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Morning. Happy Christmas Eve. Jump on in here. I'm doing a lozenge. You all look happy, at least in the comments. A. I love you, too. Great to see you, everybody. All right, we're gonna get ready for your comments now. You know what the best thing to do today is? Best thing to do is to be wrapped in your presence while you're listening to this live stream. So I'm having a. Kind of a serious asthma problem this morning, so I can't promise how long I'll be able to go, but if I have to bail out early, I'm going to turn the sound off so I can cough without bothering you. And we're just gonna hang out, and then maybe I'll come back in, maybe I won't. But today's a lot of hanging out. Okay? So you can just put me on a device, and I'll just be in your living room or wherever the hell you are. And I may or may not be able to talk, but we'll hang out. We'll do the best we can. Okay, We got comments working. We're definitely going to do the simultaneous zip, because I know that's why you're here. Just going to fix this a little bit. A little better angle. There we go. Well, what do you think you need for that? Copper mug or a glass, A tank or cells or style? Canteen, jug of flask, A vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day. The thing makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Oh. You know, I could feel the simultaneity on that. Hey, why is that still on? All right, people, if you're just joining, I've got a little respiratory problem this morning, so we'll do as much as we can, but it might be a short show. And if it is, I won't. I won't turn it off. I'll just hang with you. Okay. Because I might need to use my. My steamer on my lungs. All right, so yesterday. Yesterday I mentioned a bunch of sources that influenced my shell, and I said, I feel like I'm forgetting somebody. And I just wanted to update that with one of my other trusted favorite sources is the Federalist. So anything by Molly Hemingway, anything by Sean Davis. That's good stuff. So I'm also influenced by that. I think it's fun for you to know if you think I'm influential. I definitely take influence from other sources. The better they are the more influential. And the Federalist is right at the top of the list. All right, so this is old news, but there's a funny update. So you probably heard of this summer, the Joe Biden got a $10 million book deal. Well, today somebody was doing some engagement farming and asked what the title of that should be and what do you think? What should be the title of Joe Biden's upcoming book. I would go with either, you know, the thing or a question. I wrote a book. I wrote a book. Or Hunter who. Do you have any ideas? Put them in the comments. What should Joe Biden's book title be? Or should it be? What was that thing you said about pony soldiers? Something about pony soldiers. Oh, well, it won't be Auto Pen, but President Auto Pen. Where am I? How about where am I? All right, that's enough of that. So yesterday I had an interesting experience. I don't know if any of you have experienced this yet, but have you ever. Have you ever talked to somebody immediately after their first experience with the Tesla self driving? There's sort of an analogy to that. I told you a few years ago, the first time I got on an E bike, I couldn't get the smile off my face. Because the difference between an E bike and a regular bike is just. I mean, one of them just thrills you and the other is just a bicycle. But I'll bet you there's something just like that for people who just got done doing their very first ride in a self driving car. So I saw yesterday a few people who had just had their first ride, just got out of the car and they'd done some self driving. You know, just locally, they can't get the smiles off their faces. Apparently the first time you do it is just such an experience that, you know, it's like. It's not like anything else, apparently. So watch for that. Watch for people getting their first full self driving. When I say full self driving, I mean they still have to pay attention, but they don't have to participate. All right, well, the Nvidia director of robotics says that the Tesla self driving is like an AI that passes the physical Turing test. Now the Turing test was passed a long time ago the standard way, but this would be a physical Turing test, meaning that it acts like it's sentient even though it's not. And Elon Musk responded that the best real world AI is their Tesla AI. But he said, you can sense the sentience. Now, I still have not been in a self driving car, so I Don't know if that comment hits or not, but have any of you done the self driving Tesla? And can you confirm that when you're doing it, you can feel the sentience or, you know, almost intelligence? I don't want to say consciousness of the car. Is that true? You can sense the sentience or not? Oh, no. Oh, we got a lot of yeses. You can sense it. All right, good. So speaking of Tesla, so you know, Tesla is building the Cyber Cab, which would be a dedicated vehicle just for self driving, like a cab, basically. But the most shocking thing is that he's improved the production process so much that he thinks they'll be able to produce one of these Cyber Cabs every five seconds in one assembly line every five seconds. So obviously it's highly, highly automated assembly line, but he says you won't be able to get near the assembly line because it'll be moving so fast. Now imagine a world where people like me. You know, I don't think I'll necessarily ever be able to get into an auto cab or a Cyber cab, but wouldn't it be cool to just sit in what, what would be like a little living room? Basically just a tiny living room and it just takes you where you want to go. That is amazing. That's basically this year, end of this year. All right, let's do what I like to do. We're going to test your BS filters. Here's some science, and you tell me if the science is BS or not. According to the University of Texas at Austin, people who help other people know they volunteer or help other people a few hours a week. It may slow the brain aging of the people who are doing the helping. Do you, do you believe that study, that the people who help other people will add to their longevity? Well, maybe. I think that's entirely possible. But how do you rule out the, the more obvious possibility, Correct me if I'm wrong, but are not healthy people doing more of everything? So if you had great health and great vitality and great energy, wouldn't you do literally more of everything compared to people who are not healthy? So I can see why healthy people would volunteer more. They'd just be able to do it. So I'm going to say it might be true, but it certainly would work the other way. Now here's one. Eric Dolan on PsyPost. So he's got. There's some research now