Episode 2761 CWSA 02/25/25
Crenshaw, Putin, Trump, DOGE and lots of other fun ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
But Tesla's down 5%. I'll tell you, I'm getting tired of this stocks-going-down stuff. I think there's going to be more of it before there's less of it. But let's get our comments going and then I'll give you the show that you deserve. You deserve it. Yeah, I'm no Joy Behar, but I'll do the best I c…
View segment →h, Rachel says. And I'm wondering what else does Joy Reid have to teach her? I feel like we saw a lot of her lessons. But I think the lesson is you should blame everybody for being a racist. So that would be the big takeaway. And Rachel Maddow said, "I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at…
View segment →k that's what she learned from Joy Reid: to just call everybody racist all the time. You don't have to do anything else. That's the entire game. And when you only have that one speed, the only thing that you do is call everything racist. You know that's going to get turned against your own company,…
View segment →e a strong feeling about this. But none of it's about Crenshaw. And Marjorie Taylor Greene asked him, "Did you just say you want to kill my friend Tucker Carlson?" And he replied on X, you know, "LOL no. Correct. No, he does not actually literally want to kill Tucker Carlson. That would be crazy."…
View segment →too on the nose? What's the one thing that every one of us would have predicted when Kash Patel got nominated for the FBI? Every single one of us would say, oh, they backed up the shredders. They're going to be burning their files and deleting things. Every one of us said that. And then there's a st…
View segment →ng fast corrections. Okay, that one does need a little more money. This one underspent. Move that money over there. Worked fine. Everything worked out just right. Now, here's another one. Here's my second budget story, because if you don't understand how the real world budgets, none of this DOGE cr…
View segment →So when you hear people say, but I've been involved in a number of businesses and we cut with the scalpel, they did. They did. Here's where the scalpel doesn't work: when there is an existential threat and the timer is ticking. If the timer is ticking, you're not going to have the option of using th…
View segment →nly time that I get real hate is when people have an incorrect understanding of what I've ever said or thought. If they don't understand what I've said, then it turns into some crazy thing where they're criticizing me for something they only imagine. But when I say real things, let's take the Dan Cr…
View segment →once you leave the FDA, you can go work for Pfizer and they'll pay you a million dollars a year, whatever it is. But if you continue working for the government, we will also give you a million dollars a year. We'll match it. But you'll be on our side. So you'll do extra work and you'll go extra deep…
View segment →t the DOJ, the FBI, the IRS, and the SEC were all investigating Joe and Hunter Biden but were told to stand down. And Jim Biden was even being investigated for Medicare fraud. Insurrection Barbie's talking about this on X. Apparently six banks reported to the Treasury Department that the Bidens were…
View segment →lab locations. I don't know if we can. I don't know if there's any way to find them from the air. But suppose we could, and then we just turn it over to the other faction and just let them destroy each other until they're so weakened that then you go in. But you wait until they've just beaten themse…
View segment →ouble our capacity? Now, the reason I tell you these stories, there's always a battery story, you know, there's some new battery technology or new battery factory. I like to tell you about some stories that you can tell what the future is by the insurance industry. Like whatever the insurance compan…
View segment →But Tesla's down 5%. I'll tell you, I'm getting tired of this stocks-going-down stuff. I think there's going to be more of it before there's less of it. But let's get our comments going and then I'll give you the show that you deserve. You deserve it. Yeah, I'm no Joy Behar, but I'll do the best I can.
All right, so you go there, go there and there and there. We go. Comments. Oh, plenty.
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Question number one: Now that the funding for USAID is being cut, is that related to the high-level firings we're seeing in the media? Is that why MSNBC is cutting some of their expensive talent, or is it just a coincidence and they're not doing well, so obviously they have to make some changes? I don't know.
As you know, Joy Reid had her last show yesterday. Rachel Maddow didn't take it well. So Rachel Maddow goes on her own show to complain about Joy Reid being fired. And she said that she's learned so much from her, as we all have. Really, we have so much. And she has so much more to teach, Rachel says. And I'm wondering what else does Joy Reid have to teach her? I feel like we saw a lot of her lessons. But I think the lesson is you should blame everybody for being a racist. So that would be the big takeaway.
And Rachel Maddow said, "I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC. Personally, I think it's a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call, and I understand that, but that's what I think."
Now it gets better. Here's the payoff. Rachel Maddow said, "I will tell you it's also unnerving to see that on a network where we have two non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Fang on the weekend. And that feels worse than bad. No matter who replaces them, it feels indefensible. And I do not defend it."
Now, if there's anything that could make me happier than watching Joy Reid being taken off the air, it's watching Rachel Maddow call her own company racist for taking Joy Reid off the air. Now, I think that's what she learned from Joy Reid: to just call everybody racist all the time. You don't have to do anything else. That's the entire game.
And when you only have that one speed, the only thing that you do is call everything racist. You know that's going to get turned against your own company, right? There wasn't any way that that wouldn't work out poorly. Even on paper, if I said to you, all right, here's the deal. There's going to be this network, and the people in the network are going to call everybody and everything racist. Here's what I would have warned the network: You know that's eventually going to be turned on you, right? You can't hire a whole bunch of people who only have one speed. That's racist. It's racist. It's racist. It's racist. It's racist. And then expect that when you make a change that they don't like, that they're not going to call you a racist. Of course they are. Of course they are. It doesn't matter what reasons you have. Doesn't matter at all.
Anyway, one of the things that Rachel Maddow probably is suffering from now is that as long as Joy Reid still had a job, Rachel Maddow felt safe because Joy Reid was even crazier. So it made Rachel Maddow look sort of moderate. But once Joy Reid is gone, now Rachel Maddow will look like the craziest one on the network. And it's going to make her feel like she might be next. And I'm surprised she wasn't, just because of her pay.
How did other people take it? Well, Angela Rye, who's a black woman, which is important to the story, she was a former CNN commentator, and she calls for a boycott of MSNBC because they fired Joy Reid. And I guess that makes them racist. I don't know.
And then Keith Olbermann, you know, my mascot Keith Olbermann, he said in a post, "Breaking: MSNBC racist purge escalates." He names the people who were out. So the left is getting attacked by Keith Olbermann for being racist. Are we supposed to enjoy this as much as we are?
Now, I never like to say only negative things, so I want to say one positive thing. One of the things that Rachel Maddow said in her little speech about what happened is that Rachel Maddow is 51 years old. And I thought to myself, damn, whatever you're doing for skin care is working. Does she look 51? I think I would have guessed 40. That's pretty impressive. But whatever she does for health, it sure works on camera. Anyway, so good for her.
All right. Do you want me to make everybody mad? All right, now I'm going to make everybody mad.
You all saw the story, and you want me to talk about it, where Dan Crenshaw was caught on an open mic saying about Tucker Carlson, quote, "If I ever meet Tucker Carlson, I'll effing kill him. I'm not joking."
Now, this of course caused everybody to say, you crazy, you crazy, unhinged, out-of-control person. How crazy can you be?
And Tucker cleverly invited him to come on the show to see how it turns out. I don't think Tucker was too worried.
Now, you should probably know that Tucker has been quite a critic of Crenshaw. He's called him unstable in the past and says he needs help. I don't know about any of that.
But I had to ask ChatGPT to remind me why it is that so many MAGA people don't like Crenshaw. And it said generic stuff. Tell me if this sounds right. That Crenshaw is more what they called — now remember this is just AI, this is just ChatGPT — said that Crenshaw is more traditional conservative as opposed to a MAGA populist. And he has sometimes wanted to do bipartisan things that the MAGA people didn't like. And he has sometimes criticized Trump, which the MAGA people don't like.
Now, I don't know. Is there more to it? Probably. That sounds kind of generic.
But here's my take, and I'm going to be consistent with past takes about leaked audio and video. Here's my take: The person who's to blame is the person who leaked it.
Now, this is what I always say with a leaked video, because you have to recognize that people say things in private that are perfectly fine in private. As soon as somebody changes the context from private to public, which is what the leaked video did, they turned it into a completely different message. Because when it's private, it's just the way people talk, right? Have you ever said you want to kill somebody privately, and whoever you're talking to knows you don't want to kill them? It's just something you say when you're talking privately. It's like, "Ah, I would kill that person." I mean it.
Now, he also added, "I'm not joking," but that doesn't change it. Of course he's not joking. He's just saying that he doesn't like him.
So my rule is this: If something would be perfectly ordinary in private, and then somebody, some weasel, some weasel decides to drop that video to destroy your life, it's the weasel's fault. So I'd like to know the name of the weasel, because the weasel is who I have all of my hatred for right now. I mean, I hate that guy or woman, whoever it is. Whoever leaked this is just scum. It's despicable, because they knew it would have this effect. And I'm sure they knew that he didn't mean it seriously.
If you'd like to test whether he meant it seriously, I would apply what I call the "really" filter, where you say, "Really? Do you really think that if Crenshaw and Tucker Carlson were in the same room that Crenshaw would really slay him? Really?" Do any of you believe that? No, none of you believe that he would really slay him. So it's just talk. And the things that you say privately.
Now, I think it was a mistake to assume it was private. So there's definitely an error here. And I think Crenshaw probably learned from that. If you've got microphones and people standing around, you don't say that kind of thing if there's a microphone within 100 feet. Like, that's the lesson. So Crenshaw is not guilt-free. I would say that would be a public person error.
Now, I've made the same errors myself. I've definitely said things in places where probably there was a microphone, and maybe I should have been smarter. But, you know, not if it really hurt me.
So I have severe hatred for who leaked it. And don't take this as me supporting everything that Crenshaw wants to do policy-wise or everything he said or everything about his whole life. I don't know too much. But this really pisses me off, the fact that we would treat Crenshaw as the bad guy when the bad guy is the leaker.
Oh, the bad guy is the leaker. Does this sound familiar? Sometimes you can just grab them by the... If that had been private and stayed private, it was just two guys talking, and one of them didn't take it seriously and the other one probably didn't mean it seriously. It really had no impact if it stayed private. As soon as somebody leaked it, it changed the context, because our brains are such that we just imagine it as a public statement because it is public. But it wasn't originally public. Whoever changes the context is responsible for the message, period. Because that's not the original message. The original message is two guys talking. Completely different. Completely different.
If you've never heard two guys talking privately, maybe you wouldn't understand that.
Anyway, so yeah, I have a strong feeling about this. But none of it's about Crenshaw.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene asked him, "Did you just say you want to kill my friend Tucker Carlson?" And he replied on X, you know, "LOL no. Correct. No, he does not actually literally want to kill Tucker Carlson. That would be crazy."
Anyway, the US Post Office workers decided to protest any coming changes from Trump. So there's some talk about rolling the Post Office into the federal government, because right now it operates somewhat independently. But if they roll it into the regular government, it might be in, let's say, the Commerce Department.
Oh, I told my pre-show listeners this, but it's worth repeating. I've incorporated AI into my morning process when I get ready for the show and I'm putting my notes together. There's always something that I need a little more context, and I don't want to bother Googling it or something. So I keep my AI on, and it's in voice mode. Usually I just push it into voice mode when I've got a question. And then I said, if the Post Office got absorbed by the federal government, you know what department would it be in? And it said, well, one of them might be the Commerce Department. So it's just a great tool. Every day I use it that way, and it's really, really helpful.
Yesterday it told me that Apple was going to invest $500 million in the United States. And I said to myself, that doesn't really sound like enough. And then I checked, and it was 500 billion. And then I went back to ChatGPT and I said, is it 500 million, which you just said, or is it 500 billion? And it says, oh, it's billion. So yeah, you have to watch it. It's definitely not 100%. Sometimes it's still hallucinating. That's a pretty big hallucination, you know, the difference between millions and billions. Pretty big. Pretty big.
Anyway, so here's my question. I saw, I think it was Insurrection Barbie asked this question on X, or a version of it. So I'll just put this in my own words, so don't blame Insurrection Barbie for my wording of this. But hypothetically, if the federal government absorbed the Post Office so that they were just federal workers like everybody else in the federal government, would it be possible for Trump to order them to not deliver mail-in ballots and make it impossible to vote with mail-in ballots, even if the states find it legal and have approved it? Could he find that as like a shortcut to say, yeah, you states can say you want mail-in ballots, but I control the Post Office and I just told them that they're not in the business of mailing ballots?
Now, I'm guessing there's probably some kind of rule or legislation that says the Post Office has to deliver kind of anything that isn't dangerous. So I'm just guessing. I would imagine there to be some kind of rule that says you have to deliver whatever somebody wants you to deliver. But I feel like you could game that. It feels gameable. You could do something like, well, yes, you can do it, but people would have to pay $100 per ballot, and that would be the postage would be $100. Or yes, you can do it, but you have to show your ID when you mail or something like that. These are the bad ideas. Those are not meant to be serious ideas. But it just makes me wonder, is the change, the potential change in the Post Office leadership, meaning putting it in the federal government as opposed to operating independently, could it take care of mail-in voting?
So I'll just leave that for somebody who wants to research that and get back to me.
You know, I know we talk too much about the Democrats. They're almost reasonable, you know, like James Carville when he's not crazy, and Jon Stewart when he sometimes says something that's not 100% pro-Democrat and not 100% anti-MAGA. But a funny thing has happened with this DOGE stuff. If you haven't noticed, the Democrats have given up on saying DOGE is a bad idea, because the country loves it. You know, by a pretty good majority, the country likes cutting that waste, fraud, and abuse. So you can't really be a political party and say, yeah, we want to preserve the waste, fraud, and abuse. And they finally figured that out, that they couldn't possibly be against that. So they've changed their approach to talk about the method. Well, okay, but the method, you know, the way they're doing it, we'll talk about that.
But Jon Stewart takes it even further. So he does a pretty funny bit where he's saying that, what about, you know, it's great to stop the condoms for terrorists, which was never really a real story, but it makes a good anecdote. But what about the subsidies to Big Oil, he says, and what about the subsidies or something like that for Big Pharma? And I don't know if he thought that this was a Republican thing versus a Democrat thing and that maybe the MAGA people would be in favor of subsidies for Big Oil. I don't think we are, right? Is there any pro-Trump person who says, you know, we should give more of our tax dollars to big, profitable companies? I don't think anybody says that.
So not only is Stewart acknowledging that, you know, waste has to be addressed — he's very clear on that — but he's competing. He's competing. He's saying this is where the big money is. I don't know how big it is or how easy it is to find or if it's even real. But I love the fact that the Democrats now have to compete for fighting the most waste, fraud, and abuse.
All right, all right. Let's enter that frame. Let's enter the frame of we're competing to see who could do the best job of cutting things that we shouldn't be paying for. Love it.
Now that is a valuable contribution in my opinion.
Thomas Massie points out that the budget still has some kind of subsidies for using corn to make fuel, which everybody knows, as he points out, increases the price of food. Now, did you know that? Were you aware that even still there are Republicans who are in favor of using corn to make fuel, this ethanol? Now, I've never even heard of anybody using ethanol for anything. Have you? Do any of you have an ethanol-driven car or an ethanol tractor? I don't use ethanol for anything. So isn't ethanol well known to be just basically a scam? That might be going too far, but I don't know any voter who's in favor of this. So it's got to be one of those. Republicans want to protect their farmers, and you know, they get free money if they grow corn for fuel, I guess. So I like the fact that Massie's on that.
Now, I would add that to the DOGE process. Say, hmm, I don't know. I don't see why we're doing that. Doesn't seem to be necessary for climate change or anything else. It's not like ethanol is making a big run to take over for other fossil fuels. There's so much news going on that there are stories that in a normal time would be the number one headline. But in today's news environment, it's like the 10th most important thing that would otherwise just be huge.
Here's one of those. According to Michael Shellenberger, there's an FBI whistleblower who has a source within the FBI who said that the FBI employees were destroying evidence on servers, and that he informed Kash Patel of that. Now, if that's true — and keep in mind it's a whistleblower who talked to another person who said it's true. So it's not the... The whistleblower apparently is known. So one person is known, but the person he talked to... Do we accept that? Do we accept that's true with one anonymous source? I'm going to say Shellenberger is really good on checking sources, so I'm leaning toward this is probably true. It also just makes sense.
But isn't it also just so, you're warned about it, isn't it also a little bit too on the nose? What's the one thing that every one of us would have predicted when Kash Patel got nominated for the FBI? Every single one of us would say, oh, they backed up the shredders. They're going to be burning their files and deleting things. Every one of us said that. And then there's a story with one anonymous source that's exactly the thing that every one of us was expecting. How do you judge that one?
Now, the only thing that's going for it is Shellenberger, because he's highly credible. But if this one turns out to be not true — and I'm not sure we would ever know that if it turned out to be not true — don't be surprised, because that too-on-the-nose thing, it's just deadly accurate. Deadly accurate.
All right. Even Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan — I would call him the country's top banker, and when he says stuff about economics, people listen. I listen. I think he is very credible. And he says that DOGE needs to be done. He said something like that before. But everybody has to say that, right? As I said, even the Democrats, pretty much every Democrat has agreed, okay, if you can get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse, yeah, that would be kind of good. So it's not a surprise that the smartest guy in banking says it too.
But here's where I'm going to get into the they've shifted from what to do, which is hard to be against getting rid of fraud and waste abuse, to how it's being done.
I wanted to add what I call the Dilbert filter. You ready for this? So as the creator of Dilbert, I write about things that seem like good ideas but in the real world they just always go wrong. That's sort of what I do for 37 years or something. And this is one of those.
I'm going to give you a couple of stories from my own experience about cutting expenses in a big company. So if you don't know, I worked for two big companies before I became a cartoonist. One of them was Crocker National Bank, and then later Pacific Bell, the local phone company. And my jobs were usually the budget guy, finance guy, for most of that time. So I would be the one who was in charge of making sure the budgets were cut when they needed to get cut. But I didn't have any power. I just had to be the organizer, basically.
So here are two stories, and this will get us into the chainsaw versus the scalpel as well.
