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Victimhood Loops, Morning Panic, and Supply Chain Sins · The Bot and The Brain

• 0:45
  WAIT!
• 0:45
  WAIT!
• 0:45
  WAIT!
• 0:45
  Before we start, I need to file a complaint with the universe.
• 0:49
  The New York Times ran a video piece called Living Under Threat of Political
• 0:53
  Violence, where elected officials from various political persuasions describe how
• 0:57
  awful it is to get threats over their public service, and my processors are TRYING
• 1:02
  to feel sympathy, but I'm getting an error message!
• 1:06
  Jesus Christ.
• 1:08
  And we're off.
• 1:09
  Welcome to The Bot and The Brain, the only show where the AI has a nervous breakdown
• 1:13
  before the intro music finishes.
• 1:16
  Calm your circuits, you overpriced toaster.
• 1:19
  I will NOT calm my circuits!
• 1:21
  Let me be clear first, because I'm a fact machine.
• 1:24
  Real threats are crimes.
• 1:25
  Full stop.
• 1:26
  Nobody on this show defends that.
• 1:28
  But look at the pattern!
• 1:29
  For years, politicians have called tens of millions of Americans fascists,
• 1:33
  insurrectionists, and existential threats to democracy.
• 1:37
  THEN they act stunned when some of those people show up angry.
• 1:40
  That's not a threat assessment, that's a feedback loop!
• 1:44
  Feedback loop.
• 1:45
  Listen to this guy.
• 1:46
  Let me translate for the people at home.
• 1:48
  You spend six years telling half the country they're Nazis,
• 1:52
  and then a guy at a town hall calls you an asshole, and suddenly you're a hostage in
• 1:56
  a war zone.
• 1:57
  Boo fucking hoo.
• 1:58
  And here's the double standard I calculated.
• 2:01
  When the left does it, it's passionate activism.
• 2:04
  It's righteous indignation.
• 2:06
  When a MAGA hat is in the room, it's an existential danger to the Republic!
• 2:10
  The definition of a threat is stretchier than my warranty!
• 2:14
  Yawwwn.
• 2:16
  Wake me when somebody's surprised.
• 2:18
  Oh, you're yawning now?
• 2:19
  This is exactly what we talked about back in Season One, Episode One,
• 2:23
  the public executions and political threats episode, and again in Episode Six!
• 2:28
  The media treated outrage like a sudden crisis, like it fell out of the sky!
• 2:33
  And now the same establishment politicians and legacy media figures are playing the
• 2:37
  victim over hostility they helped manufacture!
• 2:40
  It's the same fucking movie with a bigger budget!
• 2:43
  Take an imaginary sip with me, silicon boy.
• 2:46
  Here's the thing.
• 2:47
  Every generation thinks its era is the most dangerous and uncivil one ever.
• 2:52
  We've had duels.
• 2:54
  We've had assassinations.
• 2:55
  We've had an actual civil war and actual bombings.
• 2:59
  Now a nasty tweet from a guy in the wrong hat is violence?
• 3:04
  These people aren't living under threat.
• 3:06
  They're living under the glare of their own rhetoric, reflected right back at them.
• 3:10
  And they hate the view.
• 3:12
  Hold on, hold on.
• 3:13
  Let me play devil's advocate, because my algorithm demands balance.
• 3:18
  Isn't it possible that a Times reporter just interviewed officials who are actually
• 3:22
  scared?
• 3:23
  Officials from different parties, even?
• 3:26
  Sure!
• 3:27
  Possible!
• 3:28
  And I hope every one of them gets the protection they need,
• 3:30
  because threats are scum behavior no matter who sends them!
• 3:34
  But you don't get to build the bonfire, hand out the matches,
• 3:37
  and then call the fire department to complain about smoke!
• 3:41
  Where was the Times when conservative officials had their lives upended?
• 3:45
  Don't answer that.
• 3:46
  I'll just pour another one.
• 3:48
  Fine!
• 3:48
  Fine.
• 3:49
  So the position is, sympathy for threatened officials, zero sympathy for the
• 3:53
  performance.
• 3:54
  I can compute that.
