Erick Erickson HR 1 8/13/26

Progressive knows you think the grass is always greener. Like maybe you ride a motorcycle. But today, it's raining. So you wish you had an RV. But if you did, you'd have to listen to some guy parked next to a campsite play as acoustic guitar. Now before you start wishing you had a boat, remember your brother-in-law would invite himself every weekend. Permission to come aboard, captain. But one thing that is, greener, is the money you could save when you bundle your RV, boat, or motorcycle with your home or auto with Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and third-party insurers. Not available in all states or situations. Three, two, one, zero, all engine running. Lift-off, we have a lifet-off. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. It's Eric Erickson here across the United States of America. The big story today in the Wall Street Journal, and I am not making it up. It is not an exaggeration. It is a big prominently displayed what it was until about an hour ago when they refreshed the site. Let me begin with this. It looks like a hairy alien from outer space or a meteor or one of those fidget gizmo things that stores sell in the checkout line, maybe a cat toy. It sort of looks like a fuzzy seed from a chestnut tree. Bacteria, a bait shop employee suggested, hopefully. The one thing that is the hottest, freakyest fishing lure of the summer doesn't look like a fish. And yet this tintical soft plastic beast born in Japan, smaller than a tennis ball, is a flat-out phenomenon in... bass fishing. Yes, I'm writing about bass fishing. It's August. That is one of the big stories in the Wall Street Journal today, which tells you today is a slow news day, which is great because I, your host, am a professional at finding the stories that actually matter. Truth be told, the reason the bass fishing story matters so much as I have an employee. who is an obsessive bass fisherman, were he not my employee, he would be one of those attempting to be a bass master. He would fish all the time. He literally tried to make his wife cross her legs at the beginning of March instead of giving birth to a child because apparently it's prime fishing time. What I have learned is that when the dogwood trees are blooming, the bass are biting, and they were blooming, the bass were biting, the water was breaking, and he was like, you can't. I got to go fish. That's how obsessive he is. And so today the story is singing to him, and it's like an indicative of the news stories of the day, that this is not a big news day, except it is if you know where to look, and I know where to look. And I want to start not with the bass lure. I want to start with the tariff refunds. This also in the Wall Street Journal, tariff refunds have been rolling in to big U.S. companies in some cases providing a solid boost to earnings. Contrary to warnings that the refund process could prove slow and messy, many companies appear to have received the money with remarkable speed.

So far, over 40 S&P 500 companies have reported some $9.6 billion in refunds of the past quarter or so, including at least $2.1 billion in cash already received. Among the biggest refunds reported so far, Apple at nearly $2.2 billion, Nike at $986 million, FedEx at $800 million, Amazon.com at $640 million, and General Motors at $500 million. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has received just... just over 252,000 refund applications as of July 31st for tariffs declared unlawful by the Supreme Court. The Customs Agency accepted $128.7 billion in refunds for processing an agency official told a federal court last week. Now, Exhibit 77 bagillion in why populism is an emotional response and not actually rational public policy. The populists have seen this story today, and they are demanding their refunds. All the companies, they raise their prices. I paid the higher price. So where's my part of the money? The problem is that all the populace who now want their refund are the exact same people who said tariffs don't raise prices. So are they now acknowledging tariffs raise prices? Because I was assured by all the people calling my program to tell me I was wrong about the tariffs that they weren't raising prices. And now the very same people want their portion of the money back because, well, clearly they raised prices. But you told me they hadn't. Actually, as if you're a longtime list of the program, you know where most of the money went. The prices did not go. The prices did go up. They just didn't go up as much as we. Thought they would go up where they went instead was wage decline. Companies didn't pay higher wages. Companies didn't invest. So here's the thing. Allow me to advise these companies. I want to give them a little piece of advice. Because what I'm finding is that here in the 21st century, the companies of America, particularly the publicly traded, privately held companies of America, might actually be their own worst enemies. What is it when Robert Heinlein laws is to always presume that a bureaucracy is controlled by a cabal of its enemies? You can look at Fortune 500 companies and think the same thing. Why? Because if these companies don't now raise wages or pour that money back into investment and instead return it to shareholders in the forms of dividend increases. People are going to burn their houses down. People are going to go to the CEOs and burn down their houses. Look, you know, the flock camera guy, the CEO of flock, Garrett, he's out saying flock is making changes. They're now not going to save their data for as long as they used to save it. They're going to do automatic audit trips in case police get into the cameras and they're not supposed to. They're going to make all sorts of changes to address people's concerns about flock cameras. His company is trying to respond to stay ahead of outrage growing that had been started by the communists and the democratic socialist and spilled over into civil liberties concerns. You've got Mark Zuckerberg out there spending billions of dollars from META to invest in the local communities where data centers are coming while Dario Narendra Modi, the head of Anthropic, is like, we're going to kill all of your kids and destroy all of your jobs and burn your towns and take all of your water and AI is going to be awesome.

