the 90s Dilbert was big. I was giving a speech in Washington DC just a Dilbert speech for money and some of the administration found out that I was in town the Clinton administration and I got invited into the White House to just kind of look around and meet some of the staff of Al Gore's staff his speech writing staff and I guess Al Gore found out I was in the building so somebody said hey that Dilbert guy is in the building so he sent the message to summon me to his office and I thought really? I was just visiting the staff and suddenly they're like the vice president wants to meet with you and I was like really? So I go down to this outer office with some secretary type people sitting there and there's this gigantic door like the biggest door you've ever seen in your life. I think it went to the ceiling but it was an electric door so you push a button and it opens. Maybe it was a bomb door or something special I don't know but it was the most impressive door to a room I'd ever seen. And I'm standing there and I'm thinking to myself is that door going to open and the vice president of the United States Al Gore is going to walk through it and say hi Scott? Because I couldn't really believe this was about to happen. And then suddenly this gigantic door opened up and Al Gore walks through and he extends his hand to me and he goes hi I'm Al Gore. Which I always think is funny like you're the vice president I know who you are. I'm in the White House. I'm standing in front of your office. You are Al Gore. But you know what else are you going to say? It's just reflex.

So we took some pictures and then he asked me if I had a minute to go in and chat. So we go into his office and he said that he was trying to reinvent the government you know try to figure out the better faster cheaper way to do everything and he was making a lot of progress so he was succeeding. And by the way he did he did a lot of good things he doesn't get a lot of credit for it but that's part of the reason he wanted to talk to me. He said you know it's so hard to communicate all these boring technical things that we're accomplishing but we have to put on a report to say what we did to get anybody to read it. Do you think you could help us with make it just humorous put in some comics? So he said can you put some could you make it like a Dilbert report on what we've done to fix the government. And I said to him no nope can't do that because the moment I embraced one political party 50% of my revenue would go away. So I said that doesn't really work you know because I have a fiduciary responsibility to people who have licensed Dilbert at that point. So if I became even accidentally political even if I'm just trying to help like it's not even that political I'm just trying to help somebody communicate I'd lose half of my audience. So I was like nope that doesn't work. But here's what's more important you don't want to associate comics with this serious work that would be a communication mistake because people aren't going to take you seriously if even if they learn that you did good things in the comic because the comic is the wrong it's just the wrong vehicle. Don't do comics if you're the government. But I did say I can hook you up with somebody who's an expert on user interfaces and could figure out how to make your message the most palatable. So I hooked him up with somebody who was better than me without cartoons. So he produced his booklet that said what the government was doing. It was very well written because he got good help and he made a big difference.

Now Elon Musk has offered to help Trump cut the government spending but what that really means is not a finance person's approach what it really means is re-engineering the government. What you don't want to do is bring in like somebody with a big scalpel and say 20% of this and 10% of this and I'm going to cut 15% of this. It might end up that way but that's not ideal. The ideal situation is for somebody to come in and say why do we have three entities working on the same thing? How about just one done. Why do we even do this stuff when people could do this through private means without the government at all and it'd be faster and cheaper? Get rid of it done. So that's what re-engineering is. Re-engineering is not twiddling with your budget. Re-engineering is saying all right if this didn't exist in the first place would we ever build this? If we had a problem to solve today and you had to build whatever it is that the government already has would you or would you do it a whole different way? Because if the answer is with our current knowledge and technology and situation we would do it a whole different way then you do it that different way and that's how you get your cost down.

Now could an Elon Musk reduce our government expenses enough to make the deficit go away? He'd have to take like a third of the entire government spending out of the budget. Do you think he can do that? Take one third of the entire government budget and if you did think of the chaos that would create. Just think of all these government organizations that don't have very skilled people trying to re-engineer themselves into a whole different thing. The level of complexity there is beyond anything I can even imagine but in some big ways you could probably do stuff.

So I do think that if you combined that the environment might serve up one of those rare times where the economy is going to surge no matter what you do because it's robots and AI and self-driving cars etc. maybe go into space and if you add that with lower interest rates just because things are going well and if you add that to massively re-engineering not cutting the budget not cutting the budget because that's not even the goal. In fact I would say the following if Musk decided that looking at the government there should be something we should spend twice as much on because it would pay itself back in five different ways we should do that. So don't think of it as cutting that eliminates a whole source of goodness that could be applied. Sometimes it's cutting in some areas maybe rare in some areas maybe more maybe more.

All right Kennedy RFK Jr was saying in an event recently that inflation is just a tax mostly on poor people because the rich people own assets. If you own a building your building will go up with the inflation so relative to everybody else in the world you still own the same amount of money because you owned a building and it went up. But if you are living paycheck to paycheck and all you're doing is spending your cash on groceries you're going to buy less groceries because your money isn't worth as much. So in a sense it's a way to boost the economy which is good for the people who own buildings not so good for the people working for those people. So you can see how that's a transfer it's like a tax on poor people and transfers it to the wealthy. It would be better even as somebody who might benefit from this I'd be a lot happier without the inflation. I'd rather just nothing changed so you can run the economy without the surprise and shock of inflation. But it's a good point.

And he says that I don't know about this I need a fact check on this but Kennedy says basically the inflation is caused by the government spending too much and he says that the other cause of inflation is the money we're spending on chronic disease and he says that's five times our military budget. Does that pass your sniff test? Do you think the amount that America is spending on chronic disease now I assume that doesn't mean the government spending I assume that means individuals spending it on their own for the most part but is it really five times our military budget? Does that seem possible? It does seem possible. I'll take a fact check on that because it easily could be an exaggeration but directionally feels about right.

