I'm back to talk about the news you can't use and whatnot.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Fraud, Corruption, Voting Machines Purpose, Election Fraud, Minnesota Somali Fraud Schemes, HUD Fraud, Competitive Fraud Spotting, Tim Walz, Minnesota Fraud, Anti-Fraud Reward System, AG Pam Bondi, AG Keith Ellison, Voter Vouching Corruption, Local Government Corruption, Independent Journalism, Propaganda Technique Repetition, San Francisco, Flock License Plate System, CA Wealth Tax, Iran Citizen Protests, Venezuela Drug Dock Bombed, Epstein Files Release Hesitation, Putin's Residence Attack, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
My cough is under control, but I do get a little bit dizzy if I talk too much.
So we'll do the best we can.
I apologize for my voice.
It will not get better.
Good morning, everybody.
Let's do the simultaneous sip.
You know, we'll see how far we get.
I know why you're here.
Last one of the year.
All you need is a copper microglasses, tanker chalice, a sign-cante, drug, or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the heavy little pleasure.
The dopamine of the day.
The thing that makes everything better is called the simultaneous sip.
happens now.
Terrific.
Well, let's jump right into it, shall we?
Apparently, I'm very good at guessing how many calendars I'll sell in a year because we got right up to the limit, but still a few more.
So I wouldn't wait if you don't have your Delby calendar.
Amazon.com, the only place you can get it.
How about some end-of-year predictions?
I always hate those, but they seem traditional.
I'm going to say the obvious.
2026 will be the year of the self-driving car.
I don't believe there will be robot bullers.
So I'm going to say no robot bullers yet.
I think the economy will surprise us, but I don't know which direction.
It'll either be better than we think or worse than we think.
No one can predict the economy.
Further, I predict that the topic of election rigging will become a much bigger story.
And if you haven't caught up with the Patrick Byrne, he was the CEO of Overstock.com.
If you don't know his story, you really should catch up to it because I don't know what's true.
I have no idea if his version of events captures what really happened, but he's got, he's very convincing.
He's been saying it for a while, but now I think he can say it and people can run it.
So he's got this story about Venezuela being involved with the voting machines, Chinese components, and a Serbian data center that got taken down just before they could influence the election in 2024.
Is any of that true?
I don't know.
But I got to say, he's very credible sounding.
And there's nothing about him that suggests he's making it up.
And he does seem to know.
So I feel like this will be the year he breaks through to make that a bigger story.
And then, you know, I think the fact that we know everything else in the world is rigged, as we're watching all these stories about corruption, I think that makes it easier for people to believe that the elections were rigged.
Because I've been saying something now for a while, a few years, that nobody else picks up on.
Have you noticed this?
This is what I say.
I say, what are the odds that every other institution is corrupt, but our elections are not?
What are the odds of that?
If you didn't know anything about election security, you'd never seen any story about it.
How would you believe that it's not corrupt when everything else is?
Now, I might have been a little ahead of the game because the other thing I say, which sets you up for that thing I just said, is that whenever you have the following situation, you have corruption.
There's a lot of money involved.
There's lots of people involved.
The stakes are high, money or power.
And you just wait.
Because, and there's, and assume there's no audit control, because even where there are audits, the audits don't catch stuff, as we've seen.
So if you take that as your starting point, that everything is corrupt, and that there's a reason built into why it's corrupt.
It's not chance.
It's not a weird coincidence.
It's that everything that has that element to it always becomes corrupt every time.
Now, add to that what I've also been saying, what is the reason for electronic voting machines?
What would be the legitimate reason?
There is none.
The only reason for voting machines is to cheat.
Because they're not cheaper, they're not more reliable, they're not faster, they're not anything.
So put those three discotivisms together.
Everything that has this nature is rigged or fraudulent.
Voting machines don't have any other purpose that we can see.
And then elections sort of just fall into that category.
The thing that can't be explained unless there's massive fraud going on.
Now, that doesn't mean that the only fraud is the machines.
Sorry.
It would suggest that in every way that an election can be rigged, probably is.
Probably is.
Now, I do not claim that the only bad people in the country are Democrats.
But maybe.
It doesn't seem likely that the only bad people are Democrats.
But in my bubble, that's true.
Well, David Moss, a user on X, just completed a self-driving Tesla drive across the entire United States without ever engaging with a car.
So this was the day that somebody drove the entire coast to coast and didn't touch the steering wheel.
That includes parking, includes supercharging.
So it's pretty easy to predict that this will be the year of the self-driving car.
All right, here's a question I ask myself.
How many fake news stories will I fall for in the coming year?
So apparently the other day, maybe yesterday, no, the other day, I posted, I reposted, but to my credit, with skepticism, a story about some election claim that involved a big shredding truck.
And somebody told me today, that's fake news.
It's been debunked.
So I removed it.
But it makes me wonder, how many times am I going to get fooled by fake news?
Probably a lot.
And I thought I should almost keep track of it because, yeah, that's one.
I should start with 2026 and find out how many times do I get fooled?