that shows that people prefer lower quality news on social media. Does that sound like real science? People prefer lower quality news. Do you believe that. To which I say, maybe. But you know what the biggest question is? Who gets to decide what is low quality news? Low quality? Low quality news according to if it's up to me, do I get to pick which one is low quality? So that one's a B.S. all right. I saw Sirtovich had a post on X today that I very much agree with. He said, all I want for Christmas is for everyone to know is free to set up a custodial account for your children. That would be like a, an account where you could trade stocks and have investments, but you would be in charge of it on behalf of miners and buy into the stock market. We were talking dollars, not millions, blah, blah. Now, I've been seeing a lot of that online. Adam Tom's been talking about, for example, I talk about a little bit. But the, the big benefit here is not just that it creates wealth for the children 18 years later, which would be enough. I mean, if that were the only benefit, it would be worth it. But it teaches the kids the importance of money, but it also gives them sort of a framework for how you manage it and would make them less, will say less intimidated by the financial world because it turns out that just having an account on Charles Schwab and buying and selling some stocks, you could pretty much teach them someone everything they needed to know in one hour and then, you know, reinforce it by, by activity. So I've heard of black Americans complain, rightfully so, that if they don't grow up in a family where somebody can teach them how to manage money, how are they, how are you going to work it out on your own? I mean, you're just going to work that out on your own. It's not really something anybody can do. But if your parents gave you just a little bit of exposure to managing money, such as having a custodial account, you would be less intimidated. And even those things you didn't know how to do, it wouldn't scare you to go figure out how to do them. Does that make sense? So I've always been a stock investor since my 20s, and I don't believe I would have been except that my father talked about it all the time. He was a very small investor, but we talked about it. And so I always thought, well, if my father can do. Can't be that hard. It can't be that hard if my father could do it, because honestly, he was not really a high capability person. Now, later, later in life, I realized that he couldn't do it because he used a stock broker and the stock broker was just absolutely ripping him off. Now, I didn't know that when I was a kid. It was only later, after I was a economics major and I'd learned how the world works, only then did I learn that he should have been putting his money in index funds. And I'm not talking about the managed index funds. Well, no, they're not managed if they're indexed. So I'm not talking about a stock fund. I'm talking about an index fund where it's just a bag of stocks. Stop eating. Unfortunately, I can't get rid of this lozenge because I'd have to stop the live stream. But I'm almost done with it. I completely understand if the chewing is completely bothersome, and I would recommend that you turn off the sound for maybe one to two minutes and then I'll be done with it. But your comment is well taken. Sorry, I'm just crunching the last of it. All right. Well, apparently the UK Met Office, Britain's Met Office, has recently discovered that a whole bunch of their temperature thermometer sites were fake news. So here's what they found out about their temperature sites that are all over the uk, that are the basis for climate change decisions, or at least some of them. So let's say investigators discovered that over 80% of the temperature monitoring sites are classified as junk, with measurement uncertainties of 2 degrees Celsius to 5 degrees Celsius. In other words, some of them don't exist and they're just making up the numbers. Others are in these, what they call heat islands, too close to concrete stuff. And. Their entire temperature measurement situation was completely fraudulent. Does that surprise you? How many times have I told you? If you believe that humans can measure the temperature of the Earth, you must be very young or very inexperienced in the world if you've lived in a Dilbert world, sort of the, you know, the Dilbert filter on everything. You should not be surprised that humans cannot measure the temperature of the Earth no matter how hard they try. It's just something we will never be able to do. It is ridiculous. But we've been told for years, oh yeah, we can totally measure that temperature. I will even go further and say, as I've said a number of times, this hasn't caught out at all. There's something I say a lot on social media that I wondered if it would ever catch on, but not a single person is agreeing with me yet. It goes like this. All data that's important is fake. You don't agree with that? Right. Because you, you think, well, I mean, that's a little bit of hyperbole, isn't it? All data, really all data that matters, is fake. Yep. Now, I would limit that to, let's say, the political, economic realm. It's not true that engineering data is all fake. So if you're measuring, let's say, you know, the reliability of a car or something, that's not necessarily fake, because maybe that's something that one company is doing for itself, has no incentive and a real good way to measure it, but everything in the political or economic domain, and that would be climate change for sure. You could guarantee, without doing any research, that the data is bad. Guarantee it. And the reason is, it always is. You know, you don't even need to know anything about the domain. In every case, data is unreliable, if it matters. Medical data. I heard recently an anecdote of someone who was a top brain surgeon. I forget where was this? I give credit to whoever said this, but something I heard recently. So someone who was a top brain surgeon was asked how accurate the medical information is, and he thought that less than half of what is taught in the medical arts is fake or just wrong half. So even if some of it is true, I guess that would be the other half. How do you know which is the half that's right, unless you're this expert brain guy. So the medical world may not be as bad, depending on how they're measuring it, but probably half of it is fake. And then in the other direction, the University of Graz is saying that the climate models overestimate nitrogen availability. So by this measurement, they would overestimate the CO2 levels or something, even though that's the opposite direction from maybe what the temperature problems are. It just shows you that for years people have been telling me these climate models are real. They couldn't possibly