s out that there's nothing there, I've lost nothing. But I've respected your wishes and I like doing that. If it turns out there is something there and the Christian model is the closest to it, I win.

So with your permission, I promise you that I will convert, but I probably won't spend much time in that phase. So don't expect it to happen today. Okay. But argument made, argument accepted.

All right, let's talk about the news.

Is your mind blown yet? Did I blow any minds? We'll find out about that later.

I saw a post by Chamath Palihapitiya, whose name I have trouble pronouncing, and he was pointing out that back in September, there was a bipartisan unanimous bill in the California legislature to require more reporting on the cost and income data for the homeless. So the idea is that every single Democrat and every single Republican in California agreed. How rare is that? Can you think of any other time that every Democrat and every Republican in California agreed? And they agreed to do this more rigorous auditing or checking on the expenses and this is obviously based on the alleged fraud and then as Chamath points out, Governor Newsom vetoed it.

Now his reason for vetoing is that he believed that there were already existing laws that would cover it. Now, are we supposed to believe, and this is back in September, he vetoed it. Are we supposed to believe that Newsom was the only Democrat who knew that the laws already existed and nobody talked to him? They went through all that work. You know, the Democrats went through all that work to be behind this 100%. And then he vetoes it. And Chamath asked the obvious question. Why?

Now I saw a post response to this from a post on X called Problematically Non-Compliant. And in this post he said this is the evolution of a Dilbert filter complexity laundering. So this is based on something that maybe I inspired in terms of the thinking. He said, "Gavin's pretending other complex bills that nobody will understand, much less enforce, already accomplish the same thing." How many times have I told you that fraud always hides in complexity?

So here both the Democrats and Republicans tried to come up with this way to control expenses that would be easy to understand. But Gavin Newsom hid behind the complexity of the other things he thought would do the job. Is this a case of it looks exactly like what it is? Like you don't have to wonder why he did it. They did it obviously to cover somebody's tracks. Well, I think we're in a phase of civilization where the smart assumption is that he's doing this to cover some kind of fraud. Don't know. Don't know for sure. And the reason I don't know is that hiding things behind complexity works. It works really well.

Can you predict the fraud? You can.

Well, here's a story, non-story. So Mayor Adams, the so-called communist mayor of New York City, he said he called Trump to file a complaint about the arrest of Maduro. Who would do that? So he called Trump and he said, he quote, "I registered my opposition. I made it clear. We left it at that." Now, is that just performative? Is that purely theater? And is it purely for the purpose of making it look like he can fight back against Trump? There was no value in that whatsoever. I'm kind of surprised that Trump took the call. But so you watch on one hand, you watch Trump pull off this amazing military legal operation, which was very hard to pull off and everybody in the world's impressed. But you got this one communist mayor who wants to register his opposition. "I made it clear." You did nothing.

All right. There's two quotes of the day. I'm going to call them my quote of the day. One from Eric Weinstein and he posted this. This made me laugh this morning. He said, "I've never been entirely sure if international law actually existed." Isn't that a great way to put it? I've never been sure if international law actually existed. Well, my observation is that whoever has the power gets what they want. So yeah, on some theatrical performative level, there's something like international law, but anybody who can ignore it does. So if anybody who can ignore it does ignore it, is it really an international law? It's a funny question.

And then I thought that was going to be the quote of the day, but I saw one by Bad Ombre also on X and Bad Ombre posted this. "Has Kamala set up a bail fund for Maduro yet?" Has Kamala set up a bail fund for Maduro yet?

Now, those are just good comments. So I love a war that no Americans get killed and it generates a bunch of good memes and funny quotes. These are two of my favorites today.

All right. Here's what I keep saying is working, which is that Trump creates assets out of nothing. And one of the assets he's creating out of nothing is the idea that he does what he says he'll do. If you watched the press conference yesterday, you saw Rubio, he just kept hammering that one point. We have a president who does what he says he'll do. He does what he says he'll do. And I thought he was maybe hitting that one point too much. But if Rubio is learning persuasion either by just association or whatever else from Trump, he knows that repetition is persuasion. So he just repeated and repeated. This president does what he says. This president does what he says. That's probably not because Rubio is a bad public speaker because he's a good one. It's probably because he understands the value of repetition and he's watched Trump do it a million times. So and then of course other people pick it up. You know, the conservative independent media, the people who comment on stuff like me, we pick that up and it's just automatic because we've been persuaded that that's an important thing to think about.