Is it more?
Am I more likely to be fooled because people are better at fooling people?
Am I getting dumber and older?
I don't know.
But watch out for me, will you?
All right, here is something that I feared was true, and I'm pretty sure it is.
I don't know about you, but if you're watching this podcast, it's probably true that your news and social media bubble is non-stop stories about money laundering and Somalians and basically bad behavior as well as rigged elections.
Do you have that experience?
That all day long I pick up my phone, I go to X, oh, there's another state, there's another fraud, there's another fraud, there's another fraud.
And of course, the algorithm is doing that.
But here's what I was afraid of.
I was afraid that no normies ever see these stories.
And that's what I'm starting to hear.
People are saying I went to things like, I went to lunch with my neighbors, and not one of them had heard about the Somalian fraud and stuff.
Just hold that in your head.
That your neighbors haven't even heard, they're not even aware that there's a massive money laundering fraud problem.
They've never heard it.
Now, that doesn't mean it's never been on the news, but the news doesn't cover it like social media does.
So I'm completely immersed in this world where every freaking story is about somebody stealing my money.
But if you were not paying attention to that bubble that I'm in, and you were in a different bubble, I haven't even heard of it.
That does not seem like a healthy situation, does it?
Oh my God.
Well, speaking of the bubble, so here's some more stuff of my bubble.
Eric Doherty's reporting on this.
Well, part of the reason that my bubble is different is I listen to a lot of independent journalists.
Apparently in Minnesota, as far back as 2018, whistleblowers were reporting these frauds, these Somali, basically money laundering frauds, and that they had the whistleblowers all had the same experience, that they were told that they couldn't talk about it or they'd be blamed, they'd be accused of being racist or Islamophobic.
Now, my how things change, because once Trump got elected, now we can talk about things that we should be talking about.
All right, let's do a sip.
said that so if trump had not been elected and he had not uh basically gotten rid of dei and our our blocks on free speech if if elon musk had not purchased twitter we still wouldn't know about this.
Just think about how close we were.
You know, you probably saw the other day that Elon Musk estimated that at the low bound, the theft might be $1.5 trillion a year at the low end, $1.5 trillion.
That would be the entire, essentially the deficit.
And you might remember, I keep bragging about this, but I'm actually kind of proud of it, that I told you that people like me who have a background in budgeting, you know, that was my day job in the corporate world, was a lot of budgeting.
You develop a kind of intuition about where something is wrong.
And several years ago, I started saying, I don't see how we could possibly be in this much of a deficit hole unless the amount of fraud was so high that it's unimaginable.
Now, at the time, I did not get a lot of agreement.
But today, I think every one of you agrees today that at least some big portion of it was just fraud.
So I'll give myself credit for that one.
Anyway, I saw that HUD thinks they may have found 5.8 billion in improper rental aid payments, according to Newsmax.
That's housing and urban development.
Now, they haven't confirmed that, but there's some red flags.
And what I like about this is that I'm noticing in the government that they've turned spotting fraud into a competitive sport.
So you should expect to see more and more department heads say, hey, we found some fraud.
I found some fraud.
I found more fraud than you did.
So we're going from an environment in which if you mentioned the fraud, you were racist to an environment in which people are competing to see who can find the most.
And people are competing to come up with the best idea for finding the most.
That is a good sign.
So 2026 might be just wild.
Speaking of that, Health and Human Services just froze childcare payments to Minnesota because it was all going to fraud.
Not all of it, but massive amounts were apparently going to fraud.
At the same time, what do you think Tim Waltz said when it was announced that the government was going to stop payments because the payments were almost all fraud?
What would Tim Walt say about that?
Well, here's what he said.
It's almost unbelievable.
He said that this is Trump's long game.
Quote, he's politicizing the issue to defund programs to help Minnesotans.
Really?
Really?
Does he really think that Trump sits down in the morning and says, what can I do?
How can I hurt those children in Minnesota in a way that will help me?
That is just bash crazy.
It's so obvious he has no real response to that.
How in the world does that make sense to his followers?
Oh, Trump has a long-term plan to damage Minnesota.
What?
What?
Why would anyone have that plan?
For political reasons?
I mean, you really have to, you've got to press all yourself up to make that make sense.
No.
Now, obviously, everything is political.
You know, that part's true.
But what are the odds that Trump is doing it because it's part of his long game to hurt Minnesota?
That's insane.
Bill Pulte, I saw him on a show yesterday.
He's ahead of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
And he said that they're using AI and Palantir to flag potential, you know, potential fraud.
So I think that's the model you're going to see.
I think people will be doing the Bill Pulte model, where you partner with maybe private companies, and the private companies spot potential flags, or I should say flags, for stuff, and then you look into it.
So basically, every part of the government that gives away money is probably going to move to that model.
Let's call it the Bill Pulte model.
And it should be no surprise, Fox News is reporting, that now we know from new surveillance photos, the surveillance video, that the parents in Minnesota might have been in on the fraud.
So they've got video all the way back from 2018, of course, in which parents are seen to be checking their kids into daycare, but then just turning around and taking them out.
