Slow news day, but I'm slow too. Perfect fit.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, AI Hype Awareness, Tesla Car Rental, Putin Residence Attack, Palmer Luckey, China Unsafe For Business, Ro Khanna, CA Wealth Tax, Gavin Newsom, Newsom CA Missing Billions, US Homicide Decrease, Anti-White Harvard, Traitor Tim, Somali Fraud, $1.5 Trillion Annual US Fraud, AG Pam Bondi, Epstein Documents, Meta Scam Ads Allegations, Climate Change Censorship, Jack Smith Deposition, 2020 Election Rigging, J6 Insurrection Hoax, Eric Swalwell, Macroharder, Elon Musk, Smart Phone's Future, Iran Street Protests, PBM, Pharmacy Benefits Manager, Scott Adams Health Update~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~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.
Not much news today, but we'll do the best we can.
Come on in.
And while you're streaming in, this would be a perfect time to remind you why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip.
And all you need for that is a cup of remongering glasses, tankard, Schelzerstein, a canteen, sugar flask of festival of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dope meeting of the day.
The thing that makes everything better is called the simultaneous set happens.
No.
So, so good.
Well, let's check in on the news.
It's the first day of the year.
If you don't have your Dilbert calendar, believe it or not, you could still hurriedly get one by the end of, I don't know, probably just take a few days.
You wouldn't miss much.
Well, there's a new robotic skin for robots.
So researchers have developed a neuromorphic robotic electronic skin.
So apparently the skin that you put on your robot could judge intensity, danger, and injury risk.
So do you think that's going to be the killer app for robot skin?
Would you get a robot with skin just because it's easier at identifying pain?
It seems mean.
It would be mean to the robot.
I think it's slightly more, slightly more likely that the killer app will be sex.
Because it's no fun to have sex with a robot if you're just banging metal.
But what if the robot could feel every sensation?
Are you telling me that if you made the robot soft enough and you gave it a skin so it could it could act as though you're doing something good to it?
Like, ooh, ooh.
Are you telling me that's not the killer app?
Of course it is.
Of course it is.
But do you know why the robot industry keeps talking about hands, you know, really good hands.
And they keep talking about stuff like skin.
But what they're not talking about, because they can't do it, is real intelligence.
So we'll see what happens from that.
There's an article in Arts Technica talking about how this might be the year that AI gets sort of, I won't say debunked, but that the skepticism about AI will be a little more obvious.
So after, we've got, what, two years of AI and it still can't do actual generic reasoning.
So, but it's got good hands and it could do some results.
It might have good skin, but it can't get past the hallucinations and it doesn't look like there's any way to do it that we know of.
If there was a way to do it, meaning make the AI actually intelligent like we want it to be, you would already see it.
There's no way you wouldn't have seen it by now.
So I think the rest of the world is catching up with what is hype and what is real.
Now I'm going to take some credit for being one of the first people to say, after I played with the large language models a little bit, I was one of the first people to say, uh-oh, this doesn't look like you could ever have a path to general reasoning.
And now I would say that I went from something like, you know, in the 5% of opinions to more like the 75%.
So I'm going to take a win for that prediction.
Tesla apparently is now going to offer a car rental service in Michigan that has no dealers and no middlemen.
And for $60 a day, you could apparently just go in and get a new vehicle.
You'd probably use an app or something to reserve it.
But why wouldn't you do that?
If I had a rental company near me where I didn't have to talk to anybody at the counter, and for $60, I could go get a self-driving car.
It wouldn't matter if I had a regular car.
I would still rent a car because the self-driving car would be so much better.
Apparently it's limited to where I could go and we don't know if there'll be others, but it seems like one of the best ideas Tesla's had.
Renting a self-driving car without the middleman.
So remember my skepticism about the story that Ukraine had tried to kill Putin by bombing his residence?
Remember what I said about that?
I said, there's something wrong with this story.
This doesn't look right.
Because Ukraine would have certainly known he wasn't there.
So why would he do it?
