t’s right. The simultaneous sip happens now.

Oh, so good. So, so good.

Well, let’s check in on the news. It’s the first day of the year. If you don’t have your Dilbert calendar, believe it or not, you could still currently get one by the end of January. It’ll probably just take a few days. You wouldn’t miss much.

Well, there’s a new robotic skin for robots. Researchers have developed a neuromorphic robotic electronic skin. So apparently the skin that you put on your robot could judge intensity, danger, and injury risk. So do you think that’s going to be the killer app for robot skin? When you get a robot with skin just because it’s easier at identifying pain, it seems mean to the robot.

I think it’s slightly more likely that the killer app will be sex, because it’s no fun to have sex with a robot if you’re just banging metal. But what if the robot could feel every sensation? Are you telling me that if you made the robot soft enough and you gave it a skin so it could act as though you’re doing something good to it, are you telling me that’s not the killer app? Of course it is. Of course it is.

But do you know why the robot industry keeps talking about hands, you know, really good hands, and they keep talking about stuff like that, but what they’re not talking about, because they can’t do it, is real intelligence. So we’ll see what happens from that.

There’s an article in Ars Technica talking about how this might be the year that AI gets sort of, I won’t say debunked, but that the skepticism about AI will be a little more obvious. So after we’ve got what, two years of AI, and it still can’t do actual generic reasoning. But it’s got good hands. It could do some results. It might have good skin, but it can’t get past hallucinations, and it doesn’t look like there’s any way to do it that we know of.

If there was a way to do it, meaning make the AI actually intelligent like we want it to be, you would already see it. There’s no way you wouldn’t have seen it by now. So I think the rest of the world is catching up with what is hype and what is real.

Now, I’m going to take some credit for being one of the first people to say, after I played with the large language models a little bit, I was one of the first people to say, “Uh oh, this doesn’t look like it could ever have a path to general reason.” And now I would say that I went from something like, you know, in the 5 percent of opinions to more like the 75 percent. So I’m going to take a win for that prediction.

Tesla apparently is now going to offer a car rental service in Michigan that has no dealers and no middlemen. And for $60 a day, you could just go in and get your vehicle. You probably use an app or something to reserve it. But why wouldn’t you do that? If I had a rental company near me where I didn’t have to talk to anybody at the counter and for $60 I could go get a self-driving car, it wouldn’t matter if I had a regular car. I would still rent the car because the self-driving car would be so much better.

Apparently it’s limited to where it could go and we don’t know if there’ll be others, but it seems like one of the best ideas Tesla’s had, renting a self-driving car without the middleman.

So remember my skepticism about the story that Ukraine had tried to kill Putin by bombing his residence? You remember what I said about that? I said there’s something wrong with this story. This doesn’t look right. Because Ukraine would have certainly known he wasn’t there. So why would they do it?

And now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that according to the US intelligence people there was no attack on his residence. That was made up. And so what they do say is that something was attacked deep in Russia but it wasn’t the residence and it wasn’t even that close.

So did you wonder about the fact there were never any photos? You never saw a photo of the damage. Now, maybe that was for security reasons. But when I said it was a false flag, people questioned me and maybe you’re right about that. But there’s only one thing better than a false flag. It would be a false flag that never happened, because then Putin gets to claim something happened without any damage. Nobody died. He can just say, “Oh, let’s just say he attacked my residence.” And then he’s got a little more propaganda for attacking back.

Yeah. So I don’t think it was a planned false flag. I think it was an opportunistic false flag that once something blew up nearby, somebody had the idea, hey, why don’t we say he attacked the residence? Propaganda.

So I saw an interview with the founder of Anduril, Palmer Luckey, and he was talking about the risk of China infiltrating your hardware. Here’s something I didn’t know. There were multiple times we discovered actual wiretap electronics in product samples we were given. So apparently China gives them samples of stuff and we look at it and it is literally wiretap.

He said the risks apply to everything that’s made with Chinese components, from computers, servers, phones, and drones. He said the Supermicro incident in the United States where certain server farms had Chinese components. Here’s the fun part. Chinese components smaller than a grain of rice were stealing very sensitive information from the computer.

