Verdict with Ted Cruz - December 02, 2021


Enough From Michael


Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

168.3982

Word count

5,403

Sentence count

343

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ted Cruz is a conservative presidential candidate who has been a long-term member of the Texas House of Representatives and is running for re-election in 2020. In this episode of Verdict With Ted Cruz, he answers a question from the mailbag.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.580 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.460 Enough from me.
00:00:06.780 I want to hear from you.
00:00:09.020 We all do, so we are taking your questions here.
00:00:11.760 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
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00:04:09.600 Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:04:11.780 So wonderful to be with everybody.
00:04:13.380 We have not done a great job on recent episodes in taking questions from our wonderful Verdict audience.
00:04:20.080 We've gotten so wrapped up in the things we're talking about that we have neglected the absolute best part of the show,
00:04:25.600 which is hearing from you, which we will do in one second.
00:04:28.660 But before we do that, we have a favor to ask.
00:04:31.560 You need to apply at yaf.org slash verdict to bring this show to your school.
00:04:37.920 We don't just want to hear from you in the mailbag.
00:04:39.400 We want to hear from you in real life.
00:04:41.140 We had a great time on the fall tour going all around to Wisconsin, to Texas, to Washington, D.C.
00:04:46.640 We're going to be doing another three schools this spring with Young America's Foundation.
00:04:51.260 So if you want to apply, the deadline is December 15th.
00:04:54.140 Head on over to yaf.org slash verdict.
00:04:58.500 All right, Liz, let's hear from our wonderful listeners in the mailbag.
00:05:02.720 Thank you, Michael.
00:05:03.520 We have a lot of great, great questions over on Verdict Plus today.
00:05:07.120 As always, if you want to submit a question for the mailbag portion of our show, you can do so on Verdict Plus.
00:05:13.060 Just go to verdictwithtedcruz.com slash plus and submit your question.
00:05:17.620 Subscribers over there get exclusive access to be the ones to ask Michael and the senator and me any question that you want.
00:05:24.460 As I said, we have a lot of great questions.
00:05:26.120 You can always continue to submit them, but let's get to the first one.
00:05:29.620 The first one, Senator Cruz, is for you.
00:05:31.900 It is from Jersey.
00:05:33.260 Jersey asks, can the federal government, after a person has been tried and judged by his and her peers, retry a case?
00:05:40.400 By what authority or law do they even have that authority and power to intervene in a state's judicial system?
00:05:46.020 What in the Constitution or Bill of Rights gives or retrains the federal government from the power to intervene in a concluded and tried in a court case?
00:05:54.480 Well, that's a good question.
00:05:55.660 So the Constitution protects you from what's called double jeopardy, which is you cannot be tried twice for the same crime.
00:06:03.860 So if you're charged with murder and there is a murder trial and you are acquitted, they can't come back and say, oh, we don't like that result, so let's go bring another murder charge against you.
00:06:17.400 There is, however, an exception to double jeopardy, which is you can be tried for a different crime.
00:06:24.380 And so there's a legal analysis of whether – so, for example, let's say you – to use an easy example, you're tried and acquitted of murder, but you also were speeding on the way to the murder.
00:06:36.940 You can certainly be tried and convicted or acquitted of the speeding because those are separate and distinct crimes.
00:06:42.260 When it comes to a federal crime, if it is a separate and distinct crime, you can be charged with it, but there's a legal analysis in terms of whether you're simply retrying for the acquitted conduct and the acquitted crime.
00:06:58.800 So no on a murder charge, for example, but yes, if they are different and distinct crimes.
00:07:06.020 All right, Michael, let me pivot over to you because this is a question that came in specifically requesting clarification from Knowles.
00:07:13.100 JJ 4884 says, I know you often criticize libertarians for being too licentious and crazy when it comes to certain moral issues.
00:07:21.380 Are there certain people of certain occupations or fields of interest that cannot be traditionally conservative, i.e. tech issues?
00:07:29.260 Are there ways you could steel man libertarianism and any prominent libertarians you could stand alongside?
00:07:34.720 That's a great question.
00:07:35.880 Well, you know, I'm glad to hear you brought up big tech because at first when you said that you wanted to know if certain professions just naturally can't lend themselves to virtue and naturally lend themselves to licentiousness,
00:07:48.980 I assumed you were talking about, say, prostitution, but working for big tech is far, far more disreputable than being a prostitute or a drug dealer or something like that.