And now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that according to the U.S. intelligence people, there was no attack on his residence that was made up.
And so what they do say is that something was attacked deep in Russia, but it wasn't the residence and it wasn't even that close.
So did you wonder about the fact there were never any photos?
You never saw a photo of the damage?
Now maybe that was for security reasons.
But, you know, when I said it was a false flag, people questioned me.
And maybe you're right about that.
If there's only one thing better than a false flag, it would be a false flag that never happens.
Because then Putin gets to claim something happened without any damage.
Nobody died.
He can just say, oh, let's just say he attacked my residence.
And then he's got a little more propaganda for attacking back.
Yeah.
So I don't think, I don't think it was a planned false flag.
I think it was an opportunistic false flag.
That once something blew up nearby, somebody had the idea, hey, why don't we say he attacked the residents?
Propaganda.
So I saw an interview with the founder of Andrew, Palmer Lucky, and he was talking about the risk of China infiltrating your hardware.
Here's something I didn't know.
There were multiple times we discovered actual wiretap electronics in product samples we were given.
So apparently China gives them samples of stuff.
Then we look at it, it's literally wiretap.
He said the risks apply to everything that's made with Chinese components, from computers, servers, phones, drugs.
He said the super micro incident in the United States were certain server farms that had Chinese components.
Here's the fun part.
Chinese components smaller than a grain of rice were stealing very sensitive information from the computer.
And then he asked, how many Chinese computers exist in critical utilities and infrastructure and military?
He reckons millions at least.
Millions.
So here's another example where whatever you thought was how bad it was, and the it that I'm talking about is fraud or debt or anything else.
As soon as you think you know how bad it was, you find out it's a million times worse.
A million times worse.
I would not have even been able to imagine that they had put components the size of a grain of rice in everything they shipped.
So that's what Wake Up felt.
Well, speaking of that, in China, according to Newsmax, Trump is saying that we set a world record in attracting investment to the United States, and that we attracted more investment to the U.S. than China attracted.
And he says that's entirely because of tariffs.
Now, I think it's true that the recent surge in investments is entirely because of tariffs.
So I'm going to give him the yes on that.
But you might remember that in around 2018, when I lost my stepson to Fentanyl, that I started persuading as hard as I could that China was unsafe for business.
Now, I think that made a dent.
So I think there was a priming that happened so that the businesses were already disinclined to put their money there if they had a choice of putting it somewhere else.
So between the persuasion that China is unsafe for business, which was started out as me just saying it and people telling me I was crazy, almost nobody agreed.
There were a few people who knew what China was up to that did agree that China was stealing all of our IP and spying on us and had bad intentions.
But for the most part, people said, scott, scott, scot.
There's no way this spigot is going to get turned off.
There will only be more investment in China.
And I disagreed.
So here we are.
The investment in the U.S. seems to be far exceeding that in China at the moment.
But I will agree that the tariffs are the prime reason for that at the moment.
So I saw a post by Cole Morris on X.
It started with, why do people believe that taxing billionaires, which is what California wants to do, more is suddenly going to fix all our problems.
And I've been waiting for this.
Somebody finally did the math.
So if you do the math and you took the top six billionaires in California and you took 5% of their wealth, how much would you get?
Well, you'd get about $94 billion.
That means the deficit would be $1.7 trillion instead of $1.8 trillion.
Now, that would be for the whole country, I think, not for California.
So there's actually no mathematical way that taxing the billionaires gets us to some kind of stable situation.
At best, you could bring down the deficit for one year.
That's it.
And you'd be right back to where you were.
Now, the fact that RoConna was pushing this idea was really disappointing because, as I've said, I thought he was one of the smart ones.
But it looks like maybe he's getting talked out of it a little bit by the people who are clearly smarter than he is.
And now he's in favor of doing some kind of hearing in California to find out where all the fraud was.
And I would ask you this.
When is a hearing ever fixed anything?
And apparently this put him in sharp conflict with Governor Newsom, who I read today had answers for all the missing money.
So according to Newsom, according to Postnets, all of those billions of dollars that people say are missing are not missing at all.