And then he asked, “How many Chinese computers exist in critical utilities and infrastructure and military?” He reckons millions. At least millions.

So here’s another example where whatever you thought was how bad it was, and the “it” that I’m talking about is fraud or debt or anything else, as soon as you think you know how bad it was, you find out it’s a million times worse. A million times worse. I would not have even been able to imagine that they had put components the size of a grain of rice in everything they shipped. So that’s a wakeup call.

Well, speaking of that, in China, according to Newsmax, Trump is saying that we set a world record in attracting investment to the United States and that we attracted more investment to the US than China attracted. And he says that’s entirely because of tariffs.

Now, I think it’s true that the recent surge in investments is entirely because of tariffs. So I’m going to give him the yes on that. But you might remember that in around 2018 when I lost my stepson to fentanyl that I started persuading as hard as I could that China was unsafe for business. Now I think that made a dent. So I think there was a priming that happened so that the businesses were already disinclined to put their money there if they had a choice of putting it somewhere else.

So between the persuasion that China is unsafe for business, which started out as me just saying it and people telling me I was crazy, almost nobody agreed. And there were a few people who knew what China was up to that did agree that China was stealing all our IP and spying on us and had bad intentions. But for the most part, people said, “Scott, Scott, Scott, you know, there’s no way this spigot is going to get turned off. There will only be more investment in China.” And I disagreed.

So here we are. The investment in the US seems to be far exceeding that in China at the moment. But I will agree that the tariffs are the prime reason for that at the moment.

So I saw a post by Whole Mars on X and it started with, why do people believe that taxing billionaires, which is what California wants to do more, is suddenly going to fix all our problems? And I’ve been waiting for this. Somebody finally did the math.

So if you do the math and you took the top six billionaires in California and you took 5 percent of the wealth, how much would you get? Well, you’d get about $94 billion. That means the deficit would be 1.7 trillion instead of 1.8. Now that would be for the whole country, I think, not for California. So there’s actually no mathematical way that taxing the billionaires gets us to some kind of stable situation. At best, you could bring down the deficit for one year. That’s it. And you’d be right back to where you were.

Now, the fact that Ro Khanna was pushing this idea was really disappointing because, as I’ve said, I thought he was one of the smart ones, but it looks like maybe he’s getting talked out of it a little bit by the people who are clearly smarter than he is. And now he’s in favor of doing some kind of hearing in California to find out where all the fraud was.

And I would ask you this: when does a hearing ever fix anything? And apparently this put him in sharp conflict with Governor Newsom, who I read today had answers for all the missing money. So according to Newsom, according to a post on X, all of those billions of dollars that people say are missing are not missing at all. No, that’s fake news. They know exactly where the money is. The bullet train’s on track and nothing went wrong and all the money was well spent. Things would be far worse if they didn’t have the money.

So you think that nothing got better, but you would argue that it would have been much worse without all that money. Now, how in the world can he run for president with these, let’s say, allegations over? Maybe he just lies. Yeah, maybe that just works every time. Maybe all you have to do is say that’s not true. You just make it up enough. And that might be enough because we’ve gone for years with not knowing the truth about anything. Why would that change now?

So there’s some thinking that Ro Khanna wants to run for president. So that will put him in conflict with Newsom and Newsom’s got allegations. So would you be surprised? I think the answer is no, that the fraud is worse than you thought.

According to Wall Street Apes, Minnesota has uncovered a new scam where regular homes are being registered as assisted living facilities, but they’re fakes. Who is surprised at that? Or that they’re receiving 15 times the payments of other programs. They got all these shell companies and basically the whole thing is fraudulent. I’m not surprised. As I’ve told you many times now, if it’s possible to steal and a lot of people are involved and there’s a lot of money involved, there will be fraud every time. So this should have been something we could have seen from a mile away.

Here’s some more fakeness. According to Unusual Whales on X, the US ended 2025 with the largest one-year drop in homicides ever recorded. Do you believe that? Do you believe that 2025 was the biggest one-year drop in homicides?

