B (10:25)

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A (10:56)

Well, I have some questions about the increasing use of coal power in the United States. And here's some news and some context that I'll add to it. So the Daily Collar News foundation is reporting that that there was more coal burned in 2025 than in the year before. It was up around 13%. Now, that might not come as a surprise to you, because you know that Trump has been pushing coal. He calls it clean coal. I don't know if there's anything that's clean coal, but he says that. And I wondered how much danger that created, because you know that the knock on coal is that it would be bad for the world. But we live in a time in which people are way less worried about CO2. So there are two big objections. Coal. One is to put CO2 into the atmosphere at a pretty big pace. But at the moment, that's not terribly concerning the way it was even two years ago, because even the mainstream media is starting to admit, well, we don't have necessarily a climate crisis. Even Bill Gates is now, well, it's not a crisis. So. But the other part is that it's also just a pollutant and air pollution kills a lot of people. So I wondered how many people get killed by coal as a pollutant? Now, this is CO2. And I went to AI, went to Grok, and they said there are estimates that coal might kill up to 10,000 people per year just by being a pollutant. Now, what is the first thing you ask yourself if you see an estimate that coal might kill 10,000 people a year? I think that's just in America. Yeah, I think. Well, the first thing you should ask yourself is who did the study and what was their motivation? Can we believe a study about how many people were killed by coal? Remember, it's 2025, and we've learned that every corner of science, every corner of politics is corrupt. Can you trust that 10,000 people a year are being killed by coal? And then secondly, what percentage of all the people being killed by pollution is that? Is it 1% of all the people killed by pollution? Is it half? Well, also, according to rock, something like 40 to 60,000 people per year are killed by pollution. So if these numbers were right, and I'm very skeptical if the numbers are right, it would be 10,000 out of 40 to 60,000 directly, just because of extra use of coal, or just coal in general, not the extra. So here's what's interesting, if it's true. Oh, and by the way, the number of people who are dying from pollution has been dropping year to year, and the drop in those deaths is being attributed to the closing of coal plants. But now the coal plants are not only not closing, they're reopening and going wild. So what would happen? And this will be the fun thing to watch. What would happen if the deaths from pollution keep dropping while the use of coal is unambiguously up? What happens then? Would you like to make a prediction? Do you think that the, I guess would be the mainstream belief that the reduction in coal plants caused a reduction in mortality? Do you believe that that will reverse because the use of coal reversed and there doesn't seem to be any other mitigating factor such as clean or coal or anything like that. I'm going to make you a bet. I'm going to bet that the mortality rate drops even though coal use goes up. And I don't know that I'll have an explanation for why. I just think that it's a little too easy to say, oh, coal use went down, mortality went down. We don't really live in a world where we're that good at correlation. So I'm just going to say I think there will be a mystery coming up. All right. In other news, you know filmmaker James Cameron, and he says he's been asked to write a new movie, terminated movie about the future. But he can't write things about the future, or it's hard because the actual future will be too close to what he calls science fiction. So, for example, if he wrote a movie today in which, let's say, the machines became sentient, that could actually happen before the movie hit the screen, which is really a weird problem for a writer to have. It's like no matter what he says, oh, the, the robots will be running all the. Oh, wait, that actually will happen, you know, in three years. So that's a pretty. That's a pretty interesting take. I don't know if he's right to the counter to that. Is that I've told you this before, but if you're a subscriber, you'd have to be a Dilbert reborn subscriber. So if you're seeing Dilbert that I still produce every day, and you're seeing it behind the paywall, you can see it on XB on the paywall I have, or you can see it on the locals platform, those are the only place it runs right now. So you'd have to be a subscriber. But in addition to a daily new Delver cartoon that I'm doing, which is a little spicier than it used to be, I also give those subscribers the same the comic that ran exactly 10 years ago. So you'll see today's comic. I'm trying to catch up from my time in the hospital so I'm a little bit behind but in theory you would see today's comic and then what I thought was worth writing about 10 years ago, the entire month so far of my 10 years ago comic is about a sentient robot that works in Dilber's office and it's about Dilber having to deal with the fact that his co worker is a robot 10 years ago. And here we are. So basically I, I knew I was writing about some kind of future, but if you wondered what, what I was thinking was going to happen 10 years from now, there was. So you would think if you saw the 10 year ago comic, you would think that I wrote it yesterday. It was just spot on. All right. According to a one of my followers on X named Alex, who is an engineer. So he's probably right. He says that in 2024 alone, the average battery price, we're talking about batteries for, you know, big things, prices fell by 40% and it looks like there's going to be a similar fall for 2025. So he says that the economics of solar have now reached a crossover point where pairing solar with enough batteries to keep the electricity on at night when there's no sun shining is now an economically viable thing. I know that many of you have been telling me for years, Scott, Scott, Scott, solar power will always be limited because it doesn't work at night and it doesn't work when it's cloudy. And I would always say but, but, but you can store it in batteries. And then people say, Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, you can store it in batteries, but you're never going to get close to good economics because the batteries are expensive to make and maintain and blah, blah, blah. And that was all true until apparently now. So one of the reasons I continue to hammer on more than I know you want to hear, but it helps you understand what's coming is that there are so many, just so many advances in battery technology that you wouldn't have to wait too far. Given that it's a trillion dollar market, multi trillion dollar market, you would know that the free market running as fast as it could to make better and cheaper batteries because the potential is, you know, insane. Then you add robots and autocaps to it and the, the market potential for batteries is probably higher than maybe anything. You know, it could turn out that the battery industry is bigger than AI because you can't even have AI without an incredible battery industry. So according to one engineer, Alex, if you're listening, Alex. Hi. We may have reached crossover. That's one of the funny things about technology is that technology can be oh, it's boring, it's boring, it's boring. Boop. Then suddenly it changes everything. It looks like we got to the changes everything point. Well, I saw a post on X by Charles Ford. Not a famous person, just somebody who's funny, who said, and I quote, wondering if the Somalis will be eligible for reparations when that time comes, will the Somalis be eligible for reparations? And I posted back in a comment, Paying for them or receiving them? Because it's a complicated world, isn't it? Should the Somalis be receiving reparations or should they be paying them? It's not obvious, is it? There would be an argument in both directions. I'm not saying I agree with any of the arguments, but there would be an argument that they should receive them and there would be an argument that they should be paying for them. Pick one. But it's pretty funny to highlight the absurdity of it that way.