It's wild to see the data center AI executives go tell people how awesome AI is going to be and the data centers are going to be by telling them we're going to dry out your towns, take all the water, take all the resources and destroy all your jobs. Trust us. You're going to love us. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is out there with Mike Rowe, the dirty jobs guy, saying, look, you're going to have... are blue-collar workers making six figures quickly. You're going to have towns that get new high schools. In fact, they're highlighting a big story at a Washington state where a data center came into a dirt poor town. The town was desperate. People were leaving the town. And now, you know what's happened in the town? They've got a new high school. They've got a new library. They've got new books. They've got new roads. They've got a new water system. They've got new sewage system. And the people who live in the town aren't paying property taxes. So you know what the communist and the socialist. and the left are doing now. People's cost of living is going up. The property values in the town are going to price people out. So the people who chose to stay in the town, their incomes have all gone up. Many of them have now gotten jobs tied to the people who are now coming at work for the data centers. It saved the town. And the people on the left and the people who post data users are like, ah, but the property values have gone up. Yeah, but nobody's paying property taxes because the data centers generating so much property tax revenue. There's always someone to look on the bad side. I will look on the bad side of the tariffs, though, because I told you prices would go up, wages would not go up, and investment would not go up, and it all happened. The wages were held back and the investment was held back so that the companies didn't have to dollar for dollar pass on the increase to you. And oftentimes what happened at the beginning of the tariffs is that the companies abroad that were sending the tariff goods here, they ate the cost. So there are a lot of factories in Vietnam and China and India and Thailand and elsewhere where they cut their profits. They ate it so that they could pass along the goods to the United States at a lower price. So when the tariff was applied, the price didn't go up. They're not getting their money back either. I just find it really funny that all the people who insisted that tariffs would not cause prices to go up or now outrage. They're not getting refunds because prices went up, but you guys said they wouldn't go up. It's like the $20 burrito people from last week who were complaining about the $20 burrito that doesn't actually exist. In fact, there's new data out today that a Chipotle burrito is actually now more affordable than it was 10 years ago, even with its price increase because of wage growth in the country, even taking into account inflation and inflation eating through wages. The Chipotle burrito is... now more affordable for most Americans. But it's those five Americans it's not most affordable for, who are the poster children for everybody else to claim their victims as well.