No, that's fake news.
They know exactly where the money is.
The bullet train's on track.
And nothing went wrong and all the money was well spent.
Things would be far worse if they didn't have the money.
So you think that nothing, you think nothing got better.
But he would argue that it would have been much worse without all that money.
Now, how in the world can he run for president with these, let's say, allegations over?
Maybe he just lies.
Maybe that just works every time.
Maybe all you have to do is, that's not true.
You just make it up.
And that might be enough because we've gone for years with not knowing the truth about anything.
Why would that change now?
So there's some thinking that Roe Connor wants to run for president.
So that will put him in conflict with Newsom.
And Newsom's got to hide.
He's got to hide from those allegations somehow.
Well, would you be surprised?
I think the answer is no.
That the fraud is worse than you thought.
According to Wall Street Apes, Minnesota has uncovered a new scam where regular homes are being registered as assisted living facilities, but they're fakes.
Who is surprised at that?
Or that they're receiving 15 times the payments of other programs.
They've got all these shell companies and basically the whole thing is fraudulent.
I'm not surprised.
As I've told you many times now, if it's possible to steal, and a lot of people are involved, there's a lot of money involved, there will be fraud every time.
So this should have been something we could have seen from a mile away.
Here's some more fakeness according to unusual whales on X.
The U.S. ended its 2025 with the largest one-year drop in homicides ever recorded.
Do you believe that?
do you believe that 2025 was the biggest one-year drop in homicides well i'm getting some people saying there's no sound but i think they're taking me
One of you who has my texts text me right now, and there's no problem with sound, right?
Okay, that's what I thought.
But it seems to me in our fraudulent world that the odds of the data being fake is much higher than the odds that we set record in reductions of murder.
What do you think?
Do you think it's even likely that this is true?
Well, you know, it could be.
Maybe.
But when we see that every other, it seems like every other source of data is fake.
Did we not know, did we not know that the police department were somehow faking their data?
I don't know how you'd fake murder, but I don't believe it.
Might be true.
All right, here's a take that you couldn't make a couple of years ago, but now it's happening.
According to a user named Taya on X, Harvard actually put in writing its policy of sending white men to the bottom of the pile when considering, you know, admissions, et cetera.
Now, and Taya says they deserve everything that's coming, but that's not going too hard.
A user named Hunter Ashe, who is evidently a white man on X, he said, if Harvard hates my people, I want it leveled to the ground.
They produce useful output, but clearly they'll do their best to direct any power those results produce against me.
So I'm against them.
We are not obligated to fund our open and explicit enemies.
Wow.
You know what?
He convinced me that if Harvard went out of business tomorrow, I would be better off because they're literally my enemy.
They have a very clear intention.
They have a very clear intention of destroying the white man demographic forever.
So why should I ever allow them to make even one inch of progress?
So yes, I'm completely in favor of Harvard going out of business.
All right.
I saw a post by William Wolfe on the same topic.
He said that white guilt has been one of the most destructive forces of the 21st century.
Here's what you couldn't say a little while ago, but you can say it now.
You could say now that much of the progress of humankind came from very smart white people working very hard.
I am not a scientist, so I've never invented anything to change the world, right?
So I'm not taking credit for being a white guy just because other white guys did good stuff.
Nevertheless, it is a fact that white guys contributed a lot to civilization.
Now, not to take anything away from some other demographic groups.
But remember, I'm not claiming any kind of credit for being a white guy.
What I did, I'm proud of what I did, but I didn't invent the microchip, and neither did you.
So if you took away, and this is what's happening, if you use DEI to stunt the progress of white men, just purely mathematically, you're going to destroy civilization, or you're going to degrade it back to a level that none of us will want to live in.
So I think you can say that now, that the cost of DEI is not that it just set back a generation, well, I would say several generations of white men.
It's just that I don't think people understand that there was a very small percentage of white men who were responsible for a lot of the problems.
Could somebody put in the fucking comments that the sound is fine, so shut the fuck up about the sound, please?