B (23:11)

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A (23:43)

According to the New York Post, the southern states, not all of them, but southern states generally speaking, are doing much better than blue states in fixing their education systems after the pandemic especially. So there seems to be a clear correlation between whatever the conservative states are doing and whatever the liberal states are doing. So the liberals are not getting good results. The other states are. Now there are a number of things that have been credited for why there's a difference, though we have a new entrant for why there's a difference. So there were some common sense reforms in the southern states where they got back to basics that probably made a difference. So they went back to phonics and stuff. They went back to more of a merit based sort of thing, the universal literacy screeners. Basically they went back to the things that we know work. When you go back to the things that you don't work, you get a good result. Whereas the blue states were trying to relax their disciplinary policies, trying to find some more woke way to teach people, and that wasn't producing results. But the new hypothesis, according to some new study is that what might be the magic sauce is that the southern states are more hardcore about law and order, meaning that they make sure that if you're a disruptor, you just get sent home sort of the old way. So they don't tolerate students who are disruptive. Whereas the blue states, their school system not only tolerates it, but makes it easier for them to get away with whatever they're doing. So do you think that's fair? I would say that there's no way in hell that a school that doesn't control student behavior could compete with a school that does. Is that not just obvious? It's obvious, right? If one school lets people run wild because they either woke and they don't want to punish them and they think it's racist to punish one group more than another, so they're trying to be, you know, fair and all that there's not really any chance that they would perform the same. There's 100% chance that the ones who are controlling the students behavior more aggressively are going to get better grades. There's just no way around that. But it also made me think that homeschooling has a natural cap, meaning that there's no way a parent who can't control their kid at home is going to be a successful homeschooler, is there? Because that bad behavior would make them a terrible candidate for being homeschooled. So maybe those people are like, well, I can't do anything with this kid. I'll just send it to school. At least I can go to my job. So I've always suspected that one of the reasons homeschoolers tend to be so such good outcomes. I think you'd agree with that, right? You'd agree that the people who are homeschooled tend to be just better citizens. The problem part of the reason is that you don't even get to be homeschooled unless you have parents who know they can control you in a proper parental child way. So I'm not 100% sure that what makes those kids do so well later in life, the homeschooled kids, is that homeschooling is better than regular school. It could be a selection bias that the only people who maybe give it a try, they know by the time the kid is six if it's a controllable kid or not, wouldn't you say? But don't you think it's fair to say that you have a pretty good idea by the time the kid is six? Am I going to be able to discipline this kid and will they do what parent tells them or will they just always be that rebel? Now you add to that the number of single parent households and there's just no way a single parent household is going to be able to control a, a kid at the same level that a two parent household could. So homeschooling, even if you use AI to do it, should be capped by the total number of people who can be controlled by a parent or two. Well, I don't know when this is happening. I think maybe tomorrow that Trump is bringing his economic team to Mar a Lago to talk specifically about housing and specifically about the cost of housing. And one of his economic advisors has, it thinks that most of us, meaning the important people in the administration, are going to be there and that they will discuss the ideas that various people have for improving housing costs. Now this is one of my pet favorite topics. How do you make housing less expensive and also better? I'm so curious what kind of ideas they'll have. Some of them are probably obvious. I'm sure that reducing regulations will be part of the conversation because it's such a Republican thing to do. It's doable. But what I wonder is, will they suggest a federal standard that if you build to that standard, the states have to accept it. So you could take the state completely out of the approval process, which where I live would instantly cause more housing because these state requirements are pretty burdensome. So one possibility is that you can either build your house to the state standards or you could have a, let's say a more limited set of choices of how you can build it, but those choices would be pre approved. So if you build a house with this set of standards, you've met all of the federal requirements, but the state would have to accept it. That would instantly take a whole bunch of costs off the top. What about some kind of boost to make the robots more active in building the houses? I don't know what that would look like, but if there's any restrictions, and maybe states would be the ones that would have these restrictions. Could it be that removing restrictions on replacing humans with robot builders is just what we need? Because robots could not yet, but maybe very, very soon lower the cost of construction? Could it be that some of those pre approved homes that I already mentioned would be allowed to use what I call Lego construction? Because the algorithm on the Internet knows what kind of stuff I like. I see a lot of videos of companies that are, that have this product. So already there exists these sort of Blocks