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You know when everything goes wrong all at the same time and you've got two minutes to show time?
You never really recover.
There's something about the first minute that sets the tone.
So just imagine I gave you the simultaneous sip and then you had a sip.
Nothing's working today.
Maybe that's what I needed.
Maybe it was the coffee I needed.
Audio is good.
Good.
At least on locals.
I can't see the comments on X if there are any.
But if you're on X and you're saying, why is the sound not good?
It's because it's on my phone today.
Technical difficulties.
No microphone is connected.
Well, let's talk about all the news.
I saw Joe Rogan talk about Meta's new glasses.
You know, they look like regular glasses, but it allows you to see things extra.
So you'll see your regular environment, but extra stuff added.
And Joe Rogan was talking about some Harvard kid who figured out how to use facial recognition software with these glasses.
So I guess you can add your own apps.
If you look at somebody with the glasses, it calls up their social media and Wikipedia and whatever is available about them online.
Now, Joe seemed to think that that was a terrible idea and that, you know, I guess they could find your address and everything else if your address is public.
So here's my take on this.
You could wish that this didn't exist.
You could hope that people would not use these glasses for something that looks like a privacy violation of some sort.
But it's not going to happen.
So it's not that I'm in favor of it or against it.
It's sort of like complaining about the rain.
It's just going to rain, whether you complain about it or not.
Technology is definitely going to give you this capability.
You will be able to see things in your glasses that are not in the environment.
Some of it will be telling you something about the person you're talking to.
I guarantee it.
There's no way around it, whether it comes from individuals who are hacking it or it comes from the company meta.
It's just going to happen.
So, again, I'm not in favor of it or against it.
It's just going to happen.
But in related news, there's, according to the Brighter Side of News, Joshua Chafin is writing, that there's some emotion-sensitive technology that people could wear so you could tell what their emotions are in real time.
I guess they figured out how to use galvanic skin responses.
In a more granular way than we've used them before, so that you can actually tell people's specific and immediate emotions based on what's happening around them.
Now, it's not exactly completely done, and it's a level above, you know, mood rings and things that we've had before.
But now imagine putting these two technologies together.
So imagine you could walk up to a stranger, and he would know something about them.
And let's say one of the things about them is they like dogs because they've got a lot of dogs on their social media.
You could immediately engage them in a conversation if you were shy.
You could walk up and say, whoa, you've got a corgi?
My aunt had a corgi.
Those are great.
That would be a little creepy if they didn't know you had the special glasses on.
But, you know, imagine a time when everybody has them.
Everybody knows.
And then you could determine whether the things you were saying were making the person you're talking to happy or not.
So, I don't know.
There could be a big benefit to shy people.
Because shy people don't know what to say to new people that they're meeting.
That's the biggest problem.
If they knew exactly what to say, nobody would be shy.
But imagine if you just saw enough about somebody.
You could walk up to anybody and just use their name and you'd know something about them.
It would solve a lot of shyness problems, speaking as a shy person.
Well, I'm a recovered shy person.
The best way to recover from shyness is to become famous.
It turns out that when you're famous, all that shyness stuff just goes away.
I did not expect that.
Anyway, so there's two technologies that have changed things.
We'll get to the big politics in a minute.
So, according to Fox News, Alexander Hall is reporting that San Francisco Asian American voters are basically walking away from the Democrats.
Now, of course, it's not all of them.
It's never all of them.
Whoever you're talking about, it's never all of anybody.
But does that surprise you?
How many of you would be surprised to learn that Asian Americans in San Francisco are starting to turn toward Trump in a fairly dramatic and very measurable way?
Who's surprised about that?
I would argue that you could only be surprised about that if he didn't have any Asian American friends.
Anybody who has Asian American friends, you already knew it.
You already knew it.
So I'm not going to...
Dig any deeper into that because I'd be, you know, sort of talking for a group that I shouldn't be talking for.
But if that surprised you, it's only because you didn't have any contact with that community.
Yeah, it's a very common sense.
Yeah, I guess that's as far as I can go.
I'll say that the Asian American community is very common sense based.
What works?
Oh, let's do that.
What doesn't work?
Oh, we'll avoid that.
Just common sense.
So, yeah, of course they'd be driven toward common sense solutions.
Meanwhile, our favorite crazy Democrat representative, Jasmine Crockett, she said on some radio show or podcast just recently that Republican voters don't like to read or learn facts.
They don't like to read.
Or learn facts.
What I love about this is Democrats can't learn.
There's just no learning happening at all.
If I can teach the Democrats just one thing, just one thing, don't do this.
Do not make general statements about all Republicans.
It's so dumb.
It's like dumb on a level that is hard to even fathom.
But still doing it.
And when I see this, I just say to myself, we need more Jasmine Crockett.