So think about how this created an asset. So Trump has already threatened Iran that if they shoot protesters that we would get involved. He wasn't specific, but has suggested that yeah, we'd put enough maybe military or CIA muscle into it that it would take out the regime. Now, if Trump had not already created this asset, the asset that people believe he does what he says he's going to do, and he's really done great on that, would Iran maybe think twice, or would Iran say, "Ah, it's another Joe Biden." He created an asset out of nothing. That's one of the things I always teach you before Trump goes into any negotiation. It feels like there's this point where he always creates that asset. If you think about the tariffs, for example, he created an asset out of nothing. It became a tool, a weapon that just didn't exist before. You just made it. So that's a good persuasion.

I would guess, and I hope I'm not wrong about this, that China will not attack Taiwan as long as Trump is president. Now, maybe it wouldn't have happened anyway, but when China watches our military take down the entire country in 10 minutes, they're going to think twice about doing something with Taiwan that Trump would be violently opposed to. So probably this is having a big difference.

Now he's also extending this. The New York Post is reporting that maybe you heard this already. He's already threatened Colombia and what did he say? Oh sorry one of the side effects of whatever I'm doing is I get burpy. So he's talking about Colombian President Petro who also has some kind of cartel connections and he says, quote, he has cocaine mills. Talking about the president of Colombia, he has cocaine mills. He has factories where he makes cocaine. And yeah, I think I stick by my first statement. He's making cocaine. And then he says, and here's the kill shot. He says they're sending it to the United States, so he does have to wash his ass. I tell you often that Trump is so good with swearing that he only uses it judiciously, but when he does, it really makes you focus on that thing he said. So instead of saying a boring thing like yes, I hope he cooperates in the future, he says he has to wash his ass. As soon as you throw "ass" in the sentence, people pay attention. And I imagine that the Colombian president is practicing his run to a safe room. Yeah. They probably got a stopwatch. They're like, "All right, president of Colombia, can you make it to the safe room in 37 seconds?" Because unfortunately, that's all the time you're going to have. And Maduro, I guess, almost made it, but he didn't.

Then Trump says about Mexico, talking about the president of Mexico, Sheinbaum, he goes, "We're very friendly with her. She's a good woman." Trump told, I guess Fox and Friends, he said, and quote, "But the cartels are running Mexico. She's not running Mexico." Okay. Again, would Mexican presidents be afraid of Trump if he had not created this asset of if I say I'm coming for you, I'm coming for you? Probably not. So now it creates the option at least. I don't know how this would work, but at least the option that we could somehow work with Mexico to get past the fact that their leader is a cartel plant. I don't know. We'll see.

So I would call this as Trump called it the Donro doctrine. He was trying to see if he could make that sticky. So instead of the Monroe doctrine which basically said the United States will dominate our hemisphere, stay out of our hemisphere, he suggested that should be called the Donro doctrine which I kind of like.

Now, the big surprise to me yesterday about Venezuela is that Trump says we, meaning his military and well, we mean the United States, let's say, are going to run Venezuela. What? How are we going to run Venezuela? But if you recall, one of the biggest mistakes in Iraq for the second Iraq war was that we took out their entire government and then everything fell apart. And so people say if you had left some of the corrupt government in place, there would at least be stability and then maybe you could work toward a better government or something.

So, I don't think that if it were anybody but Trump, I don't think that they would have the assets, going back to prior conversation, I don't think they would have the assets to run the country without using the locals. So, one of it looks like the current vice president who would have been Maduro's vice president, the person you could probably trust the least, is going to be under the, let's say, under threat from the US. So, Rubio and Hegseth and I think General Keane, I think they're going to be working with the existing corrupt Venezuelan government.