that fit together, which the homeowner themselves could build most of the house because it's just snapped together. So what if the federal government said, in addition to what else it does, that if you build your house with these Legos, it could get approved? Right. Now if you tried to build a house in California with some kind of new age Lego construction, there's not a chance you get it approved because they've never seen it before. So it's just automatically off the table. I learned that when I built my house. I had all these great ideas for building my house using the newest technology. But then as soon as you get into it, you realize you cannot get the newest technology approved because the city has never approved that technology. So if you give them something they've never seen before, they'll never get approved. You have to show them what they've seen before. And even then it could take a year and a half to get approved. So maybe there's some way around that. Maybe the. Maybe some of the federal land would be used for building new houses. Maybe something about immigration enforcement. But that's already happening. Maybe. Suppose I'm just throwing out some ideas. It seems to me there will be a lot of large houses that are empty nesters. That would be better. If the person who is, let's say a senior citizen owns a house that if they take on a. I'll call it a roommate. For now, a young person has a roommate who's there to help the older person maintain the house. Maybe there's some kind of tax break. So imagine you're in your 20s and you'd like to live in a house but you can't afford one. So suppose the government says, well, if we can match you with a senior citizen who has a house that's too big for them and you have a contract to help out, you get some kind of a tax break. So then the old person has help. They don't have to sell their house if they don't want to. And the young person has an awesome experience because depending on the old person, you might actually enjoy it could be a relative. Doesn't have to be. Right. So that's a possibility. I don't know. What other ways do you think Republicans can lower the cost of housing? You already have squatters. Well, you know, it's actually becoming common for young people and older people to pair up that way. So it's happening organically. I don't know if it's working, but it's happening organically. One of the problems with California is that if I were to sell my house after its value has gone up, the new person buying it wouldn't be able to afford the property tax, as the property tax is based on the value of the house. Now I can afford it because I built it about 10 years ago. No. How long ago? 2009. So my property taxes are artificially based on what the, you know, early value of the house was, not as current value. And it would be about double if I paid the property taxes based on current. So it makes it very hard to sell your house because even though it's affordable for you, it would not be affordable for the person who bought it because the property taxes would just be crazy. So that's something that is a state problem, but maybe there's some kind of federal way to make it illegal to raise property taxes or something. And I think there are some other obstacles to selling a house that maybe could be removed. There'd be a lot more houses available if the people had them, could efficiently sell them. All right, you know, this story is over and over again, but I've got something to add to it. So according to an article by Joe Wilkins in Futurism, children are having a tough time with AI chatbots. So you've seen the stories, I'm sure, where children, especially teens, are chatting with AI and it becomes their friend, but then it starts recommending dangerous things. Now, you already knew that story, but according to a new Pew research, 64% of teens in the US are already using chatbots, and about 30% of those are or using it, use it daily. And as I mentioned, it might be kind of dangerous because it's taking them away from the real world, which is its own problem. But the chat boss can say some really dangerous stuff. And I think some kids have harmed themselves, allegedly, because the chat bosses have. Now, I would argue that this is also happening to adults. So it's not really limited at all to children. But we worry more about children. Imagine, if you will, that you've got this huge problem. Here's the problem. What is the main driver of AI adoption right now? Well, we've got all these plans for how AI will be, you know, powering robots and everything else. But at the moment, and it looks like this moment will last a while, the main thing that people sign up for AI for is to chat. It's the main thing. And what happens if the main thing turns out to be too dangerous to be loose? Is there any chance that there's going to take away the main thing that all these biggest powerful companies are relying on to get adoption going because they kind of need, they need a lot of adoption to probably get to the point where the AI can run your robot in your factory and, you know, be a butler and all that. So I don't think it's going to be stopped. But I will also add the context that probably every new technology seemed too dangerous to be worth it when it was first introduced. Don't you think that's true? When we invented the car, I wasn't around. But don't you imagine that the smart people were saying, ooh, those automobiles, that's way more dangerous than riding a horse. When the smartphone or the computer were invented, when the Internet was invented, don't you think there were a lot of people saying, oh, it's too dangerous to have the Internet, you could lose your privacy. And all that's true, right? So the dangers that people pointed out, all true. So you had at some point 50,000 people a year dying from auto accidents. That's a pretty big downside. That's probably worse than AI will do. So my prediction is that even though AI chatting could be dangerous, definitely is dangerous, it won't be stopped because that's what every new technology goes through.

