So when you hear people say, but I've been involved in a number of businesses and we cut with the scalpel, they did. They did. Here's where the scalpel doesn't work: when there is an existential threat and the timer is ticking. If the timer is ticking, you're not going to have the option of using the scalpel. Because even if you did everything right, you would run out of time.

Here are two examples. Number one, Twitter. When Musk bought Twitter, the cash flow situation was dire. As in, uh-oh, there's almost no way this company can survive. He was going to have wasted $44 billion of his and other people's money if he couldn't rapidly, massively cut expenses. What would have happened if Musk had said, all right, all you employees of Twitter who hate my guts, tell me where I can scalpel away some unnecessary fat? What do you think would have happened? Every one of those people would have said their jobs are essential, and if they left, morale would drop and it could never work. So Musk instead took a chainsaw and just went, got rid of too much. And then when the too much became obvious or people argued successfully, he added it back, exactly like he said he would.

Now, what about the federal government? The federal government is also on a timer and also has an existential threat. It's called the debt. We don't have 10 years left. We really don't. I don't know if we have three years left. The national debt will crush us and will destroy the entire country. If you think that taking a scalpel to the federal government is going to get it done in any kind of reasonable timeline before the entire nation is destroyed, seems very unlikely to me. Because remember, everybody involved will be lying. Everybody involved will be trying to slow the process. They'll try to sue you so you can't even use the scalpel. It's going to be just infinite pushback. Infinite people pretending to be helping but not. All lying. People will be ganging up. They'll try to take you out as the boss if they have any way to do it. They will attack you a hundred different ways. The one and only way you have any chance is with a chainsaw.

So let me put this in terms of risk. If Musk had used a scalpel on Twitter, that would be 100% chance of failure. If he used a chainsaw on Twitter, there was some chance of success and some chance of failure. Which one do you pick? The one with a 100% chance of failure, scalpel, or the one that might work but it's pretty drastic? Well, there's only one that might work. You obviously do the one that might work.

What about the national debt? Do you think we have time to scalpel that thing? I don't. I don't think there's any time to scalpel it. I think that the one and only hope of actual survival — survival, we're not optimizing, we're trying to survive — and I think that's what people are missing. He's got to take a chainsaw to it. And you know, I would say he's just getting started because there are bigger parts he has to go after. But there's not really a second choice. The chainsaw might work and it might not work, but the scalpel definitely will fail. And it's the Dilbert filter that guarantees it, because people are lying weasels.

Now, let me make another exception. Let's say you had a business that wasn't very complicated. Let's say you are the owner of a sports franchise. You probably do understand almost all the parts, even as the big owner, right? You would probably know what your players are being paid. That's the biggest thing. You would know what the travel costs are. It wouldn't be mysterious at all. So if you wanted to take a scalpel to that, again, because you have the luxury of being profitable and you're not in a hurry, probably you could scalpel quite a bit. And I would say that would be exactly the right answer.

So when people tell you, Scott, I have personally scalpeled budgets with success, that's probably true. But it's always the specific case. It's not the you're-going-to-die-tomorrow-if-you-don't-cut-this-by-70%.

All right, so there we go. There's the ultimate reframe on that.

You know, I'm so sick of talking about this DOGE email to all the federal employees telling them to say what they did, five things they did. And I was trying to imagine — it's been a long time since I've been a cubicle — but I'm trying to imagine how I would have handled that if I'd been a federal worker. And I'm positive I would have handled it the following way. I'd open my email. I'd see what they're asking. I'd probably check with my boss to see if it's okay to answer it. But then I would sit down, and it's the first thing I would do. I would put off whatever else I had on my schedule, and I would answer that right away. And I would come up with five awesome things that I did this week, and then I'd hit send. And then I would never think about it again.

How would you handle it? Would you fight it? You didn't have anything better to do that day than fight an email? Ah, I'm going to go on CNN and fight this email. What? The most basic thing that anybody does is say what five things they accomplished. That also used to be my job. It also used to be my job to collect everybody's top five accomplishments. That was literally my job. Do you know what happened when I would collect all their accomplishments and put it into one cool document that I made myself and I gave it to my boss? Nobody ever looked at it. Nobody ever looked at it. The only point was to make sure that you thought people were watching you. It was basically just a head game so that people had to really show that they were doing real work. Nobody really looked at it. I don't even think they like maybe just glanced at it, but they didn't ask any penetrating questions.

