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Well, we got news today.
So, question number one.
Now that the funding for USAID is being cut, is that related to the high-level firings we're seeing in the media?
Is that why MSNBC's cutting some of their expensive talent?
Or is it just a coincidence and they're not doing well, so...
Obviously, they have to make some changes.
I don't know.
But as you know, Joy Reid, her show ended.
She had her last show, I guess, yesterday.
And Rachel Maddow didn't take it well.
So Rachel Maddow goes on her own show to complain about Joy Reid being fired.
And she said that she's learned so much from her, as we all have, really.
We have so much.
And she has so much more to teach her, Rachel says.
And I'm wondering, what else does Joy Reid have to teach her?
I feel like we saw a lot of her lessons, but I think the lesson is you should blame everybody for being a racist.
So that would be the big takeaway.
And Rachel Maddow said, I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC. Personally, I think it's a bad mistake to let her walk out the door.
It is not my call, and I understand that.
But that's what I think.
Now it gets better.
Here's the payoff.
Rachel Maddow said, I will tell you, it's also unnerving to see that on a network where we have two, count them, two non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their show.
Uh-oh, shows.
As is Katie Fang on the weekend.
And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them.
It feels indefensible.
And I do not defend it.
Now, if there's anything that could make me happier than watching Joy Reid being taken off the air, it's watching Rachel Maddow call her own company racist for taking Joy Reid off the air.
Now, I think that that's what she learned from Joy Reid, to just call everybody racist all the time.
You don't have to do anything else.
That's the entire game.
When you only have that one speed, the only thing that you do is call everything racist?
You know that's going to get turned against your own company, right?
There wasn't any way that that wouldn't work out poorly, even on paper.
If I said to you, all right, here's the deal.
There's going to be this network, and the people in the network are going to call everybody and everything racist.
Here's what I would have warned the network.
You know that's eventually going to be turned on you, right?
You can't hire a whole bunch of people who only have one speed.
That's racist.
And then expect that when you make a change that they don't like, that they're not going to call you a racist?
Of course they are.
Of course they are.
It doesn't matter what reasons you have.
It doesn't matter at all.
Anyway, one of the things that Rachel Maddow probably is suffering from now is that as long as Joy Reid still had a job, Rachel Maddow felt safe because Joy Reid was even crazier.
So it made Rachel Maddow look sort of moderate.
But once Joy Reid is gone, now Rachel Maddow will look like the craziest one on the network.
And it's going to make her feel like she might be next.
Surprised she wasn't, just because of her pay.
How did other people take it?
Well, Angela Rye, who's a black woman who, which is important to the story, she was a former CNN commentator, and she calls for a boycott, a boycott of MSNBC because they fired Joy Reid.
And I guess that makes him racist.
I don't know.
And then Keith Olbermann.
You know, my mascot, Keith Olbermann?
He said in a post, breaking MSNBC racist purge escalates.
Then he names the people who are out.
So the left is getting attacked by Keith Olbermann for being racist.
Are we supposed to enjoy this as much as we are?
Now, I never like to say only negative things, so I want to say one positive thing.
One of the things that Rachel Maddow said in her little speech about what happened is that Rachel Maddow is 51 years old.
And I thought to myself, damn, whatever you're doing for skin care is working.
Does she look 51?
I think I would have guessed 40. That's pretty impressive.
Whatever she does for health, it sure works on camera anyway.
So good for her.
All right, do you want me to make everybody mad?
All right, now I'm going to make everybody mad.
You all saw the story, and you want me to talk about it, where Dan Crenshaw was caught on an open mic saying about Tucker Carlson, quote, if I ever meet Tucker Carlson, I'll effing kill him.
I'm not joking.
Now, this, of course, caused everybody to say, you crazy, you crazy, out of control person.
How crazy can you be?
And Tucker cleverly invited him to come on the show to see how it turns out.
I don't think Tucker was too worried.
Now, you should probably know that Tucker has...
You know, been quite a critic of Crenshaw.
He's called him unstable in the past and says he needs help.
I don't know about any of that.
But I had to ask Chad GPT to remind me why it is that so many MAGA people don't like Crenshaw.
And he said generic stuff.
Tell me if this sounds right.
That Crenshaw was more what they called...
Now, remember, this is just AI. This is just ChatGPT.
Said that Crenshaw is more traditional conservative as opposed to a MAGA populist.
And he has sometimes wanted to do bipartisan things that the MAGA people didn't like.
And he has sometimes criticized Trump, which the MAGA people don't like.
Now, I don't know.
Is there more to it?
Probably.
This sounds kind of generic.
But here's my take.
And I'm going to be consistent with past takes about leaked audio and video.
Here's my take.
The person who's to blame is the person who leaked it.
Now, this is what I always say with a leaked video.
Because you have to recognize that people say things in private that are perfectly fine in private.
As soon as somebody changes the context from private to public, which is what the leaked video did, they turned it into a completely different message.
Because when it's private, it's just the way people talk.
Right?
Have you ever said you want to kill somebody privately?
And whoever you're talking to knows you don't want to kill them.
It's just something you say when you're talking privately.
It's like, ah, I would kill that person.
I mean it.
Now, he also added, I'm not joking.
But that doesn't change it.
Of course, he's not joking.
He's just saying that he doesn't like him.
So my rule is this.
If something would be perfectly ordinary in private, and then somebody, some weasel, some fucking asshole weasel, decides to drop that video to destroy your life, it's the weasel's fault.
So I'd like to know the name of the weasel.
Because the weasel is who I have all of my hatred for right now.
I mean, I fucking hate that guy, or woman, whoever it is.
Whoever leaked this is just scum.
It's despicable.
Because they knew it would have this effect, and I'm sure they knew that he didn't mean it seriously.
If you'd like to test whether he meant it seriously, I would apply what I call the really filter, where you say, really?
Do you really think that...
If Crenshaw and Tucker Carlson were in the same room, that Crenshaw would really slay him.
Really?
Do any of you believe that?
No.
None of you believe that he would really slay him.
So it's just talk.
And the things that you say privately, now I think it was a mistake to assume it was private.
So there's definitely an error here.
I think Crenshaw probably learned from that.
If you've got microphones and people standing around, you don't say that kind of thing if there's a microphone within 100 feet.
That's the lesson.
So Crenshaw is not, you know, guilt-free.
I would say that would be a public person error.
Now, I've made the same errors myself.
