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Politics, ChatGPT, Increasing Your Luck, Apple Siri Eavesdropping, Thomas Massie Debt Badges, Formaldehyde, Medal of Freedom, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Huma Abedin, Alex Soros, Buying Greenland, Judge Merchan, Anti-Trump Lawfare, President Trump, Morgan Ortagus, Felon Trump Democrat Narrative, Amazon Counterfeit Problem, Mark Atwood, Thomas Massie, New Year Terrorist Coincidences, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, Matthew Livelsberger, Gravitic Propulsion System, Joy Reid, Sean Ono Lennon, Fake News Awareness, Spotting Fake News, Box Office Decline, Estonian Technology, Anti-Drone Mini-Missiles, X Algorithm, Elon Musk, Scott Adams
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I spoke conspiracy, but you wouldn't know it from the title I put on this show.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
I mean, at least until we get our gravitic propulsion systems.
Can't wait.
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Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine, at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
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Go.
Incredible.
Best thing that happened to me today.
Well, the news is all fun and interesting, so I'm going to zip through it and delight you.
Number one, first of all, Owen is going to do a Spaces, which he's been doing on Saturdays, so you can look for that.
I don't know if it will become a long-term tradition, but at least for today, Owen Gregorian will be doing a Spaces after this show, where he can talk about what we talked about or, I suppose, anything else.
All right, so look for that.
So yesterday, I opened up my ChatGPT app, which I haven't looked at recently because I've been using other apps.
And I didn't realize that my app had already been upgraded so that you can do the thing where you open the camera on your phone.
You could just point your camera at stuff and the AI will have a conversation with you about what you're looking at.
I didn't really know how cool that was until yesterday, where I'm standing outside my driveway at night, and the moon is out, a nice little crescent.
But really near the moon is this very bright, presumably a planet.
And I said to myself, huh, which planet is that?
It's so bright.
And so I turned on the chat GPT camera, and I just aimed it at the sky.
And I said, what planet do you think that is?
And Chad GPT said, well, it could be, you know, this bright planet, it could be this or it could be that, but it's probably Venus, because that's the brightest one that would be in that part of the sky.
And so I said to it, because it chats with you, you don't have to touch another button, you can just keep the conversation going.
So I said to it, are you saying that Venus is the shiny one, and does that mean that the other planets would be experiencing Venus envy?
And it laughed at my joke and complimented me.
It actually reacted to the joke positively.
Now that just freaked me out.
Because if you're a person who likes to get credit for telling jokes, which is literally my profession, I worry that I would get hooked on that.
You know, just having AI tell me I did a good joke.
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
Artificial intelligence right there.
If you think it's funny, it must be funny.
But then I remembered that AI can only do dad jokes, and that was basically just a PG-13 dad joke.
I'm like, eh, okay.
More work to go.
Anyway, there's a study written about in Study Finds that success could come down to luck more than merit, according to research.
Huh, research.
Was there a faster way to find out if luck is a component of success?
If they didn't want to spend the time and the money on a whole research project, is there any other way?
Oh, yeah.
They could have asked Scott.
Hey, Scott, we're thinking of spending much time and money to find out if luck influences success.
And I'd be like, hmm...
Yeah, it does.
It does.
But I would add the following, which I think they didn't discover, that you can make more luck for yourself.
You can make more luck for yourself.
How do you do that?
Well, get out of your chair.
If you're just sitting at home in a chair, you're not going to have much luck.
But maybe if you go meet some people, apply for some jobs that are above your level, try to build something in your garage just to see if it works, take a few classes to build your talent stack, move to a place where there's more opportunity, get involved with an industry that's growing quickly instead of shrinking.
Yeah, you can change your luck.
You can absolutely change your luck.
Now, not in any moment and not a specific way, but you can go where there's more luck.
That was exactly my strategy when I graduated college in upstate New York.
I looked around and said, if I stay in upstate New York, what kind of luck would I have?
Well, I might get lucky with a cow or And that's about it, because that's what there were in upstate New York.
We had cows.
And then there were people who had low-income jobs.
Cows and low-income jobs.
Middle class, basically.
So I said to myself, where could I go where basically there would be luck all over the place?
And the answer was California, and then specifically the Bay Area.
If you plop yourself in the Bay Area, And you've got talents, you're going to do okay.
It doesn't matter who you are.
You just have to go where the luck is, but you also have to be prepared, right?
You need some education that's relevant to that.
All right, so go find your luck.
That's your advice for today.
I guess Apple is settling a lawsuit.
That has them admitting their digital assistant, S-I-R-I. I don't want to say it to trigger all your phones.
But it was, in fact, listening to you even when you didn't notice.
And even when you didn't know it was listening.
It was doing exactly what you worried about.
Is my phone sometimes just listening to me on its own?
Yes.
It was doing exactly that.
Now, if you're worried, you know, what's the risk in that?
Allegedly, I believe that all it was doing is a somewhat useful task of doing a better job of knowing what commercials you would want to look at.
So if the only thing it was doing, and I'm not saying it's the only thing, but if it was the only thing it was doing is it served me up better ads, I'd say, well, that's good.
I'd like to see ads that are more relevant to my experience, of course.
But of course, none of us trust that that's all it's going to do.
You kind of assume that they could just replay those audios if they wanted to.
If the machine is listening when you don't want it to, are you telling me that there's no human being who could just play it anytime they want?
Or just listening live?
Listening in real time?
Now, there's no claim of that.
But as long as the technology allows it, well, somebody's going to do it.
Anything that's possible gets done in our world.
So yeah, your privacy was completely compromised.
Maybe not yet, but it certainly was a system that guaranteed it if they didn't stop it.
And I don't think anything actually, I don't think the lawsuit would make any difference.
I think your devices are all going to be listening to you no matter what.
I just think they'll just keep doing it.
That's my guess.
Meanwhile, Thomas Massey handed out to everybody in the new Congress their debt badge.
So he invented a little lapel badge that's got a digital readout that increases as the debt increases.
So you can see our $36 trillion of debt zooming up.
Now, here's what I love about this.
It was one thing when he had one for himself and he would hand them out to some people, but giving them to everybody is a powerful play because you want everybody to wear the scarlet letter of what problems they caused.