Well, I’m getting some people saying there’s no sound, but I think they’re talking about one of you who has my text. Text me right now and there’s no problem with the sound. But okay, that’s what I thought. But it seems to me in our fraudulent world that the odds of the data being fake is much higher than the odds that we set a record in reductions of murder. What do you think? Do you think it’s even likely that this is true? Well, you know, it could be. Maybe. But when we see that every other source of data is fake, did we not know that the police departments were somehow faking their data? I don’t know how you’d fake murder, but I don’t believe it. Might be true.

All right. Here’s a take that you couldn’t make a couple of years ago, but now it’s happening. According to a user named Taya on X, Harvard actually put in writing it’s a policy of sending white men to the bottom of the pile when considering admissions, etc. And says they deserve everything that’s coming, but that’s not going too hard.

A user named Hunter Ash, who is evidently a white man on X, he said, “If Harvard hates my people, I want it leveled to the ground. They produce useful output, but clearly they’ll do their best to direct any power those results produce against me. So I’m against them. We are not obligated to fund our open and explicit enemies.”

Wow. You know what? He convinced me that if Harvard went out of business tomorrow that I would be better off because they’re literally my enemy. They have a very clear intention of destroying the white man demographic forever. So why should I ever allow them to make even one inch of progress? So yes, I am completely in favor of Harvard going out of business.

All right. I saw a post by William Wolf on the same topic. He said that white guilt has been one of the most destructive forces of the 21st century. Here’s what you couldn’t say a little while ago, but you can say it now. You could say now that much of the progress of humankind came from very smart white people working very hard.

I am not a scientist. So I’ve never invented anything that changed the world. Right? So I’m not taking credit for being a white guy just because other white guys did good stuff. Nevertheless, it is a fact that white guys contributed a lot to civilization.

Now, not to take anything away from some other demographic groups, but remember, I’m not claiming any kind of credit for being a white guy. You know, what I did, I’m proud of what I did, but I didn’t invent the microchip, you know, and neither did you.

So if you took away, and this is what’s happening, if you use DEI to stunt the progress of white men, just purely mathematically you’re going to destroy civilization or you’re going to degrade it back to a level that none of us would want to live in. So I think you can say that now that the cost of DEI is not that it just set back a generation. Well, I would say several generations of white men. It’s just that I don’t think people understand that there was a very small percentage of white men who were responsible for a lot of progress.

Could somebody put in the comments that the sound is fine, so shut the fuck up about the sound? Please, in the comments, just tell these people that it’s working. There might be one of the platforms that’s not working. So if they have to change platforms, go ahead and do it. But there’s nothing wrong with the sound. So there’s nothing that’s going to happen on my end that will change what we’re doing. Okay. Thank you.

Have you noticed on X that Elon Musk has given a new nickname to Tim Walz? He calls him Traitor Tim. Traitor Tim. I think he’s a traitor. And the reason he’s a traitor goes beyond whether he’s just involved in the fraud, but that the fraud would go to Somalian terrorists. And I do wonder about all of his paid trips to China when he was younger. There’s no way that that was just innocent. There’s no way that was innocent travel to China. He didn’t pay for it and they were obviously using him as a tool or worse. I mean, at the very least, he was a tool.

Now, I do think that Elon is on the right track and there will be two hearings coming up. January 7th the Minneapolis for the Minnesota state reps will be talking to the oversight committee. So the oversight committee is going to talk to Tim Walz and Keith Ellison. That won’t be till February.

Now, I’m not sure, has anybody had the experience of watching the oversight committee fix anything? I don’t know if they do. Has there ever been a hearing or an oversight meeting in which they had a problem and then they fixed it? I don’t think so. So I’m not optimistic that’ll make a difference unless the only thing it does is make it more obvious.

Okay. Thank you. Sound is good.

All right. But I will say it seems like there’s no possibility that Walz was unaware of the fraud. Would you agree with that? There’s not really any chance he didn’t know. And somebody else pointed this out. Few people did actually. Remember when Kamala got $1.2 billion to run and it got absorbed immediately. Don’t you think that Democrats also steal from Democrats? You know, what are the odds that Democrats are only stealing from, let’s say, taxpayers in general?

