the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. And it happens now.

Go.

So, so good.

All right. First, an announcement. I will be on Tucker Carlson's live stream tonight. The show starts at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, 5:00 p.m. my time in California, and I'll just be there for 20 minutes. I'm one of a few guests. Megyn Kelly's on before I am. And probably 40 minutes or so into the show is when I will appear. I think we're going to be talking mostly about the assassination and I'll just be there 20 minutes. I'll do my thing. So look for that.

Hey, I wonder if there's any scientific studies that didn't need to happen because they could have just asked Scott. Oh, here's one. Turns out that the experiment of removing cell phones from school classrooms substantially improves grades. Now, did any of you not know that would be the case? Is there somebody here who thought that letting kids play on their phone instead of paying attention in class was going to be real good for their grades? No. Every one of us knew in advance that that would be the case.

Well, Stephen King's new movie *The Long Walk* apparently flopped at the box office and it was like the lowest opening for a Stephen King adaptation in 33 years. Some say it's because he said bad things about Charlie Kirk. That might be part of it. Might be part of it.

But the funny thing is, I don't believe now, I don't know this for sure so don't sue me Stephen King, but I don't believe that a 77-year-old Stephen King is writing the books himself and I don't believe he's doing much work on the movie. So that means he had exactly one job. What was his one job regarding the movie? All he had to do was not fuck it up. He probably didn't have to write the book. He probably didn't have to do anything with the movie except cash the check. The only thing he had to do is not destroy the entire franchise by saying something so stupid you can't believe it.

Well, it turns out the bar was too high and he couldn't figure out how to go a few weeks without saying something so sensationally stupid that people would say, "I can't even watch your dumbass movie. You had one job, Stephen King."

But it gets better. He decided to do a little sort of impromptu, I guess you call it a commercial for the movie in which he's walking down a long road. You know, it's just him and that's the name of the movie. It's *The Long Walk*. So that probably made sense to him.

I would like to do my impression. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty funny. I'd like to do my impression of Stephen King doing the one thing he needed to do, which is try not to look pathetic. This is him walking. He couldn't even pull off the walking. I don't know why. He is famously an alcoholic, but I don't know. He's also 77. He doesn't look like he's in very good shape. So I don't know why he couldn't pull off walking in a straight line, but you can imagine.

Anyway, so I think there's a theme for today's show. The theme is schadenfreude. There's going to be more of it coming. That's when you feel good that something bad happened to somebody else because I'm a terrible person. But I try to limit it to people who were themselves bad so that I don't feel so bad that way.

Anyway, got some other news. U.S. retail sales are a lot stronger than people thought. They're up 6% on the month and people thought it would only be 2%. Probably they assumed the tariffs would knock it down, but looks like it didn't. So that's good. The economy is definitely showing signs of strength. The stock market is at crazy levels. I don't know if it can stay there, but it's pretty high.

All right. Axios has an exclusive survey they did and they found that half of young people are plagued by loneliness and family problems. Loneliness and family problems. So we've got two big problems in the country. Well, the family problems I'm going to put to the side at the moment. But separately, besides massive loneliness problems, we have a cost of housing that's too high. Rents too high, mortgages too high, houses cost too much.

So don't you think those two problems are screaming for a mutual solution? How could you solve loneliness at the same time as the cost of housing is too high? You put multiple people in the same house. You know, people tend to not be lonely in, let's say, a college dormitory. Even though it's not great living conditions, it feels great because you're not lonely. There's always somebody there.

So I like the idea of, sometimes senior citizens will have a big house they don't want to leave. They can afford to stay. So you get a young person and maybe two of them. You know, so there's probably some way to design housing so that multiple people can be there so nobody is lonely. Or maybe houses next to other houses so they can get together easily. But yeah, loneliness and housing being too expensive, that's almost the same problem. If you design your housing situation right, same solution.

As I often say, it's a design problem. It's not a resource shortage. It feels like it. It feels like, hey, we don't have enough money to buy these nice homes. But if you design it properly, you probably can afford it.

Well, you'll be amazed and shocked to find out that an appeals court blocked something that Trump wants to do. That would be the what, hundredth time in the last few months? In this case, it's blocking the firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook. She's the one accused of cheating on her mortgages by claiming that both of her houses are her primary residence. But I guess the court has blocked that. So that's not going to happen.