00:07:58.980 So I think that's a pretty good example to bring up big tech here.
00:08:02.660 Yeah, there are certain fields that naturally are just not going to be all that conservative.
00:08:10.720 And I do think it has been a mistake of the conservative movement to try to be all things to all people and to say that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt me or scare the horses in the street.
00:08:22.200 I mean this is why we still have drug laws in this country.
00:08:24.620 We're saying there are some things that you can do with your body that we don't think that you should be allowed to do or actually for that matter laws against prostitution.
00:08:32.980 And so now as we have discussed on this show a number of times, one of the debates on the right is over the influence that libertarianism should have versus traditionalism versus all – conservatives love all their isms.
00:08:45.940 A friend of mine once told me that the obscure political monikers are the right-wing version of gender pronouns.
00:08:52.120 So everyone has got one and some people have multiple.
00:08:55.460 And after the Second World War, there was what's called fusionism.
00:08:59.960 This was the post-war conservative movement put together by guys like Bill Buckley and Frank Meyer.
00:09:05.580 You might call it the Reagan coalition of libertarians and traditional conservatives and war hawk democrats.
00:09:11.340 They all had a common enemy in the Soviet Union.
00:09:14.580 They might have hated communism for different reasons, but they partnered together and won the Cold War.
00:09:19.440 And since that time, probably the libertarian side or the neoconservative side has led that coalition.
00:09:25.340 Traditional conservatives and some of the other groups have fallen out of favor, lost some of their power.
00:09:32.440 In 2016 then, you saw the more traditional conservative types or the more populist types try to take ground.
00:09:38.900 And so these debates are inevitable.
00:09:40.840 But in answer to your question, would you stand alongside libertarians?
00:09:43.780 I'd say, of course I would.
00:09:44.700 The fact is, politics is the art of inclusion.
00:09:48.300 And the only way you're ever going to do anything is if you can win elections.
00:09:52.380 And in order to win elections, you need to win 50 percent of the vote plus one.
00:09:56.960 And there simply are not enough traditional conservatives or enough libertarians for that matter or enough whoever to win on their own.
00:10:05.200 So you've got to form coalitions.
00:10:06.700 I just think that in some cases the libertarians have had a little too much leeway.
00:10:14.620 And frankly, I even use this term libertarianism reluctantly because I don't think that legalizing all drugs and saying that we have to totally redefine marriage and legalizing all manner of vice and licentiousness is exactly in the tradition of John Locke or Thomas Jefferson or even the 20th century.
00:10:37.020 Libertarians is certainly not the classical liberals.
00:10:39.220 So I just think we need to be a little more substantive about our views, not merely the right to freedom of religion or the right to freedom of speech, but actually have something to say and actually something more clearly that we can believe.
00:10:51.100 And I think part of that is just intrinsic to the conservative movement in America.
00:10:56.680 But whatever we've been doing for the past 20 years or so, it doesn't seem to have worked that well.
00:11:02.660 We seem to have lost on every major cultural issue.
00:11:05.220 And so I think we need the courage to say, no, this is good, this is bad, this is true, this is false, and stand by those convictions even if they're unpopular.
00:11:14.760 Well, and Michael, let me chime in on that real briefly, which is I think I'm a little bit more libertarian than you are, but I'll go even further right now.
00:11:22.780 Senator, I think Attila the Hun is a little more libertarian than I am.
00:11:25.280 So I think it's absolutely fair.
00:11:27.540 But I'm going to go even further and praise a libertine, which is, and by name, Bill Maher.
00:11:35.820 Bill Maher, his politics are very different from yours.
00:11:38.900 They're very different from mine.
00:11:41.020 He may be an old school liberal, but Bill Maher is someone who I think might well admit he's a libertine and he defends licensiousness with gusto and pride.
00:11:51.880 And it's an amazing statement of where we are today that Bill Maher as an unabashed libertine is finding himself relatively conservative because – and maybe the new impetus for the new fusionism will be the woke anti-Americanism of the hard left. 0.72
00:12:12.720 Because when Bill Maher speaks out against cancel culture, when he speaks out against Democrats who have lost common sense, when he speaks out against the idiocy of canceling people and correcting your pronouns and – or when he speaks out against radical jihad.