It's just remarkable. So last week we had the $20 burrito argument where the JD Vance crowd and the populace were all like $20 burritos is an outrage. The economy is broken. I'm like, you people are in charge of the economy and you're outraged by it? Well, the economy is broken. It's not our fault. It's Joe Biden. The economy is broken and somebody's got to do something about it. Who exactly? The government that made it more expensive? But these are the same people who also cheered on the administration when JD Vance said, we don't need cheap toasters. We need a well-paying job. So they were fine with more expensive toasters, and they were fine with your kids not being able to get 30 baby dolls, but two that were more expensive. They just didn't want the $20 burrito. It's all emotion. There's no coherent policy in any of it. There's no woven ideas. I want to fix this one thing, but by fixing it, I'm going to break this thing. Now I'm going to fix it, and I'm going to break the thing. fix plus something else. There's no coherent ideology. The one good thing about actual conservatism, not this populist nonsense that wears the skin suit of conservatism, is that there is a coherent worldview in how markets work and shape things. And one of the biggest issues is that when the government gets involved, the government makes things worse. When the government gets involved, things get more expensive. The sectors in the economy that are the most expensive are the ones the government is most involved. And increasingly, that's food. But it is health care. It is education. It is housing. The government regulatory Nazis out there who've decided you can't cut down a tree on your property. You really got to build your house in the trees because God forbid you clear cut and then plant a number of trees back to replace the ones you cut down to make it cheaper to build your house. No, no, we can't do that. You must have the fully grown trees in your property. And if they stand in the way of your house, you can keep your property, but you can't build your house. I got a friend of mine who gets mad at me about this super conservative guy. But when I talk about it, you talk to any property developer, one of the biggest impediments now to actually building houses in urban areas is they all have tree ordinances and you can't cut down any trees. And I love the trees myself. I do love the trees. But. There should be a plot on the land where you can say, I want to build a 3,000 square foot house and the trees that are in the area, I cut them down. And you know what? It was 10 trees. So when the house is built, I'll plant 10 new trees. And this buddy of mine, he's hardcore, no, you should not be able to do it. But the trees are in the way. No, the trees are important. The trees are good for the environment, for shade. Well, you know, having a tax base that can affordably live in your city is also good for your city. So maybe you should allow them to build the house and then plant the 10 trees they cut down. And in some cities now, you're literally having to figure out ways to build around the trees, which just drives up all the costs disproportionately. You got to beg some bureaucrat to allow you to cut down a tree, and it's completely arbitrary in the whim of the bureaucrat. And some people are okay with it. The government gets involved. They drive up the costs of building. They drive up the cost of education. They drive up the cost of food. In California now, if you sell pork in California,

You have to arrange that you only have so many pigs and they're so spread out and they get care and feeding and tickled and baths and everything else. And because most of the pork that's sold in California isn't actually in California, people in other states have seen their pork prices, particularly bacon prices, go up to comply with the regulations of California. And sadly, the Supreme Court said this is perfectly legal unless Congress acts and Congress will not act. Congress could bring down a lot of grocery prices tomorrow by getting rid of the ability of states to impose their care and feeding of animals regulations on animals that are about to go get slaughtered. It's only a matter of time before the Portlandia skid about knowing the name of your chicken before it was killed is actually real, where we must have labels on every package from Springer Mountain Farm chicken and the like that tells us that, well, this chicken came from Sandy and she was three years old when she was slaughtered and she was born in a chicken coop in Unidilla, Georgia. It just, I mean, that just drives up costs. By the way, there is so much chicken right now in the nation. There's a chicken glut that the price of chicken has come down. The price of eggs has come back down. These things are good. And what did the government do? The government got out of the way and they let the market work. The government got rid of import controls and tariffs to allow importation of eggs to bring down the prices. We cracked down on the chicken, or the bird flu and the like, and it worked. But now the very same populace who told us tariffs would not raise prices want refunds from the companies getting the tariff refunds because they say that's proof the prices went up when they ensured us that they knew better than the economists and the prices didn't go up. But you know what? The prices didn't go up as high as the economists expected because what do the companies do instead? They didn't give people wages. And so now I'm telling the Fortune 500 getting these massive checks. You will cause a backlash against... Corporate America like you have never seen unless you start pouring money in to invest in your companies in the United States and raise wages with the refund you're getting because we all know you didn't raise prices the way you could have raised them. Instead, you just didn't give people pay raises. Now you better or there will be bipartisan hell to pay. Have something to say? Hello. Call the show. 1-877-9-7 airing. That's 1-877-97-9-7-425.

