General Commentary

s. That's me right now. So I was telling Noah he could wear a mask like the mask Avenger or something you know. Well, I spent like an hour last night talking to Erica trying to figure out how to add a person. And unfortunately, she was using instructions from Grok. Now, I don't know if you've ever tried to get instructions from Grok about anything, but it's near impossible and it has very specific instructions, but it's about menus that don't exist. Have you had that same experience? It starts out with, all right, use the main community button and I'll go to the place. It'll be no main community button. And you could look all day for the main community button and it won't be there. And then somebody says, yes, but Grok says it's there, but it's never there. It's never there. So I have to figure that out. The one and only way I can get instructions on doing that is if somebody else who knows how to do it goes page by page and takes a screenshot and then eventually you hit that that person does not have the most current version. So there is nowhere on earth that exists a set of instructions to do what I want. And then with good luck we discover it. But it's in a completely odd weird place that you could never find on your own. So we got Sergio. But how do I get... All right, let's see if I can get Owen on my phone. He might already be there. You look amazing. Well, you're too nice. What we look is stupid because we can't do the dumb thing. But you can't it's hard to get advice because nobody else looks like the host. So is my book on here? What about birthday my... Hey guys, how's it going? Mo is here too. Happy birthday. It's my birthday. It's his birthday. So wait. So that's Mike Burrell. Yeah. Oh, okay. Good to see you. This is very much like hanging out in your own home and you don't know what to do. What do I do now? Pardon me. I'm going to drop out so that other people can join and I'm going to focus on my kids here. It was a pleasure again to hear from you this morning, Shelly. Thank you so much. Scott, thank you. I love you. And all three of my kids have grown up hearing your voice. You're like kind of the internet uncle, so to speak, that your voice is familiar to all of them even before they were born. And they'll be hearing you for the rest of their lives in one way or another. Scott, thank you. You're welcome. All right. Thank you. All right. Who's... So Owen is waiting for host approval, but do you see... Scott? This is Sarah. Sarah B88 is my Locals name, but I discovered yesterday that my Rumble name is separate and I can't change it, so that's why probably nobody knows who I am. Anyway, so I'm going to go ahead and drop out, but I just want to say hey and so glad to see you today and hope you're doing better and we're all thinking about you and praying for you. See, my problem is I'm too popular because I have to find a name in a list of a thousand and then specifically approve it and there's no search function. So how about this? How about everybody drop out except for Owen. See if that works. There's a waiting room. Yeah, but I don't think we can. So there's only two places that people could be, waiting room and participants. If I go to the waiting room. Sorry, you have to put up with this. Is there anybody whose sound is still on who can tell something about the news? Has Trump done anything interesting? No, nothing interesting. Can you see me? Can you hear me? I can see and hear you in the waiting room. Okay. But we don't see Owen, who we're sure is here. Boy, if you can put up with this, you can put up with anything. I'll be done. Required approvals. Don't require approval. So there's a problem with the waiting room. There's just too many people. Is that what's going on? I feel like I could approve. Oh, and if I could find them in a gigantic list, come on, baby. Now I know why Dave Rubin uses two people to do this. Well, do you want him just to call us and we can include his voice? We can try that. So Owen, Owen, Owen, why don't you just call me on my text number? You will not be seen, but you will be heard. How hard is it to tell somebody where a button is? But it's hard when there's a thousand people. Owen must not be here. All right. Well, all right. Something's coming in. Oh, really? He called. It went to voicemail. Why don't we try calling him? All right, here we go. Good morning, Scott. Good morning, Shel. Good morning. Good morning, Owen. Can everybody hear you? I hope so. All right, we're going to go back to the show view and give us a sign. Wait a minute. If everyone can hear me. So we're not looking at... We're just listening. Yeah, we're just listening. So we can bring more people back up on the screen. Right. You are correct. So we're going to view all. Once he's there, participants Sergio and Mike Burrell are invisible. And all right, Owen, since you're going to be on the whole time, at least your voice will be, maybe you could lead us off and... Oh, there's Marcela. There was a way to see her. So, Owen, did you make some notes of the news today? I did. Let me pull them up. We want to start with the simultaneous sip. Yes, we do. Sure to do that. Yes, we do. We would like to do that. But you're going to lead us. Okay. Well, all you need is a cup or mug, a glass, tankard, chalice or stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. Simultaneous sip. Go. Boy, that was a struggle. So in no particular order, is there some stories you want to cue us up on? There's plenty. I think as far as Iran goes, I think it was correct that they're still having their protests. The crown prince has issued a bunch of messages on X, sort of a rallying cry. So he's definitely claiming he wants to return and wants people to keep protesting. I think the ayatollah and the regime is threatening execution and saying that protesters are ruining the streets to please Trump. That's what it comes down to. He's warning of a crackdown. So they have no public bathrooms and gigantic crowds. I always wonder what happens in those situations. Yeah. I don't know. It seems like it's spreading across the country, but it's hard to know what's real and what's propaganda. I don't know if you have a view on that, but it does seem to me, as I think you pointed out before, that there's what you hear when there's something like a color revolution going on and it's all one-sided and it's all painting a narrative, but what's actually happening in the country, especially when the internet's cut off and there's not a lot of information flow, is highly in question, I think. It's pretty well understood at this point that is not organic, right? Or is it? Is it organic? I'm not sure I believe that any protests are organic anymore. Yeah, that's where I'm at. I don't believe any of these are real. And for other international news, Trump is certainly still saying he wants to go after Greenland and he's going to take it whether they like it or not. And he made a statement that he'll either do it the easy way or the hard way. He's floating an idea of paying each citizen of Greenland one hundred thousand dollars to essentially buy the country. Really? Mhm. So every single citizen would get one hundred thousand dollars if... Yeah. There aren't that many of them. Thirty thousand I think. Something like that. Yeah. Wow. Denmark is not budging so far. They're claiming they won't give it up even if the US nukes them. That's the statement they made. So they jumped right to nuclear war and they're saying it would threaten NATO and so Denmark is certainly unhappy about the situation. I know there's some meeting coming up, it might be happening now with Marco Rubio meeting with Denmark. So there is some kind of discussion or negotiation that's queued up to happen. But Trump doesn't seem to want to back down and I don't really see him backing down. Do you at this point? No. What is China threatening? Nothing, right? I don't think so. China's mostly been sitting this stuff out. I think they're probably still upset about Venezuela. I don't remember. I don't know if you remember they literally had a bunch of diplomats in Venezuela when the raid happened. And they were there to make some kind of oil deal or something. And I think there's certainly a lot of speculation that the motivation for the raid was to deprive Russia and China of oil. Oh well, that's not too scary. How much oil were they going to get from Venezuela anyway? Well, Russia and China have been making deals to get oil from Venezuela. So I'm kind of switching topics, but I think the direction now seems to be that Trump is sending a bunch of tankers to go get the oil, and he's claiming that we're going to get something like thirty to fifty million barrels of oil. There was a story I posted today that it could be that we could refill our entire strategic petroleum reserve of oil just from Venezuela. Really? So Marcela, turn on your microphone. Yes. You're a local expert on Iceland. Yes, I am. So what will be the impact on Iceland if Greenland goes American? No, I've been to Greenland as well. I th