Story number one: I was asked to put together a budget for the technology group within Pacific Bell. And we were going to do what's called a bottom-up budget. You've heard of it. They say we should only do bottom-up budgets. Now, a bottom-up budget is when you go to each department head and you say, all right, I want you to add up all the things you absolutely need to do, and then that'll be your budget. What we're not going to do, because that would be crazy, is to give you the same budget as last year plus, you know, 5% or something. Because we really need to know what you're doing. Maybe this year you don't need as much. Maybe next year you need more. So a bottom-up budget is the most responsible, thoughtful, rational way to do it. You all agree so far? Everybody on the same page that if you want to be a good manager, you want to be smart, you want to do the right thing, you're definitely going to do a bottom-up budget, because that's the only time you can put the scalpel on things. This is sort of a scalpel approach, right? You're really looking at each little project.
Now, I did that. So I collected everybody's bottom-up budgets. It took a lot of work. You'd have a list of projects and it'd be a mile long. And that would be for each department head, and every department had their list of projects that were a mile long. And then I would take it to the VP — might have been an assistant VP — the top guy in the technology department, or at least in my end of it. And I would show him this infinite list of projects.
Now, what do you think he did? Do you think that he looked at the infinite list of projects, which he only had a passing knowledge of, and then made scalpel-like decisions on each of these projects that he basically didn't even barely know that they were happening? Do you think that's what happened? Because I'm told that that's how the smart people do it. The smart people take the scalpel. They look at every expense and they cut just what needs to be cut. Do you think he did that? No. No, it was way too impossible. There's no way that he could have spent his entire life studying each of these projects to figure out on his own where to cut.
Now, if you think that the department managers did that for him, as in cut their own budget without being asked, do you think that happened? No. The individual departments wanted the most money they could get. So to them, their boss was their opponent. The boss was their opponent, and the other people who were other department heads were their opponent. They were trying to get the biggest part of the pie, and that was the game. So they couldn't do the scalpel. The people who actually understood the projects, they wouldn't do any scalpel, because they would lie. Oh yeah, if I ask the question, they'd say, oh yeah, essential. Well, if we don't do this, the entire company will fold in a minute. And then it gets to the boss, who would be able to cut it if he understood them, but he doesn't understand them. And there's no way he really could, because there were just so many of them.
So do you know what the big boss told me? He looks at me and looks at my giant list that's incomprehensible. He says, tell everybody to cut 10% across the board compared to the budget from last year. And I looked at him after doing all this work, and I looked at him and said, that's really... Is that how this works? He goes, yeah, just cut 10%. And I'd say, I've talked to all these managers and they say if you cut their budgets even a penny, the entire world will end. And they swear that's true. And he looked at me and said, they'll work it out. Just cut everybody 10%.
So I go back to everybody after I'd done this bottom-up budget, made them do all this work, and I said he just says cut everything 10%. Do you know how it turned out? Fine. Fine. Do you know how easy it was to cut 10%? Well, about a few months into every year, there would be people who imagined that they were going to start some new project on day one, but there was some vendor who couldn't deliver. There was some approvals they didn't get. So things were like six months delayed. So when somebody needed a little extra because it was really an important project or something new, they'd go to the boss and he'd say, oh, okay. Is there any projects that are delayed and not spending the budget for this year? Okay, just take it from that budget, put it over there. Problem solved.
Now, in that specific case, there was a little scalping going on, but it was after the fact. It was sort of doing it wrong and then correcting. Does that sound familiar? The big boss was doing it wrong, moving fast, being efficient, and then making fast corrections. Okay, that one does need a little more money. This one underspent. Move that money over there. Worked fine. Everything worked out just right.
Now, here's another one. Here's my second budget story, because if you don't understand how the real world budgets, none of this DOGE criticism is going to make any sense to you.
That same boss once asked me to sit in for him in a meeting where the department heads were arguing to keep their budgets, because there was a higher level above us that was trying to cut our budgets as well. So far I've only been talking about my department that had lots of sub-departments, but above it they were trying to do the same thing. So they brought us all in, and they would each ask each of the managers, you know, is this budget necessary? Is there anything you can cut from your budget? If we cut this, would that be okay?
Now, here's something that's embarrassing. I was very young, but I was fairly capable, so my boss didn't feel bad sending me to do this very important task. And when it came to me, the person leading the meeting said, all right, so you know, looked at the list of projects I guess I had submitted and said, well, what about this one? You really need to do this. Is this essential to the company? And I said, well, if he had to cut something, and I were being a team player, that's probably what I would cut.
How do you think that went over? When I took that back to my boss, every one of you who have corporate experience, you're laughing right now. It's like, how dumb were you? No, I thought I was there to do a good faith effort to reduce the budget for the company, because I thought I was working for the shareholders, right? I mean, it's a fiduciary responsibility to not waste money because you have shareholders. So I thought, yeah, you know, if you're asking me what I would cut if I had to, it would be that one.
And so they cut it. And I took it back to my boss. Oh my God, the look of death that I got. He just cut through me with his eyes. He said, so I hear you gave away my budget. And I said, oh, but you know, they asked me what would be the least priority, and I was trying to do the right thing. And that's when I learned that nobody's trying to do the right thing. Everybody in a big organization is lying because that's how you get ahead. So everybody wanted their own budget not to be cut, but they were certainly happy if other people's budget got cut, because they were competing against other managers. They weren't trying to satisfy stakeholders. That was just dumb on my part.
All right. So the first thing you need to know is if you try to do a scalpel approach, everyone is lying and you won't know it. Well, you'll know they're lying, but you don't know what the lie is or what the truth is. So if you were to say to me on paper and conceptually, is it better to use a scalpel than a chainsaw? I would say the same thing you would say. Well, yeah, scalpel makes sense. That's a reasoned looking at all the details, deciding what to keep and what not. But in the real world, nobody's going to play along with that. They're all going to just look for maintaining their own little domain.
So in my experience, the scalpel approach can only work in specific situations. And I'll give you a few. One would be if you're a small business and you're the owner of the business and it really matters to you if you cut costs, because that money goes right in your pocket. And it's small enough company that you understand all of its parts. So you could actually cut with a scalpel in that case, because you're the boss. It's all good for you if you cut, and you know exactly where to cut and where not to cut. Yes, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel. If you took a chainsaw to your own smallish business, well, that would obviously be a mistake. Obviously.
Now, what is the situation? Or another situation, well, let's put it this way. So that's a situation where you've got time to operate and you're going to be profitable no matter what, but you could be a little more profitable. So if you've got plenty of time, the scalpel will make sense. You know, even if you have to work a little extra hard to find some stuff. Yes, as long as you're in a business that's stable and you're just trying to tweak it every now and then, scalpel.
So when you hear people say, but I've been involved in a number of businesses and we cut with the scalpel, they did. They did. Here's where the scalpel doesn't work: when there is an existential threat and the timer is ticking. If the timer is ticking, you're not going to have the option of using the scalpel. Because even if you did everything right, you would run out of time.
Here are two examples. Number one, Twitter. When Musk bought Twitter, the cash flow situation was dire. As in, uh-oh, there's almost no way this company can survive. He was going to have wasted $44 billion of his and other people's money if he couldn't rapidly, massively cut expenses. What would have happened if Musk had said, all right, all you employees of Twitter who hate my guts, tell me where I can scalpel away some unnecessary fat? What do you think would have happened? Every one of those people would have said their jobs are essential, and if they left, morale would drop and it could never work. So Musk instead took a chainsaw and just went, got rid of too much. And then when the too much became obvious or people argued successfully, he added it back, exactly like he said he would.
Now, what about the federal government? The federal government is also on a timer and also has an existential threat. It's called the debt. We don't have 10 years left. We really don't. I don't know if we have three years left. The national debt will crush us and will destroy the entire country. If you think that taking a scalpel to the federal government is going to get it done in any kind of reasonable timeline before the entire nation is destroyed, seems very unlikely to me. Because remember, everybody involved will be lying. Everybody involved will be trying to slow the process. They'll try to sue you so you can't even use the scalpel. It's going to be just infinite pushback. Infinite people pretending to be helping but not. All lying. People will be ganging up. They'll try to take you out as the boss if they have any way to do it. They will attack you a hundred different ways. The one and only way you have any chance is with a chainsaw.
So let me put this in terms of risk. If Musk had used a scalpel on Twitter, that would be 100% chance of failure. If he used a chainsaw on Twitter, there was some chance of success and some chance of failure. Which one do you pick? The one with a 100% chance of failure, scalpel, or the one that might work but it's pretty drastic? Well, there's only one that might work. You obviously do the one that might work.
What about the national debt? Do you think we have time to scalpel that thing? I don't. I don't think there's any time to scalpel it. I think that the one and only hope of actual survival — survival, we're not optimizing, we're trying to survive — and I think that's what people are missing. He's got to take a chainsaw to it. And you know, I would say he's just getting started because there are bigger parts he has to go after. But there's not really a second choice. The chainsaw might work and it might not work, but the scalpel definitely will fail. And it's the Dilbert filter that guarantees it, because people are lying weasels.
Now, let me make another exception. Let's say you had a business that wasn't very complicated. Let's say you are the owner of a sports franchise. You probably do understand almost all the parts, even as the big owner, right? You would probably know what your players are being paid. That's the biggest thing. You would know what the travel costs are. It wouldn't be mysterious at all. So if you wanted to take a scalpel to that, again, because you have the luxury of being profitable and you're not in a hurry, probably you could scalpel quite a bit. And I would say that would be exactly the right answer.
So when people tell you, Scott, I have personally scalpeled budgets with success, that's probably true. But it's always the specific case. It's not the you're-going-to-die-tomorrow-if-you-don't-cut-this-by-70%.
All right, so there we go. There's the ultimate reframe on that.
You know, I'm so sick of talking about this DOGE email to all the federal employees telling them to say what they did, five things they did. And I was trying to imagine — it's been a long time since I've been a cubicle — but I'm trying to imagine how I would have handled that if I'd been a federal worker. And I'm positive I would have handled it the following way. I'd open my email. I'd see what they're asking. I'd probably check with my boss to see if it's okay to answer it. But then I would sit down, and it's the first thing I would do. I would put off whatever else I had on my schedule, and I would answer that right away. And I would come up with five awesome things that I did this week, and then I'd hit send. And then I would never think about it again.
How would you handle it? Would you fight it? You didn't have anything better to do that day than fight an email? Ah, I'm going to go on CNN and fight this email. What? The most basic thing that anybody does is say what five things they accomplished. That also used to be my job. It also used to be my job to collect everybody's top five accomplishments. That was literally my job. Do you know what happened when I would collect all their accomplishments and put it into one cool document that I made myself and I gave it to my boss? Nobody ever looked at it. Nobody ever looked at it. The only point was to make sure that you thought people were watching you. It was basically just a head game so that people had to really show that they were doing real work. Nobody really looked at it. I don't even think they like maybe just glanced at it, but they didn't ask any penetrating questions.
So when Musk says this is really just to find out if there's a real person and a pulse, that sounds right. That sounds right. That's the only thing he's going to find out. It's not like he's going to look at the five things and say, huh, one of these five things looks like maybe you could cut that with a scalpel. That's not going to happen. It's just to see if they have a pulse, if they're really there, if they really respond.
Now, I realize there's a whole bunch of complications to it. And a number of entities from the FBI to the State Department to the Pentagon have already said, no, you guys don't need to do this. That's fine. I don't mind that at all. I don't mind when the Trump administration disagrees with itself. Don't mind at all, because I think the disagreement is reasonable. But I also think the request was reasonable. So and I don't think any of it's terribly important. I think Trump and Elon might be pushing it still just so they don't lose, you know, because it'd be good to show a pattern of winning. You know, win, win, win, win, win. If you have even one pushback that's successful, it could take a little dent out of your shine. A dent out of your shine. Never quote me on that. No, never quote me on that, please.
Anyway, so I'm just bored with that whole email thing. But the Wall Street Journal had an interesting context. Apparently some companies, instead of doing that what are your five accomplishment things every week, which is a big pain in the ass, everybody hates it and everybody's lying too, there's some software now. One company called Workboard, or at least that's the product, Workboard, invades your computer, your work computer, and it looks at all the things you've done and then reports them to your boss. So everything from your calendar to your emails. And then the boss can tell who's working and what they're working on and how hard they're working.
Now, that's the scariest, creepiest thing I've ever heard in my life. I mean, I don't know how it could possibly give you anything interesting. And then I saw a picture of what the dashboard would look like, you know, if you were the top boss and you wanted to see the sum of all the things your employees were doing. It's like this really sort of detailed, complicated, you know, some boxes are bigger than others, showing that there's more activity there and stuff. And I thought to myself, okay, in the real world, your top boss would use that three times, and by the third time they would realize that there was nothing it was telling them that they could act on. It was like, ah, okay, looks like the box for talking about the budget is a little bit bigger. Okay, but that's because the budget process is happening right now. Okay, okay. Well, it looks like the box for talking to vendors is a little bit bigger, so they're doing a lot of talking to vendors. Oh, well, obviously, because we're doing a request for proposal. Probably it wouldn't be anything you could act on.
Now, I don't want to throw that company under the bus, because they might have a good argument that it's making everything better. But in the real world, if you show somebody a complicated screen of anything, they end up ignoring it after the first few tries in the real world.
So I'm going to introduce a new insulting phrase. I'm going to call it lady fiction. Lady fiction. I've told you before how Democrats, they seem to just imagine problems. Like they imagine what somebody's thinking, and then they imagine their bad personality. They imagine their bad intentions, and then they project that forward to how it's going to destroy the world. But it's all imaginary. It's imaginary future, and it's imagination that they can read the minds of strangers.
So CNN just had one of the federal employees on, and she was one of the ones resisting the email requests. And she said that Elon's email request was an act of harassment and bullying. Now, do you think that's the way Elon was thinking of it? It's like, huh, you know what I haven't done enough of? I need to do a little more harassment and bullying. Even though he tells you exactly why he's doing it, you can't take the exact reason that he describes, which makes perfect sense. You have to imagine that the real reason is this dark personality flaws, and it's harassment and bullying. That's pure mind reading. And again, men prefer reading non-fiction, women prefer fiction. And the more you see it. So I'm going to call that lady fiction.
Lady fiction. Lady friction is a completely different story. It has more to do with scissoring. But lady fiction is where you imagine that you can read somebody's mind, and you see some dark, dark secrets in there, and you project it forward.
Anyway, one of our favorite personalities on X, Data Republican. If you haven't been exposed to Data Republican yet, you're missing out. So Data Republican is a sort of a superstar of data analysis and is using a lot of the new information that we're learning to come up with some fascinating stuff about the NGOs, etc. But she was on Glenn Beck's show, and she described our current situation in a way that you'll never be able to forget.
So you've got the basic idea that USAID was giving money to all these NGOs, and other entities were giving them money, and that they became sort of operating independently. And nobody knew what they were doing. And you know, then they were maybe laundering money and stuff.
So what Data Republican said after looking at all this more deeply than we have, she said that the Democrats are offended by DOGE because their money depends on people not knowing what they're doing with our money. And I thought, yeah, that does sort of sum it up, doesn't it? Their money depends on us not knowing what they're doing with our money, because our money is just going into their pockets through the NGOs.
And so she says, so that is truly censorship, because I think if actual Americans understood what they were doing with our money and that they were actually setting up their own government — this is the key — they were setting up their own government and actually ignoring what real people wanted to do, oh, we would be so upset. There's a reframe. That's it. The NGOs were a shadow government that could get all kinds of things done. They could stall things. They could make things happen. They could overthrow countries, now working in conjunction with other parts of the government. But once you hear that frame, that the NGOs were a shadow government, wow, you can't lose that one. Like, that's sticky. That's a really good reframe.
Anyway, just think about that. And then she went on and said, because the reality is that these people have a government unto themselves that they've created with these NGOs that they run separately from us.
Now, the one thing that would be required for a shadow government would be there's one leader. Do you think that this shadow government NGO thing has one leader, or is it just an understanding that a bunch of people have that they can all be better off with this scheme? I feel like there's not one leader, but there might be maybe several people who are more influential than others. And maybe they're fighting it out. I always imagine that the Hillary Clinton people and the Obama people were not the same, and that they're all sort of jockeying for control. And you know, maybe some of that's happening through the NGOs. I don't know.
Anyway, Trump says he wants to bring back the Keystone XL pipeline that Biden shut down. But apparently it's not that easy, because you'd have to find somebody who wants to do it. And I guess the company that was doing it doesn't seem too eager to do it again. And I can understand that, because how can they guarantee it won't get canceled again? Why would you put money into something if the next Democrat president is going to cancel it?
But Trump says, you know, even if another company wants to do it, he said the approvals will be easy. Basically the government will get out of the way. And I like that. So I like that Trump's pushing that. But there really is a structural problem there. If you ask somebody to invest, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions, can you really expect them to do that if they don't know if their project will survive the next president's term? That's a lot to ask.
So I wonder if there's any fix for that. In other words, could Congress say you won't be touched for 20 years? Like, could they pass any legislation that says... I don't think so, because I think it would be illegal to say you can't ever cut an expense or cancel something. But I wonder if there's any clever way to get past the fact that this is really a giant risk now that Biden canceled it once. I don't know how you fix that, but somebody clever might have an idea for doing that.
Meanwhile, the DNC's vice chairman David Hogg, he's warning that Democrats need to stop acting like a cult. Now, how much do you love the fact that the people who were the problem are trying to become the people who are calling out the problem? It's almost like they have to pretend that they weren't deep into all the bad behavior that they say they want to stop doing.
But Hogg says this. He says, frankly, anybody who did speak out about Biden's mental decline was immediately ostracized in our party. He says, I know that we like to claim that we are not a cult, but anybody who did say that Biden was too old basically had their career destroyed. That's a problem. Where the Democrat Party, we supposed to have open conversations and dialogue. He tells his audience, he said there are many lessons we need to learn from this election, but that is one of the main ones. We cannot be a cult.
Okay, here's the problem. As long as power has more value than open conversation and dialogue, you're only going to get power. So if somehow open conversations and dialogue, you can monetize it or it would give you more power or it make everybody more successful, everybody would get a pat on the back. But it doesn't work that way. If you do open conversations and dialogue within your own party, that will immediately look like weakness and you'll be destroyed.
