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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
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Well, if you're wearing pants, you might be in the minority today based on the comments I'm seeing.
A lot of pantsless viewers today.
Some of my favorites.
All right, well, after the show, Owen Gregorian will have a Spaces on the X platform.
That's the audio-only thing.
So look for that.
If you're trying to find it, just go to my account on X. You can see the link.
Or Owen Gregorian, you can just look for his name and it'll pop up.
Did you know, according to Science Alert, that caffeine in your blood can lower your body fat and diabetes risk?
Yes, you did.
Because coffee can do it all.
Yep.
I like to put it right in my blood.
I just inject it right in there.
Along with the bleach and the disinfectants.
It does a great job.
No, don't do that.
Don't put any bleach or disinfectant or coffee in your blood.
But it's good for you, the coffee part.
Well, it's Black History Month, and despite Trump getting rid of all the DEI and the government, He did do a proclamation recognizing it, and he called out some of the notable, famous black contributors to America.
He included Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and then also threw in more modern names like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas.
Well, here's my take on that.
I think Black History Month was a great idea.
I also think affirmative action was necessary, you know, even though it didn't work out for me.
It didn't work out for me, but we probably needed to do something to kickstart things, to get a little more openness and diversity and all that.
However, it's 2025. When I see Black History Month, do I say to myself, wow, black people have...
Contributed so much to America.
Well, yes, that's sort of the point of it.
But I already knew that.
And all you have to do is turn on the television, and it's full of successful black people in every domain.
Every domain.
Politics, entertainment.
So it feels like having your own month is now...
It went from a good idea, a solidly good idea, to it feels a little condescending.
It feels like it's not giving black Americans what they hoped for, and it just sort of looks like a pat on the head.
It's almost like we should have outgrown this by now.
And let me ask you this.
Do you think Thomas Sowell would be happy that his name was on the list?
Great black Americans?
I don't know, but I'm not entirely sure he'd be happy about being on the list.
And, you know, I'm no expert on Thomas Sowell, or I can't read his mind.
But here's what I think he'd like a lot more.
Some great American economists include this person, this person, Thomas Sowell.
How about just being on the list of, you know, really important Unusually effective economists.
Now, that's a compliment.
And then just be done with it.
So, I don't think I'm too far off base because P. Hegseth in the Department of Defense said that no longer will the Department of Defense host or celebrate any of these cultural awareness months.
Now, if you don't know how many there are, Besides Black History Month, there's Women's History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
You got Pride Month.
You got National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month.
Well, I call that Native American because I'm not a racist.
My God.
Anyway, so you could go to these events, but you can't do anything in your official capacity.
If you're in the Department of Defense, I think that is the correct point of view for the Department of Defense.
Because if they're focused on anything but their lethality, as Piag Seth likes to point out, they're taking their eye off the ball.
Now, obviously, you can't spend 24 hours a day working on your lethality.
You know, there are other things in life.
But I do think this is a step in the right direction.
Because as soon as you call out some groups, all the other groups are going to say, where's my month?
I say it.
Where's my month?
Why don't I get a month?
I don't know.
Everybody else did.
Over at Stanford University, they use their AI to look at faces.
And apparently they can tell if you're gay or straight by looking at your face.
We've talked about this before.
But it made me think, Do you remember, maybe it was the, I don't know, 60s or 70s?
You know, that's as far as I can remember back.
But there was this conversation about whether being gay was genetic or just people chose it.
And I would always laugh in thinking, it's obviously genetic.
And the reason I said it's obviously genetic is that you could tell who was gay by looking at him.
Could you really tell who's gay by looking at them if it were not just baked into the genetic components?
So when I see that Stanford says they can't do it 100%, of course, but they have a high hit rate of knowing if you're gay or straight from your photo, how could it be anything except genetic if you can tell by looking at a photo?
The only way it wouldn't be genetic...
By the way, I don't know if anybody's found any specific genetic link.
I don't know if they've gone that far.
But how could lifestyle make your face recognizably gay?
Assuming you washed it.
Don't even think about that.
All right, I just cracked myself up.
I'm taking this in a completely wrong direction.
But yes, I think gays have always wanted us to acknowledge that this is the way you're born and it's nobody's fault.
It's nobody's choice.
It's just the way you're born.
And I think the face stuff is proof that they were right all along.
Amazon looks like it might be getting ready to advertise on X again, which would be a big deal.
And I think they're correct.
The correct decision.
I guess Apple is also looking at X, deciding whether to go back on.
That's pretty good.
Boy, there's nothing like winning, is there?
If Elon Musk had not been on the winning team in politics, and that gave him a big role in what's happening right now, at least the advisory role, plus Doge, do you think that the big companies would be...
So happy to re-embrace X? I don't know.
I think they would have had other pressure from Democrats, but the Democrat Party just fell apart, and Doge and Musk and Trump are doing great.
So it makes perfect sense if you're a big American company to get on the side of the winners.
There's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with saying, you know what?
I think we'll adjust our track.
And, you know, try to be more compatible with the country.
So good job, Amazon and Apple.
Heading in the right direction.
Speaking of Meta, we weren't, but let's.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta is looking into exiting Delaware and reincorporating in Texas.
Now, if you didn't know, for a very long time, Corporations like to register in Delaware, even while having no business in Delaware.
And the reason was it was the Delaware laws are kind of friendly to corporations.
