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l update. I'm still working on what to do with all my intellectual property after I pass. Obviously it will be owned by my estate. But we've been experimenting. Jay Plemmons has been helping me to see if I can turn my regular reframes from my book into a video that looks like me talking about the reframe. And he did some examples and they look pretty good. You can tell they're AI, but they're so close to the original, which would be me doing it, that I think it's completely workable.
So I'm working on that. We will have more updates as we see what's technically and practically possible, because a big part of it is how do I protect my IP, my intellectual property, at the same time let people have fun with it and put it in one place so that people know how to find it, etc. So it'll have to be protected. But I want to make it as widely available as possible.
Speaking of me, yesterday I guess it was, Trump put a statement on the White House website about the January 6 event. And some people pointed out that the language that Trump used to describe it seems like it might have come from me. Now, not directly. I'm not consulting for the White House or anything like that, but there are some things I say a lot. And let me see if you can identify things that you heard me say.
I talked about the scripted TV spectacle that they used to reverse the reality. Now, lots of people talked about the scripted TV production of it. But what I added was, well, let me just read Trump's words. He said, "The Democrats masterfully reversed reality." Do you remember how I kept saying that they reversed reality? They masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as insurrectionists and framing the event.
Now, have you noticed that the word framing has become much more popular since I started following politics? So framing and reframing, you always have to wonder, did that come from him? Framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump despite no evidence of armed rebellion or, here's the part that counts, intent to overthrow the government.
Remember, I made a big deal about the fact that the entire January 6 committee and all the hearings and nobody in the news or in the hearings ever asked them, "What was your intention?" But Trump's on it. He's noting that they never identified any intention. There's nobody who said they were trying to overthrow the government. And if you ask them what they were doing, they would have said they were trying to save the government. And they would mean it because they believed it was an obviously rigged election.
And then Trump says, in truth it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ig
Episode 3065 CWSA 01/07/26
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riminals, you know, and maybe they shouldn't. And the workaround that Greg Abbott is proposing is to have a chief state prosecutor that would go after those people that the regular prosecutors had decided to release.
Is that a good idea? What do you think?
I'll take a sip of water here. I think one of my meds is making me dry-mouthed.
Well, it feels like a good idea to me.
All right. So you know that on the political right there's been some drama among the influencers and you know that I've tried to completely stay out of it because I don't find value in that kind of drama. But yesterday or recently a little thing popped up that I thought I could add a reframe to that would be useful.
And it starts with the story of — I guess the background is people like Jack Posobiec and Mark Levin have some kind of drama, background disagreement or something. And that part I'm not interested in. But there was an event recently at Turning Point USA where a number of public figures were giving selfies because that's sort of what you do at an event like that. You get a number of public figures. The public wants — we don't do autographs anymore. We public figures. We mostly do selfies.
So there were a lot of selfies and I guess somebody who had a Nick Fuentes-inspired t-shirt had a selfie taken with Jack Posobiec and then Jack was challenged to, hey, you know, why are you taking a selfie with somebody with such a terrible meme on his t-shirt?
Now, that's the sort of problem that nobody needs. And I'll give you a little context on that and then my opinion of what's the best way to handle it.
Now the first thing you need to know is who the hell is Nick Fuentes? And I would frame it this way. He's not on the left. He's a very popular podcaster, very provocative. I'll tell you why. So he's not on the left because he's conservative, but he's also a Trump hater. So he's not really on the MAGA right or the mega left. So what is he? Because he's got a large and growing audience.
I feel like the best way to understand him is the turd in the punch bowl analogy. So I'll give you a little mental model here. Let's say you went to a party and it was a mixed party. There were old people and young people and people of all types at the party. And somebody put a turd in the punch bowl. Like not a joke turd, like an actual turd. And they put it right in the punch bowl and then ran away and nobody saw them do it.
Well, what would happen? Well, first of all, the women attending the party would say, "I'm out of here. This is not the kind of party I want to be at. There's a turd in the punch bowl." So women all leave. The older men would say, "Oh god, who did that? You know, we're going to have to find who did that." And you know, there has to be consequences. So they would also leave the party because they don't want to be at a party with a turd in the punch bowl.