Because the more Jasmine Crockett there is in the world, the longer Republicans will have total control of the government.
Well, maybe Jasmine Crockett will have a new job opportunity someday, because Joy Reid's show on MSNBC has reportedly been canceled.
I guess it's going to run for the rest of this week, and then she will be out.
Now, what would be the worst name to give your own TV show if there were some chance you would ever get canceled?
It's called The Reid Out.
Reed as in her last name, R-E-I-D. That's the name for the show, Reed Out.
What is the news today?
Reed Out.
Yeah.
So they should have conferred with me at the beginning.
It's like, if we give it this name, is anybody going to be able to mock it later?
And I would say, yes.
Yes, they will be able to mock it later.
So maybe rethink that.
It also made me think that if you imagine that someday the news readers will be robots and AI, who would be easier to replace than Joy Reid?
Allow me to do my AI robot impression of Joy Reid's replacement.
Today in the news, the weather is 85 degrees in San Francisco because of white supremacy.
Today in the news, the New York Giants won a game because of white supremacy.
I mean, how hard can you make an AI that just reproduces Joy Reid?
Because of racism.
There's racism.
Trump is bad.
Orange Hitler.
Orange Hitler.
Chaos.
There's chaos.
Orange Hitler.
Meanwhile, Trump is on Choose Social, dunking on MSNBC, and he calls them MSDNC, as in they're basically a Democrat function.
He says, MSDNC is even worse than CNN. They shouldn't even have a right to broadcast.
Only in America.
I, of course, believe they should have a right to broadcast because of free speech.
I think he's being a little hyperbolic.
But it made me think, and I don't know the answer to this.
Maybe you can tell me in the comments.
If you're a news network, do you get some extra government protection?
In other words, if you do the news, Does the government say, oh, you can use these airwaves or whatever?
Now, I don't know if it applies to cable, but is there anything like if you're in the news business, you get some extra rights?
Is that a thing?
It used to be when the airwaves were limited in bandwidth, but I think it did, so I'm not an expert on that.
But it does ask the question.
If something is pretending to be a news network, but yet in every way it functions as a propaganda organ, does it have a right to exist?
I think it does, because lying is still legal.
You can lie all you want.
You can be as biased as you want.
But it does raise a question.
Is there anything that's different about MSNBC? Now, there's some thought that the Management of MSNBC is trying to move away from doing nothing but criticizing Trump.
We'll see.
Anyway, it makes me wonder if the Trump effect took out Joy Reid.
Do you think that Trump is the reason that Joy Reid is losing her job?
I wonder.
Because if it hadn't been Trump being president, wouldn't she have some positive things to say?
Let's say a Democrat were president.
Wouldn't she have some positive things to say?
And then maybe her ratings would not have collapsed.
But when you've got a president who's polling over 50% in popularity and he's doing a lot of things that people want, if the only thing you can do is call him Warren Chandler day after day after day, I can see how your management would get tired of that.
So it makes sense to me.
It also made me wonder if Trump can recoup All of his legal expenses from the law fair and all of his business expenses from being boycotted or whatever happened to the Trump business itself.
Because let's say he got $30 million.
He won from NBC for fake news about him.
Or no, I think it was just fake news.
Somebody else got $30 million.
And then he's suing CBS. And that might be a multi-million dollar settlement.
It seems to me that the only thing you'd have to demonstrate is that the fake news knew it was fake, at least whatever story they're talking about, that they knew it and that they did it anyway.
Which I'll bet is an easy standard to achieve.
Because if you sue somebody, you get access to their emails, right?
You probably will always find some evidence in the emails.
That they knew exactly what they were doing.
So maybe there's more lawsuits coming.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah held a funeral for its late leader that Israel took out some months ago.
And it was an annoyingly and startlingly large gathering of Hezbollah supporters.
But Israel apparently did a flyover.
So all the Hezbollah people were dancing around and doing their thing.
And Israel just does a flyover with F-15s and F-35s.
I think it was just to remind them, we're not done.
So that happened.
Breitbart News is reporting, Francis Martel, that Doug Burgum, he's the Interior Secretary, And he says that Trump plans to sell energy to our friends, and it'll help defund the Russian aggression.
So part of what he's saying is that the more energy the U.S. creates, the weaker Russia will be, because Russia depends on its energy.
So if we're competing with it, it should lower their revenues, increase our revenues, and make us safer.
But here's the question I have.
Although Doug Burgum might be a solid choice, he doesn't strike me as a person who can promote any successes.
He's just not a promotional guy.
Maybe to his credit, he might be more about getting the job done.
But it seems to me that the single biggest good news would be if we did something really good in the energy field.
In other words, creating more energy, lowering the cost of energy, approving more stuff.
And I was unaware of what we're doing in energy, but I looked at Daniel Baldwin had a list of things that the administration has already done, Trump administration, that would make a difference.
