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Go. Oh, that's some good stuff.
Well, good news, everybody.
Drones are back in the news.
And I'm not talking about your hobbyist drone.
I'm talking about your possibly alien drones or possibly an advanced civilization that's always lived beneath the sea or possibly a foreign power that has technology that we can't even understand.
Maybe. So, according to The Hill, there was some interviews with 60 Minutes earlier this month, and key military assets were, let's say, visited by drones that could not be explained.
They had lights, and their enigmatic craft, their unknown origin, and some people say, the Daily Mail says they're coming from the ocean, maybe, but they don't have any video of that.
And some people say there's a gigantic underwater, like, mothership where all the drones are coming out.
And sometimes they're buzzing around our military facilities.
And sometimes they're buzzing around our military ships hundreds of miles out.
So they can't be hobbyist stuff.
And they're immune to jamming.
They can't be jammed.
And they don't make any noise when they fly over.
I have a potential hypothesis.
Well, kind of a hypothesis.
Is it possible to create a hologram without people seeing where the sources of light is for the hologram?
Could you create a pretend UFO that looked like really just some light in the sky, an orb?
And then make it look like it was defying the rules of physics because it's just a hologram, so it doesn't have any gravity.
And could you make your adversaries think that there were dozens of advanced aliens flying over your facility so they would attack the wrong thing?
I don't know.
But I just want to throw it in the mix.
It could be aliens.
It could be...
Some country that's better at technology than we are.
But a silent giant craft?
And they always have lights?
Why would they have lights if they're doing nefarious things and the only way they can be detected is by the lights?
Why would they have lights?
Seems like that would be the most optional thing you could put on a drone.
How about we just turn off the lights?
Well... So I'm not buying anything about the drones.
I think it's far more likely to be mass hysteria, people lying, people imagining, people dreaming.
I don't know.
I'm just not a believer that there's any kind of advanced alien drone situation going on.
Well, according to Zero Hedge, not only are your eggs half as expensive as they used to be, Thanks to the Trump administration finding new sources of eggs in Turkey and some other places.
And now orange juice is going down in cost.
Your breakfast has never been cheaper lately.
Lately. So, yeah, get your orange juice and your eggs.
That's exactly what I'm going to have for...
No, I'm not going to have orange juice.
Well, there's another fake hate crime.
Now, some of you get annoyed at the fake hate crimes where somebody makes an accusation.
In this case, a Pennsylvania city worker has been accused of staging her own hate crime hoax by putting a noose on her own desk and then claiming it was somebody else.
But every time I see that the supply of racism...
Is so low that you have to make some up just to get a story in the news.
So the entire country, apparently nobody was doing anything like that.
Because the only story is about the one person who faked it.
Now that's pretty good.
If you think of all the history of racism and all the bad things that people have done in every direction.
It's pretty good that you have to fake one to get even a national story.
So, New York Post had that story.
Well, Hunter Biden's ex-business partner apparently met with Trump at the NCAA wrestling event and was promised that he would get a pardon.
Now, does that mean that maybe Devin Archer is going to spill the real goods?
Because he said something that I hadn't heard before.
He said that Joe Biden would close deals by phone.
And he had a little thing that he used to say, which is, if you do something for me, you're my friend.
But if you do something for my son, you're my friend forever.
Now, that is such mafia talk.
If you do something for me, you're my friend.
But if you do something for my son, you're my friend forever.
Do you think that the Trump administration is maybe secretly doing an investigation into the Biden crime family?
Because I'd be surprised if they're not, given what Devin Archer knows and what we know about everything else.
I'm not real enthusiastic about law-faring the last president.
Because it feels like everybody can do that.
They can always find something.
But on the other hand, oh my goodness, was the Biden crime family corrupt.
Oh my goodness.
All right.
You want me to talk about the big story about the Signal app and the messages that were going along in a group chat?
You've already heard the story.
There's a group chat in which the important people in our government, from Pete Exeth to J.D. Vance, Mike Waltz, I think Rubio was on there and some others, they were chatting about an attack on the Hooties.
And somehow, we don't know the details, a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added to the Signal group.
If you heard this, if somebody said to you, they accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, what would be your first impression?
Because if you follow the news at all, you would know that Jeffrey Goldberg is famous as being one of the designated liars.
He is the least credible person in the entire business.
There's probably nobody who's more famous.
For a hoaxing as opposed to, you know, telling the truth.
So if you want, you can go Google, you know, Jeffrey Goldberg and what hoaxes he's back, but they're the big ones.
You know, he writes for The Atlantic, which is barely a publication.
It's really just narratives that are bad for Republicans.
So what are the odds of all the people in the world, of all the people in the world, he would be the number one worst one?
That you could accidentally expose to your conversations.
And yet, it looks like it happened.
So, there's a big question about whether there were war plans discussed or whether there were things that were kind of close to or adjacent to war plans, but, you know, very short of a war plan.