be. They couldn't possibly be, because they're wrong in both directions. Here's a new statistic from the rabbit hole on x 79% of refugees have vacationed in the country they fled from. So if you were doing a count of the number of refugees that came into your country, the ones that came there to save themselves from torture or whatever, imprisonment, you would have found out that 79% of them were fake, probably more, but only 79% of them went back to their dangerous country on vacation. So do you think that there's a reasonable number of the number of immigrants who are escaping their country for safety? No. Any number in that domain would be fake. Here's one. I guess Doge allegedly cut 9% in federal workers. New York Post is reporting that. And then also there's some positive reports that Doge massively improved the Social Security Administration's effectiveness. So they got 65% more business done through telephones and et cetera, and 68 million callers served. And at the same time, the number of claims were driven way down by 35%. So if these numbers were real, it would suggest that Doge was just massively successful so far. Imagine claims, Social Security claims, being driven down by 35%. Does that mean that they would have been fraudulent, or were those valid claims that just didn't get processed? I don't know. But then on top of that, there's reports that Doge saved $214 billion in taxpayer savings so far. If you read the counterpoints, I think it was Peter Baker or somebody. I saw he was debunking that number and saying, that's not a real number. Here's the reasons why. There was chaos, but there really wasn't savings, blah, blah. So here's the big question. I just told you that all numbers and all data that matters is fake. Why would you believe the Doge numbers if you don't believe in any other numbers? Now, I trust the Doge people, and I trust Musk to have the right intention about telling the truth. But do you believe this is the one thing that's accurate? Because that would be surprising, wouldn't it? Because the numbers do matter. And there is apparently more than one way to count everything. So I would say it's probably moving in the right direction in terms of directional change. Probably in the right direction, but it might be an exaggeration how much has been saved so far. Now, one of the things we would be able to count reasonably well would be the number of federal employees. If the number of federal employees went down by 9%, probably believable. But far less believable would be the dollar amounts. But like I said, it's all moving in the right direction, I think. All right, so every single day I wake up and I see news stories about California or Minnesota usually doing some additional form of massive fraud. It makes you wonder, you know, how many of the blue states are the same problem. But apparently California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness, but they didn't have any system in place to track how they were doing. So they know they spent the money, but they don't know if it made any difference because they didn't track it. Come on, you could give somebody $24 billion and then not accurately track whether it works. Oh man. CBS is reporting on this. Apparently California has 171 people homeless and that's 30% of all the homeless people in the entire U.S. now that kind of makes sense. If you live in California, you know that your odds of surviving outdoors are much better than most places. There are places that are warmer and they would be too warm, like Arizona, for example. But the place you would most likely survive on the sidewalk would be California. Then you add on top of that all the friendly policies toward the homeless. Of course we have 30%. It's amazing that we don't have 100%. Actually, probably the only reason we don't have 100% of the homeless is that they can't get here. You know, they don't have to travel here. But why would anybody go anywhere else? So that looks like a problem that's not going to get solved anytime. So I guess the state auditor of California, according to Kevin Kiley, he's a congressman from California, they issued this scathing report and they identified eight separate state agencies just in California as quote, high risk, which means they exhibit serious waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement costing taxpayers billions. So have you ever heard the word auditor as much as you have in the last 30 days? How many of you remember that? I started hitting that word like crazy. Audit, audit, audit, audit, audit. But audits are boring. So it doesn't really catch on with the, you know, the public so much. But I kept hammering on it and now I don't know if I had any influence in causing anything. But you will note that the number of times you hear the word audit and the number of times you hear somebody suggest a lot of thing, I think Chamath from the all in POD did a post on this just yesterday or so and he mentioned the needs for audits. And most of the stories are now audit related if they have to do with money. So that is a step in the right direction. But I'll tell you what, maybe you know the answer to this question. So a couple of days ago I saw a video that I don't know if it's AI or not. And that's what's funny about it. So it was a video of someone asking Governor Newsom about his waste of federal money, I guess. And Newsom starts talking and gesticulating as he does, and it was so word solid, but yet the sentences might have made sense, but it was insanely incomprehensible. Did anybody see that? Was that an AI or was that actually him being presumably stoned out of his mind on something, trying to answer a question and just, just sort of word selling his way through it for like a minute and a half. And it didn't, it didn't end like he starts with the, well, this and that. It just kept going and going and going and going. So I'm curious, did any of you see that? You would know exactly what I'm talking about if you saw it. And was that real? Because it looked like it should have been AI Well, I'm more interested in the AI technology than I am in his answer. Is it so good that I was wondering if it's AI And I couldn't tell. Right. That'll be an open question. Well, you might know this. Steve Hilton, you remember him from Fox News. He had a show on Fox. He's running for governor of California and he notes that California has paid double the national average for electricity and that it's all based on bad policies and climate crisis stuff. And if he becomes governor, he will cut in half your electric bill in California. Now, that's a pretty strong, pretty strong pitch because it has an actual number, 50%. And he gives an actual way that he can do it, which sounds quite doable. You know, just cut out, cut out the things that California has been doing wrong which everybody