I thought this about Soros, that Soros is almost certainly getting ripped off by Democrats. And now I also think that the DNC is almost certainly being ripped off by Democrats. Would you agree with that? I think you would.

You know what I’m getting tired of hearing? I’m getting tired of seeing people on X say that the fraud we’ve discovered is quote the tip of the iceberg. That doesn’t help. We’re way past that. Yes, of course it’s the tip of the iceberg. Of course it is. You don’t need to say it anymore.

But I saw Mike Lee, based Mike Lee. He thinks we could cut 1.5 trillion out of the budget if Congress stopped funding things that have nothing to do with Congress’s powers. And I’m starting to think that the $1.5 trillion number, which I’ve seen Elon use, is now going to be the assumed amount of fraud. And I think that’s true. I think Elon’s persuasion is going to make the 1.5 trillion a year look like the actual number of this being stolen. Now, I don’t know if it’s bigger or smaller, but I think at least the right is going to start using that as a presumed low number. Yeah. And Elon said it was a low number.

Well, you’ve been waiting for Pam Bondi to get busy, but did you know how much the Department of Justice under her has actually done? Well, she’s reporting today that they’re making progress, which I’ll tell you about. Some of my beds could be in dry mouth, so I have to stop and sip.

So according to Bondi, 60 people have been convicted of fraud and four Minnesota scams so far and 98 have been arrested, the majority of which are of Somali descent. But is that enough? So the question I ask is how many people should be arrested? Is 60 1 percent of the problem, the tip of the iceberg, or is 60 60 percent of the problem? So again, I can’t really tell. Is that a good scoreboard? Is that what you would expect that by now there would be 60 people just for the Minnesota scams? So that doesn’t even count all the Russia collusion hoax and overthrowing the government and all that. But no prominent people yet.

And if you’re like me, and I know you are, if you don’t see any prominent people get indicted soon, you’re going to feel like not enough happened.

Speaking of prominent people, according to Just the News, the Justice Department still has 5.2 million Epstein documents to review and that the Department of Justice has 400 attorneys assigned to just the Epstein review. What would you be happier at? Would you be happier if those 400 attorneys were immediately moved to prosecuting people who need to be prosecuted? Or would you be happier that the 400 attorneys spend their days looking through useless documents that in the end we won’t see any of the good stuff anyway?

And does it seem to you that the number of Epstein documents is increasing instead of decreasing? And I’m wondering how in the hell do the Epstein documents keep increasing? Have the documents found a way to procreate?

Here’s what I think. I think if you leave enough Epstein documents in a room, they will start having sex with each other and then they will produce offspring which are like the new documents that they keep finding. So every time they open the door, they’re like, “Whoa, what have you been up to? Looks like a lot more documents in here than last time.” So unless the documents have learned how to reproduce, this looks suspiciously like an attempt to slow things down until we run out of steam. So I don’t trust anything about the Epstein documents.

Well, speaking of scams, I’ll burp. Speaking of scams, the Virgin Islands are suing Meta because they claim that Meta allowed a bunch of scam ads on their platform that scammed lots of people out of money. And the reason that they allowed it allegedly is because Meta made a lot of money by running the ads for the scams.

Do you believe that? Do you believe that the reason they didn’t take the ads down is not because they didn’t know they were scams, but because they made a lot of money running the ads? Well, apparently a lot of money was involved, but that doesn’t make us know their thinking. What they claim is that they had an internal review process that sort of prevented them from taking down more than they did, I guess. But we’ll see.

All right. According to Climate Realism, there’s a publication called The Atlantic that wrote an article last week titled “The poor are in a very bad state. Climate change accelerates California’s cost of living crisis.” So believe it or not, even today a publication is claiming that the prices in California are up not because of the policies, not because the policies about climate change, but because of climate change itself, for which I believe there is no evidence whatsoever.

