Episode 3058 CWSA 12/31/25

Well, we'll see how this goes.

My cough is under control, but I do get a little bit dizzy if I talk too much.

So, we'll do the best we can.

I apologize for my voice.

It will not get better.

Good morning, everybody.

Let's do the simultaneous sip now and we'll see how far we get.

I know why you're here.

Last one in here.

All you need is a copper among your glasses.

Tanker shelves can candy flask a vessel of any kind.

Fill it with your favorite liquid.

I like coffee.

And join me now for the unpolable pleasure the dopamine the other day thing that makes everything better.

It's called the simultaneous step.

It happens now.

Terrific.

Well, let's jump right into it, shall we?

Um, apparently I'm very good at guessing how many calendars I'll sell in a year because we got right up to the right up to the limit.

But still a few more.

So I wouldn't wait if you don't have your DB calendar.

Amazon.com the only place you can get it.

How about some endofear predictions?

I always hate those, but they seem traditional.

Uh, I'm going to say the obvious.

2026 will be the year of the self-driving car.

Um, I don't believe there will be robot butlers.

So, I'm going to say no robot butlers yet.

I think the economy will surprise us, but I don't know which direction.

It'll either be better than we think or worse than we think.

No one can no one can predict the economy.

Further, I predict that the topic of election rigging will become a much bigger story.

Um, and if you haven't caught up with the Patrick Burn, he was the CEO of Overstock.com.

If you don't know his story, you really should catch up to it because I don't know what's true.

I have no idea if his version of events captures what really happened, but he's got he's very convincing.

He's been saying it for a while, but now I think he can say it and people can run it.

So he's got this story about Venezuela being involved with the voting machines, Chinese components, and a Serbian data center.

They got taken down just before they could influence the election in 2024.

Is any of that true?

I don't know.

But I gotta say, he's he's very he's very credible sounding and there's nothing about him that suggests he's making it up and he does seem to know.

So I I feel like this this will be the year he breaks through to uh make that a bigger story.

And then um you know I think the fact that we know everything else in the world is rigged as we're watching all these stories about corruption um I think that makes it easier for people to believe that the elections were rigged because I've been saying something now for a while few years that nobody else picks up on.

Have you noticed this?

This is what I say.

I say, "What are the odds that every other institution is corrupt, but our elections are not?" What are the odds of that?

If you didn't know anything about election security, you'd never seen any story about it.

How would you believe that it's not corrupt when everything else is?

Now, I might have been a little ahead of the game.

Because the other thing I say which sets you up for for that thing I just said is that whenever you have the following situation, you have corruption.

There's a lot of money involved.

There's lots of people involved.

The stakes are high.

money or power and you just wait because and there's and assume there's no audit control because even where there are audits the audits don't catch stuff as we've seen.

So if you take that as your starting point uh that everything is corrupt and that there's a reason built into why it's corrupt.

It's not it's not chance.

It's not it's not a weird coincidence.

It's that everything that has that element to it always becomes corrupt every time.

Now add to that what I've also been saying.

What is the reason for electronic voting machines?

What would be the legitimate reason?

And there is none.

The only reason for voting machines is to cheat because they're they're not cheaper.

They're not more reliable.

They're not faster.

They're not anything.

So, put those three discisms together, right?

Everything that has this nature is rigged or fraudulent.

Voting machines don't have any other purpose that we can see.

and then elections sort of just fall into that category.

You know, the thing that can't be explained unless there's massive fraud going on.

Now, that doesn't mean that the only fraud is the machines.

Sorry.

It would suggest that in every way that an election can be rigged.

Probably is.

Probably is.

Now, I do not claim that the only bad people in the country are Democrats, but um maybe it doesn't seem likely that the only bad people are Democrats, but in my bubble, that's true.

Well, David Moss, a user on X, just completed a self-driving Tesla to drive across the entire United States without ever engaging with the car.

So, so this was the day that somebody drove the entire coast to coast and didn't touch the steering wheel.

That includes parking.

includes um supercharging.

So, it's pretty easy to predict that this will be the year of the of the self-driving car.

All right, here's a question I asked myself.

How many fake news stories will I fall for in the coming year?

So apparently the other day, maybe yesterday, not the other day, I posted I reposted, but to my credit with skepticism, a story about some election claim that involves a big shredding truck and somebody told me today that's fake news.

It's been debunked.

So I removed it.

But it makes me wonder how many times am I going to get fooled by fake news?

Probably a lot.

And I thought I should almost keep track of it because you know that's one that's you know I should start start with 2026 and find out how many times do I get fooled?

Is it more you know am I am I more likely to be fooled because people are better at fooling people?

Am I getting dumber and older?

I don't know.

But watch out for me, will you?

All right.

Here is something that I feared was true, and I'm pretty sure it is.

Um, I don't know about you, but if you're if you're watching this podcast, it's probably true that your news and social media bubble is non-stop stories about um money laundering and Somalians and uh basically bad behavior as well as rigged elections.

Do you have that experience that all day long I pick up my phone, I go to ask, "Oh, there's another state.

There's another fraud.

There's another fraud.

There's another fraud." And of course, the the algorithm is doing that.

But here's what I was afraid of.

I was afraid that no normies ever see these stories.

And that's what I'm starting to hear.

People are saying, "I went to things like I went to lunch with my neighbors and not one of them had heard about the Somalian fraud and stuff." Ju just hold that in your head that your neighbors haven't even heard, they're not even aware that there's a massive uh money laundering fraud problem.

They've never heard it.

Now, that doesn't mean it's never been on the news, but the news doesn't cover it like social media does.

So, I'm I'm completely immersed in this world where every freaking story is about somebody stealing my money.

But if you were not paying attention to that bubble that I'm in and you were in a different bubble, haven't even heard of it.

That does not seem like a healthy situation, does it?

Oh my god.

Well, speaking of the bubble, so here's some more stuff in my bubble.

Eric Dordy's reporting on this.

Well, part of the reason that my bubble is different is I listen to a lot of uh independent journalists.

Um, apparently in Minnesota as far back as 2018, PE whistleblowers were reporting these frauds, these Somali basically money laundering frauds.

Um, and that they had the whistleblowers all had the same experience that uh that they were told that they couldn't talk about it or they'd be blamed, they'd be accused of being racist or islamophobic.

Now my how things change because once Trump got elected now we can talk about things that we should be talking about.

All right let's do a sip sip.

So, if Trump had not been elected and he had not uh basically gotten rid of DEI and our our blocks on free speech, if if Elon Musk had not purchased Twitter, we still wouldn't know about this.

Ju just think about how close we were.

You know, um, you probably saw the other day that Elon Musk estimated that at the low bound, the theft might be 1.5 trillion a year at the low end.

1.5 trillion.

That would be the entire essentially the deficit.

And you might remember, I keep bragging about this, but I'm actually kind of proud of it that I told you that people like me who have a background in budgeting, you know, that was my day job in corporate world was a lot of budgeting.

You develop a kind of intuition about where something is wrong.

And several years ago, I started saying, um, I don't see how we could possibly be in this much of a deficit hole unless the amount of fraud was so high that is unimaginable.

Now, at the time, I did not get a lot of agreement, but today I think every one of you agrees today that at least some big portion of it was just fraud.

So, I'm going to give give myself credit for that one.

Anyway, um I saw that HUD thinks they may have found 5.8 8 billion in improper rental aid payments according to Newsmax.

That's housing and urban development.

Now, they haven't confirmed that, but there are some red flags.

And what I like about this is that I'm noticing in the government that they've turned spotting fraud into a competitive sport.

So you should expect to see more and more department heads say, "Hey, we found some fraud.

I found some fraud.

I found more fraud than you did." So we're going from an environment in which if you mention the fraud, you were racist to an environment in which people are competing to see who can find the most.

And people are competing to come up with the best idea for finding the most.

That is a good sign.

So 2026 might be just wild.

Speaking of that, um, Health and Human Services just froze child care payments to Minnesota because it was all going to fraud.

Not all of it, but um, massive amounts were apparently going to fraud.

At the same time, uh, what do you think, uh, what do you think Tim Walsh said when it was announced that the government was going to stop payments because the payments were almost all fraud?

What would what would Tim Wall say about that?

Well, here's what he said.

It's almost unbelievable.

He said, uh, that this is Trump's long game.

quote, "He's politicizing the issue to defund programs to help motans." Really?

Really?

Does he really think that Trump sits down in the morning and says, "What can I do?

How can I hurt those children in Minnesota in a way that will help me?" That is just bastard crazy.

It's so obvious.

He has no no real response to that.

How in the world does that make sense to his followers?

Oh, Trump has a long-term plan to damage Minnesota.

What?

What?

Why would anyone have that plan?

For political reasons?

I mean, you really have to you got to press all yourself up to make that make sense.

No.

No.

Obviously, everything is political.

You know, that part's true, but what are the odds that Trump is doing it because it's part of his long game to hurt Minnesota?

That's insane.

Um, Bill P, I saw him on a show yesterday.

uh he's he's the head of Fanny May and Freddy Mack and he said that they're using AI and and Palanteer to flag potential uh you know potential fraud.

So I think that's the model you're going to see.

I think people will be doing the bill py model where you uh partner with maybe private companies and the private companies spot potential flags or I should just say flags for for stuff and then you look into it.

So so basically every part of the government that gives away money is probably going to move to that model.

Let's call it the Bill PE model.

And it should be no surprise, Fox News is reporting that uh now we know from uh new surveillance photos, the surveillance video that uh the parents in Minnesota might have been in on the fraud.

So, they've got video all the way back from 2018, of course, in which parents are seen to be checking their kids into daycare, but then just turning around checking them out.

So, I guess it was the checking in part that made it look legitimate.

Are you surprised that parents might be part of the scheme?

No.

Nope.

All right.

Uh, New York Post is reporting, I saw Liz Collins reports reporting on this, that there's a former home homeland security agent who claims that when uh reports were given to the uh Minnesota, let's see, he said that uh he claims that prosecutors ignored Minnesota daycare fraud cases and that they quote just evaporated.

So there was no shortage of people noticing and there was no shortage of people reporting it and when it was reported they just slow walked it and then made it go away.

So corruption.

Yeah.

Do you know how much ignoring you would have to do?

You would have to have a lot of people ignoring a lot of things for a long time.

like a lot of people.

