of 1,400 people? I think he told his managers to do whatever they need to do to get rid of 1,400 people and then they did what they needed to do. I don't know how much scalping there was. And do you think he did it without lowering morale? Oh I would think that the other people were a little bit nervous and they lost their friends who worked with them. Yeah of course it lowers morale but Jeff Bezos did it anyway because it's a smart thing to do and every big company acts the same because they know how to do this.

Then there's the issue of DOGE and Musk have demanded or asked I guess that every member of the government sends an email by I guess Monday by noon or something that says what they accomplished last week. And then a lot of people are pushing back. I think Kash Patel said they'll do their own performance reviews they don't need other people to do it. State Department had some diplomat pushing back. So you're going to see a whole bunch of pushback.

But if you see it as a way to figure out who to fire, it's more than that. It's more than that. My first take was that you should see it as a reframe. Because if somebody says tell me what you did last week, if you go through that cycle even once of uh oh somebody's asking me to prove that I'm doing something useful, you're going to start thinking that way. So you're going to say to yourself uh oh what if they ask again at the end of this week? So you're going to start doing useful things because you know somebody's going to check on you.

So I think partly it's a reframe to make people think in terms of productivity instead of in terms of just staying out of trouble or hiding at home or working at home or processing some transactions. It's like how do you actually accomplish something? You should be thinking about that every day if not every week. So as a reframe I like it.

Obviously there will be tons of people who don't answer at all and tons of people who just make stuff up. How hard would it be to say that you accomplished something last week? How hard would that be no matter what job you had? Because nobody's going to check it. They're just going to look at the email and see if there's something on it. So if you said well I processed 17 big projects last week I approved them and that's good. Yeah but what Elon Musk said is that what they're trying to do is maybe find people who are so uninvolved in work that they don't even check their email. And there's some thought that there might be people who don't do any work and maybe are not even employees somehow or you know somehow some people are getting money for fraudulent reasons. And the email, if they don't get an email from that person that would be the one you look into. It's like why is this one person unable to even lie about what they've done recently? If you can't at least lie about it which is the normal way business does this, the employees all lie about what they accomplished, if you can't at least lie about it you might not even be a real person. So that would be useful.

So when you look at this email thing it's like DOGE small, DOGE big is move fast break things and fix it. DOGE small is give us an email to say what you did because you know we might make some decisions based on that. Now that's also a really messy process. You can imagine a thousand ways that it could go wrong if somebody was on vacation and didn't get the email or somebody just forgot to send an email but they're actually very productive. So you see all these ways that it could go wrong but still sometimes you got to shake the box and see what you learn.

So to imagine that somebody like Musk is going to be looking at the emails and say huh well yep this one I guess I can cut this 10 percent, I don't think that's going to happen. I think they're just testing to see if anybody can even write an email that says they did something. It's going to be less about what they did than whether or not they get the email. And I don't think you make some broad rule like if you didn't respond you're fired. I doubt that. But it will give them an idea where to look that might be good.

Did I hear from the five that Democrats are holding town halls as kind of their response to being out of power and trying to build some kind of Trump rally situation light? You know like the baby version of it. Is that a real thing? And then there was some thought that the attendees were paid attendees. And I thought that would be so weak if Trump could give these gigantic outdoor rallies but the Democrats' response is paid attendees at an indoor town hall.

So and I was trying to think why is it that we don't see more like Trump rally things on the left and part of the reason I think is that they hate spending time with each other. If you go to a Trump rally, I haven't done this but I guarantee this is true based on all the reporting of people who have, if you go to a Trump rally you're going to see a whole bunch of people who are very happy to be with the other bunch of people and they're happier than they were when they were sitting home. It's like oh I'm with my people.

But Democrats don't have that option because they got the crazy left, super left, and then the normies. The normies and the crazies aren't going to exactly fit together in the same room. So I don't know if Democrats even have the option of having any kind of a rally that doesn't go wrong. That's real.

All right you've probably seen on social media that Elon Musk is having another baby mama drama and I'm not even going to mention the name of the mother. You know it's a known influencer but I'm not interested in their business and we don't know enough about what they agreed to what they didn't agree to. We just don't know who did what to who and we're never going to know and it's none of our business.

But one of the things that came out of it is some screen captures that actually were taken with a separate device not actually screen capture of Signal messages. The Signal app now the Signal app is what people believe is protected that it's encrypted and you can set the messages to disappear but even if you set the messages to disappear it doesn't stop somebody from taking a second device and just recording what's on the screen before it disappears. And that's what happened.

So some of Elon's private, very private messages to the baby mama are now public. They're public. And here's what I want to tell you. It has nothing to do with Elon Musk or anybody else. If you think that your digital messages no matter where you put them and who you send them to, if you think they're private, you're so wrong. You're so wrong.

And let me tell you my experience especially. So in the 90s when Dilbert was much bigger phenomenon than maybe you can even imagine by today's standards I was what would I say at least within the tech world I was quite a celebrity. Not so much now but during those days it was just wild. And one of the things I noticed is that people would often comment to me in some private way you know something essentially a DM like situation and sometimes I would answer it. It'd be somebody I didn't know, a complete stranger, but they would ask a question or they challenge me on an opinion I'd give a full answer sometimes just to strangers.

Now I would think to myself before I became smart you know when I was inexperienced I would think to myself this is a private conversati