Now when I say working with surely that means co-opting meaning it's not an equal situation that whatever Venezuela does they do at the risk of the US sending in more military and taking out the vice president. Now, if you were that new vice president or not new, but the person running the country, at least on paper, wouldn't you assume there would be a bad play to just reproduce the Maduro situation because surely you would be taken out because Trump does what he says he'll do.

So by now there have been some threats I assume like really really good threats and that maybe even some bribes but it's probably the only way that we can get to some kind of a stable pro-American Venezuelan government. So, it seems to me that Trump has learned from the Iraq experience. And I don't know if anybody's tried it exactly like this where we say, "Yeah, we're going to work together." But really, you're going to do what we tell you to do. It might work. So I would say it's the best play. We don't know if it'll work or how it will work, but I think it's the best play.

Now the remaining question I have is do we leave any military assets around the government buildings? In other words, is the VP of Venezuela already under the gun? You know, is there probably some kind of presidential palace or something. Do we have military presence where the actual physical people of the government work? And could we control them? If we had removed all of our military, even the special forces, etc., would we be able to control them?

So, nobody's asked this question yet. The press is not asking the right questions. The right question is do we have any physical assets as in special forces that are now the security for the new vice president.

Now remember we'd been told that Maduro was being protected by Cuban military. Am I right? I'll take a fact check on this if I'm wrong. But my understanding is that Maduro didn't even trust his own people enough to have them be his security and that he did trust Cuba because Cuba and Venezuela have a symbiotic relationship. So could it be that the first thing the Americans did is say Cuban gone, Cuban gone, Cuban gone until there was no security and then they said we are now your security. So if you don't do what we want, you got no security. So I think that might be what's happening, but that's speculation.

Well, you'd not be surprised to hear that there are left-leaning protests about the Venezuelan action in four different states. And as Unusual Whales posted on X that immediately at least the independent journalists figured out that they were all paid and organized by the same entity because they had the same signs, different cities. It's obviously organized protest by somebody. And then Unusual Whales also points out who it is. So, it didn't take long.

So apparently the Hands Off Venezuela protests have been funded by an NGO. Of course, funded by an NGO that hides the badness you launder through an NGO. But it's an NGO called the People's Forum, which has received over $20 million from one billionaire. Now, the billionaire, it turns out, lives in China, right? So, the money is coming from a pro-Chinese billionaire.

Do you remember when you would have thought, "Wow, I'm surprised a lot of people disagree with this Venezuela thing because it worked out so well." Now, we instantly know that it's a fake demonstration and that some billionaire or billionaires are behind it. Boom. So, that didn't work. And we're in a whole new world, people. Again, thanks to Elon Musk, Mike Benz, and the other players who have uncovered how the NGOs work, we can just instantly go to the answer. Is it real? No. Is it being paid for by a billionaire? Yes. What country backs the billionaire? In this case, China. It only takes 10 seconds. But as I've said before, you know, you and I are probably in a bubble where this is easier. The average normal person or voter still probably thinks it's real. And that's what we got to fix.

You heard me speculating and wondering what if there's a real reason behind the attack on Venezuela. So the legal justification is drugs and I do believe that Trump is serious about stopping drugs. But the real question is is that the only reason and I don't think any of us thinks it's the only reason. Some would say is because of oil etc. But I saw an opinion by Cynical Publicist on X who I think captured my thinking. Well, no, I'm not going to say that it added to my thinking. I don't want to pretend that I had this thought as clearly as Cynical Publicist, but he said he's monitoring the Venezuelan situation and there's so many questions. Yes. But the strategic reason for bringing down Maduro has become abundantly clear. It wasn't abundantly clear until I read the next part of his opinion. He said, "While we ostensibly captured Maduro based on legitimate and withstanding US drug charges from 2020, the real reason for the military operation this morning is that neutralizing Maduro's Venezuela had become a strategic imperative for the USA, meaning that Maduro and Venezuela were becoming a central hub for all the people we don't like." So he was nurturing relationships with Russia, Hezbollah and Iran and was already going to be part of China's belt and road initiative.