And apparently that's what happened.

And the only way that could happen, says me, is if people are afraid of being called racist.

So when you calculate the damage of DEI, if I were doing the analysis of what is the damage of DEI, you could come up with a long list, but you'd have to add trillions because of this trillions the cost of DEI.

Now, here's more good news that may not turn into good news.

But if you're on if you're on social media and you're you're watching the bubble that I'm watching, you see people like Elon Musk talking about the fraud and Doge and talking about it.

You'll see people like David Saxs and Chimath and, you know, lots of other smart people.

Um so the good news is that the smartest people in the country um Bill Aman would be another the smartest people in the country are very engaged and trying figuring out how to fix this because all of their wealth at least anything that depends on the United States is completely a risk.

Now, I don't think that's the only reason that they're so engaged, but they've not been engaged before.

And they are the exact same people you would want to fix any big problem.

Right?

If you said, "We have this big problem that nobody's been able to fix.

We need the smartest people in the room to really get engaged." Well, we got that.

Amazing.

we we finally have the smartest people in the room all on the same side for the most part um and focused.

But here's the problem.

We might have too much um diverse energy.

So they're not all saying exactly the same thing and it's unclear what plan would be the best as Cernovich add him to the list of the smartest people.

Um, so my question is this.

How do we get to the point where we've focused all that smart energy?

Because we're not really at a place where we can focus it.

Um, so if you said, but Scott, that's easy.

All you need is a fraud zar.

I don't think so.

I mean that might be part of the solution but the fraud ZAR would get destroyed the same way they went after Musk.

Now Musk is you know there's only one Musk.

So he's managed to recover and even grow his business and get his get his compensation from Tesla and everything else.

But that's rare.

I don't know how many people could have survived the attacks on that went after Musk.

So it would really be hard to get a fraudzar who had that much risk risk tolerance but also had the skill and I don't know if it's enough.

So uh and we also know that justice moves too slowly.

I've heard a number of people say, "Scott, all they have to do is prosecute some high level people and this will stop." You know, if Larry Ellison, um, the AG in Minnesota, let's say he quickly got indicted.

Well, I don't know.

Would that stop anything?

Um, how long would it take?

So justice moves too slowly to be the biggest part of the answer but obviously has to be part of the answer.

Um but I like the fact as I mentioned before that finding the fraud and uh doing something about it is a competitive sport.

So I think the best case scenario is that private companies find a way to free market this situation.

So you've got Palunteer and other AI companies that could be helpful.

So they might have, you know, a massive uh potentially they might have a massive financial payoff.

Uh no, Rico would be slower because you have to RICO you have to pull together like years of everything.

I mean that would be slower.

Um we need to do it probably but it would be slower.

So what was I saying?

Uh so if you added the AI companies that might have some incentive to spot the fraud and then you add to that the quam rule that I didn't know about but apparently it's been a thing for years that allows you an individual private person to to ask the government to sue somebody who has been ripping off the government and then if you as the whistle blower, let's say.

Um, if they succeed and they claw back some money, you get a portion of it and it could be big.

It could be very big money.

So, here's the good news.

When I talk about the smartest people being fully engaged, they're also the smartest people at creating new businesses that didn't exist.

Right?

Every one of them that I mentioned has done entrepreneurial things.

They've got a track record, right?

Every one of them.

Um, and that is exactly the people you want designing a new system.

So it might not be that there's one one path to fixing it.

It might be that the free market has now surfaced what looks like a set of variables that could sort of automatically drifted in the direction of getting rid of the fraud because essentially it would monetize getting rid of fraud, which hasn't really been the case.

Well, it has been the case, but not everybody knew it.

And now lots of people know it.

So that's that's the good news.

All right, let's talk about Pam Bondi, who is not working fast enough, people say, and has prosecuted no high-profile cases.

So I'm going to wait into this at the at my risk.

Um, you may have heard me say this on social media.

And it goes like this.

If I put the what I call the Dilbert filter on this situation, how do we know, we who are not lawyers, how do we know how long something should take?

How do we know how many cases she's working on?

How do we know how hard it is to staff when you can't get when when lawyers are like 90% Democrat, but you don't want to staff up with Democrats if the whole job is to go after Democrats?

How long does it take to to staff up?

>> >> um what kind of cases is she working on that are exactly where she should be working on but they just take a long time because they're complicated.

So the higher profile the case and the more complicated the case the more you should expect it would take longer than a year even even to get to indictments.

So case in point, I guess uh Cash Patella has recommended the Department of Justice to look into the whole uh situation with um the Russia collusion hoax.

Now the Russia collusion hoax is massively complicated.

It involves everybody from extracurren CIA um and it involves two parts.

one is making it easier for Democrats to get elected and the other is making it harder for Republicans to stay out of jail.

So, it involves everything from uh the original meetings that Obama had, um the special councils, the the raid on Mara Lago.

There are so many moving parts.

If Pam Bodi only had one thing to work on for the rest of her life, how long would that take?

Then you multiply that by a thousand because remember, you've got the J6 stuff.

How complicated would it be to get the other side of the JX stuff that that was all a plot and then to wrap it all into a RICO?

because a RICO case has to show a pattern of behavior that has stretched over time and involves you know multiple people.

So I am let me say this as clearly as possible.

I am as frustrated as you are that nobody important goes to jail.

Can can we all get in the same side of that?

you know, none of us think is fast enough, but we also don't know what would be fast enough.

What What would it look like if she were doing a great job and what would it look like if she were not?

Could we tell?

So, one lawyer online said to me, "Scott, what you I'm paraphrasing here.

What you're missing is that big law firms are already staffed up to surge like whole groups of people into uh different jobs for the government or for a private company.

So the the thinking is that it's just business as normal to be way overworked, but to instantly or or quickly correct the fact that you have too much work by going to big law firms and say, "Hey, we need we need two dozen lawyers today.

You know, can you just give us a whole staff?" And then those law firms, I didn't know this, by the way, um are routinely routinely set up to do that.

However, how does it work when the people you're going after are Democrats?

Do you think there's a big law firm that can give you two dozen lawyers that are both good at what they do, not doing anything more important?

You know, somebody said it's not the best lawyers that they said for that, but I don't know about that.

uh you know they didn't already have something important to do so they could sort of instantly go over and and that they would do a nonbiased job instead of dragging their feet because all you would have to do is get an anti-Trumper in the mix you know one lawyer who drags your feet and they can just drag this thing forever so I am skeptical that the existing model of surging lawyers into a highprofile, you know, high workload situation could work in this situation.

It might work in normal situations.

And how long will it take before John Brennan is indicted?

Anyway, so don't get mad at me.

I am the Dilbert filter messenger to tell you that if there's a lot of people involved and it's complicated, it's going to take way longer than you wanted to.

Does everybody agree with that?

Just just that we're all equally frustrated, but whenever you have this complexity and this setup, it's always going to take longer than you want.

you and that would be sort of normal just normal life.

Anyway, so apparently according to Wall Street apes on X, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, uh this is Wall Street apes framing of it, admits the Simoleons were imported to vote Democrat.

Um essentially he did.

He said, quote, "Well, the Somali community is critical in my own election.

I wouldn't be in office without the help of the Somali community." Okay.

Now, that alone is not illegal.

Um, but we do know that the Somali community has made a difference not just in Minnesota, but also in Ohio and Virginia, maybe some other places.

So, at what point does it become illegal?

It's not illegal to have people legally enter the country.

If they entered legally and then they were legally allowed to vote, it would just be a good strategy, but it wouldn't be illegal, right?

However, did you know Scott Presler was reporting this yesterday and and just think about the fact that what I'm about to tell you, you probably did not know and and it's been true for a while that if you're that if you work for a building, so if you're an employee of some large apartment building, it doesn't matter what kind of employee, you can vouch for an unlimited number of people who live in the building or allegedly live in the building, you can vouch that they are legally allowed to uh to vote even if they don't have ID.

So in other words, if I understand this correctly, the janitor of a big building could could uh vouch for every person in the building even if every one of them had been illegal.

And that's actually a written law in Minnesota.

It's a law.

Now, when that law got passed, what was anybody thinking?

How in the world?

Yeah, there's some paperwork to vouch.

How in the world did anybody think that was for anything but cheating in the election?

What would be the other reason?

You know, usually the Democrats say, "Well, we don't want to suppress voting, so we want to make it easy to vote." There's no way.

There's no way that that particular law was to stop suppression of voting.

That was purely to make it easier to cheat.

I I would say you can't say that any other way.

Well, are any other states or cities having problems with fraud?

Oh, surprise.

Real clear investigation says that uh there was a some guy, a city official in Austin who had uh let's see, given a bunch of fake contracts to friends that were fairly gigantic, had been doing it for a while.

So, let's see how much he get.

Uh he was he was using the city credit card which he was allowed to use for city services but instead of doing city services he used it to pay 30 different vendors but the city auditor could only verify that eight of them were even real companies.

And of the real companies do you think those are relatives too or people who gave them kickbacks?

So most of the money or a lot of it went to places that uh appeared to be fake.

At the same time, the guy who was doing this was earning over half a million dollars a year in salary.

So he was overpaid and he was just massively doing out the city credit card to his presumably fraudster friends.

Now, h how long ago was the first time you heard me say this?

that all local government is criminal.

All local government is criminal.

And the reason is this because there's always somebody who's in charge of who gets the money and there's never enough audits um let's say security to stop it from happening fraudulently.

So again, a lot of money involved, people involved, time goes by, poor auditing procedures.

Was this predictable?

Yes.

If you took a dart and threw it at map of the United States and hit any city, you don't think this is happening anywhere else?

I'll bet some form of this, maybe not as bad, but I'll bet you some form of this is 100% in every city.

100%.

because whoever has the the uh the wallet will be just infinitely approached by people who say, you know, if I got a little bit of what's in that city wallet, I'll bet you a lot of people would donate to your campaign.

There's no way this system could produce.

If you saw it on paper, if somebody said, "We've never had a city before, but we're going to we're going to invent a thing called a city, and here's how it will be run." And you simply just drew on paper who has the control, who's watching it, how money flows, how money is allocated.

Anybody smart would know that that was a settle for fraud.

So the cities are designed in a way that guarantees fraud, guarantees it.

And sure enough, that's what we see.

Well, here's a story about further layoffs in the media world.

