A (0:00)

Well, we'll see how this goes. My cough is under control, but I do get a little bit dizzy if I talk too much. So we'll do the best we can. I apologize for my voice. It will not get better. Good morning everybody. Let's do the simultaneous sip. Now we'll see how far we get. I know why you're here. Last one of the year. All you need is a copper mug or glass, a tank of shells, a stand can to your flask. A vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Enjoy me. Now for the unhelp. The dopamine to the day thing that makes everything better is called the seventh day and stuff. It happens now. Terrific. Well, let's jump right into it, shall we? Apparently I'm very good at guessing how many calendars I'll sell in a year because we got right up to the. Right up the limit but still a few more. So I wouldn't wait. If you don't have Your Dilbert calendar, Amazon.com the only place you can get it. How about some end of year predictions? I always hate those, but they seem traditional. I'm going to say the obvious. 2026 will be the year of the self driving car. I don't believe there will be robot butlers, so I'm going to say no robot butlers yet. I think the economy will surprise us, but I don't know which direction. It will either be better than we think or worse than we think. No one can predict the economy. Further, I predict that the topic of election rigging will become a much bigger story. And if you haven't caught up with the Patrick Byrne, he was the CEO of Overstock.com if you don't know his story, you really should catch up to it because I don't know what's true. I have no idea if his version of events captures what really happened. But he's got. He's very convincing. He's been saying it for a while, but now I think he can say it and people can run it. So he's got this story about Venezuela being involved with the voting machines, Chinese components and a Serbian data center that got taken down just before they could influence the election in 2024. Is any of that true? I don't know. But I gotta say he's very, he's very credible sounding and there's nothing about him that suggests he's making it up. And he does seem to know. So I feel like this, this will be the year he breaks through to make that a Bigger story. And then. I think the fact that we know everything else in the world is rigged as we're watching all these stories about corruption, I think that makes it easier for people to believe that the elections were rigged. Because I've been saying something now for a while, few years that nobody else picks up on. Have you noticed this? This is what I say. I say, what are the odds that every other institution is corrupt but our elections are not? What are the odds of that? If you didn't know anything about election security, you'd never seen any story about it. How would you believe that it's not corrupt when everything else is? Now, I might have been a little ahead of the game because the other thing I say, which sets you up for that thing I just said, is that whenever you have the following situation, you have corruption, there's a lot of money involved, there's lots of people involved, the stakes are high money or power. And you just wait because assume there's no audit control, because even where there are audits, the artists don't catch stuff, as we've seen. So if you take that as your starting point that everything is corrupt and that there's a reason built into why it's corrupt, it's not chance, it's not a weird coincidence, it's everything that has that element to it always becomes corrupt every time. Now add to that what I've also been saying. What is the reason for electronic voting machines? What would be the legitimate reason? And there is none. The only reason for voting machines is to cheat because they're not cheaper, they're not more reliable, they're not faster, they're not anything. So put those three together. Everything that has this nature is rigged or fraudulent. Voting machines have any other purpose that we can see. And then elections sort of just fall into that category. You know, the thing that can't be explained unless there's massive fraud going on. Now that doesn't mean that the only fraud is the machines. Sorry. It would suggest that, that in every way that an election can be rigged. Probably is, probably is. Now I do not claim that the only bad people in the country are Democrats, but maybe it doesn't seem likely that the only bad people are Democrats, but in my bubble that's true. Well, David Moss, a user on X, just completed a self driving Tesla drive across the entire United States without ever engaging with the car. So. So this was the day that somebody drove the entire coast to coast and didn't touch the steering wheel. That includes parking, includes supercharging. So it's pretty easy to predict that this will be the year of the self driving car. All right, here's a question I asked myself. How many fake news stories will I fall for in the coming year? So apparently the other day, maybe yesterday, the other day I reposted, but to my credit with skepticism, a story about some election claim that involved a big shredding truck. And somebody told me today that's fake news. It's been debunked. So I removed it. But it makes me wonder how many times am I going to get fooled by fake news? Probably a lot. And I thought I should almost keep track of it because, you know, that's one this, you know, I should start, start with 20, 26 and find out how many times do I get fooled? Is it more, you know, am I, am I more likely to be fooled because people are better at fooling people? Am I getting dumber and older? I don't know. But watch out for me, will you? All right, here is something that I feared was true and I'm pretty sure it is. I don't know about you, but if you're, if you're watching this podcast, it's probably true that your news and social media bubble is non stop stories about money laundering and Somalians and basically bad behavior as well as rigged elections. Do you have that experience that all day long I pick up my phone, I go to X, oh, there's another state, there's another fraud, there's another fraud, there's another fraud. And of course the algorithm is doing that. But here's what I was afraid of. I was afraid