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In parallel pleasure, the dopamine of the day thing makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It's going to happen right now.
Go.
Oh god, that was good.
Sometimes it's really, really good.
And today it's great.
I anticipate some good luck coming for all of you.
Uh, you don't all watch the pre-show.
I do a little pre-show for subscribers and locals.
And every morning I take three putts from 15 feet.
I've got a little indoor putting green.
And, uh, yesterday I made all three.
Now from that distance, according to the Chad GPT, there's a one in five chance that even a professional would make a 15 foot putt.
So yesterday I made three in a row.
So that would be, you know, one-fifth times one-fifth times one-fifth.
Kind of unusual.
This morning, I made three more in a row.
So that makes six in a row on video.
Which, if I calculated it right, the odds of doing that are 1 in 15,000.
But I pulled it off live.
So we'll see what happens tomorrow.
But the point is, it's a lucky time.
So it's probably not just me.
I feel like there's some luck in the air.
Something's brewing.
Do you feel it?
Yeah.
Something big is happening.
I just don't know what it is.
Something good and big is coming our way.
Maybe your way too.
So aren't you glad you came in this morning?
All right.
Well, so here's some technology news.
A company called Pudu.
From China.
It has a new robot.
It'll go 8 hours and it can lift 10 kilograms.
But it's another slow motion robot.
Do you know what I probably will never want as a slow motion robot?
I am slowly going to pick up this bottle of water.
And I will hand it to you.
And I'll be like, screw it!
Shut up!
I'll get the water myself.
Go, go wash the dishes.
Okay.
I will be back after spending 10 hours washing this one dish.
Fuck it.
I'll just wash it myself.
Clean the house.
Okay.
I will go dust so slowly that you wish you were killing yourself.
No, stop it.
I'll just dust the house myself.
You stupid slow robot.
That's how I feel like the first year of owning a robot will go.
I need a fast robot.
I don't need no slow robot.
Let me make that clear.
No slow robots.
California just signed a law, the governor signed it, to protect children from social media.
Now, this is one of those things where I say to myself, I'll bet you, I'll bet you this is one of those stories where it's hard to know really whether they did something good or bad.
Because there's probably like three layers to this that I don't understand.
But at the surface layer, I like the idea of protecting children from social media.
But what exactly did they do to make that happen?
Well, one of the things they did is, if it's a minor's account, you can't send them notifications without permission from a parent between 12 a.m.
and 6 a.m., which I don't mind.
Oh, and between 8 a.m.
and 3 p.m.
on weekdays, from September through May.
So basically, when kids are supposed to be sleeping or supposed to be in school, they can't give fed content.
It's not bad.
Not bad.
And there's some kind of limits to their addictive feed, except I don't know how anybody would define addictive.
Isn't everything that you like addictive?
If the social media sends you more of things that it knows you want to see, which is its entire point, isn't that addictive?
So I don't know how they can get rid of addictive feeds.
Well, in other news, ChatGPT has hired Johnny Ive, who is famous as the incredible designer who worked on the iPhone and other Apple products.
So apparently Chad GPT is making a device, some kind of a device.
We assume it's going to be something that would do some phone related tasks, but would it be related?
Would it be a phone?
Or would it be like a whole new idea that could do the phone stuff plus some extra stuff?
I wonder.
I've been saying for a while that where phones need to be is that when you pick up your phone, it's anybody's phone.
In other words, I could hand you my phone and when it comes on, it could look at your face instead of my face and it would become your phone.
So in other words, it would only get into your accounts But if I handed you my phone, it's just a blank screen and you just hold it at your face and it goes, boop.
And it pops up with basically your phone, you know, as, as stored in the cloud.
So, so the idea would be, it would be a cloud based phone, um, which only works if your internet is pretty complete, you know, cause it wouldn't work if you're not connected.
So I don't know.
We'll see if that's what, what, uh, Johnny Ive comes up with, but the fact that he's working on it and it's chat GPT.
Those are two really, really powerful things to put together.
So we'll see what comes to that.
According to The Guardian, there's a new study that links diet and metabolism to bipolar depression.
Now, they don't claim that every part of depression or bipolar depression can be cured by fixing your diet.
So I want to be clear, they're not saying it's just diet.
But in a study, about a third of the people who had bipolar depression had much better symptoms or lesser symptoms when they fixed their diet and went keto.
Now, I've been saying for some time, quite provocatively, that some percentage of all depression is related to your energy.
And that if you had high energy, you wouldn't be depressed.
And that the science of it has been at least partially backwards.
Now again, here's what I'm not saying.
I'm not saying that all depression is alike and that it's all related to energy.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that probably some percentage of it is just having low energy because you don't feel good.
And then that's going to make you depressed.
So it can be true that if you were depressed, it could make you feel like you have low energy.
I think that's well established, but it could also be true that it works the other way.
That if you have low energy, cause you're doing everything wrong, your diet's wrong, your exercise is wrong.
You don't have social interaction, all the things that would give you energy.
Um, I think that would probably take care of a third of it.
And that was about roughly what they found when they just fixed the diet.
A third of the people suddenly weren't so bipolar depressed.
Thank you, Paul.
I needed that.
All right.
So, um, let me say that again.
I've never personally, um, if you've experienced the same thing, if you've ever felt depressed, but you're not, you know, clinically a depressed person, wasn't it always associated with low energy?
Like every time.
And anytime your energy is high, you don't feel depressed.
So just be aware that working on your health and your energy might cure your depression.
You know, maybe one third of you, if you did everything right.
Maybe.
So I'm not your scientist or your doctor.
I'm just saying that if you're not working on your general physical health, your mental health isn't going to do well.
Here's a correction I would like to make.
To other people's work, not my own.
That's the best kind of correction.
I would like to now correct other people, not me.
But I've been hearing the reports of the government wasting $42 billion trying to give rural people internet connection, but not connecting a single person.
How many of you have heard that story?
That Biden-Harris got $42 billion Now, here's my clarification, I think.
and didn't get any internet connections. Now here's my clarification I think. When they say 42 billion was wasted, they don't mean it was spent, right? It wasn't wasted.
I believe it was not spent or, or some small amount of it was spent, but they didn't get to the point where they could connect anybody.
So is that, uh, does that track with what you believe?
It's not that they took $42 billion and spent it and it's all gone and we'll never give us anything.
But I think people talk about it that way.
I think rather 42 billion was budgeted.
But they were too incompetent, or there were too many regulations, or whatever it was, that they just didn't get anything done.
Is that how you understand it?
Because I've heard people in public refer to it as wasted, and I think rather it's just massive incompetence.
And, you know, the real heart of the story is that they didn't need to spend a penny.
They could have just said to Elon Musk, hey, what would it cost to have the government subsidize some rural people on your satellite?
And then he would say, here's a very reasonable price and you can all be up on it and working tomorrow.
And then they would say, wow, that's much better than 42 billion.
You mean you would only charge us, I'll just pick a number, 50 million a year or something?
And he would say, yeah, that's about right.
So that's what I think is happening.
There was another video of Kamala Harris giving a public speech in which she looked really, really inebriated, but the community notes are saying that it was fake.
So, it was slowed down or modified so it looked like she was really drunk, but maybe it was just the AI that faked it.
So, to my credit, Pat myself on the back here.
When I saw it, I did not necessarily believe it was true.
And so when I reposted it, I reposted it with the question, is this AI or is it real?
And then the answer came back, it was altered, it was AI.
So, here's my take on that.
If you can take a politician that people are very familiar with, Kamala Harris, And you can alter the video so it looks like she's drunk as a skunk and people can't tell it's altered.
That's a story.
So it would be a story if it were not altered because there she would be drunk as a skunk or inebriated in some way.
But since that wasn't true, you get to the next level of, well, isn't that interesting?