I think the war plan was, should we bomb these hooties?
Yeah, I think we should bomb the Hooties.
Should we do it, like, right away or wait?
We'll talk about that.
So, is that a war plan?
Kind of.
But it's not a war plan like most people would think of it, you know, with detailed assets and stuff like that.
Although I think there were some assets mentioned.
But here's what my first impression was.
My first impression that I posted on Axe was that it might be true, because anything is possible, but it doesn't look real.
So my first take was this is not real.
As far as I know, and this is my working assumption at the moment, it is real.
So my current belief is that it is real, and that's based on the fact that there's no strong...
No strong denial.
There's a weak confirmation from somebody who I'd never heard of, who's a spokesperson for something in the government, who said, it appears to be real.
Appears to be.
They sent the spokesperson out without knowing if it were real.
All you'd have to do is ask any one of the people who were on it, were you really talking about this, yes or no?
So that was weird.
And then I was looking at one of the screenshots of what allegedly they were talking about.
And, of course, we don't see the whole conversation.
Jeffrey Goldberg wants you to know that, oh, the stuff he's not showing us is the bad stuff.
Oh, isn't that convenient?
The most famous hoaxer and liar in the media landscape says the stuff that he can't show us, that's the real bad stuff.
Trust him.
Now, every part of this sounds sketchy, doesn't it?
But I'll tell you another.
I'm going to tell you what tells there were for it being fake, which apparently didn't work.
Because the tells for fake news are not guarantees.
They're more statistical things.
So the first thing I noticed was one of them used a semicolon.
When was the last time you used a semicolon in a text message, whether it's WhatsApp or regular messaging or Signal?
How many of you use a semicolon?
Now, I know how to use a semicolon because I'm a professional writer, so it's one of those things you have to know.
But if you ask me when was the last time I put a semicolon in a text message, I would say...
Maybe never.
Maybe 10 years ago.
But I don't remember it.
So as soon as I saw that semicolon, I said to myself, I don't know.
I don't know about that semicolon.
But then I remembered that a lot of the people on there are Ivy Leaguers.
So I think Seth is Harvard.
J.D. Vance is Harvard.
Then I said to myself, all right, all right, maybe.
Your Harvard guys, they might toss in a little semicolon in there.
That's possible.
But let me tell you the rule that should have indicated this was fake.
It's the Scott-Alexander rule, and I've described this before, but this is a perfect application.
The Scott-Alexander rule is that when you hear a story and your first reaction is, oh my God, I can't believe it.
You've heard me say this before, right?
Your first reaction is, I can't believe that happened.
There's a 20 to 1 chance it didn't happen.
20 to 1. Now, it looks like this is the 1. You know, this is the 1 where, you know, 20 to 1, but the 1 is going to happen now and then.
So it looks like this is real, but it violated the Scott-Alexander rule that when you hear something that's just too fantastical, To believe?
Now, the fantastical part is not that they were using the signal.
We'll talk about that.
The fantastical part is that of all the people in the world, of all the people in the whole world, it was Jeffrey Goldberg who got included in it by accident.
Now, I can say from my own use of apps that doing something dumb like including the wrong person, not that unusual.
That part is not fantastical.
You know, accidentally adding a wrong person, pretty normal, especially if you're busy.
But here's the surprising part.
How many of you were surprised that people this sophisticated, you know, J.D. Vance and Hegseth, etc., the people who really know security?
They know what exactly is confidential and what isn't.
How surprised are you that they would be using a commercial app and that they would think that would be okay?
Surprising? Here's what the news is not telling you.
There's something important they're leaving out.
What was the alternative?
How many of you assumed, because the news didn't say one way or the other, how many of you assumed...
That the government has a secure way of communicating so that they add an alternative.
There's nothing like that.
Do you remember the story of Hillary's email?
And do you remember her excuse for why she had her own email?
Now, we think maybe she was doing some things that she didn't want the rest of the government to see.
So she may have had more than one reason.
But the base reason...
For why they wanted their own email is that the government email was so bad that it didn't even work.
That's real.
Now, we've been watching Doge go into one department after another and finding out that the systems are like from the 60s.
They're just completely unusable.
So let me ask you this.
What do you think is this alleged secure system for the government?
What do you think that is?
Is it specific hard-lined or hard-wired phones that are in some rooms but not other ones?
Is it something they can do on their cell phone if they had the right setup on their cell phone?
I doubt it.
I don't think there's such a thing as a secure cell phone conversation.
So what about the group chat?
Do you think that the government...
Has a highly secure group chat function?
No. No.
So the reason they were using Signal and the reason it was already preloaded on their phones, because these are government phones, it was already preloaded on the phone.
There's only one reason, because the government systems don't work.
The only way that you can have a secure conversation is to be in the same room and go up to somebody's ear and say, I've got a secret.
Don't say anything.
I'll just whisper in your ear.
That's the government secure system.
