real reason he sold his stock? Public relations? Publicity? Somebody says stock options to make a profit. No. I had to exercise options. Was that it? We, I thought there was some voluntary part of that. Thank you, diversification.

Yeah, if you're the richest person in the world but your wealth is entirely in a few different entities, you need to get some of that out of there. You need to get some of your money out of the things that have a specific risk. Because it could be that tomorrow somebody builds a fusion engine and puts it in a Prius and next thing you know nobody's buying the Tesla. So any company has the odds of going to zero no matter how big or successful the company is. It still has a chance of going to zero. So the smart thing to do is to find an excuse to take money off the table and put it somewhere else where nothing can happen to you. You're invulnerable.

So Elon Musk does a totally normal economic move which is to take some money off the table and diversify. But he turns it into this public spectacle of paying more taxes than any human and dunking on Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Anytime you think that anything is done for one reason, sometimes. But it's very simple. People who do that, when Elon Musk does something there are probably five reasons. And we can think of three of them and two of them he thinks of and you haven't even thought of. So yeah, they're like five reasons to do this. One of them was that he's responding to the criticism. The others are even better. But it was a perfect exit point because he can make it look like he's not cashing out. He made cashing out look like he was paying taxes. Could you do that? Would you be smart enough to figure out how to make taking your money off the table and keeping it forever, cashing out, could you make cashing out look like you're paying taxes? No, you're not that good. He totally pulled this off. This is one of the greatest persuasion plays you'll ever see. I mean it's an A-plus.

All right, as Greg Gutfeld said the other day, and I love this phrase, the public needs a hostage negotiator to help us get out of the mandates and lockdowns and whatever else is coming at us. And the reason is because the government's the wrong tool. But the public needs to weigh risk versus life and we weigh things differently. So in almost every other situation it's better to let the government do the republic thing and represent us. This is just one unique situation where they're the wrong tool. If a war breaks out you don't want the public voting on it. You want the government to say well we got this. Let us handle this until we can sort out what's real and then the public can get involved. But with the pandemic they were never the right tool except in the fog of war stage in which they were. But at this point they're not the right tool anymore. They were at the beginning. And the trouble is that the public doesn't have any way to organize short of the government itself. And the groups that might be resisting the mandates are too diverse. So you've got the Black Americans might be resisting at some level. You've got conservatives at some level and they tend not to join together. There are some cases where they are joining together but I would say that we need a hostage negotiator.

Adam suggested indirectly that maybe somebody like a Trump. Somebody like a Trump but he's, I always say he's too divisive. So it would be amazing if he did that. It would be one of the greatest spectacles of all time if he played it straight and literally said look, let me just negotiate this and see if we can come up with a date or a metric that sets us free. But here's what I think we need. I think we need a hostage negotiator who's not too identified with one side or the other to simply pick a date and say we're all taking our masks off. If you're in a state that has masks, we're all going to take our masks off on whatever day. And you know that's just the day. We're just going to take our masks off on that day. And maybe March 1st. If I had to pick a time I'd say March 1st. Now you'd all like it to be sooner, right? But we do have the Omicron. We don't know everything that we need to know about it. And of course we could change that date if something came up. March 1st, change it. But I think we need to have a date and I think it would be responsible to have that date not right away. Give us a little time to sort out what's true and what's not.

And anybody who says it should have been a year ago, I get what you're saying. I get it. Anyway if you can think of who'd be a good new hostage negotiator, but please don't pick me because I feel like I'd be semi good at it but I don't want it to be me. Sounds like a terrible job.

All right, let's talk about the Great Reset. You know, before that let me clarify my thoughts about the mass formation psychosis. I don't think I've done a good job of telling you my objections to it. So the idea behind the mass formation psychosis is that there are a set of conditions that have happened that could lead to totalitarianism.

Now one of the things that the No Agenda podcast said is that since I was discounting that as being afraid of Hitler, they said no no it does, it's not about Hitler, it's about totalitarianism. To which I say okay, okay, it's not about Hitler, it's about totalitarianism which is about Hitler. All right. I mean I get that there's a difference but we're not really talking about a real distinction here. The fear is that powerful people who don't have your interests will take control.

So here's what my take is on the mass formation psychosis. It doesn't add anything to the understanding because we're always in it. We're always in a mass formation psychosis. In other words we're always confused. We're always not sure what's happening. We're always frightened about the future. Why is that always the case? It's because of the fake news. Did you catch this play? All right, you saw, you heard about the SUV that killed people. It wasn't the person driving it, it was the SUV. You heard about this stone that threw itself, right? We keep hearing about all these things that are happening on its own. There's no person doing it. And now we have the mass formation psychosis. Huh. That's sort of like nobody's problem, is it? I mean nobody caused it. There's no name you could put on that. Oh it just happened on its own.

Here's my problem with it. It's the fake news that is the problem. There is a name to put on this. If the fake news were telling us the truth or ultimately just one truth even if it were fake, we'd all be on the same side and we wouldn't be so worried. But the business model of the fake news is to keep you uneasy, is to isolate you and divide you. That's how the business model works. Once everybody worked up and clicking on stuff. So when you say oh the problem is a mass formation psychosis, you have shifted blame from the obvious guilty parties. The guilty parties are the people running the fake news who have removed all confidence from the public and scared us to death. If you scare us at the same time you're teaching us that all the news is fake, how is the public going to feel? Well it's going to be exactly the situation to create a mass formation psychosis.

So I'm not saying that the conditions don't exist because they clearly do. I'm not saying that that doesn't contribute to the psychosis because it clearly does. All I'm saying is it's a diversion. It doesn't add anything. We're basically adding water to the ocean and telling you it got wetter. Yeah you might be a little bit more confused now. You might be a little bit more aware that the facts are fake. But we've always been here. We always were confused and hypnotized. We always were one inch away from totalitarianism.

Do you know what pre