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Everybody. Is the stock market open today? Looks like it is. Check it out. Tesla down. Bitcoin flat. Spider flat. Won't be much action today. Come on in. Almost ready for a show. Happy Friday. You're gonna love it. All right, we'll get the locals comments going here and then we'll do the ever popular simultaneous. I think my cat picture is especially good today. There we go. We're cooking now. All right, people, come in, come in, come in. I wonder if some of you delay to skip the simultaneous sip, do you? Well, it's gonna happen anyway because I know why you're here. All you need is a copper mug or a glass. A tanker Chelsea. A canteen jugger flask. A vessel of a kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called simultaneous sip. It happens. Now go. Good stuff. Well, here's a special announcement. There are still some Dilbert calendars left, but not many. So you know, because I'm independently publishing now, we have to guess how many to publish. I got to tell you, we guessed pretty well. We made a good guess. Which means that we sold almost all of them. Which means that if you know anybody who wants one, they better order it right away from Amazon. Amazon's the only place you can get it. The Dilbert 2026 calendar. Act now before they're all gonna. I don't think we're going to print more, so get your. Get yours. Well, apparently there's some enormous storm coming or has already hit. So a weird thing happened, which is because Christmas was on a Thursday, a lot of people said, okay, Friday we'll do, you know, the in laws party and Saturday on Thursday we'll do ours. But some people moved into Saturday, but now it looks like everything's going to be snowed in. So the people who move their party to Saturday probably gonna move it to Sunday. So people are gonna be celebrating Thursday Christmas on Sunday just because the weird way that the the date hit and the snow, it's gonna feel weird celebrating Christmas three days after Christmas. All right, well, I wouldn't say there's much news today, but there's stuff to talk about. So if you lower your expectations and say to yourself, you know what? There's not much else on TV or on social media. So it's, we're just going to be hanging out and I'll chatter about a few things that I find interesting that are in the news where is that cursor? There it is. So I saw in a Mario novel post that Tesla is estimating that full self driving mode on their cars could save 32,000 lives a year and avoid 1.9 million injuries. Did you have any idea that automobile accidents were causing 1.9 million injuries per year? The 32,000 I knew or the apparently 40,000 die and car crashes? That was in the range of what I, I knew. But wow, a lot of people got injured. So the thinking is that full self driving would cut down on injuries by 80%. I believe it. All right, what else? So here's a little obscure story that I'll bet most of you have not been following. It's about the 2020 election, and it's something that the Rasmussen Reports account has been hammering for like four years. So four or five years they've been posting on the same topic. And here's the topic. Allegedly. And there's a part that's not alleged, but the part we know is that there was a locked warehouse in Fulton, Georgia, in which allegedly there were a bunch of ballasts that got counted that are sketchy. Now, I don't remember why they were sketchy. They were either all the same or, I don't know. There was something about them that was presumed to be sketchy, but nobody could check it out because the room was locked and the judge had been asked to, you know, force them to release it and unlock it, but the judge had not acted. So years went by. When Rasmussen would report, it seemed like once a week, well, that, that room is still locked now. You might say to yourself, well, over all that time, if that room had anything in it that was controversial, there would, there would have been enough time to, you know, change them out or steal them. Sort of like Fort Knox. So apparently the judge, Robert McBurney, who is being accused of being corrupt, but I don't know about that, he finally approved access. So some cynics are saying that he waited long enough that the statute of limitations might be running out for whoever, whoever did the alleged crimes. That would be a crime of, you know, election drinking. Allegedly. But I asked Grok about that. That's weird. Somebody outside my house. Must be a package delivery. Anyway, I asked Grok about the statute of limitations. It says most, mostly for election felonies, it would be seven years. But because everything takes years, there might be a way for the bad guys. Again, this is just speculation, hypothesis, you know, the allegations, the bad guys could somehow find another way to stall for another two years. And nobody would go to jail. Now, I don't know if they can, but in theory, the reason that the, I guess it was the government, some, some element of the government of Georgia was blocking the release because they estimated it would cost $400,000 to unlock the door. Now what does that mean? I have no idea. Why would it cost the government $400,000 to unlock a door? Presumably the unlocking of the door was linked with some kind of audit that I guess the government would be involved in. I don't really understand. But given that the Republicans would pay anything to prove that the election was rigged, especially Trump, I don't think it would be hard for them to raise $400,000. So it seems to be a fake reason that it would be too expensive. That must be just the excuse they were using. So there is a non zero chance. I wouldn't know how to put an estimate on this, but there's a non zero chance that everything you suspected about the election will be revealed really soon. I'm not sure what I would think if it turned out all the elections were perfectly legal because it doesn't make sense to me that if all the ballots were perfectly legal and Georgia wanted to prove that nothing was rigged, they would have just unlocked the door and they would have