So now imagine if Kennedy came in and made everybody so healthy that their health care went down. Imagine if a president Trump and by the way I can't imagine him doing this but there's one person missing from his team of pirates you know he's got an Elon Musk he's got the All-In pod they're on his side they've got a Bill Maher they've got a Tulsi Gabbard they've got you know I can keep going so he's got this incredible team but there's somebody missing. You know who's missing? Somebody to tell us to be physically active. He needs Arnold. Now I don't think Schwarzenegger is pro Trump but maybe he could be maybe he could be because we need somebody to tell us to take a walk after dinner.

You want to solve a bunch of problems at the same time watch this. I'm president Trump and I've got an idea. We've got RFK Jr working on your food supply and your medicines trying to make that healthier but let's not ignore exercise and getting outdoors. Here's what I'd like you to do. We should have an app where you can organize with your neighbors what time to take a walk after dinner. Now there might be more than one because people eat dinner at different times so you could say oh it looks like my neighbors some of them are going to take a short walk maybe a mile or two and they're going to do it at 7 o'clock on a nice evening in California. So 7 o'clock you look on your app and you can see your other neighbors have already started to assemble because it shows their location once they turn on the app and they say all right I'll walk left and I'm going to run into my neighbors taking a walk so they're coming down the street toward me I can see on my app. I walk I join their little group I see somebody in the group I know I start walking with them and chatting. An hour later we're all happy we've made some plans somebody says they're going to have a party I got invited to a party I've had my social interaction even without a friend or without a girlfriend or a relationship I chatted with my neighbors for an hour while I took a walk in a beautiful sky and I came back and my mental health was better and my chronic illness was far better because I do it on a regular basis.

Now that's just an example and honestly Trump is not your icon of good physical health he's doing a great job for his age I got to say but you know you expect somebody who looks a little fitter to take that message but you could also imagine Trump doing it because he's honest so he would say you know what you know I don't exercise as much as I should I like golf but you should. That'd be good enough. You know if he said I'm not your role model but listen to RFK Jr. Have you seen him with that aura? I tell him to tell him to take off his shirt. If RFK Jr takes off his shirt and you're not going to follow his advice about fitness well you're crazy. You might not listen to me because you know I got a few extra pounds but look at this guy. If he tells you to take a walk after dinner you're going to do it. So you could imagine a hundred different ways that the Trump Administration could sell it but I feel like they need they need an extra pirate. They need a pirate who will get us off our asses and get us moving without spending money. Just take a walk right especially for the people who are not that physical you know it's a lot of people. So you could solve your loneliness your health care expenses your inflation your mental health your physical health by taking a walk. It just has to be organized.

Teamsters apparently RFK Jr said that Sean O'Brien the head of the Teamsters called him just recently yesterday maybe and asked them to send his love to Trump. Now the Teamsters you might know decided to not endorse a presidential candidate which is rare for the last few decades it's rare and people are interpreting it as a preference for Trump they just don't want to say it out loud. So I'd say this is pretty clear the rank and file are something like two thirds in favor of Trump and then the head of the organization who did not endorse is telling RFK Jr to send his love to Trump. Okay that's you can't get closer to an endorsement than that can you? It feels like they're doing everything they can do to endorse him without endorsing him and mission accomplished. Mission accomplished.

So Sean O'Brien is probably smarter than maybe people are giving him credit for because he found a way to endorse Trump without endorsing Trump through a side door by just saying it to RFK Jr knowing that he might repeat it. Pretty good. Pretty clever. Well done.

Trump announced he wants to end sanctuary cities as soon as he gets into office. I assume that that's wildly popular in the public. If I had to guess 70% agreement with that maybe about ending sanctuary cities. So that seems a good solid thing to say if 70% I think it's at least 70% of the public would agree with it so that's just free money.

Well the entertainer named Usher deleted all his posts on X because he's getting dragged into this Diddy drama. So when he was 13 years old he lived with Diddy for a while to learn his ways and there's some old interviews in which Usher was taken under the wing of Diddy said he learned some things at the Diddy parties and introduced him to quote a totally different set of stuff sex specifically. Remember he was 13. And the accusations are that Diddy was sort of recruiting and having sex with both young male and female potential wannabe entertainers and that he basically sold it this is the allegation I don't have any personal information to confirm anything so this is just what people are saying I can't claim any of this to be true. Claiming that it was a well established organized process where Diddy had to give up his body to somebody to become who he is and then he's just passing forward the badness and making people give up their bodies to be part of his process to become famous.

Now all of that is horrible but I'm just amazed at how many little stories related to this are popping up now. For example there's an old video of Chrissy Teigen with her husband John Legend and where they were interviewed at some event and somebody asked them about if they'd had sex in a public place and Chrissy Teigen said cryptically well maybe the Obama thing and John Legend immediately said we're not talking about that. So there's no explanation of what she when she jokingly said the Obama thing because they're good friends when she said something about having sex in front of other people.

Now again confirmation bias might be all that's happening so if you've heard all these stories about Diddy then anybody who was ever involved in any of those parties or at any contact with them at all if there's any video of them saying anything unclear even if it was a joke even if you don't know what they were thinking it's going to look like they're admitting sex crimes. So I'm not a big fan of John Legend because of his politics and I don't know much about his music so I don't have a feeling for that one way or the other but I'm going to say innocent till proven guilty on this one. As a citizen I give him the courtesy that I would wish would always be extended to me by citizens. Now if there's any kind of legal process that ever had a problem with him that would be a separate conversation but I don't like the fact that Chrissy Teigen made a joking reference to