I've definitely said things in places where probably there was a microphone and maybe I should have been smarter, but, you know, none of it really hurt me.
So I have severe hatred for who leaked it.
And don't take this as me supporting everything that Crenshaw wants to do policy-wise or everything he said or everything about his whole life.
I don't know too much.
But this really pisses me off.
The fact that we would treat Crenshaw as the bad guy when the bad guy is the leaker.
Oh, the bad guy is the leaker.
Does this sound familiar?
Sometimes you can just grab them by the pussy.
If that had been private and stayed private, it was just two guys talking and one of them didn't take it seriously and the other one probably didn't mean it seriously.
It really had no impact if it stayed private.
As soon as somebody leaked it, it changed the context because our brains are such that we just imagine it as a public statement because it is public.
But it wasn't originally public.
Whoever changes the context is responsible for the message.
Period.
Because that's not the original message.
The original message is two guys talking.
Completely different.
Completely different.
If you've never heard two guys talking privately, maybe you wouldn't understand that.
Anyway, so yeah, I have a strong feeling about this, but none of it's about Crenshaw.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene asked him, Did you just say you want to kill my friend, Tucker Carlson?
And he replied on X, you know, LOL, no.
Correct.
No, he does not actually literally want to kill Tucker Carlson.
That would be crazy.
Anyway, the U.S. post office workers, they decided to protest any coming changes from Trump.
So there's some talk about Rolling the post office into the federal government, because right now it operates somewhat independently.
But if they roll it into the regular government, it might be in, let's say, the Commerce Department.
Oh, I told my pre-show listeners this, but it's worth repeating.
I've incorporated AI into my morning process when I get ready for the show and I'm putting my notes together.
There's always something that I need a little more context, and I don't want to...
Bother, you know, Googling it or something.
So I keep my AI on, and it's in voice mode.
Usually I just push it into voice mode when I've got a question.
And then I said, if the post office got absorbed by the federal government, you know, what department would it be in?
And it said, well, one of them might be the Commerce Department.
It's just a great tool.
Every day I use it that way, and it's really, really helpful.
Yesterday, it told me that Apple was going to invest $500 million in the United States.
And I said to myself, that doesn't really sound like enough.
And then I checked, and it was $500 billion.
And then I went back to ChatGPT, and I said, is it $500 million, which you just said?
Or is it 500 billion?
And it says, oh, it's billion.
So you have to watch it.
It's definitely not 100%.
Sometimes it's still hallucinating.
That's a pretty big hallucination.
You know, the difference between millions and billions.
Pretty big.
Pretty big.
Anyway, so here's my question.
I saw, I think it was Insurrection.
Barbie asked this question on X. Or a version of it.
So I'll just put this in my own words, so don't blame Insurrection Barbie for my wording of this.
But hypothetically, if the federal government absorbed the post office so that they were just federal workers like everybody else in the federal government, would it be possible for Trump to order them to not deliver mail-in ballots and make it impossible to vote?
With mail-in ballots, even if the states find it legal and have approved it.
Could he find that as like a shortcut to say, yeah, you states can say you want mail-in ballots, but I control the post office and I just told them that they're not in the business of mail-in ballots.
Now, I'm guessing there's probably some kind of rule or...
Legislation that says the post office has to deliver kind of anything that isn't dangerous.
So, I'm just guessing.
I would imagine there'd be some kind of rule that says you have to deliver whatever somebody wants you to deliver.
But I feel like you could game that.
It feels gameable.
You could do something like, well, yes, you can do it, but people would have to pay $100 per ballot.
That would be the postage.
It would be $100.
Or, Yes, you can do it, but you have to show your ID when you're mailing it.
Or something like that.
These are the bad ideas.
Those are not meant to be serious ideas.
But it just makes me wonder, is the change, the potential change in the post office leadership, meaning putting it in the federal government as opposed to operating independently, could it take care of mail-in voting?
So I'll just leave that for somebody who wants to research that and get back to me.
You know, I know we talk too much about the Democrats.
They're almost reasonable.
You know, like the Carville when he's not crazy.
And Jon Stewart when sometimes he says something that's not 100% pro-Democrat and not 100% anti-MAGA. But a funny thing has happened with this Doge stuff.
If you haven't noticed, the Democrats have given up on saying Doge is a bad idea because the country loves it.
You know, by a pretty good majority, the country likes cutting that waste, fraud, and abuse.
So you can't really be a political party and say, yeah, we want to preserve the waste, fraud, and abuse.
And they finally figured that out, that they couldn't possibly be against that.
So they've changed their approach to talk about the method.
Well, okay, but the method, you know, the way they're doing it, we'll talk about that.
But Jon Stewart takes it even further.
So he does a pretty funny bit where he's saying that what about, you know, it's great to stop the, you know, condoms for terrorists, which was never really a real story, but it makes a good anecdote.
But what about the subsidies to big oil, he says.
And what about the, I guess, subsidies or something like that for Big Pharma?
And I don't know if he thought that this was a Republican thing versus a Democrat thing, and that maybe the MAGA people would be in favor of subsidies for Big Oil.
I don't think we are, right?
Is there any pro-Trump person who says, you know...
We should give more of our tax dollars to big, profitable companies?
I don't think anybody says that.
So not only is Stewart acknowledging that waste, fraud, and abuse have to be addressed, he's very clear on that, but he's competing.
He's competing.
He's saying this is where the big money is.
I don't know how big it is or how easy it is to find or if it's even real, but I love the fact that the Democrats now have to compete.
For fighting the most waste, fraud, and abuse.
All right.
All right.
Let's enter that frame.
Let's enter the frame of we're competing to see who can do the best job of cutting things that we shouldn't be paying for.
Love it.
Now, that is a valuable contribution, in my opinion.
So, let's talk about...
I'll get to more on that later.
Thomas Massey points out that the budget still has some kind of subsidies for using corn to make fuel, which everybody knows, as he points out, Massey points out, that it increases the price of food.
Now, did you know that?
Were you aware that even still, there are Republicans who are in favor of using corn to make fuel, this ethanol?
Now, I've never even...
Heard of anybody using ethanol for anything.
Have you?
Do any of you have an ethanol-driven car?
Or an ethanol tractor?
I don't use ethanol for anything.
So isn't ethanol well-known to be just basically a scam?
That might be going too far.
But I don't know any voter who's in favor of this.