So if you were looking for the one reason that we went after Venezuela, you would miss it would be one of those missing the forest for the trees. The forest is that we can't have somebody who's actively anti-American and actively courting our enemies while also being a presence in our hemisphere. You don't need more reason than that. That under the Donro doctrine, you don't need a better reason to take down Venezuela. That they've just simply become too important to our enemies to let them have free reign.

But I'm seeing in the comments you're prompting me, but that was the next thing I was going to talk about. Apparently, Rasmussen poll notices this that Trump has posted videos of allegations of Venezuela being part of rigging our election. And what Rasmussen poll points out is that's not the sort of thing he was doing before. And it could be that the bonus on top of the bonus beyond the strategic and oil and everything else is that Trump can say to the new regime, "Hey, new regime, here's the deal. If you help me prove that Venezuela was behind the rigging of our elections, you're going to have a much better time of it as America figures out who's in charge and we work with you to rebuild Venezuela."

So, once again, it seems that Trump has built an asset that didn't exist. So if you went back a year, Trump could not have asked Venezuela to help him figure out did Dominion or anybody else through some kind of connection with Venezuela, did they make any difference to our elections? But now having taken control of the government, he can say to that government, "You're going to help me find out what happened." And they'll probably have to do it because the people who he'd be talking to would not necessarily be guilty, like personally guilty, but they would know that if they work with him, they'd be giving up something that didn't have any value to them anymore, which is some knowledge about something that may or may not have happened. But if they give that up, things are going to go a lot better for them. Nobody else could have done that. He created the asset out of nothing. I mean, not nothing. He attacked and overthrew the country. But if this is a signal that Trump is going to go hard at the election integrity and he's going to go hard at it through this more control of Venezuela, that would be quite a 2026, wouldn't it? That would change everything. And I think that's coming.

I saw a post today on X by Fisher King and he said it's striking that in the realm of foreign affairs where perhaps has real power big things can get done. Meanwhile domestically we keep running up the debt and everything is broken. That's a good point. Where Trump has the most pushback is always on domestic stuff, it's hard to get anything done. And that would work no matter who's the president. The other team is going to stop you from being effective.

Case in point, apparently Unusual Whales was reporting that the US raid to capture Maduro was actually leaked to the Washington Post and the New York Times, but both publications decided it would be too risky to publish it because it would be dangerous for the troops. However, somebody put very large bets on the day that Venezuela would be attacked and they placed them on Polymarket where I believe I'll take a fact check on this, but I believe Polymarket allows you legally or another way to say it is there's no reason you couldn't make an insider bet. So, somebody who had insider knowledge made a ton of money by picking the exact day of the attack. That probably is related to whoever was leaking as well.

All right. You all know Michael Shellenberger, one of the best independent journalists in the country, an amazing writer, does amazing work. But he's warning us, and I don't think we're watching this closely enough, that we're in an absolute free speech crisis.

So, apparently the EU, Australia, and Brazil had a meeting at Stanford recently to coordinate global censorship strategies against Americans. What? We know that they had a meeting and that the deal was they're trying to censor American free speech. Well, the reason this is a big problem is that censoring free speech is probably the beginning of every anti-democratic thing you could imagine. It's the most authoritarian thing I could imagine because everything bad comes after censoring free speech, right? If you tried to do something bad, but free speech was still in existence, there's a good chance you could catch it and get enough people involved to stop it. But if you stop free speech in America, you can kind of control America and you would have to make it look like you're trying to do the opposite. You have to make it look like you're improving free speech by getting rid of the bad parts. The bad parts. Now, the bad parts are what the free speech is for. The bad parts are the part where people don't like it. And often this isn't true. But if you don't have the freedom to speak, all bad will happen.