In the comments, just tell these people that it's working.
There might be one of the platforms that's not working.
So if they have to change platforms, go ahead and do it, but there's nothing wrong with the sound.
So there's nothing that's going to happen on my end that will change what we're doing.
Okay?
Thank you.
Have you noticed on X that Elon Musk has given a new nickname to Tim Wals?
He calls him Traitor Tim.
Traitor Tim.
Thank you.
I think it's ticky.
And the reason he's a traitor goes beyond whether he's just involved in the fraud, but that the fraud would go to Somalian terrorists.
And I do wonder about all of his paid trips to China when he was younger.
There's no way that that was just innocent.
There's no way that was innocent travel to China.
He didn't pay for it.
And they were obviously using him as a tool.
Or worse, I mean, at the very least, he was a tool.
Now, I do think that Elon is on the right track.
And there will be two hearings coming up.
In January 7th, the Minneapolis or the Minnesota state reps will be talking to who, the Oversight Committee.
So the Oversight Committee is going to talk to Tim Wals and Keith Ellison.
That won't be till February.
Now, I'm not sure, has anybody had the experience of watching the Oversight Committee fix anything?
I don't know if they do.
Has there ever been a hearing or an oversight meeting in which they had a problem and then they fixed it?
I don't think so.
So I'm not optimistic that'll make a difference, unless the only thing it does is make it more obvious.
Okay.
Thank you.
Sound is good.
All right.
But I will say, it seems like there's no possibility that Walsh was unaware of the fraud.
Would you agree with that?
There's not really any chance he didn't know.
And somebody else pointed this out, few people did actually, that remember when Kamala got $1.2 billion to run and it got absorbed immediately?
Don't you think, now you're just being prickly.
Don't you think that Democrats also steal from Democrats?
What are the odds that Democrats are only stealing from, let's say, taxpayers in general?
I thought this about Soros.
Soros is almost certainly getting ripped off by Democrats.
And now I also think that the DNC is almost certainly being ripped off by Democrats.
Would you agree with that?
I think you would.
You know what I'm getting tired of hearing?
I'm getting tired of seeing people on X say that the fraud we've discovered is, quote, the tip of the iceberg.
That doesn't help.
We're way past that.
Yes, of course it's the tip of the iceberg.
Of course it is.
You don't need to say it anymore.
I saw Mike Lee, based Mike Lee, he thinks we could cut $1.5 trillion out of the budget if Congress stopped funding things that have nothing to do with, that has nothing to do with Congress's powers.
And I'm starting to think that the $1.5 trillion number, which I've seen Elon use, is now going to be the assumed amount of fraud.
And I think that's true.
I think Elon's persuasion is going to make the $1.5 trillion a year look like the actual number that's being stolen.
Now, I don't know if it's bigger or smaller, but I think at least the right is going to start using that as their presumed low number.
Yeah.
And Elon said it was the low number.
Well, you've been waiting for Pam Bondi to get busy, but did you know how much the Department of Justice under her has actually done?
Well, she's reporting today that they're making progress, which I'll tell you about.
Some of my medicine dry mouth.
So I have to stop and sip.
So according to Bondi, 60 people have been convicted of fraud in four Minnesota scams so far.
And 98 have been arrested, the majority of which are of Somali descent.
But is that enough?
So the question I ask is how many people should be arrested?
Is 61% of the problem, the tip of the iceberg?
Or is 60 60% of the problem?
So again, I can't really tell, is that a good scoreboard?
Is that what you would expect?
That by now there would be 60 people just for the Minnesota scams.
So that doesn't even count, you know, all the Russia collusion hoax and overthrowing the government and all that.
But no prominent people yet.
And if you're like me, and I know you are, if you don't see any prominent people get indicted soon, you're going to feel like not enough happened.
Speaking of prominent people, so according to Just the News, the Justice Department still has 5.2 million Epstein documents to review, and that the Department of Justice has 400 attorneys assigned to just the Epstein Review.
What would you be happier about?