that no normies ever see these stories. And that's what I'm starting to hear. People are saying I went to things like I went to lunch with my neighbors and not one of them had heard about the Somalian fraudulent stuff. Just hold that in your head that your neighbors haven't even heard. They're not even aware that there's a massive money laundering fraud problem. They've never heard it. Now that doesn't mean it's never been on the news, but the news doesn't cover it like social media does. So I'm completely immersed in this world where every freaking story is about somebody stealing my money. But if you are not paying attention to that bubble that I'm in and you were in a different bubble, haven't even heard of it. That does not seem like a healthy situation, does it? Oh my God. Well, speaking of the bubble, so here's some more stuff in my bubble. Eric Doherty's reporting on this. Well, part of the reason my bubble is different is I listen to a lot of independent journalists. Apparently in Minnesota, as far back as 2018, people, whistleblowers were reporting these frauds, these Somali basically money laundering frauds and that they had, the whistleblowers all had the same experience that they were told that they couldn't talk about it or they'd be blamed, they'd be accused of being racist or Islamophobic. Now my, how things change. Because once Trump got elected, now we can talk about things that we should be talking about. All right, let's do a sip. Sip. So if Trump had not been elected and he had not basically gotten rid of DEI and our, our blocks on free speech, if, if Elon Musk had not purchased Twitter, we still wouldn't know about this. Just think about how close we were. You know, you probably saw the other day that Elon Musk estimated that at the low bound, the theft might be $1.5 trillion a year. At the low end, 1.5 trillion. That would be the entire essentially the deficit. And you might remember I keep bragging about this, but I'm actually kind of proud of it that I told you that people like me who have a background in budgeting, you know, that was my day job in corporate world, was a lot of budgeting. You develop a kind of intuition about where something is wrong. And several years ago I started saying, I don't see how we could possibly be in this much of a deficit hole unless the amount of fraud was so high. That is unimaginable. Now at the time I did not get a lot of agreement. But today, I think every one of you agrees today that at least some big portion of it was just fraud. So I'll give myself credit for that one. Anyway, I saw that HUD thinks they may have found 5.8 billion in improper rental aid payments. Corporations, according to Newsmax, that's Housing and Urban Development. Now they haven't confirmed that, but there's some red flags. And what I like about this is that I'm noticing in the government that they've turned spotting fraud into a competitive sport. So you should expect to see more and more department heads say, hey, we found some fraud. I found some fraud. I found more fraud than you did. So we're going from an environment in which if you mentioned the fraud, you were racist to an environment in which people are competing to see who can find the most and people are competing to come up with the best idea for finding the most that is a good sign. So 2026 might be just wild. Speaking of that, Health and Human Services just froze child care payments to Minnesota because it was all going to fraud. Not all of it, but massive amounts were apparently going to fraud at the same time. What do you think? What do you think Tim Walsh said when it was announced that the government was going to stop payments because the payments were almost all fraud? What would, what would Tim Walsh say about that? Well, here's what he said. It's almost unbelievable. He said that this is Trump's long game, quote, he's politicizing the issue to defund programs to help Minnesotans. Really? Really. Does he really think that Trump sits down in the morning and says, what can I do? How can I hurt those children in Minnesota in a way that will help me? That is just bastard crazy. It's so obvious he has no, no real response to that. How in the world does that make sense to his followers? Oh, Trump has a lot of long term plan to damage Minnesota. What? What? Why would anyone have that plan? For political reasons? I mean, you really have to, you got to press all yourself up to make that make sense. No. Now obviously everything is political. You know, that part's true. But what are the odds that Trump is doing it because it's part of his long game to hurt Minnesota? That's insane. Bill Pulte, I saw him on show yesterday. He's ahead of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and he said that they're using AI and Palantir to flag potential, potential fraud. So I think that's the model you're going to see. I think people will be doing the Bill Pulte model where you partner with maybe private companies and the private companies spot potential flags, or I should say flags for stuff, and then you look into it. So basically every part of the government that gives away money is probably going to move to that model, call it the Bill Pulte model. And it should be no surprise. Fox News is reporting that now we know from new surveillance photos, surveillance video, that the parents in Minnesota might have been in on the fraud. So they've got video all the way back from 2018, of course, in which parents are seen to be checking their kids into daycare, but then just turning around, taking them out. So I guess it was the checking in part that made it look legitimate. Are you surprised that parents might be part of the scheme? No. No. All right. New York Post is reporting, I saw Liz Collins reports reporting on this, that there's a former Homeland Security agent who Claims that when reports were given to the Minnesota. Let's see, he said that he claims that prosecutors ignored Minnesota daycare fraud cases and that they, quote, just evaporated. So there was no shortage of people noticing and there was no shortage of people reporting it. And when it was reported, they just slow walked it and then made it go away. So corruption. Yeah. Do you know how much ignoring you would