can identify. So I saw a poll where he was actually leading. Do you believe that a Republican could be leading in the polls to become governor of California? I would have said no until this year. And I think that the way Hilton is doing it is the way to do it, because the big thing that Democrats are going to ask for is affordability. So it's one thing to say, oh, vote for me, I'll give you some affordability. It's another thing to tell them exactly how much you're going to save half of your electric bill and tell you exactly how he's going to do it. And you look at it, you go, yeah, that would work. That would work. So the more ways that Steve Hilton can find to do that, this is what I'll save you. This is how I'm going to do it. He might actually become governor. So he's smart enough. It's just whether the machine will crush him or not. So are we still talking about that Barry Weiss, CBS 60 Minutes piece about Seacoth that got squashed, or is that too boring? I saw that Hillary Clinton waited on and then, then Bukele, the head of El Salvador, said, sure, we'll send back your prisoners if you take all of them, which is a pretty strong flag. You have to take all of them if you're not happy. If you're not happy with our prison, take all of them. Now. It still seems to me that the way to approach that prison would be to say, we want to use your prison. Every prison has some abuses. We need to, you know, we need to be a little more careful that we're being a little less abusive. You know, at least, at least wave your hands at the fact that you understand there's something going on there. You don't have to fix it, because I think every prison is basically a torture place, even in America. But you should definitely wave your hands at, hey, maybe we should be doing something about this. So yesterday, you may have noticed that Elon Musk warned us that he was feeling especially based. And then he started, you know, posting all day. And you tell me, is this based? I guess the Atlantic says something bad that he didn't like, which is no surprise. And Elon Musk posted. The Atlantic is a fake publication kept alive only by Loreen Jobs using her dead husband's money for something he would despise. Do you think that's true? Do you think that Steve Jobs would have despised what his widow was doing with the basically being very political and very biased in the Atlantic? I think that's true. But then he goes further. Elon goes further. He goes once again reinforcing the point that balls deep woke white women are the doom of Western civilization. Boy, you can tell he's not married. I don't think any married man could say that. Well, you know, if he were married to a white woman. I don't think any married man to a white woman could say that white women are the doom of Western civilization. Is that something you've heard me say? How many of you would agree that white women are the doom of Western civilization? I think it's true. Because if they didn't have a vote, I'm not suggesting that you take away their vote. I'm just working through the logic. We wouldn't have open borders. There's just a whole bunch of things that wouldn't have happened at all. So we're dying from this sort of forced empathy that's coming largely from one group of people who can't tell how to protect themselves. Basically. Yeah, yeah, liberal white women. Yes, you are correct. Well, Minnesota doubling down. They've got new requirements for this year that the K through six no K through 12 classrooms have a mandatory ethnic studies now. What do you think Minnesota's mandatory ethnic studies is going to be teaching their children mandatory ethnic studies. It's an anti white course that is now required. Now they don't sell it as anti white, but what else is it? So here are the things. According to Wall Street Apes, students will learn transgender affirmation. So that, that's not necessarily about the white part. How to dismantle cisgender privilege. There it is. Children are going to be taught how to dismantle cisgender privilege. That's basically discriminating against white people as much as possible. They're going to learn Black Lives Matter principles years after it's been shown that Black Lives Matter was a fake organization and a scam. They're going to learn distrust of the nuclear family, okay, that would destroy the world. And they're going to watch a video about George Floyd Square produced by some leftist group. So I'll tell you, you need to get out of Minnesota. If you're there, get out of Minnesota. But the federal government is trying to fix things in these rogue states. So the SBA is going to hold back money from Minnesota because they claim that Tim Walsh will just waste their money and there's not enough controls. So it's not a big amount of money. It's 5.5 million is being held back. But I love the approach, which is we're not going to give you a penny because you just waste it. I've never seen that before. But it's so, so supportable in terms of the facts that Minnesota is just stealing our tax money. That yeah, I agree with this. I would definitely not trust Minnesota to manage any of my money. And even funnier, apparently Republicans are going to consider a new legislation called the Wals Act. So that would be named after the Governor Walsh, the Waltz act to prevent Minnesota scale fraud from ever happening again. So the anti fraud bill is going to be named after a sitting governor because he's been the steward of so much fraud that they're going to name it after him while he's still governor of a state. Now that's kind of funny. That's kind of funny. So Brandon Gill was talking about this. He's pretty funny too, Republican. So he says, quote, $9 billion in tax money was looted. Congress has a role to ensure our programs aren't abused by left wing governors like Walsh. So he says that, that Minnesota had basically created what he calls a patronage system of taking our hard earned tax dollars, giving it to his political allies by essentially by turning a blind eye to the fraud and that he knew exactly what was going on the whole time? What do you think? Do you think that Tim Walsh was incompetent and had no idea how much fraud there was in his own state? Or do you believe that he was. He was deeply involved in promoting the lawlessness because some of that money came back to him and his allies. What do you think? I'm a little bit mixed on this. I think it might be some part pure incompetence, because he does seem incompetent. Honestly, he just gives off as an incompetent vibe like crazy. But it also seems he must have turned a blind eye to a lot of it, because it's hard to. It's hard to imagine he wasn't aware of it because of the scale. So I'm going to say blind eye, definitely. But on top of that, if he had wanted to stop it, he probably didn't have the skill. I don't think he had any