But there's some judge there that went after, you know, that went after, I guess you could say went after, Elon Musk.
And that sent a big chill because Musk was saying, you know, you should get your...
Get your corporation out of there because they can go after you.
So Delaware seems to be politicized.
And if you're a big company and you don't want to be part of that risk, you're going to have to get out of Delaware.
So that is doing, I think, exactly the right thing.
So again, good decision.
Richard Grinnell apparently succeeded in getting six, I guess they're called hostages, out of Venezuela.
Now, what's the follow-up question to that?
That Rick Grinnell got six American hostages out of Venezuela.
The follow-up question is, there were six hostages in Venezuela?
Why is this the first time I'm hearing about it?
That seems like that would be a bigger story.
Six American hostages held in Venezuela?
Well, I love the fact that Richard Grinnell is...
Sort of like a Trump-loaded weapon, and he can point Richard Grinnell at any situation, and you feel confident that the right person is taking care of it.
So I'm surprised Richard Grinnell doesn't have an official job in the administration, right?
I don't believe he has an official title, but just the fact that he's sort of available to do missions is kind of awesome.
What do you like to have?
Just a Richard Grinnell on call, so that when Trump needs to send somebody somewhere and get something done in another country, you just send the one who knows how to get it done.
I suspect that Grinnell is more effective, because when he walks into the room, if the other country has done their homework, they know he's talking for Trump.
They know they're not going to put a wedge, like, eh, we'll get this guy to maybe see our side of it or something like that.
No.
When Grinnell walks in the room, You know that Trump's preferences are going to be there, and that's the end of the story.
So that probably makes him a lot more effective, that and the fact that whatever he does in general seems to be effective.
So I love this.
So got six Americans out of Venezuela.
Meanwhile, Colombia, which gave Trump a hard time very temporarily, for shipping back the Colombian...
Immigrants or migrants.
And remember the president of Columbia said, hey, you can't land here.
And then it turned into, well, how about we send the presidential airplane to pick him up?
Because really what we care about is their repatriation is dignified.
So it's not about whether they come back.
It's about whether it's a dignified return.
So he's taken it to the next level, and he's offered to pay for all the Columbians coming home.
So I guess he doesn't want to use the presidential jet for every flight, of course.
But Columbia, I think without being prompted, because there's nothing here about negotiating, I think he just said, how about we'll pay to bring them home, and I'll make sure that it's a dignified return home.
To which I say, yeah, it's saving face, right?
So he's doing a clever little move to save face.
So now he can say, well, no, it was always just about...
Just about dignity.
Okay, I'll let him have that.
If he's going to pay some of our bills, because do you know how much it costs for a flight to ship anybody back to their native country?
It's like an amazing amount of money to ship people back.
So if Columbia wants to pay that amazing amount of money and we're going to get what we want, good.
No problem.
Trump signed an executive order to get rid of 10 regulations for every new one that's added.
I think that's exactly what it was before.
Give me a fact check.
In his first term, was it 10 to 1?
Or was it a different ratio that he had to get rid of 10 regulations to get a new one?
It was either 10 to 1 or something in that neighborhood.
And I love it.
It seems like it worked the first time.
Why wouldn't it work again?
So, good job, Trump.
Meanwhile, the FCC is demanding that CBS turn over the tape from, I guess it was 60 Minutes, when they interviewed Kamala Harris.
Now, the FCC would get involved, I guess, to make sure that people got equal time and that an interview was not so biased that maybe it turned into a campaign ad.
So the accusation is that Kamala Harris was so incoherent with her usual word salad babble that 60 Minutes had to splice in edits just to make her sound like she wasn't an idiot.
I don't think it changed any of her opinions.
I don't think it reversed any opinions.
They simply used bits from other answers so that things she said made sense for a change.
Now that's extreme.
That's way over the line.
So yes, I'd like to see the FCC look into that.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking down a lot of websites in the government, especially if they have DEI references.
So they're putting a pause on most federal government websites.
And the idea is to dig down and get rid of all the DEI references.
So we'll see how long it takes.
The DEI people are going to burrow into other jobs and change their names and hide the projects and hide the budgets.
They're going to do everything creepy and illegal to stay, to keep doing what they're doing.
But we'll see.
It does seem like Trump and the administration are pretty dead set on rooting on all this DEI. It's going to take a while.
It won't be easy.
But over on...
Over at MSNBC, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation, one of the hosts, Anna Cabrera, she said on Friday, that's yesterday, that there are plenty of data points that prove that diversity, equity, and inclusion enable business to have greater success.
Are there really?
I think the plenty of data points would actually be none.
Because how could you sort out...
How much better you did because of diversity?
Now, even if you accept that diversity improves your bottom line somehow, even if you accept that, how can you measure it?
I mean, what possible way would you have to know that, oh, it's a good thing we went from 8% black employees, we got up to 14%?
And then what?
Your profits went up that month?
So you say, it must be because of all the diversity.
How in the world would you know that diversity made a difference?
So it's absurd on its face.
It's not something you possibly measure.
And even if you tried to measure the company that added diversity versus the one that didn't, that's still a nonsense comparison.
They're probably different businesses.
Everything's different.
Anyway.
So MSNBC is just floundering, trying to hold on to the thing that was always a lie, but they got caught in the lie.
So Trump apparently took a question about why he wasn't going to visit the crash site of the airplanes, the helicopter and airplane that went in the Potomac.
