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Content:
Politics, Southern California Fires, Elon Musk Starlink Donation, California Water Mismanagement, LA Mayor Bass, Delta Smelt, California Fire Insurance, California Government Incompetence, DEI, Bernie Sanders, Governor Newsom, California Government Trump Resistance Plan, President Trump, Preemptive Pardons, Dan Crenshaw Stock Picks, Scott Adams
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We're going to find our comments and get them going so I can see what the locals people are saying to me.
And then we will blow your mind with the best show ever.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
So, Probably the best day you can ever have, but if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains.
All you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
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Sensation.
Best sip of the day.
Well, of course, I'm going to be talking about the LA fires, but I'll wait just a minute for people to stream in.
Before that, I would like to note, do any of you remember, I can't remember how long ago it was, so we're going to test your long-term memory.
It was a long time ago, but there were these two terror attacks, one in New Orleans and one in Vegas.
Does any of that sound familiar?
It was so long ago.
Right?
Trump is doing it again.
He's doing that thing where time is completely distorted.
So when the Vegas terrorism thing was the headline story, I said to myself, ooh, this is going to be in the news for a while.
So I'm going to do a Dilbert comic in which Dilbert's boss's secretary suggests that he takes a A vacation in Vegas, because he didn't know where to go on his vacation.
So she suggests that he buy a Cybertruck and drive it to Vegas and stay at the Trump Hotel.
Well, anyway, you'd have to see the comic.
It's pretty darn funny, but it's running today only for the subscribers.
You'd have to be subscribing on X or Locals to see it.
You know, I was prepping it to publish it this morning, and I thought, oh my God, that feels so long ago.
So long ago.
So, Trump, time distortion, happening again.
All right, just one more thing, then we'll talk about the fires.
I tried to use ChatGPT last night to digest a big legal document that I was asked to review, and I thought to myself, oh.
Perfect application for AI. I'm going to upload the document, and then I will query it to say, okay, is this handled?
What about this?
What's it say about this?
And then it would summarize it for me, and I'd save a bunch of time.
I was so happy to be in the age of AI, so I took my PDF file, and I uploaded it, and it said, no, we can't handle a PDF file.
And I said, in 2025. The advanced intelligence.
The most important technology in the world.
Can't read a PDF file?
But it said, you know, JPEG it could read.
So I thought, alright, alright, well.
So I just changed it to a JPEG file.
And I upload it.
And it fails.
And it says, it can only take, when it goes to JPEG, it turns the document into each of its individual pages as one file apiece.
But I thought, well, no problem.
I'll just drag all of the pages in.
It'll figure out the page numbers.
Good to go.
And then I try to drag all the pages in.
And it says, you can only handle four pages.
And I think, okay, no problem.
No problem.
I'll just do four at a time.
Because there are only 20-some pages.
It's not going to take all day.
So I drag four over.
Good.
So I drag another four over.
And then it clarifies that...
It's a total of four.
It's not four at a time.
It's a total of four.
So I spend something like 45 minutes of my day finding out that AI can't do the simplest freaking thing.
So, I don't know.
They say it's going to replace everything and do everything.
But I don't know.
All right, let's talk about the LA fires.
It's all horrible.
You know, if you're new to my live stream, I live in Northern California, and you might say to yourself, well, Northern California, that's so far away from Southern California that you're probably not much impacted.
Well, I'm not impacted directly by the fire.
That's not a risk where I am.
But if you live in California, you end up having a lot of friends in other parts of California.
So I'm very impacted.
And I had to cancel the man cave last night because there was just too many people who needed help and too many people I had to check on.
And, you know, it was both family and friends.
And it was a big wait.
So just not being in the direct fire is better than being in the fire.
But let me tell you, the other residents of California, we're taking it in the gut.
This is like being punched all day long.
And five people dead, apparently, which is a gigantic tragedy, I suppose.
I suppose you could say something like it could have been worse, but five people is five people.
One of them reportedly had stayed behind with his hose and was trying to save his house.
And I always wondered how smart...
Or dumb that strategy was.
Because there are a number of people who apparently did, in fact, save their houses.
Because somebody stayed, you know, neighbor, or they stayed with a hose.
But one of them died.
So if you're going to stay with a hose, just know, I don't know what the odds are of you dying in this sort of massive fire situation, but it might be like 20%, you know?
I mean, it's crazy high.
But people do what they have to do if it's your entire life and you're not insured, which was the case in many cases.
I guess you do what you got to do.
Anyway, so speaking of do what you want to do, I heard Greg got filled on the five yesterday requesting that people consider opening up their homes to other people.
This one's not like a lot of Different disasters.
The sheer number of people who are displaced in a fairly populated area is kind of crazy.
And they're not going to go back soon.
So a lot of people are opening houses, donating money, trying to help in every possible way they can.
So it's pretty much an all-hands-on-deck situation here.
So if you don't see me, you're putting in as much work.
Could you please understand that this isn't the week that my mind's on work?
We're trying to keep people alive and help as we can.
So, apparently, I think there's still zero containment, but the Santa Ana winds that made it so bad should be dying down by the end of today.
So, I'm hoping...
That we're going to see something like some containment.
Now, I hate to say it, but probably the only thing that will bring this fire under control is burning everything that's burnable until there's just no fuel left.
It's just the ocean.
So, I don't know what they're going to do, but Elon Musk has announced he's going to donate free Starlink terminals to the affected area in L.A. I think that's maybe today or tomorrow he's going to do that.
Axe always makes me feel like the world is so small.
So, you know, the richest, most interesting guy in the world right now is, of course, on every topic.
And he's in this topic in a productive way.
And then you see in the comments, when he says he's going to donate them, you see his brother, Kimball, saying, you know, thanks, brother.
So he must be in L.A. And he must be affected.
So even Kimball Musk is in the mix.
A lot of celebrities.
We'll talk about some of those.
All right.
The biggest macro story is the fog of war.
So I'm guilty of probably, I don't know the specifics, but I think I probably reposted some fake news yesterday because there was so much...
Speculation and not quite accurate.
So I want to talk about the things we think we know and put them in context.
If you haven't done this yet, I recommend it highly.
If you're not watching one of the fake news networks like CNN talking about the context of how we got to this situation in California, you're not really hearing the other side.
And this is one of those things where there's a fog of war, but on top of it, Two completely different versions of what happened have already emerged.
No surprise.
No surprise.
But you really need to hear the alternative explanations of what happened.
It's going to blow your mind that any of it could be a little bit explained.
Now, when I say a little bit explained, my macro theory is that there's massive incompetence.
There needs to be some kind of...
Some kind of addressing that.
I don't know what that looks like.
So there's massive incompetence, but some of the accusations clearly don't fly.
And I'll tell you which ones they are, because I feel like we want to be mad, but it's such wasted energy to be mad at the wrong things.
There's plenty of things to really be mad at.
Now, I will remind you.
Well, we'll get to that.
So here are some of the things that people accused.
The LA government and management of doing.