It makes me wonder, do the people who write those articles know they’re full of shit and they’re just trying to fool you, or are they actually so far inside a bubble that they think that the prices are up because of climate change? Do they really believe that? Really? Yeah, I’m pretty deep inside my bubble, but come on. I thought we’re past that.

Meanwhile, along the same lines, according to NoTricksZone, Europe is getting ready for more censorship over climate science and energy. So apparently they’re preparing to go hard on censorship if you say something about climate or energy science that they deem not true. What? How do they know what’s true? What makes the European Union the experts on what’s true on climate? There are plenty of people who are also experts who say that it’s not the crisis that we thought it was.

So weirdly Europe believes that more censorship of the truth will save the world. Do they really or is it just a way to control the big platforms in the United States? Do they really think that more censorship on that topic is going to be good for us? It’s weird.

All right. So as you know, Jack Smith, that special counsel, is being grilled over the alleged lawfare against Trump. And he was at a House deposition and he was asked at the deposition, “Did you develop evidence that Trump was responsible for the violence at the Capitol on January 6?” And he did not say yes. So that’s a tell. He did not say they had evidence, but instead he went with a narrative.

And the narrative is like this: that Trump was free to say that he believed the election was rigged. That would just be free speech. But according to Jack Smith, Trump was not free to violate federal law and use knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function.

Now, do you see what’s wrong with that statement? His evidence was based on his own ability to read a mind because how would he know what Trump believed about the election? In my opinion, Trump genuinely believed, as I do, that the election was rigged. Now, even the fact that people may have acted on that, that would still be free speech, right? Because there’s no evidence that he did it for the purpose of targeting a lawful government function. There’s every bit of evidence he did it because he believed it was true that the election was rigged.

And as we get further and further into the post-election environment, it does look like he was right. So not only was he right, but he had every reason to believe he was right. But Jack Smith is defending his team because they could read his mind and find out that his real intent was to overthrow the government and that somehow he knew it was a legal election or a non-rigged election.

So the word “knowingly” was always the biggest part of the hoax. The January 6 hoax, I’m going to call it a hoax, that there was an insurrection, depended entirely on believing that you could read Trump’s mind and that the things he was saying he knew not to be true. Even while they looked true to me, it looks like he was completely accurate. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that he thought that was a clean election. None.

So we’ll see where that goes.

Well, Eric Swalwell, who you might know as the person who has the worst take in every situation, he’s running for governor of California, and if he becomes governor, he promises he’ll make sure federal agents are charged with quote kidnapping and assault and will take away their driver’s licenses. That guy has the worst take on everything. Take away his driver’s licenses. That’s just absurd. But at least he’s consistent.

All right. Speaking of consistent, you probably know that Elon’s building a giant AI factory called Memphis with two R’s at the end to basically crush Microsoft. So remember when I told you I guess it has 100,000 supercomputers in it or will and he’s going to train Grok so hard they can do what Microsoft can do just by asking it to do it I guess.

So remember when I told you years ago that smartphones would become just a dumb phone that could do AI and that the phone would just be a screen and some kind of wireless thing and then sound. And Elon confirmed that on one of his podcasts that he sees someday that the phone has no apps, is just an AI. And I think this Memphis is that.

So when he was asked if he would build a phone, he didn’t say yes because I don’t think he thinks phones are the future. I think he thinks this is the future. So there’s a nonzero chance if this works that the entire smartphone industry will become whatever Elon wants it to and he’ll own this. And that would just be one thing he did. Imagine having so many accomplishments that replacing smartphones with entirely new technology would just be one of the things he did. That’s just one thing.

So I guess the US military the other day did strikes on three more alleged narco-terrorist vessels and they were traveling as a convoy, so he took them all out. You know, I don’t know about you, but my empathy for anybody else is way down. I don’t know if it’s all the fraud or what, it’s probably the fraud, but when I see this narco boat was blown up, you know, I think there was a time when I might have been thinking, oh, you know, maybe a little more due process would be good or do we have to do it this way? Because I would just have empathy. But now I don’t.

And now when I see that three of them were blown up, I’m like, yeah, why not four? Four would be better than three. Is anybody having that? Is anybody having that experience that your empathy is way down? I don’t want it to be, but events seem to be taking over.