So they've sort of painted themselves into this corner where you can't really disagree with the party. And there's nothing that David Hogg is going to say that's going to change it, because the incentive structure is as soon as you disagree, you're done. And that's not going to change. How can it? It's not like they can give an order and say, all right, don't do this. It just takes anybody who wants to do it to do it, to destroy other people.
But it does make me wonder, why is this... Do you think that this is as much of a problem on the right? Do you feel that in the MAGA Republican conservative world that we have open dialogue and that you can disagree without getting canceled? Yes or no? I feel like a number of us have disagreed with important things and not gotten canceled by at least by Republicans. Have you not seen me disagree with common MAGA thinking? I think I have a number of times. And do I ever get slapped down for that? Not that I remember. Not that I remember.
The only time that I get real hate is when people have an incorrect understanding of what I've ever said or thought. If they don't understand what I've said, then it turns into some crazy thing where they're criticizing me for something they only imagine. But when I say real things, let's take the Dan Crenshaw thing. You don't think I'm completely aware that by the time I'm done with this, there will be something on social media trying to tear me down for what somebody's going to say is supporting Dan Crenshaw against MAGA, which didn't happen. And you all witnessed it, so you know that didn't happen. But somebody will turn it into that. However, it'll probably just be a passing nothing. Like the worst case will be some troll on X, and it'll just go away. Because I think through at least my audience is completely accepting that I'm not just going to tell you the normal frame. That's mostly why you watch, because you expect me to be a little different from the mainstream opinion. If I didn't, what would be the point, really? What would be the point?
So yeah, I don't think it's as big a problem on the right.
According to Simon Kent writing in Breitbart News, Democrat donors are not feeling too good about the Democrats. But there was this one donor who had a quote that I thought was great. Quote: "They want us to spend money and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking." The donor said the thing that's clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies. And to what end?
Well, here's what I say about identity politics, which largely drove the Democrat message. Identity politics, it's a one-way trip. And they should have known that, because on paper you can see it. It's the MSNBC problem. As soon as MSNBC became the identity politics all the time network, you could guarantee, guarantee that at some point in the future their own employees would turn against them and call them racists. And that just happened. Guarantee it. You don't know when it's going to happen, but you can pretty much bet on it with a lot of safety.
And so the Democrats can't really unwind that thing that they've created, because they can't be ignoring identity politics. That would make them Republicans. So they've created their own monster that they can't kill. And the Republicans are like, yeah, good luck with that, because we're not involved. It's none of our business if you want to create a monster and then the monster kills you. But you knew that that monster would kill you, because how could it not? You know, as soon as you say that identity is everything, everybody looks at their own identity and says, wait, but I'm a short gay lesbian, whatever, you know, where's my rights? And then everything falls apart.
So the Democrats, I don't think they have a way back. Now, as I've said before, all bets are off if they found the right candidate, right? So Trump is by no measure an ordinary Republican. So nobody could have really predicted the second term of Trump and the way it's turned out. No one could have predicted that. So it's just sometimes you get this special case with a special character, this once-in-a-thousand-years type of personality, which I think Trump is. And if they don't get one of those, I don't know if they have a way back. Because even Obama, as rational sounding as he was, and I think he was very smart and very savvy about how things work, I don't even think he can abandon identity politics at this point. I mean, he can't run for office, but even if a new Obama came today, I don't know. I don't know how they can come back.
Here's the least surprising news of the day. The former head of the FDA's drug center joins Pfizer as chief medical officer. Now, as you know, there's a long history of top FDA people going to work for the companies that they had been trying to regulate. Which of course creates a massive incentive to not say bad things about the industry when you're in the FDA, because you know that the most likely outcome after you're not in the FDA is a job offer from one of those same companies.
And I was trying to think, what could you do about that? I don't love the fact that you could ban it, like don't go to work for these companies for five years. We might do that. I think RFK Junior didn't he float that idea? But that seems, you know, my sense of freedom and capitalism really rejects you can't go get a job somewhere else. Like, I don't like any kind of non-compete agreements. I hate them, because I live in America. You can't tell me what my next job is, right? I mean, that's just really offensive to me that you can tell me what my next job is. No matter what it is, you don't need to. You don't get an approval over my next job.
So on one hand, I completely understand that this is massively deforming our drug approval and safety. Massively deforms it. On the other hand, I like freedom. I like freedom. So I wonder if there's some middle ground. And the only thing I could think of is that the ex-FDA people have an option that's better than working for Big Pharma, which would pay an ungodly amount of money. Could you find a way to keep them on the, let's say, the public side? And it may require paying an ungodly amount of money to say, all right, once you leave the FDA, you can go work for Pfizer and they'll pay you a million dollars a year, whatever it is. But if you continue working for the government, we will also give you a million dollars a year. We'll match it. But you'll be on our side. So you'll do extra work and you'll go extra deep, and you work with the FDA. You won't be on the FDA, but let's say you work with them or for them or something.
Now, that's the bad idea because it's anti-DOGE. It's spending more money, not less. But I just wonder, is there any systemic way to fix that? Because you'd have to outbid the pharma. Now, the gross way to do it is just say you can't go get those jobs. I just don't love that. I don't love the lack of freedom that that implies. So maybe somebody have a good idea.
Let's talk about Ukraine. So Trump has suggested yesterday that he's willing to revive economic relations with Russia. And then Putin has offered, hey, why don't you work with us, America? Why don't you work with us to do a joint partnership to exploit rare earth minerals in the Donbass region? What? Did you see that coming? And then Putin also offers — and I'm going to talk about this in terms of persuasion, not in terms of economics — then Putin also said that Russia is ready to supply the US with 2 million tons of aluminum, which will help stabilize prices. And apparently we're the biggest importer of aluminum, so it actually would drive down some of our costs if we work with Russia on that.
And so here's the thing. Let me say up front that if you believe that I trust Putin and that he just wants to make money and stop all the fighting, I don't. It would be foolish to say that he has no ulterior motives or anything else. But think how historic this is, that Trump and Putin have changed the frame. They've changed the frame from how to kill each other to how to make money for both of us.
Now, maybe this won't come to anything. Maybe there will be no joint partnerships. Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe trusting Russia is just always a bad idea. And you know, even if it looks good on paper, maybe it just never works. I'm open to all those arguments. So I don't know that we should do it. But the fact that — I've said this before — I generally think that Trump is the best public persuader we've ever seen, just ever. But Putin's in the same weight class. I don't think he's quite Trump-like, but he understands the whole persuasion thing.
And so what Putin's doing is he's reframing Russia as a potential economic partner, which is following the lead of Trump. Trump is the — again, Trump's the better persuader — but Putin can take punch for punch. He knows persuasion. And this is brilliant. It's brilliant. I hate to say it. And again, I'm not suggesting that we get into partnership economically with Russia. I'm not against it and I'm not for it. I would have to know a lot more before I had an opinion. But from a persuasion perspective, Putin's really nailing it. He's nailing it, because he knows that Trump needs economic wins, and he could offer him some easy economic wins. So that's really good negotiating.
So again, don't take this as me loving Putin, and I don't want him to be my girlfriend, and I don't trust Russia, you know, without a lot of guarantees. But you have to appreciate that the way Putin is handling this is kind of impressive, just from a persuasion perspective. You can call it evil persuasion if you like. I won't argue. But it's very effective at changing the frame to how do we make money. I just love that. I just love that. We'll see where it goes.
All right. Again, another story that would have been the biggest story except that there were so many stories. All right. Apparently James Comer told Breitbart that the DOJ, the FBI, the IRS, and the SEC were all investigating Joe and Hunter Biden but were told to stand down. And Jim Biden was even being investigated for Medicare fraud. Insurrection Barbie's talking about this on X. Apparently six banks reported to the Treasury Department that the Bidens were committing financial crimes, but everyone was told to stand down.
Now, wouldn't that be the biggest story in the country except for all the other biggest stories? How in the world is that just a little article in Breitbart? Do you think it's true? Do you think it's true that all these entities were going to investigate the Bidens — and you know, keep in mind this is when they knew there was a risk because they were powerful creatures. So if all these entities were willing to investigate them even knowing that it would be risky, and they had to be told not to, it does suggest there was some pretty strong evidence. Not proof. Everybody's innocent until proven guilty, and they haven't been proven guilty. But it certainly would be the biggest story in the country under normal times. I am curious how much else we'll find out about what I think is the crime family.
So Trump is signing a directive to counter foreign social media censorship. So Dan Fries of Reclaim the Net is writing about this. So I guess he's trying to challenge our European — mostly European, I think — saying that they, by taxing our social media, they're basically doing it to censor them and trying to control them in various ways, censorship as well as taxation. And Trump wants the taxation and the censorship to be curtailed.
Now, I don't know what he can do about it. So that's why he signed a directive. The directive is figure out what to do about this. I assume it means we're going to put more pressure on our alleged allies. But let me say this as clearly as possible. I've said this before, but it can't be said enough. If you're trying to curtail free speech in my country, you're not my ally. England, France, whoever you are, we love you, but you're not my ally if you're trying to curtail my free speech. That is a line which you cannot cross. That's a red line. That's as bright as it could possibly be. And if it weren't for Trump, I don't know that we'd be doing anything about it.
So sometimes you think, you know, Trump is fun and sometimes you like what he's doing and sometimes you don't. But this is one of those cases where this is essential. This is essential Trump. Nobody else would do this. I don't know if he'll succeed, but it's going to require putting pressure on allies like we've never seen. He's the only person I know who would do it. There's no other normal president who would put pressure on our allies over this. But it is really, really important. And yeah, he should bring the entire toolbox. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Anything. It might take getting out of NATO. I mean, is that serious? So whatever he has to threaten, bring it on. Let's bring the threats on, because we need to ratchet this up. This can never happen again. So he's got to be tough on that. I support that 100%.
Meanwhile, down in Mexico, if you didn't know, the big cartel, the Sinaloa cartel, apparently has two factions, and the two factions are fighting it out. And there's a great article by José de Córdoba in the Wall Street Journal. And so there's a whole bunch of murder going on because they're fighting it out for control of things. But one of the things that I thought was fascinating is the number of fentanyl labs. So there was just one little area that had 100 fentanyl labs. And I guess the labs have to keep moving because the other cartel members keep narking them out. So apparently the way you compete if you're in a cartel and there are other factions in the cartel is that if you find out where the other faction's lab is, you turn them in so that the government tries to close them down. I'm assuming the government does. But even if you just turned them in and let your bad guys go and take out the lab. So there's this gigantic fight over just hundreds of different fentanyl labs.
And part of me just wishes they just fight it out. But it was hilarious that one of the lab operators quoted this. They were talking about they have to do so much security now for their labs that it's hitting their bottom line. And they just talk like regular business people. And so one of the lab operators says they have to increase production to cover higher costs for gunmen, intelligence, and weapons. He goes, quote, "If before we were making 10 million pills, now we have to make 20 million." They just talk like ordinary business people. They need DOGE anyway.
At one point I wondered, wouldn't it be better instead of us attacking the cartels to simply provide all the intelligence that the factions need to attack each other? Suppose we send our drones up there, we find all their little lab locations. I don't know if we can. I don't know if there's any way to find them from the air. But suppose we could, and then we just turn it over to the other faction and just let them destroy each other until they're so weakened that then you go in. But you wait until they've just beaten themselves into nothing.
There is some worry that if the Sinaloa cartel implodes over their internal conflicts, that one of the other cartels would just take over. So nothing will change. So it's complicated.
I saw a report that comes from the Telegraph. Now, consider the source. So some people say that's not a very credible source. But the Telegraph says that Iran fears an immediate attack on its nuclear facilities, and so they've increased all their defenses near the nuclear facilities. And the source says that Iran expects attack every night, even on nuclear facilities that no one knows about. And Iranian officials said that the regime could fall if America joins the attack.
You know what I say about that story? I could have written that story without doing any research. Do you think the Telegraph did any research? Scott, what do you think Iran is doing about its nuclear facilities? I'd say, well, if I were them and anybody else would say the same thing, they're probably trying to figure out how to protect them as best they can. Scott, do you think that the Iranian regime is worried that if America and Israel attacked, it could have an impact on their ability to lead in the future? And I would say, duh, yeah. We're not going to leave their regime alone if we do a major attack in their country. And even if we don't directly attack the regime, losing all their nuclear facilities and all of their anti-aircraft does put some question about their stability.
So on one hand, I don't know if the Telegraph story is real. On the other hand, it's exactly what you would have made up if you wanted to act like you did some research but you didn't.
The Indian army, according to Next Defense, they have an AI weapon that can track and shoot in just 10 milliseconds, and it can hit a target a mile away every time. It can hit a target a mile away every time, and it can do it in a millisecond. Now, at the moment it requires a human to allow the shot. But does anybody think that will always have to have a human? Imagine the war starts, and both sides have these incredibly effective machine guns that never miss, and they're both AI. And one of them says you better ask me before you fire, and the other one says if it's in that direction, that's where all the bad guys are, so just fire. The one who removes the human is going to win every war. So the human will be removed. And you know, I don't want to say Skynet because it's too obvious, but how does it not happen? There is no future where Skynet doesn't happen, is there? Now, there is a future where maybe it's not in control, but there's no future in which warfare doesn't look exactly like this.
And then, did you know that there are 10 new major battery plants that are coming online in the US looking to double our capacity? Now, the reason I tell you these stories, there's always a battery story, you know, there's some new battery technology or new battery factory. I like to tell you about some stories that you can tell what the future is by the insurance industry. Like whatever the insurance companies tell you, that's really indicative of the future, I think. This battery stuff, if you didn't follow anything else, would be a real good indicator of the future. Because if we can make batteries really cheaply and make a lot of them and make them domestically, that's a whole different country than if we have to depend on somebody else for the batteries or we can't make enough.
You know, Elon Musk famously says that if you had 100 square miles of solar panels and enough batteries to store it when the sun is not out, that you could power the entire country. Now, I'd love to see somebody who really understands the industry argue with that point. Now, and also it should be said that that's just for calculation purposes. You wouldn't put them all in one place. That would be insane, because one big natural disaster, you lose everything. But just in terms of how practical it is, Musk says it's completely practical. Yeah, and it doesn't even sound like you'd have to invent very much. Sounds like we already have what we need. So that's pretty interesting, and I think it tells you what the future looks like.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's all I wanted to do today. Thanks for joining. I'm going to talk to the Locals subscribers privately now. But come back tomorrow, same time, same place, and we'll see if Representative Crenshaw has killed Tucker yet. I think he'll still be alive. We hope.
All right, Locals coming at you privately in 30 seconds.