00:12:31.380 And today's angry left condemns him, even though Bill Maher and I disagree on a lot of issues, I'm grateful that he has the courage to speak out against the petty tyrants that would silence all of us.
00:12:48.740 The next question is from Elizabeth P., and I promise I did not pick this question solely based on the fact that we share a name.
00:12:55.380 I picked it because it's a good question as well, but there might have been a little element of – it's not nepotism, but, you know, some sort of similarity of name.
00:13:02.420 Elizabeth P. says, please ask the senator to block all efforts by the DOJ to retrial Kyle – or to retry Kyle and attach parents – attack parents speaking out at school boards.
00:13:14.560 Senator?
00:13:15.820 Yeah, look, it is a great point.
00:13:18.180 I very much hope we do not see the Biden Justice Department try to attack Kyle Rittenhouse.
00:13:24.120 We had a trial.
00:13:25.420 The jury rendered its verdict.
00:13:26.760 They need to accept that verdict.
00:13:28.080 Now, I'm concerned.
00:13:31.740 I think this Justice Department has been wildly political.
00:13:35.860 I think it's in the first year been in many ways more political than the Obama Justice Department, which is hard to believe because the Obama Justice Department was deeply politicized.
00:13:46.720 You know, the second half of that question focused on going after parents, and it's one of the worst examples of the politicized Biden Justice Department where the National Association of School Boards wrote a letter to the Biden White House saying,
00:14:00.860 will you please go after parents, treat them as domestic terrorists, use the Patriot Act, and silence them because, gosh, we really don't like parents getting mad at us for teaching critical race theory.
00:14:11.580 We don't like parents getting mad at us for covering up sexual assaults of girls in bathrooms at school.
00:14:19.100 And so if – would the Department of Justice go after these terrorists?
00:14:24.140 And just five days later, the attorney general directed the DOJ and the FBI to target parents and to use tools to go after them.
00:14:33.320 I think it was an absolute grotesque abuse of power.
00:14:36.240 It wasn't law.
00:14:37.440 It was politics.
00:14:38.740 And I got to say, if we see the Biden DOJ go after Kyle Rittenhouse, it won't be law.
00:14:44.420 It will be politics.
00:14:45.240 And so the question asks, will you please stop them?
00:14:50.080 I will say, sadly, I don't have a magic stop button in my Senate office.
00:14:54.800 I wish I did.
00:14:55.560 I would, much like Bill Buckley, perhaps stand to thwart history and yell halt or yell stop.
00:15:01.880 But I do at least have a spotlight and the ability to draw attention and call them out.
00:15:08.720 But under our Constitution, it's the executive branch that executes.
00:15:14.140 And so right now, the Biden administration is the only federal – branch of the federal government that can bring an indictment.
00:15:22.140 It is the only branch of the federal government that can execute the laws.
00:15:26.140 So I can do all I can to shine a light on them and denounce them.
00:15:29.820 But at the end of the day, until the voters come in and give us a new Congress and a new executive,
00:15:36.560 we're going to continue to see more and more abuse of power, sadly, from the Biden DOJ.
00:15:42.400 And, Senator, this next question is a very good question as it pertains to, I guess, the legal authority of the chief executive here.
00:15:50.680 This question is from Verdict Hawk, who asks, if a court suspends or rules against an action taken by the administration,
00:15:57.840 i.e., the vaccine mandate, but the administration persists, what remedies are available to the court?
00:16:04.620 So that's a great question.
00:16:06.300 There are a couple of different incidences of that occurring right now.
00:16:10.120 Two come to mind.
00:16:11.200 Number one is the order you just referenced, which is the Fifth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals has issued an order
00:16:22.660 staying the effect of the Biden vaccine mandate insofar as it applies to private employers.
00:16:30.220 So the OSHA mandate that applies to employers with 100, 100 more employees, that's been stayed pending litigation.
00:16:36.420 Initially, the Biden White House, the deputy press secretary, went out and said, well, you ought to just comply anyway.
00:16:44.260 Never mind the court order.
00:16:45.380 Just obey anyway.
00:16:47.240 And we've talked on the pod about how I think the Biden White House knows that this vaccine mandate is illegal and it's likely to lose in court.
00:16:56.560 But I think they cynically are counting on most people obeying anyway while the litigation proceeds.
00:17:02.760 And I think that order was an example of – or not the order, the comment from the press secretary was an example of that lawlessness.
00:17:09.580 I will say OSHA did formally suspend the order pending the resolution of that lawsuit.