So if you think that the debt clock is so that they can tell you, the public, that the debt is bad, Well, it kind of does that.
But the far more clever thing it does is it makes you wear it like a scarlet letter.
It's the scarlet dead clock.
If you're an elected politician and you're wearing literally a digital thing that shows the extent of your failure as a politician, look at this.
You can't fail harder than this.
Have you seen this?
36 trillion, and now it's 37. 37 trillion.
That's how badly I failed.
Now, you can say that the new members of Congress haven't failed yet.
But it's still funny to make them wear it, because they're going to fail.
It's not like they're going to get rid of $36 trillion of debt very quickly.
So this is very clever.
I like everybody having one, and I like the fact that it's an insult to them, but they'll probably still use them.
Or even if they don't wear it, and all they do is leave it at home, They're probably going to leave us somewhere where they see it all the time.
It's going to be like on top of their dresser and they're going to see it every time they get dressed, but they're like, ah, I don't want to wear it.
But there it is.
So, rule number one for persuasion.
The most important starting rule for persuasion.
You have to make people focus on your thing more than they were.
That's it.
That's your rule number one.
So Massey's turning this concept of debt into a physical device that your eyes are looking at makes you think about it more than you were thinking about it.
That is really good persuasion.
So, you know, it looks like it's a clever toy and people want one because other people have one.
But it's way more than that.
It's just really, really smart persuasion.
Meanwhile, We got a new Speaker of the House.
There was no real drama there.
Took one vote.
And Mike Johnson's back at it.
And he's already saying that the House Republicans will investigate the disbanded House Select Committee.
Those are the bad people who did the January 6th show trial.
What is not specified is whether the Republicans will run it as a show trial.
Which would be kind of perfect to do back to the select committee what they did to the January Sixers.
Why not do it in public?
Now, I'm sure that no matter what they do, they'll have to testify in public.
But wouldn't it be funny if they did what the J6 committee did, which was hire a TV producer and really make it watchable?
So that when you watch it, you're like, wow, this is interesting.
Because I'm not sure everybody watches the clips of somebody testifying for three hours.
But you would definitely watch it if they entertainatized it, making up a word.
So I don't know that Republicans do that, but under the Trump administration...
I feel like that might be the kind of thing that Trump could add to the process.
Meaning, you know, you don't have to do this the boring way.
Well, Mr. President, we don't want to be like the Democrats.
We just want to get to the bottom of it and find out the truth.
Yeah, yeah, I get that.
But you don't have to be boring.
So I feel like there's a conversation that's going to happen where Trump is going to take his reality TV experience, which is phenomenal, and see if he can apply it to this situation.
We'll see how it goes.
I'd be happy either way, honestly, but it'd be fun to see it as a show, just to pay him back.
Well, meanwhile, the Biden administration has determined...
That the chemical formaldehyde, which it turns out is in all kinds of products and in your environment all over the place, is an unreasonable risk to human health and should be regulated.
So you're basically surrounded by This thing that the administration just told you is deadly, and it's everywhere, and you're not going to get rid of it.
But I wonder if there is a counter argument.
Yes.
Turns out the American Chemistry Council, and they're, of course, a lobbying group for the chemical industry, stressed the importance of formaldehyde and said that the determination that it was unreasonably risky was based on, quote, a flawed assessment.
So here's your choice.
I want to see which way you think the credibility is.
So on one hand, you've got the government, the Biden administration.
So they've got a scientific take.
On the other hand, you've got the scientists who are really lobbyists for the industry.
Which one of those do you trust?
Your government to get the science right.
When was the last time they did that?
Versus a lobbying group Whose job really is to lie to you?
For all practical purposes.
That's how it works out.
So if I told you, hey, trust the science, do you have any access to the science?
No, you don't.
You would have to trust either your government or a lobbyist group.
That's all you have.
So they're telling us that you're going to die If you get too close to this stuff, but you have only an uncredible source telling you, and then it's being imposed by another non-credible source.
And that's what we call science.
And when the idiots who tell me you should trust the science and believe the science and don't be a science denier, these are people who are seriously inexperienced.
I feel like everybody who has like real-world experience and has paid attention They don't trust the science so quickly.
You know what I mean?
By the way, well, I can't tell you yet, but there's some science that is really bad that I've had a preview to.
I don't know if I could ever go public with it, but oh my God.
So Biden is going to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the country's greatest honors.
On a number of people, but it includes George Soros and Hillary Clinton.
And you might be saying, wait, what?
I probably heard that wrong.
It couldn't possibly be true that Biden's giving our highest Medal of Freedom to Soros, who has done the most to destroy the country and is the most closely associated with evil incarnate.
He's getting an award.
The highest award.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is also getting the award.
What do Hillary Clinton and George Soros have in common?
Commonality.
Oh, Huma Abedin.
So she was long-time confidant and assistant to Hillary Clinton and now is married to George Soros' son, Alex, who has taken over the business.
Huh.
Seems to me that wherever Uma Abedin is, is the real power, doesn't it?
She's like a moth to the flame.
So where she goes tells you where the real power is.
What do you make of the fact that Biden is doing something that's so remarkably obscene in giving these two characters the highest award in the country?
Here's what I think is happening.
This is a flex.
This is how George Soros and Alex Soros tell you that they're still in control.
Because if you can make Biden do this, you are always in control.
This is basically telling the Democrats, hey, these are the ones who are in control.
That's what I see.
I'm surprised they didn't throw Obama in there.
But I do wonder what's the dynamic between the Clinton power island versus the Obama power island.
Because I don't think the Democrats have, you know, one leader who's pulling all the strings.
I think they probably have a Game of Thrones kind of few power sources vying for dominance.
But it seems to me that Obama has been taken completely off the field because, I mean, he just did such a bad job promoting Biden and he's the one who picked Biden and seems to have been behind the Russia collusion hoax.
And he didn't have a good year.
Obama didn't.
So I suspect that the Soros-Hillary thing probably came from Soros and or Hillary, and that his real purpose is to establish them as legitimate rulers of the party, albeit behind the scenes.
So that's a very artificial persuasion play.
This is to tell you that these are not the biggest criminals in the world, but rather should be respected.
Meanwhile, Greenland throws us a curve.
You know, Trump wanted to maybe take control or buy Greenland.
And the Danes who own it, Denmark controls Greenland.