So when Musk says this is really just to find out if there's a real person and a pulse, that sounds right. That sounds right. That's the only thing he's going to find out. It's not like he's going to look at the five things and say, huh, one of these five things looks like maybe you could cut that with a scalpel. That's not going to happen. It's just to see if they have a pulse, if they're really there, if they really respond.

Now, I realize there's a whole bunch of complications to it. And a number of entities from the FBI to the State Department to the Pentagon have already said, no, you guys don't need to do this. That's fine. I don't mind that at all. I don't mind when the Trump administration disagrees with itself. Don't mind at all, because I think the disagreement is reasonable. But I also think the request was reasonable. So and I don't think any of it's terribly important. I think Trump and Elon might be pushing it still just so they don't lose, you know, because it'd be good to show a pattern of winning. You know, win, win, win, win, win. If you have even one pushback that's successful, it could take a little dent out of your shine. A dent out of your shine. Never quote me on that. No, never quote me on that, please.

Anyway, so I'm just bored with that whole email thing. But the Wall Street Journal had an interesting context. Apparently some companies, instead of doing that what are your five accomplishment things every week, which is a big pain in the ass, everybody hates it and everybody's lying too, there's some software now. One company called Workboard, or at least that's the product, Workboard, invades your computer, your work computer, and it looks at all the things you've done and then reports them to your boss. So everything from your calendar to your emails. And then the boss can tell who's working and what they're working on and how hard they're working.

Now, that's the scariest, creepiest thing I've ever heard in my life. I mean, I don't know how it could possibly give you anything interesting. And then I saw a picture of what the dashboard would look like, you know, if you were the top boss and you wanted to see the sum of all the things your employees were doing. It's like this really sort of detailed, complicated, you know, some boxes are bigger than others, showing that there's more activity there and stuff. And I thought to myself, okay, in the real world, your top boss would use that three times, and by the third time they would realize that there was nothing it was telling them that they could act on. It was like, ah, okay, looks like the box for talking about the budget is a little bit bigger. Okay, but that's because the budget process is happening right now. Okay, okay. Well, it looks like the box for talking to vendors is a little bit bigger, so they're doing a lot of talking to vendors. Oh, well, obviously, because we're doing a request for proposal. Probably it wouldn't be anything you could act on.

Now, I don't want to throw that company under the bus, because they might have a good argument that it's making everything better. But in the real world, if you show somebody a complicated screen of anything, they end up ignoring it after the first few tries in the real world.

So I'm going to introduce a new insulting phrase. I'm going to call it lady fiction. Lady fiction. I've told you before how Democrats, they seem to just imagine problems. Like they imagine what somebody's thinking, and then they imagine their bad personality. They imagine their bad intentions, and then they project that forward to how it's going to destroy the world. But it's all imaginary. It's imaginary future, and it's imagination that they can read the minds of strangers.

So CNN just had one of the federal employees on, and she was one of the ones resisting the email requests. And she said that Elon's email request was an act of harassment and bullying. Now, do you think that's the way Elon was thinking of it? It's like, huh, you know what I haven't done enough of? I need to do a little more harassment and bullying. Even though he tells you exactly why he's doing it, you can't take the exact reason that he describes, which makes perfect sense. You have to imagine that the real reason is this dark personality flaws, and it's harassment and bullying. That's pure mind reading. And again, men prefer reading non-fiction, women prefer fiction. And the more you see it. So I'm going to call that lady fiction.

Lady fiction. Lady friction is a completely different story. It has more to do with scissoring. But lady fiction is where you imagine that you can read somebody's mind, and you see some dark, dark secrets in there, and you project it forward.

Anyway, one of our favorite personalities on X, Data Republican. If you haven't been exposed to Data Republican yet, you're missing out. So Data Republican is a sort of a superstar of data analysis and is using a lot of the new information that we're learning to come up with some fascinating stuff about the NGOs, etc. But she was on Glenn Beck's show, and she described our current situation in a way that you'll never be able to forget.

So you've got the basic idea that USAID was giving money to all these NGOs, and other entities were giving them money, and that they became sort of operating independently. And nobody knew what they were doing. And you know, then they were maybe laundering money and stuff.