But the young men, the young men would think it's the funniest thing that happened to them all week. And even if the party shut down, they would gather in the parking lot and they would laugh uproariously at the fact that somebody put a turd in a punch bowl at a respectable party.
Now, what you need to know is that Nick Fuentes, who is verbally gifted and very good at the whole public speaking thing, is closer to a turd in the punch bowl than he is to any of the attendees. So if you think of him as sort of a train wreck where you can't look away then you would understand why his audience of mostly young men is growing and enthusiastic.
Then if you add on top of that that young men feel like they're not served by the current system then it's not unusual that they would have a burn down the system kind of approach to life. They wouldn't respect the system but they would like a good prank when they saw it. So they'd actually be attracted to the fact that somebody put a turd in a punch bowl because they're not respecting the system. The system doesn't respect them. And it's not that they're in favor of turds. This is the important part. They're not in favor of turds. They're not drinking the punch. They're just can't look away because it's a show that is a spectacle.
All right. So with that in mind, if you imagine him as the turd in the punch bowl, someone who had a t-shirt meme that was, I understand, inspired by Fuentes that involved the worst thing you could imagine, which obviously I disavow because I'm an older man. Obviously I disavow it. Which had some kind of cookie monster connection to the Holocaust. And don't make me spell it out. It's just whatever is the worst thing you can imagine. So that was on there.
So this fellow — who is also an influencer, it turns out — asked for a selfie with Jack Posobiec who gave it to him along with lots of other selfies that he was doing that day. And it would be unusual for any normal person to have known that that t-shirt was connected to Fuentes or even what it meant. It wasn't an obvious connection, but if you were deep into that world, you might have recognized it, but normal people would not have known what it was.
So it caught my attention because Mark Levin, who must have some prior bigger disagreement with Jack, wrote what looked like a drunken uncle rant about, "Wow, you need to explain, you know, explain this." Basically, I'm summarizing. Now, I'm not saying that Levin was drunk when he wrote the message, because I don't even know if he drinks, but it came off that way. If you had just been introduced to him for the first time, his content, and the only thing you knew is what he wrote on that one post, it would look like maybe the eggnog was involved.
So it seemed like it was pretty extreme and I imagine that had to do with their background, not so much with this specific event.
But I would like to give you a reframe in my typical goals versus systems way. You know, I often tell you, sometimes it's useful to have a goal, but it's not going to be useful unless you've got a system that makes sense.
So I would argue because I got some feedback from people with comments when I weighed in on that. Somebody said that they needed to know and here they would be talking about Jack that they needed to know what he believed because he was one of the people asking for unity. So if somebody's going to ask you to unify with them, is it a reasonable goal to know what it is you're unifying with? To which I say yes. As a goal. It would be good to know what people believe if they want you to join them in their belief or even in their activities. You don't have to join them in the belief, but yeah, that would be a worthy goal.
However, it would be a terrible system to use a stranger's t-shirt as a starting point of that conversation, especially if you had a Charlie Kirk inspired event. The main thing that Charlie Kirk inspired in my opinion and one of the things I respect the most about him is that he tried to turn everything into a civilized debate in which anybody could ask anybody anything and you would get an honest answer to it. That's pretty much what he was doing. He was going places and say ask me anything and I'll give you my honest opinion.
So if you happen to be in an event in which the entire vibe is that you can ask anybody their opinion and they will give you a respectful opinion. You don't need to start the conversation based on a turd in the punch bowl and the shirt he's wearing because if you start there, you're just automatically going to open up this side conversation that you don't need.
It would be far better to ask somebody about a shirt they were wearing. So if in fact I'm wearing a shirt that offends you, it certainly makes sense that you should ask, "Do you believe what's on your own shirt?" Of course. But don't ask me to defend someone else's meme on a shirt that normal people wouldn't even recognize as being offensive. That's not a good starting point. The starting point is you just ask Jack, "Jack, what is your opinion on this or that?" and he would give you a respectful reply.
Anyway, so I don't think anybody needs to apologize or explain someone else's shirt just because they took a selfie with them. And I would also say there will always be an audience for the turd in the punch bowl.
Now, if you're in my category, which is people who don't like turds in punch bowls, what do you do about it? Is it your job to fix it? And if it is your job to fix it, let's just say from a social perspective, you don't want to identify with something that's so bad. Well, I kind of think it kind of depends who you are.