But I don't know how real these are.
So one is finish the Constitution pipeline.
To bring natural gas to the Northeast.
I don't think that happened.
I think that Trump announced he wants to get that pipeline going because it would lower costs in the Northeast, at least for natural gas.
But I don't think it's going.
So I don't know if there's anything there yet.
Could be in the future, but at the moment, no.
Then also listed by Daniel Baldwin is a joint venture.
For an LNG project with Japan.
Now, does that lower costs of energy in the United States if we're doing an LNG project with Japan?
Or does it just open up a market?
I don't know.
Apparently, India agreed to make U.S. its leading supplier of crude oil and petroleum.
But isn't that just increasing demand?
So here are the two examples of increased demand.
Increased demand doesn't lower your costs.
I mean, if you increase production to meet the demand, it's still not doing anything.
Trump is reopening 625 miles of ocean that Biden had banned from drilling.
But is anybody drilling?
Is there anybody who's like, yeah, we're going to get going in that?
Place we wanted to, but weren't.
So wouldn't you like to know about that?
But I also saw that making peace with Russia should have some impact on energy prices.
Because that would allow what?
Russia to produce more energy?
I don't know.
I think they're producing all they want.
So I don't see how that's going to lower our prices.
And then Trump did call on OPEC to increase production, which, if they did that, would lower energy prices.
But are they doing it?
So you see the problem, right?
Trump made a big deal about betting on energy, American energy.
So if we increase our energy production, we could not only make more money by selling it, yay, but we could lower our own costs.
By having, you know, more supply than there is demand.
At least changing the balance.
But is any of that happening?
So here's what I would suggest for the administration.
I feel like Doug Burgum needs some help.
And like I said, he's probably a solid interior minister.
But sometimes promotion is a whole different field.
And he doesn't seem like the promotion guy.
Now, I don't want to see a bunch of BS. But don't you think that real things are brewing that could actually lower energy costs?
And if there aren't, well, I'd like to know that.
Because pretty much our entire future depends on energy booming and lowering our energy prices.
Because nothing else is going to take the price of eggs down.
Now, I do love the things that Trump is doing with lowering, you know, with Doge, etc.
So as long as we can get Congress to not spend all those savings, which I think they want to do, then maybe in the long term, you know, prices and inflation will be controlled, and that helps on prices.
But I'm not seeing the Trump administration draw a straight line between what they're doing and the price of eggs, or even the price of energy.
So we kind of need that, don't we?
It's conspicuously missing, given that the Trump administration is so good at promotion, and energy has got to be right at the top of the things that you would want to promote if there's something happening.
But I guess I'm going to say I'm not aware of anything that would make a difference.
So that's a little disturbing.
There's a new study on studies.
I like studies about studies.
This is a study that shows that research papers, they looked at 82 climate studies.
What do you think they found?
Don't get ahead of me.
It said that not a single paper of those 82 disclosed a conflict of interest in over 29 years.
So over a 29-year period, Nobody who did these studies ever disclosed if they had a conflict of interest.
Do you think they have any?
Well, here's what they found out.
So 68% of NGO-funded studies claimed that climate change drastically increased hurricane activity.
So more than two-thirds of all NGO-funded Climate studies say, oh, this is making hurricanes much worse.
What do you think would be the answer of people who are not funded by an NGO? Now, an NGO would be something like, you know, I'll just make this up, but it'd be like the Green Climate Initiative NGO. So it's basically people who want the study to say that climate change is real, and they want the study that they're funding to say that it's dire.
And 68% of the people who took money from the people who want to show how dire it is showed how dire it was.
Two-thirds of them.
But of the people who did not take money from NGOs, they had a very clear incentive structure.
Only 22% of them said that the hurricanes were getting worse because of climate change.
22% versus 68%.
And so the 22% were people who just got government or academic research that was maybe a little more neutral.
It's like, here's your money.
Come tell us what happened.
Whereas the NGOs are really directly political, I think, in most cases.
So there you go.
Your studies match the desires of the people who funded them.
They didn't disclose that they had that conflict.
So that would be a conflict if your funding came from an NGO, and the NGO definitely wanted a certain answer, because you know they did.
You know they did.
And apparently the NGO grants were far more, four times as large as the normal academic study.
Now, even in the academic world, People are going to be pressed to say climate change is real.
And even if you're funded just by the government, not through an NGO, you're still going to feel like you need to come up with something that agrees with the government.
So, climate science, not really science.
Remember they say trust the science?
If you knew that the source of the funding completely changed the outcomes, the source of the funding, not the science, The source of the funding.
If you know that, and there's such a big difference, you know, 22% compared to 68%, that's not really science, is it?
All right.
Here's what I like to say about climate change.