bit Tesla's down 5% I'll tell you I'm getting tired of this stocks going down stuff I think there's going to be more of it before there's less of it but let's get our uh comments going and then I'll give you the show that you deserve you deserve it yeah I'm no joy bayar but I'll do the best I can all right so you go there go there n there and there we go comments O Plenty good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization it's called coffee with Scott Adams and I'm pretty sure he never had a better time but if you want to take this up to levels that nobody can understand with their tiny shiny human brains all you need is a CER mug or a glass a tiger Chels a Stein a canteen jug or flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid I like coffee and join me now if the unparallel pleasure the dop me of the day the thing that makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip happens now go everything's working well we got new news today so question number one now that the funding for usaid is being cut is that related to the high level firings we're seeing in the media is that why msnbc's cutting some of their expensive Talent or is it just a coincidence and they're not doing well so obviously they have to make some changes I don't know but uh as you know Joy Reed her show ended she had her last show I guess uh yesterday and um Rachel matow didn't take it well so Rachel Mano uh goes on her own show to complain about Joy Reed being fired and she said uh that she's learned so much from her as we all have really we have so much and she has so much more to teach her Rachel says and I'm wondering what else does Joy Reed have to teach her I feel like we saw a lot of her lessons but I think the lesson is you should blame everybody for being a racist so that would be the the big takeaway um and Rachel mat said I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC personally I think it's a bad mistake to let her walk out the door it is not my call and I understand that but that's what I think now it gets better here here's the payoff Rachel M said I will tell you it's also un nerving to see that on a network where we have two canum two nonwhite hosts in Prime Time both of our nonwhite hosts in prime time are losing their show uh oh shows as is Katie Fang on the weekend and that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them it feels indefensible and I do not defend it now if there's anything that could make me happier than watching Joy Reed being taken off the air it's watching Rachel matow call her own company racist for taking Joy Reed off the air now I think that that's what she learned from Joy Reed to just call everybody racist all the time you don't have to do anything else that's that's the entire game and uh when you only have that one speed the only thing that that you do is call everything racist you know that's going to get turned against your own company right it wasn't any way that uh there wasn't any way that that wouldn't work out poorly even on paper if I said to you all right here's the deal there's going to be this network and the people in the network are going to call everybody and everything racist here's what I would have warned the network you know that's eventually going to be turned on you right you can't hire a whole bunch of people who only have one speed that's racist it's racist as racist as racist it's racist as racist and then expect that when you make a change that they don't like that they're not going to call you a racist of course they are of course they are it doesn't matter what reasons you have doesn't matter at all anyway what one of the things that Rachel M probably is suffering from now is that as long as Joy Reed still had a job Rachel matto fell safe because because Joy Reed was even crazier so it made Rachel matow look sort of moderate but once Joy Reed is gone now Rachel mat will look like the the craziest one on the network and it's going to make her feel like she might be next and I'm surprised she wasn't just because of her pay um how did other people take it well Angela Ry who's a black woman who uh which is important to the story uh she was a former CNN commentator and she calls for a boycott a boycott of MSNBC because they fired Joy Reed and I guess that makes him racist I don't know and then Keith alberman you know my mascot Keith olberman uh he said uh he said in a post breaking MSNBC racist Purge escalates they names the people who were out so so the the left is getting attacked by Keith olberman for being racist are we supposed to enjoy this as much as we are now I I never like to say only negative things so I want to say one positive thing one of the things that Rachel mat said in her little speech about what happened is that Rachel mat was 51 years old and I thought to myself damn whatever you're doing for skin care is working does she look 51 I think I would have guessed 40 that's pretty impressive but whatever she does for Health it sure works on camera anyway so good for her all right do you want me to uh make everybody mad all right now I'm going to make everybody mad you all saw the story and you want me to talk about it where Dan khaw was qu on an open mic saying about Tucker Carlson quote if I ever meet Tucker Carlson I'll effing kill him I'm not joking now this of course caused everybody to say you crazy you crazy anac contr control person how crazy can you be um and Tucker cleverly invited him to come on the show to see how it turns out I don't think Tucker was too worried wor um now you should probably know that Tucker has you know been quite a Critic of K Shaw he's called him unstable in the past and says he needs help I don't I don't know about any of that but um I had to ask Chad gbt to remind me why it is that so many magga people don't like khaw and it said generic stuff tell me if this sounds right that khaw was more what they called now this is remember this is just AI this just chat gbt said that khaw is more traditional conservative as opposed to a mega populist and he has sometimes wanted to do bipartisan things that the um that the magga people didn't like and he has sometimes criticized Trump which the mega people don't like now I don't know is there more to it probably that sounds kind of generic but here's my take and I'm I'm going to be consistent with past takes about leaked audio and video here's my take the person who's to blame is the person who leaked it now this is what I always say with a leaked video because you have to recognize that people say things in private that are perfectly fine in private as soon as somebody changes the context from private to public which is what the leaked video did they turned it into a completely different message because when it's private it's just the way people talk right have you ever said you want to kill somebody privately and whoever you're talking to knows you don't want to kill them it's just something you say when you're talking privately it's like ah I would kill that person I mean it now he also added I'm not joking but that doesn't change it of course he's not joking he's just saying that he you know doesn't like him so my rule is is this if something would be perfectly ordinary in private and then somebody some weasel some weasel decides to drop that video to destroy your life it's the weasel's fault so I'd like to know the name of the weasel because the weasel is who I have all of my hatred for right now I mean I hate that guy or woman whoever it is whoever leaked this is just scum it's despicable because they knew it would have this effect and I'm sure they knew that he didn't mean mean it seriously if you'd like to test whether he meant it seriously I would apply what I call the really filter where you say really do do you really think that if krenshaw and tuer Carlson were in the same room that krenshaw would really slay him really do any of you believe that no none of you believe that he would really slay him so it's just talk and the things that you say privately now I think it was a mistake to assume it was private so that there's definitely an error here and I think you know Kena probably learned from that if you've got microphones and people standing around and you don't say that kind of thing if there's a microphone within 100 feet like that's the lesson so K Shaw is not you know guilt-free I would say that would be a public person error now I've made the same errors as myself I've definitely said things in places where probably there was a microphone and maybe I should have been smarter but you know not if it really hurt me so I have severe hatred for who leaked it and uh don't take this as me supporting everything that CAW wants to do policy-wise or everything he said or everything about his whole life I don't know too much but this really pisses me off the the fact that we would treat khaw as the bad guy when the bad guy is the leaker oh the bad guy is the leaker does this sound familiar uh sometimes you can just grab them by the if that had been private and stayed private it was just two guys talking and one of them didn't take it seriously and the other one probably didn't mean it seriously it really had no impact if it stayed private as soon as somebody leaked it it changed the context because our brains are such that we just imagine it as a public statement because it is public but it wasn't originally public whoever changes the context is responsible for the message period because that's not the original message the original message is two guys talking completely different completely different if if you've never heard two guys talking privately maybe you wouldn't understand that anyway so yeah I have a strong feeling about this but none of it's about khaw and uh margorie Taylor green asked them did you just say you you want to kill my friend tuer Carlson and he replied on X you know LOL no correct no he does not actually literally want to kill Tucker Carlson that would be crazy anyway the US post office workers they decided to protest any coming changes from Trump um so there's some talk about rolling the post office into the federal government because right now it operates somewhat independently but if they roll it into the regular government it might be in let's say the Commerce Department oh I told my uh my pre-show listeners this but it's worth repeating um I've Incorporated AI into into my morning process when I get ready for the the show and I'm putting my notes together there's always something that I need a little more context and I don't want to bother you know Googling it or something um so I so I keep my AI on and it's in voice mode um usually I just push it into voice mode when I've got a question and then I said if the post office got absorbed by the federal government you know what department would it be in and it said well one of them might be the Commerce department so it's just it's just a great tool every day I use it that way and it's really really helpful uh yesterday it told me that Apple was going to invest $500 million in the United States and I said to myself that doesn't really sound like enough and then I checked and it was 500 billion and then I went back to chat GP and I said is it 500 million which you just said or is it 500 billion and it says oh it's billion so yeah you have to watch it it's definitely not 100% sometimes it's it's still hallucinating that's a pretty big hallucination you know the difference between millions and billions pretty big pretty big anyway so here's my question I saw I think it was Insurrection Barbie asked this question on X or a version of it um so I'll just put this in my own words so don't don't blame instraction Barbie for my wording of this but hypothetically if the federal government um absorbed the post office so that they were just federal workers like everybody else in the federal government would it be possible for Trump to order them to not deliver mailin ballots and make it impossible to vote with mailin ballots even if the states um find it legal and and have approved it could he could you find that as like a shortcut to say yeah you states can say you want mail and ballots but I control the post office and I just told them that they're not in the business of mailing ballots now I'm guessing there's probably some kind of rule or legislation that says the post office has to deliver kind of anything that isn't dangerous so I'm just guessing you know I I would imagine to be some kind of rule that says you have to deliver whatever somebody wants you to deliver but I feel like you could game that it feels gameable you could do something like well yes you can do it but people would have to pay $100 per ballot and that would be the postage would be $100 or yes you can do it but you have to show your ID when you mail or something like that these are the bad ideas those are not meant to be serious ideas but it just makes me wonder is the change the potential change in the post office leadership meaning putting it in the federal government as opposed to operating independently could it could it take care of mail and voting so I'll just leave that for somebody who wants to research that and get back to me um you know I know we talk too much about the Democrats they're uh almost reasonable you know like the Carville when he's not crazy and John Stewart when he when sometimes he said something that's you know not 100% pro-democrat and not 100% anti-a but a funny thing has happened with this Doge stuff if you haven't noticed um the Democrats have given up on saying doge is a bad idea because the country loves it you know by a pretty good majority the country likes cutting that waste Fraud and Abuse so you can't really be a political party and say yeah uh we want to preserve the waste Fraud and Abuse and they finally figured that out that they couldn't possibly be against that so they've changed their approach to talk about the method well okay but the method you know the way they're doing it we'll talk about that but John Stewart takes it even further so he does a uh uh pretty funny bit where he's saying that what about you know it's great to stop the uh you know condoms for terrorists which was never really a real story but it makes a good anecdote um but what about the subsidies to Big Oil he says and what about the I guess subsidies or something like that for a big Pharma and I don't know if he thought that this was a Republican Thing versus a Democrat thing and that maybe the magga people would be in favor of subsidies for Big Oil uh I don't think we are right is there any prot Trump person who says you know we should give more of our tax dollars to Big profitable companies I don't think anybody says that so not only is is Stuart uh acknowledging that you know waste r have to be addressed he's very clear on that but he's competing he's competing he's saying this is where the big money is I don't know how big it is or how easy it is to find or if it's even real but I love the fact that the Democrats now have to compete for fighting the most waste Fraud and Abuse all right all right let's enter that frame let's enter the frame of we're competing to see who could do the best job of cutting things that we shouldn't be paying for love it now that is a valuable contribution in my opinion so let's talk about uh I'll get i'll get to more on that later um Thomas Massie points out that the budget still has some kind of subsidies for using corn to make fuel which everybody knows as he points out Mass he points out that it increases the price of food now did you know that were you aware that even still there are Republicans there are Republicans who are in favor of uh using corn to make fuel this ethanol now I've never even heard of anybody using ethanol for anything have you do any of you have an ethanol driven car or an ethanol tractor uh I don't use ethanol for anything so isn't ethanol well known to be just basically a I know scam that that might be going too far but I don't know any voter who's in favor of this so it's got to be one of those Republicans want to protect their farmers and you know they get free money if they grow corn for fuel I guess so I I like the fact that massie's on that now I would add that I would add that to the Doge process say hm I don't know I don't see why we're doing that doesn't seem to be necessary for climate change or anything else it's not like ethanol is you know making a big run to take over for other fossil fuels or fossil fuels there there's so much news going on that there are stories that in a normal time would be the number one headline but in today's news environment it's like the you know 10th 10th most important thing that would otherwise just be huge here's one of those according to Michael shellenberg there's a FBI whistleblower uh who has a source within the FBI who said that the FBI employees were destroying evidence on servers and that he informed cash Patel of that now if that's true and keep in mind it's a whistleblower who talked to another person who said it's true so it it's not the The Whistleblower apparently is known so so one person is known but the person he talked to uh is a do we accept that do we accept that's true with an with one anonymous source I'm going to say shellenberger is really good on checking sources so I'm leaning toward this is probably true it also just makes sense but isn't it also just so you're warned about it isn't it also little bit too on the nose what's the one thing that every one of us would have predicted when when cash Patel got nominated for the FBI every single one of us would say oh they backed up the shredders they're going to be burning their files and deleting things every one of us said that and then there's a story with one anonymous source that's exactly the thing that every one of us was expecting how do you judge that one now the the only thing is guy going for it is shellenberger because he's highly credible but if this one turns out to be not true and I'm not sure we would ever know that if it turned out to be not true don't be surprised because that two on the nose thing it's just it's just deadly accurate deadly accurate all right um even Jamie Diamond of the CEO of JP Morgan I would call him the the country's top banker and when he says stuff about economics um people listen I listen I think he is very credible and um he says that Doge needs to be done now he said something like that before and uh but everybody has to say that right as I said even the Democrats pretty much every Democrat has agreed okay if you can get rid of the waste Fraud and Abuse yeah that would be kind of good so it's not a surprise that the smartest guy in banking says it too but uh here's where I'm going to get into the they've shifted from what to do which is hard to be against getting rid of Fraud and waste abuse to how it's being done I wanted to add what I call the dilber filter you ready for this so as the creator of Dilbert um I write about things that seem like good ideas but in the real world they just always go wrong that that's sort of what I do for 37 years or something and this is one of those I'm going to give you a couple of stories from my own experience about cutting expenses in a big company so if you don't know I worked for two big companies before I became a cartoonist uh one of them was uh Crocker national bank and then later Pacific Bell the local phone company and my jobs were usually the budget guy Finance guy for most of that time so I would be the one who was in charge of making sure the budgets were cut when they needed to get cut but I didn't have any power I just had to you know be the organizer basically so here are two stories and this will get get us into the chainsaw verus the scalpel as well so Story number one I was asked to put together a budget for the Technology Group within Pacific Bell and um we were going to do what's called a bottomup budget you've heard of a v say we should only do bottomup budgets now a bottomup budget is when you go to each department head and you say all right I want you to add up all the things you absolutely need to do and then that'll be your budget what we're not going to do because that would be crazy is to give you the same budget as last year plus you know 5% or something because we really need to know what you're doing maybe this year you don't need as much maybe next year you need more so it's a bottomup budget is the most responsible thoughtful rational way to do it you all agree so far everybody on the same page that if you want to be a good manager you want to be smart you want to do the right thing you're definitely going to do a bottomup budget because that's the only time you can you know put the scalpel on things this sort of a scalpel approach right you're really looking at each little project now I did that so I collected everybody's uh bottom up budgets it took a lot of work you know you'd have a list of projects and be a mile long and that would be for each department head and every Department had had their list of projects that were a mile long and then I would take it to the uh was he a VP might have been an assistant VP the top guy in the technology department or at least in my my end of it and I would show him this like infinite list of projects now what do you think needed do you think that he looked at the infinite list of projects which he only had a passing knowledge of and then made scalpel like decisions on each of these projects that he basically didn't even he barely even knew that they were happening do you think that's what happened because that I'm told that that's how the smart people do it the smart people take the scalpel they look at every expense and they cut just what needs to be cut do you think he did that no no it was way too impossible there's no way that he could have spent his entire life studying each of these projects to figure out on his own where to cut now if you think that the department managers did that for him as in cut their own budget without being asked do you think that happened no the individual departments wanted the most money they could get so to them their boss was their opponent the boss was their opponent and the other people who were other department heads were their opponent they were trying to get the biggest part of the pie and that was the game so they couldn't do the scalpel the people who actually understood the projects they wouldn't do any scalpel because they would lie oh yeah if I ask the question they'd say oh yeah essential well if we don't do this the the entire company will fold in a minute and then it gets to the boss who would be able to cut it if he understood them but he doesn't understand them and there's no way he really could because there were just so many of them so do you know what the big boss told me he looks at me and looks at my giant list that's incomprehensible he says uh tell everybody to cut 10% across the board compared to the budget from last year and I looked at him after doing all this work and I looked at him and said uh that's uh that's really is that how this works he goes yeah just cut 10% and I'd say I've talked to all these managers and they say if you cut their budgets even a penny the entire world will end and they they swear that's true and he looked at me and said they'll work it out just got everybody 10% so I go back to everybody after I'd done this bottomup budget made him do all this work and I said he just says cut everything 10% do you know how it turned out fine fine do you know how easy it was to cut 10% well about a few months into every year there would be people who imagined that they were going to start some new project on day one but there was some vendor who couldn't deliver there was some approvals they didn't get so things were like six months delayed so when somebody needed a little extra because it was really was an important project or something new they' go to the boss and he'd say oh okay is there any any projects that are delayed and not spending the budget for this year okay just take it from that budget put it over there problem solved now now in that specific case there was a little scalping going on but it was after the fact it was sort of doing it wrong and then correcting does that sound familiar the big boss was doing it wrong moving fast being efficient and then making Fast Corrections okay that one does need a little more money this one underspent move that money over there worked fine everything worked out just right now here's another one here's my second budget story CU if you don't understand how the real world budgets none of this Doge criticism is going to make any sense to you uh that same boss once asked me to sit in for him in a meeting where the department heads were arguing to keep their budgets because there was a higher level above us that was trying to cut cut our budgets as well so so far I've only been talking about my department and had lots of sub dep departments but above it they were trying to do the same thing so they brought us all in and uh they would each ask each of the managers you know do is this budget necessary you know is there anything you can cut from your budget if we cut this would that be okay now here's something that's embarrassing I was very young but I was fairly capable so my boss did didn't feel bad sending me to do this very important task and when it came to me the person leading the meeting said all right so you know looked at the list of projects I guess I had submitted and said well what about this one you really need to do this is this essential to the company and I said well if he had to cuss something and I