Now, I do believe if the President of the United States wants to make one phone call to one person or maybe a few, and they also have access to these secure communications, that probably works.
A phone call.
But how much work can a dozen people get done on a phone call?
Especially when they're all busy and they're running from one place to another and they're doing this or that.
They needed a chat.
They needed a group chat.
Does the government provide a group chat that is secure?
No. No.
So what were they supposed to do?
So they had this thing, this Hootie attack, and they wanted to be extra sure they were on the same page.
What were they going to do?
Do you think they were all going to go back to Washington, go into special little rooms, stop what they were doing, and wait for their special secured phone call, and then they would talk it out?
Or do you think that in the normal course of business, the, let's say, asynchronous chat is the best way to go?
Because what I imagine is that these people are working all the time.
You know, there's no such thing as private time if you're at that level of government.
I can imagine, you know, this is just my imagination, that it might have been off hours.
It could have been you're having dinner with the kids, the messages are coming in, you're like, okay, here's my input.
Somebody else is commuting and they're on some kind of a vehicle and they're like, okay, this is that.
Somebody else is in a meeting and they can't answer for half an hour.
But then they get back on, they go, all right.
What was the alternative exactly?
There was no alternative.
And when I mocked the government systems on X today, I mentioned that one of the things that Doge has taught us, that the government systems are completely useless.
They're just barely, barely working.
Certainly not up to any kind of modern communication standard with or without security.
And by the way, how do you know that the most secure part of our communication systems are actually secure?
It would be the one thing that the bad guys would try hardest to penetrate.
You think they'd never have?
Do you think they couldn't bribe somebody who could?
You can't bribe an insider?
I don't think there's any such thing as a...
Completely secure anything, except maybe standing in a skiff.
So, the Scott Alexander rule fooled me on this one.
And then PXF was asked about it, and he did the worst job of lying I've ever seen, trying to change the subject.
And boy, did he look like he was about to get fired.
I wouldn't be surprised.
If something bad happened to some of them, but I think Trump would like to keep his team together, so probably they're going to be okay.
But then the real question the news is going to be talking about today is, is it war plans, or was it just talking?
And then Jeffrey Goldberg will say, oh, I've seen it, nobody else can see it, because it's bad enough that I saw it.
So I'm going to save the country by not showing you.
I'll just tell you it's the worst thing that could have ever happened.
It's war plans.
So, all right.
So what I'm adding to the conversation is that you can't tell every time when something hits all the markers for being fake.
It doesn't mean it is.
Every now and then, one of those will be real.
20 to 1. But every once in a while.
And the other thing you need to know is that the government systems couldn't possibly have done what Signal did for them, which is quickly make sure they're on the same page.
There was no other way to do that.
And it looked like it might have been important to make sure they're on the same page.
So I don't think the news will ever cover the fact that there wasn't an alternative.
There was no technological alternative.
Not really.
I mean, without...
Driving to the same building for every time they wanted to talk about something.
And there's a reason it was preloaded on the phones.
I mean, just think about this.
It was preloaded on the government phone.
Obviously, everybody in that level of government must have been aware, both administrations, and really all the administrations, at least through Clinton, that the government systems just don't work.
So you're sort of on your own to get anything done.
Anyway, and then Trump avoided the question by acting like he's just heard it.
Obviously, he'd heard it.
Anyway, so there's something sketchy about the story, but the basic idea looks like it's true.
All right.
Apparently, Natalie Winters has a scoop here.
The wife of the former U.S. attorney, Matthew Graves.
Isn't that the worst name for an attorney?
Graves. Who led the prosecution of 1500 January Sixers.
His wife is on the board of Indivisible, which allegedly is a Soros-backed group that is behind the Tesla protests.
So, unbelievably, the guy who prosecuted the January Sixers by pretending that they were there for an insurrection instead of the reality, which is they were there to stop one, or what they thought they were doing was stopping one, his wife is literally a domestic terrorist.
Now, I'm using some hyperbole, but I think it's a fair characterization.
Because if you're on a Soros-backed group that's backing the Tesla actions, that is terrorism.
Now, did you know, and I didn't know this until I asked AI, did you know that if somebody is doing something that is meant to destroy the economic assets of a country, that's terrorism?
It doesn't mean violence just to people.
Terrorism can include violence to economic assets.
That's what this is.
The anti-Tesla stuff has nothing to do with anything except violence against assets, economic assets, in this case, Musk's.
So yes, if you're an organizer of the anti-Tesla stuff, And you know that Tesla had nothing to do with anything that's Doge-related.
It's just a separate company employing 80,000 Americans.
And you decided to take it down for political reasons.
You're a terrorist to me.
I mean, that feels like a totally fair description.
Anyway, so we know that our attorneys and the Department of Justice certainly has been corrupt for a long time.
The January 6th thing is one of the most corrupt things I've ever seen in my life.
Just so extremely corrupt.