So I guess it was the checking in part that made it look legitimate.
Are you surprised that parents might be part of the scheme?
No.
Nope.
All right.
The New York Post is reporting.
I saw Liz Collins reports reporting on this.
That there's a former Homeland Security agent who claims that when reports were given to the Minnesota, let's see, he said that he claims that prosecutors ignored Minnesota daycare fraud cases and that they quote, just evaporated.
So there was no shortage of people noticing and there was no shortage of people reporting it.
And when it was reported, they just slow walked it and then made it go away.
So corruption?
Yeah.
Do you know how much ignoring you would have to do?
You would have to have a lot of people ignoring a lot of things for a long time, like a lot of people.
And apparently that's what happened.
And the only way that could happen, says me, is if people were afraid of being told racists.
So when you calculate the damage of DEI, if I were doing the analysis of what is the damage of DEI, you could come up with a long list, but you'd have to add trillions because of this.
Trillions, the cost of DEI.
Now, here's more good news that may not turn into good news.
But if you're on social media and you're watching the bubble that I'm watching, you see people like Elon Musk talking about the fraud and Doge and talking about it.
You'll see people like David Sachs and Shamoth and lots of other smart people.
So the good news is that the smartest people in the country, Bill Ackman would be another, the smartest people in the country are very engaged in trying to figure out how to fix this because all of their wealth, at least anything that depends on the United States, is completely at risk.
Now, I don't think that's the only reason that they're so engaged, but they've not been engaged before.
And they're the exact same people you would want to fix any big problem, right?
If you said, we have this big problem that nobody's been able to fix, we need the smartest people in the room to really get engaged.
Well, we got that.
Amazing.
We finally have the smartest people in the room all on the same side, for the most part, and focused.
But here's the problem.
We might have too much diverse energy.
So they're not all saying exactly the same thing.
And it's unclear what plan would be the best.
Cernovich, add him to the list of the smartest people.
So my question is this, how do we get to the point where we focus all that smart energy?
Because we're not really at a place where we can focus it.
So if you said, but Scott, that's easy.
All you need is a fraud czar.
I don't think so.
I mean, it might be part of the solution.
But the fraud czar would get destroyed the same way they went after Musk.
Now, Musk is, you know, there's only one Musk, so he's managed to recover and even grow his business and get his compensation from Tesla and everything else.
But that's rare.
I don't know how many people could have survived the attacks that went after Musk.
So it would really be hard to get a fraud czar who had that much risk tolerance, but also had the skill.
And I don't know if it's enough.
So, and we also know that justice moves too slowly.
I've heard a number of people say, Scott, all they have to do is prosecute some high-level people and this will stop.
You know, if Larry Ellison, the AG in Minnesota, let's say he quickly got indicted.
Well, I don't know, would that stop anything?
How long would it take?
So justice moves too slowly to be the biggest part of the answer, but obviously it has to be part of the answer.
But I like the fact, as I mentioned before, that finding the fraud and doing something about it is a competitive sport.
So I think the best case scenario is that private companies find a way to free market this situation.
So you've got Palantir and other AI companies that could be helpful.
So they might have a massive, potentially, they might have a massive financial payoff.
No, Rico would be slower because you have to, Rico, you have to pull together like years of everything.
I mean, that would be slower.
We need to do it probably, but it would be slower.
So what was I saying?
So if you added the AI companies that might have some incentive to spot the fraud, and then you added to that the quietam rule that I didn't know about, but apparently it's been a thing for years, that allows you, an individual, private person, to ask the government to sue somebody who has been ripping off the government.
And then if you, as the whistleblower, let's say, if they succeed and they claw back some money, you get a portion of it.
It could be big.
It could be very big money.
So here's the good news.
When I talk about the smartest people being fully engaged, they're also the smartest people at creating new businesses that didn't exist, right?
Every one of them that I mentioned has done entrepreneurial things.
They've got a track record, right?
Every one of them.
And that is exactly the people you want designing a new system.
So it might not be that there's one path to fixing it.
It might be that the free market has now surfaced what looks like a set of variables that could sort of automatically drift in the direction of getting rid of the fraud because essentially it would monetize getting rid of fraud, which hasn't really been the case.
Well, it has been the case, but not everybody knew it.
And now lots of people know it.
So that's the good news.
All right, let's talk about Pam Bondi, who is not working fast enough, people say, and has prosecuted no high-profile cases.
So I'm going to wade into this at my risk.
You may have heard me say this on social media.
It goes like this.
If I put what I call the Dilber filter on this situation, how do we know, we who are not lawyers, how do we know how long something should take?
How do we know how many cases she's working on?
How do we know how hard it is to staff when you can't get, when lawyers are like 90% Democrat, but you don't want to staff up with Democrats if the whole job is to go after Democrats?
How long does it take to staff up?
What kind of cases is she working on that are exactly where she should be working on, but they just take a long time because they're complicated.
So the higher profile the case and the more complicated the case, the more you should expect it would take longer than a year, even to get to indictments.