00:17:16.800 So you did see ultimately the administration forced to comply even while they're urging people to pretend like the order still has force of law.
00:17:26.720 A second example of this concerns our open borders and the decision that Joe Biden made that caused the most havoc on our southern border was the decision to end the Remain in Mexico agreement.
00:17:41.800 Remain in Mexico was an agreement Trump negotiated with Mexico where people who came illegally into Mexico were applying for U.S. asylum.
00:17:52.220 They'd stay in Mexico while the asylum case was proceeding.
00:17:56.120 Remain in Mexico was unbelievably effective. 0.78
00:17:58.460 Last year we had the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years.
00:18:02.700 Biden came in on day one, ended Remain in Mexico, and the illegal immigration skyrocketed to now the highest rate in 61 years.
00:18:10.680 Biden administration was sued for pulling out of Remain in Mexico by Texas and Missouri, and Biden had been lost.
00:18:22.380 A district court in Texas ruled that the Biden administration had violated the law by pulling out of the Remain in Mexico agreement without going through the notice and process and the procedural steps required to do that.
00:18:35.100 So they're under an order to reenter to reenter the Remain in Mexico agreement.
00:18:40.960 They are dragging their feet, and they're basically defying that order.
00:18:44.460 And I've talked to whistleblowers at Customs and Border Patrol who said that even though this court order has been in place for many, many weeks now, they're just slow rolling.
00:18:55.700 They're moving unbelievably slowly.
00:18:58.060 So they're telling the judge, oh, we're going to comply, but in particular with this kind of order, it's easy for a defiant administration to resist it because it requires the cooperation of a sovereign nation.
00:19:11.800 So all they have to do is surreptitiously tell Mexico, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, please tell us you don't want to do this.
00:19:20.160 And then Mexico says, sorry, we don't want to do this.
00:19:22.300 And they say, gosh, judge, nothing we can do.
00:19:23.940 Mexico doesn't want to do this. 0.99
00:19:25.100 I have deep suspicions that's what they're doing.
00:19:29.120 When Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas testified before the Judiciary Committee, I asked him that question specifically.
00:19:37.160 He denied they were doing it.
00:19:39.080 But, you know, you just asked a minute ago what remedies are there.
00:19:43.080 I'll tell you the judge has a remedy, which is you can hold – the judge can hold specific members of the administration in contempt for violating the order and can literally incarcerate them.
00:19:53.800 And, you know, I asked Secretary Mayorkas, what would you say to the judge if the judge said, Mr. Secretary, why should I not put you in jail right now for defying my order and slow walking my order?
00:20:07.260 Mayorkas' answer is, well, we're trying to obey.
00:20:09.600 We are complying.
00:20:10.580 What he didn't admit is they're doing so unbelievably slowly and allowing the chaos to unfold.
00:20:17.820 Ultimately, they risk – I think there's a real possibility you see a judge enter a contempt hearing because they have, as a real and practical matter, a contempt for anything holding them to account.
00:20:29.380 And what makes it even more confusing, especially for a layman like me, is we keep talking about this as a fight between the executive and the judiciary.
00:20:39.280 And we're taught in school that there is the executive and the judiciary and the legislature.
00:20:43.540 But there are a couple of other groups that pop up as well.
00:20:46.900 We sometimes talk about the media as a fourth branch of government.
00:20:49.920 But what about the administrative state?
00:20:51.560 You know, in this case, the judiciary is saying don't enforce the order.
00:20:55.480 Joe Biden is tasking an administrative agency, OSHA, to enforce his order.
00:21:00.580 And so Biden says employers keep following the order.
00:21:03.680 OSHA, the administrative agency, says, OK, we're going to suspend the order until the court finally decides on this.
00:21:08.740 And so you seem to have a little bit of dissent even within the executive branch, you know, the president and his administrative agencies, all of which says to me, without a law school education, never having argued before the Supreme Court, that our government might not work quite the way we were told it does in Schoolhouse Rock.
00:21:24.820 Michael, I was with you right until the moment that you cast dispersions on Schoolhouse Rock.
00:21:29.540 That was going too far.
00:21:31.740 And my God, man, have you no shame?
00:21:36.340 Have you no decency, sir?
00:21:38.140 Yes.
00:21:38.560 At long last, have you no decency?
00:21:43.240 All right.