So first of all, the reports were that the fire hydrants either didn't have water or had no water pressure.
Now, there's two versions of that.
If the problem is they didn't have water because there was no stored water, there is some evidence that there was a water reservoir that was not filled.
But I'd like to know more about whether it was possible to fill it, because maybe there was no water to put in, and I don't know whose fault that would be.
So all of these things that look like they're simple, they've all got some bigger story behind them, which doesn't make any of it good or right.
It's just that you should know the context.
It's never as simple as the posts on X. So it's possible.
Well, there definitely was a low water pressure in some places, and there definitely were fire hydrants not producing water.
Some were.
So we do have reports of some working hydrants, some not.
Possibly, or even maybe probably, the reason the water pressure was insufficient is that there were so many hydrants being used at the same time, attempted, and the...
Entire place had been destroyed, so there were a lot of open, fountain-like water being wasted just in homes.
So if the area was served by the same water source, be it the hydrant or inside the house, if the house has broken pipes and the water is spewing everywhere and everybody's trying to use water at the same time to put out the fire, there's not going to be enough.
Water pressure.
Or maybe even water.
So water and water pressure were both a problem.
It's not entirely clear that either of those were some direct mistake that you could put on some particular person.
They're all complicated.
There's a question of forest management.
You know, Trump has been on it for years, literally years.
He's been saying that California is not managing its forest.
Like places like Austria, where they don't have this kind of fire.
And managing the forest means partly removing the underbrush, the really flammable stuff, because the trees can do a much better job of surviving.
If it's just going tree to tree, it's not going to go as fast as if there's this underbrush that's just ready to go.
Because the living trees are a little bit wet, so they'll slow things down, but the dead underbrush.
You know, it's just, it's going to be traveling like crazy.
So the forest management thing is a real thing.
It's really important.
It's really not done well.
But I don't know if that had a causation in this case.
Because most of what I saw burning were residential homes.
And there's at least one report that I don't think is confirmed that somebody said the fire started in somebody's backyard and then spread up a hill.
If it started in somebody's backyard and spread up a hill, which is not confirmed, not confirmed, it's just something I saw a fireman on the scene who was working, it said.
If it was set by somebody, we heard reports that, which are fake, these are fake reports, somebody, oh, that's one of the fake ones that I think I reposted.
So that's bad on me.
That's just a mistake.
I should not have been trusting that kind of information.
That early in the story.
All right?
So that's just an unforced error.
So on my part, believing that story, that some homeless person said it, which did not happen, that's on me.
That's just an error.
I should have said somebody reports it, but we don't know.
That would have been the right answer.
So we still don't know.
But I can tell you that I don't see a direct link.
From forest management to this particular fire.
I do see a gigantic risk if our forests are not well managed, and that appears to be the case.
So we don't know about the water reservoir thing.
There are a whole bunch of questions about whether water resources have been managed correctly for years.
It doesn't look like it.
It looks like there are enough allegations of things that could have solved the problem.
I guess years ago there was some big plan to capture the water runoff and make it available for fires, but that didn't get passed.
Some people will say it's because of the Democrats.
Other people will say, well, we tried to get this bipartisan bill to have more water, but the Republicans said no for some reason.
So I don't know.
But I would say the one thing that I'm...
Confident about?
I'm confident that California has completely mismanaged its water resources.
Would that have made a difference in this specific case?
Maybe not.
There's a video of Joe Rogan in 2024, in the summer, which is just six months ago, in which he was saying he talked to a fireman.
So six months before this fire in L.A., A fireman said, we've been lucky so far.
If we get the wind at the same time as a fire, all of LA is going to burn.
This is from a professional fireman who said, there's no way around it.
You're not going to be able to stop it.
If the fire starts at the same time as the high wind, which is exactly what happened, there is no defense.
So, if you say to me, if only we had more water, we could defend it.
I say to you, maybe a little, but it probably would have still taken out most of the area.
Maybe you could save some houses, but it would have taken out most of the area.
So the bigger problem was it was a known problem that was not directly addressed.
So is it a problem that forests are not managed?
It's a big one.
Maybe not directly factor in this fire.
Is the water management a problem?
Yes.
Poorly done.
Was it directly a problem in this fire?
Yes.
If your house burned down because the fire hydrant didn't work, you're probably going to say, why didn't you count on a fire that's this big or something like that?
But maybe it couldn't have been stopped.
Maybe the fireman in 2024 was exactly right and there just wasn't anything you could do.
The mayor, Karen Bass, is it?
She happened to be in Ghana for some government thing that she thought was interesting.
And I'm not sure that anything is different because the mayor was in a different country.
You know, mayors travel, and even though there's no reason they should have been doing some international work, I mean, she could have been on vacation.
There are lots of reasons that people are out of town.
I doubt that her absence had any impact on the emergency response.
But in emergencies, you want your leaders to act capable and have empathy and be on hand and tell you everything they know, give you some hope that they can get this under control.
So I don't think she did a good job on anything.
But probably it didn't make any difference to any house that burned or didn't burn.
Then, I've got to spend a moment on this.
There's a lot of accusations that this is caused by DEI. And I'm going to make some suggestions about this.
So I'll talk about DEI after I give the list of other things that people are saying.
I don't think you can pin it on one person and say that's a DEI higher or even more than one person, but more on that in a moment.
So let's see.
There's something about the smelt fish.
Smelt?
Is it a smelt fish or is it just a smelt?
Apparently Trump calls it an extinct fish.
I don't think it's extinct, which is the whole point of trying to preserve it.
If it were extinct, we wouldn't be worrying about it.
But it's funny that he calls it extinct, an extinct fish.
But apparently there was some movement to provide more water for LA, but it didn't work because it would have been bad for these rare smelt, the Delta smelt.
Well, let me tell you what else smelt about this situation.
Everything.
So, I don't know.
I think that Smelt Fish is going to be one of those two movies on one screen.
I think CNN is going to tell you, oh, that was a bipartisan thing, or Republicans should have said yes.
There's going to be another story to that.
I don't think it's as clean as...
We traded smelt for human beings, although in some ways it looks exactly like that, but probably there's a little extra context on that one.
And then the part that is definitely true is that the insurance policy caps that California tried to put on fire insurance policies caused a shortage of fire insurance policies.
Because the fire insurance people said, no thanks.
If we can't make money, we don't want to be in your state.
So they pulled out.
So, what makes this particular situation go from tragic to...
How do I say this without being cancelled?
Alright, I'm going to speak as indirectly as I can and you can piece it together.
If an ordinary tragedy happens, you get into tragedy mode.
You're, like, trying to help people.
You're feeling sad.
You're feeling impacted.
You're basically just feeling terrible but trying to do what you can if it's just a tragedy.
If it's a tragedy which would have been halved by your insurance kicking in and at least paying for what you lost, that would be half as big.
But it wouldn't be just a change of you being half as mad.
It's the difference between, and here's where I have to be careful, it's the difference between people feeling bad and people feeling homicidal.
Was that indirect enough?