So case in point, I guess Kash Patel has recommended to the Department of Justice to look into the whole situation with the Russia collusion hoax.
Now the Russia collusion hoax is massively complicated and involves everybody from X to current CIA and it involves two parts.
One is making it easier for Democrats to get elected, and the other is making it harder for Republicans to stay out of jail.
So it involves everything from the original meetings that Obama had, the special counsels, the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
There are so many moving parts.
If Pam Bodney only had one thing to work on for the rest of her life, How long would that take?
And then you multiply that by a thousand.
Because remember, you've got the JSIC stuff.
How complicated would it be to get the other side of the J-Sex stuff that that was all a plot?
And then to wrap it all into a RICO.
Because a RICO case has to show a pattern of behavior that has stretched over time and involves multiple people.
So I am, let me say this as clearly as possible.
I am as frustrated as you are that nobody important goes to jail.
Can we all get on the same side of that?
None of us think it's fast enough, but we also don't know what would be fast enough.
What would it look like if she were doing a great job?
And what would it look like if she were not?
Could we tell?
So one lawyer online said to me, Scott, what you, I'm paraphrasing here, what you're missing is that big law firms are already staffed up to surge like whole groups of people into different jobs for the government or for a private company.
So the thinking is that it's just business as normal to be way overworked, but to instantly or quickly correct the fact that you have too much work by going to big law firms and say, hey, we need two dozen lawyers today.
Can you just give us a whole staff?
And then those law firms, I didn't know this, by the way, are routinely, routinely set up to do that.
However, how does it work when the people you're going after are Democrats?
Do you think there's a big law firm that can give you two dozen lawyers that are both good at what they do, not doing anything more important?
Somebody said it's not the best lawyers that they sent for that, but I don't know about that.
They didn't already have something important to do, so they could sort of instantly go over, and that they would do a non-biased job instead of dragging their feet.
Because all you would have to do is get an anti-Trumper in the mix, one lawyer who drags their feet, and they can just drag this thing forever.
So I am skeptical that the existing model of surging lawyers into a high-profile, you know, high-workload situation could work in this situation.
It might work in normal situations.
And how long will it take before John Brennan is indicted?
Anyway, so don't get mad at me.
I am the Dilbert Filter messenger to tell you that if there's a lot of people involved and it's complicated, it's going to take way longer than you want it to.
Does everybody agree with that?
Just that.
We're all equally frustrated.
But whenever you have this complexity and this setup, it's always going to take longer than you want.
And that would be sort of normal, just normal life.
Anyway.
So apparently, according to Wall Street Apes on X, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, this is Wall Street Apes framing of it.
admits the Somalians were imported to vote Democrat.
Essentially, he did.
He said, quote, well, the Somali community is critical.
In my own election, I wouldn't be in office without the help of the Somali community.
Now, that alone is not illegal.
But we do know that the Somali community has made a difference, not just in Minnesota, but also in Ohio and Virginia, maybe some other places.
So at what point does it become illegal?
It's not illegal to have people legally enter the country.
If they entered legally and then they were legally allowed to vote, it would just be a good strategy, but it wouldn't be illegal, right?
However, did you know?
Scott Pressler was reporting this yesterday.
And just think about the fact that what I'm about to tell you, you probably did not know.
And it's been true for a while.
That if you work for a building, so if you're an employee of some large apartment building, it doesn't matter what kind of employee, you can vouch for an unlimited number of people who live in the building or allegedly live in the building.
You can vouch that they are legally allowed to vote, even if they don't have ID.
So in other words, if I understand this correctly, the janitor of a big building could vouch for every person in the building, even if every one of them had been illegal.
And that's actually a written law in Minnesota.
It's a law.
Now, when that law got passed, what was anybody thinking?
How in the world, yeah, there's some paperwork to vouch.
How in the world did anybody think that was for anything but cheating in the election?
What would be the other reason?
You know, usually the Democrats say, well, we don't want to suppress voting, so we want to make it easy to vote.
There's no way.
There's no way that that particular law was to stop suppression of voting.
That was purely to make it easier to cheat.
I would say, you can't say that any other way.
Well, are any other states or cities having problems with fraud?
Oh, surprise.
Real clear investigation says that there was some guy, a city official in Austin, who had, let's see, given a bunch of fake contracts to friends that were fairly gigantic, had been doing it for a while.
So let's see how much he gave.
He was using the city credit card, which he was allowed to use for city services.
But instead of doing city services, he used it to pay 30 different vendors, but the city auditor could only verify that eight of them were even real companies.
And of the real companies, do you think those were relatives too?
Or people who gave me kickbacks?
So most of the money, or a lot of it, went to places that appeared to be fake.
At the same time, The guy who was doing this was earning over half a million dollars a year in salary.
So he was overpaid, and he was just massively doling out the city credit card to his presumably fraudster friends.
Now, how long ago was the first time you heard me say this, that all local government is criminal?
All local government is criminal.
And the reason is this, because there's always somebody who's in charge of who gets the money.