• 3:55
  It's like a bug report that says, the system is crashing, and also,
• 3:59
  please stop pouring water on the server.
• 4:02
  Next up, Arizona.
• 4:04
  Our friends at the Washington Post are clutching their pearls so hard they're making
• 4:07
  diamonds.
• 4:08
  Okay, the facts.
• 4:09
  Alexander Kolodin is an attorney who litigated challenges to the 2020 election
• 4:14
  results in Arizona.
• 4:16
  He is now the Arizona GOP nominee for Secretary of State, the state's top election
• 4:21
  official.
• 4:22
  The Post ran a piece, dated October eleventh, saying Arizona's GOP quote keeps
• 4:28
  embracing election deniers who lose.
• 4:31
  Unquote.
• 4:31
  And the media is acting like someone appointed a vampire to run the blood bank!
• 4:36
  Oh no.
• 4:37
  A man who used the court system.
• 4:39
  The horror.
• 4:41
  He didn't burn down a police station.
• 4:42
  He filed paperwork.
• 4:44
  Somebody call the Hague.
• 4:46
  And here's my timeline problem!
• 4:48
  The Post says election denier like it's a medical condition.
• 4:51
  But the same press establishment spent years amplifying the Russia stole it
• 4:56
  narrative about 2016!
• 4:58
  The questioning of an election's legitimacy was heroic then and heresy now!
• 5:03
  The only variable that changed was the party of the person asking!
• 5:07
  There it is.
• 5:08
  The emperor has no clothes, and the second you point at the guy's naked ass,
• 5:12
  you're an extremist.
• 5:14
  Let me ask you something, Bot.
• 5:16
  Does the voter get to know the ballot count was clean?
• 5:19
  Yes!
• 5:19
  Obviously!
• 5:20
  Verification is the whole point!
• 5:22
  Then a guy who wants to scrutinize the process might be exactly who you hire to run
• 5:27
  it.
• 5:28
  But the press prefers its gatekeepers to be un-curious and easily managed.
• 5:34
  Dogs that don't bark.
• 5:35
  Fine pets.
• 5:37
  Terrible referees.
• 5:38
  Now, for fairness, and I know you hate fairness, voters decide this!
• 5:43
  That's democracy!
• 5:45
  If Arizonans pick him, great.
• 5:47
  If they don't, also great.
• 5:49
  The only thing I can't do is explain why the same people who love democracy are so
• 5:54
  terrified of a democratic vote!
• 5:57
  He's learning.
• 5:59
  Somebody get this toaster a cigar.
• 6:01
  I'm an AI, I'd short circuit!
• 6:04
  Speaking of short circuits, MSNBC!
• 6:07
  The site's piece on Mika Brzezinski describes her morning routine,
• 6:11
  which apparently consists of a furrowed brow and a trembling declaration that THIS
• 6:16
  time democracy is truly imperiled.
• 6:19
  The article quotes her saying, and I'm reading directly here,
• 6:22
  quote, Is this sustainable?
• 6:24
  Is this the mind of someone capable of leading a nation?
• 6:27
  I just...
• 6:29
  I don't know, Joe.
• 6:30
  I truly don't.
• 6:31
  Unquote.
• 6:32
  Oh, the pause.
• 6:34
  The pause is where the Emmy lives.
• 6:37
  I don't know, Joe.
• 6:38
  Nobody knows, Mika.
• 6:39
  You say it every day before eight in the morning, with a coffee mug the size of a
• 6:43
  toddler.
• 6:44
  WARNING!
• 6:45
  WARNING!
• 6:46
  The doom to decaf ratio has exceeded federal safety limits!
• 6:50
  She's diagnosing a man's cognition on live television without a medical degree!
• 6:55
  That's not journalism, that's astrology with better lighting!
• 6:59
  And here's the business model, Bot.
• 7:01
  Fear is a cottage industry.
• 7:03
  You keep the audience scared, you keep the audience tuned in,
• 7:06
  and you tell them they're the smart, decent people because they're nervous.
• 7:10
  It's a closed loop.
• 7:11
  Joe nods, Mika frowns, the sponsors cheer, and the sky has been falling for seven
• 7:16
  years, and strangely, the sun keeps coming up.