And by the way, if you ever get into a conversation with somebody who thinks January 6th was an insurrection, what you need to do is say, you know, where we differ is the starting assumption.
The starting assumption.
My starting assumption is the correct one.
Don't say that part.
My starting assumption is that the vast majority of people were there to stop an insurrection.
And their intentions are everything that matters.
Because if they were there to stop an insurrection, then we would still want to jail the people who got violent, probably.
And we can agree on that.
But the people who weren't violent...
We're there to stop an insurrection.
But the prosecutions were based on the assumption, which they have never tested.
They've never polled the people.
They've never asked.
The news has never had one on.
Have you ever seen anyone in the news put somebody on and say, what was your intention?
Was your intention to install Trump despite knowing that the election was fair and that he lost?
I don't think you'll find anybody to say that.
It's the most basic assumption of all the January 6th prosecutions, and nobody has ever asked the question, why were you there?
What did you think you were doing?
And that just blows my mind, because everything that the bad guys say about January 6th, they start with the wrong assumption that they were there as an insurrection.
And then they reason from there.
Don't let them get away with that.
That is an unsupported and easily debunked assumption.
All you'd have to do is ask any one of the nonviolent people who were there, why were you there?
Anyone. Thousands of them.
You could ask any one of them, and they would have the same answer.
Any one of them.
Nobody did.
Nobody did.
It's just like the fine people hoax.
Remember, I always say, well, did anybody ask to see if there was anybody in the crowd who didn't like the racists, but they were there because they wanted to support the statues?
I'm the only person in the world that I know of who asked that question.
That's the most important question.
Were there any ordinary people who were not racists who were there for their own reasons?
And the answer is yes.
I talked to a few of them.
Absolutely, there were.
So when you see this gigantic assumptions being ignored by the news, it's not news.
It's narrative.
Anyway, the U.S. Treasury advisor claims that 23andMe...
According to James O'Keefe, he's got an undercover footage of this Treasury Policy Advisor.
He says that 23andMe was sharing your DNA data with big pharma, including in other countries like Russia and maybe China.
So your DNA data was being sold to adversaries.
Now, what the story doesn't include, and this is the big question, Did it include identifying data, as in, you know, this is the specific person and there's specific data?
Or was it just the data so that you could see that there's this kind of person and this kind of person?
Now, neither of them are a good answer, but if they didn't include your name or identifier somehow, it's not as bad.
It's pretty bad.
But it's not as bad as if they knew exactly who you were.
So you might want to go into that app and delete all of your data while it's still up because the company's going out of business.
Well, Ezra Klein, co-author of that Abundance book, was on The Daily Show, and he was advising Democrats what they need.
He says, what you need is you've got to get some short-term wins.
So that people can see that you're doing things and you're capable.
And he gave some examples of long-term projects that didn't work out.
So here are the examples.
And this is from a Democrat, right?
He talked about how California had a bunch of money for high-speed rail, but nothing got built.
And then Biden had this big, expensive budget for...
Building all these charging stations for electric vehicles and almost none of them got built.
And then there was the broadband internet for rural communities and nothing got built.
So those are Ezra Klein's examples of long-term projects that don't impress anybody because they're long-term.
I feel like he missed the main point there.
It wasn't that they were long-term.
It's that they must have been either vast incompetence or some kind of corruption, or probably both.
And whether that was long-term or short-term, the problem is not the long-term short-term.
The problem is massive incompetence.
So he says, you know, do some short-term things that will get results.
And I'm thinking to myself, you know who's really good at that?
Trump. He's got some long-term things, such as the tariffs, you know, that they could pay off, you know, at some point.
But he's also got some short-term stuff, like all of his executive orders and the border.
The border he took care of in almost, you know, no time flat.
So Trump is really good.
At doing both the short-term stuff, so you can see that he's a man of action, but also having some long-term stuff brewing, such as boosting the energy production in this country, etc., which just might take a while to get online.
So he does both, and he does them great.
Do you know what the difference is?
It's not that he knows you should do some short-term stuff.
It's that he's capable.
He's competent.
So this is entirely a question of competence.
It's not about long-term, short-term.
If you think that the Democrats had never come up with the idea of doing something that would give you a quick win, that's probably the most obvious thing that anybody thinks about.
If I put you in that job, you wouldn't ever think of the idea of doing something that in the short term would produce a good result?
Of course you would.
This is the most useless...
The most useless advice I've ever seen.
Yeah, no.
We'll never think of that idea of doing some short-term things that are really good.
Charlie Kirk is reminding us that apparently there's such a population move from blue states to red states, because the blue states are failing, that it's going to change the 2030 congressional reapportionment.
In other words, California will lose population and will lose representatives because that's how it works.
And so California might lose four.
Minnesota might lose one.
Wisconsin, one.
Illinois, one.
New York might lose two.
Pennsylvania might lose one.
And then there...
Yeah. So, et cetera.
And then some of the red states would be looking to gain a lot, like Texas, four.
Florida, four, et cetera.