have to do? You would have to have a lot of people ignoring a lot of things for a long time. Like a lot of people. And apparently that's what happened. And the only way that could happen, says me, is if people were afraid of being called racists. So when you calculate the damage of dei, if I were doing the analysis of what is the damage of dei, you could come up with a long list. But you'd have to add trillions because of this. Trillions, the cost of dei. Now here's more good news that may not turn into good news, but if you're on social media and you're watching the bubble that I'm watching you, you see people like Elon Musk talking about the fraud and Doge and talking about it, you'll see people like David Sachs and Chamath and, you know, lots of other smart people. So the good news is that the smartest people in the country, Bill Ackman would be another. The smartest people in the country are very engaged in trying, figuring out how to fix this because all of their wealth, at least anything that depends on the United States is completely at risk. Now, I don't think that's the only reason that they're so engaged, but they've not been engaged before and they're the exact same people. You would want to fix any big problem, Right? If you said we have this big problem that nobody's been able to fix, we need the smartest people in the room to really get engaged. Well, we got that. Amazing. We finally have the smartest people in the room, all on the same side for the most part, and focused. But here's the problem. We might have too much diverse energy. So they're not all saying exactly the same thing. And it's unclear what plan would be the best. Cernovich added him to the list of the smartest people. So my question is this. How do we get to the point where we focus all that smart energy? Because we're not really at a place where we can focus it. So if you said, scott, that's easy, all you do is say fraud Czar. I don't think so. I Mean it might be part of the solution, but the fraud czar would get destroyed the same way they went after Musk. Now Musk is, you know, there's only one Musk. So he's managed to recover and even grow his business and get his, get his compensation from Tesla and everything else. But that's rare. I don't know how many people could have survived the attacks on that went after Musk. So it'd really be hard to get a frauds are who had that much risk, risk tolerance, but also at the skill. And I don't know if it's enough so. And we also know that justice moves too slowly. I've heard a number of people say, Scott, all they have to do is prosecute some high level people and this will stop. You know, if Larry Ellison, the AG in Minnesota, let's say he quickly got indicted, well, I don't know, would that stop anything? How long would it take? So justice moves too slowly to be the biggest part of the answer, but obviously has to be part of the answer. But I like the fact, as I mentioned before, that finding the fraud and doing something about it is a competitive sport. So I think the best case scenario is that private companies find a way to free market the situation. So you've got Palantir and other AI companies that could be helpful. So they might have, you know, a massive, potentially they might have a massive financial payoff. Noriko would be slower because you have to rico, you have to pull together like years of everything. I mean that would be slower. We need to do it probably, but it would be slower. So what was I saying? So if you added the AI companies that might have some incentive to spot the fraud and then you added that the que tam rule that I didn't know about, but apparently it's been a thing for years that allows you, an individual private person to ask the government to sue somebody who has been ripping off the government. And then if you as the whistleblower, let's say if they succeed and they claw back some money, you get a portion of it. It could be big, it could be very big money. So here's the good news. When I talk about the smartest people being fully engaged, they're also the smartest people at creating new businesses that didn't exist, right? Every one of them that I mentioned has done entrepreneurial things. They've got a track record, right? Every one of them. And that is exactly the people you want designing a new system. So it might not be that there's one path to Fixing it. It might be that the free market has now surfaced what looks like a set of variables that could sort of automatically drift in the direction of getting rid of the fraud, because essentially it would monetize getting rid of fraud, which hasn't really been the case. Well, it has been the case, but not everybody knew it and now lots of people know it. So that's the good news. All right, let's talk about Pam Bondi, who is not working fast enough, people say, and has prosecuted no high profile cases. So I'm going to wade into this at the, at my risk. You may have heard me say this on social media. It goes like this. If I put the, what I call the Dilbert filter on this situation, how do we know we who are not lawyers, how do we know how long something should take? How do we know how many cases she's working on? How do we know how hard it is to staff when you can't get, when lawyers are like 90% democrat but you don't want to staff up with Democrats. If the whole job is to go after Democrats, how long does it take to staff up? What kind of cases is she working on that are exactly what she should be working on, but they just take a long time because they're complicated. So the higher profile the case and the more complicated the case, the more you should expect it would take longer than a year even to get to indictments. So case in point, I guess. Kash Patel has recommended the Department of Justice to look into the whole situation with the Russia collusion hoax. Now, the Russia collusion hoax is massively complicated. It involves everybody from X to current CIA and it involves two parts. One is making it easier for Democrats to get elected and the other is making it harder for Republicans to stay out of jail. So it involves everything from the original meetings that Obama had, the special counsels, the raid on Mar a Lago. There are so many moving parts. If