There's so many people looked at that and said, yeah, that's true.
Now imagine if you tried to do that with a Trump speech.
Take a Trump speech, then try to use AI to alter it so it sounds like, oh, make America great again!
You would instantly know that was fake.
Right?
Right?
You would know it with no doubt whatsoever.
Oh, he doesn't do those things.
He's been in public a billion times.
We would have seen it by now.
That's not real.
You would have known it.
But why is it that a faked video making Kamala Harris look drunk as a skunk in public, you couldn't tell if that was real?
See, that's the story.
The story is not that it's fake.
The story that a video of her looking drunk in public looks so real that we can't tell the difference.
Although, to be fair, I had some suspicion about that one.
So this is kind of a problem because I think it's important that people do see the videos where she does look legitimately like she's on something.
Now I'm not sure I would post any because now that I know somebody's finally did what you expected, somebody made a fake one, I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable reposting anything.
All right.
on that topic from now on.
So it makes you even wonder if it was done by, you know, the Harris campaign to embarrass the people who repost them.
If so, it'd be clever.
It would have worked.
All right.
The rabbit hole account on X reposted a graph that showed that only 3.4% of journalists are Republicans as of 2022.
I think that means based on donations, I'm not sure.
Either donations or registered, but somehow they know.
And what do you think?
3.4% are Republicans.
Now, here's my take on that.
If you had a press organization that was, say, 50-50 Republicans and Democrats, and then one of you put out something that's just propaganda for one side or the other, how would that work out for you?
Not well.
Because half of your company would say, what the hell is this?
This isn't news, this is propaganda.
You should be fired.
So if it were 50-50, you wouldn't be able to get away with pure propaganda, as we see every day on what we call the press, but isn't really the press.
But suppose it's not 50-50.
Let's say it's 60-40.
Can you get away with propaganda if it's 60-40?
A real clear majority of people on one side.
And the answer is probably not.
Probably not.
Because if 40% of the people are saying, you know, I can't even work here if you're going to just print bullshit.
Right?
40% would be way too much.
You couldn't get away with just being a propaganda network.
If 40% of your employees are like, Hey, what, what the hell?
I, I came here to do news.
You're just doing propaganda now.
But what happens when you get above 85% are on the same team?
Once you reach 85% are on the same team, you're only propaganda and you don't have an option to do balanced news.
If you tried to do some balanced news in an organization where 85% of them thought Trump was Hitler, you would be fired for being balanced.
You wouldn't be able to get away with it.
So I suggest the following.
That we could come up with a working definition of whether a press entity is news or propaganda based on the percentage that lean in one direction.
And that you could be pretty sure that you had gotten it right.
So you show me an entity with 85% people clearly Democrat, and I will tell you no doubt about it, this is not a news organization.
No doubt about it.
Like 100% certain, this is not a legitimate news organization.
But you show me an entity with legitimately something closer to 50-50, even if it's 60-40.
I mean, that would be close enough for me.
Then I'm going to say, that's probably news.
Maybe not every single story is just where you want it, but that's probably a news organization that's struggling with being unbiased, but they're news.
Don't you think that definition would work perfectly?
Why do they get to tell us their news?
Why don't we get to decide whether they're news?
And I would say that we should just have a percentage and say that if you're above, let's pick a percentage, 80%?
Does that sound fair?
If you're above 80%, it doesn't matter which direction.
So you could apply the same thing to conservative outlets.
If you had a conservative publication that was 80% conservative, same thing.
Don't you think you could claim that, well, 80%, I'm not sure I'd call that news.
Because even if the 80% are really, really dedicated to giving you unbiased news, At the very least, they're going to be leaving out context and stories that maybe just didn't hit them as exciting and somebody else might have.
So you think 65 to 70 would be enough to say that you're not news anymore?
I think if 30% of your employees don't like what you're doing, you've got a problem.
I think around 80% you're guaranteed to be propaganda.
Guaranteed.
You just, there's just no way around it.
So that's what I'd say.
I'd say, I think I'd do something like 50-50 definitely news, 80-20 definitely not news, but somewhere in between would be like a little gray area.
You could rate, you know, like a maybe, yes, no, and maybe.
Well, here's something I didn't know was legal, but, uh, Republican Senator Rick Scott, and he's being joined with, I guess, Marco Rubio, also Republican.
From Florida, they're offering a $100 million reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro.
Now, if our federal government put out some kind of a reward for somebody that was an international criminal, I'd say, huh, that's weird, but, you know, we've done it before.
I mean, we did it with, what's his name in Iraq, Saddam Hussein.
So it's not the strangest thing that would ever happen if it's the federal government.
But where does a state get off doing international negotiations?
What do I not know about this story?
Because to me this is illegal.
What am I missing?
How can a state put a bounty on somebody's head in another country?
How is that legal?
Does anybody know how that's legal?
Now, I'm not opposed to it.
I don't think it'll make any difference.
So being opposed to it or not opposed to it doesn't make any difference, I don't think.
But it doesn't feel like it's legal.
It doesn't feel like it should be legal.
But probably is.
I mean, I can't imagine, it's hard for me to imagine that two senators would not know that something was illegal.
They would know, but it's kind of surprising, isn't it?
Kind of surprising.
Well, speaking of Venezuela, the Chicago gangs are apparently having a tough time because the Venezuelans are trying to move in and steal their drug dealing stuff.
Do you remember what, uh, Something I told you a while ago, Peter Zayin said, so I don't have any independent corroboration, this is just something Peter Zayin said on a video, that the reason you don't hear much about the LA black gangs, you know, the Crips and the Bloods, it's not that they don't exist, it's that their operation was basically taken over by the Mexican cartels.
And that the way they took over the businesses, they just murdered, they just murdered the black gang members until they controlled the territory.
Now, I don't know if that's true, but I do know, I don't hear much about black gang members in LA, do you?
When was the last time you heard about a black Gang member problem in LA.
I feel like that used to be more news and just sort of, it's like it doesn't exist anymore.
So my question is, is there some possibility that the Venezuelans are just going to take all of that illegal business from the black gangs in Chicago?
You know, life is so unpredictable.
Who saw this coming?
Now the Chicagoans, including the gang members, Apparently you're quite upset that Venezuelans are coming in not only getting government assistance.
Imagine this, you're a black citizen in Chicago, and let's say you're in the lower income level.
And you find out that your government is giving money that you think could have gone to you.
I mean, if the government had extra money for poor people, why is it going to the Venezuelan migrants instead of you?
That's what you'd think.
Reasonably.
That'd be a reasonable thing to think.
And then, what if you were also feeling that because you're low-income and systemic racism and all the rest, that your best opportunity for making money was illegal?
Selling drugs.
Now you'd have the government that's taking what feels like your money and giving it to the Venezuelans, while the Venezuelans are literally taking your illegal jobs Which you might think are your best option because the legal stuff isn't going to work out for you for one reason or another.
Things might be really coming to a head.
There might be some, we could be on the cusp of some, you know, murdering among the criminal elements like we've never seen before.
So as some point, the Venezuelan gangs might try to just try to wipe out the black criminal element and just take over the business.
So I don't think we fully understand how violent this could get.
Could get.
All right.
Here's a new story that, according to the AP, there are 98,000 Arizonans whose citizenship hadn't been confirmed that will be allowed to vote.
So the Arizona Supreme Court said that even though we don't know 98,000 people in Arizona, we don't know if they're citizens, they will be allowed to vote.
Now, our election system is just a joke at this point.
It's just a joke.
And the funny thing is that if you don't follow the news that I follow, you know, cause people send me stories they think I'm interested in, and I am interested in our election secure.
So I see, I see five of these a day, five a day.
Legitimate stories.
This one's from the Associapress AP.
And how am I supposed to process this?