However, there's something new. Her new defense is that she had a loan estimate that was part of her paperwork. And on the loan estimate, she declared that her house that was in question was a vacation home. So she's claiming, "No, my paperwork does show it's a vacation home and that that's the issue. It doesn't show that it's a primary residence." Well, apparently the document that has that is not a binding document. It's a loan estimate, not binding.

And she also had said it was an investment property at one point, not a second home. So some say that she even lied on the loan estimate because on the loan estimate where she said it was a vacation home, it really wasn't. It apparently, allegedly, was always meant to be a rental. So she may have lied a second time because her defense sounds like another lie.

Bill Pulte, who's been on the case here pushing this issue, he points out the pattern of a liar on X started out with saying that the claims against her were unsubstantiated. That's what Lisa Cook said. Then she said it's baseless. Then she said it's unproven. And then she said it happened before her nomination so it doesn't count. Then she said it was a clerical error. Then she said that there's not cause to fire her. Then she said Biden knew. Then she had some factual contradictions and she had a loan estimate that may have also been a secondary lie. And now she says something of a Michigan tax official. I don't even know what that is, but apparently she's been squirming quite a bit.

That is your schadenfreude number two.

Well, Pam Bondi is getting a lot of heat from the right because she said something at an event in which she said there's no place in our society for hate speech. We will target you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. A number of people pointed out that hate speech is specifically allowed under freedom of speech. So even though people are not terribly happy about the hate speech, mostly the anti-Charlie Kirk stuff, they understand if they're conservatives, they understand that unfortunately that's part of the price of free speech.

However, there is a nuance here that I think people missed. When Pam Bondi talked about it, she said there's no place for hate speech, which is not a statement of it being illegal. She just says there's no place for it. Then she follows up in the same paragraph with "we will target you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech," which I interpreted to mean if you're using the hate speech to incite violence against somebody, then you're in trouble because that would be illegal. The inciting violence would.

So it's not the speech per se, it's the speech in the service of inciting violence. So it does not look like Pam Bondi believes that hate speech is illegal. It doesn't look like she ever thought that. But a lot of people interpreted it that way, which I feel like is jumping the gun a little bit.

I mean, do you really think that Pam Bondi didn't understand that? Do you really think she needed a lesson on freedom of speech? Really? So this is where "really" comes in. She's the attorney general and you think she didn't understand that saying bad things is legal in free speech? You think she didn't know that? Really? Really? Really? You believe she didn't know that?

Or is it more likely that when she said targeting somebody with hate speech, what she meant was inciting violence, which she did later clarify to say that's exactly what she meant. So I think that whole Pam Bondi thing is maybe just people have a general problem with her because they don't like, I don't know, not enough Epstein disclosure or not enough people getting arrested or something. But I think that one's BS.

Well, there are quite a few people losing jobs over their free speech and people are saying things online that are sort of celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination. And Axios is reporting that there's quite a bit of people getting fired and a lot of people are being activists and contacting companies where they have employees who said bad things and it looks like most of those employers are choosing to fire the person involved rather than continue to deal with it and get boycotted and whatever else might happen. So people are in fact getting fired.

And you know what I say about that with all these people being canceled because of their speech? I say may you live in the world you created. May you live in the world you created. And that is what's happening. The conservatives are saying, "How about you live in the world that you created where if you say stuff that we don't like, we complain to your boss and you get canceled." Right? Turnabout is fair play.

Now, I don't love when the left cancels somebody on the right. I got canceled. I got good and canceled. I got as canceled as you can get. And was it because I said something illegal? Nope. Did I say anything hateful? No. In fact, I said I would like to stay away from hateful people. Not every one of them, but there might be too many of them. More than you would want to be around hateful people, people who hate you. So you don't want to be around people who hate you.

So I said that, got canceled. So part of me says, wouldn't it be a better world if they didn't cancel us and we didn't cancel them. However, there's nothing that's going to stop them from trying to cancel the right. And if that's the world they built, let them live in it. So yes, I admit I'm enjoying some schadenfreude. Schadenfreude, the feeling you get when bad things happen to people you're not crazy about. But they're living in the world they created.