And there's never enough audits, let's say security, to stop it from happening fraudulently.
So again, a lot of money involved, people involved, time goes by, poor auditing procedures.
Was this predictable?
Yes.
If you took a dart and threw it at a map of the United States and hit any city, you don't think this is happening anywhere else?
I'll bet some form of this, maybe not as bad, but I'll bet you some form of this is 100% in every city.
100%.
Because whoever has the wallet will be just infinitely approached by people who say, you know, if I got a little bit of what's in that city wallet, I'll bet you a lot of people would donate to your campaign.
There's no way this system could produce.
If you saw it on paper, if somebody said, we've never had a city before, but we're going to invent a thing called a city, and here's how it will be run.
And you simply just drew on paper who has the control, who's watching it, how money flows, how money is allocated.
Anybody smart would know that that was a settle for fraud.
So the cities are designed in a way that guarantees fraud, guarantees it.
And sure enough, that's what we see.
Well, here's a story about further layoffs in the media world.
According to the RAP, entertainment and media layoffs are up 18%.
And 17,000 jobs were slashed in 2025.
Now, what they mostly mean is the traditional media.
So there have been some mergers and cutbacks and stuff.
So the traditional media took a hit.
But I would argue that that's not the bad news it looks like because the independent journalists and the independent media, and I would be part of the independents, vastly increased.
So it's not really a story about less media employees.
It's more a story about less traditional fake news, stuff we don't want to see media, and way, way, way more Nick Shirley's and Scott Adams's and people who are doing a show independently.
So I think that is an evolution, not some kind of a problem.
And I love the fact that the jobs that are being created are being created by the people creating them.
So it's not like a boss had to create a company that hired people.
It's more like people like me said, well, how happens if I turn this camera on and start talking?
Can I monetize that?
Yep, turns out I can.
Well, according to SciPost, Karina Petrova, there's a study that says that shocking headlines make people skeptical, but that over time they come to believe the thing that was the shocking headline.
Does that surprise you?
So the idea is when you first see like a headline that says shocking thing happened here or there, and then you read it, you're like, well, you know, I don't know.
I'm not sure that's true.
Yeah, everybody says everything's shocking.
So you automatically put some critical thinking on a headline that just seems a little overdone, but that over time, you forget where you saw the headline and you start thinking it must be a fact.
So you remember the story, but you won't remember your initial skepticism.
So it makes it believable over time.
I think probably only if you hear it repeated.
All right.
We talked about this before, but this just blows my mind.
So San Francisco, a city you would associate with being lax on crime, right?
So San Francisco, most people would agree, left and right, that they would be soft on crime compared to other places.
But despite being soft on crime, apparently they have this license plate reading technology called FLOC, F-L-O-C-K.
And it can read license plates.
And it has, I've got about 500 of them in major roadways in San Francisco, around San Francisco.
And that is centralized.
It must be in other cities too.
So they have a centralized nationwide database of more than 1 billion license plate reads each month.
Now, they're being sued by someone who doesn't want them to be able to track you if there's no warrant.
So if there's no reason to track you, at least one individual is suing because he says that should only be, they should only track you if they have a warrant.
And these are warrantless.
So apparently you can, in most cases, you could track a car in San Francisco from wherever it starts to wherever it ends up.
How comfortable are you with that?
Because remember, it's tracking everyone.
Well, how in the world do you stop people from tracking their spouse?
Don't you think that every engineer who has access to this thing is already tracking their extra where their ex goes when they go to work?
Probably this would put an end to cheating.
But it's weird that the most lenient city would be doing this of all things.
Now, so far, all I know about it is it tracks license plates.
I don't believe it does facial recognition, but it would be easy to add it.
And I don't believe it has a full AI capability, although obviously that would be coming.
So if you take a 500 camera system and you can track license plates, you can track faces, which I just assume is coming, and you can use AI to make it identify and flag things, you have created quite a monster.
That is a monster where you're not going to know where does that end up.
Like how bad will that become?
If they do it gradually, like, well, it's just license plates, then it doesn't seem as scary.
But once you realize there's nothing to stop them really from adding facial recognition and AI, what in the world could that become?
I don't know.
So we always talk about this California wealth tax, where they're floating the idea in California that some billionaires would have to give up 1% of their wealth for a year for five years.
So in the end, 5% of their wealth would be taken in taxes.
Apparently, I didn't know this, but even Gavin Newsom opposes it.
But Bill Ackman, so it might not happen because if the governor opposes it, he could be told.
Bill Ackman warns that no one would say if California implements a wealth tax.
Now, we've already seen some billionaires in California say they're going to move, and it could be a bluff.
Maybe they prefer to stay, but they're making sure that people know that if they do go, you know, everybody would go.
And it would turn California into something that hasn't been.
But there have been some other options for raising money that have been raised.
First of all, let me say the obvious.
No one wants higher taxes when his state is wasting the money.
No one wants higher taxes in general, but in the current context of massive fraud, it's going to be really hard to increase taxes on anybody if you know that it's just being wasted.
