Find my Dilbert 2025 Calendar at: https://dilbert.com/
God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorks
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Politics, President Biden, Biden's Bad Press Insulation, Biden's Polling Insulation, Democrat Cognitive Dissonance, Democrats Ignoring Inflation, Derek Chauvin, George Floyd Heart Evidence, Harvard Post-DEI Enrollment, Rhodes College Hoax Graffiti, Democrat Identity Politics, Scott Galloway's Election Bet, CR Omnibus Defeated, Vivek Ramaswamy, Grok CR Summary, Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, CR Contribution Accountability, Global Engagement Center Funding, Speaker Johnson, Government Censorship, Mollie Hemingway, President Trump Attracts Talent, X Users, Fentanyl Deaths, TikTok's Future Ownership, Disney's Animated Trans Character, Vagus Nerve Stimulation, Scott Adams
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Apple Computer, when you made your stupid iPhone and you knew that the main way it works is upright or sideways, but never upside down like that.
It doesn't work upside down.
Why did you put the charger in the bottom?
Because then I can't set it down at the same time I'm charging it.
Wouldn't it make sense to put the charger on the top?
In what world does it make sense to have it in your way all the time?
They never thought of that?
It's just mind-boggling.
I can't believe that Steve Jobs would have done this.
If it worked upside down, it'd be fine.
I'd just turn it upside down.
But they stopped making it work upside down.
So, anyway.
So what I'm trying to do is lay it sideways so I can see your comments, which appears to be...
Are you fucking kidding me?
Never get a stand that has suction cups on it.
So I'm going to cleverly...
Put this into this area so that the...
Ta-da!
It beat the system.
Ha-ha, system.
All right, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's the best time you'll ever have, but if you'd like to take it up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need is a cup of mug, a glass of tank of chels, a stein, a canteen jug, a flask of vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it's going to happen right now.
Now go.
Extraordinary.
All kinds of things happening.
I hear that some airports in New Jersey are being closed, or there's some kind of warning because of the drones.
So apparently, no matter what we do, this drone story doesn't go away.
Have any of you settled on your best theory about the drones?
We're not going to talk about them today, but there's that one bit of new news.
Well, I think it's going to be a combination of different things and people who don't know things and a little mass hysteria and a little bit of truth.
A little bit of everything in there.
Did I see that Harris just got a $20 million book deal?
Every time an ex-president gets a multi-million dollar book deal, I just assume that's illegitimate.
Doesn't that feel like a bribe?
I feel like there's some kind of backdoor deal.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't have any, you know, information about it.
But I feel like there's always a backdoor deal where the publisher will come out whole no matter how many books are sold.
There's something going on with this whole publisher situation.
Anyway, Fannie Willis apparently is disqualified from the Trump election case, the Georgia election.
Higher court ruled that she had some kind of conflict of interest.
So Trump just keeps winning.
It's just nonstop winning.
Andrew Huberman reminds us that the research shows a clear benefit of drinking coffee.
Gives you more attention, focus, and athletic performance.
So if you enjoyed the simultaneous sip, you're probably feeling like you have more attention, more focus, and you're better at sports.
I know, you can feel it.
It just takes one sip.
Would you be surprised to know that there's another breakthrough in battery storage?
Yes!
The Monash University, they figured out some newly discovered material that integrates three modes of energy storage, which I call trimodal.
And it uses boric acid and succinic acid, some kind of acid.
And it's inexpensive and environmentally friendly and all that.
Now, again, the only reason I read you these stories every single day about battery storage is it really is everything.
If we somehow could make our battery storage five times better, civilization would be really different.
And it looks like that's going to happen one way or the other.
There's a study, according to USA Today, that women lawmakers are 70 times more likely to be victims of deepfake porn.
Let's see.
If there was any way that they could have saved time and money on this study, is there anything they could have done to be certain they had the right answer?
But not to spend the money and the time to do the study.
Well, you could have asked every single human male.
I think every one of us would have gotten this right.
Let's see.
Would I rather see...
No, I'm not going to name names.
I was going to name names, but now I realize how classless that is.
I was going to say, would I rather see Mitch McConnell naked and having a threesome...
Or would I rather...
And then I stop myself, because if I put in a name, then that becomes the news, and yeah, blah, blah, blah.
But you know what I mean, yes.
Surprise.
People like to see women more than men.
The economy is kind of strong, if you don't count the debt that's going to kill us all.
But the economy grew a little bit better than expected.
3.1% in the third quarter.
Beating expectations that were merely 2.8.
I pity the people who made those poor projections.
Consumer spending was good and the GDP price index ticked up and the core prices rose, but not much more than expectation, 2.2%.
So, the bottom line, of course, is that the Fed probably doesn't have a reason to do too many cuts.
When the Fed cuts interest rates, that's what makes the stock market go up.
So now that we know that the rates won't be cut as much as we thought, because the economy is stronger, in theory the market should be down today, right?
But it's not.
What happened?
Was there something that happened yesterday?
That had potentially enormous financial impact on the United States in a positive way?
Did something happen?
Yes, it did.
We're going to talk about that.
All right.
We'll get there in a minute.
So CNN has some reporting last night.
It's about how the Democrats were shielding Biden and his declining brain from the real world.
And she said, quote, And that wall was blocked from the American people.
And apparently they had a habit of when they showed Biden how he's doing, they would have to clip out all the mocking of his gaffes.
Can you imagine being the President of the United States and because the news that you see is what your advisors put in front of you, it's not like you're sitting in front of the TV too much?
Can you imagine being Biden and And not being aware that he was being mocked mercilessly for his gaffes.
Just try to hold that in your head.
He's the President of the United States.
And the entire world is laughing at him for having his brain degraded.