Would you be happier if those 400 attorneys were immediately moved to prosecuting people who needed to be prosecuted?
Or would you be happier that the 400 attorneys spend their days looking through useless documents that in the end we won't see any of the good stuff anyway?
And does it seem to you that the number of Epstein documents is increasing, increasing instead of decreasing?
And I'm wondering, how in the hell do the Epstein documents keep increasing?
Have the documents found a way to appropriate?
Here's what I think.
I think if you leave enough Epstein documents in a room, they will start having sex with each other.
And then they will produce offspring, which are like the new documents that they keep finding.
So every time they open the door, they're like, whoa, what have you been up to?
Looks like a lot more documents in here than last time.
So unless the documents have learned how to reproduce, this looks suspiciously like an attempt to slow things down until we run out of steam.
So I don't trust anything about the Epstein documents.
Well, speaking of scams.
Oh, I'm all burpee.
Speaking of scams, the Virgin Islands are suing Meta because they claim that Meta allowed a bunch of scam ads on their platform that scammed lots of people out of money.
And the reason that they allowed it, allegedly, is because Meta made a lot of money by running the ads for the scams.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that the reason they didn't take the ads down is not because they didn't know there were scams, but because they made a lot of money running the ads?
Well, apparently a lot of money was involved, but that doesn't make us know their thinking.
What they claim is that they had an internal review process that sort of prevented them from taking down more than they did, I guess.
We'll see.
All right, according to climate realism, there's a publication called The LAist that wrote an article last week titled, The Poor Are in a Very Bad State.
Climate Change Accelerates California's Cost of Living Crisis.
So believe it or not, even today, a publication is claiming that the prices in California are up, not because of the policies, not because of the policies about climate change, but because of climate change itself, for which I believe there's no evidence whatsoever.
It makes me wonder, do the people who write those articles know they're full of shit and they're just trying to fool you?
Or are they actually so far inside a bubble that they think that the prices are up because of climate change?
Do they really believe that?
Really?
Yeah, I'm pretty deep inside my bubble, but come on.
I thought we're past that.
Meanwhile, along the same lines, according to the no-trick zone, Europe is getting ready for more censorship over climate science and energy.
So apparently they're preparing to go hard on censorship if you say something about climate or energy science that they deem not true.
What?
How do they know what's true?
What makes the European Union the experts on what's true on climate?
There are plenty of people who are also experts who say that it's not the crisis that we thought it was.
So weirdly, Europe believes that more censorship of the truth will save the world.
Do they really?
Or is it just a way to control the big platforms in the United States?
Do they really think, really, that more censorship on that topic is going to be good for us?
It's weird.
All right.
So as you know, Jack Smith, that special counsel, is that what he was?
He's being grilled over the alleged law affair against Trump.
And he was at a House deposition.
And they asked him, he was asked at the deposition, did you develop evidence that Trump was responsible for the violence at the Capitol on January 6th?
And he did not say yes.
So that's a tell.
He did not say they had evidence, but instead, he went with a narrative.
And the narrative is like this, that Trump was free to say that he believed the election was rigged.
That would just be free speech.
But according to Jack Smith, Trump was not free to violate federal law and use knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function.
Now, do you see what's wrong with that statement?
His evidence was based on his own ability to read a mind, because how would he know what Trump believed about the election?
In my opinion, Trump genuinely believed, as I do, that the election was rigged.
Now, even the fact that people may have acted on that, that would still be free speech, right?
Because there's no evidence that he did it for the purpose of targeting a lawful government function.
There's every bit of evidence he did it because he believed it was true that the election was rigged.
And as we get further and further into the post-election environment, it does look like he was right.
So not only was he right, but he had every reason to believe he was right.
But Jack Smith is defending his team because they could read his mind and find out that his real intent was to overthrow the government and that somehow he knew it was a legal election or a non-rigged election.
So the word knowingly was always the biggest part of the hoax.
The January 6th hoax, I'm going to call it a hoax, that there was an insurrection, depended entirely on believing that you could read Trump's mind and that the things he was saying, he knew not to be true.