According to the RAP, uh, entertainment and media layoffs are up 18%.

And 17,000 jobs were slashed in 2025.

Now what they mostly mean is the traditional media.

So there've been some mergers and cutbacks and stuff.

So the traditional media uh took a hit, but I would argue that that's not the bad news it looks like um because the the independent journalists and the independent media and I I would be part of the independence um vastly increased.

So, it's not really a story about less media employees.

It's more a story about less traditional fake news stuff we don't want to see media and way way way more Nick Shirley's and Scott Adams's and people who, you know, are doing a show independently.

So, I think that is an evolution, not some kind of a problem.

And I love the fact that the the jobs that are being created are being created by the people creating them.

So it's not like a a boss had to create a company that hired people.

It's more like people like me said, "What happens if I turn this camera on and start talking?

Can I monetize that?" Yep.

Turns out I can.

Well, according to Sai Post Karina Petrova, there's a study that says that shocking headlines make people skeptical, but that over time they come to believe the thing that was the shocking headline.

Does that surprise you?

So the idea is when you first see like a headline that says shocking thing happened here or there and then you read it, you go like, well, you know, I don't know, I'm not sure that's true.

Yeah, everybody says everything's shocking.

So, so you automatically put some critical thinking on a headline that just seems a little overdone, but then over time you forget where you saw the headline and you start thinking it must be a fact.

So you you remember the story, but you won't remember your initial skepticism.

So So it makes it makes it believable over time.

I think probably only if you hear it repeated.

All right.

Uh we talked about this before, but this this is just blows my mind.

So, San Francisco, a a city you would associate with being lax on crime, right?

So, San Francisco, most people would agree left and right that they would be soft on crime compared to other places.

But despite being soft on crime, uh, apparently they have this this license plate reading technology called Flock, F L O C K, and it can read license plates and it has they've got about 500 of them in major roadways in San Francisco, around San Francisco, and that it's centralized.

It must be in other cities, too.

So they have a centralized nationwide database uh of more than 1 billion license plate reads each month.

Now they're being sued by someone who doesn't want them to be able to track you if there's no warrant.

So, if there's no, you know, reason to track you, um, at least one individual is suing because he says that should only be they should only track you, uh, if they have a warrant and these are warrantless.

So, apparently you can in most cases you could track a car in San Francisco from wherever it starts to wherever it ends up.

How comfortable are you with that?

because remember it's tracking everyone.

Well, how in the world do you stop people from tracking their spouse?

Don't you think that every engineer who has access to this thing is already tracking their ex?

Find out where their ex goes when they go to work.

Probably this would put an end to cheating.

Uh, but it's weird that the most lenient city would be doing this of all things.

Now, now so far all I know about it is it attracts license plates.

I don't believe it does facial recognition, but it would be easy to add it.

And I don't believe it has a full AI capability, although obviously that would be coming.

So if you take a 500 camera system and you can track license plates, you can track faces which I just assume is coming and you can use AI to make it, you know, identify and flag things.

You have created quite a monster.

That is a monster where you're not going to know where does that end up like how bad will that become you know if they if they do it gradually like well it's just license plates then it doesn't seem as scary but once you realize there's nothing to stop them really from adding facial recognition and uh and AI what in the world could that become I don't know So we always talk about this California wealth tax where they're floating the idea in California that the some billionaires would have to give up 1% of their wealth per year for five years.

So in the end 5% of their wealth would be taken in taxes apparently.

I didn't know this but even Gavin Newsome opposes it but Bill Aman so it might not happen because you know if the governor opposes it he could veto it.

Um, Bill Aman warns that no one would say if California implements a wealth tax.

Now, we've already seen some billionaires in California state they're going to move.

And it could be a bluff.

um maybe they prefer to stay, but uh they're making sure that people know that if they do go um you know, everybody would go and they would turn California into something it hasn't been.

But um there have been some other some other options for raising money that have been raised.

Uh first of all, let me say the obvious.

No one wants higher taxes when your estate is wasting the money.

No one wants higher taxes in general, but in the current context of massive fraud, it's going to be really hard to increase taxes on anybody if you know that it's just been wasted.

So, we'll see how that goes.

But some people have proposed that if you just raise the sales tax, it would be a a more reasonable approach.

The idea is that it's automatically progressive.

So if a billionaire buys a boat, a yacht, that's a lot of sales tax sacks.

But if you if you get a stick of gum, it's a little bit of sales tax, but not much.

However, the sales tax in California is already is insanely high.

I forget what it is.

So, I'm not in favor of a sales tax.

It's just an alternative.

Um, however, even billionaires agree with the following that billionaires have a way to avoid taxes that ordinary people don't and that maybe that needs to be closed.

Did you know how that works?

Um, I used Grock to to give me a little tutorial on how the billionaires avoid taxes.

And let me see if I can explain that in a way you would understand.

So a normal person gets normal income and they pay income tax.

A billionaire u might not have income at all.

They might just have a lot of assets.

So, one of the ways that they can avoid paying uh income taxes is to make sure that their businesses do not give them a salary.

So, there's no income.

But where do they get the money to spend if they don't have an income?

And the answer is they can make they can take a loan.

So, they could go to a bank and they can say give me a large personal loan.

Now, it wouldn't be large compared to their assets.

It would still be tiny tiny, but it would be large to us and it would be so much money that they could spend it like income, buy mansions and yachts and stuff uh without any income.

The bank would say, "Can you pay back this loan?" And the billionaire would say, "Are you kidding?

I have I'm worth, you know, $20 billion.

I'm only asking you for half a billion.

So the bank says that's a pretty good deal and we're definitely gonna get paid back.

Not definitely, but probably.

So they give them a loan and is it's collateralized by the assets of the billionaire.

So the bank is happy.

They always know they can, you know, seize the seize the mansion or seize the stock if something goes wrong.

Then the billionaire spends spends the personal loan just because it's their cash.

They can do whatever they want.

It's not a business loan.

It's a personal loan.

Sort of sort of like a line of credit on your house or just the big version.

Then when they die, the billionaire, they can transfer those assets to their heirs at a stepped up fair market value.

And even the heirs avoid taxes.

Now, I believe there's still a uh uh what do you call it?

A estate tax.

So, if you didn't know, the estate tax over a certain level is 40%.

So, when I die, if I do, my estate tax um above a certain certain dollar amount will be taxed at 40%.

which is pretty egregious, but uh but it's happening.

Anyway, did that make sense?

I'd never really I never really spent two minutes looking into why billionaires don't pay taxes.

So, I would agree, but that seems like a loophole that needs to be closed.

Seems like it.

Well, according to the Epoch Times, the CEO of the IRS, I didn't know they had a CEO, um, says that 94% of middle class taxpayers will see tax relief next year.

So, that would be under the big beautiful bill, I guess.

Do you believe that?

I I'm I'm uh primed to never believe anything about taxes going down.

I always think taxes are going up even if all the reporting is it's going down for some people.

So I'm going to say maybe maybe but probably not.

So it doesn't matter who's president.

Doesn't matter what the law is.

I never believe taxes will go down.

Whoa.

Did you know there's a study site post is writing about this of Vladimir Hedri that mass shootings increase the local turnout for voting but do not shift presidential choices.

How many of you would have known that without looking at a study that if there's a mass shooting in the news uh locally you might get a higher turnout for a vote but they don't they don't change who they vote for.

The people who wanted Democrats to get rid of guns still want it.

And the Republicans say, "Well, it's the cost of being in a free country.

Don't take my guns." Um, so they both So they both get more votes, but it doesn't change the mix.

They could have just asked me.

I knew that.

But Daniel Greenfield of Front Page magazine is reporting that the MSNBC, which is now rebranded as MS Now, the ratings have collapsed, as you probably know.

Uh, how bad is it?

We'll see.

According to Neielson Media Research, this is fairly new.

Fox News averaged 2.72 million prime time viewers and 287,000 viewers in the key demographic 25 to 54.

So that was up it was up 14%.

Uh and the the key demo group was up 18%.

That's pretty damn good.

How did MSNBC do?

Oh.

Oh.

Oh, sorry.

They averaged 920,000 923,000 down 25% since 2024 and only 81,000 in the key demo that was down 39%.

Wow.

And CNN did even worse.

Now the reporting doesn't give reasons.

Would you like to know some reasons why MS Now is down and Fox News is up?

Well, I say I say this a lot, but um MS Now has bad producers and their honor talent was mentally insane, right?

If you look at any show on MS Now, it's poorly produced.

You'll be a table of people who look crazy just yelling at each other.

You Rachel Matto looks like she just has mental illness and they just seem a little weak and weird and just somebody you don't want to watch.

But also, none of the shows are engineered to be as interesting as Fox.

So, if you've never watched um the show called The Five on uh Fox, you haven't seen what good producing looks like.

So, everything from the selection of the cast to how how many there are to um you know, how they how they always have the the one person who's sort of the the foil, you know, the Democrat foil.

um everything about that is welldesigned and the people don't look mentally insane.

So over time you can completely see how Fox News could um and they do they attract people from the other side.

But if you're if you're a Republican and you turn on MS Now you just go what the what the hell?

It's just all poorly produced.

So, and poorly produced and they don't have as good a host.

They don't they don't have a Greg Guffeld, for example.

Right.

Who who is a Greg Guffeld?

They just don't have one.

Makes a big difference.

Well, here's a weird story I don't understand.

So are you aware that in Iran uh I guess this week there were massive street protests and you know the streets are full of people who are bad at the regime.

Now I think that's happened before but it didn't turn into anything.

Yeah.

Dana Pino, Jesse Waters, every one of them are more talented than anything you see on MS Now.

So at the same time the Iranian public is doing some massive protests uh in Israel according to the Jerusalem Post MSAD.

So that would be Israel's, you know, intelligence agency.

They posted a message on X in in Farsy, the language of Iran, urging demonstrators to to act, saying that it was with them in the streets.

It's with them in the streets.

And said, go out together into the streets.

The time has come.

He said it will join them.

It says we are with you.

not only from a distance and verbally, we are with you in the field.

So MSAD is admitting that they're literally on the ground participating with the protesters.

Now, does that seem like a good idea to you?

I'd love to know why they thought that was a good idea.

Because everything I know about people is that the Iranians would be maybe plenty happy to find their own way away from the regime.