Episode 3068 ChattingWSA 01/10/26

n't get stage fright or anything. But when it comes to talking with a group of people or being in a social situation that has been difficult for me historically. But one question that I found that has helped me with that is what are you thankful for? And you can ask that to somebody in an elevator. You can ask that to your cashier, to the person serving you at a restaurant. You can ask it to your family, to your best friend. And it's better than how are you because it doesn't demand sort of a pat answer. Makes them have to think about it. Makes them think about positive things. Even if they give you a pat answer back like oh my family or my job that gives me something to then say does your family live here? Or how long have you been working here? Something that just kind of gives me a genuine interaction with a human being. I'm a spiritual person but not everybody is. And so saying things like can I pray for you about something or something like that is sometimes a little too forward for people. But I don't think I've ever had anybody be offended by asking what they're thankful for. And so if there's other people watching that find it difficult to start conversations that's a great conversation starter and it'll give you someplace to go. That is a really good tip because I can tell you're not intimidated by any kind of anything. Basically you're obviously a brave person who overcomes not a stage fright but you know what I mean. You know Dale Carnegie has this little list of things you should ask where do you work you know blah blah. Well yours will work. Yours would work every time because it makes people stop and think and it makes them stop and think about something positive. So that's a really good tip. So what are you thankful for this morning, Scott? You know what? I'm thankful that we're here and we're making this experiment and so far it looks like it works. Now we don't know how well it will still I'm still slurring my speech from the paralysis. We don't know how it will work if I'm not part of the mix. But what I'm seeing already is that people are polite, well-informed, and willing to sort of adopt a set of standards without being told. And that's actually exciting to me because I don't believe every audience would be able to do what we're doing right now which is taking turns, waiting, understanding the role and then being polite about it. So with that I want to thank you for this gentleman who's been waiting here a long time whose name I don't know. You have a black beard and some headphones on. If your microphone is on can you jump right in? Don't have soun