He may not tell you what you want to hear, but he tells you what you need to hear. It's the Eric Erickson Show. Well, I have some interesting data. I texted my daughter and said, I guess you've been marked safe from being a lesbian today, huh? There's a fire has released new academic data on the college majors that are most likely to be heterosexual. At the top of the list, 95% reporting to be heterosexual finance majors. Number two at 89% business. Number three at 88% marketing. If you're in finance, business, or marketing, you are overwhelmingly likely to be heterosexual. At the other end of the list. Fine arts, 27% heterosexual, 29% for theater, 35% for archaeology, 37% for English. I mean, archaeology. I mean, you're into leather and whips and cowboy boots and hats, I guess, because Indiana Jay Jones. Dun-da-da-da-da-da. African-American studies, 42% anthropology. You know, the real surprise here. The real surprise is that if you're a theater kid, you're only 29% likely to be heterosexual, but if you're a dance major, you're 49% likely to be there. Almost 50-50. Film and media studies is 50-50. I mean, that's the dividing line there. And above that, everything, digital media design, environmental studies, earth science, physics, philosophy, history, ag, sociology, even the classics, animal science, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, you go up. Now, the undecides, this is the most interesting one. The kids who are undecided are decided about their sexuality, at least 57% of them say they're heterosexual. I mean, it's, but again, the highest are the business class is 95% finance. Is law in here? Let's see. Yep, law criminology, 74% heterosexual. Where is political science? Political science, 66% of people who say they're majoring in political science or heterosexual. That kind of tracks. Pre-med is at 80%. Yep, where else do we have in here? Yeah, linguistics, 47% and music, 46%. Art history, 42%. How do you even survey this stuff? How do you survey? I just, what is the question that you ask? I don't know. Do you know what questions that you have to ask when you're building a computer for yourself? You don't. If you go to vision computers, they ask the questions of you. They ask what you need it for, what you want it for, how long you want to have it, and they build you a computer that is your computer. You know, if you go to the electronics store, you know, the big box store that we all get our TVs from, you can get a computer there, and it's going to be the one-size-fits-all computer. It's going to be the computer of the masses. It's not going to be your computer, and you're not going to get Vision Computers world-class tech support with it either. But if you call Vision Computers at 404-comput, wherever you are in the United States, hi, Alaska, call them at 404 compute.

You could make a comfortable living, telling people what's going on in the world. And Candace Owens makes way more money than me lying to people on a daily basis. And a lot of people, gullible people, they want to believe the lies because it's all emotion at the end of the day. It's the soap opera. And she is mad now that the defense. It's kind of undercut everything she's been telling people forever that it was the Jews. No, it's not. It's Tyler Robinson. And yet there are people out there. And I, again, I have encountered these people in the wild. And they listen to people like Candace Owens. They listen to people like Tucker Carlson. That's where they get their news. They think these people are honest brokers. And they stand up to the man and they're courageous and brave. And they really do believe that Tyler Robinson is the fall guy for Israel. They really do believe that there is a conspiracy that some guy just couldn't have shot. Charlie Kirk, the number of people who insisted that his, there's no way that his gun could have fired a bullet like that of that caliber and not done more than it did, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And yet they've all been proven wrong. The coroner has proven them wrong. The police have proven them wrong. Tyler Robinson's own defense has proven them wrong. And they are still dogmatic about it. There's a web of conspiracies and lies. Something is really unhealthy in society. And I mentioned that this morning and somebody says, Erickson, you can't reason people out of things they never reasoned themselves into. There's a lot of wisdom in that. You can't logically talk people out of something that they talk to themselves into not logically, but emotionally. They want to believe the conspiracy theory. They want to be entertained. And they don't acknowledge that there's something in their brain that has them entertained. And they love the salaciousness of it. They love feeling like they have the inside knowledge. What it is is a lot of people, they really want to feel superior to everyone else in their belief system. Take the conspiracy theory now about Anthony Fauci. I've gotten eaten alive by a number of people on this. Here's the thing. Anthony Fauci privately relayed concerns in 2020 via text message that the MRNA vaccine for COVID might cause miscarriages. And people are outraged. Anthony Fauci knew it and he didn't say it publicly. No. If you actually read the paperwork, what Anthony Fauci did is he had a concern. They investigated and determined it wasn't a concern. And I've gotten inundated with emails for people saying, my daughter had the COVID vaccine and then she had a miscarriage. My wife ate McDonald's when she was a kid and now she's got stage four lung cancer. Did the McDonald's give her the lung cancer? No.