But as soon as they're uh as soon as the country that's bombed them says, you know, I'm with you, doesn't that immediately doesn't that immediately make them bond together and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is up to us.

Get out of here.

How in the world is that good for Israel?

I don't understand.

Maybe I'm just speculating.

Maybe MSAD thinks that if the Iranians think they have support from even Israel that would embolden them.

That's not the way things usually work.

Usually the, you know, usually works the other way.

So, you know, they're not stupid, obviously.

fake news.

No, it was actually on the MSAD X account.

So, the X account is uh I think that's real.

H anyway, it's either very clever uh or it's not.

I know.

I'm just going to watch that one.

Um, according to Tech Crunch, the number of followers you have on social media has never mattered less.

Now, here they're talking about people monetizing, but apparently um the thing that moves your traffic is not how not how many followers you amassed.

It has to do with how good your clipping services.

So apparently there are all these young people who are making clips um and that's the way people discover things now.

They call it teenage clipping army.

So it's a now a well-developed market.

So if you were an independent um internet producer, you could amass a very large following.

Let's say in my case I've got 1.3 million followers on X but still even with 1.3 million followers um a lot of people who follow me don't see my content and I'm not alone you know people have been complaining about this for a while uh that they amass all these followers and they can tell that the followers are not seeing their content but what they are seeing or what people are seeing is clips Now, you may have noticed that there are more of more clips from my content than you've ever seen before.

I don't pay for that, in case you're wondering, right?

Uh but you've seen Yeah.

You you you've seen Jay and uh is it Jason Cohen?

You've seen some other people clipping me and that does make a big difference.

Sometimes it just depends if the clip goes viral.

So, in case you're wondering, I do not pay for a clipping service of teenagers.

Well, did you hear the story that apparently earlier this month the CIA launched a military attack on a uh base like a base or a port in Venezuela and it blew up some and uh we never heard of it.

But the weird part is Venezuela didn't mention it.

How in the world do did we attack a landbased major facility in Venezuela weeks ago and Venezuela never mentioned it?

Yeah.

How in the world?

But apparently Trump wasn't happy about that.

So he mentioned it on a radio show and he said that they destroyed quote a big plant or facility where ships come in.

And then he was asked who did it and he was shy about it which everybody assumes means the CIA.

And then apparently Trump wanted Venezuela to know about it or the world to know about it.

So he heard it.

Some in the CIA are not happy that he owned it.

But obviously obviously we didn't intend it to be a secret because we would have assumed Venezuela would have mentioned it.

But they didn't.

So he did anyway.

on the on the Venezuela side.

Um I'm loving this story about the well, let me give you some context.

Have you ever watched a movie or a TV show where the villain was the interesting one and then you found you found yourself rooting for the villain and you didn't feel good about yourself?

Like I can't I can't root for the villain.

Well, I'm having that experience in the real world because one of the tankers uh is empty, so there's no oil in it, but the US was going to board and seize a tanker uh that was leaving Venezuela.

And the reason we had the authority to grab it is that it was allegedly uh misidentifying itself and maybe maybe had a fake flag.

Um, but instead of instead of surrendering, which you'd expect a tanker to do if the entire if the US Navy told you to slow down, we're going to board you.

You would not expect them to run for it because they know they can't outrun us, right?

But but these are the bad guys.

Yeah, I'm just using my analogy of bad guys.

So, the bad guys decide to do a U-turn and instead of surrendering, they're going to run for it.

Now, to me, first of all, I thought, how in the world could that work?

But now there's a new twist.

Apparently, they painted a Russian flag on the side of it to pretend that they were Russian flagged ship.

Now, apparently this slowed down our navy because we didn't want to seize a Russian flagged ship.

We wanted to seize it if it was misidentified, but we can't prove it's misidentified because we don't know for sure if Russia said, "Okay, yeah, you're Russian." You know, there's there's a process by which you would reflag, but there's nothing to stop Russia from saying, "All right, yeah, sure.

Yeah, if you want to just say you're Russian," and then they paint a Russian flag on the side of the ship, and then they can't be taken down.

Again, I'll put it in the context of I don't want to rule for the bad guys, but if they get away with this, that's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

It doesn't I don't think it makes much difference to the United States whether they get away with it or not.

But if somebody actually figured out how to thwart the US Navy by painting a poorly produced flag on the side of the ship, I would have a little bit of respect for that in the in the bad guy way.

Well, there's a story that says, according to Marjorie Taylor Green, who's now out of politics, she says that when she tried to get Trump to agree to release the Epstein files, that part of that conversation involved Trump saying, and remember this is Marjgerie Taylor Green.

She's the she's the one who heard it, that if they release him, quote, his friends will get hurt.

Now, that needs a lot more context, doesn't it?

Because if the only reason that Trump doesn't want the FC rever released is because his friends would get hurt, that might not be a good reason.

But if he also knows that his friends are innocent, then you would care.

I think you would care if your friends got hurt.

And I don't I don't disagree with that impulse to protect your friends if you know that they're not guilty of anything.

Um I suspect though that's not the one and only reason he doesn't want released.

I suspect that the you know the intelligence agencies are behind some of the suppression.

I think so.

So, it seems likely to me that the CIA would suppress anything that was bad for them forever, but they would allow anything that was bad for Trump's friends to be released.

So, if Trump says it would be bad for my friends, he might be leaving out the part that says you're not going to learn anything useful because the CIA is definitely not going to show you that and they do have the power to block anything.

Um, so I would wonder if there's more context to his comments.

So I do agree that if he knew, he probably does that nothing good can come out of it uh except for it would hurt his friends but in return nothing good could come out of it.

What are you going to do?

What would you do if you knew nothing good could come out of it except it would hurt your friends?

I don't know.

I might block it.

I don't think that's the worst impulse in the world.

Anyway, I guess uh January is the month where we have to worry about the government shutting down over uh healthc care being continuously funded or not.

But pollster Frank Lent thinks that it would be bad for Trump if it doesn't get funded.

I guess that means bad for Republicans in general because Trump won't be running again.

But do you believe that?

Do you think that if the if the Republicans say no, it's a waste of money, we're not going to fund it for another three years?

Do you think that that would hurt the Republicans more?

The polling seems to suggest yes, but I wonder if that's real because I think people just always just defer to their side.

So if the Republicans shut down things, I don't know.

I I can see how that would be bad for Republicans, but not guaranteed.

All right, one more sip of water.

One more short story.

And it looks like I got through it today.

So there's a former Russian president Dimmitri Medvidev who's now on Russia's security council who said about Zalinski.

He was talking about the attack on Putin's residence.

He said uh that uh Zalinski was quote trying to derail the settlement of the conflict.

And then Medvid said that Zilinski he wants war.

But here's the provocative part.

Uh well now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life.

How would you like to be Zilinski and allegedly, but we don't know.

allegedly uh tried to assassinate Putin in his residence and knowing that Putin is the most assassinating guy in the world, maybe not counting Israel.

So, Israel does assassinate anybody they can get to, but even Israel didn't assassinate the Supreme Leader.

So if you were going to try to assassinate somebody and it didn't work, the most dangerous person you could miss would be Putin.

He he he would definitely chase you to the end of the earth to assassinate you back.

Am I right?

Especially if Zilinski is out of power.

The minute that Zalinski is no longer a the leader of Ukraine, which has to happen someday, I think Putin is going to give the green light to all of his assassinators to throw him off a balcony somewhere.

So when when Medv when Medvadev says, "Well, now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life," that's probably true.

I don't think there's enough security in the world that could protect Zilinski from Putin.

And and maybe even the Ukrainians would kill him first for making a deal.

I don't know.

But if you were Zilinski, the only the only way you have to survive is to uh stay in power.

So that's a problem.

Do that's my advice.

never assassinate or attempt to assassinate the most revenge assassinating guy in the world.

Now, my other question is this.

Apparently, apparently we know that Putin has not lived in any of his residences for three years specifically because they're harder to defend and that he's been using an apartment in u in the Kremlin because it's easier to defend.

Now, do you think that Ukraine was not aware of that?

So, what would be the point of blowing up a residence that has zero chance of having Putin inside it?

Is it because he has some family that were going after?

That doesn't seem like a good plan.

So, I'm a little bit skeptical about why that happened.

You know, I did say that it would make sense to do a false flag.

If you were Russia and you wanted to prolong the war or you wanted to do a decapitation strike on Zilinski, it would be a good false flag to say he started it.

But did he did was it was it a real assassination attempt?

Do you think they had the ability to, you know, get a asset all the way in there, but they didn't have the ability to know he wasn't there?

Why would you even do the attack if if apparently people knew he was never there?

So, something about this doesn't add up, but I don't know what it is.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, looks like I made it.

That is my show for today.

Uh yesterday I missed because I had a coughing attack that lasted a while, but so far no coughing today.

And uh we're we're wishing well for Victor Davis Hansen.

Apparently he's got some major medical problems and so give him a thought today.

Russia has attempted to assassinate Zilinski several times.

Yeah.

So they don't need a reason.

It's all mysterious.

All right, everybody.

Have a great day.

Hope you enjoyed.

I'm going to talk to the locals, my beloved locals people privately in 30 seconds.

Locals.

Well, we'll see how this goes.

My cough is under control,

but I do get a little bit dizzy if I

talk too much.

So, we'll do the best we can. I

apologize for my voice. It will not get

better.

Good morning, everybody.

Let's do the simultaneous sip

now and we'll see how far we get.

[snorts]

I know why you're here.

Last one in here.

All you need is a copper among your

glasses. Tanker shelves can candy flask

a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your

favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join

me now for the unpolable pleasure the

dopamine the other day thing that makes

everything better. It's called the

simultaneous step. It happens now.

Terrific.

Well, let's jump right into it, shall

we? Um, apparently I'm very good at

guessing how many calendars I'll sell in

a year because we got right up to the

right up to the limit. But still a few

more.

So I wouldn't wait if you don't have

your DB calendar. Amazon.com the only

place you can get it.

How about some endofear predictions?

I always hate those, but they seem

traditional.

Uh, I'm going to say the obvious. 2026

will be the year of the self-driving

car.

Um,

I don't believe there will be robot

butlers.

So, I'm going to say no robot butlers

yet.

I think the economy will surprise us,

but I don't know which direction.

It'll either be better than we think or

worse than we think. No one can no one

can predict the economy.

Further, I predict that the topic of

election rigging will become a much

bigger story.