PM Bondi only had one thing to work on for the rest of her life, how long would that take? Then you multiply that by a thousand. Remember, you've got the J6 stuff. How complicated would it be to get the other side of the J6 stuff? That that was all a plot and then to wrap it all into a Ricoh, because a Ricoh case has to show a pattern of behavior that is stretched over time, involves, you know, multiple people. So I am, let me say this as clearly as possible. I am as frustrated as you are that nobody important goes to jail. Can we all get on the same Side of that none of us think is fast enough. But we also don't know what would be fast enough. What would it look like if she were doing a great job and what would it look like if she were not? Could we tell? So one lawyer online said to me, Scott, what you, I'm paraphrasing here, what you're missing is that big law firms are already staffed up to surge like whole groups of people into different jobs for the government or for a private company. So the, the thinking is there's just business as normal to be way overworked, but to instantly or quickly correct the fact that you have too much work by going to big law firms and say, hey, we need two dozen lawyers today. Can you just give us a whole staff? And then those law firms, I didn't know this by the way, are routinely, routinely set up to do that. However, how does it work when the people you're going after are Democrats? Do you think there's a big law firm that can give you two dozen lawyers that are both good at what they do, not doing anything more important? Somebody said it's not the best lawyers that they send for that, but I don't know about that. They didn't already have something important to do so they could sort of instantly go over and that they would do a non biased job instead of dragging their feet because all you would have to do is get an anti Trumper in the mix, you know, one lawyer who drags their feet and they can just drag this thing forever. So I am skeptical that the existing model of surging lawyers into a high profile, you know, high workload situation could work in this situation. It might work in normal situations. And how long will it take before John Brennan is indicted anyway? So don't get mad at me. I'm the Dilber filter messenger to tell you that if there's a lot of people involved and it's complicated, it's going to take way longer than you want it to. Does everybody agree with that? Just, just that we're all equally frustrated. But whenever you have this complexity and this setup, it's always going to take longer than you want you. And that would be sort of normal, just normal life anyway. So apparently according to Wall Street Apes on X, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, this is Wall Street Apes framing of it, admits the Somalians were imported to vote Democrat. Essentially he did. He said, quote, well, the Somali community is critical in my own election. I wouldn't be in office without the help of the Somali community. Okay, now that alone is not illegal. But we do know that the Somali community has made a difference, not just in Minnesota, but also in Ohio and Virginia, maybe some other places. So at what point does it become illegal? It's not illegal to have people legally enter the country. If they entered legally and then they were legally allowed to vote, it would just be a good strategy. But it wouldn't be illegal. Right. However, did you know Scott Pressler was reporting this yesterday? And just think about the fact that what I'm about to tell you, you probably did not know, and it's been true for a while, that if you're. That if you work for a building. So if you're an employee of some large apartment building, it doesn't matter what kind of employee, you can vouch for an unlimited number of people who live in the building or allegedly live in the building. You can vouch that they are legally allowed to vote, even if they don't have id. So in other words, if I understand this correctly, the janitor of a big building could vouch for every person in the building, even if every one of them had been illegal. And that's actually a written law in Minnesota. It's a law now. When that law got passed, what was anybody thinking? How in the world. Yeah, there's some paperwork to vouch. How in the world did anybody think that was for anything but cheating in the election? What would be the other reason? You know, usually the Democrats say, well, we don't want to suppress voting, so we want to make it easy to vote. There's no way. There's no way that that particular law was to stop suppression of voting. That was purely to make it easier to cheat. I would say. You can't say that any other way. Well, are any other states or cities having problems with fraud? Oh, surprise. Real clear investigation says that there was some guy, a city official in Austin, who had, let's see, given a bunch of fake contracts to friends that were fairly gigantic, had been doing it for a while. So let's see, how much did he give? He was. He was using the city credit card, which he was allowed to use for city services. But instead of doing city services, he used it to pay 30 different vendors. But the city auditor could only verify that eight of them were even real companies. And of the real companies, do you think those were relatives, too, or people who gave me kickbacks? So most of the money, or a lot of it went to places that appeared to be fake. At the same time, the guy who was doing this was earning over half a million dollars. A year in salary. So he was overpaid and he was just massively doling out the city credit card to his presumably fraudster friends. Now, how long ago was the first time you heard me say this, that all local government is criminal? All local government is criminal. And the reason is this, because there's always somebody who's in charge of who gets the money. And there's never enough audits, let's say security, to stop it from happening fraudulently. So again, a lot of money involved, people involved, time goes by, poor auditing procedures. Was this predictable? Yes. If you took a dart and threw it at map of the United States and hit any city, you don't think this is happening anywhere else? I'll bet some form of