o you think he would have done this on his own if 40 of the top 50 right-leaning pundits had said, no, we like this bill, sign it? He might have argued it, you know, still argued at his point, try to change our minds. But I don't think it would have been cancelled. So there does seem to be this Council of Elders — again, they're not old, some of them are young — that is very, very important. And it's on X, and it's informing the right people to do the right things. So it does seem to be like a response to the fact that nothing was working. And so this new phenomenon has stepped in.

We'll see how the Democrats are doing here. Yeah, Swalwell and Joy Reid were talking on MSNBC that Musk is like the Speaker or the co-president. And one post on X and he controls Congress. So this is again them getting everything wrong, not understanding that everyone on both sides hated this bill and that Elon is doing the work of the people transparently and right in front of us and at great personal risk.

Then Kinzinger, Adam Kinzinger, is on CNN and he's calling Elon "President Elon" and says Trump is the vice president. Now why did they do that? Obviously the reason they do that is they think that Trump's ego will not allow him to have such a strong partner, let's say. So they think they can drive a wedge between them by going after Trump's ego. I don't think it's going to work because here's again what they get wrong about Trump. Now I've told you this for years, but now you can all see it. If you think Trump doesn't like people who are smarter than him, you're wrong. Trump really, really likes smart people. He really likes them and he wants to work with them and he wants to give them credit. But he's still the boss, right? The boss gets the top credit because he attracted the people to his administration. And if they do a good job, the boss gets the credit. That's how it works.

So we should all make sure that when we're sort of talking about these things that we give Elon his full share of credit. But when you talk about it, it would be helpful if you also add, you know, the boss gets the credit. It has to be that way. Just has to be.

Anyway, so let's see. Rand Paul cheekily suggested that since the Speaker of the House doesn't need to be a member of Congress, that they could elect Elon Musk as Speaker of the House. Now the thing that makes me laugh is that we've somehow gotten the idea that there's no limit to how many jobs Elon Musk can do at the same time. And I'm thinking to myself, well, it is true we haven't found the limit yet, right? For most people two would be too many companies to run, but he's running several. And then he's doing the DOGE thing, which is more than a full-time job. So he's got something like five or six full-time jobs, you know, plus parent, etc.

And the only thing that I don't know is how many times has he been cloned so far? Because I've done the math of how many hours a human can be awake and do work and how many jobs Elon has. And I'm pretty sure there are at least two or three of him by now. Have to be at least two, but there might be three of them. I think he's already cloned himself. Do you think underneath his skin mask there might be like an Optimus robot or something? I don't know. I think we're in the world of clones. We just don't know it yet. I'm kidding.

Meanwhile, X has reached one billion active users, and Elon calls it the group chat for Earth. And boy, did it earn its little title this week. X is the reason that bill got killed. You could say it's a lot of different reasons because it's a bad bill, whatever. But if X did not exist and exist in its current form with free speech under Musk, I don't think that would have stopped.

And you realize that that spending bill is part of a guaranteed death spiral for the country. If we just sign every big pile of bills and nobody says no, we are dead for sure. Like actually dead. Like not just having a bad day, dead. If the economy fails and the country fails, we're actually dead. And we were pretty close. And if we didn't have free speech and X and a lot of billionaires willing to take big chances personally and professionally, we would not have pulled back from the brink. To me this feels like pulling back from the brink. Still got a lot of work to do, but we did not go over the cliff. And we very, very easily could have.

Joshua Steinman, who worked in the first Trump administration, says on a post, he says, having worked through multiple government shutdowns, first as a military officer then as a White House staffer, I can say with conviction they're not real. Ten times more efficient during the shutdown. I believe that. I believe that X is 10 times more efficient when they cut the staff by 80%. And I do believe that you'll get more done during a shutdown. I believe that.

Meanwhile, according to The Hill, the lawyers for Trump have some kind of information that we don't know yet that a member of the New York jury that convicted Trump in the New York case, that one of the jurors was somehow — there's evidence of grave juror misconduct during the trial. Now I don't know what that would include, grave juror misconduct. So that would suggest that maybe they have some written communication that would say they weren't intending to be fair. Maybe they're connected to somebody and they didn't admit it. You know, somebody in politics. Maybe they had a phone call with somebody they shouldn't have been talking to. Maybe. I don't know. But it's something like that.

Do you think that that will be enough to throw out the case or anything? I doubt it because Judge Merchan seems to be just an anti-Trump judge. So I don't expect justice in that case, at least from that judge.

Meanwhile in California, I don't know if you know that California voted to ban gas-driven cars starting in 2035. I wrote down 2025 but I think that was a mistake somebody made on X and I just copied it. But anyway, in a few years the gas cars will be banned. So 2035, right? Yeah. So there was just a typo when I saw 2035. Yeah, we'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, Governor Newsom in California declared a bird flu emergency in California. I don't think that affects me yet. I don't know exactly what the flu emergency is going to do, but it doesn't require me to wear a mask or get a vaccination yet. But we'll keep an eye on that.

Meanwhile, you probably heard that Proposition 36 in California passed by 70%. And you don't need to know the details. The summary of Proposition 36 is California decided to make crime illegal again. That's all you need to know. So there are a bunch of changes, but they all have the same effect that you can't just walk into a store and take what you want, walk out. Now if they catch you and you can't do multiple crimes and get slapped on the wrist every time you do the crime, you know, it'll go up in severity if you keep doing the same crime. So it's stuff like that. Tough on fentanyl people, etc.

So there's a — speaking of fentanyl, there's some kind of fentanyl movie. I don't know what that's about, but I saw the trailer for it. So somebody's doing the good work of turning it into a movie so maybe the hearts and minds can be moved a little bit more toward getting a solution.

But I did see a graph that showed that opioid overdoses have gone down in the past year or so and quite a bit. And people say, why did they go down? Well, I can think of two reasons. One is Narcan. So the antidote to the overdose is now well enough understood and all police officers have it in their car. All first responders would have it. A lot of big organizations would have it. Probably schools, a lot of schools have it. So some of it is a whole bunch of people being saved by the Narcan. That's the Narcan. I think is the brand of it, not the drug.

But when I looked at the graph, it also was obvious to me that the only thing that happened was the big spike in overdoses during the pandemic just normalized. So in other words, if you look at the line up of every year more fentanyl deaths, more and more, then the pandemic hits and it's like way more. And now we're in the aftermath and it's back down to baseline. So if you were to just take the pre-pandemic slope and just draw a pencil line and connect it, that's where we are now. So the only change is that the pandemic bulge has now normalized back to a horrible, horrible problem that was one of the biggest problems before the pandemic.

So don't get happy about it that it went down quite a bit. It only went down from the bump. The baseline is still increasing.

Now here's what I wonder. I just have a real problem — and of course I take this topic personally. Most of you know my stepson died from an overdose. He had fentanyl in his system. And I'm not happy with China. And China has promised several times that they would take care of the source. And we know that they could, but they kind of slow-walk it and say, well, yes, we're doing all kinds