And when they asked, you know, the normal way that you would answer that question, do you want to visit the crash site?
It would be something like, oh yeah, you know, we're waiting until it's the right time, or we're looking into it.
And Trump goes, it's in the water.
What do you want me to do?
Swim there?
Now that is the way to answer a dumb question.
You do it with mocking.
And you do it with humor, and you refuse to answer it in any normal way.
Now, even Bill Maher on his show last night called that out as the right answer.
If you could ask him dumb questions, he gets to give you funny answers.
More generally, it's hilarious to watch Bill Maher become more and more pro-Trump, but still have to look balanced.
So he's got to come up with some anti-Trump stuff to balance the pro-Trump stuff.
And it's really hard to come up with the anti-stuff.
Because the anti-stuff is about stuff he hasn't done.
Well, he might steal your democracy.
But has he?
Has he stolen your democracy?
No.
No, but I think he might.
So the things he does, you kind of like.
Yeah, yeah, I liked it when he closed up the border.
But the things he hasn't done.
Or your entire problem are the things he hasn't done, says he won't do, and nobody in his party would support, which is becoming a dictator.
So I think Bill Maher might get there someday.
I don't know if you've seen it yet, but there's a photo of the Mars surface that includes some kind of an image that looks to be perfectly square.
Meaning it looks like the broken down walls of a square city or a building.
But when they say perfectly square, you know, I only know what I see in the picture.
That's perfectly square.
And it's big.
It's not like a small object.
So for a large object to be perfectly square, that's a...
It does suggest that there was some life up on Mars.
Now, here's how these things usually go.
Because this is sort of a repeat of what used to be.
Remember there was a face on Mars?
And you look at the photo and you say to yourself, that's definitely a face.
I see it.
There's this giant face like a statue had fallen over and gotten partially covered by the dust.
But it sure looked like a face.
And then the photography experts say, uh, okay, here's that same spot, but from a different angle.
And it's just a rock.
It's just a rock.
So there was something unique about an exact camera angle that cast some shadows that made it look like it was a face.
But from every other angle, it was just a rock.
Now, I think if, well, so I have two competing thoughts.
When I look at the photo, I say to myself, that's got to be some sign of life that used to be on Mars.
But when I check my common sense and my context, I know that this is one of the most common stories about the moon.
You don't think this is just going to be one of those, well, it's because it's not really square, but if you look at it from this angle, it's the angle that makes it look like it's square.
There's something about the light.
You know, I would bet against it.
If you said you've got to put a million-dollar bet down, then it's really a sign of life, or there's something about the way the photo was taken, the angle, whatever.
I don't know what kind of angle could make something look huge and perfectly square.
Like, I'm not aware of anything that a camera can do that would turn a non-square thing into a perfect square.
So my brain is not accepting that it's anything but a sign of life.
But my rational part of my brain, which is operating at the same time, sort of in parallel, says, you know, but if you're going to bet on it with real money, you should bet against it.
Because if you'd bet against every other claim of this type through the decades, you would have won every bet.
So...
Yeah, and there's also the question of whether it's a real photo, but apparently the database with the photos is available for others to check.
Yeah, and there's at least one version where it's not so square at all.
So I'm going to bet against it, but it's fun.
So the LA Times wrote an article saying essentially that Trump was right about the water problems in California.
That they're essentially self-caused.
Yeah, somebody's showing me a photo now in which it's definitely not a human structure.
So it looks like it...
Well, no, let me see.
Could it be?
I don't know.
Yeah.
It's ambiguous.
I'm going to go with it will never check out as something built by an intelligent species.
Anyway, the LA Times says Trump's right about the water supply in California, and Trump was bragging that he got some extra water turned on, even more than we heard about the other week, and that the water is flowing in California and all you have to do is turn the spigot.
So, there's something wrong with that story.
And let me summarize the story about the California water, and you tell me what I'm missing, because I know for sure that my understanding of the story couldn't possibly be right.
But it's what I'm gleaning from the report, all right?
So here's me summarizing what I think I know about California water and Trump.
So the narrative goes there's some evil goblins in California, presumably Democrats, We're preventing citizens, farmers and firefighters, from having the water that was in abundance.
So the water was in abundance.
Just these evil goblins were preventing it.
And the reason the goblins act as they do is a combination of hatred for humanity plus something about a fish.
However, Trump fixed it all by ordering someone to turn on the water.
Now, that's the story I'm reading.
Do you really think that the evil goblin trolls, with their hatred of humanity, wanted to prevent everybody from having water, and the solution was to have somebody powerful say, turn on that water, and then they turned it on, and it's all good?
I think something's missing from the story.
So I was trying to get to the bottom of it before showtime, and I don't know the answer yet, but I'll give you some hints.
There are some California water experts who say, you don't want to drain the reservoirs now because you're going to need it later during fire season.
Okay, is that a thing?
Is it possible that Trump can let a bunch of water out, but then later we'll be in worse shape?
I don't know.
Others, other water experts in California say if you do it too fast, you'll flood areas that we normally could manage without any flooding.
Is that a thing?
Will there be some extra flooding that we didn't know about?
And then other people say, well, you can release the water, but it doesn't go to the right place.
You know, it's going to end up somewhere where you don't need it anyway.
Is that true?
Or can the farmers open up new fields because they have water and they can rely on it?
I don't know.
So...
I'm not sure if the LA Times answered all these questions, but I feel like everything about this story sounds like bullshit.