this, maybe not as bad, but I'll bet you some form of this is 100% in every city. 100%. Because whoever has the wallet will be just infinitely approached by people say, you know, if I got a little bit of what's in that city wallet, I'll bet you a lot of people would donate to your campaign. There's no way this system could produce if you saw it on paper. If somebody said, we've never had a city before, well, we're going to invent a thing called a city, and here's how it will be run. And you simply just drew on paper who has the control, who's watching it, how money flows, how money is allocated. Anybody smart would know that that was a saddle for fraud. So the cities are designed in a way that guarantees fraud, guarantees us, and sure enough, that's what we see. Well, here's a story about further layoffs in the media world. According to the Wrap, entertainment and media layoffs are up 18% and 17,000 jobs were slashed in 2025. Now, what they mostly mean is the traditional media. So there have been some mergers and cutbacks and stuff. So the traditional media took a hit. But I would argue that that's not the bad news, it looks like, because the, the independent journalists and the independent media and I would be part of the independence vastly increased. So it's not really a story about less media employees. It's more a story about less traditional fake news stuff. We don't want to see media and way, way, way more Nick Shirley's and Scott Adams's and people who, you know, are doing a show independently. So I think that is an evolution, not some kind of a problem. And I love the fact that the jobs that are being created are being created by the people creating them. So it's not like a boss had to create a company that hired people. It's more like people like me said, what happens if I turn this camera on and start talking? Can I monetize that? Yep. Turns out I can. Well, according to Psy Post, Karina Petrova, there's a study that says that shocking headlines make people skeptical, but that over time, they come to believe the thing that was the shocking headline. Does that surprise you? So the idea is when you first see, like, a headline that says shocking thing happened here or there and then you read it, you're like, well, you know, I don't know. I'm not sure that's true. Yeah, everybody says everything's shocking. So you automatically put some critical thinking on a headline that just seems a little overdone, but that over time, you forget where you saw the headline and you start thinking it must be a fact. So you remember the story, but you won't remember your initial skepticism. So it makes it believable over time. I think probably only if you hear it repeated. All right, We talked about this before, but this. This just blows my mind. So San Francisco, a city you would associate with being lax on crime, right? So San Francisco, most people would agree with left and right that they would be soft on crime compared to other places. But despite being soft on crime, apparently they have this. This license plate reading technology called Flock FL O C K. And it can read license plates. And it has. They've got about 500 of them in major roadways in San Francisco, around San Francisco. And that is centralized. It must be in other cities, too. So they have a centralized nationwide database of more than 1 billion license plate reads each month. Now they're being sued by someone who doesn't want them to be able to track you if there's no warrant. So if there's no, you know, reason to track you, at least one individual is suing because he says that should only be. They should only track you if they have a warrant. And these are warrant less. So apparently you can. In most cases, you could track a car in San Francisco from wherever it starts to wherever it ends up. How comfortable are you with that? Because remember is tracking everyone. Well, how in the world do you stop people from tracking their spouse? Don't you think that every engineer who has access to this thing is already tracking the racks, find out where their ex goes when they go to work? Probably this would put an end to cheating. But it's weird that the most lenient city would be doing this of all things now. So Far, all I know about it is it tracks license plates. I don't believe it does facial recognition, but it would be easy to add it. And I don't believe it has a full AI capability, although obviously that would be coming. So if you take a 500 camera system and you can track license plates, you can track faces, which I just assume is coming, and you can use AI to make it identify and flag things, you have created quite a monster. That is a monster where you're not going to know. Where does that end up? How bad will that become? If they do it gradually, like, well, it's just license plates, then it doesn't seem as scary. But once you realize there's nothing to stop them really from adding facial recognition and AI, what in the world could that become? I don't know. So we always talk about this California wealth tax where the floating idea in California that these some billionaires would have to give up 1% of their wealth per year for five years. So in the end, 5% of their wealth would be taken in taxes. Apparently. I didn't know this, but even Gavin Newsom opposes it. But Bill Ackman. So it might not happen because, you know, if the governor opposes it, he could be told. Bill Ackman warns that no one would say if California implements a wealth tax. Now, we've already seen some billionaires in California say they're going to move and it could be a bluff. Maybe they prefer to stay. But they're making sure that people know that if they do go, you know, everybody would go and they would turn California into something it hasn't been. But there have been some other, some other options for raising money that have been raised. First of all, let me say the obvious. No one wants higher taxes when your state is wasting the money. No one wants higher taxes in general. But in the current context of massive fraud, it's going to be really hard to increase taxes on anybody if you know that it's just being wasted. So we'll see how that goes. But some people propose that if you just raise the sales tax, it would be a more