ed as a group what the starting time is and what the ending time is. You would not get this consistency if it were one person or a military thing or something that was trying to be unpredictable. But you would definitely get, let's do this from 4 to 11. Everybody good with that? Yeah, yeah, we know we have to do it at night. Don't want to go past 11. Yeah, 4 to 11 sounds good. So yes, we know it's a group of Americans deciding what time to do it. So it's the military.

They also say that the drones can't be detected by radio. Now what does that mean? That means that they can't jam them and they don't get a signal that tells them it's being controlled from afar. Because here's what I think one of the things they might be testing is AI navigation, meaning that they're not using GPS. And for the time that it's over the residential area where maybe you could check for the radio signals, that it's not using any. So it might be flying independently under the direction of whoever sent it but using an AI to decide what to do and how to get back. So that would make sense. I mean, obviously if you had an advanced drone, the thing you would definitely be testing is can somebody detect your radio signal and jam it. So it makes sense anyway.

Here's what I think we should do. We should demand the resignation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because they seem to have demonstrated and told with complete clarity that there's no homeland defense. Am I right? They have proven, if we were to take them seriously, if we take the military seriously, that they're not their drones, which is trying to tell us that they're not involved. But they don't say that because they're involved, obviously. We should call their bluff and say, oh my God, we have no defense of our skies in the homeland whatsoever. So this tells us that we wouldn't know if there's an Iranian mother ship and we wouldn't be able to shoot down anything that's predictable and small and helpless. We wouldn't be able to shoot them down. That would indicate we have no homeland defense whatsoever, which we found out a little bit in 9/11, didn't we? Didn't you think that in 9/11 there would be, you know, at the first sign of trouble the US military would be in the air and shooting down any trouble? Well, maybe they shot down one, maybe they didn't, depending on what you believe about the one that went down in Pennsylvania.

And then the Chinese spy balloon comes over and it looks like again we have no air defense whatsoever. Is it possible that the country has no air defense? I think it is. I think that's actually possible that the United States has no defense whatsoever. And it's also possible that we don't need one, because if anybody came and bombed the American homeland they would, you know, evaporate a day later. So it would never make sense for anybody to attack the US homeland if we could determine who they were, and that would be just suicide. So maybe we don't need any. It could be that the military people said, you know what, if anybody attacks us we'll destroy their entire homeland in five minutes, so they probably won't. But they're pretending as if we have no homeland defense whatsoever, and I think that's a firing offense.

Inflation is up more than people thought, if you believe statistics, which I don't. So I'm not even going to talk about that. I don't believe economic statistics.

There's a new Pete Hegseth hoax that fortunately got debunked in time. So apparently West Point's public affairs office lied to a publication called ProPublica, and they said that Pete Hegseth never even applied to West Point. I guess Pete had said he had applied but didn't go there. And it turns out that Hegseth actually kept the letter that he got in 1999 that was a West Point acceptance letter. He actually had it. He actually kept the record. When does that ever happen? And I guess ProPublica tried twice to follow up to make sure that West Point really, really checked the records and they really knew for sure that he had not applied. And they swore that he had not applied. And then he showed the letter that showed he'd applied and was accepted.

Well, if you haven't seen it yet, there's a clip going around by the Trigonometry podcast guys that is just really good. I highly recommend it. I'm going to give you the highlights. But they had a British academic, smart guy, Rafe Heydel-Mankoo, and he was trying to explain why the West has apparently—why Western civilization has apparently had more genius and exceptionalism than a lot of other places. Now this is what he says. I'm not so sure that we've got all the genius and exceptionalism. I don't know about that. But what he says about it is fascinating. So hydrated. Good coffee.

What he says is that one of the reasons the West did well in the last several hundred years is that the Catholic Church banned cousin marriages. Did you know that? That was a little bit of history I wasn't aware of. I mean, I knew that we don't do cousin marriages, but I didn't know that there was some specific point at which history turned on that. But I guess the Catholic Church at one point banned cousin marriages.

Now this part is a little unclear to me, but if I understand it, once you've banned cousin marriages you're going to drift toward nuclear families that are not related to the rest of your family. So in other words, you would move from something that's more tribal, where literally you keep things in the family so to speak, to where you forge out on your own and you become a little nuclear family. And then you've got to figure out how to make it without the big tribal support.

Now if you're trying to make it as a family unit you will necessarily need to rely on non-family people. I'll call them strangers. But there are people that you meet who make deals with you. So I'll grow some food, I'll give you money for it. You work here, I'll pay you. Basically a high-trust society. And so I've always wondered about this. I always wondered how the United States and some other Western countries have a situation where if somebody says they'll do some work they usually do it and you usually pay. I mean every now and then you get a bad egg, but basically we trust strangers. Like our entire economy is not completely trusting them like we'll do what we can to protect ourselves, but ultimately you do have to trust strangers.

And so the family unit, which was caused by an end to cousin marriages, causes more trust of strangers, which creates a far more dynamic system for inventing stuff. And Rafe said that—I don't know if this is true, but he said 75% of the world still has cousin marriages. Does that sound right? 75% of the world has cousin marriages? That sounds high to me. Are you telling me that China routinely has cousin marriages? If it does, I didn't know that. I mean I'm not saying it doesn't, but that sounds high.

He also says 90% of the world doesn't have the same notion of exclusive nuclear families. That doesn't sound right either. I thought the vast majority of modern—you know, not just Western but any modern country—I thought most of them had nuclear families as their core. Am I wrong about that? So there's some stuff about this I don't fully understand.