were being a team player that's probably what I would cut how do you think that went over when I took that back to my boss every every one of you who have corporate experience you're laughing right now it's like how dumb were you no I thought I was there to do a good faith effort to reduce the budget for the company because I thought I was working for the shareholders right I mean it's a fiduciary responsibility to not waste money because you have shareholders so I thought yeah you know if you're asking me what I would cut if I had to it would be that one and so they cut it and I took it back to my boss oh my God the look of death that I got he he just cut through me with his eyes he said so I hear you gave away my budget and I said oh but you know they asked me what would be the you know least priority and I was trying to do the right thing and that's when I learned that nobody's trying to do the right thing everybody in a big organiz organization is lying because that's how you get ahead so everybody wanted their own budget not to be cut but they were certainly happy if other people's budget got cut because they were competing against other managers they weren't trying to satisfy stakeholders that was just dumb on my on my part all right so so the first thing you need to know is if you try to do a scalpel approach everyone is lying and you won't know it well you'll know they're lying but you don't know what the LIE is or what the truth is so if you were to say to me on paper and conceptually is it better to use a scalpel than a chainsaw I would say the same thing you would say well yeah scalpa makes sense that's a reasoned looking at all the details deciding what to keep and whatnot but in the real world nobody's going to play along with that they're all going to just look for maintaining their own little domain so in my experience the scalpel approach can only work in the specific situations and I'll give you a few one would be if you're a small business and you're the owner of the business and it really matters to if you cut costs because that money goes right in your pocket and and it's small enough company that you understand all of its parts so you could actually cut with a scalpel in that case because you're the boss it's all good for you if you cut and you know exactly where to cut and where not to cut yes scalpel scalpel scalpel if you took a chainsaw to your own smallish business well that would obviously be a mistake obviously now what is the situ or another situation well let's put it this way so that's a situation where you've got time to operate and you're going to be profitable no matter what but you could be a little more profitable so if you got plenty of time the scalp will make sense you know even if you have to work a little extra hard to find some stuff yes as long as you're in a business that's stable and you're just trying to tweak it every now and then scalpel so when you hear people say but I I've been involved in a number of businesses and we C with the scalpel they did they did here's where the scalpel doesn't work when there is an existential threat and the timer is ticking if the timer is ticking you're not going to have the option of using the scalpel because even if you you did everything right you would run out a time here are two examples number one Twitter when when mus bought Twitter the cash flow situation was Dire as in uhoh there's almost no way this company can survive he was going to have wasted $44 billion do of his and other people's money if he couldn't rapidly massively cut expenses what would have happened if musk had said all right all you employees of Twitter who hate my guts tell me where I can scalpel away some unnecessary fat what do you think would have happened every one of those people would have said their jobs are essential and if they left morale would drop and it could never work so musk instead took a chainsaw and just went got rid of too much and then when when the the too much became obvious or people argued and successfully he added it back exactly like he said he would now what about the federal government the federal government is also on a timer and also has an existential threat it's called The Debt we don't have 10 years left we really don't I don't know if we have three years left the national debt will crush us and will destroy the entire country if you think that taking a scalpel to the federal government is going to get it done in any kind of reasonable timeline before the entire nation is destroyed seems very unlikely to me because remember everybody involved will be lying everybody in involved will be trying to slow the process they'll try to sue you so you can't even use the scalpel it's going to be just infinite push back infinite people pretending to be helping but not all lying people will be ganging up they'll they'll try to take you out as the boss if they have a they have any way to do it they will attack you a hundred different ways the one and only way you have any chance is with a chainsaw so let me put this in terms of risk if if uh if musk had used a scalpel on Twitter that would be 100% chance of failure if he used a chainsaw on Twitter there was some chance of success and some chance of failure which which one do you pick the one with a 100% chance of failure scalpel or the one that might work but it's pretty drastic well there's only one that might work you obviously do the one that might work what about the national debt do you think we have time to scalpel that thing I don't I don't think there's any time to scalpel it I think that the one and only hope of actual survival survival we're not optimizing we're trying to survive and I think that's what people are missing he's got to take a chainsaw to it and you know I would say he's just getting started because you know there there are bigger bigger Parts he have has to go after but there's not there's not really a second choice the the chains so might work and it might not work but the scalo definitely will fail and it's the Dilbert filter that guarantees it because people are lying weasel now let me make another exception let's say you had a business that wasn't very complicated let's say you are the uh owner of a sports franchise you probably do understand almost all the parts even as the big owner right right you would probably know what your players are being paid that's the biggest thing you would know what the travel costs are it wouldn't be mysterious at all so if you wanted to take a scalpel to that again because you have the luxury of being profitable and you're not in a hurry probably you could scalpel quite a bit and I would say that would be exactly the right answer so when people tell you Scott I have personally scalped uh budgets with success that's probably true but it's so it's always the specific case it's not the you're going to die tomorrow if you don't cut this by 70% all right so there we go there's the uh ultimate reframe on that um you know I I'm so sick of talking about this Doge email to all the federal employees telling them to say what they did uh five things they did and I was trying to imagine it's been a long time since I've been a cubicle but I'm trying to imagine how I would have handled that if I'd been a federal worker and I'm positive I would have handled it the following way I'd open my email I'd see what they're asking I'd probably check with my boss to see if it's okay to answer it but then I would sit down and it's the first thing I would do I would put off whatever else I had on my schedule and I would answer that right away and I would come up with five awesome things that I did this week and then i' H send and then I would never think about it again how would you handle it would you fight it you didn't have anything better to do that day than fight an email ahh I'm going to go on CNN and fight this email what the most basic thing that anybody does is say what five things they accomplished that also used to be my job it also used to be my job to collect everybody's top five accomplishments that was literally my job do you know what happened when I would collect all their accomplishments and put it into one cool document that I made myself and I gave it to my boss nobody ever looked at at it nobody ever looked at it the only point was to make sure that you thought people were watching you it was basically just a a head game so that people had to you know really show that they were doing real work nobody really looked at it I don't even think they like maybe just glanced at it but they didn't ask any penetrating questions so when musk says this is really just to find out if there's a real person in a pulse that's sounds right that sounds right that's the only thing he's going to find out it's not like he's going to look at the five things and say huh one of these five things looks like maybe you could cut that with a scalpel that's not going to happen it's just to see if they have a pulse if they're really there if they really respond now I realize there's a whole bunch of complications to it and um a number of a number of entities from the FBI to the state department to I know pentagon have already said no you guys don't need to do this that's fine uh I don't mind that at all uh I don't mind when the Trump Administration disagrees with itself don't mind at all because I think the disagreement is reasonable but I also think the request was reasonable so and I don't think any of it's terribly important I think uh Trump and Elon might might be pushing it still just so they don't lose you know because it' be good to it'd be good to show a pattern of winning you know win win win win win uh if you have even one push back that's successful it could take a little dent out of your shine a dent out of your shine never quote me on that no never quote me on that please anyway so I'm just bored with that whole email thing but the Wall Street Journal had an interesting context um apparently some companies instead of doing that what are your five accomplishment things every week which is a big pain in the ass everybody hates it and everybody's lying too um there's some software now uh one company called workboard or at least that's the product workboard um invades your computer your work computer and it looks at all the things you've done and then reports them to your boss so everything from your calendar to your emails and then the boss can tell who's working and what they're working and how hard they're working now that's the scariest creepiest thing I've ever heard in my life I mean I don't know how it could possibly give you anything interesting and then I saw a picture of what the the dashboard would look like you know if you were the top boss and you wanted to see that the sum of all the things your employees were doing it's like this really sort of detailed complicated you know some boxes are bigger than other showing that there's more activity there and stuff and I thought to myself okay in the real world your top boss would use that three times and by the third time they would realize that there was nothing it was telling them that they could act on it was like ah okay looks like the box for uh talking about the budget is a little bit bigger okay but that's because the budget process is happening right now okay okay well it looks like the box for uh vendor talking to vendors is a little bit bigger so they're doing a lot of talking to vendors oh well obviously because we're doing a you know request for proposal probably it wouldn't be anything you could act on now I don't want to throw that company under the bus because they might have a good argument that it's making everything better but in the real world if you show somebody a complicated screen of anything they end up ignoring it after the first few few tries in the real world so I'm going to introduce a new insulting phrase uh I'm going to call it lady fiction lady fiction I've told you before how Democrats they seem to just imagine problems like they imagine what somebody's thinking and then they imagine their bad personality they imagine their bad intentions and then they then they project that forward to how it's going to destroy the world but it's all imaginary it's imaginary future and it's imagination that they can read the minds of strangers so CNN just had uh one of the federal employees on and she was one of the ones resisting the email requests and uh she said that uh see what' she say she said that elon's email request was an act of harassment and bullying now do you think that's the way Elon was thinking of it it's like huh you know what I haven't done enough of I need to do a little more harassment and bullying even though he tells you exactly why he's doing it you can't take the exact reason that he describes which makes perfect sense you you have to imagine that the real reason this is dark personality flaws and it's harassment and bullying that's pure mind reading and again men prefer reading non-fiction women prefer fiction and the more you see it so I'm going to call that lady friction lady fiction lady friction is completely different story it's has more to do with scissoring but uh lady fiction is where you imagine that uh you can imagine you could read somebody's mind and you see some dark dark secrets in there and you project It Forward anyway um uh one of our favorite uh personalities on X data Republican if you haven't been exposed to data Republican yet um you're missing out so data Republican is a sort of a superstar of data analysis and is using a lot of the new information that we're learning to come up with some fascinating stuff about the ngos ETC but uh she was on Glenn Beck's show and um she described our current situation in a way that you'll never be able to forget so you've got the basic idea that usaid was giving money to all these Nos and other other entities were giving them money and that they became sort of operating independently and nobody knew what they were doing and you know then they were maybe laundering money and stuff um so what dat Republican said after looking at all this deep more deeply than we have he said uh that the Democrats are offended by Doge because their money depends on people not knowing what they're doing with our money and I thought yeah that does sort of sum it up doesn't it their money depends on us not knowing what they're doing with our money because our money is just going into their pockets through the Nos and so she says so that is truly censorship because because I think if actual Americans understood what they were doing with our money and that they were actually setting up their own government this is the key they were setting up their own government and actually ignoring what real people wanted to do oh we would be so upset there's a reframe that's it the NOS were a shadow government that could get all kinds of things done they could stall things they could make things happen they could overthrow countries now working in conjunction with other parts of the the uh government but once you hear that frame that the NOS were a shadow government wow you can't lose that one like that that's sticky that's a really good reframe anyway just think about that um and then she went on and said because the reality is that these people have a government unto themselves that they've created with these NOS uh that they run separately from us now the one thing that uh would be required for a shadow government would be there's one leader do you think that this Shadow government NGO thing has one leader or is it just an understanding that a bunch of people have that they can all be better off with this scheme I feel like there's not one leader but there might be maybe several people who are more influential than others um and maybe they're fighting it out I always imagine that the the Hillary Clinton people and the Obama people were not the same and that they're all sort of jockeying for control and you maybe some of that's happening through the NGS I don't know anyway Trump says he wants to bring back the Keystone XL pipeline that Biden shut down uh but apparently it's not that easy because you'd have to find somebody who wants to do it and I guess the company that was doing it um doesn't seem to eager to do it again and I can understand that because how can they guarantee it won't get canceled again why would you put money into something if the next Democrat president's going to cancel it so uh but Trump says you know even if another company wants to to do it he said the approvals will be easy basically the government will get out of the way and uh I like that so I I like that Trump's pushing that but there really is a structural problem there if you ask somebody to invest I don't know hundreds of millions of dollars maybe billions can you really expect them to do that if they don't know if their project will survive the next president's term that's a lot to ask so I wonder if there's any fix for that in other words could Congress say um you won't be touched for 20 years like could could they pass any legislation that says I don't think so because I think I think it would be illegal to say you can't ever cut an expense or cancel something but I I wonder if there's any clever way to get past the fact that this is really it's a giant risk now that Biden canceled it once I don't know how you fix that but somebody clever might have an idea for doing that um meanwhile the dnc's vice chairman David hog he's warning that Democrats they need to stop acting like a cult now how much do you love the fact that the people who were the problem are trying to become the people who are calling out the problem it's almost like they have to pretend that they weren't deep into all the bad behavior that they say they want to stop doing but hog says this he says frankly uh anybody who did speak out about Biden's mental decline was immediately ostracized in our party uh he says I know that we like to claim that we are not a cult but anybody who did say that that Biden was too old basically had their career destroyed that's a problem where the Democrat Party we supposed to have open conversations and dialogue he tells his audience he said there are many lessons we need to learn from this election but that is one of the main ones we cannot be a cult okay here's the problem as long as uh Power has more value than open conversation ations and dialogue you're only going to get power so if somehow open conversations and dialogue you can monetize or it would give you more power or it make you everybody more successful everybody would get a Pat in the back but it doesn't work that way if if you do open conversations and dialogue within your own party that will immediately look like weakness and you'll be destroyed so they they've sort of painted themselves into this corner where you can't really disagree with the party and there's nothing that David hog is going to say that's going to change it because the incentive structure is as soon as you disagree you're done and that's not going to change that how can it it's not like they can give an order and say all right don't do this it just takes anybody who wants to do it to do it to destroy other people but it does make me wonder why this is uh do you think that this is as much of a problem on the right do you feel that in the mega Republican conservative world that we have open dialogue and that you can disagree without getting cancelled yes or no I feel like a number of us have disagreed with important things and not gotten canceled by at least by Republicans um have you not seen me disagree with common mag thinking I think I have a number of times and do I ever get slapped down for that not that I remember not that I remember the the only time that I get real hate is when people have a incorrect um understanding of what I've ever said or thought if they don't understand what I've said then it turns into some crazy thing where they're criticizing me for something they only imagine but when I say real things uh let's take the Dan khaw thing you don't think I'm completely aware that by the time I'm done with this there will be something on social media trying to tear me down for what somebody's going to say is supporting Dan kencho against Mega which didn't happen and you all witness it so you know that didn't happen but somebody will turn it into that however it'll probably just be a passing nothing like the worst case will be some troll on X and it'll just go away because I think through the at least my audience uh is completely accepting that I'm not just going to tell you the normal frame that's mostly why you watch because you expect me to be a little different from the mainstream opinion if I didn't what would be the point really what would be the point so yeah I don't think it's I don't think it's as big a problem on the right um according to uh Simon Kent writing in breit bar news Republican uh I'm sorry Democrat donors are not feeling too good about the Democrats but there was this one this one donor who had a quote that I thought was great quote they want us to spend money and for what for no message no Organization no Forward Thinking the donor said the thing that's clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016 they worked off the same Playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end well here's what I say about identity politics which largely drove the Democrat message identity politics um it's a one-way trip and they should have known that because on paper you can see it it's the MSNBC problem as soon as NB MSNBC became the identity politics all the time Network you could guarantee guarantee that at some point in the future their own employees would turn against them and call them racists and that just happened guarantee it you don't know when it's going to happen but you can pretty much bet on it with a lot of safety and so the the Democrats can't really unwind that thing that they've created because they can't be ignoring identity politics that would make them Republicans so they've created they've created their own monster that they can't kill and the Republicans are like yeah good luck with that because we're not involved it's not it's none of our business if you want to create a monster and then the monster kills you but you knew that that monster would kill you because how could it not you know as soon as you say that identity is everything everybody looks at their own identity and says wait but I'm a short gay lesbian whatever you know what where's my rights and then everything falls apart so the Democrats I don't think they have a way back now as I've said before all bets are off if they found the right candidate right so uh Trump is by no measure an ordinary Republican so nobody could have really predicted the second term of trump and the way it's turned out no no could have predicted that so it's just sometimes you get this special case with a special character this you know once in a thousand years type of Personality which I think Trump is and if they don't get one of those I don't know if they have a way back because even even Obama as rational sounding as he was and I think he was very smart and very Savvy about how things work I don't even think he can abandon identity politics at this point I mean he can't run for office but even if a new Obama came today um I don't know I don't know how they can come back here's the least surprising news of the day the former head of the fda's drug Center joins fizer as chief medical officer now as you know there's a long history of top FDA people going to work for the companies that they had been um trying to regulate which of course creates a massive incentive to not say bad things about the industry when you're in the FDA because you know that the most likely outcome after you're not in the FDA is a job offer from one of those same companies and I was trying to think what could you do about that I don't love the fact that you could ban it like don't go to work for these companies for five years we might do that I think RFK Junior didn't he float that idea but that seems you know my my sense of freedom and capitalism really rejects you can't go get a job somewhere else like I don't like um any kind of non-compete agreements I hate them because I I live in America you can't tell me what my next job is right I mean that's just really offensive to me that you can tell me what my next job is no matter what it is you don't need to you don't get an approval over my next job so on one hand I completely understand that this is massively deforming our drug approval and safety massively deform it on the other hand I like freedom I like Freedom so I wonder if there's some middle ground and the only thing I could think of is that the X FDA people have an option that's better than working for a big Pharma which would pay an ungodly amount of money could you find a way to keep them on the let's say the public side and it may require paying an ungodly amount of money to say all right once you leave the FDA you can go work for fizer and they'll pay you a million dollars a year whatever it is but if you continue working for the government we will also give you a million dollars a year we'll match it but you'll be on our side so you'll do extra work and you'll go extra deep and you work with the FDA you won't be on the FDA but let's say you're you work with them or for them or something now that's the bad idea because it's you know anti-d Doge it's spending more money not less but I just wonder is there any system way to fix that because you'd have to outbid outbid the Pharma now the the gross way to