This feels like the AP is telling me that the government of one of our, you know, key states in the election is going to ignore the Constitution and just let anybody vote who signed up or something.
I mean, it looks like nobody's even trying.
It looks like the government just said, ah, screw it.
Anybody who wants to vote, come on in.
I don't even understand what I'm looking at.
Like, how can this even be happening?
It doesn't feel like any of it's legitimate.
When I see something like this, I think, okay, the Arizona Supreme Court, oh, I guess they're all owned by the cartels or owned by the Democrats or they're blackmailed.
But I can't think of any, you know, non-corrupt reason for what I'm seeing.
Can you?
Can you think of a non-corrupt explanation for why they'd let 98,000 people who can't prove that they're citizens vote in a swing state?
There's no reason other than corruption that I can think of.
Usually I at least know the argument on the other side.
What's the argument on the other side of this?
Because they try to pull the voter suppression.
Oh, you're trying to keep black people from voting.
There's no evidence of that at all.
No evidence.
Now, if somebody had some evidence, I would quickly embrace that point of view based on evidence.
I don't, I don't oppose it on any kind of philosophical level.
You're going to have to show me something, but we've still never seen a single black citizen of America who wanted to vote, who couldn't figure it out and couldn't get an ID.
Not one.
In years.
Years have passed, and we haven't found one.
And the news will still report it like that's a legitimate reason?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you could disagree or agree, but they've got a point.
You don't want to disenfranchise all these, you know, voters.
What voter?
We haven't found one disenfranchised voter ever?
Now keep in mind, they have to be people who can't get an ID, but are still interested and knowledgeable enough about politics to vote.
Zero.
That Venn diagram is no people.
None.
And we're all supposed to pretend like they exist or something.
No, I'm not going to pretend they exist.
Unless you can show me one.
Show me one.
Just one.
We got lots of people in the country.
Yep.
One.
One would be good.
Just one.
All right.
I've got a new tell for somebody being either brainwashed or being the brainwasher.
So you can't tell, because they would use the same words.
The brainwasher would inject a word into the brainwashed, so then they'd both be using the word.
So you can't tell necessarily.
You know, at least on first look, you can't tell, is this a brainwasher or brainwashed?
But they use the same words.
And here's the new one.
Useful idiot of Putin.
The useful idiot thing?
Now, if you were looking at all of the policies and problems of the country, and you were looking at what Trump offered, and you were looking at what Kamala Harris offered, why would you bring up the useful idiot of Putin concept?
The only reason you'd bring up something that dumb Is that you didn't have any real reasons to prefer Harris over Trump.
If you had a real reason, you would mention it.
You wouldn't have to make up something that sounds so dumb, and they say it every election, and everybody says it about both sides to the point where it has no meaning whatsoever.
Well, twice today, I saw the same individual on Doesn't Matter Who responding to a pro-Trump post by reminding us About that he could be a, quote, useful idiot of Putin.
Now, you've also seen, probably, if you're on social media, that lately a lot of accusations about Trump from the 70s have popped up.
Has anybody noticed that?
They'll talk about the Central Park Five.
Or they'll talk about the housing case where there was a housing discrimination case with one of his companies.
By the way, if somebody brings that up, um, I think, so there was a Trump property, I think it was the seventies, uh, that was the management team was discriminating against black applicants.
Now I believe that they pled guilty or, you know, the company basically said, okay, well, you know, I'm sorry, we'll stop doing that.
Probably paid a fine.
What was never demonstrated, as far as I know, I'll take a fact check on this if you know something different.
What was never demonstrated is that Trump had anything to do with it.
It was his company, so it's his responsibility.
So, you know, the buck stops with him.
But it was never demonstrated that he knew that his management team was discriminating.
Now, is it plausible that they would have discriminated without getting orders from the top?
In the 70s?
Yes, it is.
Yeah, you wouldn't need any orders from the top in the 70s to do some rental discrimination.
Probably any white people that they hired for that job would have just sort of done it automatically.
And in those days, it wasn't always discriminating against, let's say, the ability of the renter to pay.
In those days, the discrimination would be as much about not wanting the other people to discriminate and not want to live in your building.
So it wasn't so much what you thought about the applicant, it was about what you thought the other people who were applicants would think about the applicants.
Still illegal.
Still immoral, unethical, don't do it.
But there is a difference.
I mean, if you want to be accurate about it, there's no evidence that Trump told anybody to discriminate based on race.
That has never been presented.
Nobody's ever claimed it.
Nobody's ever said, I talked to him and he said it.
So I don't know.
I don't know.
But beyond that, I have a different standard, which I like to apply, which is if it happened 20 years ago, And especially if there's some court that dealt with it.
I don't care.
And I apply the same standard.
I applied it to Hillary Clinton as well.
You know, people would say 20 years ago or 30 years ago, she may or may not have done this to which I say, I don't care.
30 years ago, everybody was a different person.
Yeah.
So show me what you've done lately and I'll judge you on that.
But 20 years ago, 40 years ago, Do you care about what happened 40 years ago?
Well, so my point there is not to defend any of those.
So I'm not defending anything that anybody did back then.
What I am doing is saying that if the Democrats feel that they have to bring up stuff from 40 years ago, it means they've given up on comparing policies today.
You would never dig down 40 years ago.
If you had something today, because everybody knows that what's happening today is more relevant to everybody.
So I, it feels like the Democrats are feeling some kind of, um, like they're giving up or they're desperate to find something that they can talk about that isn't obviously better for Trump than, than Harris.
Anyway.
Trump did what I think is a quite clever thing.
You know, he was taking a lot of heat on the hoax that Trump was behind Project 2025, which was done by entirely different people, although they had some overlap with his past administration.
But he wasn't involved with it, doesn't endorse it, but it's a little more radical than His policies, so the Harris team is trying to tag him for being responsible for it, which he isn't.
So instead of defeating that hoax, which is impossible in today's media environment, he decided to introduce one of his own.
I love this more than I can explain.
Because in the real world, if you try to just say, oh, that's a hoax, let me explain very clearly, you can even check it yourself.
I was not involved in writing it, and you can look at my policies in public, and you can see that not once have they ever been, you know, overlapped with them on some of these things.
On some they do overlap.
And you'd think that the facts would be enough to make that story go away, right?
But because the media is a propaganda machine, he doesn't have the option of debunking a hoax.
Because they won't let him.
The propaganda machine won't do it.
If they were news, they would.
But since they're only propaganda, he has no way to debunk a hoax.
So what did he do instead?
He created his own hoax that's a direct counter to it.
He created Kamala's Project 2025.
So he says that Kamala has a Project 2025, and that She wants to, quote, abolish ICE, open the border, defund the police, release violent offenders, eliminate middle class tax cuts, ban fracking and fossil fuel usage, confiscate guns from legal gun owners, take away health care plans for people, taxpayer-funded transgender surgery for illegal aliens.
Do you know what's interesting about that list?
I think it's almost all fake.
I don't think there's anything that's true on the list, which is just what they were doing to him.
Now, what are you going to do about that?
So now you're the news.
Let's say you're MSNBC.
What you want to report is that Trump's allegations of Kamala Harris's Project 2025 is based on things that you sort of suspect she might do, but they're opposite of what she says her policy is.
So her policy is, That she's not going to ban fracking.
So Trump puts on her Project 2025 bullshit hoax list, you're going to ban fracking.
Now, it's based on a similar idea that even though she says, even though she says, I'm not going to ban it, in the past she said she would.
So you think, well, her real personality is that she would.
So, you know, it's not that much of a reach to say that she's lying about what she would do.
But if you're going to take the standard that Trump says, these are my policies and they're different from project 2025 and nobody's going to pay attention to that, then I think it's actually brilliant and hilarious that he took all of the things that they're doing to Harris, which are opposite of what she says she's going to do.