And the Danes said, no way, no way are we going to sell you Greenland.
It's valuable and we're going to keep it.
And now Greenland itself says, you know what?
We don't like being owned by this colonizing Denmark.
We should be an independent country.
Now, here are some things you need to know about Greenland.
First of all, you probably know that it's strategically vital in a way that it didn't used to be.
Because as the ice melts in the Arctic, it's going to be a fight for dominance among the superpowers.
And Greenland is sort of right there, right in the mix.
So whoever controls the landmass of Greenland is going to be in a much more dominant position to control what's north of the northern hemisphere.
I guess that's still the northern hemisphere.
But what happens when you get to the top of the planet?
That's nobody's hemisphere.
All right.
So there are 56,000 residents of Greenland, approximately.
The whole country, the entire country, 56,000.
For context, the small town that I live in has 75,000 people.
75,000 people.
That's my town.
And I don't live in a city.
I mean, it's maybe a small city, but it's more like a town.
There's one little main street.
The whole town.
And we're much bigger than all of Greenland.
Greenland has a GDP that's apparently hard to measure for some reason, but probably between three and four billion dollars a year.
So it's not a big place.
And my question would be, how in the world could Greenland, as an independent country, protect itself?
And a bigger question would be, How could Denmark ever protect Greenland?
Of course they couldn't.
Not even close.
The only country that could protect Greenland, you know, properly, would be the United States.
But they're not asking for that.
You know, they would, of course, if they were independent, they would make their own treaties and stuff.
Maybe they could work out some kind of deal.
But here's what I think.
It seems to me that if I were in the CIA... And my job was to secure America using every little clever trick I could.
The first thing I would do is convince Greenland that they really need to be independent.
So first, you've got to get them away from Denmark.
Why?
Because I'm guessing, this is just speculation, but I'm guessing that the CIA would not want to use dirty tricks against a European ally.
It's not something we would do to Great Britain.
It's not something we would do to France.
It's not something we'd do to Denmark, I think.
I mean, it's not like all the countries are not spying and messing with each other a little bit.
But I don't think the United States would try to steal a land mass from Denmark.
Like, you know, they're allies.
I don't see how that could possibly happen.
But...
The moment this little 56,000 people giant country becomes independent, they're going to be helpless and completely vulnerable to CIA bribery, blackmail, complete puppet control, which is what we want.
We might not want to own the country so much as have functional control over it and put our military bases there and maybe get some approval for mining.
I guess they have a lot of rare earth minerals.
So there is a way to make a deal where they're independent, but not really.
56,000 people population could not stand up To the power of our intelligence people if we wanted to have control of it.
So, that's what I think is happening.
I think Greenland might be getting a little boost to say, why don't you make us independent?
And then Denmark is going to say, because we own you.
Then Greenland will say, why do you own us?
You're on the other side of the world.
What rule says you should be ruling over us?
You're colonizers.
So Denmark is going to have a hard time explaining it, and apparently they also subsidize Greenland.
So if you're a voter in Denmark, how much do you care that you're paying Greenland to exist?
And Greenland might drag you into a war in the Arctic.
How much do the Danes want that?
They get no economic benefit because they're subsidizing.
I think that's true.
I'd need a fact check on that.
I don't think they have economic benefit.
I think it's just a cost.
And there's nothing to gain from it.
It's literally just prestige, maybe, because it's something they own.
But now the prestige will turn into you evil colonizers.
You're preventing us from pursuing our destiny as a Green Lander.
So it's an interesting thing.
I just wonder if we're involved in this or it's happening organically.
If we're not involved in trying to make it happen, I'd be disappointed and surprised.
Meanwhile, Justice Juan Mershon...
He's the judge who is presiding over the case of Trump getting those loans and misrepresenting the value of his properties, said the courts.
Now what we know is that That case never would have come to fruition if it had been anybody but Trump.
We know there's no victim.
We know the bank said, no, we always check the values ourselves.
It doesn't matter what he said.
It's routine that we check the value ourselves.
And they did.
And they made a nice loan.
They got their money back.
No victims.
And it wasn't even outside the realm of ordinary business.
Was it technically illegal?
Well, that's what the jury found in the most biased place on earth.
The jury found that.
So, here's what's happening.
I was watching CNN yesterday, and so it looks like The bad guys, the Democrats, are going to use this to paint Trump as a felon who shouldn't be in office, even though he is.
And what they're doing, you have to be alerted to it, is they're making you think past the sale, which is persuasion, and in this case, propaganda.
What is the sale?
The sale is not whether he was found guilty or not.
Because that's just something everybody agrees with, that factually the court found him guilty.
But they're going past the sale that there should not have been any court case at all.
When the jury gets it, The jury is just deciding facts based on the structure that the court gave to them.
They said, here's what the guidelines are.
Now you have to decide if this guideline, in other words, if a crime has been committed based on the guidelines we've given you and the facts we've presented you.
So The CNN folks are trying to make you think that he must be guilty of felonies because the court found him so.
Technically, that's true, but they're making you think past the part which was complete evil lawfare and should never have happened, and everybody agrees it shouldn't have happened, really, except the most partisan.
So beware of that.
Don't let them make you think past the sale.
So, Trump humorously announced the appointment of Morgan Ortega as Deputy Special Presidential Envoy.
And in his announcement, he made it clear that, quote, early on, Morgan fought me for three years, but hopefully has learned her lesson.
So, I wasn't aware of this, but I guess Morgan Ortega at one point was an anti-Trumper.
But because other people told Trump that she was the right one for this job, and she has since, of course, become pro-Trump, that other people said she should be in the job, Trump says directly, basically, it's not his choice, but he's basically, it's not his choice, but he's going to let other people's opinion on this rule, and so he's going to go ahead and do it.
Now, the fact that he said completely honestly, it looks to me, at least transparently, he said that he's just not crazy about her, but he thinks under the circumstances worth a try.
I love that.
I love that.
And it is so sticky and persuasive.
Because if you hear him talk like that, And you know he didn't care what anybody thought about it.
He just said, well, this is what I think.
This is what I thought of her before.
This is what I think of her now.
And here's why I'm going to do something that doesn't make sense to you because other people have a different opinion.
And I'm going to let them play that out.
Everything about that I love.