And he's the only one who doesn't know.
He's the only one.
And he lives in a world that's saturated with media, But because he's busy and because they tell him the things he needs to know, he's the only one who doesn't know.
Do you know how much easier it would have been to convince him to drop out of the race if he had seen his own bad press?
Ah?
If he had seen his own bad press, he would have dropped down sooner.
Now, if CNN and MSNBC had been more honest about how he was doing, do you think he would have stayed in the race?
If the pollsters had been doing accurate polls, do you think he would have stayed in the race?
Here's what I think.
Have you noticed that the Democrats have this habit of being the perpetrators of whatever the badness is and then blaming it on somebody else?
Well, usually they're blaming it on Republicans.
But if you turn on the news, the news is going to say, oh, that Biden campaign was bad and Joe Biden was bad because he didn't leave the race earlier.
Do you know what would have made him leave the race earlier?
Accurate news and accurate polls.
You fucking idiots.
You kept feeding your own idiots fake news and fake polls and they believed it.
And so did Biden.
Maybe, instead of blaming Biden for staying in the race too long, you should fucking blame yourself for gaslighting the country, which caused him to be gaslighted at the same time so that he legitimately thought he had a chance of winning.
I don't think that Biden would have gone so far if he knew he had no chance of winning.
It was the news that fucked him and the pollsters.
And then his campaign were, of course, incompetent.
So you had DEI, fake news, and fake polls.
That's what took Biden down.
It wasn't Biden.
He was the recipient of the worst help anybody ever got.
Because all they cared about was Trump, Trump.
So yeah, stop blaming Biden.
Ultimately, he's the guy in the job, so he gets...
I understand how it works.
Biden's in the job, so he has to take the hit.
But honestly, none of it would happen if all of the people around him had done their jobs.
None of it.
He would have looked at the news, same as we did, and said, oh, that doesn't look good.
There's no way I'm going to win with this kind of news coverage.
Anyway...
So you know, so before we talk about that continued resolution, which of course I will, I am continually entertained by how the Democrats can't figure out what went wrong.
Now, just as my prior example, they think Biden was the problem.
No, it was the news, it was the polls, it was his advisors.
But they get pretty much everything wrong because to understand it correctly would...
Be quite damning to their own, you know, capabilities.
So the way cognitive dissonance works is if you don't want to accept something that says you're stupid or that you did a bad job, so you just imagine that something else happened.
That's how cognitive dissonance works.
So you remember how they, running, when Biden was running, I'm sorry, when Harris was running against Trump and Biden before that, And Biden before that, that they were doing all these generic complaints.
You know, the generic complaints were, Trump's going to end democracy.
And people were saying, but gas is too expensive.
Could you talk about that?
He's Putin's best friend.
All right, but like, Could you talk about the price of eggs?
And so you would think that the one thing that they would most understand is that this conceptual stuff is not hitting anybody in the fields, like they don't have anybody good who understands persuasion on their team, apparently, at the moment.
It looks like they have nobody who understands the basics of persuasion.
No, end democracy isn't touching anybody.
So now that Trump's elected...
There's a Hill opinion piece in the publication called The Hill.
And the title is, Trump will turn America's justice system into a tool of political revenge.
What's that sound like?
It's more end democracy stuff.
They didn't learn anything.
They didn't learn anything.
That talking in these generic ways about it is going to be, it's a tool of political revenge.
It just doesn't hit.
You just want to be able to pay for your gas and your eggs and make sure that the country isn't destroyed by invading migrants.
But so...
Makes you wonder why they stopped saying their other generic thing.
Do you remember their other generic thing they used to say?
Nobody's above the law.
And they would say it about Trump because they were law-faring him.
You know, all these illegitimate legal processes.
Illegit in my opinion.
And every day it was like, no one's above the law.
No one's above the law.
So now...
Now that Derek Chauvin got permission to have George Floyd's heart and some of his juices tested somehow, I guess there's some skin tissue that was saved, and they could find out if he died for reasons related to maybe a heart condition, and that would potentially get Derek Chauvin out of jail.
Now, What would be the problem with somebody asking for some evidence that wasn't included in the trial but everybody who hears the story knows, oh, that would have been good evidence to be in the trial?
So it's a person who was convicted, and he simply wants to make sure that the trial did include all the correct evidence.
So what does the Biden Department of Justice say when somebody says, can we include the real important evidence such as the quality of his heart at the time he died?
Very, very obvious, simple thing we'd all want to know.
And the Biden Department of Justice is deciding to try to fight it and deny him the chance to look at the health of the heart, the heart muscles or whatever it is they saved.
Now, what happened to no one's above the law?
What happened to caring about the rule of law and the democracy?
Because you know what?
Derek Chauvin, when he requested this extra evidence...
He did it completely within the confines of the legal process.
He didn't steal it.
He's not trying to kill somebody to get the specimens.
He had legal lawyers do legal things according to the legal process, and everybody with common sense would say, yeah, you know what?
Even though he was convicted, he has a right to see that stuff.
He absolutely has a right to see it.
So, yeah.
It feels like the Democrats just want to be on whatever's the dumb side.
Meanwhile, Harvard, of course, was forced to back off from its DEI hiring practices, where it was discriminating against Asian Americans and against white Americans, mostly.
And so now we can see the result of that in their law school admissions.
The black enrollment dropped by more than half.
So, is that good or bad?
Well, Democrats, of course, seem to have some trouble understanding where the problem is.
The problem is definitely not Harvard's admission process.
That is not what's keeping any black person from succeeding.
But definitely the quality of their undergraduate or their regular school, definitely the quality of their school and their income situation, those would make a big difference.
So if you think the problem with college admission has something to do with the college, you're missing the first 18 years of the kid's life.