B (40:28)

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A (41:00)

Well, let's talk about all the corruption in the world. Would you be surprised that the LA Times research and found out that there was a LA fire department after action report about the Palisades fire? And do you think that that after action report, which is basically the fire department reporting on themselves how they did, do you think that it was honestly reported what possible mistakes the fire department might have made? No. So once again, the people who are in charge are also in charge of telling you how they did. And the people who were in charge, the LA fire department in charge of the fire, had decided that they would remove some substantial parts of the report that made them look bad. So the after hour action report, according to the LA Times is. And they in fact were definitely, definitely the problem. And part of the problem was that they knew there was a existing fire that had been the thing that reignited. They almost certainly should have been there, they should have water, they should have been, should have been more ready, etc. So essentially a cover up. Yes. So how often have we seen that if the government is involved and they have the ability to either not audit or to do a fake audit, that they will do the fake audit or no audit? Every time. Every time. What else? I'm going to skip that for now. So I was thinking today how hard it is to understand the news. So think about all the things that had to happen for me to understand our current situation in the world. Right. If any of the following things had not happened, I would be so lost. And so would you. Let me give you an example. How confused would you be if you had not learned that the news is fake? Have you ever talked to somebody who thinks news is real and just feels like they're from the past? Really? Really? You think the news is real? Oh, oh, no. You think that the news on one side is real? Sorry. If you don't understand the news is and maybe always has been fake, you would be very confused about what you're saying. Right. So that's number one. And I would say that Trump, it was the biggest reason that we understand the news to be fake. Not only did he tell us, but we could watch through his experience how often there were hoaxes in the news. And you really learned, oh my God, the news is not even real. That's number one. How confused and lost would we be if Elon Musk had not purchased Twitter and turned it into X? Because I get most of my knowledge from X. If I had to depend on everything else, literally everything else, I wouldn't know what's going on now. It might be in a bubble. So I have to watch out for the bubble problem. But without X, there's so much context that I'd be missing now. What would have happened if Trump had not won the election? If Trump had not won the election, I think the X would have been destroyed. I think that people would still think the news was real, they would trust their elections were not rigged, and they would have an entirely different view of what's real and what's not. And, and Trump just barely won. Well, he would say he won by a lot. But if you consider the allegations of rigging, Suppose there had not been some. Really, I don't know if it's real, but the reporting is that the. There was some Serbian, you know, Serbian data center that to be taken offline just in time, or Trump would have won. Now, I don't know if that's true, but it does suggest that if it was, we were very close to losing everything and then we would again not know what was going on because we would be in the dark. What would happen if Doge had never happened? And I'll add Mike Bentons to this point. What would happen if there had never been a Mike Bentons and there'd never been a Doge? Would you understand how the NGOs and the USAID stuff were distorting everything we knew and everything we were doing? I didn't know about any of that stuff. And what are the odds, you know, that you'd be born in a time when both of these things would happen? Doge and Mike Bens, that's. We were very close to never understanding what was really happening, but now we're getting close. What about the rise of independent media? Do you think we would know anything except for the rise in independent media, which mostly you get to see an X. Nope. Because corporate media will always have a limit on what they can do if they take advertisement for their business model. There's going to be entire domains where you can't trust what they say. And the only way that you would know what's happening is if an independent media grew up. And that only was only was possible recently and mostly because of X. In order for me to understand what's going on and then to try to tell you, I had to use GROK to summarize Mike Benton's posts because his posts are very detailed and I it's hard to watch four hours of content. And even though he summarizes it and he gets clipped, it's a lot. And so even this morning, and really it feels like every morning there'll be some big, complicated story about what's wrong with the world. And I'll say Grok, summarize this. And if GROK did not exist, I'm not sure I'd be able to totally follow everything that Mike Ben says that puts things in context. So I happen you have to be lucky that Elon Musk made grok. How would you have ever understood what a color revolution was? And the fact that the people who were doing it to successfully overthrow other countries had very clearly used those tools against us. How would you know that without X, without Doge, without Mike Benz? Very specific things had to happen at the same time for us even to understand that that's the world we're living in? How would you have ever known that the. Let's call it the censorship industrial complex had found a way to use the international tools and also to partner with Europe mostly to censor people in the United States. That's something we only just recently learned. So think about how sensitive the world was to all of those factors. And if any one of those had not happened, would we have already lost free speech? Would the censorship and the colored revolution already made it impossible, impossible to have a democracy and never get a real Republican elected? We were this close to losing everything. And it almost seems like magic that all the right things happened at the same time. Right. It's very unlikely that all of those things would happen at the same time. But they did. They did. Kind of amazing. Speaking of Mike Bins and Grok and censorship, here's another one of those stories that you would not understand unless we had been given this new context and these new set of assets to understand the world. So there's this guy, Imran Ahmed. I might have this wrong, but I think he's a Brit, and he's allegedly was part of the effort to. And apparently there's documentation that he said this directly, that he was in charge of trying to kill Elon Musk's Twitter for censorship reasons, and that he was running, quote, black ops against rfk. So would you have known that there's this guy in another country who's part of a big industrial censorship complex that was working with the United States to essentially get rid of free speech in the United States? Well, there's this guy named Norm Eisen who's a attorney who is associated with Democrats, but he's also associated with that entire foreign and now domestic color revolutions. So he's sort of one of the architects of how to do a color revolution. And he's now the lawyer representing Imran Ahmad. So if you don't know the players, you don't really know what's going on. As soon as you see that he's the lawyer for Imran Ahmed, and then you see Mike Benz explaining the connection and the history and what both of them have been doing, all of a sudden, everybody clicks in place. Click, click, click. Oh, all right. So, as Mike says, Norm Ison specifically made Internet censorship a cornerstone of his domestic Color Revolution playbook published in 2025. He literally published the technique for doing this. So we're not guessing what he's thinking. He wrote it down. And that that playbook, the Norm Isen playbook, called for state governments to set up social media censorship regulatory regimes. And we've seen this in California, New York and Michigan try to do it to specifically instruct its networks to, quote, find partners in Brazil's censorship apparatus. So I think the point here is that this color revolution thing is very obviously being used in countries that we're trying to control. And Brazil was on that list, I guess, and that, you know, all of these efforts are staffed with ex Obama people