reasonable approach. The idea is that it's automatically progressive. So if a billionaire buys a boat, a yacht, that's a lot of sales tax. But if you, if you get a stick of gum, it's a little bit of sales tax, but not much. However, the sales tax in California is already. Is insanely high. I forget what it is. So I'm not in favor of sales tax. It's just an alternative. However, even billionaires agree with the following, that billionaires have a way to avoid taxes that ordinary people don't. And then maybe that needs to be closed. Did you know how that works? I use grok to, to give me a little tutorial on how the billionaires avoid taxes. And let me see if I can explain that in a way you would understand. So a normal person gets normal income and they pay income tax. A billionaire might not have income at all. They might just have a lot of assets. So one of the ways that they can avoid paying income taxes is to make sure that their businesses do not give them a salary so there's no income. But where do they get the money to spend if they don't have an income? And the answer is they can take it a loan. So they could go to a bank and they could say, give me a large personal loan. Now it wouldn't be large compared to their assets. It would still be tiny. Tiny, but it would be large to us. And it would be so much money that they could spend it like income, buy mansions and yachts and stuff without any income. The bank would say, can you pay back this loan? And the billionaire would say, are you kidding? I have, I'm worth, you know, $20 billion. I'm only asking you for half a billion. So the bank says that's a pretty good deal. You know, we're definitely going to get paid back. Not definitely, but probably. So they give him a loan and is collateralized by the assets of the billionaire. So the bank is happy. They always know they can, you know, seize the actor, seize the mansion, or seize the stock if something goes wrong. Then the billionaire spends, spends the personal loan just because it's their cash, they can do whatever they want. It's not a business loan, it's a personal loan. Sort of, sort of like a line of credit on your house, but just the big version. Then when they die, the billionaire, they can transfer those assets to their heirs at a stepped up fair market value. And even the heirs avoid taxes. Now I believe there's still a, what do you call it? A estate tax. So if you didn't have the estate tax over a certain level is 40%. So when I die, if I do, my estate tax above a certain, certain dollar amount will be taxed at 40%, which is pretty egregious, but, but it's happening anyway. Does that make sense? I never really, I never really spent two minutes looking into why billionaires don't pay taxes. So I would agree that that seems like a loophole that needs to be Closed? Seems like it. Well, according to the epoch times, the CEO of the IRS, I didn't know they had a CEO says that 94 of middle class taxpayers will see tax relief next year. So that would be the big beautiful bill, I guess. Do you believe that? I'm primed to never believe anything about taxes going down. I always think taxes are going up even if all the reporting is going down for some people. So I'm going to say maybe, maybe, but probably not. So it doesn't matter who's president, doesn't matter what the law is. I never believe taxes will go down. Well, did you know there's a study SC host is writing about this of Vladimir Hedry that mass shootings increase local turnout for voting but do not shift presidential choices. How many of you would have known that without looking at a study that if there's a mass shooting in the news locally, you might get a higher turnout for a vote? But they don't change who they vote for. The people who wanted Democrats to get rid of guns still want it. And the Republicans say, well, it's the cost of being a free country, don't take my guns. So they both, so they both get more votes. But it doesn't change the mix because just asked me, I knew that. Well, Daniel Greenfield of Front Page magazine is reporting that the msnbc, which is now rebranded as Ms. Now, the ratings have collapsed, as you probably know. How bad is it? We'll say according to Nielsen Media Research, this is fairly new. Fox News averaged 2.72 million primetime viewers and 287,000 viewers in the key demographic 25 to 54. So that was up. It was up 14% and the, the key demo group was up 18%. That's pretty damn good. How did MSNBC do? Oh, oh, oh, sorry. They averaged 920,000, 23,000 down, down 25% since 2024 and only 81,000 in the key demo that was down 39%. Wow. And see, it ended even worse. Now the reporting doesn't give reasons. Would you like to know some reasons why Ms. NOW is down and Fox News is up? Well, I've said, I say this a lot, but Ms. NOW has bad producers and their on air talent was mentally insane. Right. If you look at any show on Ms. Now, it's poorly produced. You know, it'll be a table of people who look crazy just yelling at each other. Rachel Maddow looks like she just has mental illness and they just seem a little weak and weird and just somebody you don't want to watch. But also none of the shows are engineered to be as interesting as Fox. So if you've never watched the show called the Five on Fox, you haven't seen what good producing looks like. So everything from the selection of the cast to how many there are to how they, how they always have the one person who's sort of the foil, you know, the Democrat foil, everything about that is well designed and the people don't look mentally insane. So over time, you can completely see how Fox News. Good. And they do, they attract people from the other side. But if you're, if you're a Republican and you turn on Ms. Now, you just go, what the, what the hell? It's just all poorly produced. So. And poorly produced. And they don't have as good a host. They don't, they don't have a great gut, for example. Right. Who is a Greg Guffel. They just don't have one. Makes a big difference. Well, here's a weird story I don't understand. So are you aware that in Iran, I guess this week, there are massive street protests and the streets are full of people who are bad at the regime now, I think that's happened before, but it didn't turn into anything. Yeah. Dana