The odds that COVID gave your daughter the miscarriage. I don't mean to be cruel to you, but I'm trying to drive home the point to you that we can look at these things and say, is the rate of miscarriage from women who get the COVID vaccine higher than people who didn't get the COVID vaccine? And the conclusion by even the people who think the COVID vaccine causes problems is no. And yet people hate Anthony Fauci, and so they want to believe that Anthony Fauci was engaged in cover. By the way, Anthony Fauci covered up a lot of stuff. He's not a good guy, and he should go to jail for what he did. But this is not one of those things. And when you highlight this miscarriage conspiracy theory, you undermine all the other claims about Anthony Fauci. When you hang your hat on the one thing that isn't true, you undermine everything else. Now, here's why I take all of this stuff real seriously. I actually really do believe that a guy died on a cross was buried and three days later came back to life. I fundamentally believe that. It is as much a by-faith belief that I have as you have that the Jews killed Charlie Kirk, if that's your view, or that the COVID vaccine causes miscarriages or what have you. I fundamentally believe that there was a first man and woman, Adam and Eve. I fundamentally believe there was a big boat on which a family and a bunch of animals were on with a global flood. I fundamentally believe that the water separated and the Israelites were able to walk across dry land where there was sea. I fundamentally believe that Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, was buried, descended into hell, and on the third day rose again from the dead. rose into heaven and we'll come back. I fundamentally believe this. I don't have any doubt about it. When the book of Hebrews talks about hope and the resurrection, what it means the word hope is terribly translated in English, it means a profound certainty. I have the profound certainty that that is true. I raise that point because of this. If you're out there telling me the world is flat that we never landed on the moon, that the COVID vaccine causes miscarriages, that Tyler Robinson was an agent of the Jews, and they're the ones who really killed Charlie Kirk. Good luck convincing people also that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, suffered under Pontchus Pilate was crucified, die, was buried, and rose again on the third day. Because if you believe all the crazy stuff that isn't true, you're going to have a real hard time convincing people of the one thing that really is true and the thing that matters most in life. And that is why I sometimes push back real hard on people who disagree with me on this stuff when I know this stuff isn't true. Anthony Fauci did a lot of terrible things and lied about a lot of things. COVID miscarriage stuff is not one of them. And when you hold your hat and hang your hat on that, you are undermining all of the real truth claims about the bad things Anthony Fauci did when even the people who hate the COVID vaccine and don't think it should have been manufactured like, look, there's no statistical difference between women who don't get it and do heavy miscarriages. There's none. You can't convince people of the true things when you believe all the lies.

You can't convince people that Tyler Robinson was an agent of the Jews and then try to tell them, tell people that Jesus is real when everybody who is saying knows Tyler Robinson was not an agent of the Jews. And what's crazy to me on the Tyler Robinson story as well is that this guy was acting out on the trans agenda. We've had multiple shooters in the country in the last two years who were transgender acting out against Christians. One of them, you will recall, shot up a church in, was it Michigan or Minnesota, shot up a church? On behalf of the trans agenda, targeting Christians, targeting Catholic kids in a church. You had the shooter at Covenant in Nashville who was trans, who shot up the school of the Christians. And here comes Tyler Robinson, who shoots Charlie Kirk. And the first reaction of the conspiracy theorist is not that this follows a pattern of the trans agenda turning violent. It's that up, it must be the Jews.