Anyway, over in Iran, it’s been several days of street protests that are pretty aggressive and I guess some government entities are being attacked. And the question I wonder is, is this a color revolution or is this entirely organic? Do you think Iran is having an organic revolution or of course it’s our intelligence people with Mossad, you know, doing the usual color revolution stuff? Because doesn’t every color revolution involve mobilizing people for the streets?

But the part that they don’t seem to be able to do is controlling the local press. So I don’t think that’s a thing, right? I don’t think anybody’s co-opted the local press to say bad things about the government because they would be killed instantly. So it doesn’t have, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t have every element of a color revolution, but it’s got a little bit. So it does make me wonder how organic that is.

All right. Speaking of healthcare costs, which we weren’t, but let’s. How many of you know what a PBM is? A pharmacy benefit manager. Well, probably not most of you, right? Some of you have heard of it, but I was looking at an interview with Mark Cuban who launched Cost Plus Drugs that would avoid these middlemen.

So what the PBMs are, they’re intermediaries. Let’s call them middlemen that manage prescription drug benefits for health insurers, employers, and government programs. So if you were on Medicare or Medicaid. So the idea is that they would lower your health care costs while providing a service to the providers of the meds. The reality is it’s a somewhat non-transparent process that puts people in the middle of gigantic money flows.

What would happen if somebody was in the middle of gigantic money flows and you did not have visibility on what they were doing in that middle? What would happen? Well, I would argue that 100 percent of the time the middlemen would find a way to suck up the extra money and not let you know that’s what happened. So they would pretend, you know, hypothetically, they would pretend they were lowering your costs while in reality they would find a bunch of clever ways to siphon off a lot of the money going through.

So I don’t know if I’ve expressed that correctly, but Mark Cuban with his low-cost drug plan, the Cost Plus Drugs, apparently cuts out the middleman. And that is one of the reasons, if not the only reason, that he can offer much lower costs.

Now, do you think you could get the government to remove that middleman process? Well, probably not. Probably remember there are enough people in the government who are being bribed by the insurance companies, bribed by the PBMs. I just assume there’s a lot of bribery going on everywhere. I don’t know if the government can fix that because we’ve known it for a long time, but it’s really complicated and in complexity there always hides fraud. I’ve told you that before, right? If something has a lot of money involved and it’s really complicated, somebody’s stealing your money and or you know, maybe not illegally but in effect.

So as Mark points out, the Democrats have no solution for this PBM thing or for the cost of drugs just in general. Now, you know that Trump, there’s some kind of Trump pharmacy online that you could also get low-cost stuff and that might end up working with Mark Cuban’s entity. We don’t know that that’s the case, but they might have something that they can work with together.

So good on you, Mark Cuban, for surfacing this situation and then actually acting on it because it’s one thing to say you’re going to do something. It’s another thing to actually do it and he’s actually doing it.

Do you remember when was it a few years ago that Bezos and a few other entities said they were going to try to fix healthcare or at least pharmacy costs. Well, apparently they gave up because they couldn’t figure out how to do it. But Mark Cuban has not given up and he’s still pushing on that button. So good for you Mark. If there was any way to help I guess we’d want to.

All right. I’m always so amused how many of you know how to cure cancer, but the medical establishment doesn’t. You ever think about that? You’re just sitting there in your little home and you’ve decided that if I change my diet, my cancer will go away. Probably not. Probably not.

Anyway, there’s a book coming out. Washington Examiner’s Mark Judge is writing about this. So in March there’s going to be a book that explains everything. It’s called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. So the author is this guy Jacob Siegel, a journalist for Tablet. And apparently what this book does, which some people must have gotten a preview of, it explains how information was weaponized against the citizens of the United States and that part of the reason that we didn’t recognize that we were in this propaganda hoax situation where nothing they were telling us was real.

The reason we didn’t understand it, especially let’s use as example the Russia collusion hoax. If we had seen one claim about Russia collusion hoax, we might say to ourselves, “Ah, that’s just