So it's got to be one of those Republicans want to protect their farmers and, you know, they get free money if they grow corn for fuel, I guess.
So I like the fact that Massey's on that.
Now, I would add that.
I would add that to the Doge process.
Say, hmm, I don't know.
I don't see why we're doing that.
It doesn't seem to be necessary for climate change or anything else.
It's not like ethanol is, you know, making a big run to take over for other fossil fuels.
Or fossil fuels.
There's so much news going on that there are stories that in a normal time would be the number one headline.
But in today's news environment, it's like the 10th most important thing that would otherwise just be huge.
Here's one of those.
According to Michael Schellenberger, there's a FBI whistleblower who has a source within the FBI who said that the FBI employees were Destroying evidence on servers.
And then he informed Cash Patel of that.
Now, if that's true, and keep in mind it's a whistleblower who talked to another person who said it's true, so it's not the...
The whistleblower apparently is known, so one person is known, but the person he talked to is anonymous.
Do we accept that?
Do we accept that's true with one anonymous source?
I'm going to say Schellenberger is really good on checking sources, so I'm leaning toward this is probably true.
It also just makes sense.
But isn't it also, just so you're warned about it, isn't it also a little bit too on the nose?
What's the one thing that every one of us would have predicted when Kash Patel got nominated for the FBI? Every single one of us would say, Oh, they backed up the shredders.
They're going to be burning their files and deleting things.
Every one of us said that.
And then there's a story with one anonymous source that's exactly the thing that every one of us was expecting.
How do you judge that one?
Now, the only thing it's got going for it is Schellenberger because he's highly credible.
But if this one turns out to be not true...
And I'm not sure we would ever know that.
If it turned out to be not true, don't be surprised.
Because that two-on-the-nose thing is just deadly accurate.
Deadly accurate.
All right.
Even Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan, I would call him the country's top banker.
And when he says stuff about economics, people listen.
I listen.
I think he's very credible.
And he says that Doge needs to be done.
Now, he's said something like that before.
But everybody has to say that, right?
As I said, even the Democrats, pretty much every Democrat has agreed, okay, if you can get rid of the waste-run abuse, yeah, that would be kind of good.
So it's not a surprise that the smartest guy in banking says it, too.
So here's where I'm going to get into the...
They've shifted from what to do, which is hard to be against, getting rid of fraud and waste abuse, to how it's being done.
I wanted to add what I call the Dilbert filter.
You ready for this?
So as the creator of Dilbert, I write about things that seem like good ideas, but in the real world, they just always go wrong.
That's sort of what I do for...
37 years or something.
And this is one of those.
I'm going to give you a couple of stories from my own experience about cutting expenses in a big company.
So if you don't know, I worked for two big companies before I became a cartoonist.
One of them was Crocker National Bank and then later Pacific Bell, the local phone company.
And my jobs were usually the budget guy, finance guy for most of that time.
So I would be the one.
I was in charge of making sure the budgets were cut when they needed to get cut.
But I didn't have any power.
I just had to be the organizer, basically.
So here are two stories.
And this will get us into the chainsaw versus the scalpel as well.
So story number one.
I was asked to put together a budget for the technology group within Pacific Bell.
We're going to do what's called a bottom-up budget.
You've heard Vivek say we should only do bottom-up budgets?
Now, a bottom-up budget is when you go to each department head and you say, all right, I want you to add up all the things you absolutely need to do, and then that'll be your budget.
What we're not going to do, because that would be crazy, is to give you the same budget as last year plus, you know, 5% or something.
Because we really need to know what you're doing.
Maybe this year you don't need as much.
Maybe next year you need more.
So a bottom-up budget is the most responsible, thoughtful, rational way to do it.
You all agree so far?
Everybody on the same page?
That if you want to be a good manager, you want to be smart, you want to do the right thing, you're definitely going to do a bottom-up budget.
Because that's the only time you can, you know, put the scalpel on things.
There's sort of a scalpel approach, right?
You're really looking at each little project.
Now, I did that.
So I collected everybody's bottom-up budgets.
It took a lot of work.
You know, you'd have a list of projects and it'd be a mile long.
And that would be for each department head.
And every department head had their list of projects that were a mile long.
And then I would take it to the, was he a VP? Might have been an assistant VP. The top guy in the technology department, or at least in my end of it.
And I would show him this, like, infinite list of projects.
Now, what do you think he did?
Do you think that he looked at the infinite list of projects, which he only had a passing knowledge of, and then made scalpel-like decisions?
On each of these projects, they basically barely even knew that they were happening.
Do you think that's what happened?
Because I'm told that that's how the smart people do it.
The smart people take the scalpel, they look at every expense, and they cut just what needs to be cut.
Do you think he did that?
No.
It was way too impossible.
There's no way that he could have spent his entire life studying each of these projects to figure out on his own where to cut.
Now, if you think that the department managers did that for him, as in cut their own budget without being asked, do you think that happened?
No.
The individual departments wanted the most money they could get.
So to them, their boss was their opponent.
The boss was their opponent.
And the other people who were other department heads were their opponent.
They were trying to get the biggest part of the pie, and that was the game.
So they couldn't do the scalpel.
The people who actually understood the projects, they wouldn't do any scalpel because they would lie.
Oh, yeah.
If I asked the question, they'd say, oh, yeah.
Essential.
Well, if we don't do this, the entire company will fold in a minute.
And then it gets to the boss, who would be able to cut it if he understood them, but he doesn't understand them.
And there's no way he really could because there are just so many of them.
So do you know what the big boss told me?
He looks at me and looks at my giant list that's incomprehensible.
He says, tell everybody to cut 10% across the board compared to the budget from last year.
And I looked at him after doing all this work.
And I looked at him and said, that's really, is that how this works?
And he goes, yeah, just cut 10%.
And I'd say, I've talked to all these managers.
And they say if you cut your budgets, even a penny, the entire world will end.
And they swear that's true.
And he looked at me and said, they'll work it out.
Just cut everybody 10%.
So I go back to everybody after I'd done this bottom-up budget, made them do all this work, and I said, he just says cut everything 10%.
Do you know how it turned out?
Fine.
Fine.
Do you know how easy it was to cut 10%?
Well, about a few months into every year, there would be people who imagined that they were going to start some new project on day one.
But there was some vendor who couldn't deliver.
There were some approvals they didn't get.
So things were like six months delayed.