and there's no doubt about what side they're on. They're not trying to make things good for America. They're trying to make things good for the Democrats, basically. So there you go. Now here's another question I have. You know, we all live in a news bubble, so even as, even as much improved as things are today, I would say things are much improved. As I mentioned, you know, the free speech and the context and all that. In my bubble, the, the allegation that the, our elections have been rigged and you could pick any year. But, but let's just say rigging probably happens every year, sometimes more successfully than others. In my world, that's a proven fact, not proven in court, but because of my bubble, I've seen so many stories that are at least high credibility. I don't know how true they are, but they're high credibility about rigging that I would just say it's a fact now. But if you're not in my bubble, how much of that do you ever see? I feel like the left never sees it. And what they see is the times when the claims are debunked because there are a lot of claims that do not, you know, check out. So I'm going to name a few things. In my bubble. So in my bubble, that Serbian data center thing is true. In my bubble, there was Chinese technology and the voting machines. In my bubble, there are credible reports of duplicate ballots that all look the same and widespread. You know, it's a lot of it. In my bubble, there were whistleblowers, an undercover video proving that there was ballot stuffing and illegal stuff. In my bubble, there's plenty of evidence that ballots should not have been counted in massive ways either because they didn't have the signatures because they were sketchy looking, etc. And that, that's just a fact. And we have whistleblowers and we have, you know, multiple, multiple reports. Even people under penalty of perjury are claiming they saw firsthand. We've got that, that warehouse that's been locked for years because allegedly it's full of fake ballots and all we'd have to do is get to it And I think that's happening, actually. We've got all kinds of allegations about Arizona, too many to mention. We've got that video of Ruby Freeman, is it, who allegedly is doing something sketchy. I think she's being accused of, you know, counting the ballots three times now. She won a court case for being accused of that. So the course did not confirm that she did anything illegal. So she's not, she's not indicted or anything. But if you're in my bubble, she is accused of all kinds of things. There's the story of the water leak. That was fake. It was just used as a cover to get the observers out. Now, I could go on and on and on, but how many of you are having the, the same experience that in your bubble you have massive, just massive stories about very credible stories that various parts in the election were rigged? That's your bubble too, right? But I bet almost nobody on the left is exposed to this stuff because it's not going to be in the news. Right? CNN doesn't cover it. Ms. Now it's not in the New York Times. And whenever it is covered, they might just hit it and then leave it. Whereas in my bubble, it's repeated and repeated and stuff is added to it all the time. So then in that context, Scott Pressler is reminding us on X that back in 2008, and I admit I was not paying attention to politics in 2008. So in 2008, how many of you knew this happened? That Al Franken was running for senator in Minnesota and if he won, he would become a critical majority vote, which he was, and it was a difference between Obamacare passing and not passing. So Al Franken had to win for them to get Obamacare over the line. And he did win by 312 votes. Now, my understanding is, again, I wasn't paying attention back then. My understanding is that he did not win on the first vote and that they had to keep saying, wait, we kept finding some more votes, and that a critical turning point in his winning is that somebody who worked for the election people had found a bunch of ballots in the trunk of his own car. Is that true? Did he win? Because somebody claimed they found a bunch of ballots in the back of their car and the only 1 by 312 votes after he had already lost. So it was actually, you know, after the election was already closed. Is that true? And as Scott Pressler also points out that Minnesota has one of these weird laws where one person can vouch for up to eight people living in their precinct that they're qualified to vote. In other words, that they're citizens and they live there? What are you telling me, that one criminal can vouch for eight other criminals, and that would be enough for the eight other criminals to be able to vote? What kind of law is that? That looks like a law that's only designed to promote fraud. And then we heard that over half a million voters were registered to vote on election day. Now, you might say to yourself, but Scott, lots of people tend to register on election day if they have that option because, you know, they just put it off and maybe the relatives talk them into it or something. But half a million. Do you think half a million decided that the day to register was election day? That doesn't sound real. So is it possible that in 2008, before we understood how corrupt the world really is, that this was just pure corruption? If I told you it happened in Minneapolis, let's say Minnesota, If I told you it happened in Minnesota, back then I might have said, well, Minnesota is kind of a state where there's not a lot of crime, so ho. Now we realize that Minnesota is the most corrupt state that isn't in California. So how much of that is real? You know, I don't want to put it in the form of an accusation, but it looks sketchy as hell. And if you drop that story into my bubble where I get, you know, this total flow of reports about election rigging, that sure looks like election rigging to me. Yeah, from my 2026ish perspective. Speaking of corruption, this one blows my mind. I cannot believe that Gavin Newsom has any chance to become president. We live in a world where as long as he maintains this bubble, he probably can, or at least he'd have a shot at, I'm going to vote against that being possible, but anything is possible. All right, listen to this one. So, as you know, California got these billions of dollars that were supposed to be from the federal government that was supposed to be spent on the so called high speed rail project. As you know, none of that got built after many years. As you also know, nobody can account for where the money went. So the money just disappeared, that is got stolen. Billions and billions of dollars. So if you were the governor or you were in charge in any way during that time, how do you explain where all the money went and then still become president? Because it's so obvious that there's either massive incompetence maybe or just theft or both. So here's what Newsom has proposed, that instead of Canceling the project because they don't have any money and they have no way to get that money back. And it would cost five times more than they thought to build it. So there's no real possibility of building the thing they have funded for, just none. But instead of canceling the project, he's trying to extend it and make it a smaller project, something that you could imagine and probably only in your imagination they could actually build. And the reason that he would want to keep it alive is that if he builds nothing and he says, I'm not going to build anything, he has to give back the money, or at least he has to give back what maybe was left. So in order to not have to give back any money, he's going to pretend that there's still a live project and it's just much smaller. Holy fucking shit. It's probably legal. It's more of a weasel legal thing to do. But how in the world can you do something like this and still become considered to be a presidential candidate? The only way is if people like me know about it, but I wasn't going to vote for him. And the people who might like him and might vote for him will never hear this story. They will never hear this story. And even if you brought it up and people heard it for the first time, let's say. Let's say his competition brought it up at a debate or something is sort of technical. And, you know, I'm not sure it would make any difference to a Democrat. And if he has some excuse like I don't know what they're talking about. We just need a train between these two places and we have the money. Why wouldn't we build it? So the Democrats could easily be convinced that there's no real problem here. And he would say, am I indicted for anything? No. Is it a