00:21:43.780 Our next question, Michael, I'm going to toss this one to you.
00:21:46.300 This is from, well, the username of this individual, just to quote it exactly, is deadass Nemo.
00:21:51.400 Take that or leave it.
00:21:52.360 Here's the question, though.
00:21:53.060 It's a good question.
00:21:53.600 What do Michael and Senator Cruz disagree on politically and culturally?
00:21:58.500 Well, we touched on something earlier, which is the senator said he's probably a little more libertarian than me.
00:22:04.680 And because just about everyone, including Genghis Khan, is more libertarian than me, I guess that would be one area of distinction.
00:22:13.320 And then, well, we're both Italian.
00:22:18.600 We were both cigar smokers.
00:22:21.840 In terms of legislation, we probably agree on almost every single thing.
00:22:27.240 You know, OK, I know I know what we agree.
00:22:29.120 I have a big point of disagreement here.
00:22:30.880 But Senator Cruz is a Monte Cristo guy, and I'm a little bit more of a Cohiba man myself.
00:22:36.820 You know, I'm willing to split the difference and smoke both.
00:22:40.080 See, that's compromise.
00:22:41.260 It's the art of the possible.
00:22:44.300 All right.
00:22:44.620 The last question is from Eileen.
00:22:47.100 This one, topically, it's not out there, but I thought it was very interesting because you don't often hear this question.
00:22:53.920 Eileen asks, what are your ideas for an alternative option for our power grid?
00:22:59.420 Senator?
00:22:59.640 Well, there are lots of things we can do to enhance the resiliency of the power grid.
00:23:05.820 Some of it is having a diversity of sources of energy so that you don't have a particular source that goes down and that the system is dependent on that.
00:23:15.100 You have coal-fired plants, which are widespread and pretty consistently the most reliable.
00:23:23.160 They also pollute the most.
00:23:24.440 You've got natural gas, electricity generation, natural gas is also very reliable, has much, much lower pollution, much, much lower CO2 emissions, which is a big part of the reason why last year the United States led the world in reduction of CO2 emissions because we shifted a whole bunch of electricity production from coal to natural gas.
00:23:47.120 You've got wind and solar, both of which are important parts of the grid, the state of Texas.
00:23:54.120 A lot of people don't know Texas is the number one producer of wind energy in the country.
00:24:00.560 One of the problems with wind and solar is they're not always reliable.
00:24:04.180 There are days when the sun doesn't shine, where it's cloudy or it's rainy and solar doesn't produce the same power.
00:24:09.120 There are days when the wind doesn't blow.
00:24:11.440 And so wind and solar can supplement your electrical output, but they're not good on days.
00:24:18.300 They're not consistently reliable and they tend to be highly variable in terms of their output.
00:24:23.240 And in places like Texas where we don't often have cold, we saw in the winter storm last year, a lot of the wind turbines froze because they weren't weatherized.
00:24:34.640 You can weatherize wind turbines and in colder environments they do that.
00:24:38.580 In Texas they hadn't and that clearly proved to be a mistake that hopefully is being corrected.
00:24:44.220 I know the state legislature passed legislation to weatherize the grid.
00:24:51.640 You've got nuclear.
00:24:52.540 I think nuclear has enormous potential in terms of steady, reliable production of electricity with virtually no pollution or carbon emissions.
00:25:04.440 We actually had in the freeze in Texas, one of our major nuclear plants went down and it went down.
00:25:12.240 I actually went and visited the plant a few weeks ago and it went down because one small pipe and it was a little pipeline that transmitted water was not weatherized.
00:25:25.040 And we're talking, you know, pennies to weatherize this pipe.
00:25:29.260 And that one pipe froze and it was water that was used for a sensor, but because that pipe froze, it triggered the alarms and it shut down an entire reactor for days and then took a bunch of power offline because one pipe years ago had not been weatherized.
00:25:48.020 And it didn't jeopardize the safety of the plant, but because that water pipe froze, the warnings went off and they shut the plant down altogether.
00:25:59.260 They've obviously since weatherized that pipe, but it was a lesson that was not fun learning in the process.
00:26:07.640 You know, I'll say something else that is really potent for resiliency of the grid.
00:26:15.200 And this is going to surprise at least some of you, but it's Bitcoin.
00:26:18.200 And we're going to do a subsequent podcast diving into cryptocurrency and Bitcoin because that's a topic I've been getting very, very involved in.
