Elon Musk. Put Elon in the room, right? He gets to be in the room too. So we've got the smartest room that civilization has ever assembled.

But at least the Democrats have a good set of people running against them, right? All right. I'm going to put you in another room. You ready? Room number two. Room number two. You go in for your IQ test. You sit down and you look to your left and there's AOC. And you say to yourself, "Ooh, she went to college. She's bright, but I think I can take her." Then you look at the other side and there's Jasmine Crockett. And you go, "She did go to law school, right? I think she has a legal degree." But you say to yourself, "Still, I feel like I could take her on this IQ test." Then you look the other direction, you see Eric Swalwell. You say, "Okay, I could beat him." Also, he's an attorney, I think. Adam Schiff, yeah, I could take Adam. Jamie Raskin, I think so. Chuck Schumer, definitely. Bernie Sanders? Yeah, definitely. How about Mayor Brandon Johnson? Probably.

Now, what's interesting is I don't know, at least half of the people I mentioned have Ivy League or very high credentials. They're either all attorneys or they went to a good school, they're economics majors or something like that. But did this group of people look like the ones that you want running things compared to the first group of people? And by the way, do you see how powerful that is? I like to make sure you're getting the persuasion lesson at the same time as the politics. From a persuasion perspective, did you feel how powerful that was that I put you in the room first with the conservatives and then with the Democrats? You could feel that, couldn't you? Isn't that powerful? That's Jerry Spence, a famous lawyer who always says you tell the story, you put the person in the story and it's very persuasive rather than just say the facts. So that's what I did for you. Put you in the story.

Anyway, some of the Democrats are done with their leadership. Schumer and Ro Khanna says it's time to get rid of Schumer as a leader. You can't lead the fight to stop health care premiums from skyrocketing for Americans. What will you fight for? And then Seth Moulton, also Democrat, Massachusetts, and Ed Markey, Democrat, Massachusetts. They're also anti-Schumer at the moment. We'll see if that grows. So Schumer's in trouble.

Now, not only do conservatives or at least people who are pro-Trump at the moment, not only do they have better smarter people who are the notable people, but even their spouses are better on podcasts. How many of you have watched Cheryl Hines, who for whatever reason, I think probably smart reasons, has been appearing on some podcasts lately, and then compare that to Michelle Obama's podcasts and Jimmy Kimmel's wife's podcast and some other spousy podcast. If you haven't seen Cheryl Hines on the podcast, you missed how to do podcasts. I don't know how much experience she had on podcasts per se, but boy does she nail it. She is so good. And what she does right is, you know, first of all, she's charismatic and likable. Every man likes her. Every woman wants to be her. So you know, she's starting with all the tools. That's good. But she doesn't leave her lane ever. And her lane is the thing she does know and she never goes into the stuff she doesn't know. And she just is polite to everybody. Says, "Why not be nice to everybody?" And just never says whatever you think would be the provocative thing to try to make a news cycle. She just comes across as so damn likable that you think RFK Jr. is smarter than you thought because how in the heck did he lock her down? So you know, some of that just rubs off naturally on the spouse as it would. And it works both ways, right? He rubs off on her, she rubs off on him. But boy is she good. If you haven't seen her appearance on Club Random, I mean, of all things, Club Random would be the place that most, if you were a PR expert, you'd probably tell her not to go on there, right? But she makes her own decisions, it looks like. And she went on there and nailed it. Just totally nailed it. Yep. Bill loved her.

CNN is asking Hakeem Jeffries if the government shutdown was worth it. And Hakeem said, "We have waged a battle on behalf of the American people." Is that the answer to the question, "Was it worth it?" No. And CNN followed up, "But you didn't get what you want." And Jeffries says, "At the end of the day, the fight lives on." Now remember what I told you about goals versus systems. Their goal was to fight and they accomplished their goal. They fought. The Republicans had a system which is they stick together. The Republican system is that they just stick together. They take directions from Trump because that seems to work out. You know that if you've been paying attention following Trump's lead on just about anything ends up being the smart play. So Republicans have this perfect system. What does Trump want? Does that sound reasonable? Are we all going to, most of us anyway except for a Massie and perhaps Iran, are we all going to be on the same page? Yes. That's a pretty good system. Then you talk to the Democrats, they're like, "We got to fight you. Fight you and we got to swear more and fight you." Well, now Jeffries is claiming some kind of success because he fought. So they accomplished their goal. They fought. Maybe you should have a different goal or maybe you should have, I mean they would say the goal was to open the government, but they seem happy that they did the fight. So it makes it look different.