said, well, we're not going to pay for it, but knock yourself out. But they didn't do that. They pretended like they didn't have the budget to do it. So that's really, really sketchy. So we'll find out if there's still anything behind that door. I don't know that it's been unlocked yet, but maybe in the coming week. Maybe they're waiting to get the $400,000 covered. We'll find out. Don't you believe that the arc of history, It's where they would. Don't you believe that the arc of history is bending toward 100 confirmation that the election was rigged? Doesn't it feel like there's nothing that could stop that from happening? Really, all it took was Republicans to have enough time and enough, you know, enough influence that they could go look at the stuff they want to look at. But I will warn you that a tremendous amount of allegations about the election have not been proven to be true. So this, this could very easily be, you know, disappointing. But we'll find out.
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Hablas espanol Spries to die.
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So here's a very little, small story, but Newsmax is reporting that Trump was asked somewhere about the AI boom and the bubble and could, could the AI boom damage the economy, blah, blah. And Trump's answer was, quote, no. I love AI, according to the New York Times. Now, have you noticed that Trump has a very young brain? I mean, he's conservative in sort of a, you know, old school conservative way, but whenever there's something that's new tech, he's unusually good at embracing it. And AI is one of those things. Crypto is another one of those things. Even when he got in trouble for talking about COVID it's because he knew more than the doctors did about light being disinfectant. Just the way he jokes about things. He has a very young brain and I've never seen that much experience paired with that much of a sort of a youthful approach to the world. And I'm wondering in this case how much it made a difference that he's got David Sacks, you know, who obviously, you know, make him comfortable with crypto as well as AI and you know, a bunch of other people from Jared to, well, you know, you could name a few. So he's got a lot of young advisors, but he actually listens to them and he's clearly influenced by them. So yeah, he's, he's very young brained anyway. Will the robots take all our jobs? Peter Navarro, one of Trump's top trade advisors, or maybe his top trade advisor. He's urging workers to consider going into the trades. Would that be a good answer for you to go into the trades, like go out and fix air conditioners and be a mechanic and be a plumber and all that? I gotta say, I'm pretty lucky that I was born in a time when that wasn't something you had to do. I would never be good at that. I would be good at sitting in a cubicle. I would be good at typing things, I'd be good at creativity, but I would never be good at fixing your ac. So I'm glad I don't have to make that choice. However, it made me Wonder what the future looks like. And I'm going to make a prediction. Prediction number one. I believe that in the same way that unions can make companies do things they don't want to do, right? That a union can make a company do what it doesn't want to do. And that's probably true for influence over the government as well, because if your union was big enough, it could influence voting. So I believe there will be a robot union, which is people, not robots. So maybe I said that wrong. Let me say it a different way. I believe there will form a new union that might be a collection of existing unions or it might be a new one. And their primary, their primary objective will be to make sure that you can't put a robot into the field as a worker unless you have at least one human in charge on site. Had to be on site. So have you ever had a plumber come to your house and they start working and then they realize there's a part that they need so they have to stop what they're doing, go drive somewhere and get a part and come back. And you've watched people doing service work in your house and you know, there's one person who might be doing demolition and dragging stuff away and another person who's doing the carpentry or the hard stuff. I see a world where a plumber would have one or two robots that show up at the same time, but the plumber would be in charge. And this new union I'm talking about would guarantee that even if you knew you could do it with just robots, it just wouldn't be legal. You just wouldn't happen. So even if you had your own robot, the law could be so gamed that you wouldn't be allowed to use your own robot even to do some plumbing at your own house. So I think the laws, as well as the unions will conspire to keep people employed, even if that's not the best idea. But can't you just, just imagine this? All right, close your eyes and imagine the robots and the one guy, the plumber, let's just say plumber, the plumber shows up and he's got two robot assistants and he sends one of the robots to get apart that robot, this is a self driving car, literally goes into the, you know, hardware store, picks up the part and if you're not sure, it can send you a picture so you know it's picking up the right thing, pays for it with some kind of digital payment, drives back. Meanwhile, the other robot has identified where the leak is just by putting his robot hand on the wall and it can identify where the leak is. And then when it finds it, it needs to maybe take down a piece of the wall. So the. The human plumber says, all right, robot, take out this part of the Sheetrock. And the robot goes, And then you can see the leak. And then the. The plumber says, all right, I'm going to need some plumber's tape. I'm going to need this, and I'm going to need this tool. And even before he's done talking, his robot assistant has already gone to the toolbox and has those exact things. Now, maybe the robot would do the work of wrapping up things and fixing things with the supervision of the human. Or maybe before we get to that point, the human still