The first 18 years, Can make a big difference.
So, no, you can't fix that after it's too late.
So, while it might look like bad news, I think that's good news in the sense that we're getting back to capability over identity.
Well, you would not be surprised to know that there was a college in Memphis, Tennessee, a little college called Rhodes College.
And there was some pro-Trump graffiti that they say was racist.
And they did an investigation to see who did this pro-Trump racist graffiti.
How do you think that turned out?
Take a guess, if you haven't heard the story already.
So there was graffiti from what looked like a Trump supporter, and it was very racist.
And then they looked into it, and it was a hoax, of course.
It was not a Trump supporter, it was an anti-Trump person.
Of course.
Of course.
I feel like I missed the story.
I'll get to it.
So that's right on model.
MSNBC had a pundit on there.
She might think of herself as a young black woman.
The only thing I know for sure is she's a black woman.
I don't know how young she is.
But she said, quote, the Democratic Party should be led by young women of color.
So is that what the Democrats got wrong?
Did they lose everything because they didn't have enough young women of color running things?
Now, nothing against young women of color, who, by the way, are doing great in society.
If you didn't know that, black women are doing really well, you know, relative to historical norms, but also relative to white men who Black women are going to college at record rates, earning well after graduation.
So black women are doing great, actually.
So she says the Democratic Party should be led by young women of color.
Of course, that's identity politics, and of course, that's the reason they lost.
So I could not be more amused by their inability to learn from their mistakes.
But here's one that's fun.
I'm told that this didn't actually happen in the real world, but there's a post that makes it look like it happened.
It's still just as fun, even though it didn't happen.
So there's a clip of Scott Galloway saying that he had planned, this was before the election, like a day before or something, he said he planned to bet $358,000 on Harris.
And he said the reason he thought that was a good bet, and I was just told in the comments earlier, that he didn't actually place the bet.
So the day before the election, he was talking like, this is very serious, and he was placing the bet.
Somebody says he didn't place it.
But his argument went like this, that what he called the A-plus polls have Harris ahead.
So the polls that he trusted had Harris ahead.
But poly markets, where people are just betting, didn't have her, you know, conclusively winning like that.
So the odds were that you had a, you know, if you were just looking at it as one of many bets in your portfolio, you probably would have gone with the odds, meaning that it looked like she might win, Yet the betting markets were not saying that.
So you probably would get a nice payoff in the betting markets if the A-plus polls were, in fact, reliable.
So everything he said is logical.
It's mathematically and statistically and risk management perfect.
So everything he said was right.
The problem was the A-plus polls, right?
How many of you thought the polls were accurate and real, and even trying to be real, by Election Day?
I feel like 100% of the people who follow me know that the polls were some kind of a political structure.
They're not really, at least all of them.
Are not meant to be even serious.
I mean, I don't think they're trying to be accurate.
I think they're just backing their team.
Now, Rasmussen, they were superstars yet again.
Beat all the A-plus guys, but they don't get mentioned because if you're right all the time, The Democrats don't like to mention you.
They'll leave you out of the list.
So I do wonder how many people took Scott Galloway's advice and put down their own big bets on Harris.
And as I told you, I think I mentioned this before, I was very confident that Trump would win.
I mean, in plenty of time to have placed a bet if I wanted to.
I wasn't confident a year ago.
But within a month of the election, if you were watching, I think all of you saw me say, yeah, Trump's going to have the votes.
So your question would be, why didn't I bet on it?
Was I lying to you?
No, I did bet on it.
I bet on it a different way.
Over the summer, I loaded up on Tesla stock and Bitcoin, the two things that you could pretty well Predict would go up if Trump won.
So...
I'm pretty happy with my Tesla and Bitcoin.
Anyway, as you probably all already know, Congress tried to get away with slipping in this continued resolution budget bill that some call an omnibus bill, but it's something in between.
And they tried to do their usual Congress trick...
Which Thomas Massey called them out and predicted, you know, months before it happened, because they always do it.
And what they do is they wait until it's right before Christmas, where everybody just cares about going home, and then they say, either vote for this foot-tall thing that nobody can read and has all kinds of pork in it, or you'll miss your Christmas.
Your children will hate you.
And so people being people, they're like, ah...
No time to fix this.
I can't fix the whole system.
I'll just say yes and go home.
But that's what should happen.
But it's a different day.
It's a different day, isn't it?
So what happened instead was everybody looked at this bill and said, are you really going to sign a bill that nobody read?
And so people like me, upon first exposure to the story on X, said immediately, no, no, no, no, we can't do this anymore.
So I don't need to know what's in the bill.
I just need to know it's a foot tall.
And that's it.
Now, there were plenty of other reasons not to vote for it.
But you only needed to know it was a foot tall, because that tells you that the process doesn't work, because nobody's going to read the foot tall thing, and it's going to be full of pork.
So you don't need to know anything except it's a foot tall.
I didn't need to know anything else.
So I was a hard no on the first second.
But, of course, you know, I'm not that influential by myself, but you saw a whole bunch of other people who have a million-plus followers on X and other places say, uh, no.
No, no.
Hell no.
Hell no.
Hard no.
Would that have made a difference?
Probably not.
Probably not.
But it turns out...
That there's a whole new dynamic now.
So I love saying that it's like a reference to the Hulk.
I've said this before.
But we have a Vivek.
There's a Vivek on the Republican side.
He actually read the foot-tall bill and pulled out the important parts for us.
What?
What?
How is that even possible?
I would love a video of just watching Vivek sit down with a foot tall bill and pour through it so quickly that you get to see for the first time what a super smart person can do.
I'm pretty smart.
I couldn't do that.
Right?