Even while they look true to me, it looks like he was completely accurate.
And there's no evidence whatsoever that he thought that was a clean election.
None.
So we'll see where that goes.
Well, Eric Swalwell, who you might know as the person who has the worst take in every situation, he's running for governor of California.
And if he becomes governor, he promises he'll make sure federal agents are charged with, quote, kidnapping and assault and will take away their driver's licenses.
That guy has the worst take on everything.
Take away ISIS driver's licenses.
That's just absurd.
But at least he's consistent.
All right.
Speaking of consistent, you probably know that Elon's building a giant AI factory called Micro-Harder with two heart tours at the end to basically crush Microsoft.
So remember when I told you, I guess it has 100,000 supercomputers in it, or will.
And he's going to train Grok so hard that it can do what Microsoft can do just by asking it to do it, I guess.
So remember when I told you years ago that smartphones would become just a dumb phone that could do AI and that the phone would just be a screen and some kind of wireless thing and then sound.
And Elon confirmed that on one of his podcasts that he sees someday that the phone has no apps.
It's just an AI.
And I think this micro-harder is that.
So when he was asked if he would build a phone, he didn't say yes, because I don't think he thinks phones are the future.
I think he thinks this is his future.
So there's a non-zero chance, if this works, that the entire smartphone industry will become whatever Elon wants it to, and he'll own that.
And that would just be one thing he did.
Imagine having so many accomplishments that replacing smartphones with an entirely new technology would just be one of the things he did.
That's just one thing.
So I guess the U.S. military, was it the other day, did strikes on three more alleged narco-terrorist vessels.
And they were traveling as a convoy, so he took them all out.
You know, I don't know about you, but my empathy for anybody else is way down.
I don't know if it's all the fraud or what is probably the fraud.
But when I see that some narco boat was blown up, you know, I think there was a time when I might have been thinking, oh, you know, maybe a little more due process would be good, or do we have to do it this way?
Because I would just have empathy.
But now I don't.
And now I see that when I see that three of them were blown up, I'm like, yeah, why not four?
Four would be better than three.
Is anybody having that?
Is anybody having that experience that your empathy is way down?
I don't want it to be, but events seem to be taking over.
Anyway, over in Iran, it's been several days of street protests that are pretty aggressive.
And I guess some government entities are being attacked.
And the question I wonder is: is this a color revolution, or is this entirely organic?
Do you think Iran is having an organic revolution?
Or of course it's our intelligence people with Mossad, you know, doing the usual color revolution stuff.
Because doesn't every color revolution involve mobilizing people for the streets?
But the part that they don't seem to be able to do is controlling the local press.
So I don't think that's a thing, right?
I don't think anybody's co-opted the local press to say bad things about Komani because they would be killed instantly.
So it doesn't have, as far as I can tell, it doesn't have every element of a color revolution.
But it's got a little bit.
So it does make me wonder how organic that is.
All right.
Speaking of healthcare costs, which we weren't, but let's.
How many of you know what a PBM is?
A pharmacy benefit manager.
Well, probably not most of you, right?
Some of you have heard of it.
But I was looking at an interview with Mark Cuban, who launched cost-less drugs that would avoid these middlemen.
So what the PBMs are, are they're intermediaries, let's call them middlemen, that manage prescription drug benefits for health insurers, employers, and government programs.
So if you were Medicare, Medicaid.
So the idea is that they would lower your healthcare costs while providing a service to the providers of the meds.
The reality is it's a somewhat non-transparent process that puts people in the middle of gigantic money flows.
What would happen if somebody was in the middle of gigantic money flows and you did not have visibility on what they were doing in that middle?
What would happen?
Well, I would argue that 100% of the time, the middlemen would find a way to suck up the extra money and not let you know that's what happened.
So they would pretend, you know, hypothetically, hypothetically, they would pretend they were lowering your costs, while in reality, they would find a bunch of clever ways to siphon off a lot of the money going through.
So I don't know if I've expressed that correctly, but Mark Cuban, with his low-cost Drug plan, the cost plus drugs, apparently cuts out the middleman.