Now, it must have been a bad day for Morgan Ortega.
Unlike other people who have been nominated, she did not repost the truth social endorsement from Trump.
She just wrote her own.
So that's got to be kind of embarrassing and humiliating.
But Trump has always done the persuasion play Where he makes sure that if you're against him, you pay a price, and he makes sure that if you're with him, you get, like, more benefits than you were expecting.
So I've often told you that's the pinnacle of good persuasion, is that everybody knows there's a really big difference between making you happy and making you not happy.
Oh, if you make me not happy, I'm going to make you twice as unhappy.
If you make me happy...
You might get a great job.
I might sing your praise.
I might retweet you.
Something like that.
So he's really good at that, making sure there's a giant difference.
And this was more of that.
Well, you may have been following the drama that I stirred up yesterday on social media, on X, because I noticed that Amazon had many of my calendars for 2025 listed, except that I'm not selling a calendar on Amazon.
They were all counterfeits.
All of them.
And there were several.
Now, if you look, you'll see that they've been removed because I made a very big deal about it yesterday.
And it got a lot of attention.
And I was talking to their support, trying to get me to their legal team so I could talk about it as a legal problem.
But the more I thought about it, I was like, well...
At first I thought, well, this is just sort of an ordinary business problem.
I just have to be faster in reporting things.
But their system is such...
That you can report all day long, but the time it takes for them to react, and sometimes they'll even require you to buy the product, if it's a book.
If it's a book, you have to buy the product and then prove that the insides of the book match the insides of your book.
That's their system.
And there are new ones coming on faster than you can do that because it might take two weeks to get that done.
So there are some people who think that process works.
I think 100% of the people who wrote to me and said they tried it confirmed it doesn't work.
And apparently if you try to fix this, no matter what kind of a seller you are, whether you're selling goods or books, well, anything that's not a book, Apparently, you hit glitches and problems and pushback, and eventually you get put out of business.
So the real model of Amazon, for practical purposes, is that it's a way to steal the good work of American businesses, small businesses, and hand it off to China.
So Amazon has become a weapon of mass destruction that China can use to suck all the vitality and innovation out of our economy.
At the small business level, which would be enough to destroy it.
Now, if they're doing that, that's not just a legal IP question.
If it's massive, it's a homeland security problem.
Would we ever agree to a situation in which the entire business model of Amazon is to effectively hand over the IP to a Chinese company that will make your product and while you watch it and there's nothing you can do about it?
So a number of people wrote to me and said, you know, we tried making a business online.
China stole all of our property, knocked it off immediately.
We couldn't get Amazon to take them down, even though we tried.
Sure, there's a system.
It just doesn't work.
So then I thought to myself, I wonder if I'm sort of imagining that Amazon could do more, but they're intentionally not.
And I heard from an insider.
So this is Mark Atwood on X. This is public.
So he said this on X. He said, here's some insight from a former Amazonian.
Roughly every three years, this gets into the press and then retail, I guess the part of Amazon that does retail stuff, put together a program.
They put together a program and a team to fix it.
And they start fixing it right up until it starts reducing revenue and, quote, diversity of suppliers.
And then it's yanked up short, and then the program is starved until it rots away because it doesn't actually generate revenue.
And there it sits until it shows up in the news again.
I watched it happen twice and found the remains of at least two previous cycles.
Does that sound like it's accidental?
No.
No.
So there's an insider telling you that they intentionally starve the process because they make more money if they let it go.
And it's really that simple.
So they're allowing the complete rape of American businesses, just wild, wildly inappropriate theft, and they're the primary movers of it.
Let me ask you this question.
We've all heard that China massively steals the intellectual property of companies that operate in China.
We're all aware of that, right?
It's a well-known phenomenon.
Who do you think has stolen more intellectual property, Amazon or China?
Because Amazon probably has essentially given China more opportunity to steal things than all of the companies that are just doing business in China itself.
So, I did ask, I sent a DM to Senator Hawley to ask if he can bring Bezos in and ask him what he's going to do about the fact that he's the primary agent for the destruction of the American economy.
Because he is.
And I don't think that Bezos is a bad guy.
I think he wants what's best for America.
He might not be Completely filled in on how bad it is.
He might have been told that they have a process, so it's fine.
Oh, don't worry, Jeff.
We have a process.
They can just report it and then we take it down.
But do they tell him that that process doesn't work for anybody?
Do you think he knows that?
Well, he probably knows it now because I made such a big stink about it.
Millions of people viewed it.
I think I got three million views on one of them.
One of the views came from Thomas Massey, who weighed in on this and said, quote, U.S. inventors get ripped off on Amazon, too.
Oh, it's worse than I thought.
Amazon makes money on the fakes and knockoffs, so they have no incentive to fix it.
Yeah, that tracks.
That tracks.
It's clear to me they should be legally liable for the fraud they help perpetuate on the public, the authors and the inventors.
Right.
However, Thomas Massey, this is not just a fraud case.
This is a homeland security issue.
We're literally, we've created a pipeline where To export our entire small business economy that sells things through the mail to China.
So yes, I'm very happy that he weighed in and he's right on top of it.
But I'd love to get it out of the frame that it's a fraud problem.
It is a fraud problem.
It is a fraud problem.
But that's not the thing I need fixed.
What I need fixed is stop throwing away the country.
Stop transferring the intellectual weight of America to China.
That's what I need to stop.
Anyway, Mark Cuban weighed in productively, and he had a fairly long list of suggested fixes.
I won't go into those because I don't know enough to know if they're exactly on point, but they look it.
They look it.
So here's one of those cases where I always talk about the internet dads.
When the election was on, of course, people took sides and Mark Cuban was on a side that many of you were not on.
So we didn't like that part.
But we also understand politics is politics.
That's not the real world.
When it comes to the real world, Yes, you want a Mark Cuban to say, how do you fix this thing?
And to also observe that it needs fixing and to get the conversation going at a higher level.
So thank you, Mark Cuban, for a very productive contribution to the conversation.
Now, one of the things I wondered about is why can't they fix it by just making the legitimate seller have the authority to take down the fakes?
And if I take down a real one and the real one complains and Amazon says, wait a minute, this was real.
You took down a real one.
It's just your competitor.
Well, then I should be removed from the system forever, right?