So however smart Vivek is, I can't judge it.
Because as soon as somebody is a little bit smarter than you are, you really don't know how much smarter.
You have no mechanism for measuring it because it's outside of your domain.
So he's far smarter than I am, at least in this element.
So he does what I've never seen anybody do before.
He has a big audience.
He's very credible.
We all know he's working for the country, not for himself.
And he just tore into it.
He tore into it.
And when he was done, I said to myself, I have now heard the important elements.
That's amazing.
Now, at the same time, Grok I was able to look at the bill and also summarize it.
Now, unfortunately, the summary was itself like, I don't know, 20 pages or something.
So even a 20-page summary doesn't help you as much as you hoped it would because there are too many different elements or, you know, completely different topics that are all being stuffed into this monstrosity.
So if all you did is read the summary of a thing, you wouldn't necessarily know what it was about because you kind of need to get the context.
So I don't think this summary helped us as much as it should, but it did confirm there are way too many things in the bill and we don't have to live like this.
So Vivek just penetrates this thing like a spear, you know, like he just stuck a spear through it and he's holding it up and saying, and then enter Elon Musk.
Elon Musk, probably one of the most credible people in the world, known to be smart.
We know he's on our side, our side being the country, not our side being the Republicans, but the country.
He's on the country side.
And he said hard no.
And then he actually escalated it because he kind of posted about it a bunch.
And he got all the way up to...
Anybody who votes for it should be primaried.
And he's the guy who has hundreds of millions that he could put into a race to primary anybody.
And all the politicians are afraid of being primaried.
So within, I don't know, how long did it take?
Just a few hours?
The bill went from something we assumed would be signed, because that's the way it always happened, no matter how much you complained, to dead.
To dead.
Now, what happened with the blowback when it got killed by what looked like Elon Musk's work primarily?
Well, would you be surprised to know that the Democrats backed up to more generic complaints about things?
That's right.
Learning absolutely nothing about anything.
Republicans have specific complaints that they, thanks to Vivek and others, managed to pull out of this thing.
Very specific complaints.
This is a bad idea.
Don't do this.
This is a bad idea.
And their complaint was instead of defending the bill, how many of you have noticed that there isn't a single Democrat defending the bill?
How many of you did not notice that until I just said it?
Zero.
Zero.
Not a single Democrat supports the bill.
None.
So they have to be mad, because they have to oppose Republicans, but they don't like the bill either.
Because there's nobody who's dumb enough who thinks that a foot-tall bill packed with crap is a good idea.
Democrats don't think it.
Republicans don't think it.
So the only thing they had was something about Musk.
So they go for the, oh, he's a co-president.
Well, he's like the real speaker of the House.
Oh, I guess Trump's not running things.
I guess an unelected person is running the country now.
And they all sort of simultaneously went to attack Elon Musk.
Again, remember, they also agree with him.
They're attacking him for something they agree with, which is this bill is a ridiculous monstrosity and we should not be governing this way.
They agree with that.
And they still went after him.
But their argument was sort of childlike.
They just wanted to say stuff like, Musk doesn't have any power from the Republicans.
There was somebody who said, Republicans gave their power to Musk and he's unelected.
And I said, Musk doesn't have any power.
He has no power.
He has only the power of the support of the people under the following conditions.
It's common sense.
We all agree with him.
And in this case, both sides agree.
Democrats and Republicans.
Everybody agrees with him.
And he's working for the benefit of the people, obviously.
Now, is it good for Musk's own companies?
Of course.
Is it good for my company?
Of course.
It's good for everybody.
If you can fix the budget.
So as long as he's working for the people, and it's all the people, And as long as it's common sense, and as long as he does everything in public, and as long as he couldn't get away with any of it, unless he had massive backing by at least one of the parties, the one in charge, I'm good with that.
And the people who said, well, he wasn't elected.
He wasn't elected.
I say, that's true of all of Trump's advisors.
You know, the cabinet maybe needs to be vetted and approved, but if Trump decides you're going to be my advisor, you know, my Kelly Conway or something.
They're not voted.
So, Musk is a citizen who has the power to make recommendations and the power to say things in public.
But if the Republicans had been completely in favor of this bill, even if Elon thought it was a bad idea, would he have been able to kill it?
I don't think so.
So here's the thing that the Democrats can't understand because they're kind of a top-down organization.
You know, the orders come from who knows where at the top and go down.
But Trump only exists because the base wants him to.
Musk is only part of this process because the base wants him to.
Vivek is only part of the process because the base wants him to, etc., etc., etc.
So the base is getting what they want.
If Democrats think, oh, these rich people have taken over without any votes, nothing like that has happened.
The so-called rich people, even Trump, Have very little ability to do anything outside of what the base wants them to do.
That's how populism works.
So, then they start complaining about the fact that the Republicans have a billionaire who's working on their side.
Oh, so I guess you only care about the billionaire.
To which I say, have you heard of Soros?
And Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and Bill Gates.
I mean, there are a lot of billionaires out there.
I think they're just mad because we got the best one.
If you were to rank the billionaires, we got the best one.
Bill Ackman, another billionaire, suggests that the bill should be required to have a footnote so you know which congressperson added which provisions, so you know who put in the bad stuff.
And I said to myself, wait a minute, we don't know that?
I didn't think it'd be part of the bill, but I thought in some way that would be part of the public record.
But it's not.
So this bill is so bad that the people who added things to it don't want you to know their names.
Literally.
Right?
There was nobody who came forward and said, oh, good news, people.
That thing in that bill, that was all me.
Like, that wouldn't even be there if not for me.
So I made that happen.
Literally, they're trying to hide their contribution from To the country.
They're trying to hide it.
And they're trying really hard.
So, yes, that's a good idea.