So we'll see how that goes.
But some people have proposed that if you just raise the sales tax, it would be a more reasonable approach.
The idea is that it's automatically progressive.
So if a billionaire buys a boat, a yacht, that's a lot of sales tax.
But if you get a stick of gum, it's a little bit of sales tax, but not much.
However, the sales tax in California is already insanely high.
I forget what it is.
So I'm not in favor of a sales tax.
It's just an alternative.
However, even billionaires agree with the following, that billionaires have a way to avoid taxes that ordinary people don't.
And that maybe that needs to be closed.
Did you know how that works?
I used Grok to give me a little tutorial on how the billionaires avoid taxes.
And let me see if I can explain that in a way you would understand.
So a normal person gets normal income and they pay income tax.
A billionaire might not have income at all.
They might just have a lot of assets.
So one of the ways that they can avoid paying income taxes is to make sure that their businesses do not give them a salary, so there's no income.
But where do they get the money to spend if they don't have an income?
And the answer is they can make, they can take a loan.
So they can go to a bank and they can say, give me a large personal loan.
Now, it wouldn't be large compared to their assets.
It would still be tiny, tiny, but it would be large to us.
And it would be so much money that they could spend it like income by mansions and yachts and stuff without any income.
The bank would say, can you pay back this loan?
And the billionaire would say, are you kidding?
I have, I'm worth $20 billion.
I'm only asking you for half a billion.
So the bank says, that's a pretty good deal.
We're definitely going to get paid back.
Not that really, but probably.
So they give them a loan, and it's collateralized by the assets of the billionaire.
So the bank is happy.
They always know they can seize the option or seize the mansion or seize the stock if something goes wrong.
Then the billionaire spends the personal loan just because it's their cash.
They can do whatever they want.
It's not a business loan, it's a personal loan.
Sort of like a line of credit on your house, but just the big version.
Then, when they die, the billionaire, they can transfer those assets to their heirs at a stepped-up fair market value, and even the heirs avoid taxes.
Now, I believe there's still a, what do you call it, a estate tax.
So if you didn't know, the estate tax over a certain level is 40%.
So when I die, if I do, my estate tax above a certain dollar amount will be taxed at 40%, which is pretty egregious, but it's happening.
Anyway, did that make sense?
I never really spent two minutes looking into why billionaires don't pay taxes.
So I would agree that that seems like a loophole that needs to be closed.
Seems like it.
Well, according to the Epoch Times, the CEO of the IRS, I didn't know they had a CEO, says that 94% of middle-class taxpayers will see tax relief next year.
So that would be under the big, beautiful bill, I guess.
Do you believe that?
I'm primed to never believe anything about taxes going down.
I always think taxes are going up, even if all the reporting is going down for some people.
So I'm going to say maybe, maybe, but probably not.
So it doesn't matter who's president.
It doesn't matter what the law is.
I never believe taxes will go down.
Well, did you know, there's a study, SciPost is writing about this, of Vladimir Hedry, that mass shootings increase the local turnout for voting, but do not shift presidential choices.
How many of you would have known that without looking at a study?
That if there's a mass shooting in the news, locally, you might get a higher turnout for a vote, but they don't change what they vote for.
The people who wanted Democrats to get rid of guns still want it.
And the Republicans say, well, it's the cost of being in a free country.
Don't take my guns.
So they both get more votes, but it doesn't change the mix.
They just asked me.
I knew that.
Well, Daniel Greenfield of Front Page Magazine is reporting that the MSNBC, which is now rebranded as MS Now, the ratings have collapsed, as you probably know.
How bad is it?
We'll see.
According to Nielsen Media Research, this is fairly new, Fox News averaged 2.72 million prime time viewers and 287,000 viewers in the key demographic, 25 to 54.
So that was up.
It was up 14%.
And the key demo group was up 18%.
That's pretty damn good.
How did MSNBC do?
Oh, oh, oh, sorry.
They averaged 920,000, 923,000, down 25% since 2024.
And only 81,000 in the key demo that was down 39%.
Wow.
And CNN did even worse.
Now, the reporting doesn't give reasons.
Would you like to know some reasons why MS Now is down and Fox News is up?
Well, I say this a lot, but MS Now has bad producers and their honor talent looks mentally insane.
Right?
If you look at any show on MS Now, it's poorly produced.
It'll be a table of people who look crazy just yelling at each other.
Rachel Maddow looks like she just has mental illness.
And they just seem a little weak and weird and just somebody you don't want to watch.
But also, none of the shows are engineered to be as interesting as Fox.
So if you've never watched the show called The Five on Fox, you haven't seen what good producing looks like.
So everything from the selection of the cast to how many there are to how they always have the one person who's sort of the foil, the Democrat foil.
Everything about that is well designed.
And the people don't look mentally insane.
So over time, you can completely see how Fox News could, and they do, they attract people from the other side.
But if you're a Republican and you turn on MS Now, you just go, what the, ugh, what the hell?
It's just all poorly produced.