We're looking at the government of California, and I can tell you from personal experience, my emotions I'm trying to keep under control.
And if you've seen a lot of Californians talking in ways that you think are unusually calm, given the situation, like James Woods, you saw him acting completely calm that the house he loved and just rebuilt and remodeled was lost and he had no insurance.
Now, he has better resources maybe than other people, but even he broke down on an interview.
So don't mistake.
How strong people are acting with how they're feeling on the inside.
This feels like we got raped.
That's what it feels like.
It doesn't feel like a tragedy happened.
It feels like we got raped.
All of us.
Even if you're not directly affected, do you know what this is going to do to the possibility of getting insurance?
Anywhere in the state?
This just made the entire state unlivable.
They're going to have to tax the bejesus end of us to pay for whatever this caused.
The level of economic destruction, I don't even think you can calculate it.
It's bigger than anything that's ever happened in the country.
And so I feel a sense of rage that makes me in revenge-y, homicidal head.
Instead of recovery from an event head.
I want to be just in the healthful recovery mode.
But man, when they give you the double tap, you know, one in the chest, one in the head, one in the chest was the bad fire management.
The one in the head was you don't have insurance because we changed the rules in an obvious way, in a way that obviously would make insurance go away and not be available.
You do that?
I don't think the...
Let me say it in a way that I heard it stated, and I'm not going to attribute this, but without attribution, I heard yesterday a Californian who was directly affected say, of one of the leading politicians who was getting a lot of blame.
Again, I won't be specific.
And the advice was, I wouldn't show yourself in public.
Now, that advice, I think, was well intended as a security thing.
You need to know that people feel homicidal.
They don't feel just hurt.
This is not like other things.
The level of incompetence, apparently, is so extreme that it doesn't feel like an accident.
It feels intentional.
It wasn't intentional.
But it feels like it.
It feels like people just raped us because they didn't give a shit.
So if you think we're going to get over this, I doubt it.
I doubt it.
I don't think we're going to get over this.
And you didn't have to be in the fire zone to not get over it.
I'm not getting over this.
This is the wake-up call.
It's the tap on the shoulder.
It says, you know, all that complaining you did?
Complaining is nothing.
Complaining is nothing.
At this point, pretty serious action, and I hope it's not the homicidal kind, is required.
And I do believe that people of character are going to act really differently.
And some of them will be sacrificing their...
Personal fortunes.
Some will be sacrificing their reputations.
But the risk-reward equation just changed completely.
Once you realize you can't live in this state the way it is, then you're going to take a bigger risk to change it.
If you're just like, I don't like it, but next year is going to be a lot like this year, you're just going to get on with your life.
But now it's an existential risk just to be managed by incompetence.
It's an existential risk of incompetence.
Now, I will remind you, as I was reminded just moments ago before the show started, that it was a while ago that I warned that DEI would cause massive institutional and corporate and government incompetence, and it would be really, really obvious, and it could destroy everything we love.
When people mention that on TV, such as the amazing Scott Jennings, he got into that conversation on CNN, it went completely off the rail.
And I'm going to call it a rare communication mistake by Scott Jennings.
When I talk about him, usually it's like, oh my God, he just explained things so well among this.
Panel of Democrats, and he won that day, and I'll be forwarding around.
So in general, he's the best we have.
If you're looking at who's the best communicator who's not Trump himself, it might be Scott Jennings.
He's really, really impressive.
But on the DEI stuff, total fail.
Now, I think it's easy to correct, and I would expect he will.
Here's the correction.
And I posted this.
I hope he sees it.
But accusing people, specific people.
If what you're doing is accusing specific people of being DEI hires, we don't have that kind of information.
We can tell that they're in a certain demographic group, but you can't tell that that's the problem.
You can't look at a specific case and say, oh, if Karen Bass had been a white guy, everything would be fine.
Now, it might be that she is a DEI hire, and then that's the whole story, and the police chief is a DEI hire, and you've got everything you need.
It might be.
But we don't have that kind of information.
So when Scott Jennings brought up the DEI element, he had a couple of black female panelists who just ate him up.
And what they did is they do the thing where they say, why are you saying that black women can't do a good job?
Nobody says that.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the DEI conversation.
The DEI conversation is not about the capability of any particular group.
It's not a capability.
It's a system incentive design problem that you could replace anybody in this equation and you get the same bad outcome.
So nobody's saying that.
There's something special about black women not being able to do stuff.
I'm not aware of anybody who has that opinion.
It's more about the system.
And let me explain that a little bit better.
So the first point is that as soon as you apply it to any individual, you're on thin ice.
You don't have the proof of that unless you work with that person every day.
You probably don't know if they're doing a good or bad job.
You know, sometimes there are other variables that make stuff impossible.
But here's what you can say.
You can say, number one, that leaders focus on what is easiest to measure.
That probably is the number one most important thing you need to know about management.
That managers manage to things that can be tracked.
Why do they do that?
Because when they get their bonuses and their awards and their raises, It's going to be based on what can be measured.
What is easier to measure than diversity improvement?
It's easy.
What are you?
I'm a woman.
Got it.
What are you?
I identify as black.
Got it.
Right?
Easy to count.
Easy to keep track.
Easy to see how it changed from what it was to where it is.
If you give any manager that situation, Where it's easy to know if you did it right, or at least if you hit the goal.
I won't say right, but you hit the goal.
They're going to manage that.
And they're going to let other things lapse because it won't affect their pay.
For example, suppose several years ago, the people in charge had decided to do a big water management improvement.
How long would it take?
To get that approved, to get it built, to see if it worked.
And then even when you built it, you wouldn't know if it worked.
You would only know that there weren't any fires lately.
You wouldn't know that it worked.
So if you've got this big, ambiguous, but way more important thing to do, the water management is way more important than other things, but it takes a long time.
You can't tell what any one person did to make it happen.
It's really hard to get...
You know, to be held responsible for that.
So if you're a manager, you go for what can be measured easily, you focus on it, that's where your pay depends.
Then on top of that, the second thing you need to know is that every major company is trying to improve their diversity at the same time.
And I would argue, even the companies that may have renounced their DEI efforts, the individual managers are still going to be hiring with a DEI goal.
You don't need a DEI program because those same managers are still going to be bragging if they get more diversity.
You could give up the entire incentive system, but if one of the people says, well, I diversified my department, and the other manager that they're competing against for the top job says, oh, I did some long-term things that are really smart, but...
How did it turn out?
Well, we won't know because lots of people involved.
It could take years.
If it doesn't work, it might not be my fault.
It could be the legislation, right?
So anyway, so if you have every company trying to do it at the same time, even if it's not part of an organized program, you're going to run out of your target demographics.
And here's the important thing to know.
You could switch out the target demographics.
And replace it with any other group.
And it's the same.
That's why it's not a racist observation.
For example, let's say your DEI program was you had to hire more Irish people or Irish Americans.
And that's it.
How's that going to work out?
You're going to maximize Irish American.
Now, there are a lot of Irish Americans.