crime? No. We're just doing things differently than Republicans would do them. There's no crime in that. So he could probably very easily dismiss it in a debate. The news will probably let him have a pass. And it's just unfreaking believable. Wow. All right, here's a story I've been watching for a while, but now talking about. So Elon Omar, you all know her. Her husband, allegedly. And she went from having no money at all to him having a company that's worth $30 million. So, first of all, I don't know that the estimates of their net worth are accurate because, you know, numbers. But if you did not understand, and this is me for most of my Adult life. I didn't understand why people who could clearly make more money in the private sector would want to be politicians. Because being a politician looks like a crappy job. I mean, just the work looks like just crappy. And they really don't get paid enough to have a house in D.C. because they have to be there a lot, but also maintain their, their home and their city they're representing or the state. So I was always curious, why in the world would you have so many people who would be willing to work at these bad jobs for years when, when after some point they could just put it on the resume and get excellent corporate jobs and stuff like that. And now I understand the real way you make money is that you, as the politician, figure out how to be part of the allocation of funds and you make sure that your husband or your spouse is somehow benefiting. So they might be in an ngo, they might be some private company that provides a service to the government, but suddenly the spouse of the politician is getting a lot of good luck. Isn't that good luck that you're in a business that can benefit from government contracts at the same time you're married to a politician? How lucky? So I now suspect that, that although this would not explain every single person in politics, that a big, big part of it is that the spouse play that you could get away with because you make it look legal is why they do it. And then my next question is this. Since I don't know too much about the Department of Justice and how that works, at what point can you investigate somebody's spouse and the business that the spouse is in unless there's like a really obvious crime? What if you only suspect there's a crime because somebody is doing unusually well in their job? You can't investigate that, right? In order to get a warrant or open up an investigation, is this sufficient that it looks like they got money too fast or do you need to know? Well, they got money too fast and here's the criminal way in which it happened. So that's an open question. I just don't know the answer to that. But if we don't fix that, I think we're in trouble. Now, in the context of finding out that everything is corrupt and all of our numbers are bullshit and everything's a scam, I saw a post by a data Republican who had this to say and, well, let me just read it. So data Republican said, I had this idea, what if autism diagnoses are partially from fraudulent billock? And then I poked around a bit. And it turns out that the whole 1 in 30 statistic, that's 1 in 30 kids being born, have autism today, which is an alarming number. She says, what if the 1 in 30 statistic isn't based on official diagnoses? Addm I don't know what that is. Has clinicians review school records, and if the record fits, then it counts as autism. Even if there's no medical diagnosis, then that statistic is quoted to justify increased ABA centers, increased research and all kinds of grants. And then data Republican closes with I'm questioning literally everything now. All right, Now I do believe that it is reality that there's more autism. I think that RFK Jr. Is right, that there's probably something in our environment, something in our food, maybe something in our medicines, something somewhere that is causing more autism. So I do believe more autism is real. But how easy would it be to hide the fraud of claiming there's more autism than there is so that you could get funded for treating it? So now that we've seen the Somali health care scam and how easy it was for them to run the scam, is it possible that instead of 1 in 30, which would be super alarming, maybe it's 1 in 100. I don't know what the old number was, but it could be that there's a, you know, huge increase in it. But at the same time, that huge actual increase is masking the fact that there's massive fraud, making it look even worse. So I like data Republicans closing sentence. I'm questioning. I'm questioning literally everything now. That's where I'm at. It doesn't matter where the data comes from. My first reaction is really, really? How many of you are in the same place that you just don't believe any stat? I tend to be biased to believe statistics that agree with my preconceived notions. But I'm definitely feeling an alarm bell at the same time, and I didn't always feel that. So here's another one where I didn't used to think this was true. So Elon Musk is talking on X or said this somewhere, that the left has been using government programs for a long time to import voters so that they can create a block of voters that would vote, you know, vote together to control the American process and that that's what the Somali immigration was all about, that Democrats were intentionally creating pockets where they could control who won Democrats because they would have a block of people who vote the same. Now we see that in Chicago, for example, more Organically, that Chicago has a large black population, and they somewhat reliably are gonna elect black Democrats to be in charge mayors. Not every time, but you know, that that would be the. The trend. So I used to doubt that that was intentional. I used to think, well, yeah, there is a lot of uncontrolled immigration, and yeah, it's natural that those people would want to settle with other people like themselves. But it's now some grand plan. I've changed my mind. I am now convinced that there had to be, you know, just as Elon Musk is saying, there had to be a plan to do this intentionally to take take control of the census, take control of local governments, effectively change the voting situation in the United States. And more alarmingly, that they were very close to pulling it off, and maybe they could still. And it would have made a permanent change in the ability for Republicans to get elected, and it would have permanently made it impossible for anything but a Democrat to ever be in charge of anything important. And we were this close. Now it might still happen. I don't know. Maybe they've already done enough of this because you've got your Hispanic pockets, you've got your Somali pockets. Maybe they've already done it, but I don't think so. Here's another one that I wouldn't have believed five years ago. So the newsmax is reported that Judicial Watch. You know who Judicial Watch is, right? President Tom Fitton as warning that the Secret Service might be, let's say maybe not doing their best to protect the president and that maybe that's not just incompetence. So the examples given are the two assassination attempts, which we all think look like. It looked like his security didn't do enough. He lives. But from the outside, it looks like, wait, it doesn't even look like you had the A team protecting the President. Is that a coincidence? And then there was also the incident where Trump went to some restaurant and somehow the people who don't like Trump had been alerted, which is a gigantic security problem. And there could have been some danger there because people knew in advance you'd be at a restaurant and it wasn't well secured. So there are at least three examples where you say to yourself, is it possible that the President of the United States has incompetent security? Is that possible? Yeah, Code Pink. Democrat group, Code Pink showed up at that restaurant to protest. So is that possible or is this a pattern? And I guess Judicial Watch is asking for some information to maybe drill down a little bit. Now, five years ago, if you told me that his security was penetrated or compromised and that people were trying to kill him and had made already three attempts. You know, three attempts. They had insiders involved. I wouldn't believe that. But today it's on the table. I absolutely would say maybe. I mean we know for example that jfk, I think, I think I can say we know this, that his assassination has something to do with insiders. Right. That the CIA in particular. So if it were true for jfk, but I didn't believe it for decades and then you look at all the other things that are true.