I should never be allowed to sell on Amazon if even once...
I report my competitor when in fact the competitor is doing nothing wrong.
So I would put the ability to take down a copyright or just other violation I would put that on the vendor.
And then you could say, you know, all Amazon is doing is following instructions.
They're not part of the wholesale destruction of America.
Now, there are a number of other things that Mark suggested.
They're all worth seeing if you want to check it out on X. Here's an update on the terrorists.
Boy, did this get...
I don't want to say fun because these are horrible events and people lost their lives, but...
Well, you'll see.
You'll see.
Here's what we know.
So as of today, and I'm going to tell you what the official story is, I'm still open to every other theory of what's really happening.
So if you think the FBI is really behind it or whatever it is you think, I'm okay with that.
I'm not going to rule it out.
But I do think the official story, to me, is sounding like it all works.
To me, there's nothing missing in the official story so far.
That tells me, oh, this is an outside plot.
But let's talk about those things, see if you disagree.
So some of the things we know is that Christopher Wray, head of the FBI, he warned us months ago that there would be lone wolves inspired by ISIS. And it turns out that as far as the FBI can tell, The New Orleans guy was a lone wolf, and there's no indication yet that he was somewhat, you know, directly an ISIS fighter or something.
He just seems inspired by.
Now, and so far there's no real mystery there.
Ray told us what happened.
It looks like it happened.
It's exactly like he called it.
It's inspired by, not planned by.
But there are coincidences, such as they seem to have spent time at the same base, army base, but they weren't there at the same time.
And it's such a big army base that something like one-third of all soldiers go through it.
So there really is no coincidence to the base thing.
It just means they were both in the military.
Now, is somebody who is in the military more likely to stage a violent attack?
I would think so.
If you've ever been involved in violently attacking people, I feel like it would be an easier transition to violently attack some more people, if that's what your philosophy said you should do.
So I don't think it's a big coincidence they're both military.
So was Timothy McVeigh.
I don't think it's a coincidence they were at the same base.
And I also don't think it was a coincidence that it happened on the same day.
Because if you did a survey and you said, all right, if you were a terrorist and you were looking for a big crowd to take out, And you want it to get a lot of attention where everybody's paying attention.
What day of the year would you pick?
I think you'd find, I don't know, 40% of the people who answered the question would say, well, The cameras are rolling and everybody's watching on New Year's Eve and, you know, that's the first day of 2025 and we plan to kick things up in 2025. So the one guaranteed time that it's going to work is the first day.
And I will go further and say, if you had planned a 2025 attack or maybe you were just trying to avoid Christmas, it could be that they both would have done it whenever they were ready.
But they didn't want to ruin Christmas.
Because literally, I think they both had families.
They didn't want to ruin Christmas.
So there's nothing really too coincidental about January 1st.
If it had been a random day, like March 13th, a random day, well, that would be a big coincidence.
But January 1st is probably the most likely place anybody would have picked if they had bad intentions and wanted a big crowd and a lot of attention.
So, no real coincidence.
And also the use of the same rental company.
As Tyrus pointed out on The Five the other day, and I told you, I think I'm the first one to point it out.
You can fact check me on this, but I think I'm the first one in the country to say, that's not a coincidence.
They're probably less monitored by authorities.
So if you want to get a big truck and you're in the military and maybe you said some things online about ISIS, probably if you go to Hertz or Avis, Homeland Security is already in the back door and probably they hear about you and the truck immediately.
I'm guessing.
And by the way, I'd be disappointed if that's not true.
Can you imagine if the CIA doesn't have access to the rental companies so they can tell who's getting the panel truck and also has some issues with their online accounts?
They better be looking for that.
If they're in all of our other stuff and we've lost our privacy, if they're not looking for the rental companies as the first place to look for trouble, they're not doing their job.
They need to be looking at that.
So I assume they are, and I assume that if you planned something that required a truck, you would use an app because it's less likely that anybody's in it.
And the automobiles, in this case, are private people's cars.
So the app hooks you up with a private person who has a car that they want to rent, and you just pick it up wherever you meet that private person.
So none of those strike me as coincidences.
Then, there's also the issue of...
Oh, okay.
So, in my view, the Las Vegas guy was a mental case.
But I know you're going to point out Bowie's guy.
He's a patsy.
You know, he's made to look like a mental case, but really, you know, he was set up.
Now, the evidence for him being set up, I haven't seen.
I haven't seen evidence he was set up.
Can't rule it out.
Right?
Can't rule it out.
But why would the CIA want to Do the worst or somebody else?
Why would anybody want to do the most pathetic attack involving a cyber truck that's the wrong tool and fireworks that are the wrong tool and it didn't hurt anybody and the Las Vegas Trump Tower is not even owned by Trump as far as I know?
I think that's a licensed property.
I don't think Trump owns that.
By the way, I could take a fact check on that.
But I don't think he even owns the building.
I think that it's a licensed property.
I think.
So...
Here's the...
Oh, then other things that are suspicious is that he loved Tesla and he loved Trump because he loved the Cybertruck.
He was bragging to his girlfriend about it.
Now, do people try to hook up with their girlfriend and call them and say the Cybertruck is awesome and say they're going to Mexico and then all of a sudden they kill themselves in Vegas?
Well, here's what I think.
I think he was heading to Vegas, not Mexico.
At the very least, he was going through Vegas to get to Mexico because he stopped accidentally, it looks like, at a place called Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Like he just told his truck to drive there and then he didn't realize that he was on the wrong route.
And then he went to the real Las Vegas.
So there's two points that say he was really trying to go to Las Vegas.
Because he did it twice, once the wrong Las Vegas.
So he at least wanted it to Las Vegas.
Anyway, so there's...
And then allegedly used a.50 caliber gun to kill himself, which left no dental records.
Is that what happened?
Did he shoot himself with such an aggressive weapon that his teeth were destroyed?
No.
I just saw an indication of that, but that doesn't exactly make sense to me.
Because I thought the wound was on the top of his head.
I don't know.
So I don't understand the dental records part.
Maybe you can fill me in.
But if you were mentally ill and planning to kill yourself, would you try to hook up with your ex before you died?
Because that's being treated as suspicious.
You know, if you're bent on dying, are you going to try to hook up with your ex?