But if everybody suddenly said, oh, God, I've got to get myself an Irish guy, you would run out of highly qualified Irish Americans on day two.
On day one, all the smart ones with a good resume have already been hired.
We've got an Irish guy.
Yes, it's going to look good on my resume.
So when Scott Jennings on CNN... Allows his panelists to argue that black women can do any job.
Nobody's disagreeing with that.
That the right qualified person of any demographic can do pretty much any job.
And the thing that you have to understand is you can replace that target demographic with anybody.
You can take black women out of the conversation entirely.
But Irish men, Irish men, same problem.
If you're managing to the number of Irish men on your staff, you're in trouble.
You're going to have massive incompetence if you fast forward 20 years.
And here we are.
We are in a position of massive, massive incompetence.
Is it the cause of any specific demographic group?
Can't tell.
The only thing you can know for sure is that this was a guaranteed outcome.
That the design of the incentive system and the natural limitation of any demographic group to have unlimited people in it is all you needed to know.
On paper, it couldn't have worked.
And that's why it's so important to reverse it and reverse our thinking about it.
So, Scott Jennings, I hope you make that correction.
The first thing you should say is it's not about any individual.
It's about a system design.
If you have incentives that make people do the wrong thing, they'll do the wrong thing.
And that's where we are.
Now, some of the worst takes on this.
Bernie Sanders weighs in while people are running for their lives and posts this.
80,000 people told to evacuate.
I think it's twice that now since he posted it.
80,000 people told to evacuate.
He said blazes, 0% contained.
And so far I'm thinking, oh, this is Bernie being helpful.
He's telling us how bad it is, and then he's going to hit us with what we should do about it.
He says, eight months since the area has seen rain.
Okay, that did make it worse.
The scale of the damage and loss is unimaginable.
Thank you for, you know, recognizing how bad this is.
And then he said, climate change is real, not a hoax.
Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is, meaning climate change.
Well, you can imagine how I felt when I read that.
Have I mentioned that we Californians don't feel like we went through a tragedy?
We feel like we got raped by you, by politicians.
You know, so Bernie.
Burning, you know, indirectly.
And the fact that California was focusing on your little pet project, the climate change, which I believe is mostly frickin' fake because it only applies to people who think the news is real and science is not corrupt.
If you think the news is real and science is not completely corrupted by money, you might believe that this climate change has been proven by all the smart people to be in danger.
Now, It might be a danger.
I often say, I don't know.
I don't know how much people are contributing to it.
I see both sides.
I don't think any of them are believable from my point of view because I can't tell.
But I can tell you for sure that if you think the climate models are predicting the future, you have not looked into it very much.
If you think we can measure the temperature of the Earth over decades, you haven't looked into it.
And I find that I can't even have a conversation with somebody who thinks all of that climate, the alarm part, is true.
You can't even talk to them because they've been so hypnotized, they think the news is real.
The news is not real about anything important.
The news could have a correct fact now and then, but the narrative is never real.
Narratives are always motivated.
They're not real.
If you believe the news is even trying to be real, you can't be reached.
You have to first understand that they're not trying to tell you the truth.
It's just not their business model.
And if you think that anybody, under any circumstances, can take all these weird hidden variables and gigantic variables and hard-to-measure variables and put them into a complicated model and tell you the temperature in 10 years, How do I begin to tell you how impossible that is?
That's not something that the smart people figured out.
That is a pure hoax, the models part.
Now, what I'm not calling the hoax is, I don't know if it's getting warmer.
I don't know if people are involved.
I just know that nobody else knows.
I know for sure that nobody else knows.
But my problem with Bernie is not that he believes in climate change, and I'm pretty sure that he's wrong, at least in terms of the alarm part of it.
My part is, you need to be able to read the room a little bit better.
You don't talk to rape victims about wearing a condom.
You know what I mean?
You don't talk to rape victims about wearing a condom.
Maybe you should have a condom with you.
Now, you are just making it worse.
So my first reaction was, I was just going to go nuclear.
And I had every F-bomb, like I was ready to go, and my fingers hit the keyboard.
And I said, I'm not going to make it worse.
Because that was just a pure emotional reaction.
So instead, I reposted this.
I said, Senator Sanders, as a Californian, I respectfully ask for you to delete this post.
No Californian thinks climate change dried up the fire hydrants and canceled fire insurance.
Now, whether my take is factually correct, that the fire hydrants were a problem that somehow was undermanaged, or that the canceled fire insurance, that's certainly a fact.
And then I told him to read the room.
Two million people.
Agreed with me, which is very unusual for a post on X, to get 2 million views.
That means people really agreed.
Not every person, but it means a lot of people agreed with my take that he was not reading the room.
And I would like to add a few things.
If the problem with the LA fire were caused by climate change, the whole world would be on fire by now, right?
I'm pretty sure that the climate change is not limited to LA. We would see basically everything on fire.
If climate changes cause fire, if droughts cause fire, everything that's having a slightly under normal year, which is what LA is, LA is in what I think they call a moderate drought, meaning it's barely a drought, and it's not outside of the historical norm whatsoever.
Not at all.
So, anyway.
Who else was bad?
Then Joe Biden, with his defective brain to depress her, talked about the fire, but nobody remembers that.
All they remember is he had the bad judgment to say, quote, the good news is that I became a grandpa.
Wow!
Wow!
Between Sanders and Biden not being able to read the room, do they understand that California is a blue state?
or was?
Let's see.
According to the New York Post, I think Molly Hemingway flagged this, that Governor Newsom is launching his Trump resistance plan this week.
So Newsom wants to tell you how much he's resisting Trump, which looks like the problem, not the solution, this week, doesn't it?
Because now we have on video Trump saying all the right things about fire prevention in California.
You've blocked the water.
You're not doing forest management.
Turns out those were the right answers.
Those were the right answers.
Of course, he's against DEI. Again, we don't know that that caused this problem, but it's the right overarching theme.
Trump was as right about this situation and on time, because he said it way before it happened.
He was right and he was on time.
And it looks like California completely screwed the pooch in every dimension.
At least it looks that way.
We don't know that that's true.
But let me talk about the future of California politics, because everything has a political element to it.
And here's how Trump posted it.
He said, on one of his posts on Truth, I think, he said, the governor, New Scum, as he calls him, chose to save the extinct fish instead of sending water to Southern California to fight apocalyptic wildfires.
Now, this is another example of how good Trump is in messaging.
To take this big, complicated situation, And just turn it into new scum chosen extinct fish over saving the lives of Californians?
It's an oversimplification.
And I don't even know if the fish part is really a valid...
I don't even know if that's a valid claim.
Because if you turn on CNN, they're going to say, well, but, you know, it's Republicans' fault too, and blah, blah, blah.
I don't know what they say.
But there's more context to it.
However, as a political messaging thing, the...
The brilliance of the summary is what Trump does better than anybody.
Nobody does that well.
He's the best ever at summarizing.
Nobody summarizes better than he does.