So when somebody needed a little extra, because it really was an important project or something new, they'd go to the boss.
And he'd say, oh, okay, is there any projects that are delayed and not spending the budget for this year?
Okay, just take it from that budget, put it over there.
Problem solved.
Now, in that specific case, there was a little scalpling going on, but it was after the fact.
It was sort of doing it wrong and then correcting.
Does that sound familiar?
The big boss was doing it wrong, moving fast, being efficient, and then making fast corrections.
Okay, that one does need a little more money.
This one underspent.
Move that money over there.
Worked fine.
Everything worked out just right.
Now, here's another one.
Here's my second budget story.
Because if you don't understand how the real-world budgets, none of this doge criticism is going to make any sense to you.
That same boss once asked me to sit in for him in a meeting where the department heads were arguing to keep their budgets because there was a higher level above us that was trying to cut...
Cut our budgets as well.
So, so far, I've only been talking about my department and had lots of sub-departments.
But above it, they were trying to do the same thing.
So they brought us all in and they would ask each of the managers, you know, is this budget necessary?
You know, is there anything you can cut from your budget?
If we cut this, would that be okay?
Now, here's something that's embarrassing.
I was very young.
But I was fairly capable, so my boss didn't feel bad sending me to do this very important task.
And when it came to me, the person leading the meeting said, all right, so, you know, looked at the list of projects I guess I'd submitted, and said, well, what about this one?
Do you really need to do this?
Is this essential to the company?
And I said, well, if you had to cut something...
And I were being a team player, that's probably what I would cut.
How do you think that went over when I took that back to my boss?
Every one of you who have corporate experience, you're laughing right now.
It's like, how dumb were you?
No, I thought I was there to do a good faith effort to reduce the budget for the company because I thought I was working for the shareholders.
Right?
I mean, it's a fiduciary responsibility to not waste money because you have shareholders.
So I thought, yeah, you know, if you're asking me what I would cut if I had to, it would be that one.
And so they cut it.
And I took it back to my boss.
Oh, my God.
The look of death that I got.
He just cut through me with his eyes.
He said, so, I hear you gave away my budget.
And I said, oh, but, you know, they asked me what would be the least priority, and I was trying to do the right thing.
And that's what I learned, that nobody's trying to do the right thing.
Everybody in a big organization is lying because that's how you get ahead.
So everybody wanted their own budget not to be cut, but they were certainly happy if other people's budget got cut because they were competing against other managers.
They weren't trying to...
Satisfy stakeholders.
That was just dumb on my part.
All right.
So the first thing you need to know is if you try to do a scalpel approach, everyone is lying and you won't know it.
Well, you'll know they're lying, but you don't know what the lie is or what the truth is.
So if you were to say to me on paper and conceptually, is it better to use a scalpel than a chainsaw?
I would say the same thing you would say.
Well, yeah, scalpel makes sense.
That's a reason looking at all the details, deciding what to keep and whatnot.
But in the real world, nobody's going to play along with that.
They're all going to just look for maintaining their own little domain.
So in my experience, the scalpel approach can only work in the specific situations.
And I'll give you a few.
One would be if you're a small business and you're the owner of the business and it really matters to you if you cut costs because that money goes right in your pocket.
And it's a small enough company that you understand all of its parts.
So you could actually cut with a scalpel in that case because you're the boss.
It's all good for you if you cut and you know exactly where to cut and where not to cut.
Yes.
Scalpel, scalpel, scalpel.
If you took a chainsaw, To your own smallish business?
Well, that would obviously be a mistake.
Obviously.
Now, what is the situation?
Well, let's put it this way.
So that's a situation where you've got time to operate and you're going to be profitable no matter what, but you could be a little more profitable.
So if you've got plenty of time, the scalp will make sense.
You know, even if you have to work a little extra hard.
Find some stuff.
Yes.
As long as you're in a business that's stable and you're just trying to tweak it every now and then, scalpel.
So when you hear people say, but I've been involved in a number of businesses and we cut with the scalpel.
They did.
They did.
Here's where the scalpel doesn't work.
When there's an existential threat and the timer is ticking.
If the timer is ticking, You're not going to have the option of using the scalpel, because even if you did everything right, you would run out of time.
Here are two examples.
Number one, Twitter.
When Musk bought Twitter, the cash flow situation was dire, as in, uh-oh, there's almost no way this company can survive.
He was going to have wasted $44 billion of his and other people's money if he couldn't rapidly.
Massively cut expenses.
What would have happened if Musk had said, all right, all you employees of Twitter who hate my guts, tell me where I can scalpel away some unnecessary fat.
What do you think would have happened?
Every one of those people would have said their jobs are essential, and if they left, morale would drop and it could never work.
So Musk instead took a chainsaw.
And just went, got rid of too much.
And then when the too much became obvious, or people argued successfully, he added it back, exactly like he said he would.
Now, what about the federal government?
The federal government is also on a timer and also has an existential threat.
It's called the debt.
We don't have 10 years left.
We really don't.
I don't know if we have three years left.
The national debt will crush us and will destroy the entire country.
If you think that taking a scalpel to the federal government is going to get it done in any kind of reasonable timeline before the entire nation is destroyed, that seems very unlikely to me.
Because remember, everybody involved will be lying.
Everybody involved will be trying to slow the process.
They'll try to sue you so you can't even use the scalpel.
It's going to be just infinite pushback, infinite people pretending to be helping but not, all lying.
People will be ganging up.
They'll try to take you out as the boss if they have any way to do it.
They will attack you a hundred different ways.
The one and only way you have any chance.
It's with a chainsaw.
So let me put this in terms of risk.
If Musk had used a scalpel on Twitter, that would be a 100% chance of failure.
If he used a chainsaw on Twitter, there was some chance of success and some chance of failure.
Which one do you pick?
The one with a 100% chance of failure, scalpel, or the one that might work, but it's pretty drastic.
Well, there's only one that might work.
You obviously do the one that might work.
What about the national debt?
Do you think we have time to scalpel that thing?
I don't.
I don't think there's any time to scalpel it.
I think that the one and only hope of actual survival, survival.
We're not optimizing.
We're trying to survive.
And I think that's what people are missing.
He's got to take a chainsaw to it.
And, you know, I would say he's just getting started because, you know, there are bigger parts he has to go after.
But there's not really a second choice.
The chainsaw might work and it might not work.
But the scalpel definitely will fail.