Speaking of Jasmine Crockett, she, I love this story. She's demanding that all 50 states abolish Dominion voting machines. Now, I don't know how many states actually use them, but because Dominion is now owned by some entity that has conservative connections, she thinks that it's a sure thing that they will be used to rig the election. So now we have, we went from a Democrat swearing there could never be a way to rig an election to a top Democrat, at least in terms of attention, a top Democrat saying, "Oh my god, these elections are so unsecure. We're going to have to change this right away." That's called winning. Winning.

I've been telling you for a while that one of the big turning points in the American mind will be when we realize there was never a way to know who won. I don't know who won because I didn't count the votes and I don't trust anybody who does. But if you don't realize there never was a way to know who won. There never was. Because you could never know what happened that you don't know about. What if somebody cheated in a clever way and got away with it? How would you know? Getting away with it is what that means. That they didn't get caught. You think nobody's ever cheated an election and didn't get caught? It must happen all the time. So the fact that the Democrats made it so you couldn't get a job or couldn't go to college if you believed that the election was even questionable, that's a pretty bold play right there. But now we have Jasmine saying what in my mind is actually a completely reasonable complaint. The reasonable complaint is that you can't know for sure or you can't be confident. You can't be confident that you know for sure the election was fair when machines are involved and you don't know if anybody had access to the machines and maybe you're not sure that you could find out if anybody had access to the machines. So it's completely reasonable and it actually matches a lot of conservative thought including my own.

So what should Trump do about that? Now, this is a joke, but not really. Wouldn't it be funny if he invited her to the White House so that other people could hear her complaints about the machines and about the unreliability of the voting system? What would she do? What would she do if Trump not only agreed with her, but asked if he could boost her signal? Yeah, you know, you make a good point there. I don't know about the voting machines. We'll have somebody look into that. But in general, if what you're saying is our elections need some extra security, well, here's what I can do for you. All paper ballots. That's what you want. You don't want machines. You want all paper ballots. And don't you think it'd be a good idea if we made sure we don't count them for too many days because you don't want those conservatives to be sneaking in any fake ballots after election day, right? Nobody wants that. So how about you and I get together and we fix this election system and then you can win fair and square on your great policies. That will never happen, but it's funny to think about it.

Anyway, so Bill O'Reilly, who is getting a lot of attention lately, a lot of it's on NewsNation, by the way. Are you tracking the NewsNation arc? I don't know how they're doing financially, but I got to say that Chris Cuomo is doing an incredibly good job of promoting a new network. And they do have interesting guests. Cuomo was the first person who I trusted who reached out to me after I got cancelled and I thought did a very respectful and fair but tough interview with me. So I have lots of good things to say about Cuomo just because of personal interactions. But yeah, NewsNation is doing a great job. But anyway, they had Bill O'Reilly on quite a few times and so they're sort of reconstituting him. But he said on the cost of living, he thinks sort of the next the midterms will really and maybe 2028 will turn on cost of living things and he's probably right about that. And he suggests a cost of living czar. Now, if he's suggesting a cost of living czar simply for the purpose of making it look like Republicans are doing something about affordability, maybe it's a semi good idea. But if you leave out what would the czar do, I don't know if it's anything. What would the czar exactly do? Is there something that a czar knows how to do that you and I don't know how to do? What exactly do you do? I can't think of anything. If people had great ideas for lowering costs, don't you think we'd be noodling on those all the time? If the Democrats have a great idea for lowering costs, I want to hear it. I don't want to reject it. If anybody has a great idea for lowering costs, I'd like to hear it. So I feel as though it's a lack of anybody having an idea. It's not like somebody didn't fight hard enough. It's not because we didn't have a czar. It's not because there's no cabinet position for lowering expenses. It's because nobody has an idea, you know, short of the big ideas like Trump has of lowering interest rates, for example. And you could do things around the margin, but I don't know what a czar is going to get you. Let's get an idea first and then maybe a czar.

So Trump is now, I guess, in favor of up to 600,000 Chinese students coming to the US for college. And he says that's a pro-MAGA stance. He was telling Laura Ingraham. And he says that if you didn't do that, because the Chinese students bring in a lot of money to the colleges because they pay full price where a lot of Americans would not. Trump says you would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business. I think he mentioned the historically black colleges would also have trouble. He says, "I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else." Well, MAGA wants everything to work, right? So if the only way college works is if there are a lot of Chinese students, then I don't know, maybe you do the best you can to make that situation work, which looks like what Trump is doing. But I don't know how you could feel safe with that here.

So here's my take. I assume there's something Trump knows that we don't about the Chinese students. One thing he might know, and this is pure speculation, because remember I'm not a Democrat, so I can't read any minds. Pure speculation. What if our intelligence people have assessed that the best way we can deal wi