Adam Carolla, who apparently is one of the more famous people being displaced, he looked like he was in a hotel room, and he did a video and he was explaining something that you might not fully understand outside of California.
Do you know how hard it is to build something in California?
All of these people who think, well, I'll get my insurance check, or maybe I had some extra money, and I'm going to rebuild.
So they're going to go to the city and say, here's my plan.
Oh my God, they're just entering hell.
I won't go into the details, but let me just tell you this.
Getting a California entity, any city really, to approve a building of anything.
It was pretty much a nightmare.
The house I'm in right now, I had built, but I think it took 18 months just to get approval.
Something like that.
Now, these are people who just think, well, it should be easy because I'm just going to build back the house I had with a slight variety.
It's not going to be easy.
You're going to spend a year not getting the permit and then good luck finding a contractor.
Because everybody in your whole city is trying to hire the contractor who knows how to build stuff.
You're not going to have a contractor.
You're not going to be able to get insurance.
You're not going to be able to pay for it with the insurance you don't have.
You're not going to be able to get a permit.
I don't believe the country and maybe even Californians have absorbed how bad this is.
You're seeing something closer to the beginning of the problem than the end, as bad as it was.
And I don't think we can fully appreciate the economic disruption to the state.
Who's going to pay for the recovery?
I don't think the federal government's going to pay for it all.
Is this going to raise my California taxes again?
From the highest taxes to the highest taxes on turbo?
How are we going to survive it?
How are we going to fix the things that need to get fixed?
We're already paying the highest taxes, and it feels like the lowest level of service in return.
So no, if you think we're just going to rebuild, you don't know California.
That might be just empty land for the rest of my life.
Like, I don't know that it's...
I just don't see a path where that quickly gets fixed.
I don't know.
Here's what I think.
I think this has been such a black eye for the management of the state that for the first time recently, I can say it's possible to have a Republican governor.
Now, it would take a special character.
It would take a Reagan-type character who is a Republican.
And I don't know anybody in the state who would fit that Reagan-esque thing.
And would also have experience managing something.
Because you don't want somebody who's never managed anything.
Because a state is as much management as politics.
So it's not exactly like other jobs.
You need to manage.
So we need a DeSantis type of governor.
So if somebody like a DeSantis became available to run for governor, it's the best time.
Now, other people are going to say, Scott, Scott, Scott.
I think you don't realize that the blue team has California all wrapped up and nobody but a Democrat could win.
And it's not just because of the voters.
It's because the Democrat machine controls too much and they can rig any vote to go the way they want because they just control too much.
Now, that might be true.
However, I think that the opening is now, if it's ever going to happen, I saw some people suggest that maybe a smart independent, like Nicole Shanahan, would be a possibility.
Now, I like everything about Nicole Shanahan, but I don't know that she has exactly the right background for managing.
Because whoever takes this job has to dig into the whole water thing, the forest thing.
It's really a management thing.
So, as high quality and...
As much as I would trust Nicole Shanahan, I like everything about her, basically.
I don't know if she has the exact background that fits this slot.
But maybe somebody will merge.
And then, as people have noted, the legislature would probably still stay blue, and so even the governor couldn't get anything done.
So I saw it somewhat related to this.
I saw a Bill Maher video, and he was talking to Stephen A. Smith.
And Maher said this that really caught my attention.
He said, quote, I've been out with every type of celebrity, you know, meaning just having fun.
And he says, they don't say the things they say to me to other celebrities.
There it is.
Now, you probably said to yourself, Scott, you can't get a Republican governor.
Because the state is filled with so many Democrat voters, you're never going to get over the hump.
I don't think they're Democrats.
I think they're literally pretending to be Democrats.
I think that every one of these people who may have been seeming like political enemies are now seeing that the thing we need to get together on is common sense stuff.
I don't believe there's a Democrat who wanted...
Less forest management.
Well, there's some crazy ones who want to preserve everything natural, but not really.
I don't think there's any Democrats who say, I'm sure glad we didn't have enough water.
Right?
I don't think there are any Democrats who said, sure is a good thing there were not enough escape routes from a place that is an obvious fire risk.
These are all so clearly and cleanly common sense issues.
That I don't think anybody's going to give a shit about the smelt going forward.
Try stopping us from fixing the state because of a smelt.
Yeah, because I don't think that works anymore.
So, of course, I'm speaking from my own little bubble because, you know, I'm very influenced by how I personally feel about this, which is some intense feelings in many directions.
I'm pretty sure that this is the wake-up call that tells everybody in the South, you know, the Republicans don't hate you.
You get that, right?
We really, I'm going to say we because I caucus with the Republicans even though I'm a Democrat by registration.
I think maybe it will be a little better understood.
That Trump was on California's side, and whatever the Democrats running things were doing may have been for their own benefit, or may have been just pure incompetence.
We don't know what it was, but we know that Trump had exactly the right solution in exactly the right time, early.
And we know that the Democrats failed just in performance.
The exact reasons, hard to know, but they certainly failed.
Hunter Biden's rental burned up.
And I think the thing that bothered me the most about that was that it was a rental.
Like, it's bad enough if you're the landlord for Hunter Biden.
Because remember, we heard the story that he'd rented someplace and didn't pay in the past, a different place.
But he'd been renting a place and didn't pay the rent.
And then he used the Secret Service to keep the landlord from getting to him to ask for the rent.
That is like the most effed up thing you're going to hear.
He didn't pay the rent, and he used his Secret Service protection to make sure that nobody would come bug him to get the rent.
That actually happened.
Was it Sean McGuire, I think, was the landlord there?
So I don't think he's in that house anymore, but I just feel sorry, doubly sorry for whoever owned it.
Because they lost their house that was rental.
But also they had Hunter Biden as a resident.
I mean, I don't know if you could even clean it after that.
Christy Teigen and John Legend and their kids are in a hotel.
Henry Winkler said some angry, drunk-looking things.
He's affected.
I have mixed feelings talking about the celebrities involved.
On one hand, I don't think this is a story about celebrities, and so it's just gross and icky that they're even part of the story.
Like, why do we care about them more?
Does it matter more to you that Henry Winkler is safe than Henry Winkler's not-famous neighbor?
So there's something creepy about it.
But at the same time, the politics of it is that some of them are conservative, but a number of other ones...
Are outspoken Democrats.
And I would love to know how Chrissy Teigen and John Legend feel about their team after losing their house to their team.
Does that change how you feel?
What else could?
I mean, if you're going to change somebody's mind, having a debate with them, maybe, usually not.
Having really good points, yeah, might work.
Probably not.
Really being good at persuasion?
That might help.
Probably not.
People are pretty set in their ways.
You burn down somebody's house, you have their attention.
Everybody who lost a house is now open to a better argument.
A lot of minds open up.
So, I think California is in play.
Anyway, in related but other news, because we can't spend all our time talking about this, it's just too hard.
Trump is, as other people have noted, flooding the zone.
So he's completely controlling the news.