Wait till you find out about the climate models.
Now, some of you who follow me already know what I mean about that.
But I'm fascinated by the category of communication, which is something that can't be communicated.
For example, you know the story about the little boy who cried wolf?
He warned that a wolf was coming when there wasn't.
So many times that when a real wolf was coming, and he said, there's a wolf coming, everybody said, ah, that's that little kid who cries wolf all the time, so they ignored him.
So that was a case where the boy who cried wolf could not communicate a real thing because people weren't ready for it.
And that's also true if, you know, if you get your information from your enemy, you don't believe it.
There's a whole bunch of categories of things that can't be communicated.
Here's another one.
If physics came up with some great new thing, but the physicist wanted to explain it to me, do you think they could do it?
Not really.
It'd be stuff like, well, then the muon went through the quantum phase into the multi-dimensions, and I'd be, I don't know what any of those mean.
I don't know what you're saying.
Well, but then the fluctuation of the Schrodinger's cat, blah, blah, I'd say, nope, still nothing.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
So that'd be something you can't communicate to.
But what I know about climate models is in that category.
So I used to say, let me give you all my detailed explanation about why the climate models couldn't possibly be real.
And unless you have an hour to sit there and you can watch me do it on a whiteboard, I can't communicate it.
So it's just funnier for me to say, when do you find out?
Because you will find out.
I'm completely certain.
That the climate models are going to have their day of judgment, where even the smart people say, ah, I didn't know this about the climate models, but now that I know it, that changes everything.
It's coming.
I guarantee it.
Anyway, the National Institute of Health stopped considering new grants because of the Doge, either the Doge cross-cutting or some other effect from Doge.
And the idea here is that the scientists are feeling like, oh no, it's the end of the world because we have all these things we want to get funding for and grants, but the National Institute of Health is now kind of constipated and they can't make it happen.
Well, I saw a mocking post by Vinay Prasad, a doctor.
Now, Vinay is well known, at least on the internet.
For debunking research studies and teaching us how unreliable the scientific literature is, meaning the studies.
So here's what he says about the NIH pausing their funding of new grants.
He goes, oh no!
There are delays in a broken, inadequate, and corrupt system that produces fraudulent and irreproducible research and has never subjected itself to empirical testing.
If this keeps up, we might break a system where scientists spend 60 hours a week writing grants.
That's pretty brutal.
But here's what I would say.
It reminded me of Elon Musk's engineering rule.
You said this a number of times.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in engineering is to try to optimize something that shouldn't exist.
Like if you have a feature that nobody uses, if you're spending time making it better, maybe you should just get rid of it.
So this is one of those things where the National Institute of Health, yeah, I guess they'd like to optimize it.
But at least the way it has been running up to now, it doesn't have any credibility.
Maybe we just don't need it.
Maybe we shouldn't fix it.
Meanwhile, over in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, he's got this idea that mothers would be exempt from income tax forever.
But you'd have to be a mother of two or more.
So if you had two or more kids, you could be exempt from income taxes in his country forever.
Does that sound like it could work?
I'd love to think that it would, because, you know, wouldn't it be great if there were some simple formula for increasing your local population?
Because a lot of countries would need that.
But doesn't that seem kind of easy to game that system?
So, for example, if the wife's income is not taxed, ever, but the husband's income is taxed, what do you think the family's going to do?
Well, one thing they might do, if it's a small business, they would just put all the income in the wife's name.
The other thing is, if both the man and the woman are capable of getting jobs that are similar, they might say, hey, how about the husband stays home, because he gets taxed if he works, and the wife will go to work, and the husband will take care of the kids, because the wife goes to work and doesn't get taxed.
Hungary is trying to accomplish.
They're not trying to accomplish stay-at-home husbands and new mothers who are going to work and leaving their kids at home.
But wouldn't that happen?
And how do you promise that any tax exemption will be lifelong?
Lifelong?
What happens if the government changes tomorrow?
You can't guarantee anything lifelong.
That's not a thing.
So I guess I just wonder if they have enough controls on that.
I mean, obviously, they had to think about all those same things I'm mentioning.
But it makes me wonder if it's practical.
We'll keep an eye on this one.
According to Just the News, the Trump administration is making it a little easier to get some homeschooling started.
I guess the Biden administration required a federal review of, quote, how states approve and select...
Private entities for homeschooling.
And I think the Trump administration said, nah, get rid of that.
You states, just do what you need to do and give us more homeschooling.
And that seems like the right decision.
I like that.
All right.
Here's something I noticed that I thought I noticed, a pattern.
And so I asked Grok.
If this pattern is real, or I'm just imagining it.
And the pattern is that the people who know the most about the government, I'm sorry, the people who know the most about business, the most experienced people, are kind of on the same side about Doge.
That it's a good system and it's probably going to work.