I have the arrogant opinion that if someone who is young and had a very bad opinion that's just way over the line you know just way over the line into inappropriate that if they associate with me that over tim
Episode 3055 CWSA 12/27/25
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le ships. And I guess what they do is they bring in a bunch of helicopters. And the helicopters keep everybody busy. Then the special elite team, they rappel down presumably. I don't think the helicopter lands. I think they probably rappel down. And then they use their superior weaponry to make it to the bridge and then basically take over. And then there's some speculation that they're looking for a captain who would know how to run the boat after they take it over because it's not that common to know how to operate that kind of a ship. So it might be hard to find somebody who's willing to be the new captain.
Would they be SEALs? I don't know. Maybe they would be a subset of SEALs, but the SEALs were not mentioned in this story.
Anyway, as part of that story, I keep hearing it said that if the Venezuelan oil shipments are shut down or even seriously degraded, that it will collapse the economy of Cuba because Cuba is already a basket case and it depends on cheap Venezuelan oil. So if the cheap Venezuelan oil gets cut off or seriously degraded, some people say, "Oh, the Cuban economy will collapse." To which I say, "There's never been a time in my life when the Cuban economy was not on the border of collapse. Do you believe that they're going to collapse?" Every time we hear this, things don't collapse. At least not completely. So it seems like there's always a workaround for everything.
But the thing I still don't know is if the Trump administration thinks they're getting a twofer and that they're going to find a way to do regime change in Cuba the hard way just indirectly by putting pressure on their sponsor. Don't know.
All right. According to Politico, the US Immigration Customs Enforcement people that we know as ICE are buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of surveillance tools so that they can find the non-legal residents. So that would include social media monitoring tools, facial recognition software, license plate readers, and services to find people where people live and work.
So let me take you back to something I've been predicting for 10 years. If you think you can protect your privacy, you can't. Your privacy was always going to disappear and it wouldn't matter who's in charge. And the reason I say that is that the utility of taking your privacy away is just too high. So the government, whoever the government is, is going to say, well, you know, we really need to do this for the illegals. Then the next thing you know, you're gonna say, "Well, we have all these tools, why don't we also use it for the police force?" And I don't think it will ever matter if the Democrats or the Republicans are in charge. I think in every scenario, just the usefulness of taking away your privacy for law and order will be so high that you don't have a chance. It will just disappear. And I'm not saying that's a good idea. I'm just saying it's inevitable.
So if you're worried about it happening, maybe what you should worry about is not doing anything that can be discovered that you would not want to be discovered because a full lack of privacy is just guaranteed in the future. I mean, that's before you have a robot in your house. How much privacy could you have with a robot in your house?
All right, let me ask you this. Let's say you've got an Optimus robot and the police say if we could get that robot to spy on you that we could find out if you're doing anything bad, would Elon Musk say, "Nope. Even though you have a warrant, I will not turn on the ability to monitor people through the robot, which would be presumably not that hard." But even Elon Musk can't defy the Department of Justice. So if the Department of Justice says, "Oh yeah, this is a totally legitimate use of a warrant. You've got a robot. We can listen through the robot. We are ordering you to make that robot a spy." Would he do it? I don't know that he would have a choice. I think he would go to jail if he didn't do it. So yeah, as soon as there's a robot in every house, you'd better not break any laws.
All right. Surprisingly, there's a report that Zelenskyy is going to meet at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday to try to reach an agreement. Now, that surprises me because the most recent comment from the Russian envoys was that they didn't make any progress recently and they're not close to a deal. But there are some hints that they might be close to a deal. One of the hints is that Trump probably wouldn't take the meeting unless he thought it's close enough that he could push it over the edge. Now, he's an optimist. So just because he thinks they might be close, that doesn't mean they're close, but it's worth a try.
So remember, he's got Kushner and Witkoff working on this, and they're very good at what they do. So maybe we're in for a surprise. But according to Axios, here are some of the things that are the biggest sticking points and why we might be closer to a deal than we think. One is that Ukraine needed security guarantees. And apparently the US is willing to push some legislation through Congress that would give them security guarantees without NATO. Now, what would that look like? What exactly would a US security guarantee be unless it meant we would put boots on the ground if Russia got adventurous? Well, I don't know. But one of the things it could be is an open-ended, you know, we will respond. But what we would plan to do is give the Ukrainians the good weapons that we've never given them before.