Well, you could imagine maybe she's not quite honest about it.
And he's just throwing it back at him.
So instead of trying to make her hoaxes go away, which can't happen in the propaganda press environment, he simply matched her hoaxes.
He just matched her hoax.
I don't know if this will work, but I love the fact that they can't debunk his hoaxes without kind of accidentally showing that it's similar to what she's doing to him.
Kind of brilliant.
Kind of brilliant.
I like everything about this.
So, again, I'd like to say that this is the first time I've seen where both of the campaigns are A+.
The candidates, you know, are the candidates.
But, wow!
If I'm just looking at the skill level of the Harris campaign, even if you don't like the candidate, The skill level of the campaign is just so good, even when they're lying.
They lie really, really well.
And then Trump's campaign, again, you know, everybody has a stumble now and then, but I think that they're A+.
This is just kind of brilliant.
Well, we have to talk about Bill Maher again, because I forgot to mention he had Bjorn Lomborg on his show on Friday.
Now, Bjorn has been on his show before, for years actually, but here's what I feel I'm sensing that's different.
The Washington Post just did a big story in which they were going to show the temperatures of the climate across the eons, you know, going way back into the future.
And they were surprised to learn that despite our high levels of CO2 from man-made sources, That the temperature is actually kind of lowish historically.
That we're not anywhere close to any kind of like historical earth high.
Now, because the Washington Post are mostly idiots, I don't think they presented the counter-argument against the CO2 is a hoax.
The counter-argument is that you can't compare the current to the past.
And the reason is that there were lots of other things that were different.
For example, the intensity of the sun and other atmospheric things were different.
So the argument would be that although there might've been, you know, different CO2 and different temperature, you can't really compare it to the present and make any kind of reasonable conclusion.
I actually agree with that.
So I think the Washington Post is wrong about climate change being a problem, but just to show how dumb they are, When they sort of indicated that maybe it was a little bit debunked with their own work, their own new work of debunking it was also moronically incomplete.
So I think they got it wrong on both sides.
I think they got it wrong about the level of the risk, and then when they looked at the temperature over time, they were idiots and they couldn't figure out how to do a good job on that, so they acted like CO2 is the only thing that changed, or temperature is the only thing that changed.
The two things that changed.
And that's just not the case.
There are a bunch of other things that were different.
I'm a little speculating here because I didn't read the whole article, but I do think that they're not qualified to tell you what the temperature is.
So here's what I think.
I think maybe Bill Maher has seen some of these stories about the climate risk being overdone.
And he had Bjorn Lomborg on whose story is not that the temperature isn't rising and not that humans don't have something to do with it.
But rather that we've completely miscalculated how bad it would be.
And you would add to that that there's more greening and apparently our corn and rice yields worldwide are way better than they've ever been because of CO2.
So we would actually be starving now without much more CO2 than we had.
It's the CO2 that's the only reason we can eat.
I mean, imagine if we didn't have corn and rice.
I mean, we're talking about huge Huge increases in crop yields that seem directly related to the CO2.
We would be starving if we didn't fertilize the air, I guess.
Now, of course, there may be downsides as well, and the argument with climate is not that it's instantly going to kill you.
But that it might even be good and good and good for the farmers until it reaches some turning point where you can't get back.
That would be the argument.
Now, I don't think that's likely.
Neither does Lomborg.
But for, I think it's notable that Bill Maher, a big green guy, I guess, would have him on, just so you can see the alternate argument.
And I think he listened to it.
And I think he's sort of on the path to figuring out that climate change might have been like the pandemic, might have been like everything else we've been told, a lie.
And I think Bill Maher is suspecting it.
Now the other thing that gives me this little hint...
Do you remember years ago, he was famously, he got a Prius and he was all, you know, Hey, you know, even a celebrity like me will just drive a Prius because we've got to save the environment.
And now he says it was just the worst car and admits that the, the electric cars have, have problems with, you know, rare earth minerals and, you know, maybe they're not so good for the environment after all.
And then he also said he got a Tesla after that and he hated it.
So he's basically said that the buying of tiny vehicles that are good for the environment didn't really work out for him.
While he's got Bjorn Lomborg on, saying these green cars might be as much bad as good, depending on who's calculating the bad and the good.
And I think he's signaling That he's evolving on the, at least the risk level and what you should do about it for the environment.
So I can't read his mind.
It would be unfair for me to say, I think he's changed his mind, but the signaling and the foreshadowing is definitely there.
And I think that he may be having, if you took Trump out of the news, I feel like Bill Maher would be a Republican.
Or no, he wouldn't be a Republican, that's too far.
I feel like he would be close to it.
You know, more like an independent who's not, not batshit crazy.
So I think it's really only Trump that keeps him from saying, you know, I'm not even so sure about this climate change stuff.
He just wouldn't want to agree with Trump.
That would be too far.
But I feel like he's leaning that way, or at least he's open to the arguments because he had Lomborgan, which again, he's had, he's had him on in the past before.
Cats on the roof.
So Trump, I've said this before, does not get enough credit for the quality of his writing.
And it's because, you know, the press wants to paint him as a sixth grade vocabulary, you know, crazy person.
But, um, I just love his writing when he does these extended posts on truth and he was getting on also more for his guests, but let me just read it.
And I'm going to tell you a writer's way of looking at things.
So when I was first selected to be a syndicated cartoonist, my editor was the first person in the world to look at my writing and say, Hey, I think you have Commercial level writing ability just in the context of a comic strip and here's how she explained it to me She said your writing is voice voicey like voice and I didn't know what that meant.
So she explained it's voicey meaning that you can tell that it came from one personality so my writing displays my personality and More than other writing does.
A lot of people, if they're not professional writers, they're not good at it, they'll write in a way that looks like everybody else who's trying to write.
You'll see no personality, you'll just see that they're struggling to put words in the right order so that they can say something.
When you read Trump's anything, you can hear his voice, and you so hear his personality.
That's voicey.
Voice-y for non-fiction stuff.
If you're writing for fiction, you want the characters to be the voice.
That's different.
If you're writing for non-fiction, let's say career advice, politics, anything that's based on facts, you want it to be voice-y because that's what makes it fascinating and interesting and it holds your attention.
And what holds your attention is what influences you.
So it'd be one thing if you said, oh, that's interesting, but then you didn't remember it.
If you remember it, and especially if you read it more than once because just the way it was said, and then you post it because you thought it was funny, that's the ultimate writing.
The ultimate writing is interesting, you'll remember it, and you'll share it with somebody.
You can't beat that.
And Trump does that by being the ultimate voicey candidate.
Now I'm going to show you what I mean by simply reading a lengthy post he did on Truth.
So listen to it, not for the perfect grammar.
You can't tell, but maybe there's a typo in here.
Don't care.
Good writing is not about the grammar.
The editors fix your grammar.
It's not about your typos.
The editors fix your typos.
It's not even your job.
You know, you do the first draft, but somebody else does that stuff.
So see how voicey this is, all right?
So Donald Trump talking about Mara.
He says, The ratings-challenged Bill Maher, on his increasingly boring show on HBO, is really having a hard time coping with Trump Derangement Syndrome, all in caps.
He is a befuddled mess, sloppy and tired, and every conversation with B- and C-list guests seems to start with, or revert back to, me.
This week he had, quote, dumb-as-a-rock bimbo Stephanie Ruhle from MSDNC on the show, along with a Trump-hating loser, Bret Stephens, who seemed totally confused and unsure of himself, very much like Mar himself.
Stephen should find himself another line of work, because I'm driving the failing New York Times absolutely crazy, and it is very hard, perhaps impossible, for a writer to write well of me without suffering the wrath of the degenerate editors who, with a push from the top, have gone insane.