capability. On top of that, I guess. Trump has directed the Justice Department to investigate Acta Blue. Do you know what act of Blue is? So ActBlue is an organization that services Democrats, and what they try to do is get lots of small donations from people that would add up to something big for elections. But they're accused of only pretending that the donations are small, but actually raising big money from dark sources and then just pretending that it came from individuals. They've also been accused of using people's names without their approval so that they could put a name to all the small donations that were not real. Now, I don't know how much of that is real, but I suspect that ActBlue is essentially a criminal organization. I don't know that, but the hints are that it looks like it's just a criminal organization. So now think. Let me ask you this. Is it going too far? If I said that the Democrats are a criminal organization, the entire entity now, I don't mean every voter, voters probably are just going, blah, blah, blah, everybody's bad. Democrats have some problems, Republicans have some problems, but I prefer the Democrats. Most voters, I think, are blissfully unaware of just how much crime is happening. But if you look at it collectively, you're just some of the things. You've got thousands, if not millions of NGOs, and we know now that the NGOs are essentially money laundering operations. So those would be mostly Democrat criminal organizations, or at least they'd be involved in something that would be, I think you would call it money laundering. We know that these SNAP funds were massively stolen and that that was Primarily by Democrats. We might find out that ActBlue is a criminal organization. I think we will. Some people say that our elections were rigged primarily by Democrats. That would be crime. You could argue how proven that is or not. But in my opinion, I think the rigging of elections is just a fact. And I think it leans heavily toward the Democrats. Not that no Republicans ever cheated, but probably there's a pretty big difference in scale. Then there's everything in California. Basically, it seems like every dime that California. Yes. It just disappears. The fire recovery money didn't go to the people who were recovering. The bullet train never happened. The money for the homeless didn't help anybody. So pretty much everything in California is even worse than Minnesota. And it's all criminal. To me, it looks criminal. And then you got this whole operation where the Democrats find ways to fund teachers who are all Democrats, and then they donate to Democrat people. So you got some, you know, some kind of circular money laundering thing. Then you've got the, the main Democrats who pulled the Russia collusion hoax. You've got the Clinton. What was that big Clinton initiative that was probably just a money laundering thing. So pretty much every major story that involves gigantic fraud seems to be Democrats. Now, just to be clear, I'm not giving Republicans a pass. Maybe they're just better at it. Right. You know, it's hard to believe that all the crime is just on one side of the political aisle. That would be weird. Right. But we don't really. Yeah. The Clinton Foundation. Thank you. But am I wrong? Am I in a bubble? Am I in some kind of a bubble where I'm only seeing the Democrat bad behavior? You know, I hear lots of accusations about Trump personally, but that stuff tends to be all transparent in public. You know, he's not hiding it. You know, it's in the news. It's. You can, you can tell he did this with crypto. You could tell he did this with whatever. So you could disagree or not like what Trump does, but that's still not Republicans. That would be something you don't like about Trump. So am I wrong that this is so, so imbalanced toward Democrats that if you said the Democrats are at least as a party, not the individual voters, but it seems like a criminal organization? And I mean that without any hyperbole. All right, well, that's. I think. Well, Breitbart is reporting and lots of other people reporting that the GDP grew at a robust 4.3% when even the smartest people thought it would be 3.3. And if you Went back a few months, the smartest people were saying, we're gonna have a recession because of all these damn tariffs. So it turns out that all the smartest economists were wrong. And the people who were right were Trump and Bessant and anybody who agreed with them. Do you believe that now, if this is true, that the people who got it right were the few, but that the main economic experts all get it wrong? Just thousands and thousands of economists completely wrong. What does that tell you about the science of economics? Now, I'm an economics major and it seems to me that economics is mostly guessing. You can learn how things fit together if you learn economics, but if you think you can use that to predict, you really can't. And I would argue that the inability to predict, you know, it's kind of a big knock on your profession, right? If you were a scientist and you couldn't predict what was going to happen with your scientific theory, you would think, well, that's no good. But economists could just make up all day long. They can be completely wrong and then just come back tomorrow and make up some more shit. Economics is barely a respectable profession. Just barely. Maybe not at all. But getting back to my prior thought. Do you think this number is real? Because I already told you that all data that matters is fake. Well, this matters. This would be important data. Would I change my opinion that this is the rare accurate data? What do you think? I'm going to stick with my earlier statements. I do not believe yet. Yet I could be convinced, but I do not believe this is a stable predictive number. It could be a blip. Because if all the economists were wrong up till now, what are the odds that they could, they could calculate the GDP accurately if they didn't get anything else right? So do you believe they got everything wrong? But boy, they're good at calculating that gdp. If you put the Dilbert filter on it, I would say there's a healthy chance that this will be revised or, you know, won't be a consistent number or we'll find out that there was some special case about it that gave it a little bump. So do not be too enthusiastic. But I gotta say, if it's even directionally true, and it might be, that would be pretty impressive. It would certainly put Trump and Bessant looking good just before the end of the year. But how about Canada? If Canada also got a big bump, maybe that would tell us something. Well, according to Statistics Canada, their GDP for October showed their economy shrank by 3/10 of 1%. It's the biggest decline in almost three years. Their manufacturing base decreased by 1.5%, blah, blah, blah. So how do you think