Um, and if you haven't caught up with

the Patrick Burn, he was the CEO of

Overstock.com. If you don't know his

story,

you really should catch up to it because

I don't know what's true. I have no idea

if his version of events captures what

really happened, but he's got he's very

convincing. He's been saying it for a

while, but now I think he can say it and

people can run it. So he's got this

story about Venezuela being involved

with the voting machines, Chinese

components, and a Serbian data center.

They got taken down just before they

could influence the election in 2024.

Is any of that true? I don't know. But I

gotta say, he's he's very he's very

credible sounding

and there's nothing about him that

suggests he's making it up and he does

seem to know.

So I I feel like this this will be the

year he breaks through to uh make that a

bigger story.

And then

um you know I think the fact that we

know everything else in the world is

rigged

as we're watching all these stories

about corruption

um I think that makes it easier for

people to believe that the elections

were rigged

because I've been saying something now

for a while few years that nobody else

picks up on. Have you noticed this? This

is what I say. I say, "What are the odds

that every other institution is corrupt,

but our elections are not?"

What are the odds of that? If you didn't

know anything

about election security,

you'd never seen any story about it. How

would you believe that it's not corrupt

when everything else is?

Now, I might have been a little ahead of

the game.

Because the other thing I say which sets

you up for for that thing I just said is

that whenever you have the following

situation, you have corruption.

There's a lot of money involved.

There's lots of people involved.

The stakes are high.

money or power

and you just wait

because and there's and assume there's

no audit control because even where

there are audits the audits don't catch

stuff as we've seen.

So

if you take that as your starting point

uh that everything is corrupt and that

there's a reason built into why it's

corrupt. It's not it's not chance.

It's not it's not a weird coincidence.

It's that everything that has that

element to it always becomes corrupt

every time.

Now add to that what I've also been

saying. What is the reason for

electronic voting machines?

What would be the legitimate reason? And

there is none. The only reason for

voting machines is to cheat because

they're they're not cheaper. They're not

more reliable. They're not faster.

They're not anything. So, put those

three discisms together,

right? Everything that has this nature

is rigged or fraudulent.

Voting machines

don't have any other purpose that we can

see.

and then elections sort of just fall

into that category. You know, the thing

that can't be explained

unless there's massive fraud going on.

Now, that doesn't mean that the only

fraud is the machines. [clears throat]

Sorry. It would suggest that in every

way that an election can be rigged.

Probably is. Probably is. Now, I do not

claim

that the only bad people in the country

are Democrats,

but um maybe [laughter]

it doesn't seem likely that the only bad

people are Democrats, but in my bubble,

that's true.

Well, David Moss, a user on X, just

completed a self-driving Tesla to drive

across the entire United States without

ever engaging with the car.

So, so this was the day that somebody

drove the entire coast to coast

and didn't touch the steering wheel.

That includes parking. includes um

supercharging.

So, it's pretty easy to predict

that this will be the year of the of the

self-driving car.

All right, here's a question I asked

myself.

How many fake news stories will I fall

for in the coming year?

So apparently the other day, maybe

yesterday,

not the other day, I posted I reposted,

but to my credit with skepticism, a

story about some election claim that

involves a big shredding truck and

somebody told me today that's fake news.

It's been debunked. So I removed it. But

it makes me wonder how many times am I

going to get fooled by fake news?

Probably a lot.

And I thought I should almost keep track

of it because you know that's one that's

you know I should start start with 2026

and find out how many times do I get

fooled? Is it more

you know am I am I more likely to be

fooled because people are better at

fooling people? Am I getting dumber and

older? I don't know. But watch out for

me, will you?

All right. Here is something that I

feared was true, and I'm pretty sure it

is.

Um, I don't know about you, but if

you're if you're watching this podcast,

it's probably true that your news and

social media bubble is non-stop stories

about um money laundering and Somalians

and uh basically bad behavior as well as

rigged elections. Do you have that

experience

that all day long I pick up my phone, I

go to ask, "Oh, there's another state.

There's another fraud. There's another

fraud. There's another fraud." And of

course, the the algorithm is doing that.

But here's what I was afraid of.

I was afraid that no normies ever see

these stories. And that's what I'm

starting to hear. People are saying, "I

went to things like I went to lunch with

my neighbors and not one of them had

heard about the Somalian fraud and

stuff."

Ju just hold that in your head that your

neighbors

haven't even heard, they're not even

aware that there's a massive uh money

laundering fraud problem. They've never

heard it.

Now, that doesn't mean it's never been

on the news, but the news doesn't cover

it like social media does. So, I'm I'm

completely immersed in this world where

every freaking story is about somebody

stealing my money. But if you were not

paying attention to that bubble that I'm

in and you were in a different bubble,

haven't even heard of it.

That does not seem like a healthy

situation, does it?

Oh my god.

Well, speaking of the bubble, so here's

some more stuff in my bubble. Eric

Dordy's reporting on this. Well, part of

the reason that my bubble is different

is I listen to a lot of uh independent

journalists.

Um, apparently in Minnesota as far back

as 2018,

PE whistleblowers were reporting these

frauds, these Somali basically money

laundering frauds. Um, and that they had

the whistleblowers all had the same

experience

that uh that they were told that they

couldn't talk about it or they'd be

blamed, they'd be accused of being

racist or islamophobic.

Now my how things change because once

Trump got elected

now we can talk about things that we

should be talking about.

All right let's do a sip

sip.

So, if Trump had not been elected and he

had not uh basically gotten rid of DEI

and our our blocks on free speech, if if

Elon Musk had not purchased Twitter,

we still wouldn't know about this.

Ju just think about how close we were.

You know, um, you probably saw the other

day that Elon Musk estimated that at the

low bound, the theft might be 1.5

trillion a year at the low end.

1.5 trillion. That would be the entire

essentially the deficit.

And you might remember, I keep bragging

about this, but I'm actually kind of

proud of it that I told you that people

like me who have a background in

budgeting, you know, that was my day job

in corporate world was a lot of

budgeting. You develop a kind of

intuition

about where something is wrong.

And several years ago, I started saying,

um, I don't see how we could possibly be

in this much of a deficit hole unless

the amount of fraud was so high that is

unimaginable.

Now, at the time, I did not get a lot of

agreement,

but today I think every one of you

agrees today that at least some big

portion of it was just fraud.

So, I'm going to give give myself credit

for that one.

Anyway, um

I saw that HUD

thinks they may have found 5.8 8 billion

in improper rental aid payments

according to Newsmax. That's housing and

urban development. Now, they haven't

confirmed that, but there are some red

flags.

And what I like about this is that I'm

noticing in the government that they've

turned spotting fraud into a competitive

sport.

So you should expect to see more and

more department heads say, "Hey, we

found some fraud. I found some fraud. I

found more fraud than you did." So we're

going from an environment in which if

you mention the fraud, you were racist

to an environment in which people are

competing to see who can find the most.

And people are competing to come up with

the best idea for finding the most. That

is a good sign. So 2026 might be just

wild.

Speaking of that, um, Health and Human

Services just froze child care payments

to Minnesota because it was all going to

fraud. Not all of it, but um, massive

amounts were apparently going to fraud.

At the same time,

uh, what do you think, uh, what do you

think Tim Walsh said when it was

announced that the government was going

to stop payments because the payments

were almost all fraud? What would what

would Tim Wall say about that?

Well, here's what he said. It's almost

unbelievable.

He said, uh, that this is Trump's long

game. quote, "He's politicizing the

issue to defund programs to help

motans."

Really?

Really?

Does he really think that Trump sits

down in the morning and says, "What can

I do? How can I hurt those children in

Minnesota in a way that will help me?"

That is just bastard crazy. It's so

obvious. He has no no real response to

that. How in the world

does that make sense to his followers?

Oh, Trump has a long-term plan to damage

Minnesota.

What?

What? Why would anyone have that plan?

For political reasons? I mean, you

really have to

you got to press all yourself up to make

that make sense. No.

No. Obviously, everything is political.

You know, that part's true, but what are

the odds that Trump is doing it because

it's part of his long game to hurt

Minnesota?

That's insane.

Um, Bill P,

I saw him on a show yesterday. uh he's

he's the head of Fanny May and Freddy

Mack and he said that they're using AI

and and Palanteer to flag potential uh

you know potential fraud. So I think

that's the model you're going to see. I

think people will be doing the bill py

model where you uh partner with maybe

private companies and the private

companies spot potential flags or I

should just say flags for for stuff and

then you look into it. So so basically

every part of the government that gives

away money is probably going to move to

that model. Let's call it the Bill PE

model.

And it should be no surprise, Fox News

is reporting that uh now we know from uh

new surveillance photos, the

surveillance video that uh the parents

in Minnesota might have been in on the

fraud. So, they've got video all the way

back from 2018,

of course, in which parents are seen to

be checking their kids into daycare, but

then just turning around checking them

out. So, I guess it was the checking in

part that made it look legitimate.

Are you surprised

that parents might be part of the

scheme? No. Nope.

All right. Uh, New York Post is

reporting, I saw Liz Collins reports

reporting on this, that there's a former

home homeland security agent who claims

that when uh reports were given to the

uh Minnesota, let's see, he said that uh

he claims that prosecutors ignored

Minnesota daycare fraud cases and that

they quote just evaporated.

So there was no shortage of people

noticing

and there was no shortage of people

reporting it

and when it was reported they just slow

walked it and then made it go away.

So corruption.

Yeah. Do you know how much ignoring you

would have to do? You would have to have

a lot of people ignoring a lot of things

for a long time. like a lot of people.

And apparently that's what happened. And

the only way that could happen, says me,

is if people are afraid of being called

racist.

So when you calculate the damage of DEI,

if I were doing the analysis of what is

the damage of DEI,

you could come up with a long list, but

you'd have to add trillions

because of this trillions

the cost of DEI.

Now, here's more good news that may not

turn into good news. But if you're on if

you're on social media and you're you're

watching the bubble that I'm watching,

you see people like Elon Musk talking

about the fraud and Doge and talking

about it. You'll see people like David

Saxs and Chimath and, you know, lots of

other smart people.

Um

so the good news is that the smartest

people in the country

um Bill Aman would be another the

smartest people in the country are very

engaged and trying figuring out how to

fix this because all of their wealth at

least anything that depends on the

United States is completely a risk. Now,

I don't think that's the only reason

that they're so engaged, but they've not

been engaged before.