As Charlie Kirk totals it up, he says, some estimate that blue states could lose as many as 12 congressional seats.
That'd be kind of a big deal by 2030, wouldn't it?
And this is a good time to check in on one of my wildest predictions.
Now, you know I like to make wild predictions that are just completely against the grain, and then I wait.
And eventually my wild prediction, in some cases, become mainstream.
For example, in 2015, the thing that kind of put me on the map was saying, wait a minute, this Trump guy, he's not like other people.
And his persuasion game is so strong that it's going to change everything.
And he's going to win.
Now, at the moment, the most common belief about Trump, even by his enemies, Okay, he's really good at this politics stuff.
He's really persuasive.
I heard some show the other day where the Democrats were saying, okay, we do accept that he's incredible.
They call him a political athlete.
Yeah. Yeah, I saw it in 2015, and I could see it clear as day.
He's an athlete like you've never seen before.
So they couldn't see what was coming because they didn't see that.
But now it's common knowledge.
So that was an incredibly non-standard prediction that now everybody thinks is just ordinary.
Like, yeah, he's very persuasive, yeah.
So here was another one I made that was only like a week or two ago, and I got almost no agreement with it.
Remember, we're in Trump time now, so two weeks is like 10 minutes, so it's not going to feel like this was a long time.
But about two weeks ago, I said on this show, and I think I probably posted it as well on X, I said that it looks like the Democrats have no path to recover, that they might be just done as a political party at the federal level, not at the local level, they'll do fine.
Now, that would be an extremely non-standard prediction, because Almost everybody, just two weeks ago, almost everybody thought, yeah, I mean, that might be a fantasy, but all it takes is one good candidate and, you know, they'll be right back.
You know, the elections will be close.
But if you notice that even Democrats are saying, there's no way back.
So in two weeks, it went from kind of a crazy sounding prediction.
That the Democrats actually can't come back.
They've created a structure that they can't come back from because they've got this identity politics cooking and they don't have any good candidates and they're losing their congressional authority.
Trump is doing amazing things that if it all works out, it's going to be tough to say that you shouldn't do more of that.
And it seemed like every single thing was moving in the same direction.
And it was going to crush the Democrats, at least in terms of presidential races and probably congressional.
So at the moment, even Bill Maher is saying it doesn't look like they can come back in a generation.
And he's a Democrat.
So it's already gone in just two weeks from the most crazy prediction, okay, Democrats are done, to looks like the Democrats are done.
Now, I don't know if it'll be true.
So I can't claim credit yet because that would be looking into the future.
But look how quickly that went from a crazy idea to the common belief.
Two weeks.
That's all it took.
Kind of amazing.
I do still think an especially charismatic leader could just change everything.
But it would have to be charismatic almost on a Trumpian level.
And he's a once-every-thousand-year character.
So good luck getting one of those.
But whoever it is won't be running against Trump, presumably.
So they don't have to be full Trump.
They just have to be able to pull together their side, which I don't think can be done, but we'll see.
I guess the stock market partially had a nice boom yesterday because Trump had narrowed the scope of some of his tariffs.
So Postmillennial is writing about this.
So apparently, instead of just wildly tariffing everybody and just saying, we're going to go reciprocal with everybody, he's narrowed it down to 15%, 1.5%, the dirty 15, as he calls it.
It's 15% of countries, but they call it the dirty 15. And they happen to be the ones we do the most trade with.
So it gets you most of your benefits because the 15% of the countries are the ones with all the big trade.
And so now those tariffs will be more focused to each country will get its own little tariff.
And that would include, let's see, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, and a few others, according to the Wall Street Journal.
So, because the stock market likes clarity, and they like certainty, this got people a lot closer to, all right, I can see this.
That makes sense.
We can negotiate with those countries and maybe the tariffs will stick.
Maybe we'll see more money coming to this country.
Isn't it something like $3 trillion?
Give me a fact check on this.
Haven't we seen something like $3 trillion flow into the United States, at least in promises, commitments from big companies?
And they say directly, In part, it's because the U.S. looks like a good place to invest, but also they can avoid tariffs by making their stuff here.
So it looks like Trump's main thesis that if you don't make it here, we're not going to be suckers and just be paying you money on tariffs for no reason.
I think his crazy tariff idea, believe it or not, Just like my prediction, his crazy, crazy tariff idea has now almost completely morphed into common sense.
Do you feel that yet?
Am I getting ahead of it?
Let me say it again.
It was only a few weeks ago that even Republicans were saying, I don't know.
I don't know about this tariff stuff.
It looks crazy.
It looks not really well thought out.
He doesn't understand how economics work.
This is not the way you deal with your allies.
There must be a better way to do it.
But nobody had a better way.
Nobody suggested a better way.
And we don't know exactly what he's doing, and he keeps changing his mind.
And that was only like two weeks ago.
And today, because we're seeing these big companies come in with, oh yeah, we want to build it here so we can avoid the tariffs.