And the people who know the least...
are the ones who have the criticisms because they don't know how things work in the real world.
But I made a list of the dumbest takes on Doge.
If you have ever said any one of these things, you're probably not very experienced.
You might have a high IQ. I see a lot of, like, PhDs and stuff weighing in on social media.
But they clearly don't have job experience of being a leader and having to manage big groups and stuff like that.
So here are the worst takes.
I pinned this to my X account if you want to see it.
The worst takes on Doge.
Now, these all come from the most inexperienced people.
People with experience, you know, who have managed big groups, who have done their own layoffs, who have been through layoffs.
They kind of think that Doge is doing the right thing, which is move fast, break things, fix it, keep moving.
That's the real world.
In the real world, that's the way you do it.
Exactly the way Musk is laying it out.
But the people who don't have that real world experience, mostly the media pundits and the academics and stuff, here's what they say.
Now, I'm not going to tell you what's wrong with each of these things.
Because again, if you have experience, you know exactly what's wrong with them.
And if you don't, well, again, I can't fix that with a few lines of wisdom.
So I'll just tell you what the dumb mistakes are.
Number one, Doge should use a scalpel, not a chainsaw.
You with me so far?
If you ever said Doge should use a scalpel, not a chainsaw, you really don't understand much about anything.
I don't even need to get into it.
I mean, I could.
But you all see it, right?
Well, maybe you don't.
Because what I'm saying is it's not based on IQ. It's literally based on experience.
If you have experience, you know that the chainsaw is the right tool.
All right, here's another one.
The cuts need to be more thoughtful.
The cuts need to be more thoughtful?
What?
You can say that about everything.
Well, I think Musk is trying to put a rocket to Mars, but I think he should be more thoughtful about it.
All right.
Somebody is doing something.
It doesn't matter what it is.
I think they should be more thoughtful about it.
Okay.
Isn't that kind of true of everything all the time?
No, you shouldn't be more thoughtful about it.
You should.
Cut with your chainsaw, see what gets broken, put it back together, move on.
Doge is lowering morale among the people who are affected.
Yeah, of course it's lowering morale.
But have you ever seen a company where they're doing big layoffs and all the people are like, yeah, I'm so happy I work here this week with all the layoffs and stuff.
No, you can't do big layoffs and cost cutting and also maintain morale.
For the same period that you're doing the cost cutting, that's not a thing.
You don't even bring it up.
It's just not a thing.
Nobody can do it.
It's never been done.
Nobody will ever do it.
No.
Morale goes down when you cut budgets.
That's it.
You've got to live with it.
How about Doge's creating chaos?
Chaos.
Yeah, it's creating a little chaos.
But you're going to have to take that to the second level, which is end.
That's bad because the chaos stole your democracy?
The chaos slowed it down?
No, the chaos came from going fast.
So it's not about slowing things down.
It's just a generic political word.
Have you noticed that no matter what Trump does, way before Doge, no matter what Trump did, Let's see, what's that say?
Somebody's trying to get my attention on something.
I'd like to see him get more aggressive.
Yeah, so Trump is saying on True Social directly to Elon, who responded, that he wants to see Elon get more aggressive, which would be more chainsaw, more chaos, lower morale.
Now, is that a mistake?
No, it's not.
It's not a mistake.
It's very good that Trump is inserting himself to say there should be more of it.
That's exactly the right framing.
Because if you're wondering if it's already gone too far, and it's too fast, and it's too chainsaw-y, and it's too much chaos, well, there's the President of the United States saying, you know, we need more of it, not less.
And all the smart people are going to say, yeah.
Yeah, more would be better.
Here's another one that's dumb.
Doge is how Musk will rob the country.
All right.
Musk was not elected.
Okay.
Doge needs to be more transparent.
Could you imagine if Doge were more transparent?
Do you know what that would look like?
We went into this organization.
They have 10,000 NGOs and 400 departments.
We've decided that we'll downsize by 8% the Department of Energy Democracy for America Freedom.
And you'll be like, what even was that?
Well, here's a long description of what that department did.
I was like, okay.
I'm not going to read that long description.
And here's 7,000 more of them we did today.
How in the world could they possibly be more transparent in a way that would help anybody?
Because unless you're one of those geniuses who's really digging into these things, you don't even know what the department does.
You don't know if they need more of it or less of it.
They could be the most transparent project in the world, and you wouldn't know anything.
You would just hear the names of things, and now, okay.
All right, well, that sounded like the name of it was good, but they're cutting it?
Why would they cut something that has a name that sounds good, but maybe the name isn't, you know, very indicative of what it is?
Anyway, if you find yourself tempted to say any of those things about Doge, I recommend taking a week off because you're not going to look smart in public.