doesn't work because maybe it's just slightly outside of what the robots can do. But the robots are learning like an apprentice. So on day one, you get a cheap robot that can only fetch and maybe do some demo stuff and maybe get some tools. But as you do work, the robot learns the same way an apprentice would. So your robot would become more and more valuable every time it accompanied you on a. On a plumber trip. So that's what I think, but give me some feedback on that. Do you think that's reasonable? So the things I'm predicting are that the unions and the laws will guarantee that you have to have a human if a robot's doing some physical work. Do you agree with that part, at least for the predictable future? I think so. And that would just make your plumbers more effective. How many jobs do you know where you ask for some service person to come to your house and you can't get them there in a week? A lot, right? Or there's not a lot of situations where you want a service, but they're booked up so you can't get to them for a week. Well, if you add the robots, maybe it's the same workers, but they can do three jobs a day instead of two. So suddenly, suddenly, your human plumber is making twice as much money or not twice as much. Let's say 15% more. All right, you agree? So there's another AI company that's being skeptical about the robots. Let's see if I can find that story. Maybe I didn't write that down, but. All right, here's a story. So I think this was in the Wall Street Journal today that the headline is, even the companies making humanoid robots think they're overhyped. So, you know what I've been saying for forever, so I believe I was ahead of the curve, is that if robots could do more than one thing, they would already be deployed. But we keep seeing these demos where the robot is trained to do exactly one thing, like iron a shirt. But that skill does not, it doesn't go to anything else. You can't, you can't just give it an AI brain today and have it figure out stuff. You would have to specifically train it for every little task. So that's why you do see robots in warehouses, because a warehouse is a very limited training set. If you get this command, go get this box, you know, carry this box over here and put it there. So it's such a small domain that a robot could work in a warehouse. But I've been saying for a while, if you, if you have any experience with the large language model AIs, which are the dominant parts, that they don't really have any hope of becoming general intelligence. There's nothing that they're doing. The AI, the AI industry, I don't believe there's anything they're doing that could logically lead to a general intelligence robot. And, and I think that some of the experts are saying it too. You know, now that they've all been overfunded, they can tell the truth. But there's this one guy, I guess he's head of a AI company called, I don't know, his name is Velikaputi. And he's skeptical. So he says the same thing I do, that you can train them to do warehouse tasks. But did you know that for every hundred dollars you would spend on a Robot, only about $20 of that is a robot? And the rest of the money is for protecting humans from the robots. Now, I think that means physically, so that the robot doesn't accidentally run you over or something. So here's my question, Elon Musk is very pro robot, and I wonder what does he know that the other top people in the industry don't know? Now, it's always a bad idea to bet against Musk when he's making a prediction of the future. He might be off by timing, but it's a bad idea to bet against him. He very clearly believes that, that the Optimus robots will be general purpose robots. And apparently his version of AI is way ahead of the other AIs. But is he way ahead in a way that would give us general intelligence, or is he just way ahead in the way that we can never get general intelligence? You know, maybe his will hallucinate less or Something. But what does he know? Is he going about it in a completely different way now? I know that he trained his cars with video, but again that's, that's a limited domain. So as, as varied as the possibilities are for a car, I musa a trillion different things that a car could have to do. You could probably get to a trillion. So you could, I think you could train a car on a trillion different possibilities and then it would be better than a human, but it would still be trained for narrow domain, which is driving safely. So I get how we can get to self driving cars. That, that makes total sense. You just train them with video instead of language. But how do you get to a butler? How would you ever get to a butler where there's something new every day that is never seen? What does he know that we don't know? Does his AI have a, like a secret, like a skunk works that nobody knows about? That's getting close to it. And I've said this before, but it's a really good tip. If you think that you'll have a robot butler in one year, you would already see it, right? Because I can't believe that the robots would be launching in one year and they didn't know how to do it yet. Does that even make sense? You know what, do you think there's any possibility that a big, serious, you know, high functioning company would say, oh yeah, in a year we'll have robot butlers, but we have no idea how to do it at the moment. No big company would do that, you know, not Tesla, not anybody. So if you're not hearing today that they have one in the lab that has general intelligence and you're not. I don't believe there's going to be one in a year. I do not believe. So I want to be wrong. I want to be wrong. How many of you agree with my assessment that if they can't do it today, it's not going to be a product in one year? Would you agree with that? Well, once again, unless I guess I have to say it one more time, in a sense, I'm betting against Elon Musk's prediction. But what he knows about this topic is, you know, a thousand times more than I know. So does he know more than I know or is he just being, is it just wishful thinking? And my guess is he knows more than