He's proven his main point, that he can cause businesses to move back to the U.S. That's a really big deal.
But he's also now clarified it so it's easy to understand, okay, it's only the big countries who have been kind of abusing us, and why wouldn't we have reciprocal tariffs?
Why wouldn't we?
So am I wrong that it's gone from crazy two weeks ago, Incomprehensible.
To common sense?
In just two weeks?
Am I getting ahead of it or no?
Tell me in the comments.
Because I feel like that's what I'm watching in real time.
And I think the stock market responded because they saw it collapse into common sense.
Now it's just common sense.
And I'm pretty sure it's such common sense.
That it will be the standard that the United States uses for the rest of time.
I think it's that commonsensical that it will never go back.
Now, apparently, he's also put secondary tariffs on Venezuela.
Now, if I understand correctly, a secondary tariff means that he will tariff people who are doing business, especially energy business, I think, with Venezuela.
So, that's going to crush Venezuela.
Now, of course, there's always going to be some illegal, pirated business.
So, you know, maybe countries like...
Maybe some other countries will do some sketchy things and still get their oil, and we won't know if they did it or not.
But that's pretty powerful.
He's definitely using the full power of the United States economy.
Where it's needed.
He does understand power.
Well, meanwhile, RFK Jr. says that Doge is now inside the Department of Health and Human Services.
And here's how bad it was inside the Health and Human Services.
Now, imagine being just the new head of Health and Human Services and trying to fix the following on your own.
So here's what...
RFK Jr. says that.
He says, we've identified extraordinary waste in my department and HHS.
The expenditures and the budget of HHS during the Biden administration went up by 38%.
The employees went up by 17%, and health care went down.
He said, this part just blows my mind.
He says, we have 40 comms departments, 40 procurement departments, 40 IT departments.
40 procurement, 40 HR, none of them talking to each other.
And then he says, we are, with Elon's help, meaning Doge, eliminating the redundancies.
We are streamlining our department.
Now, imagine if he tried to do that while also trying to do his job as head of health and human research.
You couldn't do it.
It was way too big.
Doge is not just a good idea.
It's essential.
And we're also very close to the point where we're going from these crazy conversations about scalpels and chainsaws and just wild ideas and he's trying to steal your money to reduce his own taxes.
Just crazy shit.
And now it's moving to just common sense.
Because how can you look at 40 comms department and 40 procurements and all that and say, well, that was a good idea the way it was.
Well, we leave it the way it was.
It was working great.
You just can't.
Like, your brain can't go there.
So you just go, okay, okay.
This is kind of common sense that you take from the leader of the group, you know, the responsibility of figuring out how to simplify.
But also give them the ultimate approval over what happens.
That's exactly how you would design it.
If you were to start today and design this thing, design a thing that would lower expenses and get rid of the fraud and corruption, it would look exactly like Doge.
So that's pretty amazing.
So again, that's collapsing into common sense.
So let me give you a little tour of the things we know are completely corrupt in the United States.
And when you hear them all together, it's wild.
I'll just run down the list.
It's all stuff you know about.
So we first found out about USAID, which we learned was largely a CIA purse where they could do things like coup other countries.
But also, it seemed to be this giant piggyback that was supporting up to 55,000 other NGOs, and none of it had any audit function.
So it was this massive money laundering, fraudulent, secret, unchecked use of your money.
Billions, billions of dollars.
So I don't know if that's fraud, corruption, or incompetence, or all three.
But that was shocking.
And now we're finding out that a lot of the government is run by outside contractors, consultants.
And we're learning that the consultants, because they're smart and capable, and they're working with government employees who are hiring them, and the government employees are neither smart nor capable, they sign deals with these giant consulting companies for billions of dollars of work.
The deal is not based on performance.
It's based on hours spent.
Now, you don't have to be an expert on management to know that if you're paying people outrageous amounts of money, and it's based on the hours that they spend, not on whether they get a job done, that the job will never be done so that they can continue charging you billions of dollars.
So what do you think happened?
Exactly that.
The consultants never leave.
They always have a reason there should be more of them.
They keep finding things that are also broken and only they can fix until eventually the consultants are like this giant boa constrictor.
I think this is how Scott Bessent described it.
And it just starts strangling the government because they're highly capable and the government employees Couldn't do it themselves.
And it's not their budget.
And nobody was checking.
So the government employees are like, well, you say you can do this thing.
I can tell my boss that I'm doing something if I give you a bunch of money.
So we'll just hire you.
And you can work by the hour.
And every time my boss asks, I'll say, well, you should talk to the consultants.
They say things are going great.
It's just going to take them longer than they thought because they found extra problems.
As they do.
They were finding that there were SBA loans to kids under 11 and over, I don't know, 120 or something.
We found out that there was plenty of Social Security fraud, which means that the public are fraudulent.
Not everybody.
But the public was finding ways to rip off the Social Security, to rip off the SBA.