They apologized to the readers in 2016 for their complete and total miss, and they'll do it again in November.
The failing New York Times has badly run, quote, newspaper that has totally lost its way.
Put it to sleep.
Ha ha ha.
Put it to sleep.
Put it to sleep.
Who says that?
So if you want to know, if you want just one example out of 50 from that, what makes it a voicey?
Put it to sleep.
Put it to sleep?
Who says that?
Who would ever use those words in this sense on that?
Put it to sleep.
It's like a dog.
Just put it to sleep.
Anyway, so have I made my point?
So my point is that every word he writes, you see him, you feel him, you can hear him, and you remember him, and then you want to repost it.
That is the ultimate, the ultimate great writing.
If you're still on the, he had a typo and he spelled a word wrong, oh, you're missing the show.
You are missing the show, if it's the grammar you're worried about.
Anyway, best writer in the public sphere, in my opinion.
So, Boeing.
So, as you know, Boeing's been having a hard time with its Starliner and its various aircraft and stuff.
And, you know, some of its equipment's not working late and cost overruns and stuff like that.
The Starliner cost, uh, there was a 1.6 billion in overruns and, uh, they've had problems with it.
And as you know, it's the one that got stranded the astronauts on the, on the international space station.
So the, uh, the head of its space and defense unit has been fired.
So the, the person who was in charge of Boeing, uh, not all of Boeing, but was in charge of the space and defense unit just got fired.
Wow.
Now, there's a picture of the individual who is a black American.
What do you think the pundits are saying about this situation?
Well, quite unfairly, they're calling him a DEI hire.
Now, I have no evidence to suggest that anything that happened bad with the Starliner had anything to do with this one person, even though he was the boss.
And certainly I have no evidence to suggest there's any kind of DEI.
In other words, was he promoted because he's black as opposed to the best person for the job?
I have no information that would suggest he wasn't the best person for the job.
So I'm going to take what I call the Glenn Lowry frame on this.
If you don't know Glenn Lowry, he's a very smart economist, I think is his background.
And he talks a lot about DEI.
He is black.
American.
And his take, if I can accurately summarize it, is that DEI obviously isn't good for the people who were passed over because they're the wrong race.
Right?
That's obvious.
If you're Chinese-American and you got passed over for somebody else because you're the wrong DEI, that's bad.
Right?
So, Glenn would see that.
But he would also say it's bad for blacks Who get promoted because they're trying to satisfy DEI.
And he says that that makes his own accomplishments, as well as anybody who legitimately has credibility and competence, that anytime anybody black accomplishes anything, it's going to still look like it was a DEI situation.
And it's humiliating and degrading and patronizing and all of that.
So I'm going to take his view, which I think is, is quite complete because it shows both sides of the situation, which is always a, you know, it's always going to be a better than taking half a side and thinking you're done.
So I have no, no information that would suggest there was anything wrong with this one individual hire.
But as Glenn Lowry would point out, this is a disaster for black Americans who are good at their jobs.
It's a disaster because people are people.
They're going to look at this and they're going to draw their conclusions that it's another DEI hire.
It's a disaster.
If you're a capable, hardworking black American, you're just trying to make it on the same rules that everybody else is trying to make it.
And let's say it's working out for you.
And then people are going to look at you and they're going to look at this Boeing guy and they're going to say, huh, Boeing guy.
DEI hire?
I wonder if there's more of this?
So, yes.
Glenn Lowry, you are correct.
This is a disaster for the reputation of capable black people in this country.
All right.
Mike Cernovich said something that, speaking of being voicey, Cernovich is the ultimate voicey poster.
You can see his personality in everything he does.
And that is, again, that's the best writing.
That's just the best.
He said this about the debt.
He said, the country will eventually have to default.
You know it.
I know it.
They know it.
What happens when a nuclear power says we decide not to pay?
Who knows?
We will find out soon.
So I agree with every word of that.
But the only thing I can add to this is, the reason that we don't talk about it, and the reason that he can say, Mike can say, you know it, I know it, they know it, and that rings true, but yet, it's not the number one story.
The number one story should be that the United States is getting ready to default on $35 trillion worth of debt, and there's nothing that can stop it.
That should be the biggest story.
But we're going to pretend that this is like Biden and his mental competence.
Remember when we all had to pretend that he was a little bit like a real person and he could do things?
And it was obvious he couldn't.
And now we're pretending that Kamala Harris has capability and she has what it takes to be president.
We all know that she doesn't.
The Democrats know it.
We know it.
The press clearly knows it, and we're going to kind of pretend that we don't notice.
So we have three things that everybody could see that we sort of collectively agreed to act like we don't see it.
So Biden's brain, Kamala Harris's competence, and the national debt.
We all see all three of those things for sure, like no doubt about it.
But they're not the big stories, like until there's something that forces it, like the debate with Trump and Biden that just forced the issue.
But what is going to make us talk honestly about the debt?
There is no solution to the debt.
And by the way, if we defaulted on the debt, it wouldn't even solve the problem.
If we're adding to it at $2 trillion, well, we wouldn't be able to borrow, so I guess we wouldn't be able to add to it.
So basically, the whole government would fall apart, because so much of it is based on borrowing.
Here's the only way I can imagine that we could survive this.
Number one, you gotta get the interest rates down, because the interest on the debt is bigger than, I think, the military spending at this point.
So, could Trump do anything, for example, that would lower the interest rates?
Well, yes, and maybe just the economy can do that.
So it's possible interest rates can come down, and that would make a big difference, but not by itself.
What happens if you got the GDP up to 4%?
Well, you might be able to do that because this will be the second or third time in the industrial human age in which something special was happening.
So I always say that Bill Clinton was one of my favorite presidents because the economy was good.
But you have to say that he came in during the dot com boom.
If the dot-com boom hadn't happened, all by itself, had nothing to do with Clinton, would he have had the great economy?
No.
But that was a once-ever situation where things boomed like we haven't seen boom in our lifetime.
Now, prior to that, many years ago, there was the Industrial Revolution.
So, if you looked at all of human history, the Industrial Revolution didn't take much time, but it was this rare time when we became industrialized.
So, you can imagine the GDP would be zooming during something like that.
You can imagine the GDP would be unusually zooming during a Uh, internet.com takeoff.
And you could imagine that the age of robots and nuclear power and, uh, AI would be one of those periods.
So we might be into a 10 year period where a 4% GDP, which I would consider impossible under normal circumstances.
Yeah.
You don't just get the 4% GDP that basically it doesn't happen.
But you could, if something really unusual is happening by itself in the outside environment, such as AI and robots, electric cars, self-driving cars.
These are once-ever things.
There will only be one time when everybody wants to get rid of their car for a self-driving car.
There was only one time everybody wanted to get rid of their regular phone for a smartphone.
These don't come along.
So, you know, luck is more important than skill for a lot of this economic stuff.
And it could be that whoever is president next could be president when there's this economic boom like we've never seen, and we could be over 4%.
Now, you need the 4% growth.
But you'd also need not a lot of unemployment.
So if the robots and the AI take too many jobs, well, we've got a whole new problem, and it's a big one.
So could we navigate that?
Maybe.
You can navigate that by building new cities.
Because the people who don't have jobs say, hey, why don't you move to this new city that Trump is building on federal land?
And they're looking for lots of workers and you don't have a skill, but you know, we'll train you.
We'll teach you how to do this stuff because you'll just be, you know, carrying things or mixing concrete or something.
So we'll just teach you how to do that.
So you could imagine that we could, you could imagine some way that the unemployed would get quickly redeployed.
Now, the fact that we're bringing in all of these migrants and part of the story that you don't hear a lot about, Is that I think a lot of them are being employed.
And I don't know enough about that.
So here's my question.
Are there so many companies that need low end employees and can't get them?
That something like, I'll just make up this number.