Trump feels that he's got this amazing gdp, which we hope is real at the same time that Canada is decreasing its gdp? I'll tell you, you can't win much harder than that. But he's not winning everything because the Supreme Court has ruled that Trump cannot use the National Guard in Illinois to reduce crime. And I guess the Supreme Court said the government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois. That was what one of the high court majority people wrote. So I don't know if that's the biggest problem in the world, but. And there may be more to it. There might be, I don't know, maybe another angle that the feds can use. We'll see. But not the biggest story in the world. So Trump is once again being Trump. And instead of saying Merry Christmas and settling into the Christmas week on Truth Social, he ran a poll to see who was the worst late night host, because that's important. So, so instead of Merry Christmas, it's a Poland who's the worst late night host? And so he's got listed Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon. And then furthermore, he said that Stephen Colbert was quote, a dead man walking and he urged CBS to put late night host to sleep. That is so Trump. The beauty of it is that what makes this extra provocative is that he's doing a Christmas week, so it's sort of a slow week. So he's got all these successes like the, the gdp and then he uses that time to slam on his, his opponents. So at the same time, Poly Market, that's the online place where people bet on stuff. Polymarket says the number one suspect in the Epstein files is Stephen Colbert and that they estimate there's a 97% chance that Colbert is in the Epstein files. Now, I don't think that's true. I do not think he's in the Epstein files. But it's funny to watch that, you know, be distorted. So I'm not sure I would use polymarket to make my predictions if it's anything political. All right. But it's funny. So speaking of funny, apparently the latest dump of the Epstein files with lots of redactions, the way they redacted it was with Adobe Acrobat, which is a two step process. So first you black out the line using Adobe Acrobat and then you run some of the process to make sure that it flattens the file and that the thing that's covering up the sentence really covers it up. But it looks like somebody forgot to do that second part, at least with some of the files. So people could just take it, reverse the redactions. So people have been reversing the redactions. They just take them off. But here's the big story. They didn't find anything. Apparently there wasn't anything provocative. Maybe there was something that the victims didn't like, but they didn't find any smoking guns when they removed the, removed the removal of the content. So lot of people were chattering online saying, ah, somebody in the FBI or Department of justice, whoever was in charge of redacting wanted us to know the truth. And so they pretended to redact knowing that it would be discovered that the redactions could be reversed. What do you think? Do you think there's somebody cleverly and intentionally made the redactions reversible or do you think it was purely a didn't do it right and didn't notice? Well, you know, we're tempted to believe in conspiracy theory. So I know a lot of you think it was intentional. I'm going to put the Dilbert filter, as I like to call it, on this situation. And the Dilbert filter says far more likely it was a mistake. Far more likely it was a mistake. It's not like impossible that somebody did it intentionally, but I'd say it's 10 to 1, 20 to 1 more likely that it was just a mistake. It feels intentional. You might be right about that. It feels intentional because it's kind of wacky that it happened at all. But I don't know in the real world what is more likely. Incompetence. Right, incompetence. Or really clever play that would cost them their job. Because whoever did the redactions is in a lot of trouble today. And unless they were planning to quit quant, it's not really something you would do to your own career on Christmas. So I can't imagine anybody doing it intentionally because there would be a hundred percent chance you would get in a lot of trouble. Keep an eye on that one. So Alan Dershowitz says no surprise here that the latest drop from the Epstein stuff has a bunch of fake files, fake documents, false accusations. There was one that sounded really bad about Trump that turned out to be a total forgery. I'm not even going to mention what the, what the fake was because you just don't want to hear it. But it is known to be fake and a Lot of the other stuff is now known to be fake. So Joshua was warning us about that. So Schumer, you know Schumer, right, He goes on some, I guess, some interview, he said the, the law was written very clearly and it did not allow all these redactions, this blacking out of everything. It did not say you can dribble the amount over a period of months. These guys are, quote, full of shit. They should simply release it all now. Now I refer to Schumer as the randomly cursing lizard guy. He reminds me of a lizard. But when he randomly curses, it reminds us that they don't know how to curse. Why did he need to curse there? Compare that again, compare that to JD Vance telling people that they could ease shit for insulting his wife. That's a good curse. That's a good curse. But why did Schumer have to just throw it in? These guys are full of shit. He didn't. They just don't know how to do this. Anyway, I also saw a cenk from the Young Turks. He said something online that I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or not, but he said that he believed, I guess he believes there's stuff that would be bad for Trump in the files, but he said the only, the only way that that could be blocked as long as it has been is if the intelligence agencies are behind the blocking of it. Is that a sarcastic comment or does he believe, as I do, that we have all the proof we need that some intelligence entities are blocking the more extensive release? How many of you believe that there's a hundred percent chance we would have seen the files unless intelligence agencies blocked it and that there's nobody who's simply powerful enough that they could have done it because both, remember Democrats and Republicans have had access to the files and they both blocked it. So what would be the one entity that could make both Democrats and Republicans block something? I feel like only the intel people. So at this point, I think there's, I've said this before, there's no real hope that we're going to see everything we want to see. There's no real hope of that because the intel people have the power to block it and apparently the motive. If you have the motive and you have the power, it's pretty easy to predict. So I was waiting for this to happen, but the FCC