We should know who does what.
You might also know that the monstrosity of a budget was going to refund the Global Engagement Center.
Now, that's part of the big industrial...
What would you call it?
The censorship industrial complex.
This is the thing that we want to kill more than just about anything.
These are the people who came after the Federalist and Daily Wire.
So this is a group that's literally trying to close down right-leaning publications.
And you're telling me that the Speaker of the House signed off on this?
What?
The Republican Speaker of the House signed off on funding the Global Engagement Center, whose primary mission is to shut down Republican stuff without good reasons.
How?
How in the world did this happen?
And do you think that Speaker Johnson should lose his position because he allowed this to happen?
Yes.
Yeah.
Hard yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You should lose your job if you do this.
This is not a small deal.
It might seem small if you don't follow the news in detail.
This is a big deal.
It's the biggest deal.
The censorship is basically the government, because if you can stop people from knowing what's happening, then you can control what happens.
Without directly getting elected, even.
So the censorship thing is kind of the engine that drives everything, because opinion drives everything after censorship.
So, yeah, I think you have to lose your job if you put this in a bill and ask your own team to sign for their own destruction.
You have to lose your job.
And I didn't personally have any big problems with Speaker Johnson.
I mean, I know that a lot of people had issues, but I didn't follow it too closely.
But no, there's no way that you should keep your job if you signed off on this.
No fucking way.
You need to take a step back.
Maybe keep his job in Congress, but no, you can't be the leader.
This is not leadership.
So...
And I was really touched by Molly Hemingway, who works at The Federalist.
She said, well, basically, she said she takes it personally.
Like, she's worked so hard, and The Federalist has worked so hard to make sure that Republican and conservative views are fully, you know, fully expressed.
So basically, fighting hard for your team, if you're Republican or conservative, fighting hard for your team, and then the team puts in basically the destruction of her entity, and they put that in a bill?
Are you kidding me?
This is just such a slap in the face and a stab in the back for both the Daily Wire and the Federalist.
This is so inappropriate.
Like, this is...
Wow.
I mean, it's just head-shaking.
How many Republicans were going to vote for that?
Like, if Musk had not stepped in, and again, Musk was really empowered by the base, so it's not just Musk, of course.
So here's what I think.
I think there's something incredibly good happening.
Like, incredibly good.
And...
I feel like a separate branch of government has formed spontaneously because it was required.
We all noticed that the system, the way it was working, was just driving us off a cliff.
We were just going to drive ourselves into debt and start wars until we're all dead.
So nothing was working.
But here's what I think has happened.
And I think Trump gets all the credit.
Right?
Trump gets all the credit.
Trump managed to attract exactly the right amount of talent, and that didn't happen on its own.
So if you want to say, oh, you know, he had all the help from RFK Jr. and Vivek and from Elon Musk, so really, you know, they were the powers that pushed him over the finish line, and there's something to that.
But remember, that only happened because Trump Made himself attractive to voters as well as important smart people.
Right?
The boss gets all the credit.
It doesn't matter what Elon does or Vivek does or RFK Jr. And by the way, they would get tons of credit for doing good work.
But the boss is the one who attracts them.
The boss is the one who has to say yes.
Trump, of course, was fully supportive of both Vivek and Elon, as well as the whole base, in saying, nope, can't sign this thing.
Now here's what's great.
I believe that we have somewhat accidentally evolved into a system which I wanted to call a council of elders, but it makes us sound old, so I'm not going to say that.
And just to simplify, there are a number of opinion people who have more than a million followers on Acts.
Who, if they were all opposed to a thing, it would be really hard for Elon to go forward with that thing or anybody else who was on that side.
So I don't think it's necessarily the total number of voters because they don't get to have a say until the next election.
But I do think that Elon and Trump specifically are really, really plugged in To what?
I'll just randomly pick a number.
I'm going to say the top 50 smart people on their side.
Top 50. What do you think the top 50 smartest people who lean right said about this bill?
I'll bet all 50 said no.
If all 50 of the smartest people, let's say most persuasive, I won't say smartest, If your 50 top most persuasive people are all on the same side, and I think they were, that empowers Trump.
And that's what empowers everybody who works for him, and let's say Elon in this situation.
So the will of the people is usually pretty accurately captured by the people who have over a million followers.
So you're not getting it directly, but we all have a, you know, fee in the real world.
So I feel like it's almost like another form of government where the people inform the people, the influencers who have a million-plus followers.
Elon is following the people who have a million-plus.
You can tell.
He responded to me yesterday.
When I weighed in on this topic, there was Elon's comment.
So we know that he's watching at least the larger accounts.
And that allows him to know when he's got backing and when he doesn't.
Do you think he would have done this on his own if 40 of the top 50 right-leaning pundits had said, no, we like this bill.
Sign that.
He might have argued it.
Still argue to this point, try to change our minds.
But I don't think it would have been canceled.
So there does seem to be this council of elders.
Again, they're not old.
Some of them are young.
That is very, very important.
And it's on X, and it's informing the right people to do the right things.
So it does seem to be like a response to the fact that nothing was working.
And so this new phenomenon has stepped in.
Let's see how the Democrats are doing here.
Yeah, Swalwell and Joy Reid were talking on MSNBC that, you know, Musk is like the speaker or the co-president, and one post on X and he controls Congress.
So this is, again, them getting everything wrong, not understanding that everyone on both sides hated this bill, and that Elon is doing the work of the people, transparently and right in front of us and at great personal risk.
Then Kinzinger, Adam Kinzinger, he's on CNN, and he's calling Elon Musk the President Elon and says Trump is the Vice President Trump.
Now, why did they do that?
Why?