And here are some examples. And by the way, if you're wondering what is the right number of people to get fired, I would recommend 1,600. There's no way to keep track, but you know what I mean. There were 1,600 people on January 6 that went to jail, most of them for free speech. Most of them. The violent ones are a different story, of course. But if you were just wandering around and you thought you were protesting, that's a lot closer to free speech than it is to a violent insurrection and 1,600 people went to jail.

So if you ask me how many people on the left should lose their jobs, 1,600. That'd be a good start because I do think there needs to be some mutually assured destruction. Even if it doesn't make anything better, do you all understand that point? Even if it doesn't make anything better, might even make things worse, still have to do it. Because if you're never willing to do the mutually assured destruction, then one side can just destroy you at their leisure. So no, there needs to be some very strong pushback and we see it happening. I don't know how many people are getting fired, but I suspect it's hundreds at this point.

Perkins Coie, the big law firm that I think was associated with the Democrats and Hillary Clinton, they fired an attorney for something that the attorney said about Charlie Kirk. They rapidly fired him. Good choice for a law firm.

Let's see, there was the Long Island newspaper *Newsday*. They had somebody who made an offensive cartoon and they removed the syndicated editorial cartoon. So they removed the cartoon. Did they remove the person who made it? They apologized and removed the cartoon. Well, I don't know. Maybe that's enough.

The *Washington Post* fired a columnist for saying bad stuff. Karen Attiah. She was accused of gross misconduct. The *Washington Post*. I didn't know anybody was left at the *Washington Post*. I thought everybody quit or got fired already, but apparently they still have employees.

But one last, UCLA put their so-called race and equity director on leave because he made bad comments about Charlie Kirk. That's UCLA.

There's a Texas Tech student who was arrested for mocking Charlie Kirk at a Charlie Kirk vigil and said some bad things, running around causing trouble, and they slapped the cuffs on her and took her away.

And other, I don't know. I hate to call this good news, but it's better than if it didn't happen. I guess Charlie Kirk's podcasts, the ones that have been recorded up to this point, have gone to number one on the podcast list. No surprise. I don't know if that will be a continuing thing because he's not making new content, obviously, or if it's just people checking in to see what he said lately and reacquainting themselves with his content. But it's better than not being the number one podcast.

Meanwhile, a so-called popular streamer, there's a character online, I don't know if you've seen him, his name is Destiny. Now, Destiny appears to be in some kind of competition to become the worst personality in the entire world. Just the worst person. Oh my god. And I don't know, maybe that's part of what makes him so well known or famous, at least online, not to the rest of the world. But Destiny is his name.

He said he refused to condemn the assassination of Charlie Kirk because, quote, "You need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed." He said that on Piers Morgan. And then Elon Musk commented to Destiny's comment that maybe some conservatives need to be afraid of getting killed. And Elon Musk said, "I don't think this jackass should be banned, but Amazon should stop paying him to incite murder." So I didn't realize there's some kind of Amazon podcast thing. I don't know.

He says that's insane. Separately, incitement to murder and domestic terrorism is a felony crime. For that, he should go to prison. He can resume streaming when he has served his term.

Do you think that was a crime? Do you think it's a crime to say you need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events so that they look to their leadership to turn down the temperature? So on one hand, he's asking both sides to turn down the temperature. Well, he's asking the conservatives to turn down the temperature. Is asking to turn down the temperature the same as inciting violence? Well, he kind of did both because he said that if they don't turn down the temperature, then maybe some of this fear that people are having should be maintained, the fear.

So he's talked about fear and he's talked about turning down the temperature. He didn't directly say, "Wouldn't it be good if something bad happened to these people?" He's right on the line. I doubt that would be actionable. I don't think he can be arrested for that. In my non-lawyer opinion. But if you're Elon Musk and you've had probably countless murder attempts or at least threats, it would feel a lot more like inciting violence. You know, if you're the one, if you're specifically the one who might get attacked by somebody who listened to this guy Destiny, well, it would feel like inciting violence then. So I certainly understand Elon Musk's point of view. I don't know what the legal opinion would be there, but probably he just barely stayed in bounds is my guess.

Well, the