I know. So therefore, oh, I guess I should, I should reveal this every once in a while. I do own Tesla stock, so I wanted to work and I desperately want Elon to be right and me to be wrong. And I literally have my money bet. I actually bet my money against myself. I bet my money on Elon instead of myself, which probably is a good bet. All right, enough about that. I'm just going back to the front here. So if any of you had the experience that AI has already ruined, your YouTube experience, apparently there's a way to fix that by blocking the videos that were downvoting them somehow. And then YouTube will learn what to not give you AI slop. So AI slop, if you haven't heard that term, is AI content that is sort of impressive, but not really something you want to see too often. So that's called slop. So when I go to YouTube, let's say two or three years ago, if I went to YouTube and I saw a topic that I was interested in, it was made by humans and it would keep me interested for year an hour. But today, if I see something that interests me, it's almost always slop. And it'll be this, you know, this boring robot voice. And the Andes is a mountain rage and it's just sort of repetitive and not interesting and ugh. And there's so much of the AI crap that searching through it to find something that's not AI is just too much work. So that's one of the reasons that I just stopped watching YouTube mostly, not completely. And I do videos on X because if you go to X, you go to the side menu on your app. One of the options now is video. And what they do really well is they only feed you video that the algorithm thinks you would be interested in. So that's not AI. So I will catch up on all kinds of politics and technology and AI stuff and Tesla stuff. And I don't have to do anything. I just hit the button once. It just goes from video to video and I can listen to it all day. So YouTube's got a problem. Anyway, let's talk about the Mar a Lago raid. I know that's old news, but Mike Davis has an article about it in Fox News. So here are some of the things to just summarize the whole Mar A Lago raid for the the classified documents. Did you know that the FBI agents allegedly lacked probable cause, which would be sort of a crime. So I think something that we learned from the now released files, somehow we learned this, is that the FBI said they didn't know what the. Didn't know what the probable cause was, which would make it completely illegal to do that kind of a raid. But they were allegedly pressed by the Biden administration to do it anyway. Now, I think that's still in the allegedly category, but getting closer to fact. Secondly, at this part, I don't, I'm not convinced about this. But some say that the real reason for the raid was that Trump had some records about Operation Crossfire Hurricane, which would implicate the old Obama and Brennan people. And so they were trying to really get that. So it looked like it was about classified information, but really it was about making sure that Trump did not have documents that would incriminate Democrats. Do you believe that that is just, that is just slightly too far into conspiracy theory for me. Very possible. I wouldn't rule it out. But I say I don't believe there are any documents that show that. Are there. Have there been any whistleblowers who said the real reason is because those Crossfire Hurricane documents, by now there would be a whistleblower. Right. And I don't believe we've seen one. So I'm going to say maybe. All right. And then there's some issue about the judge who was not very, not very neutral. And I guess they did the bad guys, the Democrats did some judge shopping. And I found this guy, Judge Bruce Reinhardt of the Southern District of Florida. So he's the one who signed a warrant, but just six weeks earlier, he had recused himself from some Trump Clinton lawsuit. And the reason was that he had as a civilian in 2017, he had written a Facebook post officiously bashing Trump. So the Department of Justice apparently found the, the one person you could guarantee was anti Trump, and that's the guy that signed the warrant. Now, again, judge shopping is not illegal, right? As far as I know, it's not illegal. It's just not ideal. So keep an eye on that. So Russell Brand has been charged with new allegations of rape and sexual assault. Breivard News is reporting. I think I told you that when Russell Brand was originally accused of those things several years ago, I guess that I happened to be booked for a show. So I went on a show while he was right in the middle of all the accusations. He was losing everything as he was being demonetized. And let me tell you, I thought my interview with him was going to be a lot of fun, but he was not really in the mood. He was not in the mood to have a lot of fun. And I completely understand that. But he's being hit again with new, new charges. And I don't have an opinion about who did what or who's Guilty of what? I will give this you, this context that I think is useful every time this kind of a story comes up and the context goes like this. Pretty much every rich and powerful man is, is accused of falsely of sex crimes, pretty much all of them. So if you've got somebody of his, his notoriety, especially if he's known to be a sex addict, especially if he's seemed to be siding with one part of the political aisle, the odds of him having a false accusation were a hundred percent. Now that does not mean that these allegations are false. It only means that you should not judge it by the fact that they exist because there was 100% chance that someone like him would be falsely accused even if there were any real things he ever did. So that's the only thing I'm going to add to the story. And trust me, you could talk to any, if you privately talk to any, let's say rich CEO, I'll bet you every one of them would say, yeah, you know, my secretary or you know, some employee accused me. And often it's people you never met because I told, I told you I've been accused of sexual abuse by someone who lives in Canada I've never met, right? So they called the people