So this is a question, not a statement.
Would it be true that 80% of the migrants who are coming in through asylum, so they technically would be legal.
Do 80% of them just get a job working on a farm or an assembly line because we didn't have enough people to do those jobs?
Or is it 20%?
Because if only 20% of them are coming in and getting jobs, that is a disaster at a level that I can't even comprehend.
If 80% of them Are coming in and although they don't make much money and, you know, 10 of them have to live in an apartment, but they got jobs.
Is that the case?
If 80% of them have jobs, it's a whole different situation.
And it also suggests that if we curbed immigration, we might find a way for people who lose their jobs to find a way, you know, not in the lowest of the low paid jobs, ideally.
So then the other thing would be re-engineering the government.
As you know, and Thomas Massey points this out, the way the government does budgets are they say, how about making a cut in this budget?
And then all hell breaks loose because there's somebody who's protecting every budget.
So you can't really cut any budgets.
The way a business would run would be they'd say, Um, every department tell me how much you need and you're going to have to argue your case every year.
And then you add them all together and that's your budget.
But the government just says, um, we're going to need a 5% more than last year because of inflation.
And there's more people we're taking care of.
And then the, so let's say the Democrats say that, then the Republicans say, no way, but we need to spend billions more on the military.
And the Democrats say, no way.
And then the two of them get together and they say, how about this?
Why don't we just run up the debt, and you get your billions, I get my billions, I get re-elected, you get re-elected, because it's good for our states, and we'll just push that can down the road.
And that's what happens.
So our budgeting process is not even a budgeting process.
So it's like, how did you repair your broken engine on your car?
I took up knitting.
Wait, what?
I took up knitting.
Wow, that doesn't even seem like you're in the right domain.
I mean, how does knitting fix your car engine?
Well, I'm knitting really hard.
Not really an answer.
How hard you knit is not related because you can't really fix a car engine.
Yes, but I've got lots of people knitting.
Again, again.
That's not really the right tool or even the right conversation to cutting the debt.
So that's sort of where we're at.
We're in this absurdity where the government pretends they have something to do with the budget, but they don't.
They're just not even doing the job.
Even in the most basic way you would describe somebody doing a job, they're not doing anything like that.
There's nothing even remotely like your government managing the budget.
Nothing.
Nothing in that domain.
It's like they're knitting instead of changing the engine in your car.
They're not even in the same game.
What could fix that?
Well, back in the 90s when Dilbert was huge, corporations had a similar problem.
So the corporate budgets were just growing and growing and they weren't sure that they were doing the right things that they should be doing.
They were just spending more money.
And so they came up with this idea, it came from one book in particular, to do something they called reengineering.
So they would, for the first time, instead of just giving 10% more to the thing they were already doing, they would say, do we even need to do that?
Maybe, maybe we should just do everything differently.
And then we don't even need this system at all.
So that would be called re-engineering, where you look at it from the ground as if you'd never looked at it before.
You know, you go to first principles and you say, all right, what do we need to do?
What would it take to do it?
And does that have anything to do with what we're paying for now?
And if they don't, you stop paying for that stuff and you re-engineer it and then you save money and you're more efficient.
Now, also around that time, the Clinton administration was in office.
And do you remember what portfolio Al Gore got as the vice president?
Because they sold him as sort of more of an active partner than just being a boring vice president.
And sure enough, Al Gore Reinvented government.
Well, that's the name for it.
And what he focused on was using the internet and newer tech to do things that we used to do in efficient bad ways.
So basically putting a lot of the government online so you don't need people and people can get their service faster.
And so Gore, have I ever told this story?
So I don't know if I ever told you this story, but maybe this is the first time you've heard it.
So this is the 90s.
Dilbert was big.
I was giving a speech in Washington, D.C., just a Dilbert-y speech for money.
And some of the administration found out that I was in town, you know, the Clinton administration.
And I got invited into the White House to just kind of look around and meet some of the staff of Al Gore's staff, his speechwriting staff.
And I guess Al Gore found out I was in the building.
So somebody said, hey, that Dilbert guy's in the building.
So he sent the message to summon me to his office.
And I thought, really?
I was just visiting the staff.
And suddenly they're like, uh, vice president wants to meet with you.
And I was like, really?
So I go down to this, uh, this owner office with some secretary type people sitting there and there's this gigantic door, like the biggest door you've ever seen in your life.
I think it went to the, it felt like it went to the ceiling, but it was a electric door.
So you push a button and it opens, maybe it was a bomb door or something special.
I don't know, but it was the most impressive door to a room I'd ever seen.
And I'm standing there and I'm thinking to myself, is that door going to open?
And the Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, is going to walk through it and say, Hi, Scott, because I couldn't really believe that this was about to happen.
And then suddenly I saw this gigantic door open up and Al Gore walks through and he extends his hand to me and he goes, Hi, I'm Al Gore.
Which I always think is funny.
You're the vice president.
I know who you are.
I'm in the White House.
I'm in the White House.
I'm standing in front of your office.
You are Al Gore.
But what else are you going to say?
It's just a reflex.
So we took some pictures and then he asked me if I had a minute to go in and chat.
So we go into his office and he said that, uh, you know, he was trying to reinvent the government, you know, try to figure out the better, faster, cheaper way to do everything.
And he was making a lot of progress.
So he was succeeding.
And by the way, he did, he did a lot of good things.
Uh, he doesn't get a lot of credit for it, but that's part of the reason he wanted to talk to me.
He said, you know, it's so hard to communicate all these boring technical things that we're accomplishing, but we have to put it on a report.
Um, to say we, what we did to get anybody to read it.
Do you think you could help us with make it just humorous and put in some comics?
So he said, can you put some, could you make it like a Dilbert?
Um, this is before I was canceled.
So people still like me.
You said, could you make it a Dilbert report on what we've done to fix the government?
And I said to him, no, nope, can't do that.
Because the moment I embraced one political party, 50% of my revenue would go away.
So I said, that doesn't really work.
You know, cause I have, I have a fiduciary responsibility to people who have licensed Dilbert at that point.
So if I became even accidentally political, even if I'm just trying to help, like it's not even that political.
I'm just trying to help somebody communicate.
Uh, I lose half of my audience.
So I was like, Nope, that doesn't work.
But here's, what's more important.
You don't want to associate comics with this serious work.
That would be a communication mistake.
Because people aren't going to take you seriously, even if they learn that you did good things in the comic.
Because the comic is just the wrong vehicle.
Don't do comics if you're the government.
But I did say I can hook you up with somebody who is an expert on user interfaces and could figure out how to make your message the most palatable.
So I hooked him up with somebody who was better than me without cartoons.
So, he produced his booklet that said what the government was doing.
It was very well written, because he got good help, and he made a big difference.
Now, Elon Musk has offered to help Trump cut the government spending, but what that really means is not a finance person's approach.
What it really means is re-engineering the government.
What you don't want to do Is bring in like somebody with a big scalpel and say, 20% of this, 10% of this, and I'm going to cut 15% of this.
It might end up that way, but that's not ideal.
The ideal situation is for somebody to come in and say, why do we have three entities working on the same thing?
How about just one?
Done.
Why do we even do this stuff when people could do this through private means without the government at all?
And it'd be faster and cheaper.
Get rid of it.
Done.
So that's what re-engineering is.
Re-engineering is not twiddling with your budget.
Re-engineering is saying, all right, if this didn't exist in the first place, would we ever build this?
If we had a problem to solve today, and you had to build whatever it is that the government already has, would you?
Or would you do it a whole different way?
Because if the answer is with our current knowledge and technology and situation, we would do it a whole different way.
Then you do it that different way, and that's how you get your costs down.
Now, could an Elon Musk reduce our government expenses enough to make the deficit go away?
He'd have to take like a third of the entire government spending out of the budget.