Loans, probably ripping off everything that can be ripped off.
Then we're finding out, as I mentioned, the judges that have been judging all Trump-related things and even January 6th-related things are not just conflicted, but almost conflicted beyond the realm of believable, that they literally have spouses that are activists working on one side of the aisle.
And somehow, We didn't catch this soon enough.
Now people are looking at every one of the judges and they just keep finding the same thing.
It's like, oh, your daughter or your spouse are really active in politics and you did not recuse yourself.
You bastard.
If you didn't recuse yourself, oh man, that's corrupt.
That is super corrupt.
So we know that our judges are corrupt.
We know that the Soros DAs and Attorney Generals are corrupt, at least in terms of how it plays out.
We know until recently the FBI and the Department of Justice were corrupt and political.
I'm not sure how much they still are, but less.
We know that Congress has so many liars that I can call some of them the designated liars.
Like Jasmine Crockett, Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney.
They're designated liars.
They're so corrupt that they just will say anything.
They'll just start any hoax, any lie, any ridiculous claim.
Totally corrupt.
We know that the Pentagon lost trillions of dollars.
And whatever it was that started that war in Ukraine looks pretty sketchy and fraudulent and full of crime to most of us.
So the military probably is a source, although the soldiers, I'm sure, are honorable and doing the best they can.
At least at the leadership position, it looks super, super corrupt.
And then, of course, the media, which should have been the watchdogs to all of this.
Totally corrupt.
They're mostly just organs of the Democrats, and we can see that in play every day.
So, that's our world.
So, every large group in the government didn't seem to be tracking their expenses.
Totally corrupt.
The judges, totally corrupt.
The Congress, totally corrupt.
The DAs and the Attorney Generals, corrupt.
The FBI and the Department of Justice, until recently.
Totally corrupt.
What isn't corrupt?
You know, I've got this rule that I've been saying for a long time, that anytime you have a situation that involves a lot of money, and there are a number of people involved, and there's a long time involved, that they're corrupt every time.
Because people are going to try to chip away and find out where they can take advantage of something until they do.
So every one of these government entities fall into that category.
They've been around a long time, there's a lot of money involved, and there are a number of people involved.
That pretty much guarantees corruption.
That's all it takes.
People plus time plus money.
You'll get corruption every time.
And I don't think there's an exception to that.
Anyway, according to Just the News, there's some ongoing negotiations with Russia over the Ukraine war.
And the Russia officials negotiating said that the talks had been useful, but they didn't give any details.
And they said, we talked about everything, one of the negotiators, a Russian, said.
We talked about everything.
It was an intense dialogue, not easy.
But very useful for us and the Americans.
So there does seem to be maybe some possibility of something good happening.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Didn't Trump just recently, maybe yesterday, say that we were close to signing a minerals deal with Ukraine?
Because I'm very skeptical that that's going to happen.
So... We'll see.
I mean, I can be wrong.
It's possible that we'll sign an agreement, but then nothing ever happens, you know, because Ukraine will resist it one way or the other, or other events will happen.
So I don't really think any of this looks like it's going to wrap up quickly.
So my best guess would be three months.
In three months, maybe there's something that looks like an agreement of something we could try.
But I don't think it's going to be three days.
I don't think it's going to be three weeks.
I'm going to say three months at best.
So that'll be my estimate.
In three months, you might see some kind of a deal.
Now, if we got it in three months, you know, you'd be happy in retrospect.
You might think it should happen really quickly.
Anyway, so I'm seeing the comments.
The whole signal, The signal app story.
The bad guys in the media are turning it into the only thing they have to talk about, which does make me think that James Carville might have been pretty smart.
Because in the normal flow of things, if you just simply sit there and shut up and wait...
Stories will emerge because the media will find something to latch onto, like this Signal app thing, and they can blow it in out of proportion and turn it into another hoax, or they can exaggerate it from a little problem into a big one, and then you just watch it happen, and then you've got something to work with.
So I'm going to be so sick of Signal, you know, the Signal stuff, but we've got to listen to that for months.
Anyway, there's a new resolution, according to the Daily Wire.
So there's Representative Stubbe.
He's got a resolution that charges the cartels are a clear and evident danger, and it would give the military more leeway on what to do.
It would allow the full force of the American military to combat the drug cartels.
Now, I thought we already had the ability to do that because we said they're terrorists.
But apparently there's something else you can do, some kind of resolution.
So I'd be all for that, even if it's just a threat.
Here's a little tip they could have just asked me, but there was a scientific study, Scientific America is talking about it, Rachel Neuer is writing about it, that you will be more trusted if you have a better microphone.
So if you're doing anything remote or anything like in a podcast or anything like I'm doing right now, if you have a good microphone, people will think you're smarter and more capable and more trustworthy just because the sound is better.
And if you had asked me, do you think that's a thing?
I would have said yes without any study whatsoever.
It was, yeah.