is going to ban the purchase of Chinese made drones because of national security concerns. Now, I think the reason it took so long for them to ban Chinese drones is because we didn't have A domestic manufacturing way to do it. And we needed drones because the drones are really useful for farming and a whole bunch of things. So it looks like I intuit from this that enough manufacturing entities in the United States are making drones and they're doing it well enough now that we can, we can just make that a domestic industry and we don't have to get the Chinese drones. I wonder, I am curious who the big drone makers are. I'm pretty sure that Anduril, that would be the high tech defense industry company. I'm pretty sure they make a bunch of drones and anti drone stuff, but I don't know how much volume they do. Perhaps they've reached some kind of volume thing. But you know, it's not just military drones. I wonder who's making the non military drones. Well, over In Belgium, apparently 73% of the children and teens in Brussels have a non EU migration background and only 10.5% are Belgians of Belgian origin. So basically Belgium is now no longer Belgium. Now maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. I don't know any Belgian people, but Belgium really just went away. You know, you could argue not yet, Scott, but it's guaranteed. I mean if, if 73% of your children were not Belgium, you just have to wait and your country will look completely different. Will it be better or will it be worse? I don't know. I'm not there. Not my country. Yeah, but it will give you a glimpse of what might be happening with the rest of Europe. Well, there's a Israeli Defense Minister who says, believe it or not, that the Israel, the Israeli military will never leave Gaza. So they never, they never plan to withdraw their military from Gaza. Gaza. Is anybody surprised by that? So apparently the peace deal with Hamas said that Hamas would give up their weapons. I think they said that. And that Israel would remove his military. It looks like neither of them are going to do that. I don't think Hamas gave up his weapons and surrendered. And I never thought that Israel would give up its military control of Gaza. So what are the odds of a two state solution? Is it my imagination or is the idea of a two state solution never more than something to talk about? Because there is never a chance of it happening. Was there ever. Did any of you ever have a time where you thought, you know what? I think that two stage solution might actually happen? Now that's independent from whether you want it to happen. We're, we're not talking, we're not talking about whether you think it's a good idea or a bad idea. I'm just saying it's not really even possible because there's zero chance that Israel would ever go for that. So it feels like just something you say when you're negotiating, well, you know, if we do this or that, we'll be getting closer to a two state solution. But meanwhile they're, you know, they're going hog wild on building, you know, building settlements and there's not really any chance that could happen, is there? So. Well, anyway, I remind you that I'm neither pro nor anti Israel. I simply observe. And sometimes they do things that look like it would work from their perspective and sometimes maybe they do things that I don't know why they do them. But it's not my job to tell Israel what's good for Israel and it's not their job to tell America what's good for America. So I'll definitely give you opinions on American policy, but other countries just observe, sometimes predict, because that's fun. But I only care about America. It's not that I don't care, that's going too far. It's that if Israel is doing a good job of taking care of Israel, my impression of that is, hey, good job. Everybody should do a good job of taking care of their country. If part of their doing a good job is that it creates some situations that America doesn't like, then we should address that. But I don't disrespect them for doing a good job influencing people. They want influence. I could not like it, but I observe it. Speaking of Israel, there's an Israeli company that found a breakthrough that could reverse paralysis. So apparently has something to do with neural tissues. And let's see what it is. It's a biotech company called matraself. And they've got this new spinal cord tissue that they grow from the patient's own cells and then they somehow squirt it back into you and you can regrow your nerve cells that had been damaged. Listen to this. Do you believe this? Regenerate stem cells from the patient's tissue. Then the fatty tissue provides a scaffolding material that allows the cell to form functional neural networks. Now, I told you about another company that was doing this with 3D printing. So they would 3D print the scaffolding. This doesn't mention 3D printing, but anyway, so apparently they've successfully tested this on paralyzed rats. Listen to this next part. They've tested it on paralyzed rats which were able to walk and run within days of treatment. What? What are you Telling me that they really took paralyzed rats and unparalyzed them. Within days, they just squirted their own stem cells in there and had some kind of scaffolding. And within days. I don't believe that. It doesn't take, like, two months for nerves to even regrow. Days. A little bit optimistic, but anyway, I'm waiting in line behind the rats. Soon as all the rats are fixed, I'm hoping they'll do me next. Well, there's a publication called the Conversation, in which Frank Chiraki is asking, is democracy always about truth and why we may need to loosen our views to heal our divisions. So what do you think? Do you think that democracy could survive truth? I don't. Do you remember when Ben Shapiro was famous for saying that the facts don't care about your feelings? And then I wrote my book, Win Bigly, and I tried to correct that notion by saying the feelings don't care about your facts. Both of those are kind of true, but it's more predictive that feelings don't care about your facts. But just imagine what would happen to democracy if we knew the truth about everything. Your first instinct is, well, that'd be better. Wouldn't it be great? We knew the truth, you couldn't handle the truth. Or to go further, democracy itself, it can't handle the truth. If you actually knew what was happening with your money, if you actually knew what the real data was, you probably would not be in a happy place. So my take on the world is that there are functional lies, there's functional propaganda, and sometimes you need that to hold the country together. For example, is it good or bad for America if you spread the idea that Americans are better than other people, which is what I was raised to believe? Well, I don't think it's true that Americans are better