And it's the Dilbert filter that guarantees it because people are lying weasels.
Now, let me make another exception.
Let's say you had a business that wasn't very complicated.
Let's say you were the owner of a sports franchise.
You probably do understand almost all the parts, even as the big owner, right?
You would probably know what your players are being paid.
That's the biggest thing.
You would know what the travel costs are.
It wouldn't be mysterious at all.
So if you wanted to take a scalpel to that, Again, because you have the luxury of being profitable and you're not in a hurry, probably you could scalpel quite a bit.
And I would say that would be exactly the right answer.
So when people tell you, Scott, I have personally scalpeled budgets with success, that's probably true.
But it's always the specific case.
It's not the, you're going to die tomorrow if you don't cut this by 70%.
All right.
So there you go.
There's the ultimate reframe on that.
You know, I'm so sick of talking about this Doge email to all the federal employees telling them to say what they did, five things they did.
And I was trying to imagine, it's been a long time since I've been a cubicle, but I'm trying to imagine how I would have handled that if I'd been a federal worker.
And I'm positive I would have handled it the following way.
I'd open my email.
I'd see what they're asking.
I'd probably check with my boss to see if it's okay to answer it.
But then I would sit down, and it's the first thing I would do.
I would put off whatever else I had on my schedule, and I would answer that right away, and I would come up with five awesome things that I did this week, and then I'd hit a send.
And then I would never think about it again.
How would you handle it?
Would you fight it?
You didn't have anything better to do that day than fight an email?
I'm going to go on CNN and fight this email.
The most basic thing that anybody does is say what five things they accomplished.
That also used to be my job.
It also used to be my job to collect everybody's top five accomplishments.
That was literally my job.
Do you know what happened when I would collect all their accomplishments and put it into one cool document that I made myself and I gave it to my boss?
Nobody ever looked at it.
Nobody ever looked at it.
The only point was to make sure that you thought people were watching you.
It was basically just a head game so that people had to, you know, really show that they were doing real work.
Nobody really looked at it.
I don't even think they, like...
Maybe just glanced at it, but they didn't ask any penetrating questions.
So when Musk says this is really just to find out if there's a real person and a pulse, that sounds right.
That sounds right.
That's the only thing he's going to find out.
It's not like he's going to look at the five things and say, huh, one of these five things looks like maybe you could cut that with a scalpel.
That's not going to happen.
It's just to see if they have a pulse, if they're really there, if they really...
Now, I realize there's a whole bunch of complications to it, and a number of entities from the FBI to the State Department to Pentagon have already said, no, you guys don't need to do this.
That's fine.
I don't mind that at all.
I don't mind when the Trump administration disagrees with itself.
I don't mind at all, because I think the disagreement is reasonable, but I also think the request was reasonable.
So, and I don't think any of it's terribly important.
I think Trump and Elon might be pushing it still just so they don't lose, you know, because it'd be good to show a pattern of winning, you know, win, win, win, win, win.
If you have even one pushback that's successful, it could take a little dent out of your shine.
A dent out of your shine?
Never quote me on that.
No, never quote me on that, please.
Anyway, so I'm just bored with that whole email thing.
But the Wall Street Journal had an interesting context.
Apparently some companies, instead of doing that what are your five accomplishment things every week, which is a big pain in the ass, everybody hates it, and everybody's lying too, there's some software now.
One company called Workboard, or at least that's the product, Workboard.
Invades your computer, your work computer, and it looks at all the things you've done and then reports them to your boss.
So everything from your calendar to your emails.
And then the boss can tell who's working and what they're working on and how hard they're working.
Now, that's the scariest, creepiest thing I've ever heard in my life.
I mean, I don't know how it could possibly give you anything interesting.
And then I saw a picture of what the dashboard would look like, you know, if you were the top boss.
And you wanted to see the sum of all the things your employees were doing.
And it's like this really sort of detailed, complicated, you know, some boxes are bigger than others, showing that there's more activity there and stuff.
And I thought to myself, okay, in the real world, your top boss would use that three times.
And by the third time, they would realize that there was nothing it was telling them that they could act on.
It was like, ah, okay.
Looks like the box for talking about the budget is a little bit bigger.
Okay, but that's because the budget process is happening right now.
Okay, okay.
Well, it looks like the box for talking to vendors is a little bit bigger.
So they're doing a lot of talking to vendors.
Oh, well, obviously, because we're doing a request for a proposal.
Probably it wouldn't be anything you could act on.
Now, I don't want to throw that company under the bus because they might have a good argument that it's making everything better.
But in the real world, if you show somebody a complicated screen of anything, they end up ignoring it after the first few tries in the real world.
So I'm going to introduce a new insulting phrase.
I'm going to call it lady fiction.
Lady fiction.
I've told you before how Democrats They seem to just imagine problems, like they imagine what somebody's thinking, and then they imagine their bad personality, they imagine their bad intentions, and then they project that forward to how it's going to destroy the world.
But it's all imaginary.
It's imaginary future, and it's imagination that they can read the minds of strangers.
So CNN just had one of the federal employees on.
And she was one of the ones resisting the email request.
And she said that, let's see, what'd she say?
She said that Elon's email request was an act of harassment and bullying.
Now, do you think that's the way Elon was thinking of it?
It's like, huh, you know what I haven't done enough of?
I need to do a little more harassment and bullying, even though he tells you exactly why he's doing it.
You can't take the exact reason that he describes, which makes perfect sense.
You have to imagine that the real reason this is dark personality flaws and it's harassment and bullying.
That's pure mind reading.
And again, men prefer reading nonfiction.
Women prefer fiction.
And the more you see it, so I'm going to call that lady friction, lady fiction.
Lady friction is a completely different story.
It has more to do with scissoring.
But lady fiction is where you imagine that you can imagine you can read somebody's mind and you see some dark, dark secrets in there and you project it forward.
Anyway.
One of our favorite personalities on X, Data Republican.
If you haven't been exposed to Data Republican yet.
You're missing out.
So Data Republican is sort of a superstar of data analysis and is using a lot of the new information that we're learning to come up with some fascinating stuff about the NGOs, etc.
But she was on Glenn Beck's show and she described our current situation in a way that you'll never be able to forget.
So you've got the basic idea that USAID was giving money to all these NGOs and other entities were giving the money, and that they became sort of operating independently, and nobody knew what they were doing, and then they were maybe laundering money and stuff.