Obviously, the reason they do that is they think that Trump's ego will not allow him to have such a strong partner, let's say.
So they think they can drive a wedge between them by going after Trump's ego.
I don't think it's going to work.
Because here again is what they get wrong about Trump.
Now, I've told you this for years.
But now you can all see it.
If you think Trump doesn't like people who are smarter than him, you're wrong.
Trump really, really likes smart people.
He really likes them.
And he wants to work with them.
And he wants to give them credit.
But he's still the boss, right?
The boss gets the top credit because he attracted the people to his administration.
And if they do a good job, the boss gets the credit.
That's how it works.
So we should all make sure that when we're sort of talking about these things, that we give Elon his full share of credit.
But when you talk about it, it would be helpful if you also add, you know, the boss gets the credit.
It has to be that way.
It just has to be.
Anyway...
So, let's see.
Rand Paul cheekily suggested that since the Speaker of the House doesn't need to be a member of Congress, that they could elect Elon Musk as Speaker of the House.
Now, the thing that makes me laugh is that we've somehow gotten the idea that there's no limit to how many jobs Elon Musk can do at the same time.
And I'm thinking to myself, Well, it is true we haven't found the limit yet.
For most people, two would be too many companies to run.
But he's running several.
And then he's doing the Doge thing, which is more than a full-time job.
So he's got something like five or six full-time jobs, plus parent, etc.
And the only thing that I don't know is how many times has he been cloned so far?
Because I've done the math of how many hours a human can be awake and do work and how many jobs Elon has, and I'm pretty sure there are at least two or three of him by now.
Have to be at least two, but there might be three of him.
I think he's already cloned himself.
Do you think underneath his skin mask there might be like an Optimus robot or something?
I don't know.
I think we're in the world of clones.
We just don't know it yet.
I'm kidding.
Meanwhile, X has reached one billion active users, and Elon calls it the group chat for Earth.
And boy, did it earn its little title this week.
X is the reason that bill got killed.
You could say it's, you know, a lot of different reasons because it's a bad bill, whatever.
But if X did not exist and exist in its current form with free speech under Musk, I don't think that would have stopped.
And you realize that that spending bill is part of a guaranteed death spiral for the country.
If we just sign every big pile of bills and nobody says no, we're dead for sure.
Like, actually dead.
Like, not just having a bad day.
Dead.
If the economy fails and the country fails, we're actually dead.
And we were pretty close.
And if we didn't have free speech and X and a lot of billionaires were willing to take big chances, personally and professionally, we would not have pulled back from the brink.
To me, this feels like pulling back from the brink.
Still got a lot of work to do.
But we did not go over the cliff, and we very, very easily could have.
Joshua Steinman, who worked in the first Trump administration, says on a post, he says, having worked through multiple government shutdowns, first as a military officer, then as a White House staffer, I can say with conviction, they're not real.
Ten times more efficient during the shutdown.
I believe that.
I believe that X is 10 times more efficient when they cut the staff by 80%.
And I do believe that you'll get more done during a shutdown.
I believe that.
Meanwhile, according to The Hill, the lawyers for Trump have some kind of information that we don't know yet that That a member of the New York jury that convicted Trump in the New York case,
that one of the jurors was somehow, somehow, there's evidence of a grave juror misconduct during the trial.
Now, I don't know what that would include, grave juror misconduct.
So that would suggest that maybe they have some written communication that would say they weren't intending to be fair.
Maybe.
Maybe they're connected to somebody and they didn't admit it.
You know, somebody in politics.
Maybe.
Maybe they had a phone call with somebody they shouldn't have been talking to.
Maybe.
I don't know.
But it's something like that.
Do you think that that will be enough to throw out the case or anything?
I doubt it, because Judge Merchan seems to be just an anti-Trump judge, so I don't expect justice in that case, at least from that judge.
Meanwhile, in California, I don't know if you know that California voted to ban gas-driven cars starting in 20...
What?
I think this is wrong.
Isn't it 2030 or 35?
I wrote down 2025, but I think that was a mistake somebody made on X, and I just copied it.
But anyway, in a few years, gas cars will be banned.
So...
2035, right?
Yeah, so there was just a typo when I saw it.
2035. We'll see how that goes.
Meanwhile, Governor Newsom in California declared a bird flu emergency in California.
I don't think that affects me yet.
I don't know exactly what the flu emergency is going to do, but it doesn't require me to wear a mask or get a vaccination yet.
But we'll keep an eye on that.
Meanwhile, you probably heard that Proposition 36 in California passed by 70%.
And you don't need to know the details.
The summary of Proposition 36 is California decided to make crime illegal again.
That's all you need to know.
So there are a bunch of changes, but they all have the same effect, that you can't just walk into a store and take what you want and walk out now, if they catch you.
And you can't do multiple crimes and get slapped on the wrist every time you do the crime.
You know, it'll go up in severity if you keep doing the same crime.
So it's stuff like that.
Tougher on fentanyl people, etc.
Speaking of fentanyl, there's some kind of fentanyl movie.
I don't know what that's about, but I saw the trailer for it.
Somebody's doing the good work of turning it into a movie, so maybe the hearts and minds can be moved a little bit more toward getting a solution.
But I did see a graph that showed that opioid overdoses have gone down in the past year or so, and quite a bit.
And people say, why'd they go down?
Well, I can think of two reasons.
One is Narcan.
So the antidote to the overdose is now well enough understood and all police officers have it in their car.
All first responders would have it.
A lot of big organizations would have it.
Probably schools.
A lot of schools have it.
So some of it is a whole bunch of people being saved By the Narcan.
Narcan, I think, is the brand of it, not the drug.
But when I looked at the graph, it also was obvious to me that the only thing that happened was the big spike in overdose deaths during the pandemic just normalized.