And then I saw on the X that X user named Matt Van Swal, Pointed out that Jeff Bezos laid off 1,400 people from his Blue Origin space company last week.
So he laid off 1,400 people, and not a single one of them is on 60 Minutes Bitching.
And then Matt says, do you get it yet?
Okay, do you get it?
Do you think that Jeff Bezos used a scalpel?
Do you think he used a scalpel to get rid of 1,400 people?
I think he told his managers to do whatever they need to do to get rid of 1,400 people.
And then they did what they needed to do.
I don't know how much scalpling there was.
And do you think he did it without lowering morale?
Oh, I would think that the other people were a little bit nervous and they lost their friends who worked with them.
Yeah, of course it lowers morale.
But Jeff Bezos did it anyway because it's a smart thing to do.
And every big company acts the same.
Because they know how to do this.
Then there's the issue of Doge and Musk have demanded or asked, I guess, that every member of the government sends an email by, I guess, Monday by noon or something that says what they accomplished last week.
And then a lot of people are pushing back.
I think...
Kash Patel said they'll do their own performance reviews.
They don't need other people to do it.
State Department had some diplomat pushing back.
So you're going to see a whole bunch of pushback.
But if you see it as a way to figure out who to fire, it's more than that.
It's more than that.
My first take was that you should see it as a reframe.
Because if somebody says, Tell me what you did last week.
If you go through that cycle even once of, uh-oh, somebody's asking me to prove that I'm doing something useful, you're going to start thinking that way.
So you're going to say to yourself, uh-oh, what if they ask again at the end of this week?
So you're going to start doing useful things because you know somebody's going to check on you.
So I think partly it's a reframe to make people think, In terms of productivity, instead of in terms of just staying out of trouble or hiding at home or working at home or processing some transactions.
It's like, how do you actually accomplish something?
You should be thinking about that every day, if not every week.
So as a reframe, I like it.
Obviously, there will be tons of people who don't answer at all and tons of people who just make stuff up.
How hard would it be to say that you accomplished something last week?
How hard would that be?
No matter what job you had.
Because nobody's going to check it.
They're just going to look at the email and see if there's something on it.
So if you said, well, I processed 17 big projects last week.
I approved them.
And that's good.
Yeah, but what Elon Musk said is that what they're trying to do is maybe find people who are so uninvolved in work.
That they don't even check their email.
And there's some thought that there might be people who don't do any work, and maybe you're not even employees somehow, or somehow some people are getting money for fraudulent reasons.
And the email, if they don't get an email from that person, that would be the one you look into.
It's like, hmm, why is this one person unable to even lie about what they've done recently?
If you can't at least lie about it, which is the normal way business does this.
The employees all lie about what they accomplished.
If you can't at least lie about it, you might not even be a real person.
So that would be useful.
So when you look at this email thing, it's like doge small.
Doge big is move fast, break things, and fix it.
Doge small is give us an email to say what you did.
Because, you know, we might make some decisions based on that.
Now, that's also a really messy process.
You can imagine a thousand ways that it could go wrong if somebody was on vacation and didn't get the email or somebody just forgot to send an email, but they're actually very productive.
So you see all these ways it could go wrong.
But still, sometimes you've got to shake the box and see what you learn.
Somebody like Musk is going to be looking at the emails and saying, yep, this one, I guess I can cut this 10%.
I don't think that's going to happen.
I think they're just testing to see if anybody can even write an email that says they did something.
It could be less about what they did than whether or not they get the email.
And I don't think they're going to make some broad rule like if you didn't respond, you're fired.
I doubt that.
But it will give them an idea of where to look.
That might be good.
Did I hear from the five that Democrats are holding town halls as kind of their response to being out of power and trying to build some kind of Trump rally situation light, you know, like the baby version of it?
Is that a real thing?
And then there was some thought that the attendees were paid attendees.
And I thought, that would be so weak.
If Trump can give these gigantic outdoor rallies, but the Democrats' response is paid attendees at an indoor town hall.
And I was trying to think, why is it that we don't see more Trump rally things on the left?
And part of the reason, I think, is that they hate spending time with each other.
If you go to a Trump rally, I haven't done this, but I guarantee this is true, Based on all the reporting of people who have.
If you go to a Trump rally, you're going to see a whole bunch of people who are very happy to be with the other bunch of people.
And they're happier than they were when they were sitting home.
It's like, oh, I'm with my people.
But Democrats don't have that option because they've got the crazy left, super left, and then the normies.
The normies and the crazies aren't going to exactly fit together in the same room.
I don't know if Democrats even have the option of having any kind of a rally that doesn't go wrong.
That's real.
All right.
You've probably seen on social media that Elon Musk is having another baby mama drama.
And I'm not even going to mention the name of the mother.
You know, it's a known influencer.
But I'm not interested in their business.