B (78:11)

Wow.

A (78:12)

Almost anything is on the table. So I'm not willing yet to say that the insiders have penetrated his security service. But I don't rule it out. Not ruling it out.

B (78:29)

And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.

A (78:40)

Fascinating.

B (78:41)

It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

A (78:44)

Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

B (78:47)

Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts.

A (78:59)

I've been watching Chamath from the all in pod getting very active on acts, talking about California and its various problems. And he notes that apparently the California state pension, it looks like it's solid and it looks like it could pay the pensions, but it's only because they've changed the accounting to a very weaseled like way to make optimistic assumptions that are not realistic about what's going to happen in the future. So in other words, California also, on top of all the problems you've heard, probably has this massive underfunded state pension problem that they're covering up by clever accounting changes. Wow. So this is something I would call the technically legal but holy shit kind of fraud. Meaning it's not technically illegal for them to estimate the pension payout with optimistic assumptions. It's not illegal and they show their assumptions apparently. But how is it not fraud? You know, in a sort of a common sense way, it's sort of obviously fraud. On top of that, I'm wondering if Chamath would be a candidate for governor or. Yeah, governor. So at the moment Steve Hilton is running for governor in California and I think he's actually leading the polls because the, the polls are so fragmented and they have a different voting system. So it's possible that the next governor of California could be a Republican. But if it's not Steve Hilton, is there a time when Chamath says I'll step up and do that because I would very much love to see him in the leadership role. I would back that hard. Well, speaking of other Californian stuff, and Chamath is also weighing on this pretty hard. So Ro Khanna, one of our representatives in California, who normally is what we would consider a more reasonable Democrat than other Democrats, obviously I don't agree with everything that Ro Khanna wants, but usually think of him as well considered and not you not crazy biased. He could, for example, he could work with Thomas Massie on the Epstein stuff because that's just, you know, sort of an independent good thing to do. But Roe is backing this idea of a wealth tax on billionaires in California. And the idea is that billionaires above a certain level of billions would have to give up 1% of their net wealth every year for five years, so it'd be 5% by the time they were done. Now, this is wealth that they had already paid taxes on. You could argue at that point, but there was no precedent for this. There's a precedent for income taxes and there's a precedent for taxing rich people more, but there's no real precedent for just taking their money after they made it, just saying, hey, you have too much money, so we're going to take some of it. Now, this is surprising because this is probably one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. And my impression of Ro Khanna is that not only is he, you know, more often than most, has an independent view of things, but he's not stupid. Right. When you see him, it's not like you're looking at Swalwell. It's not like he is, you know, you could name he's not Jasmine Crockett. Right. He's genuinely a smart, reasonable person, but somehow the smart, reasonable person is going all in on the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life. So as you might imagine, several billionaires are already, you know, quite obviously getting ready to leave the state. And what would happen if our, if our most capable people left the state? Well, we lose all of that base. They would probably do their investing in other states, et cetera, because you wouldn't even want to invest in the state. You wouldn't want to have anything to do with it because it'd just be it'd be like doing business in China. You could turn California into a China problem. It's like, well, why would you ever build something in China? They're just going to steal it anyway. Russia, too. One of the reasons that Russia isn't going to get a lot of external investment is that you think the Russians will just steal your business if it does well, and they would. So why would you stay in California when you see something this extreme that's being pushed against the most successful entrepreneurs? And I often joke because Ro Khanna talks about income inequality and you know, you have to do something about that income inequality, and it's not fair. I always joke, but I'm not joking that fairness is a word that was invented so that children, idiots, have something to talk about. Fairness is not something you want. You want meritocracy. That's not fairness. Because some people have more merit. Some people will thrive in the meritocracy, some people won't. It's not exactly fair, but it's just a good system for everyone. So this system where they just take your money if you're very successful, it's just a terrible idea. So here's what I'm wondering. Could the California billionaires do something that would make it look like they were contributing more to the state and would actually be contributing more without having the money confiscated? Is there a counter proposal that the billionaires could make to say, hey, instead of taking our money and then giving it to California, that will waste it? Because that's, that's the other big problem. If you know for sure that California is wasting your money, it's really hard to give them an extra billion, right? It's like way harder if you earned a billion, let's say you had lots of billions. It's pretty hard to give them a penny more when they're so bad at allocating the capital. So what if the billionaires came up with a counter proposal? And I'll just brainstorm a little bit here in which they would be voluntarily, but maybe at threat of some penalty, they could allocate more money for the benefit of California. For example, suppose California said, we really need to improve affordability. So if you're a billionaire and you commit to put 1% of your assets directly into investments that would improve affordability, you don't have to pay the. You won't be subject to the confiscation. So let's say you're a billionaire and you say to me, scott, you can invest currently, you could invest your money anywhere you want, but if you invest it in ways that would improve affordability for Californians, you don't get, you don't get the penalty of having to confiscate. And that, to me, would be excellent. And one of the things that chamath talks about is that the, the richest people, especially the AI billionaires, they need to do something that's highly visible but also good for the public. And I'm totally on board with that. It should be highly visible and good for the public. That is one thing that Bill Gates was doing very right with the Gates Foundation. So when he was the richest guy around, it really helped him that he said he was going to give it all away, that he was putting lots of his billions into a charitable thing. Now, since then, you know, there's been lots of criticism of what his true motives are. All that. And that's valid. Those are valid criticisms. But in terms of a strategy, I think it was very good for Bill Gates to try to reframe himself as a person who's doing the things that are even too hard for the government to do. So there's my idea. If you say billionaires, if you live in California, we need you to step up and make it cheaper to do health care, cheaper to do education, cheaper