I worked with and the one woman did the, the crazy woman, she called the people I worked with, the people in my restaurant, when I owned a restaurant and told them that I was a terrible rapist and that on a regular basis I would travel to Canada and rifle through her possessions and then sexually abuser. Now I promise you, this is nobody I've ever met. This is pure crazy woman. But the people who received the call, how did they know? How would they know if that's real or not? So that is the world of high profile people. But this makes me ask the following question. How did we go from an environment of me too every single day to it doesn't really get in the news much. Did something change? Is it possible that the, the CEOs have learned, you know, just don't do anything that would get you in trouble? Is it possible that the Mike Pence rule, where you just don't allow yourself to be alone with a woman, are many or CEOs doing that? Because I have to admit when I first heard the Mike Pence rule, that he would not go to lunch, for example, even a business lunch, you wouldn't even do a business lunch with a woman by herself unless he brought his wife. And I think we all laughed at that, right? You know, Mike Pence, you know It's Mike Pence. Don't live in the past. You know, women are part of the workforce. You know, if they want to go lunch for business should be exactly like a man. And it didn't take me long to realize he was a smart one. So I don't know what is. You know, maybe it was probably religious and partly being faithful to his wife. But man, that is a good way to protect yourself. You just don't ever allow yourself to be alone with somebody who might accuse you. That's not a bad rule. So could it be there's so many people kind of took that to heart that the rate of me tooing went way down Maybe. Or was it never real? It was always a sort of a news related thing. Well, let me say it a different way. Maybe the rate of me tooing has always been the same. But when it was in the news, the people who were the victims of the me tooing were far more likely to pursue it. But once it falls out of the news, then maybe they feel, you know, there'll be retaliation or, you know, they'd rather just move on with their life. So is it my imagination? So give me, give me a comment here. Is it my imagination or is it real that the me tooing thing was just every day but now it just sort of shrunk and you don't really hear. I mean, you still hear about it, but it's like way less. Why would that be? Why do you think that would be if it's true that we're hearing about less?
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Well, I guess some New York Times reporter is suing the big AI companies. In this case, this would include X. So Google X OpenAI they're suing over chatbot training. So I guess they're worried that the chat bots read their books without permission and got trained on them and they think that's some kind of a copyright violation. Now you've heard this before. It's sort of an old story that authors but I guess they're not doing a class action in this case. Which has some extra risk for the AI companies, allegedly. So I ask it, I ask AI about my books, and it generally, it knows. Well, here's what it pretends to know. If I ask AI, you know, what's on page whatever of my book, it can't do it. So it's not trained that well. If I ask it to summarize my book, it can do it, but it takes a summary from other people's comments about the book. So it is legal for the AI to look at public comments like a review of the book or what somebody said about it on social media, for example. And usually that's enough to piece together what the book was about. So in a sense, AI, at least in my case, finds a workaround that doesn't look like a copyright violation to me because there's. There's no problem quoting a reviewer or something. So I asked Gemini today if it was true that John Bogle, who is the famous Vanguard Index Fund guy, is it true that he wants to use my financial advice in his book? Because I was wondering who I have influence. And according to Gemini, it could tell me the page number and the book. And I think it was year 2010 that his book took my nine page personal finance advice and he just included it in the book because he thought it was so well done. It was really well done. And that was, I think, mostly right. But when inside I could give me the page number, I'll bet that was a hallucination. So I don't know. I've not. I cannot confirm that his book included my financial advice. I can confirm that a few people asked for permission to reprint that. So whether he did or not, I don't know. Anyway, did you know that I have, I've had an influence on personal finance? How many of you knew that? That's one of the weird areas that I had an influence. You know how I've told you that one of the ways to be influential is to be the person who writes it down? Whatever it is, if you write it down, you become influential if you do a good job of writing it down. So because I'm a cartoonist and I'm really good at summarizing, I found a way to write down all the advice you would ever need for personal finance in just nine bullet points. So the, the breakthrough was not that I knew more than anybody else, the breakthrough is that I figured out how to do it in nine bullet points. That would be in the order. This is the key part. They would be in the order that you should do Them. Nobody did that before. Everybody else just said, this is a good idea, this is a bad idea, good idea, bad idea. But it was overwhelming. So I got rid of the overwhelming part by just saying, if you don't know anything else, do this. I think number one was make a will. If you have, if you have people you're trying to take care of. But of course, you should do that first. Why would you leave yourself exposed? So I don't know if AI got that right. Well, Jasmine Crockett, your favorite Democrat. Yes, I said Democrat. She's got a new technique that is so. It's so bad that it's almost good. So she was asked, Breitbart News was reporting this. So in some interview recently, she