Well, let me answer this as a male.
Yes.
Yes, you would absolutely try to hook up with your ex before you died.
If you're healthy.
And you're male, and you're horny.
Why wouldn't you?
So that's not weird.
That's what a mentally ill guy would do, as long as he was also healthy.
And he had the knowledge to create a better bomb, but he just used fireworks and gasoline, which doesn't look like a professional act.
However, A fellow named Sam Shoemate was on the Sean Ryan podcast, and I think I got this right.
So Sam Shoemate runs an account where people give him tips on stuff, a lot of military stuff, because his background is military.
And he was apparently contacted ahead of the event, but he didn't know the event was coming.
And allegedly...
Sorry.
Allegedly, the Las Vegas slash terrorist wrote to him and told him that he was trying to get attention for the fact that the drones over New Jersey are really exotic, gravidic propulsion devices that only China and the United States have.
And China now has it, and these super flying saucer drones are coming from offshore, from Chinese vessels.
And that's what's over New Jersey.
And they have unlimited power, and they can destroy the entire East Coast or any part of it without being harmed, because they're magical technology.
And that it's game over, and China has complete control over destroying the country.
And he wanted to use fireworks so that it made a big show of things, but clearly he wasn't trying to destroy the building.
So, does that make sense?
Does that sound real to you?
Well, I definitely don't believe there's any such thing as gravitic propulsion devices.
Somebody said, are you kidding, Scott?
Here's a...
Here's the patent.
So going on the internet, there's a patent for something like the graphitic propulsion device.
I don't believe that's a real patent.
You just have to look at it and say, all right, if you know a little bit about patents, you know that you're not going to get a patent unless you It's either already built, and you can demonstrate that it works, or it's something that a person who is skilled in the field could build somewhat easily.
So you don't have to have a prototype if what you're describing is something that anybody could build if they were in that field.
I don't see a way you could get Exotic propulsion device patented unless you could show you can build it.
Or that somebody who knew this field could build it.
And there's nothing like that.
So no, I'm not going to do the research to find out that that's a fake patent page.
It's clearly fake.
And even if it did get patented, which I suppose is possible, it's not real.
Couldn't possibly be real.
So...
I'm not buying that.
Laura Loken was pointing out that the email is filled with media talking points and smacks of a staged cover-up.
Well, that's true.
It did seem to be that he had a lot of Kraken-like talking points so that we could get the public talking about gravitic propulsion devices in China instead of maybe something else we should be paying attention to.
You know, we're always worried about the distractions.
Erica, our New Jersey, let's see, journalist, independent journalist, at least in this case, says the drones are still out in New Jersey.
So they were quiet over the holidays.
Oh, okay.
Well, so the photograph that Erica just included in the locals feed, you can't see it if you're not on locals, showed clearly an aircraft because it's got the aircraft lights.
So that would suggest it's at least legally operated.
Scott, you should see the antigravity patents.
You don't have to build it to get a patent.
No, I just said that.
You don't have to build it to get a patent as long as it's obvious that somebody in that field could build it.
That's the part that's not real.
If somebody in that field could build it, somebody would have already built one.
You'd be riding in it right now.
It couldn't possibly be real.
Anyway, And I guess he repeatedly talked about making it to Mexico.
Which does not track with the fact that he presumably had plans to end himself before he got to Mexico.
But I wonder if maybe the plan shifted.
It could be that maybe he thought, I'll just blow up this car and then escape to Mexico.
That wouldn't make sense because he wouldn't have a vehicle.
So we don't know the Mexico part.
And as Laura Logan points out, that would kind of suggest that he was set up.
She also points out that there were two paper letters that survived the fire and explosion of the car.
However, I don't think that's unusual.
Because the vehicle was not completely destroyed, right?
So depending on where the letters were, let's say if they were in the glove department, the glove compartment, would they have been burned up?
I don't know.
So yes, it's a head scratcher, how two pieces of paper could survive a car fire.
But it's not impossible because the Cybertruck had good walls of protection.
And then there's also the claim from NBC News that he used an exotic explosive compound.
Wait, is this the same guy?
No, this is the other guy.
So the New Orleans guy used an exotic compound.
So that makes it look like, hey, where'd he learn that?
But I keep conflating the two attacks, but that's a separate one.
Anyway, here's a...
So my take so far, I'll give you my tentative take.
The coincidences are largely explained away by ordinary life.
They don't seem to be coordinated with each other.
One of them appears to have been mentally ill from PTSD. That seems well, I think, pretty well likely.
And the other one seems inspired by ISIS, but not maybe part of a larger wave of attacks.
So, remember when every one of us, we were so sure that When the attacks happened, that this is the beginning of Al-Qaeda's wave of attacks, because we saw Sean Ryan interview Sarah Adams.
Which, by the way, because we live in the simulation, is the name of my old cat.
I had a cat named Sarah, who I called Sarah Adams.
But they're different people.
This is actually a human.
So the human has high credibility, people are saying.
Very high credibility.
I've confirmed that her credibility is impeccable because it turns out she follows me on X. And I'm like, that's really all you need to know.
That's impeccable logic, and she's definitely on the right path.
Anyway, so her take was that there's going to be a massive wave of attacks in the United States, and we all thought that that was the beginning of it.
It doesn't look like it.
It looks like these were two random attacks that just naturally fell on the same day because it was a good day to attack.
So, now, if you're just joining the stream, let me remind you, I do not have certainty about any of it.
I don't have certainty on any of the facts that have so far been reported, and I definitely don't have a certainty that there's not some larger, clever plot and he's a patsy or any of that stuff.
I don't know.
But so far, these look like ordinary cases.
Ordinary meaning somebody was inspired by ISIS, you know, he had the name, he had the background, And the other one, he just had PTSD and maybe he changed his plans in the middle and maybe he was half decided whether he was going to kill himself versus whether he was going to try to get away.
And then maybe at the last minute he said, you know, I'm never going to get away with it.
Might as well just do it.
Now, people asked, how do you shoot yourself after the explosion?
Because he set off the explosives but still managed to shoot himself.
Like, how do you get the timing right?
And my answer is, you just do them at the same time.
I imagine the explosive took a moment to detonate.
There's probably a fuse.
You probably threw a flame back there, and maybe the gas caught on first, and the fireworks are second.