than other people, but if you could convince me they were, would you get a better outcome? And the answer is maybe. Maybe. So if you really drill down on all of our biggest issues, I think you'd find that there's a functional fiction for almost everything that works better than the truth. A functional fiction. So I could talk about that for a lot longer, but you could probably think of 10 examples yourself where you know something's not true, but it seems to hold people together. Right. Think about it. That'll be your Christmas debate with your family. Do you want the truth, or do you want a functional propaganda? Well, I'll give you another example. So Trump is famously optimistic. He's kind of a salesperson that uses hyperbole to try to push the country forward. So what would be better? That every time Trump talked about the economy, he talked about what was wrong, but also what was right. Now compare that to what he actually does, which is he always says, things are going great, country is really humming, you know, wait till next year, it'll be even better. Which one of those is a functional propaganda versus the truth? The truth, as close as you could come to it, would be partly good, partly bad. But it wouldn't motivate you the same way. If you could, if you could convince the businesses the next year is going to be better, even if you don't know that to be true, it would convince them to invest, and then once they invest, it becomes true. So I don't know how many examples I'd have to give you before I sell this to you, but optimism, which is not really always based on truth, is very functional, right? It's very functional. So I would argue that democracy and capitalism specifically require some kind of enlightened propaganda, meaning that you're doing it for people's best interests. You're not doing it for your selfishness, but you're doing it. You're doing it. Well. Let's talk about Venezuela and Maduro. Zero Hedge is reporting that Trump said that Maduro would be, quote, smart to get out. So he was asked about, presumably asked about, you know, what next for Venezuela, I guess. Russians are reportedly evacuating their diplomats. Do you think it's meaningful that Russia is evacuating their diplomats from Venezuela? Well, if you believe that, Russia probably has some good sources in the United States, spies and otherwise, why would they be doing it? Now, if it's true, it might also be a fake report. But if they are getting rid of their diplomats, that would suggest that Russia expects some military action. Now, here's what else Trump said about that. When asked about whether he should leave, Trump said, that's his decision, but I think it would be smart for him to do that. It would be smart for him to do that. Maybe that's all Russia needed to hear because it sounds so warlike. Well, he doesn't have to, but be smart for him to do that. And then he says, Trump says, when asked about the possibility that the Venezuelan military might try to put up some resistance should the US Military get more aggressive, Trump said, if he plays tough, it'll be the last time he's able to do so. So he's basically said, if you resist us, that he'll jail you or kill you. Now, he doesn't have to say it out loud, but that's what that means. Obviously, it's the last time you'd be able to do it. So what I'm wondering is the real strategy here that Trump is trying to scare Maduro into leaving? Do you think he can simply frighten him into leaving and never have to fire a shot? Probably not, because I think Maduro would at the very least need to have someplace to go that would not be worse than putting up a stand. So we don't know if he has any place to go, but it does look like Trump would let him leave alive. So here's the test. The test is this, is Trump trying to win a war without firing a shot. And I would say the answer is yes, he is trying to win the war that hasn't even started without firing a shot. Is it possible? Yes, it's actually possible that he could scare Maduro by being so convincingly scary that Maduro said, oh, I'm going to be. I got no options left. I better get out of here. That is very, very, very possible. But I would still bet against it because, yeah, I would bet against it. So one of the things that you could imagine Trump negotiating with Putin is asking Putin to make a safe haven for Maduro. Wouldn't that be interesting just as part of the overall Russian negotiations? Say, look, here's the deal. One of the things we want from you, Putin, besides ending the war, one of the things we want is for you to make a home for Maduro so he can get the hell out and we can take over. Might happen. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is all I have for my prepared remarks. So I told you that there was. If I made it through. I'm surprised I made it through the entire show. I was having quite some respiratory issues here, but I made it. Yay. I told you I'd hang out with you a little bit. So what do you think? Would you be okay if we just hang out just a little bit, just for a few minutes? You can keep doing what you're doing. You could turn off the sound. I'll be like an extra family member, just hanging out in your living room. Okay. All right, that's the deal. I am so crooked, I'm gonna fall over. I did not believe I'd get through it. Oh, that's good. All right, tell me what you're doing. Send me pictures. Oh, you can only do that in locals. If you're in local, send me pictures of what you're doing. Show you wrapping gifts, playing with the dog. I had a tough night last night, not being able to breathe too much. But I'm feeling much, much better right now, and I am ready for breakfast. So when my breakfast gets here, I'll. I'll take my leave walking the dog. Or you just walk the dog. Okay. Your stepson's going back. Did you hear that? I'm ready for breakfast whenever. No, I'm still live streaming. But I told them I'd just hang out with them until I got breakfast because I know some of you are feeling a little lonely today, aren't you? Is anybody feeling lonely on the holidays? Well, I'm here. Your bagel is toasted, Back in your car and added to your daughters. Nice. Yeah, the steroids probably are helping, but I don't know what it would be like if I were not on them. Show me your hands. Why? Your hands. You're not lonely. You're overwhelmed. Yeah, people are pretty busy today. Oh, I just realized. I just realized I have a healthcare worker who's gonna stop by pretty soon, so I do. I do need to take my leave because I gotta eat before a healthcare worker shows up and gives me a sponge bath. Some nice man is gonna sponge bath me today, if that's what it's. Oh, your friends have tds. Bummer. All right, everybody, get ready for Christmas. Next time I see you probably will be Christmas. Hope you enjoyed the show. Go say goodbye for now. Bye for now. It.