Episode 3067 ChattingWSA 01/09/26

de have so recently had the opposite point of view than the one that they want to have. What I mean by that is that some of the prominent Democrats have said that Maduro has to go and then when Madur

Episode 3065 CWSA 01/07/26

funneled it to NPR and PBS, is officially dissolved. Now there was probably a time when I would have thought, man, I hate to see my government defund a place that gives me the news. But what we know recently about any of these mainstream media entities is they're definitely not helping. They were not really additive to the country. And so when you see cuts to these venerable institutions, what president could make a cut to a venerable institution? Only Trump. He's like the only one who could do it. But it doesn't work every time because there's a court ruling. Newsmax is reporting that Trump had tried to cut a big part of the National Institute of Health funding for scientific and medical research to these big colleges and institutions. But a three-judge panel just ruled that he can't do that. I'm not good enough on the legal stuff to know why he can't do that, but that's a ruling. Now there's an argument I hear on what I'm going to call my side that I don't think holds up. And maybe that's the problem too. So part of the argument for making cuts to places like Harvard is that a few of the big institutions, it doesn't apply to all of them but the biggest ones, have these enormous endowments that means that people have donated massive amounts of money and they have that money for various Harvard uses. So the argument went, if you already have so much money, why does the government need to give you any more? Because the endowment doesn't get spent every year. It just sits there and grows. Here's what people generally don't know about the endowments that you should add to your knowledge bank. Most of them, and I think most is the right word, but some large number of them are not available for anybody who wants to use it for anything. They ar

Episode 3064 CWSA 01/06/26

o they would have had a base that said, what are you doing? Their base would have stopped that president because they were in on it. So Trump, whether or not any Republicans are in on it, and certainly some must be, that didn't stop him. So he's not stopped by the DEI attacks, let's call it the racism attacks. He's not stopped because somebody on his team is in on it. And lastly, you need basically balls of steel to do something that people will interpret, the bad guys will interpret as killing children. So a Democrat probably couldn't survive doing something that people would say, hey, you take that money away and it will kill the children. But Trump would be smart enough, tough enough, strong enough to say, well, all you have to do is prove that you're real. You can have the money right away. So I don't know that any other president could have done this. It's sort of the perfect combination of the person who needed to be there at the right time. Otherwise I think we're just doomed. Just doomed. All right. I've asked you this before but I'm going to add a little

Episode 3060 CWSA 01/02/26

most obviously documented total facts is that the Trump administration has in fact reduced the number of illegal border crossings? Now, how can she possibly say that that didn't happen? Well, here's what she did. So she didn't want to give credit for what is an immense accomplishment. So instead, she said, "We know that this administration has not been the most honest when it comes to reporting numbers." So instead of saying yes, obviously they stopped border crossings, she questioned whether the data was accurate. Oh my god, I hate it and I love it at the same time. It's so bold that you would even go that direction, but if you assume that the public isn't really following things closely, she says, "Well, you know, they cheated on the jobs numbers." I don't know if that's true, but she said the jobs numbers were fake. So if the job numbers were fake, couldn't it also be true that the border numbers were fake? No. Because we would definitely notice that the border numbers were fake. If the border was exactly the way it had been, you don't think we would have noticed. It's harder to notice unemployment or employment, you know, especially if you're talking one or two percent. But it's not hard to notice that the border is wide open or totally closed. But the hubris of even saying that it might be a data reporting problem by the administration, that's pretty bold. So apparently there's a giant tanker, oil tanker that is one of these shadow fleet trying to illegally move oil from Venezuela. And so the Coast Guard started chasing it down and instead of surrendering, which you would expect them to do because they're literally up against a military. So instead of surrendering, they decided to do a U-turn and make a run for it. Now, obviously, they're not going to outrun the Coast Guard. So there's a little bit of a mystery as to why they haven't surrendered because the staff of the vessel, they're not military, you know, they're just underpaid seamen, so to speak. So why would they even take a chance? It's not their oil. I mean, I suppose there's some risk of penalty to them if they give it up, but what do they think? Do they think they're going to outrun the Coast Guard? So part of the story, Wall Street Journal's reporting on this, is that the US is just waiting to bring some more military assets in so they can do a proper military takeover of the boat if they don't voluntarily surrender. It looks like they're not. So did you know that there's such a thing as a maritime special response team? So apparently the US military has a group who are specially trained, an elite force for boarding hosti

Episode 3054 CWSA 12/26/25