That's what I think.
Now, I'm not saying that Trump didn't help.
There's at least a 50% chance that that's exactly what happened, that California was unable to do the common-sense logical things.
Trump just forced them into it.
Maybe.
Maybe.
But I'm pretty sure we're not hearing the whole story here.
So hold your powder on that one.
You probably heard there's another jet crash.
It was a small jet that did some kind of medical flights.
I think it was Mexican nationals were on it.
And they brought a young Mexican girl to America for some treatments that I guess were not available in her hometown.
And sadly...
The plane went down with half a dozen people on it, and they're all deceased, of course.
Now, one thing that's different about these plane crashes is that it seems like no matter where there's a crash, somebody had a Ring camera that got good footage of it.
So there's unusually good footage of the actual crash from all the cameras in the world.
I don't know how many times small aircrafts the size of this one crash, but I think it's way more than we know.
I don't even think it makes national news.
Like if a little Cessna goes down somewhere, does it make national news?
I don't know.
But there's probably a lot more small airplane accidents than we know about.
Well, the New York Post is reporting that, speaking of that plane crash, That the Army is not going to name the female pilot killed aboard the military.
Okay.
Now, until this morning, there were a lot of you saying it's a DEI problem, and that when you found out who was piloting it, you'd find out it's some kind of DEI hire.
Now, I said, no, don't go there.
There's no evidence of that.
If ever there is evidence of it, then I'm with you.
But don't go there without evidence.
The only thing we know for sure is that DEI should be breaking all of our systems.
It should.
By design, it should make everything break.
Now, even Bill Maher did an extended piece last night about how all of our systems in the country are broken.
Does that sound familiar?
That's me.
How many times have I told you, you realize that all of our systems are broken?
All of them.
From healthcare to finance.
And when I say broken, I mean corrupt.
From healthcare to finance to politics to you name it.
You name it.
And I've been saying that for a while.
But when Bill Maher says it, the difference is he's still not to the point where he can give a reason for it.
I feel like he, and he might be right, by the way, he might think it's just the natural evolution of organizations.
They might start out as a good idea, but then they evolve and their budget's too big and they do DEI hiring and they lose sense of the mission and it all falls apart.
But I don't think you can ignore the fact that DEI predicts complete destruction of all of our systems.
By focusing on the wrong stuff.
Now, again, it has nothing to do with anybody's DNA. It has nothing to do with your culture.
It's not about your gender.
It's none of that.
The problem with DEI is it forces you away from hiring only the best and toward making sure you hit your DEI quota.
So humans being humans are going to make sure they hit the quota that's easiest to measure.
And the easiest one to measure is always DEI. Count the number of people and say, what are you?
It's the easiest one.
For measuring, it's the easiest one.
So, of course, in the real world, people manage to whatever will be measured and their bonus depends on it.
So, yeah, everything's falling apart.
But it turns out that this pilot that I had been telling you, stop saying to EI, you know, you don't know anything about the actual crew.
It's a female pilot.
Now, that doesn't mean the pilot made a mistake.
We're miles away from saying the pilot made a mistake.
There's nothing connecting female pilot to pilot mistake.
There might be.
I mean, at some point in the future, but even that wouldn't prove DEI is a problem.
It might prove one pilot is a problem.
But here's what I've heard from my pilot friend.
And I think other pilots have said something like it.
That the real reason for the crash is probably several factors.
It's very unlikely there's just one thing.
One of the factors is the airport's way busier and more dangerous, and pilots have been complaining about it forever.
Another is that pilots have said, you know, you don't want the helicopters doing too much there because they're going to be in the way.
So now they've stopped the helicopter traffic there.
So that was part of it.
Some of it was...
Maybe the training wasn't as good as it could have been.
Some of it was the tower was ambiguous.
So the thinking is it was sort of a perfect storm of a bunch of things going wrong in the context of it was easy for those things to go wrong.
But if only one of those things had gone wrong, probably you could have recovered.
It looks like a bunch of things went wrong at the same time, which was perfectly predictable.
Because of the complexity and the nature of the problem.
So if you have an increasingly complicated flying environment, which they did, and a decreasingly small number of people who are working in the tower, which we did, see more traffic, more complexity, fewer people handling the traffic and the complexity.
What's it going to be?
I mean, there's only one way that goes.
So it was sort of inevitable, but maybe this was the wake-up call to fix some of that.
But we cannot blame the female pilot, and I completely understand why the family doesn't want to release the name, because it would be a feeding frenzy if they did, just a feeding frenzy.
So let me say it again.
I'm not in favor of blaming individual problems on DEI. That's going to be a losing proposition.
You're just going to turn yourself into, you know, you look like a jerk.
Even if you're right, sometimes you'll probably be right that that's exactly the problem, and the one individual is exactly the problem.
But if you don't know that, it's kind of messed up.
It's kind of messed up if you don't know it.
So I think we can say DEI should destroy everything sooner or later because it's designed that way, but you can't say much about any one person in one act, usually.
Usually.
Sometimes you will be able to, but usually not.
Anyway, let's see.
The FAA is embroiled in a lawsuit because apparently they turned away 1,000 applicants based on race.
New York Post is reporting this.
So 1,000 applicants were turned away.
Now, these are the people who could have, you know, maybe been in that tower so they had proper amount of employees working there.
But I think this goes back to 2015 or something.