00:26:26.420 It's a complicated topic. 0.79
00:26:28.600 Most members of the Senate don't know a damn thing about Bitcoin, don't know a damn thing about cryptocurrency.
00:26:34.420 I've been in the process of trying to educate myself, learn more about it, meeting with industry experts.
00:26:40.520 But one of the interesting possibilities, and you may be saying, well, what does Bitcoin have to do with the grid?
00:26:46.500 And to the extent you think about anything concerning Bitcoin and the grid, you think about it as energy consumers.
00:26:54.680 Well, Texas is becoming really the epicenter of Bitcoin and crypto mining in the United States and in the world.
00:27:03.580 And part of the reason is if you want to mine Bitcoin or other crypto, you need abundant energy, you need low-cost energy.
00:27:11.500 And Texas has a lot of that.
00:27:14.760 And there is an opportunity.
00:27:16.600 It's something – a couple of months ago I spoke at the Blockchain National Conference that was in Austin, Texas.
00:27:24.180 And I talked about a win-win opportunity that there is that in West Texas, in the Permian Basin, we've got lots and lots of wells that are right now flaring natural gas.
00:27:35.940 And what happens is you drill an oil well, starts producing oil.
00:27:39.560 Often with the oil, there's natural gas.
00:27:41.920 And there's not enough of the natural gas for it to be economical for you to build a pipeline to transmit the natural gas and use it.
00:27:49.460 So instead, what they do is they flare it.
00:27:52.200 And flare it literally means they light it on fire.
00:27:54.140 So you go out to West Texas at night and you see these flames like torches that are just burning the natural gas that is being produced alongside the oil that they're piping out and selling.
00:28:05.760 Well, what Bitcoin provides the opportunity to do is you can go and set up a Bitcoin rig.
00:28:12.220 Think like an 18-wheeler, like the back of an 18-wheeler.
00:28:16.840 You can set it up right there at that oil well.
00:28:21.760 You can capture the natural gas, put it in a generator right there, and so produce electricity using that natural gas.
00:28:28.640 That electricity can turn, can power a Bitcoin rig that is mining Bitcoin.
00:28:34.780 So you're capturing, it benefits the environment because flaring natural gas is not great for the environment.
00:28:40.940 It produces a lot of pollution, a lot of CO2.
00:28:43.320 If you capture it and put it in a generator, it's much better for the environment.
00:28:47.380 You generate Bitcoin.
00:28:49.680 It makes, instead of economic waste, it makes it an economic profit.
00:28:53.960 And if you have that rig connected to the grid, what it provides is a real opportunity for resiliency because those rigs can be switched on or off in one one-hundredth of a second.
00:29:09.260 So if you have, let's say you have a weather disaster, whether it's a hurricane or a tornado or another freeze, and suddenly the grid, there's a shortage of electricity and the price for electricity shoots up.
00:29:20.220 Well, if suddenly the price on the grid for electricity is higher than the value that would be generated mining Bitcoin, in a hundredth of a second, they can stop the mining of the Bitcoin and put that electricity instead onto the grid.
00:29:34.860 So one way to think about Bitcoin and crypto mining is it's like a battery.
00:29:39.540 It's a way of producing excess electricity that can be diverted back into the grid to meet critical needs in a time of emergency so it can enhance resiliency of the grid.
00:29:51.780 You know, my answer was just going to be hamsters on wheels.
00:29:55.120 So that's much more interesting, Senator.
00:29:57.380 That's, gosh, and especially now, I just recently went out and bought a crypto coin.
00:30:04.960 I had not really invested in crypto at all.
00:30:07.500 I don't know anything about crypto or really anything about investing.
00:30:10.220 So I wanted to do it, and I found a coin that was kind of mean about Joe Biden, and I bought about a billion of them.
00:30:17.480 So I am a billionaire.
00:30:18.380 I don't want you to treat me any differently now.
00:30:19.880 But I'm very excited for this future episode where I will get to learn about the thing that I just invested in, because it sounds like there's a whole lot of possibility there.
00:30:29.980 So I'm very excited about it, but we'll have to hold it until then.
00:30:33.720 Thank you, Liz.
00:30:35.040 All right.
00:30:35.560 Anybody who wants to ask a question for next week's episode, go on over to verdictwithtedcruise.com slash plus.
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00:31:27.060 In the meantime, I'm Michael Moles.
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