was asked if she accepts the idea that the current administration has vastly reduced the illegal border crossings. Now, would you agree that one of the most obviously documented total facts is that the Trump administration has in fact reduced the number of illegal border crossings? Now, how could she possibly say that that didn't. Okay, I'll get back to that. Well, here's what she did. So she didn't want to give credit for what is an immense accomplishment. So instead she said, we know that this administration has not been the most honest when it comes to reporting numbers. So instead of saying, yes, obviously they stopped border crossings, she questioned whether the data was accurate. Oh, my God, I hate it and I love it. At the same time, it's so bold that you would even go that direction. But if you assume that the public isn't really following things closely, she says, well, you know, they, they cheated on the jobs numbers. I don't know if that's true, but she said the jobs numbers were fake. So if the job numbers were fake, couldn't it also be true that the border numbers were fake? No, because we would definitely notice that the border numbers were fake if the border was exactly the way it had been. You don't think we were noticed? It's harder to notice unemployment or employment, you know, especially if you're talking 1 or 2%. But it's not hard to notice that the border is wide open or totally closed. But the, the husband of even saying that it might be a data reporting problem by the administration. That's pretty bold. So apparently there's a giant tanker, oil tanker that is one of these shadow fleet trying to illegally move oil from Venezuela. And so the Coast Guard started chasing it down. And instead of surrendering, which you would expect them to do because they're literally up against the military. So instead of Surrendering, they decided to do a U turn and make a run for it. Now, obviously they're not going to outrun the Coast Guard, so there's a little bit of a mystery as to why they haven't surrendered. Because the, the staff of the, of the, the vessel, they're not military, you know, they're just underpaid semen, so to speak. So why would they even take a chance? It's not their oil, you know, I mean, I suppose there's some risk of penalty to them if they give it up, but what do they think? They think they're going to outrun the Coast Guard. So part of the story Wall Street Journal is reporting on this is that the US is just waiting to bring some more military assets in so they can do a proper military takeover of the boat. If they don't voluntarily surrender, it looks like they're not. So did you know that there's such a thing as a maritime special response team? So apparently the US military has a group who are specially trained elite force for boarding hostile ships. I guess what they do is they bring in a bunch of helicopters and, you know, the helicopters keep everybody busy. Then the special elite team, they repel down, presumably. I, I don't think the helicopter lands. I think they probably rappel down and then they use their superior weaponry to make it to the bridge and then basically take over. And then there's some speculation that they're looking for a captain who would know how to run the boat after they, the ship after they take it over. Because it's not that common to know how to operate that kind of a ship. So it might be hard to find somebody who's willing to, you know, be the, be the new captain. Would they be seals? I don't know. Maybe there would be a subset of seals, but the seals were not mentioned in this story. Anyway, as part of that story I keep hearing is said that if the Venezuelan oil shipments are shut down or even seriously degraded, that it will collapse the economy of Cuba, because Cuba is already a basket case and it depends on cheap Venezuelan oil. So if the cheap Venezuelan oil gets cut off or seriously degraded, some people say, oh, the Cuban economy will collapse. To which I say there's never been a time in my life when the Cuban economy was not on the border of collapse. Do you believe that they're going to collapse every time we hear this? Things don't collapse, at least not completely. So it seems like there's always a workaround for everything. But the thing I still don't know is if the Trump administration thinks they're getting a twofer and that they're going to find a way to do regime change in Cuba the hard way, just indirectly, by putting pressure on their, their sponsor. Don't know. All right. According to POLITICO, the U.S. immigration Customs Enforcement people that we know as ICE are buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of surveillance tools so that they can find the non legal residents. So that would include, let's see, social media monitoring tools, facial recognition software, licensed flight readers and services to find people, where people live and work. So let me take you back to something I've been predicting for 10 years. If you think you can protect your privacy, you can't. Your privacy was always going to disappear and it wouldn't matter who's in charge. And the reason I say that is that the utility of taking your privacy away is just too high. So the government, whoever the government is, is going to say, well, you know, we really need to, you know, we really need to do this for the illegals. Then the next thing you know, you're going to say, well, we have all these tools, you know, why do we also sell it to the police force? And I don't think it will ever matter if the Democrats or the Republicans are in charge. I think in every scenario, just the usefulness of taking away your privacy for law and order will be so high that you don't have a chance. It will just disappear. And I'm not saying that's a good idea. I'm just saying it's inevitable. So, you know, if you're worried about it happening, maybe what you should worry about is not doing anything that can be discovered that you would want to be discovered. Because a full lack of privacy is just guaranteed in the future. I mean, that's before you have a robot in your house, how