Even the fire, which you would think is not directly a Trump topic, he's still the top of the news because he said the right things and did the right things and it stands in contrast to what happened.
Not only that, but apparently there's a report from Steph Knight, I think she's at Axios, saying that there's some knowledge that Trump plans to flood the zone with 100 executive orders, like his first day or first week or something.
Now, so we've got Trump talking about Greenland, Panama, Canada.
He's talking about the fire.
He might have a hundred executive orders every day, three new things.
This is the only way to defeat the fake news.
And, you know, he's always done this thing where he keeps the Overton window, so to speak, keeps the action going, and it keeps the attention on him.
But I think I just realized the other hidden benefit of this.
You know, as we've often said, Republicans can be right.
And they can be wrong.
They can have wrong facts, and often do.
They might believe in some conspiracy theories that don't prove out.
But that's normal, sort of normal human beings.
On the Democrat side, there's an organized hoax creation machine for the Democrats.
They'll create a hoax about the other side, and then they'll use their news, their media, and their talking heads to say the same things over and over again.
Right?
How many times have you seen that?
Well, he's a convicted felon.
You know, that's just the talking point.
And if they say convicted felon a million times, it's going to stick in your head.
Because repetition is the number one tool of persuasion.
And even more importantly, it's the number one tool of brainwashing.
Brainwashing requires you to hear the same exact message over and over and over and over again until your brain just uncritically says, well, it must be true.
I keep hearing it.
Which doesn't make sense, but your brain will process it that way.
So, what Trump has done is he's removed from the fake news the ability to repeat any of their messages often enough for them to stick.
Because they start going on with, he wants to send the military into Greenland.
And then they repeat that.
We got him.
We got him.
Because nobody's going to be in favor of, you know, sending the military in.
Although some are.
So they repeat that.
And the next thing you know, he's talking about Panama.
And then they're like, all right, what are we saying about Panama?
Panama.
Wait, he's talking about Canada now.
What are we saying about Canada?
Wait, what did he say about the smelt?
Wait, new scum.
He's calling him new scum.
100 executive orders.
They can't repeat often enough.
He took away from them their number one persuasion trick, repetition.
Now, is this intentional?
Do you think that he intentionally said, if I just take away all of their oxygen, they'll never be able to repeat anything enough to stick?
The answer is yes.
Yes, this is absolutely intentional.
Now, that doesn't mean it's only Trump who knows this.
He's working with Stephen Miller and a bunch of brilliant people, right?
The brilliant people can see this clear as day.
So, yes, it's not an accident that he's going to have 100 executive orders and he's talking about things that make your hair just catch on fire.
And also, everything that Trump says is too interesting to ignore.
It doesn't matter what he says.
It's always too interesting to ignore.
He's, what?
Greenland, what?
So, yes, it's intentional.
Yes, it's brilliant in a way that we don't even deserve.
Like, we don't even deserve that level of capability.
And when he shows you the competence level that he brings just in messaging, the competence level that he brought to his campaign, the competence level in which he's, Taking things that people said are ridiculous things to do, such as using the old Twitter or now posting things that are geopolitical, hugely important things, he makes that work.
When you watch somebody who is just an extreme example of competence with his team, he doesn't do everything alone.
But I think people are going to notice.
Competence is hard to ignore if you just keep at it, and he is.
Well, in other news, if there's any good news at all, the employment for this coming year looks like a little better than people expected.
It hasn't happened yet, but the thinking is that in surveys, big companies are showing much more optimism and more...
More, let's say, prediction that they'll do serious hiring.
Apparently, the reason there was less hiring than there might have been is that big companies said, ooh, we better wait to see if AI is going to take all the jobs.
And now they've waited.
And like my example where I started the show, where I said I tried to get AI to do any simple thing, just look at a document and summarize it, and just because it was multiple pages, it just couldn't do it.
So I think that...
Probably the companies have now wised up that what they thought was going to be this instant replacement of employees with machines, it might still happen, but not in 2025. So in 2025, they're like, we're going to need human bodies because we can tell them to look at the whole contract, not just four pages and quit.
So it could be, at least in the short run, a little bump in improvement in employment.
This is just an aside because I'm amused by it.
But do you remember Aaron Rupar?
He's the reason that I came up with the phrase Rupar for a description of a video that's been edited to change its meaning.
Because he did a number of those and it looked like he knew he was doing it.
You couldn't tell because you can't read his mind.
But it looked like, I feel like he knows he took that out of context.
And then I saw he made some claim.
I think it was yesterday.
It doesn't matter what the claim was.
But the community note to it just noted that he's a well-known liar.
So the actual community note wasn't just that he was saying something that wasn't true.
It said he was a well-known, famous liar who does it for clicks.
Now, I'm paraphrasing, but it said basically that.
As soon as I refreshed it, the community note changed to something less attacking of his character.
But for a moment, the community note settled on, yeah, he's just a famous liar, so you shouldn't pay attention to him.
If I contributed even 1% by making people understand that a Rupar is literally a fake post or edit, If I contributed even 1% to that, I'm proud.
All right.
I love the fake news talking about the use of force to overtake Greenland.
So I guess the Pentagon was asked if there was any kind of plan to invade Greenland.
But what's funny is that whoever was talking, some kind of Pentagon spokesperson, Said that they didn't know of any plan.
It was short of a no.
So instead of saying no, there's no plan to use the military or even a plan to what it would look like if you used the military.
Instead, the spokesperson said, I'm not aware of one.
Would the spokesperson be aware of the secret attack plans?
I feel like you wouldn't tell the spokesperson because if you told them, They could accidentally tip somebody off.
So the spokesperson never knows the secret attack plans, do they?
Because if they do, that feels like a mistake to me.
But anyway, the only thing I want to add to this is that why would the Pentagon need a plan?
The entire country is 56,000 people, mostly in one place.
And they seem to be fairly pro-MAGA. Pro-American.
And if it were up to them and not Denmark, who owns them, if it were just up to the people in Greenland, it's kind of looking like they might be okay with this idea.
But I think it's funny that anybody would ask the Pentagon if they have a conquest plan for Greenland when all they really needed was Don Jr. and Charlie Kirk to fly over there and take some selfies.
Now, to be fair...
Don Jr. and Charlie Kirk taking selfies with the locals is not enough to conquer a country.
It's not enough.
They might have to go back two or three more times and take more selfies.
That should be enough.
I think three to four trips of Don Jr. and Charlie Kirk taking selfies, the whole island surrenders.
Then we just have to work on a deal with Denmark.
So, no.
No military needed.
Just Don and Charlie.
All right.
Senator Rick Scott has introduced some legislation to stop the changing of the clocks twice a year.
I keep wanting to have an opinion on that.
But I don't.
And I'm going to admit why.
Because I don't know what change they're talking about.
It's too hard for me to figure out the whole...
Hour backwards, hour forwards.
But if they standardize it, which one are they standardizing on?
Because I never know which one's the base case.
I don't know.
And I also don't know if I'd like it, since I've never experienced it, you know, the different amount of light at a different time of day.