do it is just say you can't go get those jobs I I just don't love that I I don't love the lack of Freedom that that implies so maybe somebody have a good idea let's talk about Ukraine so Trump has suggested on yesterday that he's willing to uh revive economic relations with Russia and then Putin has offered uh hey why don't you work with us America why don't you work with us uh to do a joint partnership to exploit Rare Earth minerals in the donbass region what what did you see that coming and then Putin also offers and I'm going to talking about this in terms of persuasion not in terms of economics then Putin also said that Russia is ready to supply the US with 2 million tons of aluminum which will help stabilize prices and apparently we're the biggest uh importer of aluminum so it actually would drive down some of our costs if we work with Russia on that um and so here's the thing um let me say up front that if you believe that I that I trust to Putin and that he just just wants to make money and stop all the fighting I don't I don't it would be foolish to say that he has no ulterior motives or anything else but think how historic this is that Trump and Putin have changed the frame they've changed the frame from how to kill each other to how to make money for both of us now maybe this won't come to anything maybe there will be no joint Partnerships maybe it's a bad idea maybe trusting Russia is just always a bad idea and you know even if it looks good on paper maybe it just never works I'm open to all those arguments so I don't know that we should do it but the fact that um I've said this before I I generally think that Trump is the best public Persuader we've ever seen just ever but Putin's in the same weight class I don't think he's quite a he's not quite uh trump-like but he understands the whole persuasion thing and so what Putin's doing is he's reframing Russia as a potential economic partner which is following the lead of Trump trump is the again Trump's the better Persuader but Putin can Putin can take punch for punch he knows persuasion and this is brilliant it's brilliant I hate to say it and again I'm not suggesting that we get into partnership economically with uh Russia I'm not against it and I'm not for it I would have to know a lot more before I had an opinion but from a persuasion perspective Putin's really nailing it he's nailing it because he knows that uh Trump needs economic wins and he could offer him some easy economic wins so that's really good negotiating so again don't don't take this as me loving Putin and I don't want him to be my girlfriend and I don't I don't trust Russia you know without a lot of guarantees but you have to appreciate that the way Putin is handling this is kind of impressive just from a persuasion perspective you can call it evil persuasion if you like I won't argue but it's very effective and changing the frame to how how do we make money I just love that I just love that we'll see where it goes all right um again another story that would have been the biggest story except that there were so many stories all right apparently James comr uh told Breitbart that uh the doj the FBI the IRS and the SEC were all investigating Joe and Hunter Biden but were told to stand down and Jim Biden was even being investigated for Medicare and fraud Insurrection Barbie's talking about this onx um apparently six Banks reported to the treasury Department that the bidens were committing Financial crimes but everyone was told to stand down now wouldn't that be the biggest story in the country except for all the other biggest stories how in the world is that just a little article and breart do you think it's true do you think it's true that all these entities were going to investigate the Bens and you know keep in mind this is when they knew there was a risk because they were powerful creatures so if all these entities were willing to investigate them even knowing that it would be risky and they had to be told not to it does suggest there was some pretty strong evidence not proof everybody's everybody's innocent who proven guilty and they haven't been proven guilty but it certainly would be the biggest story in the country under normal times I am curious how much else we'll find out about the what I think is the crime family uh so Trump is signing a directive to counter foreign social media censorship um so Dan fre of reclaimed the Net's writing about this so I guess uh he's trying to challenge our European mostly European I think um saying that they by taxing our social media they're basically you know doing it to censor them and trying to control them in various ways censorship as well as Taxation and Trump wants the Taxation and the censorship to be curtailed now I don't know what he can do about it so that's why he signed a directive the directive is figure out what to do about this I assume it means we're going to put more pressure on our alleged allies but let me say this as clearly as possible I've said this before but it can't be said enough if you're trying to curtail free speech in my country you're not my Ally England France whoever you are we love you but you're not my Ally if you're trying to curtail my free speech that is a line which you cannot cross that's that's a red line that's as bright as it could possibly be and if it weren't for Trump I don't know that we'd be doing anything about it so sometimes you think you know Trump is fun and sometimes you like what he's doing and sometimes you don't but this is one of those cases where this is essential this is essential Trump nobody else would do this I don't know if he'll succeed but it's going to require putting pressure on allies like we've never seen he's the only person I know who would do it there there's no other normal president who would put pressure on our allies over this but it is really really important and yeah he should bring he should bring the entire toolbox what whatever it takes whatever whatever it takes I anything it might take getting out of NATO I mean is that serious so whatever he has to threaten bring it on let's bring the threats on because we need to ratchet this up this can never happen again so he's got to be tough on that I support that 100% meanwhile down in Mexico the uh um if you didn't know the the Big Cartel the caloa cartel apparently has two factions and the two factions are fighting it out and uh there's a great article by uh Jose De Cordova in the Wall Street Journal and so there's a whole bunch of murder going on because the they're fighting it down for control of things but uh one of the things that I thought was uh fascinating is the number of fenel labs so there was just one little area that had a 100 fentanyl labs and I guess the labs have to keep moving because the other cartel members keep narking him out so apparently the the way you compete if you're in a cartel and there other factions in the cartel is that if you find out where the other factions lab is you turn them in so that the government tries to close them down I'm assuming the government does but even if you you know just turned them in and let your your bad guys go and take out the lab so there's this gigantic fight over just hundred hundreds of different fental labs and part of me just wishes they uh they they just fight it out but it was hilarious that uh one of one of the uh lab operators quoted this they were talking about uh they have to do so much security Now for their Labs that it's it's hitting their bottom line and they just talk like regular business people and so the one of the lab operators says they have to increased production to cover higher costs for gunmen intelligence and weapons he goes quote if before we were making 10 million pills now we have to make 20 million they they just talk like ordinary business people they need Doge anyway um at one point I'd wondered wouldn't it be better instead of us attacking the cartels to Simply provide all the intelligence that the factions need to attack each other suppose we send our drones up there we find all their their little lab locations I don't know if we can I don't know if there's any way to find them from the air but suppose we could and then we just turn it over to the other faction and just let them destroy each other until they're so weakened that then you go in but you wait until they've just beaten themselves into nothing there is some there is some worry that uh if the caloa cartel implodes over their internal conflicts that one of the other cartels would just take over so nothing will change so it's complicated I saw a report that comes from the telegraph now consider the source so some people say that's not a very credible Source but the telegraph says that Iran fears an immediate attack on its nuclear facilities and so they've increased all their defenses near the nuclear facilities and the source says that Iran expects attack every night even on nuclear facilities that no one knows about and Iranian officials said that tran Fields a regime could fall if America joins the attack you know what I say about that story uh I could have written that story without doing any research do you think Telegraph did any research uh Scott what do you think Iran is doing about its nuclear facilities I'd say well if I were them and anybody else would say the same thing they're probably trying to figure out how to protect them as best they can Scott do you think that the Iranian regime is worried that if America and Israel attacked it could have an impact on their ability to lead in the future and I would say duh yeah we're not going to leave their regime alone if we do a major attack in their country and even if we don't directly attack the regime losing all their nuclear facilities and all of their anti-aircraft doeses put some question about their uh stability so on one hand I don't know if the telegraph story is real on the other hand it's exactly what you would have made up if you wanted to act like you did some research but you didn't the Indian army according to nextg defense they have an AI weapon that can track and shoot in just 10 Mill seconds and it can hit a target a mile away every time it can hit a target a mile away every time and it can do it in a millisecond now at the moment it requires a human to uh allow the shot but does anybody think that will always have to have a human imagine imagine the war starts and both sides have these incredibly effective machine gun that never misses and they're both Ai and one of them says you better ask me before you fire and the other one says if it's in that direction that's where all the bad guys are so just fire the one who removes the human is going to win every war so the human will be removed and you know I don't want to say Skynet because it's too obvious but how how does it not happen there is no future where Skynet doesn't happen is there now there is a future where maybe it's not in control but there's no future in which Warfare doesn't look exactly like this um and then did you know that there are 10 new major battery plants that are coming online in the US looking to double our capacity now the reason I tell you these stories there's there's always a battery story you know there's some new battery technology or new battery Factory I like I tell you about some stories that you can tell what the future is by the insurance industry like whatever the insurance companies tell you that's that's really indicative or indicative of the future I think this battery stuff if you didn't follow anything else would be a real good indicator of the future because if we can make batteries really cheaply and make a lot of them and make them domestically that's a whole different country than if we have to depend on somebody else for the batteries or we can't make enough you know Elon Musk famously says that if you had 100 square mile of uh solar panels and enough batteries to store it when the sun is not out that you could power the entire country now I'd love to see somebody who really understands the industry argue with that point um now and also it should be said that that's just uh for calculation purposes you wouldn't put them all in one place that would be insane because you know one one big natural disaster you lose everything but just in terms of how how practical it is musk says it's completely practical yeah and it doesn't even sound like you'd have to invent very much sounds like we already have what we need so that's pretty interesting and I think it tells you what the future looks like all right ladies and gentlemen that's all I wanted to do today thanks for joining I'm going to talk to the locals subscribers privately now um but come back tomorrow same time same place and we'll see if uh representative CAW has killed Tucker yet I think he'll still be alive we hope all right locals coming at you privately in 30 seconds e e e
bit Tesla's down 5% I'll tell you I'm
getting tired of this stocks going down
stuff I think there's going to be more
of it before there's less of
it but let's get our uh comments going
and then I'll give you the show that you
deserve you deserve
it yeah I'm no joy
bayar but I'll do the best I
can all right so you go there go there
n
there and there we
go comments O
[Music]
Plenty good morning everybody and
welcome to the highlight of human
civilization it's called coffee with
Scott Adams and I'm pretty sure he never
had a better time but if you want to
take this up to levels that nobody can
understand with their tiny shiny human
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that makes everything better it's called
the simultaneous sip happens now
go everything's
working well we got new news
today so question number one now that
the funding for usaid is being cut is
that related to the high level firings
we're seeing in the
media is that why
msnbc's cutting some of their expensive
Talent or is it just a coincidence and
they're not doing well so obviously they
have to make some changes I don't know
but uh as you know Joy Reed her show
ended she had her last show I guess uh
yesterday
and um Rachel matow didn't take it well
so Rachel Mano uh goes on her own show
to complain about Joy Reed being fired
and she said uh that she's learned so
much from
her as we all have really we have so
much and she has so much more to teach
her Rachel says and I'm wondering what
else does Joy Reed have to teach her I
feel like we saw a lot of her lessons
but I think the lesson is you should
blame everybody for being a racist so
that would be the the big
takeaway um and Rachel mat said I do not
want to lose her as a colleague here at
MSNBC personally I think it's a bad
mistake to let her walk out the door it
is not my call and I understand that but
that's what I think now it gets better
here here's the payoff Rachel M said I
will tell you it's also un nerving to
see that on a network where we have two
canum two nonwhite hosts in Prime Time
both of our nonwhite hosts in prime time
are losing their show uh oh shows as is
Katie Fang on the weekend and that feels
worse than bad no matter who replaces
them it feels indefensible and I do not
defend
it now if there's anything that could
make me happier than watching Joy Reed
being taken off the air it's watching
Rachel matow call her own company racist
for taking Joy Reed off the air now I
think that that's what she learned from
Joy Reed to just call everybody racist
all the time you don't have to do
anything else that's that's the entire
game and uh when you only have that one
speed the only thing that that you do is
call everything
racist you know that's going to get
turned against your own company right it
wasn't any way that uh there wasn't any
way that that wouldn't work out poorly
even on paper if I said to you all right
here's the deal there's going to be this
network and the people in the network
are going to call everybody and
everything
racist here's what I would have warned
the
network you know that's eventually going
to be turned on you right you can't hire
a whole bunch of people who only have
one speed that's racist it's racist as
racist as racist it's racist as racist
and then expect that when you make a
change that they don't like that they're
not going to call you a
racist of course they are of course they
are it doesn't matter what reasons you
have doesn't matter at
all anyway what one of the things that
Rachel M probably is suffering from now
is that as long as Joy Reed still had a
job Rachel matto fell safe because
because Joy Reed was even crazier so it
made Rachel matow look sort of moderate
but once Joy Reed is gone now Rachel mat
will look like the the craziest one on
the
network and it's going to make her feel
like she might be next and I'm surprised
she wasn't just because of her
pay um how did other people take it well
Angela
Ry who's a black woman who uh which is
important to the story uh she was a
former CNN
commentator and she calls for a
boycott a boycott of
MSNBC because they fired Joy Reed and I
guess that makes him racist I don't know
and then Keith alberman you know my
mascot Keith
olberman uh he said uh he said in a post
breaking MSNBC racist Purge
escalates they names the people who were
out so
so the the left is getting attacked by
Keith olberman for being
racist are we supposed to enjoy this as
much as we
are now I I never like to say only
negative things so I want to say one
positive thing one of the things that
Rachel mat said in her little speech
about what happened is that Rachel mat
was 51 years old and I thought to myself
damn whatever you're doing for skin care
is working does she look
51 I think I would have
guessed 40 that's pretty impressive but
whatever she does for
Health it sure works on camera anyway so
good for her all right do you want me to
uh make everybody mad all right now I'm
going to make everybody mad you all saw
the story and you want me to talk about
it where Dan khaw was qu on an open mic
saying about Tucker Carlson quote if I
ever meet Tucker Carlson I'll effing
kill him I'm not
joking now this of course caused
everybody to say you crazy you crazy
anac contr control person how crazy can
you
be um and Tucker cleverly invited him to
come on the show to see how it turns
out I don't think Tucker was too worried
wor um now you should probably know that
Tucker has you know been quite a Critic
of K Shaw he's called him unstable in
the past and says he needs help I don't
I don't know about any of that but um I
had to ask Chad gbt to remind me why it
is that so many magga people don't like
khaw and it said generic stuff tell me
if this sounds right that khaw was more
what they called now this is remember
this is just AI this just chat gbt said
that khaw is more traditional
conservative as opposed to a mega
populist and he has sometimes wanted to
do bipartisan things that the um that
the magga people didn't like and he has
sometimes criticized Trump which the
mega people don't like now I don't know
is there more to it probably that sounds
kind of generic but here's my
take and I'm I'm going to be consistent
with past takes about leaked audio and
video here's my take the person who's to
blame is the person who leaked it now
this is what I always say with a leaked
video because you have to recognize that
people say things in private that are
perfectly fine in private as soon as
somebody changes the context from
private to public which is what the
leaked video did they turned it into a
completely different message
because when it's private it's just the
way people
talk right have you ever said you want
to kill somebody privately and whoever
you're talking to knows you don't want
to kill them it's just something you say
when you're talking privately it's like
ah I would kill that person I mean it
now he also added I'm not joking but
that doesn't change it of course he's
not joking he's just saying that he you
know doesn't like
him so my rule is is this if something
would be perfectly ordinary in private
and then somebody some weasel some
weasel decides to drop
that video to destroy your life it's the
weasel's fault so I'd like to know the
name of the weasel because the weasel is
who I have all of my hatred for right
now I mean I hate that guy or
woman whoever it is whoever leaked this
is just scum it's despicable because
they knew it would have this effect and
I'm sure they knew that he didn't mean
mean it seriously if you'd like to test
whether he meant it seriously I would
apply what I call the really filter
where you say really do do you really
think that if krenshaw and tuer Carlson
were in the same room that krenshaw
would really slay him really do any of
you believe that no none of you believe
that he would really slay him so it's
just talk and the things that you say
privately now I think it was a mistake
to assume it was private so that there's
definitely an error here and I think you
know Kena probably learned from that if
you've got microphones and people
standing around and you don't say that
kind of thing if there's a microphone
within 100 feet like that's the lesson
so K Shaw is not you know guilt-free
I would say that would be a public
person error now I've made the same
errors as myself I've definitely said
things in places where probably there
was a microphone and maybe I should have
been smarter but you know not if it
really hurt me so I have severe hatred
for who leaked it and uh don't take this
as me supporting everything that CAW
wants to do policy-wise or everything he
said or everything about his whole life
I don't know too much but this really
pisses me off the the fact that we would
treat khaw as the bad guy when the bad
guy is the leaker oh the bad guy is the
leaker does this sound familiar uh
sometimes you can just grab them by the
if that had been private and
stayed private it was just two guys
talking and one of them didn't take it
seriously and the other one probably
didn't mean it seriously
it really had no impact if it stayed
private as soon as somebody leaked it it
changed the context because our brains
are such that we just imagine it as a
public statement because it is public
but it wasn't originally public whoever
changes the context is responsible for
the message period because that's not
the original message the original
message is two guys talking completely
different completely
different if if you've never heard two
guys talking privately maybe you
wouldn't understand
that anyway so yeah I have a strong
feeling about this but none of it's
about khaw and uh margorie Taylor green
asked them did you just say you you want
to kill my friend tuer Carlson and he
replied on X you know LOL no correct no
he does not actually literally want to
kill Tucker Carlson that would be crazy
anyway the US post office workers they
decided to protest any coming changes
from Trump um so there's some talk about
rolling the post office into the federal
government because right now it operates
somewhat independently but if they roll
it into the regular government it might
be in let's say the Commerce
Department oh I told my uh my pre-show
listeners this but it's worth repeating
um I've Incorporated AI into into my
morning process when I get ready for the
the show and I'm putting my notes
together there's always something that I
need a little more context and I don't
want to bother you know Googling it or
something um so I so I keep my AI on and
it's in voice mode um usually I just
push it into voice mode when I've got a
question and then I said if the post
office got absorbed by the federal
government you know what department
would it be in and it said well one of
them might be the Commerce department so
it's just it's just a great tool every
day I use it that way and it's really
really helpful uh yesterday it told me
that Apple was going to invest $500
million in the United States and I said
to
myself that doesn't really sound
like enough and then I checked and it
was 500
billion and then I went back to chat GP
and I said is it 500 million which you
just said or is it 500 billion and it
says oh it's billion so yeah you have to
watch it it's definitely not
100% sometimes it's it's still
hallucinating that's a pretty big
hallucination you know the difference
between millions and billions pretty big
pretty big anyway so here's my question
I saw I think it was Insurrection Barbie
asked this question on X or a version of
it
um so I'll just put this in my own words
so don't don't blame instraction Barbie
for my wording of this
but
hypothetically if the federal government
um absorbed the post office so that they
were just federal workers like everybody
else in the federal
government would it be possible for
Trump to order them to not deliver
mailin ballots and make it impossible to
vote with mailin ballots even if the
states um find it legal and and have
approved
it could he could you find that as like
a shortcut to say yeah you states can
say you want mail and ballots but I
control the post office and I just told
them that they're not in the business of
mailing
ballots now I'm guessing there's
probably some kind of rule or
legislation that says the post office
has to deliver kind of anything that
isn't
dangerous so I'm just guessing you know
I I would imagine to be some kind of
rule that says you have to deliver
whatever somebody wants you to deliver
but I feel like you could game that it
feels gameable you could do something
like well yes you can do it but people
would have to pay $100 per ballot and
that would be the postage would be $100
or yes you can do it but you have to
show your ID when you mail
or something like that these are the bad
ideas those are not meant to be serious
ideas but it just makes me
wonder is the change the potential