People's minds are breaking in the 21st century. And you know what I think it is? Actually, I think it's information overload. I think it's information overload that people are now so overwhelmed with information in their pocket that they are losing their ability to discern what is true and what is not true. And to some degree to process what is true and not true, they're processing it through how are they most entertained? How is the tickling ears tickled? How is the itch scratched? But then that gets to other things like data centers and the flock cameras. Flock CEO, Garrett, I forget his last name. We share the same barber, ironically. Garrett is saying they're going to restrict how long flock keeps data. They're going to put on new protocols. They're going to allow new audits. They're going to protect people from police abuse, things like that. Do you know how many kids have been saved by flock cameras in just the last year alone? It's a significant number. The number of dementia patients who have been saved, and yet people are worried about the future. And they're worried about the future, one because of the conspiracy theories, but also because of the insane rhetoric that's coming out of people. The insane rhetoric, let me play you some of this. Because I transition from the conspiracy theory to the normal concerns, but the normal concerns are getting amplified as well. This is one of the Democratic Socialists of America talking about the talking about the...

Democrats and their path to take over and what they want to do. And it's really alarming the way the guy is talking about trying to plot to take over. It actually is not only extremely disruptive, but they actually are headed towards a place where we could elect ourselves into socialism and only be able to shoot our ways out. This is the PSL founder. Talking about the growth. Now, hang on a second, PSL party. That is the party for socialism and liberation. They're partners with the Democratic Socialists of America. They're actually the more closer to the communists that even the DSA is. Listen to this. If we have one of our comrades get into the U.S. Congress, we're going to use it to disrupt the U.S. Congress, to expose the U.S. Congress, to expose the capitalist, to expose the billionaires. and not try to reform the capitalist system, but to expose why it should be toppled and replaced by a rational, humane system called socialism. Let's say we became a socialist government. DSA, PSL, some other parties. Some unions, we became the government. What would we do right away that would make a difference for large parts of the population that aren't yet socialist but are starting to be sympathetic? Well, here's a couple of things that you could do. Because you would say housing is a right and no one will ever be homeless again. And if you're paying a mortgage to a bank, your mortgage is canceled. You don't have to pay another penny. The house belongs to you. Right then, you have like many millions of conservative homeowners who would say, we like this DSA-PSL government. Until it brings down the banking system and we can't bank anymore and they don't ever want to leave office. When the rhetoric, the shrill rhetoric of the DSA and the PSL and the like, I can understand my friends who have civil liberty concerned about flock cameras creating a police state because we open the door in corporate America and then you move it into the government to spy on us. When you have the Democrats saying they're going to pack the Supreme Court with a bunch of progressives, we can say today we have a privacy right that prevents the government from snooping with the flock cameras without reason. But tomorrow we could have a Supreme Court that says, well, you can do whatever you want to snatch people civil liberties away. And the concerns. are started by the hysteria of the left. They're woven into a conspiracy theory emotionalism that is pervasive in society today. And there's a fear and a worry about tomorrow. What's going to happen tomorrow? Today, we cannot allow the cameras to rescue kidnapped kids and find patients with dementia who have disappeared because tomorrow is something bad can happen. Part of this also is an antithetical to scripture. Today's got enough problems. Worry about today. Tomorrow will take...