Do you think he can do that?
Take one third of the entire government budget, and if you did, think of the chaos that would create.
Just think of all these government organizations that don't have very skilled people trying to re-engineer themselves into a whole different thing.
The level of complexity there is beyond anything I could even imagine.
But in some big ways you could probably do stuff.
So I do think that if you combined, um, that the, the environment might serve up one of those rare times where the economy is going to surge, no matter what you do, because it's robots and AI and self-driving cars, et cetera, maybe go into space.
And if you add that with lower interest rates, just because things are going well, and if you add that to massively re-engineering, not cutting the budget, Not cutting the budget.
Because that's not even the goal.
In fact, I would say the following.
If Musk decided that looking at the government, there should be something we should spend twice as much on, because it would, you know, pay itself back in five different ways, we should do that.
So don't think of it as cutting that eliminates a whole source of goodness that could be applied.
Sometimes it's cutting.
In some areas, Maybe rare.
In some areas, maybe more.
Maybe more.
All right.
Kennedy, RFK Jr., was saying in an event recently that inflation is just a tax, mostly on poor people, because the rich people own assets.
If you own a building, your building will go up with the inflation.
So relative to everybody else in the world, you still own the same amount of money.
Because you owned a building and it went up.
But if you are living paycheck to paycheck and all you're doing is spending your cash on groceries, you're going to buy less groceries because your money isn't worth as much.
So in a sense, it's a way to boost the economy, which is good for the people who own buildings, not so good for the people working for those people.
So you can see how that's a transfer.
It's like a tax on poor people and transfers it to the wealthy.
It would be better, even as somebody who might benefit from this, I'd be a lot happier without the inflation.
I'd rather just nothing changed, so you can run the economy without the surprise and shock of inflation.
But it's a good point.
I don't know about this.
I need a fact check on this.
But Kennedy says basically the inflation is caused by the government spending too much.
And he says that the other cause of inflation is the money we're spending on chronic disease.
He says that's five times our military budget.
Does that pass your sniff test?
Do you think the amount that America is spending on chronic disease Now I assume that doesn't mean the government's spending.
I assume that means individuals spending it on their own for the most part.
But is it really five times our military budget?
Does that seem possible?
It does seem possible.
I'll take a fact check on that because it easily could be an exaggeration.
But directionally, it feels about right.
So now imagine if Kennedy came in and made everybody so healthy that their health care went down.
Imagine if a President Trump, and by the way, I can't imagine him doing this, but there's one person missing from his team.
You know, President Trump's team of pirates, you know, he's got an Elon Musk, he's got an Alan Pod, they're on his side, they've got a Bill Ackman, they've got a, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, they've got, you know, I could keep going, Vivek.
So he's got this incredible team, but there's somebody missing.
You know who's missing?
Somebody to tell us to be physically active.
He needs Arnold.
Now, I don't think Schwarzenegger is pro-Trump, but maybe he could be.
Maybe he could be.
Because we need somebody to tell us to take a walk after dinner.
You want to solve a bunch of problems at the same time?
Watch this.
I'm President Trump, and I've got an idea.
We've got RFK Jr.
working on your food supply and your medicines, trying to make that healthier.
But let's not ignore exercise and getting outdoors.
Here's what I'd like you to do.
We should have an app where you can organize with your neighbors what time to take a walk after dinner.
Now there might be more than one, because people eat dinner at different times.
So you could say, oh, it looks like my neighbors, some of them, are going to take a short walk, maybe a mile or two.
And they're going to do it at seven o'clock on a nice evening in California.
So seven o'clock, you look on your app and you can see your other neighbors have already started to assemble because it shows their location once they turn on the app.
And they say, all right, I'll walk left and I'm going to run into my neighbors taking a walk.
So they're coming down the street toward me.
I can see on my app, I walk, I joined their little group.
I see somebody in the group I know.
I started walking with them and chatting.
An hour later, we're all happy.
We've made some plans.
Somebody says they're going to have a party.
I got invited to a party.
I've had my social interaction, even without a friend or without a girlfriend or a relationship.
I chatted with my neighbors for an hour while I took a walk in the beautiful sky.
And I came back and my mental health was better.
And my chronic illness was far better because I do it on a regular basis.
Now that's just an example.
And honestly, Trump is not your, um, your icon of good physical health.
He's doing a great job for his age.
I got to say, but you know, you expect somebody who looks a little fitter to take that message, but you could also imagine Trump doing it because he's honest.
So he would say, you know what?
You know, I don't, I don't exercise as much as I should.
I like golf, but you should, that'd be good enough.
You know, if he, if he said, I'm not your role model, but listen to RFK Jr.
You know, have you seen him without a shirt?
I mean, tell him that, tell him to take off his shirt.
If RFK Jr.
takes off his shirt and you're not going to follow his advice about, uh, fitness, well, you're crazy.
You might not listen to me.
Because, you know, I got a few extra pounds.
But look at this guy.
If he tells you to take a walk after dinner, are you going to do it?
So you could imagine a hundred different ways that the Trump administration could sell it, but I feel like they need an extra pirate.
They need a pirate who will get us off our asses and get us moving without spending money.
Just take a walk.
Right?
Especially for the people who are not that physical.
You know, it's a lot of people.
So you can solve your loneliness, your healthcare expenses, your inflation, your mental health, your physical health, by taking a walk.
It just has to be organized.
Teamsters.
Apparently, RFK Jr.
said that Sean O'Brien, the head of the Teamsters, called him just recently, yesterday maybe, and asked him to send his love to Trump.
Now the Teamsters, you might know, decided to not endorse a presidential candidate, which is rare for the last few decades.
It's rare.
And people are interpreting it as a preference for Trump.
They just don't want to say it out loud.
So I'd say this is pretty clear.
The rank and file are something like two thirds in favor of Trump.
And then the head of the organization who did not endorse, Is telling RFK Jr.
to send his love to Trump.
Okay.
You can't get closer to an endorsement than that.
Can you?
It feels like they're doing everything they can do to endorse him without endorsing him.
And mission accomplished.
Mission accomplished.
So Sean O'Brien is probably smarter than maybe people are giving him credit for because he found a way to endorse Trump without endorsing Trump.
Through a side door by just saying it to RFK Jr.
Knowing that he might repeat it.
Pretty good.
Pretty clever.
Well done.
Um, Trump announced he wants to end sanctuary cities as soon as he gets into office.
Um, I assume that that's wildly popular in the public.
Um, if I had to guess 70% agreement with that, maybe.
About ending Sanctuary Cities.
So that seems a good solid thing to say of 70%.
I think it's at least 70% of the public would agree with it.
So that's just free money.
Well, the entertainer named Usher deleted all his posts on X because he's getting dragged into this Diddy drama.
So when he was 13 years old, he lived with Diddy for a while to learn his ways.
And there's some old interviews In which Usher, who was taken under the wing of Diddy, said he learned some things at the Diddy parties and introduced him to, quote, a totally different set of stuff, sex specifically.
Remember, he was 13.
And the accusations are that Diddy was sort of recruiting and, uh, having sex with both young male and female potential wannabe entertainers.
And that, uh, you basically sold it.
This, this is the allegation.
I don't have any personal information to confirm anything.
So this is just what people are saying.
I can't claim any of this to be true.
Um, claiming that it was a well established organized process.
Where did he had to give up his body to somebody to become who he is.
And then he's just passing forward the badness and making people give up their bodies to be part of his process to become famous.
Now, all of that is horrible, but I'm just amazed at how many little stories related to this are popping up now.
For example, there's an old video of Christy Teigen with, what's her husband's name?
John Legend.
And where they were interviewed at some event and somebody asked them about if they'd had sex in a public place.
And Christy Teigen said cryptically, well, maybe the Obama thing.