So in other words, if you look at the, you know, there's this line up of, you know, every year more fentanyl deaths, more and more, then the pandemic hits and it's like way more.
And now, you know, we're in the aftermath and it's back down to baseline.
So if you were to just take the pre-pandemic slope and just draw a pencil line and connect it, that's where we are now.
So the only change is that the pandemic bulge has now normalized back to a horrible, horrible problem that was one of the biggest problems before the pandemic.
So don't get happy about it, that it went down quite a bit.
It only went down from the bump.
The baseline is still increasing.
Now, here's what I wonder.
I just have a real problem.
Of course, I take this topic personally.
Most of you know my stepson died from an overdose.
He had fentanyl in his system.
And, you know, I'm not happy with China.
And China has promised several times that they would take care of the source, and we know that they could.
But they're kind of slow walking in and saying, well, yes, we're doing all kinds of things, but they're staying ahead of us, which we don't believe.
We think they're allowing it to happen, or at least they're not trying hard enough to stop it.
Here's what I think.
I don't think we should throw this in the category of just one more thing we're talking to China about.
It's not trade policy.
It's not even military stuff.
It's not UN stuff.
We should close the embassy until they fix this.
But we should tell them that it's temporary.
And just say, we're not comfortable having any communication with you officially while you're poisoning our citizens.
If you stop this, we'll reopen the embassy.
So we're not intending to close it totally.
And the embassy would do services for American entities in China, so you need some of it.
But there might be something where you could close it so that China doesn't have access to it and just don't have any meetings with anybody in China.
And the reason to do it is not that they would care that much.
It said it would embarrass them.
The purpose would be to embarrass them.
And apparently killing people with fentanyl shipments doesn't embarrass them because it kind of just looks like they're getting revenge for the opium wars long ago.
So I don't think they're embarrassed by it because they're doing it intentionally and they're probably enjoying the benefit of it, you know.
But if we said, you know, we can't even deal with you like adults because you're murdering our children.
So if you stop murdering our children, we'll open an embassy and treat you like you would like to be treated.
But we can't have a summit with you.
We just can't have a normal relationship while you're killing our children.
And I think you can still be professional about everything else we do, still trade with them, you know, even while we're trying to reshore stuff.
But I think we need to embarrass them.
And I think we have to say, look, we're going to temporarily shut it down our embassy, and it's not going to last long because it wouldn't take you long to clean up this fentanyl stuff.
But...
Take as long as you want.
You just can't have an embassy from the United States.
Or we kick them out of our embassy.
Maybe you do the reverse.
Just say, you can't have an embassy in the United States while you're sending us fentanyl.
And you just keep it just to that one topic.
And you just say, I'm sorry, you can't be in the nation of good countries.
We just can't deal with you on that basis.
We don't have respect for you.
Let's say it this way.
We don't have respect for you, and you can't have an embassy in our country under these conditions.
Well, anyway.
Apparently, the Supreme Court is going to hear TikTok's appeal to try to stay in business and intact.
Zero Hedges reporting.
And so here's the deal.
I guess Trump has offered that he could facilitate a sale of TikTok to an American entity, which would satisfy the court order.
So then TikTok could remain, but it would be owned and managed, and the data would be in the United States.
Do you like that idea?
Do you think it should be banned, or would you prefer that an American buy it?
Well, here's the answer to the question.
It really depends which American buys it.
And something very interesting is about to happen.
If Elon Musk bought TikTok, and that's not going to happen, but if he did, the Democrats would be completely toast.
Because then the two biggest sources of knowledge, X and TikTok, would both be pro-Trump, pro-common-sense.
And that would be bad for Democrats.
But also the other way.
If Reid Hoffman, and let's say some team of investors, bought TikTok, well, at least TikTok would be an American company.
But then you would worry that they've got their finger on the scale and they're basically causing the outcome in the elections.
So, if TikTok leaned left, which it does, but it was very pro-Trump this election, weirdly, and X people think it leans right, but I don't think it leans right as much as people think, that would be sort of a good competition, wouldn't it?
But what happens if Trump puts together the sale?
If Trump puts together the sale, presumably, he's going to make sure that some people who like him are the ones who buy it.
So, here's what TikTok might be missing in this story.
They have an opportunity for a bidding war like you've never seen.
So, whatever is the current value of TikTok, you know, the entire TikTok, If they take the American piece and they put it out to bid, the Democrat billionaires and the Republican billionaires are going to have to basically break the piggy bank because neither side is going to be willing to let the other have that much control of the American mind.
Right?
There's literally, there probably would be no asset in the United States besides X that would be that valuable because it'd be valuable for profits.
But way more valuable for controlling the country.
So I think there could be the biggest bidding war we've ever seen.
Like crazy bidding war.
So TikTok could probably monetize this in a way that nobody's ever seen.
And one of the ways that a Trump dealmaker could make this palatable is to say that out loud.
Say, hey, TikTok, you do understand that there's going to be a bidding war like you've never seen in your life, right?
You're going to make a lot of money if you sell the American part, and you'll never have a better chance.
I mean, this would be like an amazing opportunity.
So my guess is that it will get sold to an American entity, and probably somebody that Trump likes.
Disney, meanwhile, has decided to Get rid of the trans storyline in one of their children's movies.
Is that even real?
Did those words just come out of my mouth?
Yep.
So there's an animated show.
Is it a movie or just a show?
It's called Win or Lose, an animated show, so maybe it's a TV show, about a co-ed middle school softball team, and there's some trans character in there they decided to remove.
This is what Disney said about it.
When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.
That's kind of perfect.
Thank you.
So Disney.
So now Disney has paid Trump $15 million through their ownership of ABC News and George Stephanopoulos.