So what Data Republican said, after looking at all this more deeply than we have, said...
That the Democrats are offended by Doge because their money depends on people not knowing what they're doing with our money.
And I thought, yeah, that does sort of sum it up, doesn't it?
Their money depends on us not knowing what they're doing with our money.
Because our money is just going into their pockets through the NGOs.
And so she says, so that is truly censorship, because I think if actual Americans understood what they were doing with our money, and that they were actually setting up their own government, this is the key, they were setting up their own government and actually ignoring what real people wanted to do, oh, we would be so upset.
There's the reframe.
That's it.
The NGOs were a shadow government.
They could get all kinds of things done.
They could stall things.
They could make things happen.
They could overthrow countries.
Now, working in conjunction with other parts of the government.
But once you hear that frame, that the NGOs were a shadow government, wow, you can't lose that one.
Like, that's sticky.
That's a really good reframe.
Anyway, just think about that.
And then she went on and said, because the reality is that these people have a government unto themselves that they've created with these NGOs that they run separately from us.
Now, the one thing that would be required for a shadow government would be there's one leader.
Do you think that this shadow government NGO thing has one leader?
Or is it just an understanding that a bunch of people have that they can all be better off with this?
I feel like there's not one leader, but there might be maybe several people who are more influential than others, and maybe they're fighting it out.
I always imagined that the Hillary Clinton people and the Obama people were not the same, and that they're all sort of jockeying for control, and maybe some of that's happening through the NGOs.
I don't know.
Anyway, Trump says he wants to bring back the Keystone XL pipeline that Biden shot down.
But apparently it's not that easy because you'd have to find somebody who wants to do it.
And I guess the company that was doing it doesn't seem too eager to do it again.
And I can understand that because how can they guarantee it won't get canceled again?
Why would you put money into something if the next Democrat president is going to cancel it?
But Trump says, even if another company wants to do it, he says the approvals will be easy.
Basically, the government will get out of the way.
And I like that.
So I like that Trump's pushing that.
But there really is a structural problem there.
If you ask somebody to invest, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions.
Can you really expect them to do that if they don't know if their project will survive the next president's term?
That's a lot to ask.
So I wonder if there's any fix for that.
In other words, could Congress say, you won't be touched for 20 years?
Could they pass any legislation that says, I don't think so, because I think it would be illegal to say you can't ever cut an expense or cancel something.
I wonder if there's any clever way to get past the fact that this is really, it's a giant risk now that Biden canceled it once.
I don't know how you fix that.
But somebody clever might have an idea for doing that.
Meanwhile, the DNC's Vice Chairman, David Hogg, he's warning that Democrats, they need to stop acting like a cult.
Now, how much do you love the fact that the people who were the problem Are trying to become the people who are calling out the problem.
It's almost like they have to pretend that they weren't deep into all the bad behavior that they say they want to stop doing.
But Hogg says this.
He says, frankly, anybody who did speak out about Biden's mental decline was immediately ostracized in our party.
He says, "I know that we like to claim that we are not a cult, but anybody who did say that, that Biden was too old, basically had their career destroyed.
That's a problem.
We're the Democrat Party.
We're supposed to have open conversations and dialogue," he tells this audience.
And he said, "There are many lessons we need to learn from this election, but that is one of the main ones.
We cannot be a cult." Okay, here's the problem.
As long as power has more value than open conversations and dialogue, you're only going to get power.
So if somehow open conversations and dialogue you could monetize, or it would give you more power, or it would make everybody more successful, everybody would get a pat on the back.
But it doesn't work that way.
If you do open conversations and dialogue within your own party, That will immediately look like weakness, and you'll be destroyed.
So they've sort of painted themselves into this corner where you can't really disagree with the party, and there's nothing that David Hogg is going to say that's going to change it, because the incentive structure is, as soon as you disagree, you're done.
And that's not going to change.
How can it?
It's not like they can give an order and say, all right, don't do this.
It just takes anybody who wants to do it to do it, to destroy other people.
But it does make me wonder why this is...
Do you think that this is as much of a problem on the right?
Do you feel that in the mega-Republican-Conservative world that we have open dialogue and that you can disagree without getting cancelled?
Yes or no?
I feel like a number of us have disagreed with important things and not gotten cancelled, at least by Republicans.
Have you not seen me disagree with common MAGA thinking?
I think I have, a number of times.
And do I ever get slapped down for that?
Not that I remember.
Not that I remember.
The only time that I get real hate is when people have an incorrect...
Understanding what I've ever said or thought.
If they don't understand what I've said, then it turns into some crazy thing where they're criticizing me for something they only imagined.
But when I say real things, let's take the Dan Crenshaw thing.
You don't think I'm completely aware that by the time I'm done with this, there'll be something on social media trying to tear me down for what somebody's going to say is supporting Dan Crenshaw against MAGA. Which didn't happen.
And you all witnessed it, so you know that didn't happen.
But somebody will turn it into that.
However, it will probably just be a passing nothing.
Like the worst case will be some troll on X, and it will just go away.
Because I think, at least my audience, is completely accepting that I'm not just going to tell you the normal frame.
That's mostly why you watch.
Because you expect me to be a little different from the mainstream opinion.
If I didn't, what would be the point, really?
What would be the point?
So, yeah, I don't think it's as big a problem on the right.
According to Simon Kent writing in Breitbart News, Republican, I'm sorry, Democrat donors are not feeling too good about the Democrats, but there was this one donor, Well,
here's what I say about identity politics, which largely drove the Democrat message, identity politics.
It's a one-way trip.
And they should have known that.
Because on paper, you can see it.
It's the MSNBC problem.
As soon as MSNBC became the identity politics all the time network, you could guarantee, guarantee that at some point in the future, their own employees would turn against them and call them racists.
And that just happened.
Guarantee it.
You don't know when it's going to happen.
But you can pretty much bet on it with a lot of safety.
And so the Democrats can't really unwind that thing that they've created.
Because they can't be ignoring identity politics.
That would make them Republicans.
So they've created their own monster that they can't kill.
And the Republicans are like, yeah, good luck with that.
Because we're not involved.
It's none of our business.
If you want to create a monster and then the monster kills you, but you knew that that monster would kill you, because how could it not?
You know, as soon as you say that identity is everything, everybody looks at their own identity and says, wait, but I'm a short, gay, lesbian, whatever.
You know, where's my rights?
And then everything falls apart.
So the Democrats...