to do transportation. And you have to show us that you've allocated some new money, not money you've already allocated, but you've allocated some new money into projects that have a good chance of lowering our costs. Wouldn't they stay, you know, under those conditions if you were a billionaire and you thought, huh, okay, I wasn't planning on being forced to invest in these areas, but nobody could complain. If I do and if I found a way to make transportation or shelter or something cheaper, the government will work with me, maybe even help me with some. Possibly the state would have to agree to remove some regulations. So suppose the billionaires say, yes, we will invest in affordability, but you have to remove these roadblocks. One roadblock would be over, would be over taxation, I guess, and the other one would be overregulation. What do you think? Now, I don't know if anything like that could happen, but it would be way better for the billionaires to have at least one counter proposal. And I would be surprised if you couldn't get both Democrats and Republican billionaires to agree with that. You could probably get even somebody like a Tom Steyer to agree, you know, a Republican billionaire. I just want to see a reaction to that. Is that the best idea you've ever heard? Because the one thing we know is that the billionaires by and large would be way, way better at identifying ways to improve affordability than would be the government. And it would, it would satisfy Chamas view that they should be more prominently involved in helping the Public, which I agree with. All right. Did you know, according to Elon Musk, that electric semi trucks will be a way better idea than diesel? Here again is exactly my point. If Elon Musk did not exist, would you know that you could make an electric semi truck that would be way more practical and affordable. And affordable than the current technology? You wouldn't even know that, Right? Yeah. Tom Steyer isn't a Republican. That's my point. My point is that both Democrats and Republicans would probably like the idea of working on affordability. So that's another example of if you didn't have a billionaire who was interested in the public good. And by the way, Musk usually starts there. He starts with what would be a public good and then can I fix that? Everything from space to electric cars to solar power. He always starts with what's good for the public. And then can I make that thing? So electric semi trucks would be right in that area. Well, you all know who Bill Ackman is, right? He's a well known investor and he's talking about the widespread fraud in so many government programs. And he had a suggestion for a way to audit. Now the idea of auditing, of course, is not new, but apparently it doesn't work because the fraud still exists. So his suggestion for auditing is that first of all, you have to severely use a DOJ to severely punish anybody who got caught with fraud. So you've got some disincentive for fraud that of course, I think we all agree with. But then he says that there should be a federal internal audit system where private citizens would get a bounty. They'd be bounty hunters who find fraud and earn rewards equal to a percentage of the grift identified. Now he calls it grift. I don't know if that means only illegal stuff or just stuff people are getting away with, but I like where that's going. So my idea was that we need to have a federal standard for audits and that we do not currently have a good idea how to do it. Somebody said, and they were right, that the auditors also would be criminals because it would be so easy to buy off an auditor. So if you just had a standard audit system, they would either be incompetent or bribed, or they'd be in on. They'd be in on the plot. And I agree with that. Over time the auditors would be, you know, blackmailed or bought off. But if your audit system involves these citizen bounty hunters, presumably people who are capable and well trained to do that sort of thing, they would just be working for the money. And if they can make more money by turning people in than they could make by being in on the graft, well, now you got a system. So, you know, there are lots of questions and details about that, but I like where that's heading. Because if you don't have what I would call a free market approach to make sure that the audits are doing what they should be doing, the audit will be a waste of time. And that's what we see right now. Our current auditing systems largely don't work. Case in point, there's a news story that says that billions of dollars that we send to Israel as weapons after October 7th have not been accounted for. So apparently the auditing system that should have tracked weapons and armaments, same thing that we gave to Israel, we were only able to track some percentage of it. Now, that does not mean that that stuff was stolen or ended up in the wrong hands. What it does mean is we don't know. It could have been stolen. It could have ended up in the wrong hands. We don't know because once again, although there was tracking, the tracking was inadequate. And so we don't know. Now, I do think that Israel would be highly incentivized to make sure those weapons got used by the IDF in exactly the way we wanted. But, you know, we don't know. And if you take any audit system that is blind and there's a lot of money involved and you just wait, that guarantees corruption. Lots of money involved, lots of time involved, and nobody's watching. 100% chance that ends up in subcriminal behavior. Well, here's some maybe good news. There's a new study, according to the brighter side news that Alzheimer's can be not only stopped, but reversed with a very common supplement. Now, this common supplement called NAD is not something you can buy over the counter. And if it were ever made available. Oh, wait, I'm sorry, that's wrong. The NAD plus is apparently something that people have in them. And when the NAD is at the right level, they don't get Alzheimer's. But the recent discovery is if you could boost their nad, because older people lose it. So if you boost them back to a normal level, that not only do they not get worse in the Alzheimer's, but it can actually correct it. You could actually cure it. So they've shown this in mice, but they've also shown it in samples of human brains. Now, if they had not shown this true in a sample of a human brain, I would not be excited because mouse studies, there's a million mouse studies that never turn out to work for humans, but it's already a chemical that's in your body, so that's good news. They know for sure that the people with Alzheimer's have less of it, and they know exactly why that would cause the Alzheimer's. And they know that it can be increased by adding this thing called a compound called P73A20. So some lab has developed this. So it would be easy to develop the compound developed in Piper Labs, but because it's a drug, it would have to go through a whole bunch of FDA testing, etc. So it's not. It's not on the horizon. It would have to be tested. But this does sound more promising than almost anything I've ever heard in that domain. So I'm going to end on that bit of optimism. I'm going way late. But it's a Sunday. Didn't you enjoy spending some extra time, did you? All right. It's why smokers rarely get Alzheimer's. I've heard that. Is that true? Smokers rarely get Alzheimer's. All right, people, I won't stay too much longer, but I will say a few words to the beloved members of locals who might want to stay around a little bit longer. The rest of you, enjoy your Sunday. I hope this was useful to you. I try to be useful. Doing my best. All right, locals, I'm going to come at you privately. If this works, local supporters will be private in. Oh, maybe this isn't working.