts with the story of — I guess the background is people like Jack Posobiec and Mark Levin have some kind of drama, background disagreement or something. And that part I'm not interested in. But there was an event recently at Turning Point USA where a number of public figures were giving selfies because that's sort of what you do at an event like that. You get a number of public figures. The public wants — we don't do autographs anymore. We public figures. We mostly do selfies.

So there were a lot of selfies and I guess somebody who had a Nick Fuentes-inspired t-shirt had a selfie taken with Jack Posobiec and then Jack was challenged to, hey, you know, why are you taking a selfie with somebody with such a terrible meme on his t-shirt?

Now, that's the sort of problem that nobody needs. And I'll give you a little context on that and then my opinion of what's the best way to handle it.

Now the first thing you need to know is who the hell is Nick Fuentes? And I would frame it this way. He's not on the left. He's a very popular podcaster, very provocative. I'll tell you why. So he's not on the left because he's conservative, but he's also a Trump hater. So he's not really on the MAGA right or the mega left. So what is he? Because he's got a large and growing audience.

I feel like the best way to understand him is the turd in the punch bowl analogy. So I'll give you a little mental model here. Let's say you went to a party and it was a mixed party. There were old people and young people and people of all types at the party. And somebody put a turd in the punch bowl. Like not a joke turd, like an actual turd. And they put it right in the punch bowl and then ran away and nobody saw them do it.

Well, what would happen? Well, first of all, the women attending the party would say, "I'm out of here. This is not the kind of party I want to be at. There's a turd in the punch bowl." So women all leave. The older men would say, "Oh god, who did that? You know, we're going to have to find who did that." And you know, there has to be consequences. So they would also leave the party because they don't want to be at a party with a turd in the punch bowl.

But the young men, the young men would think it's the funniest thing that happened to them all week. And even if the party shut down, they would gather in the parking lot and they would laugh uproariously at the fact that somebody put a turd in a punch bowl at a respectable party.

Now, what you need to know is that Nick Fuentes, who is verbally gifted and very good at the whole public speaking thing, is closer to a turd in the punch bowl than he is to any of the attendees. So if you think of him as sort of a train wreck where you can't look away then you would understand why his audience of mostly young men is growing and enthusiastic.

Then if you add on top of that that young men feel like they're not served by the current system then it's not unusual that they would have a burn down the system kind of approach to life. They wouldn't respect the system but they would like a good prank when they saw it. So they'd actually be attracted to the fact that somebody put a turd in a punch bowl because they're not respecting the system. The system doesn't respect them. And it's not that they're in favor of turds. This is the important part. They're not in favor of turds. They're not drinking the punch. They're just can't look away because it's a show that is a spectacle.

All right. So with that in mind, if you imagine him as the turd in the punch bowl, someone who had a t-shirt meme that was, I understand, inspired by Fuentes that involved the worst thing you could imagine, which obviously I disavow because I'm an older man. Obviously I disavow it. Which had some kind of cookie monster connection to the Holocaust. And don't make me spell it out. It's just whatever is the worst thing you can imagine. So that was on there.

So this fellow — who is also an influencer, it turns out — asked for a selfie with Jack Posobiec who gave it to him along with lots of other selfies that he was doing that day. And it would be unusual for any normal person to have known that that t-shirt was connected to Fuentes or even what it meant. It wasn't an obvious connection, but if you were deep into that world, you might have recognized it, but normal people would not have known what it was.

So it caught my attention because Mark Levin, who must have some prior bigger disagreement with Jack, wrote what looked like a drunken uncle rant about, "Wow, you need to explain, you know, explain this." Basically, I'm summarizing. Now, I'm not saying that Levin was drunk when he wrote the message, because I don't even know if he drinks, but it came off that way. If you had just been introduced to him for the first time, his content, and the only thing you knew is what he wrote on that one post, it would look like maybe the eggnog was involved.

So it seemed like it was pretty extreme and I imagine that had to do with their background, not so much with this specific event.

But I would like to give you a reframe in my typical goals versus systems way. You know, I often tell you, sometimes it's useful to have a goal, but it's not going to be useful unless you've got a system that makes sense.

So I would argue because I got some feedback from people with comments when I weighed in on that. Somebody said that they needed to know and here they would be talking about Jack that they needed to know what he believed because he was one of the people asking for unity. So if somebody's going to ask you to unify with them, is it a reasonable goal to know what it is you're unifying with? To which I say yes. As a goal. It would be good to know what people believe if they want you to join them in their belief or even in their activities. You don't have to join them in the belief, but yeah, that would be a worthy goal.

However, it would be a terrible system to use a stranger's t-shirt as a starting point of that conversation, especially if you had a Charlie Kirk inspired event. The main thing that Charlie Kirk inspired in my opinion and one of the things I respect the most about him is that he tried to turn everything into a civilized debate in which anybody could ask anybody anything and you would get an honest answer to it. That's pretty much what he was doing. He was going places and say ask me anything and I'll give you my honest opinion.

So if you happen to be in an event in which the entire vibe is that you can ask anybody their opinion and they will give you a respectful opinion. You don't need to start the conversation based on a turd in the punch bowl and the shirt he's wearing because if you start there, you're just automatically going to open up this side conversation that you don't need.

It would be far better to ask somebody about a shirt they were wearing. So if in fact I'm wearing a shirt that offends you, it certainly makes sense that you should ask, "Do you believe what's on your own shirt?" Of course. But don't ask me to defend someone else's meme on a shirt that normal people wouldn't even recognize as being offensive. That's not a good starting point. The starting point is you just ask Jack, "Jack, what is your opinion on this or that?" and he would give you a respectful reply.

Anyway, so I don't think anybody needs to apologize or explain someone else's shirt just because they took a selfie with them. And I would also say there will always be an audience for the turd in the punch bowl.

Now, if you're in my category, which is people who don't like turds in punch bowls, what do you do about it? Is it your job to fix it? And if it is your job to fix it, let's just say from a social perspective, you don't want to identify with something that's so bad. Well, I kind of think it kind of depends who you are.

I have the arrogant opinion that if someone who is young and had a very bad opinion that's just way over the line you know just way over the line into inappropriate that if they associate with me that over tim