And John Legend immediately said, we're not talking about that.
So there's no explanation of what she meant when she jokingly said the Obama thing, because they're good friends, when she said something about having sex in front of other people.
Now, again, again, confirmation bias might be all that's happening.
So if you've heard all these stories about Diddy, then anybody who was ever involved in any of those parties or had any contact with him at all, if there's any video of them saying anything unclear, even if it was a joke, even if you don't know what they were thinking, it's gonna look like they're admitting sex crimes.
So I'm gonna I'm not a big fan of John Legend because of his politics, and I don't know much about his music, so I don't have a feeling for that one way or the other.
But I'm going to say innocent until proven guilty on this one.
As a citizen, I give him the courtesy that I would wish would always be extended to me by citizens.
Now, if there's any kind of legal process that ever had a problem with him, that would be a separate conversation.
But I don't like the fact that Christy Teigen made a joking reference to something, and we don't know what that meant, and then assumed that she was banging it out with the Obamas.
That's a little too far for me.
So maybe, I mean, you can't rule it out.
Anything, anything's possible, I suppose.
But I don't think that we have something like evidence of that.
I think we have confirmation bias, like we, our brains are primed for that kind of interpretation.
And then that comes along and then you say, Oh, there's more of that.
Probably not, probably not, but you never know.
Anyway, I saw that Elon Musk, I think he retweeted something that said that X is not just a social media network, it's a crime scene.
So when people delete all of their social media, it does look like a crime scene.
So also with Usher, I have no evidence whatsoever that Usher was involved in anything inappropriate.
The confirmation bias is enormous, and sometimes the simulation tries to give you a hint as well.
But I'm not saying that Usher did anything that involved gay sex.
I'm just saying that they wouldn't call him Usher unless he showed a lot of people to his seat.
I'll just let that one sink in a little bit.
Yeah, you wonder why nobody else said that first.
That's why you have me, is for this.
Well, there's another sex-related scandal you heard about, a journalist named Olivia Nuzzi.
Allegedly was sexting RFK Jr., but we only have confirmation that she was sexting.
We do not have confirmation that he said anything, um, anything inappropriate.
But there are reports that his wife had her wedding ring off, you know, where she, wherever she was overseas, I guess.
And there are reports that Olivia Nuzzi, who was So poor Ryan Lizza left his wife and kids to be with Olivia Nuzzi.
that that's been broken off because of whatever this was.
So poor Ryan Lizza left his wife and kids to be with Olivia Nuzzi.
He was 50, she's 31.
And then the 31 year old may have cheated on him by sexting with somebody who was closer to 70.
Yeah.
And, um, now to be fair, the person she was allegedly sexting was, you know, far more alpha than her, uh, her fiance.
But, uh, I think he's maybe the biggest victim in all this.
You know, RFK Jr.
probably can handle this like it's just a Tuesday.
But, I mean, because he's handled basically everything you can handle.
But this poor guy, Ryan Lizza, imagine like it's in the news.
Oh my God.
It's terrible.
Anyway, I would say that there's no evidence that RFK Jr.
did anything inappropriate.
There's definitely evidence that she did.
But we haven't seen any texts from him to suggest that he went too far.
I'm going to say innocent until proven guilty.
So I'm just going to ignore it.
Also, you never know what the situation is with anybody else's relationship.
You never know.
So trying to assume, you know, it's just like you would act and you know, that never works in these situations.
Well, meanwhile, in Lebanon, the U.S.
State Department It's calling on its citizens to get out of Lebanon.
What do you think that means?
It means exactly what you think it means.
It means that Lebanon is going to get a lot of bombing.
And of course it's already started.
So the Hezbollah up in Lebanon They've been launching rockets into Israel, they say, in response to the pagers and walkie-talkies blowing up.
And, of course, Israel is attacking, and so Israel is telling this to the media, that they're attacking to prevent an imminent attack.
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, they're going to attack any minute now, so you bomb them first.
That might be true, but you know what else is true?
Hezbollah has been sending rockets pretty much non-stop for years.
They don't need a reason.
You don't need a reason.
You don't need to tell me that you're doing it because they're ready to launch an attack.
They've got 100,000 rockets aimed at you, and you have not threatened them whatsoever, at least except in defense, and they don't need a reason.
You just don't need a reason.
If somebody's got 100,000 rockets pointed at you, and they're sending some of them at your residential places on a regular basis for years, you don't need a reason.
I'm glad that you said it.
Maybe it's better than not saying it, but don't think you need to justify it.
Nobody needs to justify that.
If we had a hundred thousand rockets pointed at us from Canada and they'd been shooting some of them every day, no, we don't need to know that you were going to shoot some more today in order to go cap all of their asses.
No, don't need a reason.
And again, every time you say to yourself, here's what Israel should do To be good and moral, ethical people.
And here's what the Palestinians should do to be good and ethical people.
And here's how to make up for the past.
None of that has anything to do with anything.
This area of the world is nothing but power.
And if you're lucky, your allies will be the ones with the power.
Now, is that good or immoral or ethical?
No, it's not even in the right conversation.
None of those things matter.
Nobody's making any decisions based on what's moral or ethical.
That's just things yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.
It's pure power.
It's self-interest.
Now, it's hard for me to criticize Israel's strategy when it is so clearly linked to their self-interest.
How do you criticize somebody who is pursuing their own best self-interest?
Ever.
Like, ever.
So I don't.
And you know that if the power situation were reversed, Israel would get wiped out.
And again, that wouldn't be about, you know, you could argue it's unethical and illegal and immoral and all that.
You could talk about it all day long, but it doesn't matter.
What would matter is the ones with the most power got everything.
That's just the way it is.
Now, unfortunately, and I'm not saying that that's right, I'm just saying that talking about the ethics and the morality of it is just a waste of time.
You can't ask Israel to do something that's, in your opinion, in your opinion, you're not there, but you can't ask them to do something that, in your opinion, is more moral and ethical.
They shouldn't listen to you.
They should look at what's good for them, And then if it's not exactly as moral and ethical as some strangers in another country want it to be, well, then you say stuff like they were ready to attack us first.
But let's not get lost that any of that matters.
None of that matters.
The ones with the power and the interest are going to do what they can do.
And that's what we're watching.
So the best case scenario is that your allies are winning.
That's it.
That's all we have.
And at the moment they're doing well.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you didn't know, the Dilbert 2025 calendar is available for pre-sale you can only get it at the link you can find at Dilbert.com and pre-sale will help me out a lot because it will be awkward if there's a gazillion sales two weeks before Christmas because I'd like to make sure that you can actually get it and there's not a production production lag so
For a number of reasons that are just practical and selfish, it helps me a lot, personally, if you pre-order.
And because the shipping costs are High for everything.
If you can get more than one, because you're going to give out some presents perhaps, your shipping costs will look a lot more reasonable.
So the sooner you do it, the better for me.
So if you're thinking of doing it later, I'm asking you as a favor to do it sooner.
So if anybody feels like doing that, it would make me very happy.
All right.
And remember, the Dilbert calendar is because people asked for it.
You know, I'm sort of at a There's a point in my career where I really don't have to do anything I don't want to do.
You all know that, right?
I don't have to do anything I don't want to do.
I'm good.
I don't need to prove anything.
I don't need any more money.
I only do the things I want to do.
Now, the reason the calendar is reproduced, and it's a lot of work, like to set up a whole new operation, find partners to do the hard stuff, all that.
It's a lot of work.
And I did that in this case because so many people said, you know, my life is not the same without the Dilbert calendar and we give it as a gift every year.
So this is done for you.
It's not like a big moneymaker that will make a difference in my life.
But I'd love if you got it sooner than later.
All right.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have to say to you today.
And I'm going to go talk to the local subscribers, because they're special, in a good way.