It's an older lawsuit that's kicking around.
So just know that you can draw a straight line between not enough people in the tower and DEI hiring.
I think that straight line exists.
I feel that that's demonstrated enough that you can say, yeah, at the very least, it's the reason there are not enough people working.
At the very least.
All right.
I guess Trump's going to put some tariffs on chips and steel and pharma and oil.
That's all coming.
And when he was asked, hey, won't that increase inflation?
Now, or at least the prices.
Because if it costs more for everything we import, well, who's paying for it?
Eventually those costs...
And not even eventually, pretty quickly.
Those costs get passed on to the consumer.
So if Trump puts a tariff on everything coming into the country, doesn't that largely guarantee that, well, we get some income from the tariff, the government would, but I think that's paid by the American companies that are importing.
So it seems to me that it would cause prices to go up.
If the price of everything goes up.
Let me say it again.
If the price of everything goes up, won't that cause the price of everything to go up?
It's a pretty direct line.
But Trump's argument is weirdly good.
And his argument is, we had tariffs in my first term and no inflation.
When I say no inflation, it's actually okay to have a little bit.
So what he had was a little bit.
It was within the, this is no problem range.
So that is a good point.
If he's already done pretty big tariffs and we had no inflation, there's at least one data point that says you can do this.
So that's a pretty good response.
I guess we'll have to keep an eye on it and see how it works.
And, of course, the tariffs on Mexico and Canada and China are going into effect.
Trump explains that as partly revenue, partly just having fair trading agreements with our partners, making things more fair, but also largely because of the fentanyl trade.
So it's coming across both of our borders, and China is the originator of the raw materials that the cartels and others are turning into fentanyl.
We'll see if a tariff makes any difference.
Now, my guess is the tariff will not really change anything.
Because if the government of Mexico had any ability to stop it, or any will to stop it, I guess, I think it already would have happened.
So I'm not really expecting pressure on the governments to have any impact on the cartels, because the cartels...
Don't care if the alleged government gets pressure.
They just care if they get pressure.
But speaking of that, PXF has announced that because the cartels are designated as terrorist organizations, thanks to Trump, that they can now, the Department of Defense, can use special ops against the Mexican cartels.
When asked about that, I think Seth gave the correct answer, which is all options are on the table, meaning it doesn't mean that we mobilized yesterday, but it might mean that.
It might mean that we mobilized and the special forces are ready to go in or already have gone in, and we haven't heard about it.
So that is exactly what I want to see.
I want to see the special forces take on the cartels, and I want to...
I want to see the tariffs get the governments of those countries on board.
You put it all together, and I don't think it's going to stop fentanyl.
I hate to say, but I don't think it'll be enough.
But you have to do it.
You can't just let people be dying like crazy without trying something.
So if you can't stop it at the source...
You can't stop people from trying to get it.
I don't know.
What do you do?
I don't know.
But I'm quite appreciative of this for reasons you know.
I lost my stepson in 2018 to an overdose.
All right.
FBI is experiencing massive firings.
So CNN's reporting that, of course, this is part of the cleaning house of the Trump administration.
Dozens of FBI agents, Who worked on the January 6th cases have been let go.
And agents who worked to investigate Trump's handling of the classified documents let go.
And those who investigated the 1,600 January 6th attendees seems like they'll be let go.
It's being reported that many of the agents initially had qualms about taking those assignments, the ones that are getting fired for those assignments.
They had qualms about taking them because they believed that maybe it would come back and bite them in the ass.
Yes, your instinct was right.
If you take those illegitimate jobs and the other team gets in power, you're in trouble.
Now, I do have some sympathy here.
If you're just trying to make your career work, and your boss says you're going to work on this January 6th thing, or you're going to work on the Mar-a-Lago thing, are you going to say, you know, honestly, I have a philosophical problem with this?
If you do, I'm guessing that's the end of your career.
So there must be a lot of people who didn't feel like they had a choice.
So I'd feel bad for them.
But I'm going to give you an alternate point of view so that you don't see them as poor victims just doing their job and mean old Trump is coming in to get rid of them.
I'd like to give you a reaction from Julie Kelly, who you might know has been following the January 6th thing very closely.
She's attended courtroom stuff and knows the most probably about the situation of anybody I know.
And here's what she says.
It appears that between 30 and 40 of the J6 line prosecutors were fired today.
Now, I think she's talking about the DOJ. I can only guess how much pleasure their victims take at this astounding news.
So there are two things happening.
There's the purging of the FBI, but separately the purging of the DOJ. And Julie Kelly says, kudos to the acting.
Deputy AG, Emile Bove, blah, blah, blah.
And she said, here's the payoff.
For three years, I watched these prosecutors in disgust.
When I left January 6th court proceedings, I would pray that their comeuppance would come, but I had little hope it would.
It is not so much how they abuse the law and work hand in glove with like-minded D.C. judges to violate the rights of J6 defendants.
What sickened me was seeing how gratified they were in inflicting pain on people who had no recourse, no ability to fight the legal and judicial circle of hell created by the DOJ and federal courts in Washington.
I often referred to them as sadists.
There is something deeply wrong with them.
Maybe being unemployed and under investigation will allow them time to conduct some much needed soul searching.
But for now, this is an historic day worthy of much celebration.
Okay.
Now that's what I call a victory lap.
Julie Kelly, thank you for your service to the country.
You deserve a victory lap.