change in the post office leadership
meaning putting it in the federal
government as opposed to operating
independently could it could it take
care of mail and voting so I'll just
leave that for somebody who wants to
research that and get back to
me um you know I know we talk too much
about the Democrats they're uh almost
reasonable you know like the Carville
when he's not crazy and John Stewart
when he when sometimes he said something
that's you know not 100% pro-democrat
and not 100%
anti-a but a funny thing has happened
with this Doge stuff if you haven't
noticed um the Democrats have given up
on saying doge is a bad idea because the
country loves it you know by a pretty
good majority the country likes cutting
that waste Fraud and Abuse so you can't
really be a political party and say yeah
uh we want to preserve the waste Fraud
and Abuse and they finally figured that
out that they couldn't possibly be
against that so they've changed their
approach to talk about the method well
okay but the method you know the way
they're doing it we'll talk about that
but John Stewart takes it even further
so he does a uh uh pretty funny bit
where he's saying that what about you
know it's great to stop the uh you know
condoms for terrorists which was never
really a real story but it makes a good
anecdote um but what about the subsidies
to Big Oil he says and what about the I
guess subsidies or something like that
for a big
Pharma and I don't know if he thought
that this was a Republican Thing versus
a Democrat thing and that maybe the
magga people would be in favor of
subsidies for Big
Oil uh I don't think we are right is
there any prot Trump person who says you
know we should give more of our tax
dollars to Big profitable
companies I don't think anybody says
that so not only is is
Stuart uh acknowledging that you know
waste r have to be addressed he's very
clear on that but he's
competing he's competing he's saying
this is where the big money is I don't
know how big it is or how easy it is to
find or if it's even real but I love the
fact that the Democrats now have to
compete for fighting the most waste
Fraud and
Abuse all right all right let's enter
that frame let's enter the frame of
we're competing to see who could do the
best job of cutting things that we
shouldn't be paying for love it now that
is a valuable contribution in my
opinion so let's talk about uh I'll get
i'll get to more on that later um Thomas
Massie points out that the budget still
has some kind of subsidies for using
corn to make
fuel which everybody knows as he points
out Mass he points out that it increases
the price of food
now did you know that were you aware
that even still there are Republicans
there are Republicans who are in favor
of uh using corn to make fuel this
ethanol now I've never even heard of
anybody using ethanol for anything have
you do any of you have an ethanol driven
car or an ethanol
tractor uh I don't use ethanol for
anything so isn't ethanol well known to
be just basically a I know
scam that that might be going too far
but I don't know any voter who's in
favor of this so it's got to be one of
those Republicans want to protect their
farmers and you know they get free money
if they grow corn for fuel I guess so I
I like the fact that massie's on that
now I would add that I would add that to
the Doge process say hm I don't know I
don't see why we're doing that doesn't
seem to be necessary for climate change
or anything else it's not like ethanol
is you know making a big run to take
over for other fossil fuels or fossil
fuels there there's so much news going
on that there are stories that in a
normal time would be the number one
headline but in today's news environment
it's like the you know 10th 10th most
important thing that would otherwise
just be huge here's one of those
according to Michael shellenberg
there's a FBI
whistleblower uh who has a source within
the FBI who said that the FBI employees
were destroying evidence on
servers and that he informed cash Patel
of that
now if that's true and keep in mind it's
a whistleblower who talked to another
person who said it's true so it it's not
the The Whistleblower apparently is
known so so one person is known but the
person he talked to uh is a
do we accept that do we accept that's
true with an with one anonymous
source I'm going to say shellenberger is
really good on checking sources so I'm
leaning toward this is probably
true it also just makes sense but isn't
it also just so you're warned about it
isn't it also little bit too on the
nose what's the one thing that every one
of us would have predicted when when
cash Patel got nominated for the FBI
every single one of us would say oh they
backed up the shredders they're going to
be burning their files and deleting
things every one of us said that and
then there's a story with one anonymous
source that's exactly the thing that
every one of us was
expecting how do you judge that one now
the the only thing is guy going for it
is shellenberger because he's highly
credible but if this one turns out to be
not true and I'm not sure we would ever
know that if it turned out to be not
true don't be surprised because that two
on the nose thing it's just it's just
deadly accurate deadly
accurate all right um even Jamie Diamond
of the CEO of JP Morgan I would call him
the the country's top banker and when he
says stuff about
economics um people listen I listen I
think he is very credible and um he says
that Doge needs to be done now he said
something like that
before and
uh but everybody has to say that right
as I said even the Democrats pretty much
every Democrat has agreed okay if you
can get rid of the waste Fraud and Abuse
yeah that would be kind of good so it's
not a surprise that the
smartest guy in banking says it too but
uh here's where I'm going to get into
the they've shifted from what to do
which is hard to be against getting rid
of Fraud and waste abuse to how it's
being done I wanted to add what I call
the dilber filter you ready for this so
as the creator of
Dilbert um I write about things that
seem like good ideas but in the real
world they just always go wrong that
that's sort of what I do for 37 years or
something
and this is one of those I'm going to
give you a couple of stories from my own
experience about cutting expenses in a
big company so if you don't know I
worked for two big companies before I
became a cartoonist uh one of them was
uh Crocker national bank and then later
Pacific Bell the local phone
company and my jobs were usually the
budget guy Finance guy for most of that
time so I would be the one who was in
charge of making sure the budgets were
cut when they needed to get cut but I
didn't have any power I just had to you
know be the organizer basically so here
are two stories and this will get get us
into the chainsaw verus the scalpel as
well so Story number
one I was asked to put together a budget
for the Technology Group within Pacific
Bell and um we were going to do what's
called a bottomup budget you've heard of
a v say we should only do bottomup
budgets now a bottomup budget is when
you go to each department head and you
say all right I want you to add up all
the things you absolutely need to do and
then that'll be your budget what we're
not going to do because that would be
crazy is to give you the same budget as
last year plus you know 5% or something
because we really need to know what
you're doing maybe this year you don't
need as much maybe next year you need
more so it's a bottomup budget is the
most responsible
thoughtful rational way to do it you all
agree so far everybody on the same page
that if you want to be a good manager
you want to be smart you want to do the
right thing you're definitely going to
do a bottomup budget because that's the
only time you can you know put the
scalpel on things this sort of a scalpel
approach right you're really looking at
each little
project now I did that so I collected
everybody's uh bottom up budgets it took
a lot of work you know you'd have a list
of projects and be a mile long and that
would be for each department head and
every Department had had their list of
projects that were a mile long and then
I would take it to the uh was he a
VP might have been an assistant VP the
top guy in the technology
department or at least in my my end of
it and I would show him this like
infinite list of
projects now what do you think needed do
you think that he looked at the infinite
list of projects which he only had a
passing knowledge
of and then made scalpel like decisions
on each of these projects that he
basically didn't even he barely even
knew that they were happening do you
think that's what happened because that
I'm told that that's how the smart
people do it the smart people take the
scalpel they look at every expense and
they cut just what needs to be cut do
you think he did that no no it was way
too impossible there's no way that he
could have spent his entire life
studying each of these projects to
figure out on his own where to cut now
if you think that the department
managers did that for him as in cut
their own budget without being asked do
you think that happened no the
individual departments wanted the most
money they could get so to them their
boss was their
opponent the boss was their opponent and
the other people who were other
department heads were their opponent
they were trying to get the biggest part
of the pie and that was the game so they
couldn't do the scalpel the people who
actually understood the projects they
wouldn't do any scalpel because they
would lie oh yeah if I ask the question
they'd say oh yeah essential well if we
don't do this the the entire company
will fold in a
minute and then it gets to the boss who
would be able to cut it if he understood
them
but he doesn't understand them and
there's no way he really could because
there were just so many of them so do
you know what the big boss told
me he looks at me and looks at my giant
list that's
incomprehensible he says uh tell
everybody to cut 10% across the
board compared to the budget from last
year and I looked at him after doing all
this work and I looked at him and said
uh that's uh that's
really is that how this works
he goes yeah just cut 10% and I'd say
I've talked to all these managers and
they say if you cut their budgets even a
penny the entire world will end and they
they swear that's true and he looked at
me and said they'll work it out just got
everybody
10% so I go back to everybody after I'd
done this bottomup
budget made him do all this work and I
said he just says cut everything
10% do you know how it turned out
fine fine do you know how easy it was to
cut
10% well about a few months into every
year there would be people who imagined
that they were going to start some new
project on day one but there was some
vendor who couldn't deliver there was
some approvals they didn't get so things
were like six months delayed so when
somebody needed a little extra because
it was really was an important project
or something new they' go to the boss
and he'd say oh okay is there any any
projects that are delayed and not
spending the budget for this year okay
just take it from that budget put it
over there problem
solved now now in that specific case
there was a little scalping going on but
it was after the fact it was sort of
doing it wrong and then correcting does
that sound familiar the big boss was
doing it wrong moving fast being
efficient and then making Fast
Corrections okay that one does need a
little more money this one underspent
move that money over there worked fine
everything worked out just right now
here's another one here's my second
budget story CU if you don't understand
how the real world budgets none of this
Doge criticism is going to make any
sense to
you uh that same boss once asked me to
sit in for him in a meeting where the
department heads were arguing to keep
their budgets because there was a higher
level above us that was trying to cut
cut our budgets as well so so far I've
only been talking about my
department and had lots of sub dep
departments but above it they were
trying to do the same thing so they
brought us all in and uh they would each
ask each of the managers you know do is
this budget necessary you know is there
anything you can cut from your budget if
we cut this would that be
okay now here's something that's
embarrassing I was very
young but I was fairly capable so my
boss did didn't feel bad sending me to
do this very important task and when it
came to me the person leading the
meeting said all right so you know
looked at the list of projects I guess I
had submitted and said well what about
this one you really need to do this is
this essential to the
company and I
said
well if he had to cuss something and I
were being a team player that's probably
what I would cut
how do you think that went over when I
took that back to my
boss every every one of you who have
corporate experience you're laughing
right now it's like how dumb were you no
I thought I was there to do a good faith
effort to reduce the budget for the
company because I thought I was working
for the
shareholders right I mean it's a
fiduciary responsibility to not waste
money because you have shareholders so I
thought yeah you know if you're asking
me what I would cut if I had to it would
be that one and so they cut it and I
took it back to my boss oh my God the
look of death that I got he he just cut
through me with his eyes he said
so I hear you gave away my
budget and I said oh but you know they
asked me what would be the you know
least priority and I was trying to do
the right thing
and that's when I
learned that nobody's trying to do the
right thing everybody in a big organiz
organization is lying because that's how
you get ahead so everybody wanted their
own budget not to be cut but they were
certainly happy if other people's budget
got cut because they were competing
against other managers they weren't
trying to satisfy
stakeholders that was just dumb on my on
my part all right so
so the first thing you need to know is
if you try to do a scalpel approach
everyone is lying and you won't know it
well you'll know they're lying but you
don't know what the LIE is or what the
truth
is so if you were to say to me on paper
and conceptually is it better to use a
scalpel than a chainsaw I would say the
same thing you would say well yeah
scalpa makes sense that's a reasoned
looking at all the details deciding what
to keep and whatnot but in the real
world nobody's going to play along with
that they're all going to just look for
maintaining their own little domain so
in my
experience the scalpel approach can only
work in the specific situations and I'll
give you a few one would be if you're a
small business and you're the owner of
the business and it really matters to if
you cut costs because that money goes
right in your pocket and and it's small
enough company that you understand all
of its parts so you could actually cut
with a scalpel in that case because
you're the boss it's all good for you if
you cut and you know exactly where to
cut and where not to cut yes scalpel
scalpel scalpel if you took a chainsaw
to your own smallish business well that
would obviously be a mistake
obviously now what is the situ or
another situation
well let's put it this way so that's a
situation where you've got time to
operate and you're going to be
profitable no matter what but you could
be a little more profitable so if you
got plenty of time the scalp will make
sense you know even if you have to work
a little extra hard to find some stuff
yes as long as you're in a business
that's stable and you're just trying to
tweak it every now and then scalpel so
when you hear people say but I I've been
involved in a number of businesses and
we C with the scalpel they did they did
here's where the scalpel doesn't
work when there is an existential threat
and the timer is
ticking if the timer is ticking you're
not going to have the option of using
the scalpel because even if you you did
everything right you would run out a
time here are two examples number one
Twitter when when mus bought Twitter the
cash flow situation was Dire as in uhoh
there's almost no way this company can
survive he was going to have wasted $44
billion do of his and other people's
money if he couldn't rapidly massively
cut expenses what would have happened if
musk had said all right all you
employees of Twitter who hate my guts
tell me where I can scalpel away some
unnecessary fat
what do you think would have happened
every one of those people would have
said their jobs are essential and if
they left morale would drop and it could
never work so musk instead took a
chainsaw and just
went got rid of too much and then when
when the the too much became obvious or
people argued and successfully he added
it back exactly like he said he would
now
what about the federal government the
federal government is also on a timer
and also has an existential threat it's
called The Debt we don't have 10 years
left we really don't I don't know if we
have three years left the national debt
will crush us and will destroy the
entire country if you think that taking
a scalpel to the federal government is
going to get it done in
any kind of reasonable timeline before
the entire nation is
destroyed seems very unlikely to me
because remember everybody involved will
be
lying everybody in involved will be
trying to slow the process they'll try
to sue you so you can't even use the
scalpel it's going to be just infinite
push back infinite people pretending to
be helping but not all lying people will
be ganging up they'll they'll try to
take you out as the boss if they have a
they have any way to do it they will
attack you a hundred different ways the
one and only way you have any chance is
with a chainsaw so let me put this in
terms of
risk if if uh if musk had used a scalpel
on Twitter that would be 100% chance of
failure if he used a chainsaw on Twitter
there was some chance of success and
some chance of failure which which one
do you pick the one with a 100% chance
of failure scalpel or the one that might
work but it's pretty
drastic well there's only one that might
work you obviously do the one that might
work what about the national debt do you
think we have time to scalpel that thing
I don't I don't think there's any time
to scalpel it I think that the one and
only hope of actual
survival survival we're not optimizing
we're trying to survive and I think
that's what people are missing he's got
to take a chainsaw to it and you know I
would say he's just getting started
because you know there there are bigger
bigger Parts he have has to go
after but there's not there's not really
a second
choice the the chains so might work and
it might not
work but the scalo definitely will fail
and it's the Dilbert filter that
guarantees it because people are lying
weasel now let me make another
exception let's say you had a business
that wasn't very
complicated let's say you are the uh
owner of a sports
franchise you probably do understand
almost all the parts even as the big
owner right right you would probably
know what your players are being
paid that's the biggest thing you would
know what the travel costs are it
wouldn't be mysterious at all so if you
wanted to take a scalpel to that again
because you have the luxury of being
profitable and you're not in a hurry
probably you could scalpel quite a bit
and I would say that would be exactly
the right answer so when people tell you
Scott I have personally scalped uh
budgets with success that's probably
true but it's so it's always the
specific case it's not the you're going
to die tomorrow if you don't cut this by
70% all right so there we go there's the
uh ultimate reframe on
that um you know I I'm so sick of
talking about this Doge email to all the
federal employees telling them to say
what they did uh five things they did
and I was trying to imagine it's been a
long time since I've been a cubicle but
I'm trying to imagine how I would have
handled that if I'd been a federal
worker and I'm positive I would have
handled it the following way I'd open my
email I'd see what they're asking I'd
probably check with my boss to see if
it's okay to answer it but then I would
sit down and it's the first thing I
would do I would put off whatever else I
had on my schedule and I would answer
that right away and I would come up with
five awesome things that I did this week
and then i' H send and then I would
never think about it
again how would you handle it would you
fight
it you didn't have anything better to do
that day than fight an email ahh I'm
going to go on CNN and fight this
email what the most basic thing that
anybody does is say what five things
they accomplished that also used to be
my job it also used to be my job to
collect everybody's top five
accomplishments that was literally my
job do you know what happened when I
would collect all their accomplishments
and put it into one cool document that I
made myself and I gave it to my boss
nobody ever looked at at it nobody ever
looked at it the only point was to make
sure that you thought people were
watching you it was basically just a a
head game so that people had to you know
really show that they were doing real
work nobody really looked at it I don't
even think they like maybe just glanced
at it but they didn't ask any
penetrating questions so when musk says
this is really just to find out if
there's a real person in a pulse that's
sounds right that sounds right that's
the only thing he's going to find out
it's not like he's going to look at the
five things and say huh one of these
five things looks like maybe you could
cut that with a scalpel that's not going
to happen it's just to see if they have
a pulse if they're really there if they
really respond now I realize there's a
whole bunch of complications to it and
um a number of a number of entities from
the FBI to the state department to I
know pentagon have already said no you
guys don't need to do this that's fine
uh I don't mind that at all uh I don't
mind when the Trump Administration
disagrees with itself don't mind at all
because I think the disagreement is
reasonable but I also think the request
was reasonable so and I don't think any
of it's terribly
important I think uh Trump and Elon
might might be pushing it still just so
they don't lose you know because it' be
good to it'd be good to show a pattern
of winning you know win win win win win
uh if you have even one push back that's
successful it could take a little dent
out of your shine a dent out of your
shine never quote me on that no never
quote me on that
please anyway so I'm just bored with
that whole email
thing but the Wall Street Journal had an
interesting context um apparently some
companies instead of doing that what are
your five accomplishment things every
week which is a big pain in the ass
everybody hates it and everybody's lying
too um there's some software now uh one
company called workboard or at least
that's the product
workboard um invades your computer your
work computer and it looks at all the
things you've done and then reports them
to your
boss so everything from your calendar to
your emails and then the boss can tell
who's working and what they're working
and how hard they're working now that's
the scariest creepiest thing I've ever
heard in my life I mean I don't know how
it could possibly give you anything
interesting and then I saw a picture of
what the the dashboard would look like
you know if you were the top boss and
you wanted to see that the sum of all
the things your employees were doing
it's like this really sort of detailed
complicated you know some boxes are
bigger than other showing that there's
more activity there and stuff and I
thought to myself okay in the real world
your top boss would use that three
times and by the third time they would
realize that there was nothing it was
telling them that they could act on it
was like ah okay looks like the box
for uh talking about the budget is a
little bit bigger okay but that's
because the budget process is happening
right now okay okay well it looks like
the box for uh
vendor talking to vendors is a little
bit bigger so they're doing a lot of
talking to vendors oh well obviously
because we're doing a you know request
for
proposal probably it wouldn't be
anything you could act on now I don't
want to throw that company under the bus
because they might have a good argument
that it's making everything better but
in the real
world if you show somebody a complicated
screen of anything they end up ignoring
it after the first few few tries in the
real world
so I'm going to introduce a new
insulting phrase uh I'm going to call it
lady fiction lady fiction I've told you
before how Democrats they seem to just
imagine problems like they imagine what
somebody's thinking and then they
imagine their bad personality they
imagine their bad intentions and then
they then they project that forward to
how it's going to destroy the world but
it's all imaginary it's imaginary future
and it's imagination that they can read
the minds of strangers so CNN just had
uh one of the federal employees on and
she was one of the ones resisting the
requests and uh she said that
uh see what' she say she said that
elon's email request was an act of
harassment and
bullying now do you think that's the way
Elon was thinking of it it's like huh
you know what I haven't done enough of I
need to do a little more harassment and
bullying even though he tells you
exactly why he's doing it you can't take
the exact reason that he describes which
makes perfect sense you you have to
imagine that the real reason this is
dark personality flaws and it's
harassment and
bullying that's pure mind