Yeah, sound makes a difference.
One of the things I noticed back in my corporate days, Is that the people who became executives were not necessarily the most gifted leaders, but they all had a certain kind of voice.
And the voice was almost like a radio voice, almost like you could hear two different voices in one, like really interesting voices.
And I thought to myself, there's no way that's a coincidence.
They have nice hair.
And they have these unusually interesting voices.
Yeah, it totally makes a difference.
People are absolutely influenced by height, attractiveness, hair, fitness, and the sound of a voice.
And if the microphone is changing the sound of your voice, it's the easiest thing to fix.
Get a better microphone.
It'll make a huge difference.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, That's all I had to talk about today.
I think it's a fun day.
It does seem like what we've learned about the government being corrupt from top to bottom is just shocking.
But on the other hand, it shouldn't be surprising.
I'll tell you what my biggest surprises were, that there's no accountability for spending.
Now, I have to admit, As low as my opinion was of the government, I didn't think it was possible that they couldn't account for their spending.
I just never would have imagined that.
And think about the Pentagon not being able to explain where trillions of dollars went.
Trillions. I never could have guessed that.
I also would not have guessed that the government systems are closer to the 60s than 2025.
I would have said they're probably old and they need to be updated, but I wouldn't have guessed that.
And those were way worse than I thought.
And I wouldn't have guessed that there was an entire secondary government structure set up.
You could argue that it was all under the sort of Obama umbrella, because it was an extension of things that happened during his time in office and beyond.
And that that extensive network of NGOs, And then Soros getting his DAs and doing all of his dirty tricks.
It was essentially a shadow government.
And it was a shadow government that Obama had apparently set up to run the country from not being in office.
And it looks like it was to enrich his friends primarily.
Basically, they just figured out that the best way to get rich is ripping off the government.
And so Democrats seem to have created a criminal organization, at least the people who were in the know and the people who were deeply into the NGOs and stuff.
It appears that they somewhat intentionally set up a mass criminal organization to steal your tax money and put it in their pockets.
Because everything from the Ukraine war to USAID to...
You know, the Pentagon spending.
It just all seems to have the same characteristic, which is it doesn't look like it was even designed for the benefit of the public.
It looks like it was designed entirely as a criminal enterprise and functioned as one.
So I don't know if we'll ever be able to wrap our heads around that.
And then the biggest problem is that you have to get pretty deep into the weeds.
To feel that you've got a sense for the big picture?
Because I don't think there's any Democrat who's seeing the same news that you and I are.
I don't think so.
I think we're seeing news that is informing us, you know, sort of the Mike Benz, Glenn Greenwald kind of a description of how the world works.
If you looked at the things that are coming out of Doge, And the Mike Benn stuff and the Glenn Greenwald stuff, and you could probably add a few more.
We're seeing a picture of the world that is insanely different from what I imagine it was even a few years ago.
As much as you thought the government was bad, you really didn't have any idea.
I mean, maybe you did, but I didn't.
Un-frickin-believable.
And it could be that the...
Our experience with the pandemic may have opened our brains to see the rest.
I think it was invisible.
Like, you couldn't actually accept it because it was too far out of what you would think would be normal.
You know, if something doesn't belong somewhere, it's invisible.
And you would say to yourself, well, these weird claims you're making, there's no way this could be true.
But wow, once you find out some of the claims are true...
It looks completely different.
So my question is, how could you ever communicate that to Democrats?
Because there's still a lot of Democrats who don't know that they belong to a criminal organization because they're not criminals.
They're just voters who have a preference.
But they are part of a criminal organization.
Definitely part of a criminal organization.
There's so many moving parts to it, though, that you can't really describe it.
Anything you did would sound like such a weak description because you should really spend a week of your time doing nothing but digging in to see how everything's connected and how bad it is, how bad the conflict is, how bad the lawfare was.
You'd have to dig pretty deeply.
And I don't know if there's any way to communicate it.
I think Trump and Musk probably have the best approach I can think of, which is just giving you anecdotes of crazy things your money was going to.
Now, that doesn't get you to the criminal element of it, but it does make you oppose it, because maybe you didn't want to give your money to find out if flies can be turned transsexual, or whatever it is.
So they've got all these examples.
That might not even turn out to be exactly true, but at least they're easy to remember.
You know, transsexual frogs and stuff.
So it might be that's the best you can do.
Just give some wild anecdotes and people remember one or two of the anecdotes and say, yeah, I don't want to be involved in funding those transsexual frogs.
But I feel like there's probably a better narrative or something.
That could capture all the badness, which is extreme.
Just extreme badness.
So, I'll think about that, see if I can come up with anything.
Two words, Chicago politics.
Yeah, but even that, the average person doesn't know what Chicago politics is.
You know, you're really into the top five percenters when you do something like that.
All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to talk to the locals people privately for a minute.
The rest of you, thanks for joining.
I'll be back here tomorrow, same time, same place.