But I would note—and because I know you're going to be shouting it in the comments, I know you're going to be saying in the comments—that the end of cousin marriages probably increased the IQ of the people who banned cousin marriages compared to the ones who are still marrying their cousins. That's what you're going to say, isn't it? And you're going to say that it just made the Western people smarter. They just had fewer cousin marriages, fewer problems. I don't know if that's true. I'm no expert on cousin marriages. But it's something that's floating around the internet. So that would answer a lot, and that would suggest that we have somewhat of a big advantage, but that we're losing it because people are not in nuclear families anymore.

But even if they're not, and even if they're operating as individuals, then they need even more trust because an individual doesn't even have family members to rely on. So I think we may be moving to an even higher high trust, which is another advantage.

The other advantage I always hear about the West, but America in particular—so this is an advantage of America over even Great Britain. And the advantage is in America if you try something big and it fails, what you mostly get out of that is experience. So you can try another thing and maybe that fails too. But if you keep trying you'll get a winner and then you will be hailed as a winner and then you'll be happy and people will respect you.

I guess in Great Britain if you try a startup and it doesn't work you must spend the rest of your life trying to erase the shame. And I think you know some of the Asian countries have the same problem, that if you fail everybody knows and then your family is disgraced and that's the end of that story. So don't try anything risky because failure is too much of a problem.

I literally wrote a book called "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big," and you've probably seen a number of books that came after it that also had a similar theme and even before it a similar theme that the failure is basically a pathway to success. That's very American. It turns out it's super American. It just—honestly I didn't even know when I wrote the book that it was not just important to say that you know failure is more of a path than it is a destination. I didn't realize that that little message is what keeps America America maybe more than anything. The fact that we're willing to try things even if they might fail and we can live with it. We just get over it. Somebody was asking me the other day about regret and I said I've never experienced it. What's it feel like? I don't even know what it feels like. I can't think of anything I've ever regretted. There are just things that work and things that don't. But even the things that didn't work taught me something useful, so it was on my path to success. So regret? I'm exactly where I want to be. Well what am I regretting? So that might be a very American thing. And it makes me happy that my book could be part of the American psyche. It's a small part, but a small part of making sure that you know that failure is not the end point. Failure is just a path.

All right. Every morning I wake up to the hilarity of another Democrat who doesn't understand why they lost but tries to explain it like they do. I saw a clip with a bunch of people after the election talking, some on each side. And somebody named Sarah Longwell—must be a journalist associated with the left-leaning politics—she said that Trump won because he does more lying and therefore he's better at it. Now I'm paraphrasing, but I think that's pretty close to what she said. That Trump lies about everything, therefore he got a lot of practice at it and then he was really good at it. And then that excellent lying is what put him over the top.

Does Sarah Longwell think that the Democrats didn't do any lying? How could you be alive for the last eight years and think that Trump is just all by himself out there lying? I sure like that everybody else is telling the truth but that Trump, he's the one politician that lies. And again I always say that you can't evaluate the lying by the quantity of them. Trump did, you know, infinite interviews. So if he had any one thing he said that was like a little hyperbole he would say it in all of his interviews and then they would count them as there's one, there's one, there's one. Meanwhile while the Democrats would be putting together this massive intelligence-led, FBI-supported hoax with, you know, many moving parts and getting the media involved and like the really big lies, like the really big ones like the fine people hoax and the Russia collusion and the drinking bleach hoax and all those other things like big organized multi-member, thousands of people involved in the media keeping the lie alive and knowing it and knowing that they were keeping a lie alive. They knew it.

How do you compare that to Trump saying that your TV might go off if the wind stops blowing when you know it's just hyperbole? And they would just count that as one lie for Trump and none for them because they think the hoaxes are real. Imagine thinking that the Democrats have been telling the truth for eight years. How could you even function? You would be so confused about anything you saw if you thought your team was telling you the truth all the time.

Anyway, Zuckerberg and Meta have donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund. Now that's a pretty clever move. So as you know, Zuckerberg is trying to disassociate himself from the crazy left. He's not trying to make himself part of the right. He would just like to be less involved in the political stuff because it didn't work out when he did it. So he probably knows he didn't help. He may have hurt for $400 million. He may have spent $400 million making things worse. So I think he's learned his lesson because if there's one thing you can say about Mark Zuckerberg that everyone should agree with, he is really smart. I don't know if you noticed but he's really smart, like crazy smart. So yes, when he does something that doesn't work and then he adjusts, that's that smart thing. There it is.

So he failed like an American and instead of wallowing in shame forever he said, oh well that didn't work. What do we do now? Oh we'll donate to the inaugural process because that's not really donating to the politics of it. Perfect. That's perfect. So he is helping out, giving his million which is not much you know for them. And it's the thing that's the least political thing you could ever give to the inauguration because presumably you know he would do it for anybody's inauguration at this point. Nicely done. Yeah. But it also is an indication that the way the smart people are seeing Trump is as someone they can work with, right? That's a big, big deal. Because before they saw him as something they needed to defeat. And now the smart people, all the smart people are saying we could work with this. Wait, you want fewer regulations? Oh well yeah we could work with that. Wait you want to lower taxes? You have my attention. You want to put criminals back in jail? I think this is very commonsensical.

I'm seeing the comments, the pictur