And they are the exact same people you

would want to fix any big problem.

Right? If you said, "We have this big

problem that nobody's been able to fix.

We need the smartest people in the room

to really get engaged." Well, we got

that.

Amazing. we we finally have the smartest

people in the room all on the same side

for the most part um and focused. But

here's the problem. We might have too

much

um diverse energy.

So they're not all saying exactly the

same thing

and it's unclear what plan would be the

best as Cernovich add him to the list of

the smartest people. Um,

so my question is this. How do we get to

the point where we've focused all that

smart energy? Because we're not really

at a place where we can focus it.

Um, so if you said, but Scott, that's

easy. All you need is a fraud zar. I

don't think so. I mean that might be

part of the solution but the fraud ZAR

would get destroyed the same way they

went after Musk. Now Musk is you know

there's only one Musk. So he's managed

to recover

and even grow his business and get his

get his compensation from Tesla and

everything else. But that's rare. I

don't know how many people could have

survived the attacks on that went after

Musk. So it would really be hard to get

a fraudzar who had that much risk

risk tolerance but also had the skill

and I don't know if it's enough.

So

uh and we also know that justice moves

too slowly. I've heard a number of

people say, "Scott, all they have to do

is prosecute some high level people and

this will stop." You know, if Larry

Ellison,

um, the AG in Minnesota, let's say he

quickly got indicted.

Well, I don't know. Would that stop

anything?

Um, how long would it take?

So justice moves too slowly to be the

biggest part of the answer but obviously

has to be part of the answer.

Um but I like the fact as I mentioned

before that finding the fraud

and uh doing something about it is a

competitive sport. So I think the best

case scenario is that private companies

find a way to free market this

situation.

So you've got Palunteer and other AI

companies that could be helpful. So they

might have, you know, a massive uh

potentially they might have a massive

financial payoff.

Uh no, Rico would be slower because you

have to RICO you have to pull together

like years of everything. I mean that

would be slower.

Um we need to do it probably but it

would be slower.

So what was I saying? Uh

so if you added the AI companies that

might have some incentive to spot the

fraud and then you add to that the quam

rule that I didn't know about but

apparently it's been a thing for years

that allows you an individual private

person to to ask the government to sue

somebody who has been ripping off the

government and then if you as the

whistle blower, let's say. Um, if they

succeed and they claw back some money,

you get a portion of it and it could be

big. It could be very big money. So,

here's the good news. When I talk about

the smartest people being fully engaged,

they're also the smartest people at

creating new businesses that didn't

exist. Right? Every one of them that I

mentioned has done entrepreneurial

things. They've got a track record,

right? Every one of them. Um, and that

is exactly

the people you want designing a new

system. So it might not be that there's

one one path to fixing it. It might be

that the free market has now surfaced

what looks like a set of variables that

could sort of automatically

drifted in the direction of getting rid

of the fraud because essentially it

would monetize getting rid of fraud,

which hasn't really been the case. Well,

it has been the case, but not everybody

knew it. And now lots of people know it.

So that's that's the good news. All

right, let's talk about Pam Bondi,

who is not working fast enough, people

say,

and has prosecuted no high-profile

cases.

So I'm going to wait into this

at the at my risk.

Um, you may have heard me say this on

social media.

And it goes like this. If I put the what

I call the Dilbert filter on this

situation,

how do we know, we who are not lawyers,

how do we know how long something should

take? How do we know how many cases

she's working on? How do we know how

hard it is to staff when you can't get

when when lawyers are like 90% Democrat,

but you don't want to staff up with

Democrats if the whole job is to go

after Democrats?

How long does it take to to staff up?

>> [snorts]

>> um what kind of cases is she working on

that are exactly where she should be

working on but they just take a long

time because they're complicated. So the

higher profile the case and the more

complicated the case the more you should

expect it would take longer than a year

even even to get to indictments.

So case in point,

I guess uh Cash Patella has recommended

the Department of Justice to look into

the whole uh situation with um the

Russia collusion hoax.

Now the Russia collusion hoax is

massively complicated. It involves

everybody from extracurren CIA

um and it involves two parts.

one is making it easier for Democrats to

get elected and the other is making it

harder for Republicans to stay out of

jail.

So, it involves everything from

uh the original meetings that Obama had,

um the special councils,

the the [snorts] raid on Mara Lago.

There are so many moving parts. If Pam

Bodi only had one thing to work on for

the rest of her life,

how long would that take?

Then you multiply that by a thousand

because remember, you've got the J6

stuff. How complicated would it be

to get the other side of the JX stuff

that that was all a plot

and then to wrap it all into a RICO?

because a RICO case has to show a

pattern of behavior that has stretched

over time and involves you know multiple

people.

So I am let me say this as clearly as

possible. I am as frustrated as you are

that nobody important goes to jail. Can

can we all get in the same side of that?

you know, none of us think is fast

enough, but we also don't know what

would be fast enough. What [snorts] What

would it look like if she were doing a

great job and what would it look like if

she were not? Could we tell? So, one

lawyer online said to me, "Scott, what

you I'm paraphrasing here. What you're

missing is that big law firms are

already staffed up to surge like whole

groups of people into uh different jobs

for the government or for a private

company. So the the thinking is that

it's just business as normal to be way

overworked,

but to instantly or or quickly correct

the fact that you have too much work by

going to big law firms and say, "Hey, we

need we need two dozen lawyers today.

You know, can you just give us a whole

staff?" And then those law firms, I

didn't know this, by the way, um are

routinely

routinely set up to do that.

However,

how does it work when the people you're

going after are Democrats?

Do you think there's a big law firm that

can give you two dozen lawyers that are

both good at what they do,

not doing anything more important?

You know, somebody said it's not the

best lawyers that they said for that,

but I don't know about that. uh you know

they didn't already have something

important to do so they could sort of

instantly go over and and that they

would do a nonbiased job instead of

dragging their feet

because all you would have to do is get

an anti-Trumper in the mix you know one

lawyer who drags your feet and they can

just drag this thing forever

so I am skeptical that the existing

model of surging lawyers

into a highprofile,

you know, high workload situation could

work in this situation. It might work in

normal situations.

And how long will it take before John

Brennan is indicted?

Anyway, so don't get mad at me. I am the

Dilbert filter messenger to tell you

that if there's a lot of people involved

and it's complicated, it's going to take

way longer than you wanted to. Does

everybody agree with that? Just just

that

we're all equally frustrated,

but whenever you have this complexity

and this setup, it's always going to

take longer than you want. you and that

would be sort of normal just normal

life.

Anyway,

so apparently according to Wall Street

apes on X, Minnesota Attorney General

Keith Ellison,

uh this is Wall Street apes framing of

it, admits the Simoleons were imported

to vote Democrat.

Um essentially he did. He said, quote,

"Well, the Somali community is critical

in my own election. I wouldn't be in

office without the help of the Somali

community." Okay. Now, that alone is not

illegal.

Um,

but we do know that the Somali community

has made a difference not just in

Minnesota, but also in Ohio and

Virginia, maybe some other places. So,

at what point

does it become illegal?

It's not illegal to

have people legally enter the country.

If they entered legally

and then they were legally allowed to

vote,

it would just be a good strategy, but it

wouldn't be illegal, right?

However,

did you know Scott Presler was reporting

this yesterday and and just think about

the fact that what I'm about to tell

you, you probably did not know

and and it's been true for a while that

if you're that if you work for a

building, so if you're an employee of

some large apartment building, it

doesn't matter what kind of employee,

you can vouch for an unlimited number of

people who live in the building or

allegedly live in the building, you can

vouch that they are legally allowed to

uh to vote

even if they don't have ID. So in other

words, if I understand this correctly,

the janitor of a big building could

could uh vouch for every person in the

building even if every one of them had

been illegal.

And that's actually a written law in

Minnesota. It's a law. Now, when that

law got passed,

what was anybody thinking? How in the

world? Yeah, there's some paperwork to

vouch. How in the world did anybody

think that was for anything but cheating

in the election? What would be the other

reason? You know, usually the Democrats

say, "Well, we don't want to suppress

voting, so we want to make it easy to

vote." There's no way.

There's no way that that particular law

was to stop suppression of voting. That

was purely to make it easier to cheat.

I I would say you can't say that any

other way.

Well, are any other states or cities

having problems with fraud? Oh,

surprise. Real clear investigation says

that uh there was a some guy, a city

official in Austin

who had uh let's see, given a bunch of

fake contracts to friends that were

fairly gigantic,

had been doing it for a while.

So, let's see how much he get. Uh he was

he was using the city credit card which

he was allowed to use for city services

but instead of doing city services he

used it to pay 30 different vendors but

the city auditor could only verify that

eight of them were even real companies.

And of the real companies

do you think those are relatives too or

people who gave them kickbacks?

So most of the money or a lot of it went

to places that uh appeared to be fake.

At the same time, the guy who was doing

this was earning over half a million

dollars a year in salary. So he was

overpaid and he was just massively doing

out the city credit card to his

presumably fraudster friends.

Now, h how long ago was the first time

you heard me say this? that all local

government is criminal.

All local government is criminal. And

the reason is this because there's

always somebody who's in charge of who

gets the money and there's never enough

audits um let's say security to stop it

from happening fraudulently.

So again, a lot of money involved,

people involved, time goes by, poor

auditing procedures.

Was this predictable? Yes. If you took a

dart and threw it at map of the United

States and hit any city, you don't think

this is happening anywhere else? I'll

bet some form of this, maybe not as bad,

but I'll bet you some form of this is

100% in every city. 100%. because

whoever has the the uh the wallet will

be just infinitely approached by people

who say, you know, if I got a little bit

of what's in that city wallet, I'll bet

you a lot of people would donate to your

campaign.

There's no way this system could

produce. If you saw it on paper,

if somebody said, "We've never had a

city before, but we're going to we're

going to invent a thing called a city,

and here's how it will be run." And you

simply

just drew on paper who has the control,

who's watching it, how money flows, how

money is allocated. Anybody smart would

know that that was a settle for fraud.

So the cities are designed in a way that

guarantees fraud,

guarantees it. And sure enough, that's

what we see.

Well, here's a story about further

layoffs in the media world. According to

the RAP,

uh, entertainment and media layoffs are

up 18%.