So, and poorly produced, and they don't have as good a host.
They don't have a Greg Gofeld, for example.
Right?
Who is a Greg Gofeld?
They just don't have one.
Makes a big difference.
Well, here's a weird story I don't understand.
So are you aware that in Iran, I guess this week there are massive street protests and the streets are full of people who are bad at the regime.
Now, I think this happened before, but it didn't turn into anything.
Yeah, Dana Perino, Jesse Waters, every one of them are more talented than anything you see on MS Now.
So at the same time, the Iranian public is doing some massive protests.
In Israel, according to the Jerusalem Post, Mossad, so that would be Israel's intelligence agency, they posted a message on X in Farsi, the language of Iran, urging demonstrators to act, saying that it was with them in the streets.
It's with them in the streets.
And said, go out together into the streets.
The time has come.
It said it will join them.
It says, we are with you, not only from a distance and verbally, we are with you in the field.
So Mossad is admitting that they're literally on the ground participating with the protesters.
Now, does that seem like a good idea to you?
I'd love to know why they thought that was a good idea.
Because everything I know about people is that the Iranians would be maybe plenty happy to find their own way away from the regime.
But as soon as the country that's bombed them says, you know, I'm with you, doesn't that immediately make them bond together and say, wait a minute, wait a minute.
This is up to us here.
How in the world is that good for Israel?
I don't understand.
Maybe, I'm just speculating.
Maybe Mossad thinks that if the Iranians think they have support from even Israel, that it would embolden them.
That's not the way things usually work.
Usually it works the other way.
So, you know, they're not stupid, obviously.
Fake news?
No, it was actually on the Mossad X account.
So the X account is, I think that's real.
Anyway, it's either very clever or it's not.
I don't know.
I'll just go watch that one.
According to TechCrunch, the number of followers you have on social media has never mattered less.
Now, here they're talking about people monetizing.
But apparently, the thing that moves your traffic is not how many followers you amassed.
It has to do with how good your clipping service is.
So apparently there are all these young people who are making clips.
And that's the way people discover things now.
They call it a teenage clipping army.
So it's now a well-developed market.
So if you were an independent internet producer, you could amass a very large following.
Let's say in my case, I've got 1.3 million followers on X.
But still, even with 1.3 million followers, a lot of people who follow me don't see my content.
And I'm not alone.
You know, people have been complaining about this for a while.
That they amass all these followers, and they can tell that the followers are not seeing their content.
But what they are seeing, or what people are seeing, is clips.
Now you may have noticed that there are more clips from my content than you've ever seen before.
I don't pay for that, in case you're wondering, right?
But you've seen, yeah, you've seen Jay and Jason, Jason Cohen.
You've seen some other people clipping me, and that does make a big difference sometimes.
It just depends if the clip goes viral.
So in case you're wondering, I do not pay for a clipping service of teenagers.
Well, did you hear the story that apparently earlier this month, the CIA launched a military attack on a base, like a base or a port in Venezuela, and it blew up some shit.
And we never heard of it.
But the weird part is, Venezuela didn't mention it.
How in the world did we attack a land-based major facility in Venezuela weeks ago and Venezuela never mentioned it?
Yeah.
How in the world?
But apparently, Trump wasn't happy about that, so he mentioned it on a radio show.
And he said that they destroyed, quote, a big plant or facility where ships come in.
And then he was asked who did it, and he was shy about it, which everybody assumes means the CIA.
And then apparently, Trump wanted Venezuela to know about it or the world to know about it, so he outed it.
Some in the CIA are not happy that he owned it.
But obviously, we didn't intend it to be a secret because we would have assumed Venezuela would have mentioned it, but they didn't, so he did.
Anyway, on the Venezuela side, I'm loving this story about the, well, let me give you some context.
Have you ever watched a movie or a TV show where the villain was the interesting one?
And then you found yourself rooting for the villain and you didn't feel good about yourself?
Like, I can't root for the villain.
Well, I'm having that experience in the real world because one of the tankers is empty, so there's no oil in it.
But the U.S. was going to board and seize a tanker that was leaving Venezuela.
And the reason we had the authority to grab it is that it was allegedly misidentifying itself and maybe had a fake flag.
But instead of surrendering, which you would expect a tanker to do if the entire, if the U.S. Navy told you to slow down, we're going to board you, you would not expect them to run for it because they know they can't outrun us, right?
But these are the bad guys.
Yeah, I'm just using my analogy of bad guys.
So the bad guys decide to do a U-turn.
Instead of surrendering, they're going to run for it.
Now, to me, first of all, I thought, how in the world could that work?
But now there's a new twist.
Apparently, they painted a Russian flag on the side of it to pretend that they were a Russian flag ship.
Now, apparently, this slowed down our Navy because we didn't want to seize a Russian flagged ship.
We wanted to seize it if it was misidentified, but we can't prove it's misidentified because we don't know for sure if Russia said, okay, yeah, you're Russian.
You know, there's a process by which you would re-flag, but there's nothing to stop Russia from saying, all right, yeah, sure.