And we don't know enough about what they agreed to, what they didn't agree to.
We just don't know who did what to whom, and we're never going to know, and it's none of our business.
But one of the things that came out of it is screen captures that actually were taken with a separate device, not actually a screen capture, of signal messages, the Signal app.
Now, the Signal app is what people believe is protected.
That it's encrypted, and you can set the messages to disappear.
But even if you set the messages to disappear, it doesn't stop somebody from taking a second device and just recording what's on the screen before it disappears.
And that's what happened.
So some of Elon's private, very private, messages to the baby mama are now public.
They're public.
Here's what I want to tell you.
It has nothing to do with Elon Musk or anybody else.
If you think that your digital messages, no matter where you put them or who you send them to, if you think they're private, you're so wrong.
You're so wrong.
And let me tell you my experience especially.
So in the 90s, when Dilbert was a much bigger phenomenon, Than maybe you can even imagine by today's standards.
I was, what would I say, at least within the tech world, I was quite a celebrity.
Not so much now.
But during those days, it was just wild.
And one of the things I noticed is that people would often, you know, comment to me in some private way.
You know, something essentially a DM-like situation.
And sometimes I would answer.
It would be somebody I didn't know.
You know, a complete stranger.
But they would ask a question, or they'd challenge me on an opinion, and I'd give a full answer.
Sometimes just to strangers.
Now, I would think to myself before I became smart, you know, when I was inexperienced, I would think to myself, this is a private conversation, and the person knows it, so it's going to stay that way, because that's the way your other private conversations stay, right?
Here's what I don't count on, but I'm smarter now, so I do.
If you're a celebrity, 100% of your messages get screenshotted.
100%.
And they're always sent around.
If it's something that can embarrass you, it'll be published.
Guaranteed.
Now, I'm not talking about your best friends necessarily, but even your old lovers and stuff could be doing the same thing.
So it's a real wake-up call.
So if you're Elon Musk, Clearly he knows, at this point in his life, clearly he knows that everything he says is getting screenshotted.
Don't you think?
Everything?
Do you think that when he replies or boosts somebody on X, you don't think that person takes a screenshot immediately and sends it to their friends?
Hey, look.
I do.
I'm also sort of kind of a celebrity.
And even I do that.
It's like, hey, did you see this?
Because it means something.
It's meaningful, right?
It's not nothing.
It's definitely something.
So no matter how jaded you are, you still think it's just kind of cool.
It doesn't change your life, but hey, this is cool.
Somebody that you respect agreed with you in public.
Nice.
So my lesson here is there is no privacy.
There is no privacy.
And the more well-known or controversial you are, it just goes to zero.
But here's the thing.
Having now read the baby mama's messages and also Elon Musk's responses, I think it's obvious that Elon knows he's never private.
Because if you look at the quality of his responses, they are things which if they got public, and they did, you'd say, okay, that was totally reasonable.
That's just a reasonable thing to say in that situation.
Friendly and reasonable.
Now, that's somebody who learned the hard way that everything he writes is public, one way or another.
It's either going to be shown to somebody's friends or their family or somebody.
So it was just sort of fun to watch the difference because the baby mama in this case said a few things that...
I don't know if she wanted those to be public, right?
That was somebody who thought maybe her messages were still private sometimes.
But you see Musk's very straightforward, ordinary, common sense stuff.
The other thing I've learned, not from the Elon Musk situation, but I've learned from other celebrities recently where their messages are public.
There are a lot of people who are really bad.
A dirty talk.
Now, I'm not talking about Musk in this case.
I'm talking about other people.
But have you noticed that?
You never really see other people's dirty talk.
Like I don't.
I mean, I never see a guy's dirty talk because it's not directly to me.
And women don't really do it.
So to me, it's like this invisible world.
Like everybody thinks they can do it.
But it's actually a skill.
And very few people can.
Yeah.
Yeah, sometimes the best that guys are doing are stuff like, can you come over here?
I want to put it in you.
What?
What?
That was your best dirty talk?
Of course, sometimes it works if they're, you know, professional athletes or something.
Anyway, Governor Newsom of California asked Congress for about $40 billion for the LA Wildfire Relief.
You know, LA Times is reporting this, Clara Harder, and it seems like the right number, 40 billion, like based on things I've heard, it's not even as high as it could be, but it seems like the right number.
But it's so depressing to know that Doge can be, you know, going crazy, finding things to cut and cutting things, and then...
One match in California could eat all of those savings.
And yeah, that fire wasn't caused by a match as far as we know.
But one fire and all the savings basically just absorbed.
That is seriously bad.
Now, Rick Grinnell says that there will probably be conditions on the funding.
We don't know if the funding will be granted.
It's just been requested.
But if it is granted, or any portion of it, part of it might have a condition of defunding the California Coastal Commission.