And now they've de-wokified at least some of their content.
I'd expect more.
Because if you make a statement like this, you're going to have to apply it to your other properties.
So I think this is a big step.
But I like how well they said it.
So whoever was in charge of Crafting the statement for Disney?
Good job.
They're not saying their own opinion.
They're saying we recognize that many parents, not all, would prefer to discuss certain things on their own terms and timeline.
That's as perfect as you can say that.
I'm actually impressed just at the skill that went into the statement.
It's a lot of skill.
Meanwhile, there's a The Washington University in St. Louis is reporting a study where they put something like a pacemaker device on people who are depressed, except instead of being a pacemaker for your heart, it would zap your vagus nerve in the neck.
And what they found is if you stimulate the vagus nerve just right, it can eliminate depression symptoms.
Now, they did this with people who had tried a whole bunch of other things and got no relief.
So they knew these were not easy cases.
These were hard cases, and they got a great response.
But, so on one hand, I'm really happy for anybody who has this problem in their life because maybe they have another future treatment if it all gets approved.
But, yeah, it's for severe treatment-resistant depression.
I mean, that's got to be the worst thing you could possibly imagine.
And so this might help them with it.
But I would like to make the following observation.
If you put a mechanical device in my body and it changes me from being depressed Into not depressed.
That's a personality change.
And it's a personality change that's driven by hardware.
So, am I a cyborg?
Because if you can change my most fundamental personality, which is I'm depressed all the time, and I only have depressed thoughts and depressed actions, to, hey, I'm having a good day.
That's more than just fixing a medical problem.
That's a whole different personality.
I mean, you're changing people from Karen to non-Karen.
That's a personality change.
And I'm in favor of it because I don't think the people in this situation should suffer one second longer.
So if you can help them, please do.
But I think it's just an observation.
I'm not complaining one bit.
But it's a complete personality change.
So to me, that's...
Kind of a cyborg.
You're no longer what you were when you were organic.
You're something new that's a combination of hardware and skinware.
Kind of cool.
I don't hate it at all.
A biological machine.
That's right.
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I feel like I missed a few stories today.
There's been so much going on lately.
Was there a story that you wanted me to talk about?
I feel like I'm done with drones until something new happens.
You're all okay with that, right?
It feels like...
Yeah, Naval had some great quotes that I posted.
It's better if you just read them in his own words.
I decided not to talk about them.
So the stock market's up, right?
Oh, I think I didn't complete my thought.
So normally when the economy is strong enough that the Fed says we're not going to reduce rates or we're not going to reduce them as much as you thought, That usually causes the stock market to tank, and it did on the first day.
But today, it should still be down because the Fed is still not going to lower rates as fast as we thought, but it went up sharply.
Here's why.
I think that It's the budget.
I think that when the country realized that maybe we can stop this out of control budget spending, which is our biggest problem, just to be clear, it's our biggest problem by far.
It's the one thing that could end the entire country.
Nothing else could.
I mean, short of a nuclear war, which I don't see happening, Almost nothing could end America.
But this could.
The debt could.
It could end the entire experiment.
And so you see the Council of Elders.
You see the Viveks, the Elon Musks enter the breach.
And at the very least, they did the first thing you need to do, which is stop this signature of that foot-tall bill that nobody likes.
Now, I think the world is shocked that that was so handily and well handled.
Because the politicians are in this situation where they sort of can't do their jobs.
You know, they don't want to go against their party and everybody wants to go home for Christmas.
Their family will be mad.
They're really, they can't get it done.
So the fact that this new mechanism appeared, the new mechanism is Vivek reads the thing in one day.
You didn't see that coming.
Tells us what's in it.
You didn't see that coming.
And then Elon goes in hard.
Like, you know, he wouldn't like the bull.
And then he got complete backing, 100% backing from everybody on the right.
And like I said, nobody on the left really disagrees.
They just don't love the fact that the right is getting stuff done.
So I think that the stock market is responding to the fact that America may have corrected its biggest problem.
And it's the big one, the biggest of the big.
Now, that's a long way from doging our way down to a budget that works.
You know, we haven't doged a bit, but we did show that if the people on X have a strong opinion about something, things are going to change.
And that's new.
So I think we're in one of the best situations the country's ever been in.
Not only are we at the cusp of a super cycle, the likes of which we might never see again, which is robots and self-driving taxis, flying cars, drones.
Probably...
Probably the most important cycle ever.
And the only thing that could stop us is the runaway debt.
And we might have that under control soon.
It's not under control.
But we have all the right players.
And we have the support to do it.
At least conceptually, we have the support.
So...
All right, is there anything else I should have mentioned?
It's a vagus nerve, V-A-G-A-S, not Vegas as in Las Vegas.
No, V-A-G-U-S, vagus nerve, V-A-G-U-S. Can I wax poetic about Raquel Welch?
You know, I'm going to tell you later when I go private on Locals why that comment blew my mind, but I can't say it.
I can't say it to the rest of you.
All right.
All right, I'm going to talk to the people on Locals privately, the subscribers.
If you were wondering how to see Dilbert, you can see it if you subscribe on X or on Locals.
But Locals has more of my political stuff.
And if you get the Dilbert calendar today, I can't guarantee it'll be there by Christmas.
Probably wouldn't.
But it would probably be there by January 1st.
So if it's somebody that lives locally, family member, father, and you wanted to get one, you still have time.
Before January 1st.
And you can just give them a card that says you bought it and it's on the way.
So you can still buy it.
Dilbert Calendar.
The only place you can find it is on Dilbert.com.
That's where the link to buy it is.
It exists nowhere else.
There's nowhere else you can get it but that one link on Amazon, not in stores.