So what Data Republican said after looking at all this more deeply than we have, she said that the Democrats are offended by DOGE because their money depends on people not knowing what they're doing with our money. And I thought, yeah, that does sort of sum it up, doesn't it? Their money depends on us not knowing what they're doing with our money, because our money is just going into their pockets through the NGOs.

And so she says, so that is truly censorship, because I think if actual Americans understood what they were doing with our money and that they were actually setting up their own government — this is the key — they were setting up their own government and actually ignoring what real people wanted to do, oh, we would be so upset. There's a reframe. That's it. The NGOs were a shadow government that could get all kinds of things done. They could stall things. They could make things happen. They could overthrow countries, now working in conjunction with other parts of the government. But once you hear that frame, that the NGOs were a shadow government, wow, you can't lose that one. Like, that's sticky. That's a really good reframe.

Anyway, just think about that. And then she went on and said, because the reality is that these people have a government unto themselves that they've created with these NGOs that they run separately from us.

Now, the one thing that would be required for a shadow government would be there's one leader. Do you think that this shadow government NGO thing has one leader, or is it just an understanding that a bunch of people have that they can all be better off with this scheme? I feel like there's not one leader, but there might be maybe several people who are more influential than others. And maybe they're fighting it out. I always imagine that the Hillary Clinton people and the Obama people were not the same, and that they're all sort of jockeying for control. And you know, maybe some of that's happening through the NGOs. I don't know.

Anyway, Trump says he wants to bring back the Keystone XL pipeline that Biden shut down. But apparently it's not that easy, because you'd have to find somebody who wants to do it. And I guess the company that was doing it doesn't seem too eager to do it again. And I can understand that, because how can they guarantee it won't get canceled again? Why would you put money into something if the next Democrat president is going to cancel it?

But Trump says, you know, even if another company wants to do it, he said the approvals will be easy. Basically the government will get out of the way. And I like that. So I like that Trump's pushing that. But there really is a structural problem there. If you ask somebody to invest, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions, can you really expect them to do that if they don't know if their project will survive the next president's term? That's a lot to ask.

So I wonder if there's any fix for that. In other words, could Congress say you won't be touched for 20 years? Like, could they pass any legislation that says... I don't think so, because I think it would be illegal to say you can't ever cut an expense or cancel something. But I wonder if there's any clever way to get past the fact that this is really a giant risk now that Biden canceled it once. I don't know how you fix that, but somebody clever might have an idea for doing that.

Meanwhile, the DNC's vice chairman David Hogg, he's warning that Democrats need to stop acting like a cult. Now, how much do you love the fact that the people who were the problem are trying to become the people who are calling out the problem? It's almost like they have to pretend that they weren't deep into all the bad behavior that they say they want to stop doing.

But Hogg says this. He says, frankly, anybody who did speak out about Biden's mental decline was immediately ostracized in our party. He says, I know that we like to claim that we are not a cult, but anybody who did say that Biden was too old basically had their career destroyed. That's a problem. Where the Democrat Party, we supposed to have open conversations and dialogue. He tells his audience, he said there are many lessons we need to learn from this election, but that is one of the main ones. We cannot be a cult.

Okay, here's the problem. As long as power has more value than open conversation and dialogue, you're only going to get power. So if somehow open conversations and dialogue, you can monetize it or it would give you more power or it make everybody more successful, everybody would get a pat on the back. But it doesn't work that way. If you do open conversations and dialogue within your own party, that will immediately look like weakness and you'll be destroyed.

So they've sort of painted themselves into this corner where you can't really disagree with the party. And there's nothing that David Hogg is going to say that's going to change it, because the incentive structure is as soon as you disagree, you're done. And that's not going to change. How can it? It's not like they can give an order and say, all right, don't do this. It just takes anybody who wants to do it to do it, to destroy other people.

But it does make me wonder, why is this... Do you think that this is as much of a problem on the right? Do you feel that in the MAGA Republican conservative world that we have open dialogue and that you can disagree without getting canceled? Yes or no? I feel like a number of us have disagreed with important things and not gotten canceled by at least by Republicans. Have you not seen me disagree with common MAGA thinking? I think I have a number of times. And do I ever get slapped down for that? Not that I remember. Not that I remember.

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