I've never experienced it.
So how would I even have an opinion on that?
Maybe I'd like it a little bit more in the morning, but dislike it more at night.
But what's the net?
So if it's expensive, and I know it cuts down on productivity when the time changes, I don't see a reason to change the time.
So I'm in favor of changing it, but I don't have any idea what that looks like, like in my actual life.
But just in terms of economics, it makes sense.
Britain is threatened to cut ties, security ties with the U.S., unless Trump stops working with Elon Musk, according to the National Pulse, William Upton, to which I say, Great Britain is threatening to cut ties with us?
Okay.
Can you remind me what are all the military advantages we're getting?
From protecting them?
What products are you getting from England?
From their manufacturing base?
How much do we need England?
Or the UK? Or Great Britain?
How much do we need them?
I don't know.
Sounds like a pretty bad threat to me.
And I don't think there's any chance they're going to cut ties.
Biden is considering, according to the post-millennial Hayden Cunningham is writing, That Biden's thinking about preemptive pardons for Liz Cheney and Anthony Fauci.
So Liz Cheney for the corrupt insurrection, so-called insurrection committee.
Do you have a problem with that?
Yeah, this one's an interesting one.
Because I think, I don't know if any charges would ever be brought up because...
There's a lot of bad behavior that I don't know if it's criminal.
It's just really, really bad and unethical behavior.
So, if they get a preemptive pardon, we don't have to watch the trial and talk about it.
But also, it would label them forever as felons.
Because who gets a preemptive pardon?
I would like to ask the following question.
In the history of pardons, How many times has a completely innocent person got a preemptive pardon?
Is there even one time that's ever happened?
Where somebody who was legitimately innocent got a preemptive pardon?
Can you think of any time that's ever happened?
No.
You give a preemptive pardon to somebody you know is damn guilty.
So, to be fair...
They might be more worried about some illegitimate lawfare being used against them.
And if that's the only thing they're thinking, well, if you think there was no real crime, maybe.
But the way we're going to read it is that they just declared themselves guilty.
If they accept a preemptive pardon for something they didn't do, I'm not going to believe they didn't do it.
I'm just going to believe, oh, you know you're dirty.
You lucky guy and lucky woman.
All right.
The Mexican president, what's her name?
Claudia Scheinbaum.
I will never get tired of saying this.
The Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum.
I'm going to say it another time because it's funny.
So the Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum, the Jewish woman, I just love that.
You know, I have to give Mexico credit because you think of Mexico as, you know, they're going to be kind of a patriarchy.
You presume if most of the residents are Mexican, they're going to vote for somebody who's as Mexican as possible.
But they elected Claudia Sheinbaum, and I give them credit for that.
If she does a good job, good work.
Anyway, so she's responding to Trump saying that he wants the Gulf to be called the Gulf of America instead of the Gulf of Mexico.
And she's shooting back.
And she says the U.S. should be called America Mexicana.
Let's see how long it takes me to forget her framing.
One, two, three.
Wait, what did she say?
What did she call it?
Do you see how special Trump is?
Trump says extinct fish once, and I'll remember it for the rest of my life.
The Mexican president, as capable as she probably is, I imagine she's very good in general, to get where she got.
But she tries to match him.
He's like, how about, I got it.
I'm going to zing you.
How about we call it?
America Mexicana.
Why isn't everybody clapping?
Clap, please.
The difference in persuasion and communication skill is just so striking.
Like, you don't realize how good Trump is at what I'll call the little stuff, you know, just the ordinary communication.
You don't realize how good he is until you see somebody else try it.
And they just do a total face plant.
I have to read it again.
America, Mexicana.
No, that's not a good try.
Well, Russia's introducing these land robot tank things.
It looks like a little miniature tank, and it can have wheels or tracks.
But it's got it loaded with all kinds of weapons, and they're going to make a bunch of them, they say, and send them at Ukraine.
Here's my question.
Can Russia manufacture?
Now, I know they have manufacturing, and I know they make weapons, and this is a weapon.
But if their outcome of the war depends on making a lot of these robots that they've never made before, how good are they going to be?
Now, it could be that even if Russia is not a massively good manufacturing company, It could be that they put their best people in the military stuff, which would make sense.
And maybe this is.
Maybe it's good work, and maybe they can crank them out like crazy.
But the thing I'd be looking for is whether they can manufacture well enough to put working models in the field that make a difference.
Now, the other thing is that even the ground robots like these, the ones on wheels or...
Running dogs or whatever.
They will soon be programmed to swarm, just like the drones in the air.
So if you organize the drones so that they operate as one and they swarm, there's almost no defense.
But likewise, if you were on the front line and you're a human being and you get swarmed by these robots, you're going to be in a lot of trouble, the robots on the ground.
It probably takes a little bit of planning and work and strange execution to even take out one of them.
If six of them are bearing down on you, you've got to run, and it will run faster than you.
So it's going to get real interesting in Ukraine.
I would look to see if they can manufacture well and quickly.
Well, I'm going to do something that you don't like.
I'm going to defend Crenshaw.
So Dan Crenshaw is often reported for having very high relative to other people, really good gains on his stock picks.
So there's another story today mentioning that he's a top five investor among Congress.
You're like, hmm, top five.
Did he do that because of insider information?
And the implication is that it's because he has insider information.
So that he and other members who trade are just beating people because they're inside information.
And it was pointed out that he had a high percentage gain.
So if you look at his gain, I think it was over 40% for the year or something, that that would put him in the top five.
Now, what do I teach you about spotting fake news?
If you know the percentage of gain he made, but they don't tell you the dollar amount, is it real news or fake news?
The answer is, it's fake news.
If they told you both the percentage and the dollar amount, it might be real.
If they told you only the dollar amount without the percentage, that would be fake.
And if they told you the percentage without the dollar amount, which is what they did, that's fake.
So the first thing you need to know is that you got abused when you read the story.
You got abused.
Somebody's trying to put one over on you.
Turns out, his portfolio is not very big.
He's not a rich guy.
And he said directly, That one of the few ways that he can get ahead and still afford to be in Congress, because it doesn't pay that much relative to the cost of being there, that he absolutely needs to augment his income, and he does it by trading.
Now, how did you rule out the possibility he's good at it?
He told you he needs it.
He told you he focuses on it.
That's different than most of the people in Congress.
Most of the people in Congress don't need it.
A lot of them are rich.
I don't know what percentage, but a lot of them are rich.
And some of them are not concentrating on it.
They're concentrating on other things.
He's concentrating on it.
If you knew his educational background, it's really good.
Do you know how much formal education he's had, plus the military?
I don't think people understand how academically trained he is.
So you've got somebody who's got higher academic training than most of Congress.
Unlike Congress, he's really paying attention, which means he's learning how to do it right.
And there's very little dollar amount.
So if he had one good pick, he would have that gain.
How do you know that the reason he's up is some kind of secret insider information?
What if, and this is not in the story, this should be in the story, what if he bought stock in NVIDIA? Do you know who bought stock in NVIDIA? I did.