And that is one of the reasons, if not the only reason, that he can offer much lower costs.
Now, do you think you could get the government to remove that middleman process?
Well, probably not.
Probably, remember, there are enough people in the government who are being bribed by the insurance companies, bribed by the PBMs.
I just assume there's a lot of bribery going on everywhere.
I don't know if the government can fix that, because we've known it for a long time, but it's really complicated.
And in complexity, there always hides fraud.
I've told you that before, right?
If something has a lot of money involved and it's really complicated, somebody's stealing your money.
And, or, you know, maybe not illegally, but in effect.
So, as Mark points out, the Democrats have no solution for this PBM thing or for the cost of drugs just in general.
Now, you know that Trump, there's some kind of Trump pharmacy online that you could also get low-cost stuff, and that might end up working with Mark Cuban's entity.
We don't know that that's the case, but they might have something that they can work with together.
So, good on you, Mark Cuban, for surfacing this situation and then actually acting on it.
Because it's one thing to say you're going to do something, and it's another thing to actually do it, and he's actually doing it.
Do you remember when, was it a few years ago, that Bezos and a few other entities said they were going to try to fix healthcare, or at least pharmacosts?
Well, apparently, they gave up because they couldn't figure out how to do it.
But Mark Cuban has not given up, and he's still pushing on that button.
So, good for you, Mark.
If there was any way to help, I guess we would want to.
All right.
I'm always so amused at how many of you know how to cure cancer, but the medical establishment doesn't.
Did you ever think about that?
You're just sitting there in your little home, and you've decided that if I change my diet, my cancer will go away.
Probably not.
Probably not.
Anyway, there's a book coming out.
Washington Examiner's Mark Judge is writing about this.
So, in March, there's going to be a book that explains everything.
It's called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control.
So, the author is this guy, Jacob Siegel.
He's a journalist for Tablet.
And apparently, what this book does, which some people must have gotten a preview of, it explains how information was weaponized against the citizens of the United States.
And that part of the reason that we didn't recognize that we were in this propaganda hoax situation where nothing they were telling us was real, the reason we didn't understand it, especially let's use this example, the Russia collusion hoax.
If we had seen one claim about Russia collusion hoax, we might say to ourselves, ah, that's just a claim, that's nothing.
If only one entity had told us that that stuff was true, and it obviously wasn't, we might have said, oh, but these other entities don't say it's true.
But what happened was, for the first time in American history, I think, that the people who colluded were all of our what we thought were credible organizations.
So you had the fake news saying it was true.
You had the intelligence agencies saying it was true.
You had the FBI, the DOJ, and the entire Democrat machine saying it was true.
I'm talking about the Russia collusion hoax.
Now, that's what I call laundry lists persuasion.
When you don't have anything that's individually persuasive, but you just throw just a fire hose of claims.
And then on top of the fire hose of claims, you have a fire host of previously credible entities that gave up all their credibility to go all in on it because they were so afraid of Trump.
So I call that laundry list persuasion.
So I've explained this before.
If you say Trump did one thing bad, people would discount it.
But if you say he did this and this and this and this and this, people assume that there's truth in there because there's so much.
There's so much smoke, there must be fire.
But that's not the case.
That's just laundry list persuasion.
And I guess this book does a good job of showing how screwed we were.
Well, did you know, according to, let's say, New York Times, that when Trump backed off on funding weapons for Ukraine, it didn't stop our involvement, that the CIA took over.
And they didn't do the same thing that we were doing, but they didn't have their funding cut.
And the CIA helped Ukraine target the most sensitive Russian places they could attack.
So it looks like the CIA helped Ukraine work smarter, not harder.
So instead of raw weapons and raw military, the CIA helped them get just the stuff that was affordable and would make a big difference on the Russian economy.
How many of you are surprised that the CIA just kept doing what they were doing?
Of course they did.
Of course they did.
Now, the indication is that Trump was in favor of that.