So suppose we said, here's the deal, Russia. We have held back our best weapons because then it would look like we're part of the war if we give them the good stuff. But if we give them a security guarantee and you move on them militarily, we will instantly take the controls off and they can have everything except our nuclear weapons. So suddenly you will not be facing Ukrainian weapons, you'll be facing the most optimized American weapons. And if you look at what companies like Anduril are doing to make our weapons smart
Episode 3054 CWSA 12/26/25
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ouldn't handle the truth or to go further, democracy itself, it can't handle the truth. If you actually knew what was happening with your money, if you actually knew what the real data was, you probably would not be in a happy place.
So my take on the world is that there are functional lies, there's functional propaganda, and sometimes you need that to hold the country together. For example, is it good or bad for America if you spread the idea that Americans are better than other people, which is what I was raised to believe? Well, I don't think it's true that Americans are better than other people. But if you could convince me they were, would you get a better outcome? And the answer is maybe. Maybe.
So if you really drill down on all of our biggest issues, I think you'd find that there's a functional fiction for almost everything that works better than the truth. A functional fiction. So I could talk about that for a lot longer, but you could probably think of 10 examples yourself where you know something's not true, but it seems to hold people together, right? Think about it. That'll be your Christmas debate with your family. Do you want the truth or do you want a functional propaganda?
Well, I'll give you another example. So Trump is famously optimistic. He's kind of a salesperson. He uses hyperbole to try to push the country forward. So what would be better that every time Trump talked about the economy, he talked about what was wrong, but also what was right? Now compare that to what he actually does which is he always says things are going great country is really humming you know wait till next year it'll be even better. Which one of those is a functional propaganda versus the truth? The truth as close as you could come to it would be partly good partly bad but it wouldn't motivate you the same way. If you could convince the businesses that next year is going to be even if you don't know that to be true, it would convince them to invest. And then once they invest, it becomes true.
So I don't know how many examples I'd have to give you before I sell this to you, but optimism, which is not really always based on truth, is very functional, right? It's very functional. So I would argue that democracy and capitalism specifically require some kind of enlightened propaganda, meaning that you're doing it for people's best interests. You're not doing it for your selfishness, but you're doing it.
Well, let's talk about Venezuela and Maduro. Zero Hedge is reporting that Trump said that Maduro would be quote smart to get out. So he was asked about presumably asked about what next for Venezuela. I guess Russians are reportedly evacuating their diplomats. Do you think it's meaningful that Russia is evacuating their diplomats from Venezuela? Well, if you believe that Russia probably has some good sources in the United States, spies and otherwise, why would they be doing it now? If it's true, it might also be a fake report. But if they are getting rid of their diplomats, that would suggest that Russia expects some military action.
Now, here's what else Trump said about that. When asked about whether he should leave, Trump said that's his decision. But I think it would be smart for him to do that. It would be smart for him to do that. Maybe that's all Russia needed to hear because it sounds so warlike. Well, he doesn't have to, but be smart for him to do that. And then he says, Trump says, when asked about the possibility that the Venezuelan military might try to put up some resistance should the US military get more aggressive. Trump said, if he plays tough, it'll be the last time he's able to do so. So he's basically said if you resist us that he'll jail you or kill you. Now, he doesn't have to say it out loud, but that's what that means. Obviously, you know, it's the last time he'd be able to do it.
So what I'm wondering is, is the real strategy here that Trump is trying to scare Maduro into leaving? Do you think he can simply frighten him into leaving and never have to fire a shot? Probably not because I think Maduro would at the very least need to have someplace to go that would not be worse than putting up a stand. So we don't know if he has any place to go. But it does look like Trump would let him leave alive.
So here's the test. The test is this. Is Trump trying to win a war without firing a shot? And I would say the answer is yes. He's trying to win the war that ha
Episode 3052 CWSA 12/24/25
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ng what is called the pre-show. And if you didn't know it, I do a pre-show before this show. The pre-show is only for subscribers of the Locals platform. And one of the Locals people asked me how do you learn to change your mind and how do you recognize people who can do it? And I thought that that's a really good question. How do you learn to change your mind?