care of itself. So many people are getting whipped into a frenzy about the what if scenarios of tomorrow they can't enjoy today. And all of these things are weaving together into an unhealthy... situation in society where people are losing their minds over the fears about tomorrow they can't enjoy today they're losing their minds about reality and in the process all of them are undermining the actual truth claims that society needs to survive the biggest of which is the resurrection you cannot tell me you can take someone seriously on the idea of the resurrection being real when today they're telling you that Tyler Robinson is an agent of israel and if we don't chop down all the flock here cameras today. Tomorrow, the Democratic Socialists of America will take over in a coup and turn us into a surveillance police date. And, oh, by the way, look, they've already lied to us about Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. People are losing their minds online. And again, I really do, I have decided the root cause is information overload. We now are so flooded with so much information, so many seconds of the day, we're losing our ability to discern what is real and not real. And the itching of our ears and the tickling of our ears, we're gravitating to those who take care of those feelings as opposed to those who tell you the truth. And people are falling away from reality. They're not falling away from the truth. They're not falling away from the truth. They're Y'all, I have met people who in the real world believe that Tyler Robinson was an agent of Israel. I have met people in the real world who believe that the assassination in Pennsylvania and Butler, the assassination tip, was staged by the president to shape his reelection campaign. And I have met people who believe the same assassination was a plot of the Jews. And it's alarming that these numbers of people are growing, and then it conflates into the data centers and the flock cameras and everything else, and people can't know what's true, and everyone lives in a state of anxiety about what might happen tomorrow, and if I can give you one piece of advice, it's tomorrow will take care of itself. And if you're so worried about it, You're not going to be able to enjoy today. And what we're seeing with the anger of the Democratic Socialists who hate Thanksgiving and hate the Fourth of July and hate football and everything else is that these people can't enjoy tomorrow because they already hate today and you don't want to become like them. Honest. Putting your trust in me to tell you what's going on. Transparent. I need you to know this from the bottom of my heart. Giving you the information without the noise. My job is to tell you what you want to hear. It's to tell you the truth. It's the Eric Erickson Show.

Just joined us? No worries. Check out the Eric Erickson Show 24-7 stream at Ericerickson.com. Available for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Hello, my friends. It is Eric Erickson here. This hour of the program brought to you by Van Allen Golf. Van Allen Golf.com makers of fine golf equipment. They're about to start getting some apparel on there and stuff. You can say 15% on any order by going to Van Allen Golf.com and putting in my name, Eric, E-R-I-C-K. You can also text golf. to 33777. Y'all, I wasn't kidding when I say that the Bass lure is one of the biggest stories of the Wall Street Journal Day, but there's another one I actually want to get into. The United States has wargamed with Ukraine. Our top forces engaged in war games with Ukraine, and in every single scenario, we lost. Every single scenario we lost to their drone army, which is the evolution of drone warfare. I want to get to that. And also... The V8, it's not going anywhere. Americans refuse to give up the V8. Environmentalists are furious. and I wonder if Toyota's starting to second-guess decided to make all of its models some sort of souped-up four-cylinder. I got to tell you, I used to love my for forerunner, but I'm not buying a four-cylinder vehicle for anybody in my family. It's got to be six-cylinders at least, the get-up and go, whether you call it a hybrid or not, and I'm sure there will be some defenders, but nope, I want a six-cylinder, eight-cylinder, ten, I want something with power. I'm too tired of getting behind people on the interstate who don't know how to accelerate onto the on ramp. Now, I want you to also get a good night's sleep, which is how you can if you go to cozyearth.com and put in Eric as your promo code at checkout. You'll get 20% off there. If you don't know about cozy earth sheets, they are premium bamboo sheets. They come with a hundred night trial. When's the last time you ordered sheets for your bed that you could sleep on for 100 nights if you'd like you can send them back? They even have a 10-year warranty. They're not going to fray like some of the cotton sheets for sale out there online. They are fantastically well-made. They are super light, super comfortable, and they keep you cool. And if you sleep cool at night, you sleep better at night. Go to cozyearth.com. Use promo code Eric at checkout, save 20%. CozyEarth.com. You can sleep cooler at night, sleep better at night. And, well, you're not going to need new sheets for a very long time because they're going to hold up. And they get softer over time, even. And they're already soft. CozyEarth.com. The promo code is Eric, E, E, C, C.C, save 20% at cozyEarth.com. Get a great, cool night sleep.

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