So as long as it wasn't obvious what they were doing, he wanted to keep the pressure on Putin.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, there's not much news happening today.
A lot of it looks like a repeat.
Every time I turn on X, it's another claim of another state with another giant fraudulent thing they just discovered.
I'm getting tired of it.
But I am worried that there is no solution for California's debt.
And that however bad I think it's going to get in California, it might get worse.
Now I will say that the one thing we have going for us is the Adams law of slow-moving disasters.
I hope that the disaster, which is California's debt problem and fraud problem, I hope that we've all known about it long enough that somebody is figuring out what to do about it.
And I don't know what that would be.
It doesn't look like it's solvable in any mathematical way that I can understand.
But I would expect that maybe in the next year, maybe two, there's going to be some shock to the system that's beyond anything we've imagined.
Now, I don't know what that is.
It could be maybe we default under debt.
What?
I don't know.
Maybe there's an earthquake.
There's something.
But whatever it is, it's going to have to be big.
And I don't know if we're ready for it.
So it could be.
Well, I mean, what would happen, for example, if the federal government said, here's the deal.
We're just not going to fund $1.5 trillion worth of stuff.
We don't know exactly how much is fraud and how much isn't, but we can't survive unless we stop doing it.
What would happen?
Well, in theory, it would also cut a bunch of things we didn't want to cut, or at least we thought we wouldn't.
But it might be the only way to survive.
So we might have to throw a whole bunch of poor people under the bus.
Oh, Hans, you're so fucking stupid.
Of course I've researched that.
Of course I did.
Stop assuming that I didn't look into my options.
Stop it.
All right.
So no more stupid suggestions.
So I will give you a little bit of a heads up.
I talked to my radiologist yesterday.
He was working on the day before New Year's.
And it's all bad news.
So the odds of me recovering are essentially zero.
So we'll, I'll give you any updates if that changes, but it won't.
So there's no chance I'll get my feeling back in my legs.
And I've got some ongoing heart failure, which is making it difficult to breathe sometimes during the day.
But at the moment, I can breathe, and I'm not in any pain.
However, you should prepare yourself that January will be probably a month of transition, one way or the other.
Now, I haven't made any decisions, but it was all bad news.
No good news at all.
So I will keep doing this as long as it makes sense, because I like doing it.
Keeps me busy.
You know, what's weird is that I have much bigger problems than the stuff I'm talking about in the news.
But I'm so interested in what's happening in the world that it's very engaging.
Totally engaging.
So after the show, I will continue doing a robots read news comic, which I do every day.
I try to.
And I'll try to make some new comics, Dilbert comics.
And I'll just act like nothing's happening.
Well, I'll just pretend I have no problems, which is weirder, it's easier than you think.
Then I'll take some painkillers if I need them.
There's no real limit to what I can take at this point.
And I will probably smoke a massive marijuana because it puts me into a stupor that actually feels kind of good in my current situation.
If I do a full day's work, which I plan to do, I allow myself to enter the stupor zone.
I mean, yesterday, for example, I was doing work and watching the Warriors game.
Is a kite.
It wasn't bad.
The only thing that's really bugging me at the moment is the inability to breathe if I get one of these coughing attacks.
And that could last hours.
It could last eight to twelve hours.
So it's eight to twelve hours of hell, but it's not always hell.
So, but things are changing fast.
So I thought I'd give you a little update on that.
Has anybody gotten an update on Victor Davis Hansen?
Because I know he had some major surgery, but we don't know what that was about.
I hope he's doing better than I am.
Yep, I do appreciate all of your thoughts.
I will probably write down some closing thoughts today, just so I have them.
Just so you can see what I was thinking in my final glide path.
He's recovering?
Good.
Good for him.
Well, I will tell you that my interest and my empathy for all of you and for Americans in general is very high.
So to my final breath, if there's anything I can do to make things better for you, I will definitely do it.
All right, we're past the entertaining part of the show.
And I don't want to get your, I don't want to get you a year off to a bad start.
But there will be more to come.
All right.
People, I'm going to say hi to the locals beloved people privately.