much privacy you can have with a robot in your house. All right, let me ask you this. Let's say you've got a, an optimist robot and the police say if we could get that robot to spy on you, that we can find out, you know, if you're doing anything bad. Would Elon Musk say, nope, even though you have a warrant, I will not, I will not turn on the ability to monitor people through the robot, which would be presumably not that hard. But even Elon Musk can't defy the Department of Justice. So if the Department of Justice says, oh yeah, this is a totally legitimate use of a warrant, you've got a robot, we can listen through the robot we are ordering you to make that robot a spy. Would he do it? I don't know that he would have a choice. I think he would go to jail if he didn't do it. So, yeah, as soon as there's a robot in every house, you'd better not break any laws. Surprisingly, there's a report that Zelensky is going to meet at Mar a Lago on Sunday to try to reach an agreement. Now that surprises me because the most recent comment from the Russian envoys was that they're not, they didn't make any progress recently and they're, they're not close to a deal. But there are some hints that they might be close to a deal. One of the hints is that Trump probably wouldn't take the meeting unless he thought it was close enough that he could push it over the edge. Now, he's an optimist. So just because he thinks they might be close, that doesn't mean they're close. But it's worth a try. So remember, he's got Kushner and Wyckoff working on this and they're very good at what they do. So maybe we're in for a surprise. But according to Axios, here are some of the things that are the biggest sticking points and why we might be closer to a deal than we think. One is that Ukraine needed security guarantees and apparently the US Is willing to put some legislation through Congress that would give them security guarantees without NATO. Now what would that look like? What exactly would a US Security guarantee be unless it meant we would put boots on the ground if Russia got adventurous? Well, I don't know, but one of the things it could be is that open ended, we will respond, but that what we would plan to do is give the Ukrainians the good weapons that we've never given them before. So suppose we said, here's the deal, Russia, we have held back our best weapons because it would look like we're part of the war if we give it the good stuff. But if we give them a security guarantee and you move on them militarily, we will instantly take the controls off and they can have everything except our nuclear weapons. So suddenly, you will not be facing Ukrainian weapons. You'll be facing the most optimized American weapons. If you look at what companies like Anduril are doing to make our weapons smarter, cheaper, that would be quite a threat. And it would not guarantee that there would be any boosts on the ground, but it could be quite a good, quite a good incentive for Russia to stay away so I'm just speculating that there is a way to create a security guarantee that would be sensible. I wasn't sure there would be. And that if Russia responds military, there would also be sanctions. Of course. And maybe the sanctions would be worse. If they could be worse, then the other thing that Russia wants is it wants complete control over the Donbass. So it sounds like they're not flexible on control of the Donbass, which would require, I think, Ukraine to actually pull out of some part of the Donbass that they have not yet lost. And Russia would have control over what they already have, plus a little extra. Now, here's what the US Seems to have counter proposed since the word that's being used as control. Is it possible that you can find a hybrid situation where Russia feels like it has enough control to be, let's say, safe from a military build up there or safe from something bad happening? But that, I guess Wyckoff and Jared Kushner have suggested that they turn that into the Donbass, into a free economic zone, so that you reframe it. And I like this part. You reframe the Donbass from a military zone to an economic zone and you say, how about we make this the one place that you can make some money and there's not going to be any war. If that works for you, it works for us. We don't need to put any missiles there, you don't need to attack it, but you can have something like control. Do you think there's any hybrid situation in which Russia would say, all right, that's enough control? Because we're worried about security, we're worried about the US Putting some missiles there and we, we would agree not to maybe. Maybe. I think there might be something there. And let's see. And apparently there's some issue about a ceasefire, because Russia doesn't want to do a ceasefire until they have a deal. But Ukraine is saying we can't have a deal because of our laws unless we have a referendum. And the referendum ended in voting to give up that control of the Donbass. But it looks like the Russians understand that if the, if the referendum is the only way to get there, and the only way to have a referendum is with a ceasefire, that might be negotiable. So maybe that's something that they would cave on. So anyway, I'm just speculating that is possible. I'd probably still bet against it, but it's possible that they're close to a deal. And then I saw in where Did I see this in the Amuse account on X pointed out. I don't know what the source of this is, but Amuse is good on sources that the European Union has committed to. This blows my mind that the European Union has deals to buy Russian energy through 2027. So that would be, that would imply that Russia could continue affording war for at least two more years. So it's possible that Russia, you know, might want to make a deal, but maybe they could wait another two years and see if they get more control over the Donbass if they don't care about the casualties. So it just blows my mind that Europe is still, you know, attached to Russian oil. Then apparently there's some people in the administration who think that if we make peace with