Free now, Jesse Waters, every one of them are more talented than anything you see on Ms. Now. So at the same time, the Iranian public is doing some massive protests in Israel, according to the Jerusalem Post, Mossad, So that would be Israel's, you know, intelligence agency. They posted a message on X in Farsi, the language of Iran, urging demonstrators to act, to act, saying that it was with them in the streets, it's with them in the streets, and said, go out together into the streets. The time has come. He said, it will join them. It says, we are with you, not only from a distance and verbally, we are with you in the field. So Mossad is admitting that they're literally on the ground participating with the protesters. Now, does that seem like a good idea to you? I'd love to know why they thought that was a good idea. Because everything I know about people is that the Iranians would be maybe plenty happy to find their own way away from the regime. But as soon as they're, as soon as the country that's bombed them says, you know, I'm with you, doesn't that immediately, doesn't that immediately make them bond together and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is up to us. Get out of here. How in the world is that good for Israel? I don't understand. Maybe I'm just speculating. Maybe Mossad thinks that if the Iranians think they have support from even Israel, that would embolden them. That's not the way things usually work. Usually the, you know, usually it works the other way. So, you know, they're not stupid. Obviously. Fake news. No, it was actually on the Mossad X account. So the X account is. I think that's real. Huh. Anyway, it's either very clever or it's not. I don't know. I'm just gonna watch that one. According to TechCrunch, the number of followers you have on social media has never mattered less. Now here they're talking about people monetizing, but apparently the thing that moves your traffic is not how many followers you amassed, it has to do with how good your clipping services. So apparently there are all these young people who are making clips and that's the way people discover things. Now they call it a teenage clipping army. So it's a now a well developed market. So if you were an independent Internet producer, you could amass a very large following, let's say in my case, I've got 1.3 million followers on X. But still, even with 1.3 million followers, a lot of people who follow me don't see my content. And I'm not alone. You know, people have been complaining about this for a while that they amass all these followers and they can tell that the followers are not seeing their content. But what they are seeing or what people are seeing is clips. Now you may have noticed that there are more of more clips from my content than you've ever seen before. I don't pay for that, in case you're wondering. Right, but you've seen, yeah, you, you, you've seen Jay and is it Jason? Jason Cohen? You've seen some other people clipping me and that does make a big difference. Sometimes it just depends if the clip goes viral. So in case you're wondering, I do not pay for a clipping service of teenagers. Well, did you hear the story that apparently earlier this month the CIA launched a military attack on a base. Look at a base or a port in Venezuela. And it blew up some shit and we never heard of it. But the weird part is Venezuela didn't mention it. How in the world did we attack a land based major facility in Venezuela weeks ago and Venezuela never mentioned it? Yeah, how in the world. But apparently Trump wasn't happy about that. So he mentioned it on a radio show and he said that they destroyed, quote, a Big plant or facility where ships come in, and he was asked who did it, and he was shy about it, which everybody assumes means the CIA. And then apparently Trump wanted Venezuela to know about it or the world to know about it, so he outed it. Some in the CIA are not happy, but obviously, obviously we didn't intend it to be a secret because we would have assumed Venezuela would have mentioned it, but they didn't, so he did. Anyway. On the, on the Venezuela side, I'm loving this story about the. Well, let me give you some context. Have you ever watched a movie or a TV show where the villain was the interesting one, and then you found yourself rooting for the villain and you didn't feel good about yourself? I can't root for the villain. Well, I'm having that experience in the real world because one of the tankers is empty, so there's no oil in it. But the US Was going to board and seize a tanker that was leaving Venezuela. And the reason we had the authority to grab it is that it was allegedly misidentifying itself and maybe, maybe at a fake flag. But instead of, instead of surrendering, which you would expect a tanker to do, if the entire. If the U.S. navy told you to slow down, we're going to board you, you would not expect them to run for it because they know they can't run us. Right, but they, but these are the bad guys. Yeah, I'm just using my analogy of bad guys. So the bad guys decide to do a U turn and instead of surrendering, they're going to run for it. Now, to me, first of all, I thought, how in the world could that work? But now there's a new twist. Apparently they painted a Russian flag on the side of it to pretend that they were Russian flagged ship. Now, apparently this slowed down our navy because we didn't want to seize a Russian flagged ship. We wanted to seize it if it was misidentified, but we can't prove it's misidentified because we don't know for sure if Russia said, okay, yeah, you're Russian, you know, there's, there's a process by which you would reflag, but there's nothing to stop Russia from saying, all right, yeah, sure, yeah. If you want to just say you're Russian and then they paint a Russian flag on the side of the ship and then they can't be taken down. Again, I'll put it in the context of I don't want to root for the bad guys, but if they get Away with this. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. It doesn't. I don't think it makes much difference in the United States whether they get away with it or not. But if somebody actually figured out how to thwart the US Navy by painting a poorly produced flag on the side of the ship, I would have a little bit of respect for that in the bad guy way. Well, there's a story that says, according to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is now out of politics, she says that when she tried to get Trump to agree to release the Epstein files, that part of that conversation involved Trump saying, remember, this is Marjorie Taylor Greene, she's the one who heard it, that if they release him, quote, his friends will get hurt. Now, that needs a lot more context, doesn't it? Because if the only reason that Trump doesn't want the Epstein followers released is because his friends would get hurt, that might not be a good reason. But if he also knows that his friends are innocent, then you would care. I think you would care if your friends got hurt. And I don't disagree with that impulse to protect your friends if you know that they're not guilty of anything. I suspect, though, that's not the one and only reason he doesn't want released. I suspect that the, you know, the intelligence agencies are behind some of the suppression, I think. So it seems likely to me that the CIA would suppress anything that was bad for them forever, but they would allow anything that was bad for Trump's friends to be released. So if Trump says it would be bad for my friends, he might be leaving out the part that says you're not going to learn anything useful because the CIA is definitely not going to show you that. And they do have the power to block anything. So I would wonder if there's more context to his comments. So I do agree that if he knew, he probably does, that nothing good could come out of it except he reverted his friends. But in return, nothing good could come out of it. What are you going to do? What would you do if you knew nothing good could come out of it except it would hurt your friends? I don't know. I might block it. I don't think that's the worst impulse in the world anyway. I guess January is the month where we have to worry about the government shutting down over health care being continuously funded or not. But pollster Frank Lentz thinks that it would be bad for Trump if it doesn't get funded. I guess that means bad for Republicans in general because Trump won't be running Again, but do you believe that? Do you think that if the, if the Republicans say no, it's a waste of money, we're not going to fund it for another three years. Do you think that that would hurt the Republicans more? The polling seems to suggest yes. But I wonder if that's real, because I think people just always just defer to their side. So if the Republicans shut down things, I know, I, I can see how that would be bad for Republicans, but not guaranteed. All right. One more sip of water, one more short story, And it looks like I got through it. So there's a former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, who's now on Russia's Security Council, who said about Zelensky, he was talking about the attack on Putin's residence. He said that Zelensky was, quote, trying to derail the settlement of the conflict. And then Medved said that Zelensky, he wants war. But here's the provocative part. Well, now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life. How would you like to be Zelensky? And allegedly, but we don't know, allegedly tried to assassinate Putin in his residence. And knowing that Putin is the most assassinating guy in the world, maybe not counting Israel. So Israel does assassinate anybody they can get to, but even Israel didn't assassinate the Supreme Leader. So if you were going to try to assassinate somebody and it didn't work, the most dangerous person you could miss would be Putin. He would definitely chase you to the end of the earth to assassinate you back. Am I right? Especially if Zelensky is out of power. The minute that Zelensky is no longer a, the leader of Ukraine, which has to happen someday, I think Putin is going to give the green light to all of his assassinators to throw him off a balcony somewhere. So when Medvedev says, well, now at least he'll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life, that's probably true. I don't think there's enough security in the world that could protect Zelensky from Putin. And, and maybe even the Ukrainians would kill him first for making a deal. I don't know. But if you were Zelensky, the only, the only way you have to survive is to stay in power. So that's a problem. That's my advice. Never assassinate or attempt to assassinate the most revenge assassinating guy in the world. Now, my other question is this. Apparently, apparently we know that Putin has not lived in any of his residences for three years, specifically because they're harder to defend and that he's been using an apartment in. In the Kremlin because it's easier to defend. Now, do you think that Ukraine was not aware of that? So what would be the point of blowing up a residence that has zero chance of having Putin inside it? Is it because he has a family they were going after? That doesn't seem like a good plan. So I'm a little bit skeptical about why that happened. You know, I did say that it would make sense to do a false flag. If you were Russia and you wanted to prolong the war or you wanted to do a decapitation strike on Zelensky, it would be a good false flag to say he started it. But did he? Was it. Was it a real assassination attempt, do you think? They had the ability to, you know, get a asset all the way in there, but they didn't have the ability to know he wasn't there? Why would you even do the attack if. If apparently people knew he was never there? So something about this doesn't add up, but I don't know what it is. All right, ladies and gentlemen, looks like he made it. That is my show for today. Yesterday I missed because I had a coughing attack that lasted a while, but so far, no coughing today. And we're wishing well for Victor Davis Hansen. Apparently, he's got some major medical problems, and so give him a thought today. Russia has attempted to assassinate Zelensky several times. Yeah. So they don't need a reason. It's all mysterious. All right, everybody, have a great day. Hope you enjoyed. I'm going to talk to the locals, my beloved locals, people, privately in 30 seconds, locals.