And here's the reframe. I'm reasonably sure that part of the reason, it's not the 100% the reason, but a big part of the reason people don't want to change their mind is that it would look like weakness and maybe you would look like, well, you're not so smart, you know, because you were wrong. So the reframe is this. There's something I can guarantee you as an official smart person.
First of all, would you accept my starting assumption that I am a smart person? True. You know, even if you hate me, would you agree that I would be classified as a smarter person? And so I'm going to talk as an official smart person. Nothing is smarter than being able to change your mind. So instead of thinking of your ability to change your mind as a weakness, you should think of it as a strength, almost a superpower.
You've seen me change my mind in front of you how many times? I mean, how many times have you seen me change my mind? A few, right? Did I ever look like I got weaker? Did it make me look stupid? Not at all. You probably said to yourself, "Wow, I wish I could have done that." You might have said, "Oh, that was probably pretty hard to change your mind."
So once you realize that changing your mind, assuming you have reasons for it, is recognized by other smart people, and this is the key, it's not recognized this way by dumb people, but do you care what dumb people think? You don't care what dumb people think. If you want to be impressive, the only people that matter are smart people. If smart people say, "Whoa, there's somebody who can change their mind," that's a superpower. You come out way ahead.
So I think that people mistakenly believe that when I change my mind, I'm experiencing some kind of sacrifice. I'm not. I'm experiencing bragging. It's closer to narcissism, you know, because I'm basically showing off. Look, I can change my mind. So I've never once in my life, not once, did anybody give me a hard time for changing my mind, but a lot of times people have given me credit for changing my mind. It really is a one-way street.
So the answer is reframe it from, oh no, it's not a weakness to change your mind. It is a superpower.
Now the second part of the question was how can you recognize this superpower in other people? And unfortunately I think the only way is to observe it. So if you observe them changing their mind, you should immediately bump up your impression of their mental capacity. You might even mention, you know, that's impressive. Changed your mind.
So that's your reframe of the day.
So yesterday you remember I made a big deal about the talent stacks of a few people, primarily Akira The Don, who's released his Meaningwave music. Well, he followed up with me and this is fascinating to give me a list of his actual talents because the one thing I could tell just by observing, I have no musical ability whatsoever but even I could observe that whatever he was doing, creating this mix of podcast voices including mine with musical beats, however he was pulling this off had to be a combination of a wide range of talents.
But he gave me a list of his actual talents and I thought this is so interesting. I just have to read it to you. So apparently when he was young, as young as seven, he was already making mixtapes. All right. If you've been making mixtapes since you were seven, you know, that's a talent. He was a DJ. And as he points out, if you're a disc jockey, you get this sense of how music affects people physically. That's a good one. If you've experienced live what kind of music has what kind of effect on people's bodies like a DJ would. Wow. What a talent.
He was a rapper for years, over a decade. So he says it gave me a weapons-grade sense of rhythm. You could observe that. I wondered where that came from when I was observing it but he had a decade of practice. He was an ad music composer. So he learned to produce in any genre. He did music production. He was a music journalist and he used to interview people which was helpful for him to go through his podcast and transcripts and pick out the vital points. He was a comic artist. I didn't even remember this, but he does his own artwork. So his album covers are his own artwork. That's a hell of a talent. Of course I'm biased.
He knows video editing. He learned web design. He learned marketing. And he adds to his list that he's been a voracious reader since he was three. And that allowed him to delve into the philosophical writings of people and just be aware of more types of human thought because they just read more than other people.
So I hope that's as interesting to you as it is to me. I find that fascinating. So thanks, Akira The Don. If you want to see what we're talking about just Google Akira The Don and my name or Meaningwave, one word, and you'll find his product.
Well, there's another UFO sighting. Apparently, according to the New York Post, a pilot saw a silver canister that was floating off the airplane's, I don't know, it was floating at the same speed as the airplane. And there's an audio of the air traffic controllers talking to the pilot. And you know what's missing? You won't believe this, but it does not include a grainy video. So the pilots, there obviously there were two of them, were sitting there observing a UFO that they believed was a silver canister that was matching their speed and not connected to anything. And neit
Episode 3050 CWSA 12/22/25