And 17,000 jobs were slashed in 2025.

Now what they mostly mean is the

traditional media. So there've been some

mergers and cutbacks and stuff. So the

traditional media

uh took a hit, but I would argue that

that's not the bad news it looks like um

because the the independent journalists

and the independent media and I I would

be part of the independence um vastly

increased.

So, it's not really a story about less

media employees. It's more a story about

less traditional fake news

stuff we don't want to see media and way

way way more Nick Shirley's and Scott

Adams's and people who, you know, are

doing a show independently.

So, I think that is an evolution,

not some kind of a problem.

And I love the fact that the the jobs

that are being created are being created

by the people creating them. So it's not

like a a boss had to create a company

that hired people. It's more like people

like me said, "What happens if I turn

this camera on and start talking?

Can I monetize that?" Yep. Turns out I

can.

Well, according to Sai Post

Karina Petrova, there's a study that

says that shocking headlines

make people skeptical,

but that over time they come to believe

the thing that was the shocking

headline. Does that surprise you? So the

idea is when you first see like a

headline that says shocking thing

happened here or there and then you read

it, you go like, well, you know, I don't

know, I'm not sure that's true. Yeah,

everybody says everything's shocking.

So, so you automatically put some

critical thinking on a headline that

just seems a little overdone, but then

over time you forget where you saw the

headline and you start thinking it must

be a fact. So you you remember the

story, but you won't remember your

initial skepticism. So So it makes it

makes it believable over time. I think

probably only if you hear it repeated.

All right.

Uh

we talked about this before, but this

this is just blows my mind. So, San

Francisco,

a a city you would associate with being

lax on crime, right? So, San Francisco,

most people would agree left and right

that they would be soft on crime

compared [clears throat] to other

places. But despite being soft on crime,

uh, apparently they have this this

license plate reading technology called

Flock, F L O C K, and it can read

license plates and it has they've got

about 500 of them in major roadways in

San Francisco, around San Francisco,

and that it's centralized. It must be in

other cities, too. So they have a

centralized nationwide database

uh of more than 1 billion license plate

reads each month.

Now they're being sued by someone who

doesn't want them to be able to track

you if there's no warrant. So, if

there's no, you know, reason to track

you, um, at least one individual is

suing because he says that should only

be they should only track you, uh, if

they have a warrant and these are

warrantless.

So, apparently you can in most cases you

could track a car in San Francisco from

wherever it starts to wherever it ends

up.

How comfortable are you with that?

because remember it's tracking everyone.

Well, how in the world do you stop

people from tracking their spouse?

Don't you think that every engineer who

has access to this thing is already

tracking their ex? Find out where their

ex goes when they go to work.

Probably this would put an end to

cheating.

Uh, but it's weird that the most lenient

city

would be doing this of all things.

Now, now so far all I know about it is

it attracts license plates. I don't

believe it does facial recognition, but

it would be easy to add it. And I don't

believe it has a full AI capability,

although obviously that would be coming.

So if you take a 500 camera system and

you can track license plates, you can

track faces which I just assume is

coming and you can use AI to make it,

you know, identify and flag things. You

have created quite a monster.

That is a monster where you're not going

to know where does that end up like how

bad will that become

you know if they if they do it gradually

like well it's just license plates then

it doesn't seem as scary but once you

realize there's nothing to stop them

really from adding facial recognition

and uh and AI what in the world could

that become

I don't know

So we always talk about this California

wealth tax where they're floating the

idea in California that the some

billionaires would have to give up 1% of

their wealth per year for five years. So

in the end 5% of their wealth would be

taken in taxes

apparently. I didn't know this but even

Gavin Newsome opposes it but Bill Aman

so it might not happen because you know

if the governor opposes it he could veto

it. Um, Bill Aman warns that no one

would say if California implements a

wealth tax.

Now, we've already seen some

billionaires in California state they're

going to move. And it could be a bluff.

um maybe they prefer to stay, but uh

they're making sure that people know

that if they do go um you know,

everybody would go and they would turn

California into something it hasn't

been. But um there have been some other

some other options for raising money

that have been raised.

Uh first of all, let me say the obvious.

No one wants higher taxes

when your estate is wasting the money.

No one wants higher taxes in general,

but in the current context of massive

fraud, it's going to be really hard to

increase taxes on anybody if you know

that it's just been wasted. So, we'll

see how that goes. But some people have

proposed that if you just raise the

sales tax,

it would be a a more reasonable

approach. The idea is that it's

automatically progressive.

So if a billionaire buys a boat,

a yacht, that's a lot of sales tax

sacks. But if you if you get a stick of

gum, it's a little bit of sales tax, but

not much. However, the sales tax in

California is already

is insanely high. I forget what it is.

So, I'm not in favor of a sales tax.

It's just an alternative.

Um, however,

even billionaires agree with the

following that billionaires have a way

to avoid taxes that ordinary people

don't and that maybe that needs to be

closed. Did you know how that works? Um,

I used Grock to to give me a little

tutorial on how the billionaires avoid

taxes.

And let me see if I can explain that

in a way you would understand. So a

normal person gets normal income and

they pay income tax. A billionaire u

might not have income at all. They might

just have a lot of assets.

So, one of the ways that they can avoid

paying uh income taxes is to make sure

that their businesses do not give them a

salary. So, there's no income. But where

do they get the money to spend if they

don't have an income?

And the answer is they can make they can

take a loan. So, they could go to a bank

and they can say give me a large

personal loan. Now, it wouldn't be large

compared to their assets. It would still

be tiny tiny, but it would be large to

us and it would be so much money that

they could spend it like income, buy

mansions and yachts and stuff uh without

any income. The bank would say, "Can you

pay back this loan?" And the billionaire

would say, "Are you kidding? I have I'm

worth, you know, $20 billion.

I'm only asking you for half a billion.

So the bank says that's a pretty good

deal and we're definitely gonna get paid

back. Not definitely, but probably. So

they give them a loan and is it's

collateralized

by the assets of the billionaire. So the

bank is happy. They always know they

can, you know, seize the seize the

mansion or seize the stock if something

goes wrong. Then the billionaire spends

spends the personal loan

just because it's their cash. They can

do whatever they want. It's not a

business loan. It's a personal loan.

Sort of sort of like a line of credit on

your house or just the big version.

Then when they die, the billionaire,

they can transfer those assets to their

heirs at a stepped up fair market value.

And even the heirs avoid taxes.

Now, I believe there's still a uh uh

what do you call it? A estate tax. So,

if you didn't know, the estate tax over

a certain level is 40%.

So, when I die, if I do, my estate tax

um above a certain certain dollar amount

will be taxed at 40%. which is pretty

egregious, but

uh but it's happening. Anyway, did that

make sense? I'd never really I never

really spent two minutes looking into

why billionaires don't pay taxes.

So, I would agree,

but that seems like a loophole that

needs to be closed.

Seems like it.

Well, according to the Epoch Times, the

CEO of the IRS, I didn't know they had a

CEO, um, says that 94% of middle class

taxpayers will see tax relief next year.

So, that would be under the big

beautiful bill, I guess. Do you believe

that?

I I'm I'm uh primed to never believe

anything about taxes going down.

I always think taxes are going up even

if all the reporting is it's going down

for some people. So I'm going to say

maybe

maybe

but probably not.

So it doesn't matter who's president.

Doesn't matter what the law is.

I never believe taxes will go down.

Whoa. Did you know

there's a study site post is writing

about this of Vladimir Hedri that mass

shootings increase the local turnout for

voting but do not shift presidential

choices.

How many of you would have known that

without looking at a study that if

there's a mass shooting in the news

uh locally you might get a higher

turnout for a vote but they don't they

don't change who they vote for. The

people who wanted Democrats to get rid

of guns still want it. And the

Republicans say, "Well, it's the cost of

being in a free country. Don't take my

guns." Um, so they both So they both get

more votes, but it doesn't change the

mix.

They could have just asked me. I knew

that.

But Daniel Greenfield

of Front Page magazine is reporting that

the MSNBC, which is now rebranded as MS

Now, the ratings have collapsed, as you

probably know. Uh, how bad is it? We'll

see. According to Neielson Media

Research, this is fairly new. Fox News

averaged 2.72 million prime time viewers

and 287,000 viewers in the key

demographic 25 to 54. So that was up it

was up 14%.

Uh and the the key demo group was up

18%. That's pretty damn good. How did

MSNBC do? Oh. Oh. Oh, sorry.

They averaged 920,000

923,000

down

25% since 2024

and only 81,000 in the key demo that was

down 39%.

Wow. And CNN did even worse.

Now the reporting doesn't give reasons.

Would you like to know some reasons why

MS Now is down and Fox News is up?

Well, I say I say this a lot,

but um MS Now has bad producers

and their honor talent was mentally

insane,

right? If you look at any show on MS

Now,

it's poorly produced. You'll be a table

of people who look crazy just yelling at

each other.

You Rachel Matto looks like she just has

mental illness and they just seem a

little weak and weird and

just somebody you don't want to watch.

But also, none of the shows are

engineered to be as interesting as Fox.

So, if you've never watched um the show

called The Five on uh Fox, you haven't

seen what good producing looks like. So,

everything from the selection of the

cast to how how many there are to um you

know, how they how they always have the

the one person who's sort of the the

foil, you know, the Democrat foil. um

everything about that is welldesigned

and the people don't look mentally

insane. So over time you can completely

see how Fox News could um and they do

they attract people from the other side.

But if you're if you're a Republican and

you turn on MS Now you just go what the

what the hell? It's just all poorly

produced.

So, and poorly produced and they don't

have as good a host. They don't they

don't have a Greg Guffeld, for example.

Right. Who who is a Greg Guffeld? They

just don't have one. Makes a big

difference.

Well, here's a weird story I don't

understand.

So are you aware that in Iran

uh I guess this week there were massive

street protests

and you know the streets are full of

people who are bad at the regime. Now I

think that's happened before but it

didn't turn into anything. Yeah. Dana

Pino, Jesse Waters, every one of them

are more talented than anything you see

on MS Now.

So at the same time the Iranian public

is doing some massive protests uh in

Israel according to the Jerusalem Post

MSAD. So that would be Israel's, you

know, intelligence agency. They posted a

message on X in in Farsy, the language

of Iran, urging demonstrators to to act,

saying that it was with them in the

streets.