So I hope you're having a great day.
So congratulations and thank you for all of your work on that.
So now do you feel sorry for the ones getting fired?
Do you feel sorry for them now?
I don't.
All of my sort of instinct for empathy just went completely away.
If you stand in the court and they seem to you like sadists and they seem to you like they're enjoying it, yeah.
Yeah, there's got to be a response to that.
And there was.
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he's made some changes to the The news coverage for the Department of Defense.
And he evicted the following news entities from their, I guess they have a physical spot that they have control of so they can be closer to the Department of Defense.
So he's evicting the New York Times, NPR, NBC, and Politico from their Pentagon offices so they can make room for One American News Network, the New York Post, Breitbart, and HuffPost.
Now, there's one name on that list that you said, what?
Now, I'm sure you understand why you'd want One American Network, New York Post, and Breitbart.
You understand those.
But why the Huffington Post?
Is he just trying to be both sides?
You know, just saying, hey, it's not about being right-leaning.
It's more about being a non-traditional media.
But here's the thing.
BuzzFeed owns Huffington Post, and Vivek Ramaswamy recently bought 8% of BuzzFeed.
So maybe this is looking ahead a little bit in the sense that it could be that BuzzFeed is going to...
Take on more of a Vivek, Ramaswamy tone.
He only has 8% of it.
So I don't know if that's enough to affect a change, but we'll see.
And maybe there's some thought that that would trickle down to the Huffington Post that's owned by BuzzFeed.
So the only way it makes sense to me is if the Vivek level there is what mattered.
So maybe it is.
Maybe.
Well, on the all-in pod, Chamath was talking about Doge's success.
He says we're only nine or ten days in, and he said the fact that we're already at a billion dollars a day is really incredible, and there's been no discernible impact.
I believe that's up to $4 billion a day now.
I think Elon said they're finding $4 billion a day now that they can cut.
I'm not going to believe any of the specific numbers coming out of Doge because Doge is, and rightfully so, trying to make us understand that it's working so that we'll keep backing it.
So if they make some claims early on that are maybe hyperbolic or a little exaggerated or they give us a number that's a multi-year number but it looked like it was just one year, I'm going to give them a lot of passes.
Because one of the things I always say is that the first impressions become a weapon.
So if they can cause a first impression that, oh my goodness, this Doge stuff is working so well, we want more of it.
More, more.
It's so good.
And that's what they're doing.
So there is a useful, practical, and desirable level of PR for Doge that I think they're doing a good job.
Of making it look like it's hitting the ground running and getting some stuff done.
And the more that you think it's happening, the more likely it will.
Because it just sets the tone.
If other government entities see that the other ones got gutted and there was no bad impact on the country, it just makes all the rest of the work easier.
So I'm in favor of calling out Doge for huge success.
Maybe even before it happens.
That would be normal business to kind of over-claim that the first day is doing great.
So it's very normal.
There's nothing creepy or dishonest about it because it's just a universal trait.
So I'm okay with that.
One of the things that Chamath points out is that the Doge teams each have an engineer on them.
Now, that's good thinking.
Because imagine being in a team and it's your job to go into some part of the government you've never had any access to, and you have to figure out how it's all connected to everything else.
You're going to have to bring an engineer just to figure out how everything's connected.
And then secondly, you want the engineer to say, wait a minute, that's what they do?
This is all they do?
I can do that with a software program I can write in 10 minutes.
Now, I'm exaggerating, of course.
But you need an engineer to say, I can get rid of this whole thing.
I'll just put in this AI or we'll skip it or whatever.
So, yeah, engineer.
You've got to have an engineer on every team.
And the fact that Elon knows that and he's working on that model, so good.
Oh, that is so good.
Just the design of the system is impressive.
There's an engineer on every team.
Now, I love engineers, and I think they're the least or the most underappreciated job in the world because they're the ones who have changed the world most fundamentally.
Let's see if they can do it on the government.
I guess 1,000 EPA employees are going to go on probationary status and might be fired immediately, CNN's reporting.
Here's the interesting one.
So apparently the highest-ranking person in the Treasury, David Lebrick, he resigned rather than comply with Doge for access to audit where they spent trillions of dollars a year.
Trillions of dollars go through the system, and as soon as Doge said, can we see what's in there, see where the money went?
The person in charge quit.
Now, I don't know how that could be more damning.
The only thing that would be more damning is if they've already left the country to a country with no extradition.
But let me tell you a universal truth.
One of the things we learned in this story, allegedly, is that there was never any audit to money requests that went through the Treasury.
They simply said yes to everything.
Now, I hope that's not literally true, but it's been reported that they didn't even have the function to check.
There was nobody whose job it was to even check.
They just said yes.
And some of that would include maybe some requests that you wouldn't want them to pay, including payments to, quote, fraudulent or terrorist groups.
So even if you knew the request was fraudulent, Or going to a group that made other fraudulent requests?
I guess their operating rule was they would still release the money.
Even to a terrorist, even to a known fraudulent request.
Because it wasn't their job to check on the sources.
I guess they were just writing the checks.
Anyway, but apparently they've never denied any payment at any time.
Now...
If I told you that there was one guy in charge of the system that would handle trillions of dollars in payments, and he quit when they asked if they could audit it, what would you think about that?
Because what I think is if you put anybody in charge of trillions of dollars and then you don't watch where it's going, isn't that a guarantee of corruption?