And as Michael Shellenberger points out, here are the approval ratings of some of these countries involved. So Macron of France has a 15% approval. What? And he's going, this guy with 15% approval in his own country is going to come and tell us what kind of free speech we have or don't. How about Germany's Scholz? Their leader has a 20% approval. Britain's prime minister, 25% approval. Now, these are the clowns that are trying to figure out a way to have European pressure on American platforms to the point where the American platforms have to say, "All right, all right. You know, we'll go out of business if we don't deal with you. So we'll have to start censoring our own people." And that's like the beginning of the end.

So, as Shellenberger points out accurately, we are in a free speech crisis because they might be able to pull it off. You know, I don't know what the response is. I think the response is if you have Trump as a president, he will say at some point, if he hasn't already, here's the deal. You clowns need to stay away from our free speech. And if you don't, all bets are off. All bets are off because I would consider this one of the biggest strategic defense issues in the country. It's a bigger risk than China attacking us. It's a bigger risk than Russia attacking us because I don't think they will. But this is definitely happening. So, you know, the thing you have to worry about is not the one that sounds worse on paper. It's the one that's actually going to happen and it looks like they're coming after us.

So, I would expect at some point Trump to use his asset, which is he does what he says he'll do, to at least postpone this. But my god, you know, and the weapon that these other countries have is that they can fine us. They can fine an American company like X. I think they're trying to fine X $140 million or something. So, they do have a tool, but their tools are the leaders of their countries too.

In other news that I find fascinating, but you don't, China's got this gigantic effort to try to improve batteries. So China big country. So they've got this massive new project is government backed but also some big companies and they're trying to advance solid state electrolyte batteries.

Now I tell you all the time that different laboratories in different countries they're all working on better batteries. But imagine if there was some big breakthrough ideally from an American company. It really changes everything. It makes your robot last a lot longer, makes your car go farther. But more importantly, think about the national security benefit of getting as many people as we can off the grid and onto batteries. So if you have a battery that's good enough and economical enough, then every residential house and every business too could be off the grid. At least where the sun shines enough. So imagine if we get into some kind of war and the first thing the enemy wants to do is turn off our power. If enough residential entities have battery, then they can't turn us all off. So maybe you don't have a battery, but maybe your neighbor does, so you don't have to freeze to death. You know, you can still charge your phone. So at some point, the economics of batteries are just a major security issue.

And then this makes me wonder. I never really hear what Tesla is doing with their plans for next generation batteries. I hear stories about incremental changes, but it makes me wonder if Tesla has some secret project that would leapfrog all these other battery wannabe people because that would be huge.

Speaking of Tesla, makes me think of Elon which makes me think of this story that apparently Neuralink is going to enter mass production in 2026. So apparently the Neuralink that's the I'll loosely say it's a chip that they put in your brain. That's not really the right explanation but loosely it will do things like respond. It will restore function to people who are disabled in a variety of ways. So they might be paralyzed but then they would be unparalyzed. They might have vision or hearing problems but that would fix it. And I imagine there'd be a whole bunch of things that could be fixed by Neuralink, which apparently they've sort of gotten to the next level of development on.

But here's my insight. What happens when the people who have the Neuralink chip are not just restored back to as good as the normal, I'll say the normies. I don't want to insult anybody accidentally. What happens if you've got the chip and you only got it for fixing one problem? Let's say your problem was hearing. So, you get the thing and you could hear. Now, that would bring you up to what the average baseline human can do. But once you've got the chip in you, what would stop it from adding extra powers? Why not connect it to AI? Why not allow you to control things at a distance just by thinking it? Are we entering a stage where you would rather hire somebody with a chip in their head because they can do everything a normal person can do but a whole bunch of things that normal people can't do?

You know, if you were hiring a programmer, would you rather have one who has a chip in his head and can just think the code and the code appears or do you want to stick with somebody who has to type it in, run it by AI, test it? That's a bad example, but it seems to me it's inevitable that the people with the Neuralink implant would be better employees who didn't have it, right? What would be the counterargument to that? And then do we get to the point where and this wouldn't happen right away, but a point where people just optionally get a chip because they too want to get the full cyborg power. Probably won't be legal. You know, probably there'll be some regulation that says you can only do it if you're trying to fix a problem. But eventually it's going to be do you have a chip or do you not have a chip? Oh, I wouldn't even want to marry somebody who didn't have a chip. That's coming.