It's with them in the streets.

And said, go out together into the

streets. The time has come.

He said it will join them.

It says we are with you. not only from a

distance and verbally, we are with you

in the field.

So MSAD is admitting

that they're literally on the ground

participating with the protesters.

Now, does that seem like a good idea to

you? I'd love to know why they thought

that was a good idea. Because everything

I know about people is that the Iranians

would be maybe plenty happy to find

their own way away from the regime. But

as soon as they're uh as soon as the

country that's bombed them says, you

know, I'm with you, doesn't that

immediately

doesn't that immediately make them bond

together and say, wait a minute, wait a

minute, this is up to us. Get out of

here. How in the world is that good for

Israel?

I don't understand. Maybe

I'm just speculating. Maybe MSAD thinks

that if the Iranians think they have

support from even Israel that would

embolden them.

That's not the way things usually work.

Usually the, you know, usually works the

other way. So, you know, they're not

stupid, obviously.

fake news. No, it was actually on the

MSAD X account.

So, the X account is uh I think that's

real.

H anyway, it's either very clever

uh or it's not. I know. I'm just going

to watch that one.

Um, according to Tech Crunch, the number

of followers you have on social media

has never mattered less. Now, here

they're talking about people monetizing,

but apparently um the thing that moves

your traffic is not how not how many

followers you amassed. It has to do with

how good your clipping services. So

apparently there are all these young

people who are making clips

um and that's the way people discover

things now. They call it teenage

clipping army.

So it's a now a well-developed market.

So if you were an independent

um internet producer,

you could amass a very large following.

Let's say in my case I've got 1.3

million followers on X but still even

with 1.3 million followers

um a lot of people who follow me don't

see my content and I'm not alone you

know people have been complaining about

this for a while uh that they amass all

these followers and they can tell that

the followers are not seeing their

content but what they are seeing or what

people are seeing is clips

Now, you may have noticed that there are

more of more clips from my content than

you've ever seen before. I don't pay for

that, in case you're wondering, right?

Uh but you've seen Yeah.

You you you've seen Jay and uh is it

Jason Cohen? You've seen some other

people clipping me and that does make a

big difference. Sometimes it just

depends if the clip goes viral.

So, in case you're wondering,

I do not pay for a clipping service of

teenagers.

Well, did you hear the story that

apparently earlier this month the CIA

launched a military attack on a uh base

like a base or a port in Venezuela and

it blew up some and uh we never

heard of it. But the weird part is

Venezuela didn't mention it.

How in the world do did we attack a

landbased

major facility in Venezuela weeks ago

and Venezuela never mentioned it? Yeah.

How in the world?

But apparently Trump wasn't happy about

that. So he mentioned it on a radio show

and he said that they destroyed quote a

big plant or facility where ships come

in.

And then he was asked who did it and he

was shy about it which everybody assumes

means the CIA.

And then apparently Trump wanted

Venezuela to know about it or the world

to know about it. So he heard it. Some

in the CIA are not happy that he owned

it. But obviously obviously we didn't

intend it to be a secret because we

would have assumed Venezuela would have

mentioned it. But they didn't. So he did

anyway.

on the on the Venezuela side. Um I'm

loving this story about the well, let me

give you some context. Have you ever

watched a movie or a TV show where the

villain was the interesting one and then

you found you found yourself rooting for

the villain and you didn't feel good

about yourself? Like I can't I can't

root for the villain. Well, I'm having

that experience in the real world

because one of the tankers

uh is empty, so there's no oil in it,

but the US was going to board and seize

a tanker uh that was leaving Venezuela.

And the reason we had the authority to

grab it is that it was allegedly uh

misidentifying itself and maybe maybe

had a fake flag.

Um, but instead of instead of

surrendering, which you'd expect a

tanker to do if the entire

if the US Navy told you to slow down,

we're going to board you. You would not

expect them to run for it because they

know they can't outrun us, right? But

but these are the bad guys. Yeah, I'm

just using my analogy of bad guys. So,

the bad guys decide to do a U-turn and

instead of surrendering, they're going

to run for it.

Now, to me, first of all, I thought, how

in the world could that work? But now

there's a new twist.

Apparently, they painted a Russian flag

on the side of it to pretend that they

were Russian flagged ship.

Now, apparently this slowed down our

navy because we didn't want to seize a

Russian flagged ship. We wanted to seize

it if it was misidentified,

but we can't prove it's misidentified

because we don't know for sure if Russia

said, "Okay, yeah, you're Russian." You

know, there's there's a process by which

you would reflag, but there's nothing to

stop Russia from saying, "All right,

yeah, sure. Yeah, if you want to just

say you're Russian," and then they paint

a Russian flag on the side of the ship,

and then they can't be taken down.

Again, I'll put it in the context of I

don't want to rule for the bad guys, but

if they get away with this,

that's pretty good.

That's pretty [clears throat] good. It

doesn't I don't think it makes much

difference to the United States whether

they get away with it or not. But if

somebody actually figured out how to

thwart the US Navy by painting a poorly

produced flag on the side of the ship, I

would have a little bit of respect for

that in the in the bad guy way.

Well, there's a story that says,

according to Marjorie Taylor Green,

who's now out of politics, she says that

when she tried to get Trump to agree to

release the Epstein files, that part of

that conversation involved Trump saying,

and remember this is Marjgerie Taylor

Green. She's the she's the one who heard

it, that if they release him, quote, his

friends will get hurt.

Now, that needs a lot more context,

doesn't it? Because if the only reason

that Trump doesn't want the FC rever

released is because his friends would

get hurt, that might not be a good

reason. But if he also knows that his

friends are innocent,

then you would care. I think you would

care if your friends got hurt. And I

don't I don't disagree with that impulse

to protect your friends if you know that

they're not guilty of anything. Um I

suspect though that's not the one and

only reason he doesn't want released. I

suspect that the you know the

intelligence agencies are behind some of

the suppression.

I think so. So, it seems likely to me

that the CIA would suppress anything

that was bad for them forever, but they

would allow anything that was bad for

Trump's friends to be released.

So, if Trump says it would be bad for my

friends, he might be leaving out the

part that says you're not going to learn

anything useful because the CIA is

definitely not going to show you that

and they do have the power to block

anything.

Um, so I would wonder if there's more

context to his comments.

So I do agree that if he knew, he

probably does that nothing good can come

out of it uh except for it would hurt

his friends but in return nothing good

could come out of it. What are you going

to do? What would you do if you knew

nothing good could come out of it except

it would hurt your friends?

I don't know. I might block it. I don't

think that's the worst impulse in the

world.

Anyway, I guess uh January is the month

where we have to worry about the

government shutting down over uh healthc

care being continuously funded or not.

But pollster Frank Lent

thinks that it would be bad for Trump if

it doesn't get funded.

I guess that means bad for Republicans

in general because Trump won't be

running again. But do you believe that?

Do you think that if the if the

Republicans say no, it's a waste of

money,

we're not going to fund it for another

three years? Do you think that that

would hurt the Republicans more? The

polling seems to suggest yes, but I

wonder if that's real because I think

people just always just defer to their

side. So if the Republicans shut down

things,

I don't know. I I can see how that would

be bad for Republicans, but not

guaranteed.

All right, one more sip of water.

One more short story.

And it looks [clears throat] like I got

through it today.

So there's a former Russian president

Dimmitri Medvidev

who's now on Russia's security council

who said about Zalinski. He was talking

about the attack on Putin's residence.

He said uh that uh Zalinski was quote

trying to derail the settlement of the

conflict. And then Medvid said that

Zilinski he wants war. But here's the

provocative part. Uh well now at least

he'll have to stay in hiding for the

rest of his worthless life.

[gasps] How would you like to be

Zilinski

and allegedly, but we don't know.

allegedly

uh tried to assassinate Putin in his

residence

and knowing that Putin is the most

assassinating guy in the world, maybe

not counting Israel. So, Israel does

assassinate anybody they can get to, but

even Israel didn't assassinate the

Supreme Leader.

So if you were going to try to

assassinate somebody and it didn't work,

the most dangerous person you could miss

would be Putin. He he he would

definitely chase you to the end of the

earth to assassinate you back. Am I

right? Especially if Zilinski is out of

power. The minute that Zalinski is no

longer a the leader of Ukraine, which

has to happen someday, I think Putin is

going to give the green light to all of

his assassinators to throw him off a

balcony somewhere. So when when Medv

when Medvadev says, "Well, now at least

he'll have to stay in hiding for the

rest of his worthless life," that's

probably true. I don't think there's

enough security in the world that could

protect Zilinski from Putin. And and

maybe even the Ukrainians would kill him

first for making a deal. I don't know.

But if you were Zilinski,

the only the only way you have to

survive

is to uh stay in power.

So that's a problem.

Do that's my advice. never assassinate

or attempt to assassinate the most

revenge assassinating guy in the world.

Now, my other question is this.

Apparently,

apparently we know that Putin has not

lived in any of his residences for three

years specifically because they're

harder to defend and that he's been

using an apartment in u in the Kremlin

because it's easier to defend.

Now, do you think that Ukraine was not

aware of that? So, what would be the

point of blowing up a residence that has

zero chance of having Putin inside it?

Is it because he has some family that

were going after? That doesn't seem like

a good plan. So, I'm a little bit

skeptical

about why that happened. You know, I did

say that it would make sense to do a

false flag. If you were Russia and you

wanted to prolong the war or you wanted

to do a decapitation strike on Zilinski,

it would be a good false flag to say he

started it. But did he did was it was it

a real assassination attempt? Do you

think they had the ability to, you know,

get a asset all the way in there, but

they didn't have the ability to know he

wasn't there? Why would you even do the

attack

if if apparently people knew he was

never there? So, something about this

doesn't add up, but I don't know what it

is. All right, ladies and gentlemen,

looks like I made it. That is my show

for today. Uh yesterday I missed because

I had a coughing attack that lasted a

while, but so far no coughing today.

And uh we're we're wishing well for

Victor Davis Hansen. Apparently he's got

some major medical problems and so give

him a thought today.

Russia has attempted to assassinate

Zilinski several times. Yeah. So they

don't need a reason. It's all

mysterious.

All right, everybody.

Have a great day. Hope you enjoyed. I'm

going to talk to the locals, my beloved

locals people privately in 30 seconds.

Locals.