You could design that system a thousand times.
And implement it in a thousand different countries.
And then just play the tape forward for a couple years, and whoever was in that position would be stealing a trillion dollars a year.
Because they can.
You could even put an honest person in that position.
And after a few years, they'd be like, seriously?
Every time somebody asks for a check, I just authorize it, and nobody checks?
Nobody checks where I authorized the payment?
Nobody ever sees if it's legal or appropriate or ordered by Congress.
Nobody?
Ever?
Do you think that person's not going to steal your money?
Probably 9 out of 10 people in that situation would end up saying, well, maybe a little bit of money could come my way.
I'm so underpaid.
It would just be fair.
So yeah, it's almost a guarantee of corruption if you don't have anybody watching the store.
Guaranteed.
Some say that Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation to DNI might be in trouble.
I guess she got mostly in trouble for not being willing to say that Edward Snowden is a traitor, only that he broke laws.
But apparently, as of this morning, there were no Republicans who had said publicly they would not vote to confirm Tulsi.
So if the Republicans stay united...
She still gets in.
But the thing is that maybe even some Republicans are going to have a problem with her.
So I think we're treating this one as a coin flip.
I don't know if Trump and supporters will go as hard at the politicians if they don't say yes to this one.
If RFK Jr. gets turned down, people are going to flip out.
And I'm one of them.
I'm just going to flip out.
I'm just going to want something to be corrected very fast.
The other nominees, I might say, as I do with Tulsi, I say, huh, I would very much like her to get confirmed.
But if she didn't, I don't know if I'd go to war.
Especially if the other side had a reason.
They'd go, okay, here's my specific reason, and this is a line I can't cross.
I think I can live with it.
But I couldn't live with the Kennedy confirmation being derailed by fake news and stuff.
I can't live with that.
That one's life and death.
Got to get that one.
I do want very much Tulsi to get confirmed and Kash Patel especially.
I think Kash is going to be okay.
So I'm going to say yes on Kash.
He'll get confirmed.
And Tulsi's still a coin flip.
Could go either way.
Remember Bernie Sanders was arguing with RFK Jr. and the confirmation hearings?
And RFK Jr. pointed out he's one of the main recipients of pharma donations.
And Bernie argued, no, I'm not taking anything from the executives.
I'm taking, I only accept small donations.
Those are from just employees.
And then I say, what's the difference?
What is the difference?
If the pharma industry, be they the executives or be they the employees, have decided that you're the person that they're going to give money to because they like what you're doing, you're not going to change what you're doing, right?
Why does it matter that the employees gave it versus the executives?
It's exactly the same thing.
It's exactly the same.
So, no, that's not a dodge.
And also, if you're familiar with the real world, let's see how many of you know the real world.
If you found out that an industry, such as pharma, had a lot of individual employee donations, so much so that when you summed it up, it became the biggest number on the chart, what would you say about the willingness of the employees to give money?
To Bernie Sanders.
Well, let me tell you how the real world works.
This is your CEO. We've decided that we like Bernie Sanders, and we're going to give him some corporate money, but we don't want to do it with our money because it would look like we're putting too much of a thumb on the scale.
So we'd like to encourage each of you to use your own judgment.
We're not going to tell you who to donate to.
We like Bernie.
We like Bernie.
But we're not going to tell you who.
Maybe there'll be a few others.
They'll get some money.
But here's a list of five people we think you should consider.
So anybody on this list.
Oh, and by the way, we can't tell you for sure that we won't know who you donated to.
Because maybe there's some kind of a company process to make it easy.
So they don't just go to a website.
They do something internally.
And then it gets summed up and sent to the politicians, maybe.
So in the real world, there's no such thing as the employees independently decided to give to a candidate.
That's not really a thing.
There are lots of individuals who do on their own decide to give to candidates.
But if you see a bunch of them in one industry, that means the executives had their finger on the scale and were...
Not so subtly nudging the employees in the direction they wanted them to go.
And again, they can say any one of these five politicians would be a good place to give a donation.
They don't have to just pick Bernie.
You know, Bernie will get his share and they would bribe the other people at the same time.
All right.
There's more coming out about Kamala Harris and her campaign and not getting on Joe Rogan, which was considered a...
But boy, when you hear the back and forth, there's more details coming out.
I think somebody has a book on it.
But when you hear the details of the negotiations, basically Joe Rogan said, I can schedule you in lots of different times.
You just have to do what everybody else does.
Come to the studio, like Trump, like everybody else.
And talked for three hours.
And I think Rogan wanted them to sign something like some kind of deal.
Billy John, you're such a turd.
Like that matters.
Anyway.
But the overall take on it is, oh my God, Kamala Harris' staff was so incompetent.
They could not figure out how to essentially take Joe Rogan's money because appearing on Joe Rogan is like money.
It's like one of the best things you could do if you think you'll do a good job.
So he's offering her, just as he offered Trump, this gigantic platform.
I mean, the best platform you could ever be on in terms of reach and independence, etc.
And they couldn't figure it out.
And then apparently...
So here's part of why they couldn't figure it out.
They thought that if they sent Kamala to Texas for just that, that the money people would complain because Texas is not in play and that she should be spending all of her time in the states where she could win the state.
But she couldn't win Texas, so why go there?
Why go there is because Joe Rogan's there.
That's why.
So instead of just saying, oh.
The best thing we could do is go on the Joe Rogan show.