Remember, you may have heard me doubt the story that murder is at a 20-year low or went down 19% or something. So, ZeroHedge has an article that is likewise, as I did, questioning whether the real thing is bad data. So, did murder go down because Trump did a good job? How? Or is it the cities were manipulating the data and it's all bad? I've been saying for some time that all data that's important is fake. And murder rates is kind of important data. So, according to Scott's rule that all data that's important is fake. I think it's just fake data. I just don't think it's real. So, I'm glad there's at least one entity that agrees that we don't know if that's real.

All right, here there's a couple more Tesla things. So, apparently Tesla's Optimus robot, and I think this is coming from Elon, is going to be active in law enforcement. Now, the robots would not have weapons and they would not do violence. But they would somehow assist human crime fighting. So, he doesn't say specifically how, but he says no guns, no tasers, you know, completely unarmed. It would focus on humane containment and nonviolent intervention designed to deescalate, not dominate. And it would be AI powered patrols with zero aggression. So it'd be a way to sort of control things.

So do you think that Optimus will be a guide let's say an assist in avoiding crime? I think it would be because if you look at human psychology, it seems to me there's a high likelihood that if you put a robot into a dangerous situation, that the criminals would say, "Uh oh, that robot is watching us." So, if the only thing the robot did was say, "Go into the dangerous place and look around," that alone probably would decrease the amount of crime. So, it could be that the robot is more like a security camera that can walk, right? The problem with existing security cameras is that they're in one place. So if you needed the visibility to be behind a door or something, well, maybe it can knock down a door and just walk in and start taking that video. So, I do believe that this is a doable thing, but I want to clarify something that I said at a prior podcast. I said I didn't think that robots were ready to be like butlers where they could learn any skill and then you can just teach them what you want and they can go do it. And somebody clarified to me I think this is correct that the initial wave of robots will be single purpose and probably factory. So the Optimus robots that they're going to start building at scale is not because they're smart enough to do what robots should do if they were ideal. They're just smart enough to do a single purpose thing such as learn what to do in a specific warehouse or factory. And then that would make sense with this idea that the Optimus could also be good for security. It'd be closer to a single purpose than it would be to a general purpose.

Then Elon says he said this in an X post that Optimus will eliminate poverty and provide universal high income for all. Now do you think he learned to talk like that from Trump? Right. Because doesn't that sound more like something that Trump would say because it feels like an overclaim? It feels like a salesperson approach. But it's also optimistic as hell. And I think that this is an example of how Musk is learning from Trump just as Rubio is. So, we're starting to see people pick up the Trumpian way of communicating where it doesn't have to be 100% true. It just has to make you feel a certain way and ideally act a certain way that is productive and good for the country. And I'm all for it. So, you know, the old me would have said, "No, come on. That's too much of a claim. Eliminate poverty. Eliminate it. Really? Really?" But now I think it's just a style of communication that's very effective and making me feel right and act right. And I'm okay with that. It works.

All right. As I said, after the show, which is basically now, Owen Gregorian will be firing up a new spaces and this will be more about the news, more about Venezuela. And you should all join. If you don't know how to find it, go to my feed on X. I'm pretty sure I reposted it this morning. Or just do a search for Owen Gregorian and you'll see it at the top of his X feed. You'll see the link to go to the spaces and I remind you that spaces is a feature on X that allows people to speak but not be seen. And you'll see one of the best hosts you've ever seen. Owen Gregorian does an amazing job.

All right, people. Let me go back to my first talk about the simulation. Did I accomplish my goal of blowing your mind? Yes or no? It'll take me a minute for your comments to catch up. But I want to see if I accomplish my goal. I think there's a delay of maybe a minute between you posting the comment and before it shows up here only because there's so many of them. What do you think? Mind's blown. Yes. There we go. Your comments just caught up. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Good. Yeah, I got a few nopes in there. More yeses than no. That's the most you could hope for, right?

Well, you'll be thinking about that. I think it's hilarious once you realize that w