I don't think they have a way back.
Now, as I've said before, all bets are off if they found the right candidate.
So, Trump is by no measure an ordinary Republican.
So, nobody could have really predicted the second term of Trump and the way it's turned out.
Nobody could have predicted that.
So, it's just...
Sometimes you get this special case with a special character, this once in a thousand years type of personality, which I think Trump is.
And if they don't get one of those, I don't know if they have a way back.
Because even Obama, as rational-sounding as he was, and I think he was very smart and very savvy about how things work, I don't even think he can abandon identity politics.
At this point, I mean, he can't run for office, but even if a new Obama came today, I don't know.
I don't know how they can come back.
Here's the least surprising news of the day.
The former head of the FDA's drug center joins Pfizer as chief medical officer.
Now, as you know, there's a long history of top FDA people going to work for the companies that they had been trying to regulate, which, of course, Creates a massive incentive to not say bad things about the industry when you're in the FDA, because you know that the most likely outcome after you're not in the FDA is a job offer from one of those same companies.
And I was trying to think, what could you do about that?
I don't love the fact that you could ban it, like don't go to work for these companies for five years.
We might do that.
I think RFK Jr., didn't he float that idea?
But that seems, you know, my sense of freedom and capitalism really rejects you can't go get a job somewhere else.
Like, I don't like any kind of non-compete agreements.
I hate them.
Because I live in America.
You can't tell me what my next job is, right?
I mean, that's just really offensive to me that you can tell me what my next job is, no matter what it is.
You don't get an approval over my next job.
So on one hand, I completely understand that this is massively deforming our drug approval and safety.
Massively deforming it.
On the other hand, I like freedom.
I like freedom.
So I wonder if there's some middle ground.
And the only thing I can think of is that the ex-FDA people Have an option that's better than working for a big pharma, which would pay an ungodly amount of money.
Could you find a way to keep them on the, let's say, the public side?
And it may require paying an ungodly amount of money to say, all right, once you leave the FDA, you can go work for Pfizer and they'll pay you a million dollars a year, whatever it is.
But if you continue working for the government, We will also give you a million dollars a year.
We'll match it.
But you'll be on our side.
So you'll do extra work and you'll go extra deep and you'll work with the FDA. You won't be on the FDA, but let's say you work with them or for them or something.
Now, that's the bad idea because it's anti-doge.
It's spending more money, not less.
But I just wonder, is there any system way to fix that?
Because you'd have to outbid the pharma.
Now, the gross way to do it is to just say you can't go get those jobs.
I just don't love that.
I don't love the lack of freedom that that implies.
So maybe some of them have a good idea.
Let's talk about Ukraine.
So Trump has suggested yesterday that he's willing to revive economic relations with Russia.
And then Putin has offered, hey, why don't you work with us, America?
Why don't you work with us to do a joint partnership to exploit rare earth minerals in the Donbass region?
What?
What?
Did you see that coming?
And then Putin also offers, and I'm going to talk about this in terms of persuasion, not in terms of economics.
Then Putin also said that Russia is ready to supply the U.S. with 2 million tons of aluminum.
Which will help stabilize prices.
And apparently we're the biggest importer of aluminum.
So it actually would drive down some of our costs if we worked with Russia on that.
And so here's the thing.
Let me say up front that if you believe that I trust Putin and that he just wants to make money and stop all the fighting, I don't.
I don't.
It would be foolish to say that he has no ulterior motives or anything else.
But think how historic this is that Trump and Putin have changed the frame.
They've changed the frame from how to kill each other to how to make money for both of us.
Now, maybe this won't come to anything.
Maybe there will be no joint partnerships.
Maybe it's a bad idea.
Maybe trusting Russia is just always a bad idea.
And, you know, even if it looks good on paper, maybe it just never works.
I'm open to all those arguments.
So I don't know that we should do it.
But the fact that, I've said this before, I generally think that Trump is the best public persuader we've ever seen.
Just ever.
But Putin's in the same weight class.
I don't think he's quite a, he's not quite Trump-like.
But he understands the whole persuasion thing.
And so what Putin's doing is he's reframing Russia as a potential economic partner, which is following the lead of Trump.
Trump is the, again, Trump's the better persuader, but Putin can take punch for punch.
He knows persuasion.
And this is fucking brilliant.
It's brilliant.
I hate to say it.
And again, I'm not suggesting that we get into partnership economically with Russia.
I'm not against it, and I'm not for it.
I would have to know a lot more before I add an opinion.
But from a persuasion perspective, Putin's really nailing it.
He's nailing it.
Because he knows that Trump needs economic wins, and he could offer him some easy economic wins.
That's really good negotiating.
So again, don't take this as me loving Putin and I don't want him to be my girlfriend.
And I don't trust Russia, you know, without a lot of guarantees.
But you have to appreciate that the way Putin is handling this is kind of impressive, just from a persuasion perspective.
You can call it evil persuasion if you like.
I won't argue.
But it's very effective.
And changing the frame to how do we make money?
I just love that.
I just love that.
We'll see where it goes.
All right.
Again, another story that would have been the biggest story, except that there are so many stories.
All right.
Apparently, James Comer told Breitbart...
That the DOJ, the FBI, the IRS, and the SEC were all investigating Joe and Hunter Biden, but were told to stand down.
And Jim Biden was even being investigated for Medicare and fraud.
Insurrection Barbie is talking about this on X. Apparently six banks reported to the Treasury Department that the Bidens were committing financial crimes, but everyone was told to stand down.
Now, wouldn't that be the biggest story in the country, except for all the other biggest stories?
How in the world is that just a little article in Breitbart?
Do you think it's true?
Do you think it's true that all these entities were going to investigate the Bardens?
And, you know, keep in mind, this is when they knew there was a risk because they were powerful creatures.
So if all these entities were willing to investigate them, Even knowing that it would be risky, and they had to be told not to, it does suggest there was some pretty strong evidence.
Not proof.
Everybody's innocent until proven guilty, and they haven't been proven guilty.
But it certainly would be the biggest story in the country under normal times.
I'm curious how much else we'll find out about what I think is the Biden crime family.
So Trump is signing a directive.
To counter foreign social media censorship.
So Dan Freeth of Reclaim the Nets writing about this.
So I guess he's trying to challenge our European, mostly European, I think, saying that by taxing our social media, they're basically doing it to censor them and trying to control them in various ways, censorship as well as taxation.