So apparently they make it really hard to build anything on the coast, and Trump thinks they need to go away.
Maybe that's a plus.
Well, there's a story that Zelensky has, according to Resist the Mainstream, bent the knee in that he's ready to agree any moment, maybe it already happened, but allegedly any moment now, Zelensky's going to sign a document that says that he agrees that the United States will be in a partnership to exploit the rare earth minerals in Ukraine for the mutual benefit.
Now, I wouldn't hold my breath that anything's going to get assigned about that today, because we've already gone through one round of, you said you'd do it, no I didn't, I'm going to take all your funding.
And I think one of the things that happened was that Trump got really mad at Zelensky, this is the reports from behind the curtain, and threatened to remove all American support.
If he didn't agree to the mineral deal.
Now, I don't know about the details of the mineral deal, but he had to agree to a mineral deal.
Or Trump was just going to pull the rug out.
And what I love about this is that Trump doesn't bluff.
I absolutely believe that if Zelensky had said no, no, no, there's no way we're going to do the mineral thing, I believe that Trump would have started pulling out our funding right away.
Now, he might have reversed himself if Zelensky also reversed himself.
And changed his mind.
But he actually would have.
I believe he would have pulled the funding.
And what matters is that Zelensky believed it.
Yeah.
When I say he doesn't bluff, I mean that he makes threats that he can actually do.
And he will.
Now, usually the threats are so bad that if he started to implement the threat, the other side would immediately cave.
So the caving is what he wants.
He doesn't want to do the threat.
So these are real.
He doesn't bluff.
The longer that the rest of the world realizes he doesn't bluff, because he doesn't need to, he doesn't need to.
I mean, he might do it if he needed to, but he doesn't need to.
He's got real weapons.
Tools.
Let's call it tools, not weapons.
But here's a little wrinkle.
According to the Financial Times, you know how none of the news is real?
If you knew the real secret behind the news, it would just be completely different every time.
According to the Financial Times, Zelensky is the one who proposed that the U.S. take a stake in Ukraine's rare minerals.
So the Financial Times says it was Zelensky's idea all along, and he brought it up when?
Back in September.
Now, that was long before Trump first said, let's do something with the rare earth minerals, right?
Now, I'm not going to say the Financial Times reporting is correct.
I'm just going to point that it exists.
Wouldn't that be wild if we got to this point in thinking that Zelensky was trying to hold out on the rare earth minerals and Trump was trying to get them, but the entire time it was Zelensky's idea, and he always liked it from the start.
He just wanted to make sure it was good for Ukraine.
I don't know.
I don't know what to believe anymore.
Meanwhile, Britain and France, trying to be helpful, according to the Wall Street Journal, they think they've got an idea that they would employ, deploy, Britain and France, 30,000 European peacekeepers in Ukraine, but only if there's a ceasefire that looks like it would stick.
And they would ask for the United States to backstop them.
In other words, if Russia attacked while they had their forces in Ukraine, That the United States would get involved to.
To which I say, are they just reinventing NATO? Let's see, NATO, European people coordinating to defend against Russia, and the U.S. is the biggest footprint there.
But they don't want to do NATO because that's what Russia objects to.
So they create a little, like, proto-NATO. They just don't call it NATO. Oh, no, it's not NATO. It's just two of the most important countries and being backstopped by the most important country.
Okay.
Well, that's not NATO. But it's very NATO-ish.
It's very NATO-like.
So maybe this is how you solve international things.
You do things that maybe don't make sense on paper, but you can sell it.
You know, if you can sell it to the public, it's good enough.
Anyway, here's what sounds like a tiny story that could be a big one, according to The Guardian.
There's a research group that figured out how to add some, I guess, microbes or something to soil, and it allows it to absorb nutrients so much better that they could use a lot less fertilizer, so a lot less nitrate and phosphate.
You might say, Scott, that's the boringest, smallest story I've ever heard.
I never even think about nitrate and phosphate.
But you would if you knew that phosphate in particular, fact check me if I'm wrong, but I think this is true, that phosphate, you know, the main fertilizer, we have a global shortage.
And we don't really know how to make up the difference.
So the food supply is a genuine threat because if fertilizer goes away or we have to use less of it, you're going to get a lot less yield.
But this might be a technical fix.
So we don't know if this is going to be commercial grade yet.
But if they did anything that made our existing supply of fertilizer last longer, that would be a pretty big deal.
Pretty big deal.
So that's what I've got for today.
Thanks for joining, everybody.
I'm going to say something very loud happening outside that shouldn't be happening today.
I better check that out.
It sounds like it's on my property, but I don't think it is.
I know you can't hear it.
Anyway, X, thanks for joining.
I'm going to say bye to you on X. I think we'll be able to put this up on YouTube and Rumble later today.