They decided to play it another way.
And they started negotiating.
And they're like, all right, here's what we'll do.
We'll have a fake rally in Houston.
This is real.
We'll do a fake rally.
It's really a rally, but they would do it just for the purpose of giving her a reason.
I think it was on maybe reproductive rights or something.
So that would give her a reason to come to the state.
And then since she was already there, that would give her a reason to do the Joe Rogan show.
But I think they picked like the only day he wasn't available to do it.
So they couldn't schedule it.
They couldn't say yes.
They had to come up with a whole fake cover story to get her in the state.
Every part of that is screaming incompetence.
Let me tell you how Trump would have handled that.
Joe Rogan invited me on the show.
Okay.
Schedule it.
That was it.
That's all she needed to do.
And did he ever say, oh, I can't go these days because people will judge me from what state I... No.
It had nothing to do with the fact that he was likely to win the state.
Because arguably, Trump didn't have a reason to go either because he was going to win the state anyway.
But he just said, where is the show?
I'm going to go to the show because it's the most important platform in 2024. So it's quite amazing to see the competence difference in the campaign.
Meanwhile, Democrat Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs is being asked to explain what happened to $339 million that, quote, disappeared from the state budget.
Huh.
Meanwhile, her budget director mysteriously resigned.
Okay, does this sound like the Treasury Department story?
The moment the budget is being questioned, because there's a massive amount of money that's missing, the budget director quits.
Wait, what?
The budget director quits?
That doesn't sound good.
So there is suspicion that $339 million went where it shouldn't.
The Gateway Pundit's reporting on this.
They've been all over it.
And one of the state reps talked to the Gateway Pundit and said, quote, maybe somebody's siphoning off some funds.
And then he clarified, maybe some are mistakes.
Who knows?
But they don't match up.
So the spending and the budget, I guess, don't match.
Something doesn't match.
We'll see.
And then also Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, is writing about this.
One of the things that we hope to find out under the Trump administration is if there's anything else to know about the Seth Rich story.
Now, historically...
I've mostly been a skeptic about that really being related to anything important.
And it looked probably more like a random crime, even though there were a ton of coincidences involved.
I get it.
I get it.
Hillary Clinton, etc.
So I understand the suspicion about it.
But this is interesting.
So apparently the FBI is still stalling.
Refusing to turn over the Seth Rich records to an attorney, Ty Clevenger, and he's been trying to get them for years, and he keeps being denied.
Now, what happens when Cash Patel gets in the office, if he does, is Cash going to say, yeah, just release all that Seth Rich stuff?
I don't know.
I've heard that Cash has seen some of the other secret files, like he's seen the UFO files.
He's seen the Kennedy files.
Do you think he's also seen the Seth Rich files?
Don't know, but it could get interesting.
Maybe something will happen there.
Meanwhile, according to Anthony Watts at the Climate Change Dispatch, the AP is doing a story that...
Projects millions of European heat deaths using the debunked model.
Now, so the AP has a story that says a whole bunch of people are going to die from too much heat in Europe.
The model that they used to model this risk, it's even got a name.
The name is called the RCP 8.5.
So I think that means that the...
There are a bunch of different scenarios.
You know, if this and that happened, it looks like this.
But if this and that happened, it looks like this.
So this is one of those.
But it's the most extreme one, and the one that literally nobody thinks is real.
So the AP wrote a story based on a climate model that even the climate scientists say, what, you're using that model?
Nobody thinks that model's real.
Why do they think it's not real?
Because, let's see, it assumes an improbable future of runaway coal consumption, stalled technological progress, and unmitigated population growth.
So the population is stalled.
Coal is just one of the technologies.
Probably we'll do a lot more nuclear than we will coal in the long run.
And technological progress is not stalled.
It's the opposite.
So it's a discredited model, but the AP still ran with it because it fit their narrative.
Now, here's my question.
How many models are there?
And if there are more than one model, isn't that proof that the models aren't real?
To me, it is.
If you had one model, I'd say that might be useful.
I mean, I'd watch it to see if I could predict.
But if you have a hundred models, and they're all based on different assumptions, such as how much coal you use, etc., like I just mentioned, if they have different assumptions, and there's a hundred of them, and they go in different directions, doesn't that mean they're not real?
Because I would think that even if you knew which assumptions are the real ones, Then you'd get into how did they calculate the endpoint, and you'd find it's bullshit.
There's no such thing as predicting the future with complicated models of any kind.
It's not true in climate.
It's not true in finance.
It's not true in anything, anywhere.
There's no such thing as a complicated, many-variable model that tells you the future.
Never will be, unless AI can figure it out.
So, wait till you find out about climate models is what I like to say.
Wait till you find out about climate models.
Lots more to find out there.
So, as I mentioned, Owen Gregorian is going to have a Spaces event on X. That's the audio app so you can listen in.
You can either go to Owen Gregorian's X page or you can go to mine and you'll see the link.
It's at the top.
Near the top.
And that'll happen probably as soon as he gets organized after I close down.
I imagine he's starting to get ready to push that button any moment.
So you'll enjoy that.
I've popped into a number of them and people seem to be having fun.
So I like it.
In the meantime, I'm going to talk privately to the locals people.
If you are not subscribing to the Dilbert comic, You should do it on Locals if you like the political stuff, too.
Or if you just want the comic, there's a cheaper way to get it just by subscribing to me on X for the comic.