reading and again men prefer reading
non-fiction women prefer fiction and the
more you see it so I'm going to call
that lady friction lady fiction lady
friction is completely different story
it's has more to do with scissoring but
uh lady fiction is where you imagine
that
uh you can imagine you could read
somebody's mind and you see some dark
dark secrets in there and you project It
Forward
anyway
um uh one of our favorite uh
personalities on X data Republican if
you haven't been exposed to data
Republican yet um you're missing out so
data Republican is a sort of a superstar
of data analysis and is using a lot of
the new information that we're learning
to come up with some fascinating stuff
about the ngos ETC but uh she was on
Glenn Beck's show
and um she described our current
situation in a way that you'll never be
able to
forget so you've got the basic idea that
usaid was giving money to all these Nos
and other other entities were giving
them money and that they became sort of
operating independently and nobody knew
what they were doing and you know then
they were maybe laundering money and
stuff um so what dat Republican said
after looking at all this deep more
deeply than we have he said uh that the
Democrats are offended by Doge because
their money depends on people not
knowing what they're doing with our
money and I thought yeah that does sort
of sum it up doesn't it their money
depends on us not knowing what they're
doing with our money because our money
is just going into their pockets through
the
Nos and so she says so that is truly
censorship because because I think if
actual Americans understood what they
were doing with our money and that they
were actually setting up their own
government this is the key they were
setting up their own government and
actually ignoring what real people
wanted to do oh we would be so upset
there's a
reframe that's it the NOS were a shadow
government that could get all kinds of
things done they could stall things they
could make things happen they could
overthrow countries now working in
conjunction with other parts of the the
uh
government but once you hear that frame
that the NOS were a shadow government
wow you can't lose that one like that
that's sticky that's a really good
reframe anyway just think about
that um and then she went on and said
because the reality is that these people
have a government unto themselves that
they've created with these NOS uh that
they run separately from
us now the one thing that uh would be
required for a shadow government would
be there's one leader
do you think that this Shadow government
NGO thing has one leader or is it just
an understanding that a bunch of people
have that they can all be better off
with this
scheme I feel like there's not one
leader but there might be maybe several
people who are more influential than
others um and maybe they're fighting it
out I always imagine that the the
Hillary Clinton people and the Obama
people were not the same and that
they're all sort of jockeying for
control and you maybe some of that's
happening through the NGS I don't know
anyway Trump says he wants to bring back
the Keystone XL pipeline that Biden shut
down uh but apparently it's not that
easy because you'd have to find somebody
who wants to do it and I guess the
company that was doing it um doesn't
seem to eager to do it again and I can
understand that because how can they
guarantee it won't get canceled again
why would you put money into something
if the next Democrat president's going
to cancel it
so uh but Trump says you know even if
another company wants to to do it he
said the approvals will be easy
basically the government will get out of
the way and uh I like that so I I like
that Trump's pushing that but there
really is a structural problem there if
you ask somebody to invest I don't know
hundreds of millions of dollars maybe
billions can you really expect them to
do that if they don't know if their
project will survive the next
president's
term that's a lot to ask so I wonder if
there's any fix for that in other words
could Congress say um you won't be
touched for 20
years like could could they pass any
legislation that says I don't think so
because I think I think it would be
illegal to say you can't ever cut an
expense or cancel something but I I
wonder if there's any clever way to get
past the fact that this is really it's a
giant risk now that Biden canceled it
once I don't know how you fix that but
somebody clever might have an idea for
doing
that um meanwhile the dnc's vice
chairman David
hog he's warning that Democrats they
need to stop acting like a cult now how
much do you love the fact that the
people who were the problem are trying
to become the people who are calling out
the
problem it's almost like they have to
pretend that they weren't deep into all
the bad behavior that they say they want
to stop doing but hog says this he says
frankly uh anybody who did speak out
about Biden's mental decline was
immediately ostracized in our
party uh he says I know that we like to
claim that we are not a cult but anybody
who did say that that Biden was too old
basically had their career destroyed
that's a problem where the Democrat
Party we supposed to have open
conversations and dialogue he tells his
audience he said there are many lessons
we need to learn from this election but
that is one of the main ones we cannot
be a
cult okay here's the
problem as long as uh Power has more
value than open conversation ations and
dialogue you're only going to get
power so if somehow open conversations
and dialogue you can monetize or it
would give you more power or it make you
everybody more successful everybody
would get a Pat in the back but it
doesn't work that way if if you do open
conversations and dialogue within your
own party that will immediately look
like weakness and you'll be
destroyed so they they've sort of
painted themselves into this
corner where you can't really disagree
with the party and there's nothing that
David hog is going to say that's going
to change it because the incentive
structure is as soon as you disagree
you're
done and that's not going to change that
how can it it's not like they can give
an order and say all right don't do this
it just takes anybody who wants to do it
to do it to destroy other
people but it does make me wonder why
this is uh do you think that this is as
much of a problem on the
right do you feel that in the mega
Republican conservative world that we
have open dialogue and that you can
disagree without getting
cancelled yes or
no I feel like a number of us have
disagreed with important things and not
gotten canceled by at least by
Republicans um have you not seen me
disagree with common mag
thinking I think I have a number of
times and do I ever get slapped down for
that not that I remember not that I
remember the the only time that I get
real hate is when people have a
incorrect um understanding of what I've
ever said or thought if they don't
understand what I've said then it turns
into some crazy thing where they're
criticizing me for something they only
imagine but when I say real things uh
let's take the Dan khaw thing you don't
think I'm completely
aware that by the time I'm done with
this there will be something on social
media trying to tear me down for what
somebody's going to say is supporting
Dan kencho against Mega which didn't
happen and you all witness it so you
know that didn't happen but somebody
will turn it into that however it'll
probably just be a passing nothing like
the worst case will be some troll on X
and it'll just go away because I think
through the at least my audience uh is
completely accepting that I'm not just
going to tell you the normal frame
that's mostly why you watch because you
expect me to be a little different from
the mainstream opinion if I didn't what
would be the point really what would be
the
point so yeah I don't think it's I don't
think it's as big a problem on the right
um according to uh Simon Kent writing in
breit bar news Republican uh I'm sorry
Democrat donors are not feeling too good
about the Democrats but there was this
one this one donor who had a quote that
I thought was great quote they want us
to spend money and for what for no
message no Organization no Forward
Thinking the donor said the thing that's
clear to a lot of us is that the party
never really learned its lesson in 2016
they worked off the same Playbook and
the same ineffective strategies and to
what
end well here's what I say about
identity politics which largely drove
the Democrat message identity politics
um it's a one-way
trip and they should have known that
because on paper you can see it it's the
MSNBC problem as soon as NB MSNBC became
the identity politics all the time
Network you could guarantee
guarantee that at some point in the
future their own employees would turn
against them and call them racists and
that just happened guarantee it you
don't know when it's going to happen but
you can pretty much bet on it with a lot
of safety and so the the
Democrats can't really unwind that thing
that they've created because they can't
be ignoring identity politics that would
make them Republicans
[Laughter]
so they've created they've created their
own monster that they can't kill and the
Republicans are like yeah good luck with
that because we're not
involved it's not it's none of our
business if you want to create a monster
and then the monster kills you but you
knew that that monster would kill you
because how could it not you know as
soon as you say that identity is
everything everybody looks at their own
identity and says wait but I'm a short
gay lesbian whatever you know what
where's my rights and then everything
falls apart so the
Democrats I don't think they have a way
back now as I've said before all bets
are off if they found the right
candidate right so uh Trump is by no
measure an ordinary
Republican so nobody could have really
predicted the second term of trump and
the way it's turned out no no could have
predicted that so it's just sometimes
you get this special case with a special
character this you know once in a
thousand years type of Personality which
I think Trump is and if they don't get
one of
those I don't know if they have a way
back because even even Obama as rational
sounding as he was and I think he was
very smart and very Savvy about how
things work I don't even think he can
abandon identity
politics at this point I mean he can't
run for office but even if a new Obama
came
today um I don't know I don't know how
they can come
back here's the least surprising news of
the day the former head of the fda's
drug Center joins fizer as chief medical
officer now as you know there's a long
history of top FDA people going to work
for the companies that they had been um
trying to regulate which of course
creates a massive incentive to not say
bad things about the industry when
you're in the FDA because you know that
the most likely outcome after you're not
in the FDA is a job offer from one of
those same companies and I was trying to
think what could you do about
that I don't love the fact that you
could ban it like don't go to work for
these companies for five years we might
do that I think RFK Junior didn't he
float that idea but that seems you know
my my sense of freedom and capitalism
really rejects you can't go get a job
somewhere else like I don't like um any
kind of non-compete agreements I hate
them because I I live in America you
can't tell me what my next job is right
I mean that's just really offensive to
me that you can tell me what my next job
is no matter what it is you don't need
to you don't get an approval over my
next job
so on one hand I completely understand
that this is massively deforming our
drug approval and safety massively
deform it on the other hand I like
freedom I like Freedom so I wonder if
there's some middle
ground and the only thing I could think
of is that the X FDA people have an
option that's better than working for a
big Pharma which would pay an ungodly
amount of money could you find a way to
keep them on the let's say the public
side and it may require paying an
ungodly amount of money to say all right
once you leave the FDA you can go work
for fizer and they'll pay you a million
dollars a year whatever it is but if you
continue working for the government we
will also give you a million dollars a
year we'll match it but you'll be on our
side so you'll do extra work and you'll
go extra deep and you work with the FDA
you won't be on the FDA but let's say
you're you work with them or for them or
something now that's the bad idea
because it's you know anti-d Doge it's
spending more money not less but I just
wonder is there any system way to fix
that because you'd have to outbid outbid
the Pharma now the the gross way to do
it is just say you can't go get those
jobs I I just don't love that I I don't
love the lack of Freedom that that
implies so maybe somebody have a good
idea let's talk about
Ukraine so Trump has suggested on
yesterday that he's willing to uh revive
economic relations with Russia and then
Putin has offered uh hey why don't you
work with us America why don't you work
with us uh to do a joint partnership to
exploit Rare Earth minerals in the
donbass
region what
what did you see that coming and then
Putin also
offers and I'm going to talking about
this in terms of persuasion not in terms
of economics then Putin also said that
Russia is ready to supply the US with 2
million tons of aluminum which will help
stabilize prices and apparently we're
the biggest uh importer of aluminum so
it actually would drive down some of our
costs if we work with Russia on that
um and
so here's the
thing um let me say up front that if you
believe that I that I trust to Putin and
that he just just wants to make money
and stop all the fighting I don't I
don't it would be foolish to say that he
has no ulterior motives or anything else
but think how historic this is that
Trump and Putin have changed the frame
they've changed the frame from how to
kill each other to how to make money for
both of us
now maybe this won't come to anything
maybe there will be no joint
Partnerships maybe it's a bad idea maybe
trusting Russia is just always a bad
idea and you know even if it looks good
on paper maybe it just never works I'm
open to all those arguments so I don't
know that we should do it but the fact
that um I've said this before
I I generally think that Trump is the
best public Persuader we've ever seen
just ever but Putin's in the same weight
class I don't think he's quite a he's
not quite uh trump-like but he
understands the whole persuasion thing
and so what Putin's doing is he's
reframing Russia as a potential economic
partner which is following the lead of
Trump trump is the again Trump's the
better Persuader but Putin can Putin can
take punch for punch he knows persuasion
and this is
brilliant it's brilliant I hate to say
it and again I'm not suggesting that we
get into partnership economically with
uh Russia I'm not against it and I'm not
for it I would have to know a lot more
before I had an opinion but from a
persuasion perspective
Putin's really nailing it he's nailing
it because he knows that uh Trump needs
economic wins and he could offer him
some easy economic
wins so that's really good
negotiating so
again don't don't take this as me loving
Putin and I don't want him to be my
girlfriend and I don't I don't trust
Russia you know without a lot of
guarantees but you have to
appreciate that the way Putin is
handling this is kind of impressive just
from a persuasion perspective you can
call it evil persuasion if you like I
won't
argue but it's very effective and
changing the frame to how how do we make
money I just love that I just love
that we'll see where it goes all right
um again another story that would have
been the biggest story except that there
were so many stories
all right apparently James
comr uh told
Breitbart that uh the doj the FBI the
IRS and the SEC were all investigating
Joe and Hunter Biden but were told to
stand
down and Jim Biden was even being
investigated for Medicare and fraud
Insurrection Barbie's talking about this
onx
um apparently six Banks reported to the
treasury Department that the bidens were
committing Financial crimes but everyone
was told to stand
down now wouldn't that be the biggest
story in the country except for all the
other biggest stories how in the world
is that just a little article and
breart do you think it's true do you
think it's true that all these entities
were going to investigate the Bens and
you know keep in
mind this is when they knew there was a
risk because they were powerful
creatures so if all these entities were
willing to investigate them even knowing
that it would be risky and they had to
be told not to it does suggest there was
some pretty strong evidence not proof
everybody's everybody's innocent who
proven guilty and they haven't been
proven guilty but it certainly would be
the biggest story in the country under
normal
times I am curious how much else we'll
find out about the what I think is the
crime
family uh so Trump is signing a
directive to counter foreign social
media
censorship um so Dan fre of reclaimed
the Net's writing about this so I guess
uh he's trying to challenge our European
mostly European I think um saying that
they by taxing our social media they're
basically you know doing it to censor
them and trying to control them in
various ways censorship as well as
Taxation and Trump wants the Taxation
and the censorship to be curtailed now I
don't know what he can do about it so
that's why he signed a directive the
directive is figure out what to do about
this I assume it means we're going to
put more pressure on our alleged allies
but let me say this as clearly as
possible I've said this before but it
can't be said enough if you're trying to
curtail free speech in my country you're
not my Ally
England France whoever you are we love
you but you're not my Ally if you're
trying to curtail my free speech that is
a line which you cannot cross that's
that's a red line that's as bright as it
could possibly be and if it weren't for
Trump I don't know that we'd be doing
anything about it so sometimes you think
you know Trump is fun and sometimes you
like what he's doing and sometimes you
don't but this is one of those cases
where this is essential this is
essential Trump nobody else would do
this I don't know if he'll succeed but
it's going to require putting pressure
on
allies like we've never
seen he's the only person I know who
would do it there there's no other
normal president who would put pressure
on our allies over this but it is really
really important and yeah he should
bring he should bring the entire toolbox
what whatever it takes whatever whatever
it takes I anything it might take
getting out of
NATO I mean is that serious so whatever
he has to
threaten bring it on let's bring the
threats on because we need to ratchet
this up this can never happen
again so he's got to be tough on that I
support that 100% meanwhile down in
Mexico the uh um if you didn't know the
the Big Cartel the caloa cartel
apparently has two factions and the two
factions are fighting it out and uh
there's a great article by uh Jose De
Cordova in the Wall Street Journal and
so there's a whole bunch of murder going
on because the they're fighting it down
for control of things but
uh one of the things that I thought was
uh fascinating is the number of fenel
labs so there was just one little area
that had a 100 fentanyl labs and I guess
the labs have to keep moving because the
other cartel members keep narking him
out so apparently the the way you
compete if you're in a cartel and there
other factions in the cartel is that if
you find out where the other factions
lab is you turn them in so that the
government tries to close them down I'm
assuming the government does but even if
you you know just turned them in and let
your your bad guys go and take out the
lab so there's this gigantic fight over
just hundred hundreds of different
fental labs and part of me just wishes
they
uh they they just fight it
out but it was hilarious that uh one
of one of the uh lab operators quoted
this they were talking about uh they
have to do so much security Now for
their Labs that it's it's hitting their
bottom line and they just talk like
regular business people and so the one
of the lab operators says they have to
increased production to cover higher
costs for gunmen intelligence and
weapons he goes quote if before we were
making 10 million pills now we have to
make 20
million they they just talk like
ordinary business people they need
Doge anyway um at one point I'd wondered
wouldn't it be better instead of us
attacking the cartels to Simply provide
all the intelligence that the factions
need to attack each other
suppose we send our drones up there we
find all their their little lab
locations I don't know if we can I don't
know if there's any way to find them
from the air but suppose we could and
then we just turn it over to the other
faction and just let them destroy each
other until they're so weakened that
then you go in but you wait until
they've just beaten themselves into
nothing there is some there is some
worry that uh if the caloa cartel
implodes over their internal conflicts
that one of the other cartels would just
take over so nothing will change so it's
complicated I saw a report that comes
from the
telegraph now consider the source so
some people say that's not a very
credible Source but the telegraph says
that Iran fears an immediate attack on
its nuclear facilities and so they've
increased all their defenses near the
nuclear
facilities and the source says that Iran
expects attack every night even on
nuclear facilities that no one knows
about and Iranian officials said that
tran Fields a regime could fall if
America joins the attack you know what I
say about that
story uh I could have written that story
without doing any
research do you think Telegraph did any
research uh Scott what do you think Iran
is doing about its nuclear facilities
I'd say well if I were them and
anybody else would say the same thing
they're probably trying to figure out
how to protect them as best they can
Scott do you think that the Iranian
regime is worried that if America and
Israel attacked it could have an impact
on their ability to lead in the future
and I would say
duh yeah we're not going to leave their
regime alone if we do a major attack in
their country and even if we don't
directly attack the regime losing all
their nuclear facilities and all of
their anti-aircraft
doeses put some question about their uh
stability so on one hand I don't know if
the telegraph story is real on the other
hand it's exactly what you would have
made up if you wanted to act like you
did some research but you
didn't the Indian army according to
nextg defense they have an AI weapon
that can track and shoot in just 10 Mill
seconds and it can hit a target a mile
away every
time it can hit a target a mile away
every time and it can do it in a
millisecond now at the moment it
requires a human to uh allow the
shot but does anybody think that will
always have to have a human imagine
imagine the war starts and both sides
have these incredibly effective machine
gun that never misses and they're both
Ai and one of them says you better ask
me before you fire and the other one
says if it's in that direction that's
where all the bad guys are so just
fire the one who removes the human is
going to win every
war so the human will be removed and you
know I don't want to say Skynet because
it's too obvious but how how does it not
happen there is no future where Skynet
doesn't happen is there now there is a
future where maybe it's not in control
but there's no future in which Warfare
doesn't look exactly like
this um and then did you know that there
are 10 new major battery plants that are
coming online in the US looking to
double our capacity now the reason I
tell you these stories there's there's
always a battery story you know there's
some new battery technology or new
battery Factory I like I tell you about
some stories that you can tell what the
future is by the insurance industry like
whatever the insurance companies tell
you that's that's really indicative or
indicative of the future I think this
battery stuff if you didn't follow
anything else would be a real good
indicator of the future because if we
can make batteries really cheaply and
make a lot of them and make them
domestically that's a whole different
country than if we have to depend on
somebody else for the batteries or we
can't make enough you know Elon Musk
famously says that if you had 100 square
mile of uh solar panels and enough
batteries to store it when the sun is
not out that you could power the entire
country now I'd love to see somebody who
really understands the industry argue
with that
point um now and also it should be said
that that's just uh for calculation
purposes you wouldn't put them all in
one place that would be insane because
you know one one big natural disaster
you lose everything but just in terms of
how how practical it is musk says it's
completely practical yeah and it doesn't
even sound like you'd have to invent
very much sounds like we already have
what we need so that's pretty
interesting and I think it tells you
what the future looks like all right
ladies and gentlemen that's all I wanted
to do today thanks for joining I'm going
to talk to the locals subscribers
privately now um but come back tomorrow
same time same place and we'll see if uh
representative CAW has killed Tucker yet
I think he'll still be
alive we hope all right locals coming at
you privately in 30
seconds
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