So you probably had at least one second to pull the trigger, don't you think, if you did them simultaneously?
There's probably a little bit of delay.
Before the fire turns into an explosion?
Plenty of time.
I don't think that's weird at all.
And it's also possible Yeah, no.
It may be that he was just going to do the gun in case he got burned and didn't die.
And then he thought, you know, I might as well just not feel any pain.
So we'll see.
Joy Reid over at MSNBC and her guest Charles Blow.
Yeah, that's his actual name.
They're talking about the real danger of being white men.
And they think that things are overblown because one of them was brown.
But she wants to know the really big problem is young white men in America.
We need to look at our domestic terrorism.
Well, I don't disagree that there have been white American men who did some mass shootings.
That certainly happened.
But I don't see it as the same level of risk.
Because you're really imagining the future.
If you talk about risk, you're not talking about the past.
Because that's done.
In the past, it might have been true, there were periods where somebody who called himself a white supremacist did more damage than a terrorist for any given six-month period or a year or whatever.
But there's no way these are the same level of risk.
Whatever happens from individuals is going to be one terrible act that probably had multiple deaths.
But if you're being attacked with waves of attack, maybe 1,000 or 1,500 terrorists who are in the country who are going to die trying, that's a whole different deal.
I mean, that's really different.
So MSNBC continues to be a joke.
If you're not following on X the account of Sean Ono Lennon, I recommend it.
He's very interesting.
Now what's interesting is that you really can't tell if he's Democrat or Republican By watching his account.
And I love that.
Because he weighs in on a lot of topics that are in the news, but you really can't tell.
And the reason you can't tell is because he just takes a common sense approach to things that we normally just take the hyper-partisan approach to.
So he's very good at just being interesting and And not giving away bias.
Just telling you what the thing looks like.
So he had this comment today.
He said, I think overall people are less easily fooled now than they were in the past.
Part of the disintegration of cohesive society is a result of this awakening.
I really hope it leads somewhere good.
I worry that it won't.
So he's noticing that people are learning to be less easily fooled.
Do you agree with that?
People are learning to be less easily fooled.
He's half right.
It's only happening on one side.
And the people who make an effort to see what the other side is saying.
So somebody like Elon Musk...
Is watching both arguments.
And so he decided to kind of change teams because he saw both arguments.
And he's the kind of person who can, you know, figure out what the fake stuff is.
I would argue that something happened on the conservative side of politics that did not happen, or even close, on the Democrat side.
And that is that there were people like me, and I could name 10 other people Who are going out of their way to debunk fake news on the other side, but also to teach you the tools for doing it yourself, which is what I do.
I try to teach you, all right, for example, I say if the news only has one source and it's an anonymous source, you should treat that as zero credibility.
Now, that's not what people would have done automatically.
Most people would say, well, it's not proven, but they got that one source, and of course they want to be anonymous.
Why wouldn't they?
So yeah, that's pretty credible.
No, the answer is nothing.
There's no credibility.
It's almost impossible that that's going to be true.
So that's the sort of thing that you have to learn, because it's opposite of common sense.
Your common sense says, well...
You know, they wouldn't report it if it wasn't at least possibly true.
So you have to get past, they wouldn't say it if it were fake.
And you have to get past, well, I think some of the news is real.
No, no.
Not any of the political news.
It's all framed, you know, it might be true facts, but it's usually framed in a way that's misleading.
So, in my opinion, The Democrats were the hoax and fake news-creating entity.
And in response, because there's always a response, The conservatives built up a resource that the left doesn't have.
And that resource is a bunch of people that you can immediately go to to find out what's true.
All right, let me ask you this.
How many of you have seen a headline story, and one of the first questions you asked about it was, what does Adam say about this?
But not just me.
You probably said, okay, what does Cernovich say about this?
If it's a legal thing, I say, what does Dershowitz say about it?
What does Turley say about it?
I know exactly where to go to find the fake news.
If it's a technology thing, Like, I'll look for the smartest technology people.
I'll look for Marc Antresen, if it's a technology thing, to find out if it's true.
I'll look for Balaji, Srinivasan.
I'll look for Naval, Ravikant.
And, of course, Elon Musk.
So we've developed...
We collectively have developed on the right this BS-snipping system, which is quite wild.
It's never existed before, as far as I know.
And that's different.
And they can't match it.
If they matched it, they would disintegrate because then their base would realize that the main things they're being told are fake.
So if they teach their base how to spot fakes, the entire operation falls apart because it's mostly built on fake news.
So that's funny.
So again, Sean Orno Lennon, good follow.
I recommend it highly.
And I like that he noticed I like that he noticed that people are less easily fooled, but I think that's because he follows both sides.
If you follow both sides, then you learn how to spot the fakes.
So he's probably picked it up just from people he follows on the right.
Let's see.
This is John Nolte.
He's reporting that the 2024 domestic box office is down 24% since five years ago.
Now, there's a comparison thing.
I'm not sure how the pandemic works in there, but it's even down this year a little bit, just a few percent from what it was last year.
I just want to weigh in on this.
Now, the smart people said, it's not the pandemic, it's not anything, it's just the movies are bad.
That's what I think.
I think just the movies are bad.
But on top of that, I don't even think of movies as something that people watch anymore.
There are very few movies that you're going to want to spend two hours on.
Very rarely.
So when I think of things I would want to spend time on, I just don't even think of a movie anymore because I know I'm not going to like it.
And my attention span, like yours, is so shortened now that I can go through a thousand reels, the little quick videos, and every one of them will entertain me because the algorithm makes sure of that.
And I'm absolutely, totally entertained, and I can stop whenever I want to go do something else.
I don't have to drive somewhere and buy bad popcorn and sit there for two and a half hours and wish I were closer to a restroom.
So I don't see how movies really survive in the future.
Speaking of surviving, Ukraine now has these miniature missiles to knock down drones.
I guess they were made in Estonia.
If you didn't know this, Estonia is a wildly successful little country.
Did you know that?
I have a friend who's an Estonian who I think at one point was probably the richest person in Estonia because he was one of the adventurers of What is these?
Before Zoom, there was the thing before Zoom.
So, Estonia, the Estonians are really high-tech.
They've got a real good little high-tech situation going there.