Russia, that would be a four way piece, you know, Europe, us, Ukraine, Russia, if we can make peace. That Russia has such unlimited natural resources that everybody can make a ton of money. But the counter to that is that the entire economy of Russia is about the size of Italy. Italy's economy and is sort of shrinking. They've got a demographic problem. But the biggest problem that Russia has is that if you're a legitimate business person from the west and you built a company that made money in Russia, the Russians would steal it. They would literally just steal your company. Because Russia is basically a criminal organization pretending to be a country. So do you think it's. And they don't have that many resources that are, they're unique. So the thinking is that if you thought Russia was this gold mine of natural resources. Well, it does have some natural resources, but it's not essential to run the world. And it's so risky to do any kind of business in Russia that you'd be crazy to try. So one question is, can we really sell the idea that doing business with Russia is good for them and good for us? I can see why it would be good for them. Because if, if an American company comes in and, you know, let's say, you know, builds this really successful energy enterprise working with the Russians, the Russians would seal it, they would nationalize it, they would jail the CEO. They would just steal it. So we'll see if the. We'll see if that's even a path they can take. Hey, everybody makes money. We'll see. Well, over Christmas, if you weren't paying attention, the US launched strikes on the Islamic State targets in Nigeria. Apparently Nigerian ISIS has been killing, literally massacring Christians. And Trump really doesn't like that. So he had warned them that the bad guys that if they kept killing Christians, he was going to respond militarily. Allegedly Nigeria's government approved it, so it wasn't a violation of their sovereignty. But we don't know how many people were bombed or if it was missiles. I'm pretty sure no American boots were on the ground and no American casualties. Don't know that for sure, but I'm sure we did it from a distance anyway. It makes me wonder under what authority can Trump order an attack on Nigeria? Even if the government of Nigeria says yes, what authority allows him to do that? Can he just tell the military to attack anybody he wants now? You know, arguably there's a good rationale for it. I'm not arguing that he shouldn't have done it, but how do you justify that legally? I know. I suspect the anti war people will have something to say about this next week. And again, I'm not opposed to it. If there were no casualties on the American side and it made a difference. We don't yet know if it made a difference, but potentially might have been a good play. You know, I've told you now quite a few times that when Trump has options, he always picks the strongest one. Even if the War Powers act, even if it's not the optimal strategy, that every time he picks the, quote, strong strategy, that pays off because the next situation where he's negotiating, nobody will think he's bluffing. You see what I'm saying? As long as he always picks the strongest play, even if it's not the optimized play, then every time he has to deal with somebody, they're going to say, oh, damn it, he's not bluffing. If he says he's going to bomb us, he's definitely going to bomb us. So even if he isn't, so it's a real good play. Persuasion wise, literally murdering priests. I also don't know the scale of it. Obviously there's no amount. That's right. There's no amount that's the right amount of killing Christians. But I do wonder, what is the scale? I mean, are they killing 100 Christians a day? How bad is it? Arguing about the legality is laughable. Yeah, I would say I'm more curious than arguing about it. I wouldn't say I'm arguing about it. All right, pull our investments. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's all I have for you today. And if you want to hang out for another minute, I will be happy to sip my coffee and hang out with you just because you might be lonely. I know there Are a few birthdays today. How many of you have a birthday today? At least two of the locals people have a birthday, but we've got, what, 5,000 people watching? Out of the 5,000 people, how many are. How many are having a birthday today? I'll bet there's quite a few. So there you go, Deb. Happy birthday to all the birthday people. Your brother does all right. Did anybody get a pet for Christmas? Did anybody get, like a kitten or a puppy? If you did, I want to see a picture of it. Oh, it's a lonely day for you. Well, that's why we're here. You need not be lonely because I'm here and all of your friends are here. I'd like to see a robot do this. Well, I don't know if that was a good show, but kept you busy for an hour. Sex kittens. Yeah, they count. You wish. You got a puppy. Over 52,000 Christians I've been. Wow. Well, that's in Africa in general. That's all of Africa, not Nigeria. Right. That's a lot. 52,000 Christians. Yeah. No medical advice, please. You're understanding that? What? Oh, you can't show that. Do I have a lot of close friends from school? Not from school, because I don't live anywhere where my school is. But let me tell you this. I am so blessed, so blessed to have people that I trust completely in my life. Because when you get in my situation, you have to. You have to trust people to do what you need to be done and not take advantage of you. And I have a. I have a very high trust social situation. Very high trust. And that is quite a. Quite a relief. You're always alone on the holidays, huh? Sorry about that. I know you said it doesn't bother you, but it's not what I want for you. Yeah, no, I had no problems on the holidays whatsoever. You reap what you sow. True enough. No, don't send gifts to my caretakers, But thanks for offering. Are you enjoying your Sunday home? All right, people, I think we've done enough for today, so how about we say bye for now and I'll catch up with you tomorrow? Bye for now. Where's my cursor?