And a lot of my followers did.
Because I mentioned it as sort of once ever kind of a unique situation.
So most of my followers probably had the same return he did.
Because if the only thing you did was buy the one most obvious stock, NVIDIA, you would beat all the other members of Congress.
Is that what happened?
If he had just bought Tesla, he would have beat most of the members of Congress.
If he had just invested in, you know, one of the atomic stocks that I mentioned that I'm not going to mention today, he would have beat everybody.
It only took one, just one good stock and his whole portfolio is up 40%.
So if you see a story that says he did better than the other people in Congress and therefore The implication is that he broke some law or did something.
He wouldn't break a law because it's legal for them to use to be insider traders.
If you believe that it was like some secret, unethical thing he did to get those gains, there's no evidence of that in the story.
There's no evidence of it in the story.
Now, if there is evidence of any bad behavior or, you know, it wouldn't be illegal, so I guess it wouldn't even be necessarily unethical.
But you wouldn't like it.
You're going to have to give me a lot more than he did a good job.
Because if your complaint about the guy is he's good at investing, that just pisses me off.
That just pisses me off.
Because that's punishing somebody for competence.
And that might be the only thing that's happening.
Now again, let me be very clear.
I don't know if there's any...
You know, valid insider trading that helped his returns.
I don't know.
But what I do know is you don't know.
You don't know.
So if you're going to go from he's a good investor to he did something sketchy that you hate, that's a leap I can't support.
And it pisses me off when somebody does a good job and there's no evidence that he did it unethically, that we criticize him for competence and for making it affordable.
To do the job of the people.
Now, before you give me a hard time, because I know you want to, you're going to say, but Scott, what about those other unrelated things that we don't like about his policies?
Fine.
I'm not arguing that.
If you don't think he's doing the job you want, I'm not even in that conversation.
I don't know enough, frankly, about him.
I'll also tell you, just for full disclosure, that I have had conversations with him because I did his podcast a while ago.
So I've interacted with him, at least on a Zoom kind of a way.
And he's a really nice guy.
I don't know if you know that, but he's a really nice guy.
And so I'm influenced by that.
And then I see him being attacked for something that, if there's any basis to this, nobody's revealing it.
So, let's calm down on that.
It certainly makes sense to go after him for the other stuff, but let me sum that up with a little bit of a context.
Sometimes you wonder, what's it like to be a public figure, such as Dan Crenshaw, and such as me?
What's it like to be a public figure?
Well, like Dan Crenshaw, One thing I have in common with him is that I've had several scandals in my career.
Some of them you haven't heard of or you forgot about because they're so long.
One of the things that all of my scandals have in common is that none of them actually happened.
None of them happened.
For example, let's see.
I'm being criticized for being an H-1B supporter.
So that's lately.
That didn't happen.
Not once.
No.
I have said we need to bring in, you know, only the best people who make sense.
But the H-1B process apparently doesn't do that.
So I've never said it does that.
I've never said I was in favor of it.
And it's the biggest thing I'm being criticized for.
Let's see.
I'm also being criticized for recommending that people get vaccinated during the pandemic, which never happened.
I forcefully always said the opposite.
Very frequently, probably said it over and over again.
I'm not your doctor.
I'm not telling you to get it.
I'm not telling you not to get it.
It's a personal decision.
Opposite.
Literally the opposite of what I'm blamed for.
Do you remember, some of you might remember, the thing that first derailed my career, this was years ago, where I had an argument where I predicted That evolution, the theory of evolution, would be debunked in my lifetime.
And that it would be debunked, not necessarily in, let's say, in classic ways, but it would be debunked because we would understand the nature of reality so differently that evolution would stop making sense.
And that happened.
That's called the simulation.
Now, you could argue that the simulation is not real.
But the argument is it's a trillion to one likely that it is.
And if we're a simulation, then the past is actually created on demand.
Now, I could be right about that, right?
I could be right about that.
Or I could be wrong about that.
And I don't know.
But what I will tell you is that 100% of the pushback, to my opinion, was based on stuff I didn't say.
So again...
This major thing, I probably lost, I bet I lost 30% of the Dilbert fans over this.
Something I was right about, at least in terms of knowing that some rethinking of reality would cause us to rethink evolution, that was one hell of a good prediction.
I mean, that was a crazy good prediction.
Like, beyond.
If it's right, and I think it is.
Then, does anybody remember?
This will be a good test.
How many of you remember the sock puppet scandal about me?
The accusation was that I sock puppeted, which is a very specific act.
Anybody remember that?
Which never happened.
It never happened.
Now, did I go online with a fake identity and have...
What I thought was a hilarious conversation with somebody who wanted to argue about the intelligence of Scott Adams.
Yes, I did.
Why did I do it?
I was just debunking some hoaxes that were told about me.
One of the hoaxes was that I was a Holocaust denier.
Do you see the pattern yet?
I'm not a Holocaust denier.
But the public had decided I was.
You see the pattern, right?
100% of all of my scandals never happened.
None of them.
Not a single one.
So when I look, let me give you some others.
I'm also called a climate denier, like I deny science.
That's not happening.
That's not real.
And then what about my cancellation?
My cancellation happened almost entirely for political reasons, because there's not a single Republican who's canceled me.
100% of the people who have heard me explain the situation in detail, because, you know, the drama never gets into the detail, 100% have not disagreed with my point.
Nobody.
There are people who didn't understand the point, and there are people who said it made me mad, which I acknowledge, and there are people who said you shouldn't have said it.
That's their opinion.
But what they think I did and said didn't happen.
I was complaining against racism, and I was accused of being a racist.
No, I'm complaining about racists.
I'm anti-racist.
The entire rant was against racism, and I got accused of being racist.
Now, so here's the context.
So you look at Dan Crenshaw, and you see this bullshit about his investing.
Do you think that's real?
You just heard my resume.
All of the claims against me are fake.
We're out of context to the point that they're reversed.
So I don't know the truth about the Dan Crenshaw investment stuff, but with what I know, if I had to place a bet, especially knowing that people have been watching his investments really closely, because this is sort of an evergreen thing that they say about him, you don't have one example?
You can't give us one example of a company that he had special knowledge about and that's the reason he made money.
Because if you've got even one example, you better lead with that.
How about he made this investment with insider information on this company and here's the name of the company and that caused him to have a 40% gain.
You tell me that and you have my attention.
Then I'm going to say, oh, still legal, completely legal.
But I'd say, hmm.
Maybe we should look at changing that law.
So just put it in context.
Most stories like this one, the investment one, they don't play out.
They're fake.
So again, I'm not defending Dan Crenshaw for any other opinions.
They might be excellent.
They might not be.
But that's not my topic today.
Thank you for watching, ladies and gentlemen.
You continue to be the thing that keeps me alive because I love connecting with all of you in real time.
All right, I'm going to say hi to the locals people and everybody else.
Have a terrific day as best you can, unless you're in Southern California, and then we'll see what we can do for you.