And Trump wants the taxation and the censorship to be curtailed.
Now, I don't know what he can do about it, so that's why he signed a directive.
The directive is, figure out what to do about this.
I assume it means we're going to put more pressure on our alleged allies.
But let me say this as clearly as possible.
I've said this before, but it can't be said enough.
If you're trying to curtail free speech in my country, you're not my ally.
England.
France.
Whoever you are, we love you, but you're not my ally if you're trying to curtail my free speech.
That is a line which you cannot cross.
That's a red line that's as bright as it could possibly be.
And if it weren't for Trump, I don't know that we'd be doing anything about it.
So sometimes you think Trump is fun, and sometimes you like what he's doing, and sometimes you don't.
But this is one of those cases where this is essential.
This is essential Trump.
Nobody else would do this.
I don't know if he'll succeed, but it's going to require putting pressure on allies like we've never seen.
He's the only person I know who would do it.
There's no other normal president who would put pressure on our allies over this.
But it is really, really important.
And yeah, he should bring the entire toolbox, whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes.
Anything.
It might take getting out of NATO. I mean, it's that serious.
So whatever he has to threaten, bring it on.
Let's bring the threats on, because we need to ratchet this up.
This can never happen again.
So he's got to be tough on that.
100%.
Meanwhile, down in Mexico, if you didn't know, the big cartel, the Sinaloa cartel, Apparently he has two factions, and the two factions are fighting it out.
And there's a great article by Jose de Cordoba in the Wall Street Journal.
And so there's a whole bunch of murder going on because they're fighting it down for control of things.
But one of the things that I thought was fascinating is the number of fentanyl labs.
So there was just one little area that had 100 fentanyl labs.
And I guess the labs have to keep moving because the other cartel members keep narking them out.
So apparently the way you compete if you're in a cartel and there are other factions in the cartel is that if you find out where the other faction's lab is, you turn them in so that the government tries to close them down.
I'm assuming the government does.
But even if you just turned them in and let your bad guys go and...
Take out the lab.
So there's this gigantic fight over just hundreds of different fentanyl labs.
And part of me just wishes they just fight it out.
But it was hilarious that one of the lab operators quoted this.
They were talking about...
They have to do so much security now for their labs that it's hitting the bottom line.
And they just talk like regular business people.
And so one of the lab operators says, they have to increase production to cover higher costs for gunmen, intelligence, and weapons.
He goes, quote, if before we were making 10 million pills, now we have to make 20 million.
They just talk like ordinary business people.
They need doge.
Anyway, at one point I'd wondered, wouldn't it be better, instead of us attacking the cartels, to simply provide all the intelligence that the factions need to attack each other?
Suppose we send our drones up there, we find all their little lab locations.
I don't know if we can.
I don't know if there's any way to find them from the air.
But suppose we could.
And then we just turn it over to the other faction and just let them destroy each other until they're so weakened.
That then you go in.
But you wait until they've just beaten themselves into nothing.
There is some worry that if the Sinaloa cartel implodes over their internal conflicts, that one of the other cartels would just take over so nothing will change.
So, it's complicated.
I saw a report that comes from The Telegraph.
Now, consider the source.
So some people say that's not a very credible source.
But the Telegraph says that Iran fears an immediate attack on its nuclear facilities.
And so they've increased all their defenses near the nuclear facilities.
And the source says that Iran expects an attack every night, even on nuclear facilities that no one knows about.
And an Iranian official said that Tehran feels the regime could fall if America joins the attack.
You know what I say about that story?
I could have written that story without doing any research.
Do you think Telegraph did any research?
Scott, what do you think Iran is doing about its nuclear facilities?
I'd say, well, if I were them, and anybody else would say the same thing, they're probably trying to figure out how to protect them as best they can.
Scott, do you think that the Iranian regime is worried that if America and Israel attacked, It could have an impact on their ability to lead in the future.
And I would say, duh.
Yeah, we're not going to leave their regime alone if we do a major attack of their country.
And even if we don't directly attack the regime, losing all their nuclear facilities and all of their anti-aircraft does...
Put some question about their stability.
So on one hand, I don't know if the telegraph story is real.
On the other hand, it's exactly what you would have made up if you wanted to act like you did some research, but you didn't.
The Indian Army, according to NextGen Defense, they have an AI weapon that can track and shoot in just 10 milliseconds, and it can hit a target a mile away every time.
It can hit a target a mile away.
Every time.
And they can do it in a millisecond.
Now, at the moment, it requires a human to allow the shot.
But does anybody think that we'll always have to have a human?
Imagine the war starts and both sides have these incredibly effective machine gun that never misses.
And they're both AI. And one of them says, you better ask me before you fire.
And the other one says, if it's in that direction, that's where all the bad guys are, so just fire.
The one who removes the human is going to win every war.
So the human will be removed, and I don't want to say Skynet because it's too obvious, but how does it not happen?
There is no future where Skynet doesn't happen, is there?
Now, there is a future where maybe it's not in control, but there's no future in which warfare doesn't look exactly like this.
And then, did you know that there are 10 new major battery plants that are coming online in the US looking to double our capacity?
Now, the reason I tell you these stories, there's always a battery story.
You know, there's some new battery technology or new battery factory.
Like I tell you about some stories that you can tell what the future is by the insurance industry, like whatever the insurance companies tell you, that's really indicative of the future.
I think this battery stuff, if you didn't follow anything else, would be a real good indicator of the future.
Because if we can make batteries really cheaply and make a lot of them and make them domestically, that's a whole different country.
Then if we have to depend on somebody else for the batteries or we can't make enough, you know, Elon Musk famously says that if you had 100 square mile of solar panels and enough batteries to store it when the sun is not out, then you could power the entire country.
Now, I'd love to see somebody who really understands the industry argue with that point.
Now, and also, it should be said that that's just...
For calculation purposes, you wouldn't put them all in one place.
That would be insane.
Because, you know, one big natural disaster, you'd lose everything.
But just in terms of how practical it is, Musk says it's completely practical.
Yeah.
And it doesn't even sound like you would have to invent very much.
It sounds like we already have what we need.
So that's pretty interesting.
And I think it tells you what the future looks like.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's all I wanted to do today.
Thanks for joining.
I'm going to talk to the locals' subscribers privately now, but come back tomorrow, same time, same place, and we'll see if Representative Crenshaw has killed Tucker yet.