Yeah, if you want to, just say you're Russian.
And then they paint a Russian flag on the side of the ship, and then they can't be taken down.
Again, I'll put it in the context of, I don't want to root for the bad guys, but if they get away with this, that's pretty good.
That's pretty good.
I don't think it makes much difference to the United States whether they get away with it or not.
But if somebody actually figured out how to thwart the U.S. Navy by painting a poorly produced flag on the side of the ship, I would have a little bit of respect for that in the bad guy way.
Well, there's a story that says, according to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's now out of politics, she says that when she tried to get Trump to agree to release the Epstein files, that part of that conversation involved Trump saying, and remember, this is Marjorie Taylor Green, she's the one that heard it, that if they release him, quote, his friends will get hurt.
Now, that needs a lot more context, doesn't it?
Because if the only reason that Trump doesn't want the Epstein files released is because his friends would get hurt, that might not be a good reason.
But if he also knows that his friends are innocent, then you would care.
I think you would care if your friends got hurt.
And I don't disagree with that impulse to protect your friends, if you know that they're not guilty of anything.
I suspect, though, that's not the one and only reason he doesn't want released.
I suspect that the intelligence agencies are behind some of the suppression, I think.
So it seems likely to me that the CIA would suppress anything that was bad for them forever, but they would allow anything that was bad for Trump's friends to be released.
So if Trump says it would be bad for my friends, he might be leaving out the part that says you're not going to learn anything useful because the CIA is definitely not going to show you that.
And they do have the power to block anything.
So I would wonder if there's more context to his comments.
So I do agree that if he knew, and he probably does, that nothing good could come out of it, except it would hurt his friends, but in return, nothing good could come out of it.
What are you going to do?
What would you do if you knew nothing good could come out of it, except that it would hurt your friends?
I don't know.
I might block it.
I don't think that's the worst impulse in the world.
Anyway, I guess January is the month where we have to worry about the government shutting down over healthcare being continuously funded or not.
But Polster Frank Luntz thinks that it would be bad for Trump if it doesn't get funded.
I guess that means bad for Republicans in general because Trump won't be running again.
But do you believe that?
Do you think that if the Republicans say no, it's a waste of money, we're not going to fund it for another three years, do you think that that would hurt the Republicans more?
The polling seems to suggest yes, but I wonder if that's real.
Because I think people just always just defer to their side.
So if the Republicans shut down things, I don't know.
I can see how that would be bad for Republicans, but not guaranteed.
All right.
One more sip of water.
One more short story, and it looks like I got through it today.
So there's a former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, who's now on Russia's Security Council, who said about Zelensky, he was talking about the attack on Putin's residence.
He said that Zelensky was, quote, trying to derail the settlement of the conflict.
And then Medved said that Zelensky, he wants war.
But here's the provocative part.
Well, now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life.
How would you like to be Zelensky and allegedly, but we don't know, allegedly tried to assassinate Putin in his residence.
And knowing that Putin is the most assassinating guy in the world, maybe not counting Israel.
So Israel does assassinate anybody they can get to.
But even Israel didn't assassinate the supreme leader.
So if you were going to try to assassinate somebody and it didn't work, the most dangerous person you could miss would be Putin.
He would definitely chase you to the end of the earth to assassinate you back.
Am I right?
Especially if Zelensky's out of power.
The minute that Zelensky is no longer the leader of Ukraine, which has to happen someday, I think Putin is going to give the green light to all of his assassinators to throw him off a balcony somewhere.
So when Medvedev says, well, now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life, that's probably true.
I don't think there's enough security in the world that could protect Zelensky from Putin.
And maybe even the Ukrainians would kill him first for making the deal, I don't know.
But if you were Zelensky, the only way you have to survive is to stay in power.
So that's a problem.
That's my advice.
Never assassinate or attempt to assassinate the most revengey assassinating guy in the world.
Now, my other question is this.
Apparently, we know that Putin has not lived in any of his residences for three years, specifically because they're harder to defend.
And that he's been using an apartment in the Kremlin because it's easier to defend.
Now, do you think that Ukraine was not aware of that?
So what would be the point of blowing up a residence that has zero chance of having Putin inside it?
Is it because he has a family they're going after?
That doesn't seem like a good plan.
So I'm a little bit skeptical about why that happened.
You know, I did say that it would make sense to do a false flag if you were Russia and you wanted to prolong the war or you wanted to do a decapitation strike on Zelensky.
It would be a good false flag to say he started it.
But did he?
Was it a real assassination attempt?
Do you think they had the ability to get an asset all the way in there, but they didn't have the ability to know he wasn't there?
Why would you even do the attack if apparently people knew he was never there?
So something about this doesn't add up, but I don't know what it is.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, looks like I made it.
That is my show for today.
Yesterday I missed because I had a coughing attack that lasted a while.
But so far, no coughing today.
And we're wishing well for Victor Davis Hansen.
Apparently, he's got some major medical problems.
And so give him a thought today.
Russia has attempted to assassinate Zelensky several times.