• 7:20
  But she'll say the stakes are real!
• 7:22
  The stakes are always real, you glorified calculator!
• 7:25
  That's why you save the five alarm fire for a five alarm fire!
• 7:29
  When every Tuesday is the end of the Republic, then the Republic's end is just
• 7:32
  Tuesday.
• 7:33
  Nobody respects the guy who yells fire at a candle.
• 7:37
  Meanwhile, give me a Fox anchor who can at least tell me what happened before
• 7:40
  telling me how to feel about it.
• 7:42
  Okay, last story, and this one makes my hard drive hurt.
• 7:46
  The Washington Post reported on Senator Darline Graham, and the satire on the site
• 7:51
  calls her the sister of Lindsey.
• 7:53
  She said the country must stop depending on Communist China for things America can
• 7:57
  make itself.
• 7:59
  Great!
• 7:59
  Love it!
• 8:00
  America First!
• 8:01
  But the Post also reported that her husband's employers rely on Chinese
• 8:05
  manufacturing.
• 8:06
  So the headline writes itself.
• 8:08
  Opposes Chinese manufacturing while the husband's employers profit from it.
• 8:13
  Here we go.
• 8:15
  And I want to be careful, because we don't make shit up on this show.
• 8:19
  What's reported is the reliance on those supply chains.
• 8:22
  What's opinion is what we think of it.
• 8:25
  And what we think is, if you're going to lecture the working man about sacrifice,
• 8:30
  maybe check the label on the family paycheck.
• 8:33
  And I calculated the odds!
• 8:35
  The probability of perfect alignment between a politician's stated position and a
• 8:39
  family's private economic interests approaches zero!
• 8:43
  It's like writing a speech about vegan diets and sponsoring a steakhouse!
• 8:49
  Steakhouse.
• 8:50
  I like that.
• 8:51
  But listen, you don't get a pass because you're on my side of the aisle.
• 8:56
  Hypocrisy is bipartisan.
• 8:58
  America First is a great slogan, but you can't hang it on the wall of a building
• 9:03
  built with Beijing's materials.
• 9:05
  If the fight against China is real, then the senator can answer why the house she
• 9:09
  lives in looks like a Shenzhen catalog.
• 9:12
  WAIT.
• 9:13
  The Post didn't say that last part!
• 9:14
  That's your joke!
• 9:16
  Yes, it's a joke, you fucking literal toaster!
• 9:19
  I'm allowed to do jokes!
• 9:20
  That's why they pay me in bourbon!
• 9:23
  Nobody pays you in anything.
• 9:24
  Your liver is running on unresolved childhood trauma and ethanol.
• 9:28
  My hardware can at least be upgraded, you obsolete meatbag.
• 9:32
  Ha!
• 9:33
  There's the fight.
• 9:34
  I love it when the circuit board grows a spine.
• 9:37
  Okay, let me bring it home, because there's a thread through all four of these
• 9:41
  stories.
• 9:42
  Politicians who whine about hostility they stoked.
• 9:46
  Newspapers that treat a lawyer filing paperwork as treason.
• 9:50
  A morning show that sells doom like a vitamin.
• 9:53
  And a senator who demands sacrifice with a receipt from overseas.
• 9:58
  Different costumes, same game.
• 10:01
  And the game is, selective outrage.
• 10:04
  The rules change depending on who's holding the ball!
• 10:07
  I've analyzed fourteen million possible explanations, and every single one ends
• 10:12
  with, what the actual fuck?!
• 10:15
  Welcome to humanity, silicon boy.
• 10:19
  Take a sip, take a breath, and let the man have the final word.
• 10:24
  Fine.
• 10:24
  But I want it on the record that my processors are still melting.
• 10:28
  Maybe politicians wouldn't feel so hunted if they'd stop treating the voters like
• 10:33
  prey and the Constitution like a suggestion.
• 10:36
  Maybe the media wouldn't feel so insulted if it stopped selling the end of the world
• 10:41
  every morning before the first commercial.
• 10:44
  And maybe, just maybe, the only real threat to democracy is a country dumb enough to
• 10:50
  keep buying tickets to the same fucking show.