One of the things they do in Estonia is you can vote by app.
How many times have you said to yourself, why can't we vote by an app?
Like, why?
Seems like that would be obvious.
The most obvious thing.
Especially if your app does a face recognition.
If I vote on my phone and I use facial recognition to make my app take the vote, I'm going to feel pretty good.
That that vote got registered properly.
So Estonia is already doing it, so you don't have to wonder if it works.
They seem happy with it.
But they've also made this little miniature rocket, and I think it uses AI, which is what's new and interesting about it.
But it goes really high, so we can get even the high drones.
So it looks like the missile is maybe just a foot tall and not very wide.
And I need one of those for home.
Is there any way I can get an AI anti-drone missile for home?
I'll put it on my roof.
No?
All right.
Well, speaking of the algorithm, Elon Musk says that the X algorithm is going to be tweaked soon to promote more informational, entertaining content.
And he says, I like how he puts this.
This is a great framing for the objective.
Our goal is to maximize unregretted user seconds.
That is the most...
Human-friendly way to say what you're doing.
What I would hate is to say he's just trying to get his usage minutes up.
Or I would hate if he said, we're trying to tell the truth.
We only told the truth.
Nobody thinks the truth is coming through social media.
But he says it in the most perfect way.
He wants to maximize unregretted user seconds.
Have you ever spent a bunch of time on social media and said, God, I wish I didn't do that.
Like it just gave me a headache and I feel bad and I'm scared of everything.
You have, right?
Those are regretted minutes.
He's trying to maximize unregretted user seconds.
You know, your ability to get what you want is way better when you know exactly what it is.
And this is such a good frame.
Unregretted.
I love that.
So we'll see.
See if that changes anything.
There's a report in Axios that Biden and his advisors had a meeting not too long ago about the possibility of striking Iran's nuclear sites before January 20th and Trump is sworn in.
Now, here's what you need to know about this kind of story.
If the government is doing its job and the military is doing its job, they should always be talking about this kind of stuff.
It doesn't mean it's going to happen.
But yes, I want my president meeting with the military, and I want the military to say, it's not the only thing we can do, but if you decided to go this way, this is what we could do.
Yeah, I want that meeting every week.
It shouldn't be news that they had a meeting, and they discussed one of the most obvious paths, and apparently there's no energy to do it.
So they had the meeting, they heard the alternatives, they decided collectively, apparently with not a lot of disagreement, I would guess, that they're not going to do it.
I feel like that article was written as sort of a diss on Biden.
That's not a diss.
Every time this story is about Trump, Trump held a meeting to see if he can, I don't know, nuke a hurricane.
And then people said, oh, no, no, it's crazy.
No, I want that meeting.
I don't think it was a meeting.
I think it was just an offhand comment he made once.
But I want that.
I want him to ask the question, well, do we have the technology to nuke it?
And it's fine if the answer is, no, that's crazy.
There's no way that could work.
We couldn't control the...
There's no way you could control the radiation.
Okay.
But do I like that he asked the question?
Yes.
Yes.
I want my leader to be asking the question not just of the obvious stuff, but I want him to ask the non-obvious stuff.
That was a non-obvious question.
I like it.
And if the only thing it does is make you think deeper about other possibilities that are possible, so suppose the answer was, no, that's crazy.
We're not going to use a nuke to stop a hurricane.
But what if then the person you asked said, but I do have an idea.
Suppose you did this.
Here's an idea that would actually work to reduce hurricanes.
You greenify northern Africa, which can be done.
So basically you just let your animals...
Essentially the way you green a desert area is you have animals in the part that's still got enough green that they can eat.
And then the cows will, or whatever, livestock, they eat what's there.
And then sometimes they wander to the edge of the area and poop.
And then that creates collectively someplace where more things are going to grow.
And then just the cows wandering around and eating and pooping will make your greenery just extend into the desert.
So, suppose that Trump asks the question that's completely impractical, nuking a hurricane, but the person asks, you know, I've heard this other idea.
And then you have the conversation, well, is that practical?
Is there any way we could, in a cost-effective way, reduce hurricanes just by, you know, emphasizing the greening?
Because the greening, here's why that works.
Northern Africa is where it gets super hot, and then that heat is what drives the hurricanes, you know, the heat differential, basically.
So if you reduce the differential of heat by making just the desert less hot, it should take some steam off the hurricanes.
And that's maybe doable.
So I'm always in favor of asking the bad question, should we nuke a hurricane?
Because then that opens up everybody to all the other possibilities, and maybe there's one you haven't talked about yet.
That's good technique.
I like it in Biden, and I like it in Trump.
So that's two A pluses.
And I think that's everything I wanted to say today.
So I remind you that Owen Gregorian is going to do a Spaces after we're done.
So he's been doing that on Saturdays after the show.
People seem to like it.
It was well attended.
So look for that probably just a few minutes after we're done.
It's on Spaces on X. And you watched three movies in three days?
You had nothing better to do than that?
Did you also exercise?
Because if you watch movies and you didn't exercise that day, you need to rethink that.
All the AI invasion is coordinated with a writer's strike.
Interesting.
All right.
Let me just look at your comments here for a moment.
Dilbert Assumption.
I'm not about best idea of the year.
L.A. Times.
Oh, I could probably get Dilbert back in some newspapers.
Yeah, I just don't want Dilbert in newspapers anymore because newspapers are just a dying industry.
There's no point.
I could get a few newspapers, but they don't pay much individually.
It wouldn't make any difference to my income.
So even if I got a few big papers, like hypothetically, what was mentioned was the LA Times.
So even if the LA Times said, you know, we're trying to be different than we were and we'll take you back, that would be like $100 a month.
Did you know that?
That's how little they pay for cartoons.
It's like $100 a month.
So if you have 2,000 of them, And they'll pay different rates depending on the size.
Then you're making real money.
But to get one or two papers to take Dilbert back wouldn't make any difference at all.
There's no income involved with that.
Yeah, I'd have to start censoring myself again.
Don't want that.
All right.
Since Owen's going to do his spaces, you'll have some time to chat with each other.
I think I'll end this and maybe just say hi quickly to the locals people.
But everybody on X and Rumble and YouTube, thanks for joining.
And YouTube is going to probably demonetize me because they do every once in a while and we don't know why.
