eeting so again I'll use the same standard. If this story were about Trump I would warn you it's probably not true because there's no source, right? It's just somebody was at a meeting. Were they at that meeting? We don't know. So recreationally, just for fun, I'm going to treat it like it's true. And the story is that there was a meeting in which the CEO of CNN told Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper that they ought to avoid prejudging Trump and stop talking about the past and all the lawfare stuff and calling him a felon and all that stuff. And just talk about what the future looks like and what he's doing at the moment.

What do you think about that? Well it does look like there is some change. It does look like the hosts of CNN are intentionally, and I give them credit for this, most of them seem to be finding some kind of middle ground. However they're still doing the thing where they invite idiots on the show. If they're inviting idiots on the show and they give them lots of time, it's the same CNN. So at the same time I'm reading this about they're not going to be full of it, I see a clip of Scott Jennings have to shut down a salute truther. So they have one of these guests on who starts with saying that well you know Elon did that. He was raising his hand. You see I, oh my God I almost, that was close. I don't know if you noticed but inadvertently I had allowed one of my hands to be higher than my waist and you can't do that when Trump's in office. Yeah you know as soon as it gets up here they're like is that a Hitler? No I was just reaching for something. I was over here. No I was just reaching for something. I just wanted to turn on my lamp. The lamp is a little. No no. So you get a little jumpy.

But they had some guests I hadn't seen before. I don't know her name, who talked about Musk was overshadowing Trump and he was doing that arm salute. Now what do you think the CEO of CNN was thinking when the guest came on and started talking about the fake news of the arm salute and the fake news that Musk is going to overshadow Trump and trying to drive a wedge? That feels like exactly what the CEO said stop doing. So if the host stopped doing it but then they introduce somebody who does it and they do that every day, which is exactly what's happening. Nothing really changed. Seems like it's all the same. So anyway Scott Jennings calls it the salute truthers, which is pretty good.

Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel came to Elon Musk's defense about that fake salute thing. And he said Musk is being falsely smeared and Elon is a great friend of Israel. And all true, all true. And I'm trying to figure out how can I get Netanyahu to do this for me. Can Netanyahu do this for me? It would be great. I'd like him to say that the ADL is not right when they smeared me. That'd be great. So BB, and that's the reason that I don't support Israel because they don't support me. But they do support Elon so I can see why he would support them. Otherwise I just observe. I'll just be an observer. But I can't be a supporter because they don't support me. Got to have reciprocity. Without reciprocity nothing works, right? So a little reciprocity and then we're in good shape.

The Sam Altman story is just getting more and more interesting. So I was unaware until Mike Cernovich found Altman's old posts and started putting them on X. I didn't realize that Sam was not just anti-Trump but he was really involved in being anti-Trump in 2016 and 2020 apparently. So some of his posts, which I never seen then. You know he was less prominent then so there's no reason I would have noticed. So this is actually a Sam Altman post on Twitter back in December 2021. So in 2021, this is after Trump lost the reelection. Sam Altman said, "Very few people realized just how much Reid Hoffman did and spent to stop Trump from getting reelected. It seems likely to me that Trump would still be in office without his efforts. Thank you Reid." And then Paul Graham had said in 2016, so this was just a month or so before the 2016 election in October, he said few have done more than Sam Altman to defeat Trump.

So according to the people who know the most and are the insiders, Sam Altman was one of the primary people for defeating Trump in 2020 and one of the primary ones with Reid Hoffman to try to keep him out of office in 2016. Did you know that? That's kind of interesting. And Altman himself said on one of these, I think responding to Paul Graham, he said I've spent all of my free time and done less work than I should have on various projects and a lot of money. The various projects in the context of stopping Trump. How many various projects was he involved in and how many of them were totally legitimate? I don't know.

But now more recently, especially because he's sort of trying to work with Trump which is necessary for all the tech leaders are going to have to work with him, now he said, I don't have his exact words but Altman basically said that now he's had a chance to see Trump more objectively and he doesn't have his old views. And he explained why he was so wrong before by calling himself an NPC. A non-player character. Somebody who doesn't think before they act, just goes along with the crowd.

Do you think that explains it? Do you think that one of the smartest most capable people in the entire country was an NPC and spent all of his time and all of his money without realizing that he'd been hypnotized by the television? Now your first instinct is there's no way, right? Common sense says you can't be that smart and have acted that seemingly NPC-like for eight years or whatever it was and then suddenly you wake up and now you see the error of your ways. That doesn't seem real, does it? Right? So all of your common sense says that doesn't seem like a real change. You must be pretending now because it's less likely you were pretending then because you put years of work, years of work and massive amounts of money before. So that looked real. And then suddenly you do one post where you're like oh sorry I was an NPC, didn't mean it. And then we're supposed to believe it.

Here's the hard part. That's normal. That's completely normal. If you think there's no way that could be true because you could be that smart and that dumb at the same time. Yeah you can. Totally normal. If you were to look at the IQs of all the people suffering from TDS and you compared to the IQs the people not suffering from it, the sufferers are probably higher because they're more likely to have gone to college where they got hypnotized. So IQ is actually not opposite of being fooled. High IQ and high likelihood of being fooled try to travel together. And we have seen genuine cases where people who had that much TDS or at least were in the TDS world were in fact deprogrammed. I know because I deprogrammed some of them. At least I was part of the process. And the fine people hoax did in fact, no doubt about it, reprogram people who were brilliant. And they didn't know they were acting like NPCs.

So the first filter I'm going to put on this is that this is entirely possible. Now I can almost hear Mike Cernovich yelling at me you idiot he's just pretending for money. I agree with that. I agree with that. My current best take is that he might see that he wasn't entirely right before but he's seemingly transactional. He's got a fiduciary responsibility to the company. If he didn't at least pretend to have become pro-Trump, if he hadn't at least pretended, well he wouldn't be doing his job. He has