Elon Musk’s SpaceX began trading at $150 a share on Friday, above its listing price of $135 a share, making him the world’s first-ever trillionaire following the IPO.

The rocket and satellite company raised a record $75 billion, valuing the company at about $1.8 trillion, pushing the value of Musk’s stake in SpaceX to an estimated $690 billion. The company is trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker “SPCX” after pricing its IPO on Thursday.

Combined with his holdings in electric vehicle maker Tesla, as well as other investments and assets, Musk’s net worth is now estimated at about $1.1 trillion.

Do you know what I think about when I hear that Elon Musk became a trillionaire? One of my favorite quotes from the late, great Walter Williams:

Elon Musk is so rich because he’s done such a good job of serving his fellow man.

Tesla revolutionized the electric car business, and SpaceX has revolutionized rocketry and satellite Internet. He’s also working on The Boring Company, which has the potential to make it much easier to move around big cities, xAI, which was created to reduce the dangers of AI to the human race, and Neuralink, which may allow crippled people to walk again.

Like everyone else, Elon Musk has flaws, but if there was one person on Earth you’d want to have this many resources, it’s him because he’s successfully doing a lot of extremely difficult things that have the potential to benefit the whole human race. There is no such thing as an “indispensable man,” but the closest thing to it on the planet right now is Elon Musk.

On the other hand, when liberals hear that Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire, they immediately think, “There’s a big pot of money we can confiscate to distribute to each other and use to get more votes.” It’s like a horde of fleas getting excited and hopping up and down as they see a big, fluffy dog walking their way:

We could go on and on with these quotes, but they’re all variations on the same thing. It’s socialists encouraging people to break the 10th Commandment instead of telling people to copy success and then pitching pie-in-the-sky promises about what they could do with that money.

“Oh, if we had that money, we could pay for free college and trade school for everyone, get rid of the homeless, make sure everyone has enough to eat (I’m not sure I believe that’s much of a problem in a country where statistically, the poor are fatter than everyone else), solve world hunger, get everyone in the world clean drinking water, and reforest the Amazon,” and whatever 84 magical, beautiful things Bernie Sanders says he wants to do with the money.

But, if that’s true and in 2025 we took in 5 trillion dollars, spent 7 trillion dollars, and are 39 trillion dollars in debt, why haven’t all of those things already been done? If you are dumb enough to believe what these people are saying, then theoretically, we should have been able to do all the things they want to do many, many times over.

So, why haven’t we? Because this is all socialist bullsh*t from start to finish.

Just as a starting point, Elon Musk’s money is almost entirely tied up in companies he created that are bringing amazing new things into the world, not sitting in some Scrooge McDuck-style vault, waiting to be looted and handed out to the crew doing the heist.

If Elon Musk were to sell all of his stock so we could put unicorns in the Amazon or give every homeless person a beachfront cottage in Kennebunkport, the value of Musk’s holdings would plunge because the very fact that he’s personally involved in these companies is a significant part of their value. So, if you liquidated Elon Musk, you wouldn’t get a trillion dollars, you’d get a fraction of that:

On top of that, we’d also lose the extraordinarily large amount of taxes and economic activity his corporations produce:

And what would actually be done with that money? We hear all these beautiful promises (“Oh, if they get that money everybody will get their own private jet and the grocery store will pay you money to take their food,” but back in the real world, socialists are continuously spending money on the most ridiculous things imaginable. We get trans puppet shows in Croatia, massive grants to homelessness fighting NGOs that only create more homelessness, payouts to illegal aliens that aren’t supposed to be here, tens of billions spent on infrastructure projects that never actually get built, like the high-speed choo-choo to nowhere in Gavin Newsom’s California and even richer hauls for welfare queens, in return for voting for Democrats, of course.

All of this is in service of the only things they really care about, which are getting reelected, having control over their fellow citizens, and forcing all of us to spend money on things we wouldn’t want at any price.

On top of that, not only do I not want Elon to pay higher taxes, I believe no one should be paying higher taxes right now. Not only do I not want these new programs they’re promising, I want the government to dramatically cut back on the programs we already have to reduce spending. In fact, until we AT LEAST get rid of the deficit and start paying down the debt, we shouldn’t be talking about any new programs that don’t revolve around the most basic functions of government, like national security or securing the border.

Last but not least, instead of trying to convince everyone that it’s terrible that Elon Musk got so rich by succeeding in building so many amazing things, why aren’t we encouraging more Americans to follow his example? The man is an African immigrant who was living with his brother, his mother, and working an $18 an hour job when he was eighteen years old. Now, 36 years later, because of his own incredible ability, a little luck, and the amazing opportunities that are available in America, he’s worth a trillion dollars. Our country’s message today should be, “If Elon Musk did that, what can you do?”

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Never before in recorded human history have people been beset by lies coming from every direction like this, and it makes it so difficult to know what’s real and what’s not that people are starting to have “truth fatigue.” For many people, it’s too much work to figure out what’s real and what isn’t.

This is extremely bad for society because when people don’t know who to trust, instead of trusting no one, they often just start listening to anyone who says what they want to hear.

So, how do you ferret out the truth? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in many cases, you don’t. When it comes to getting the truth about things that are in dispute, smart people often think in terms of probabilities: “What’s going on is probably this, but there is a chance it could also be this and maybe even that!”

Still, how do you tilt the probability that you’re right in your favor? Well, it’s certainly not simple, because a combination of experience, detailed knowledge about the subject at hand, and raw intelligence matters a lot.

If the subject is rocket science and you know nothing about it, chances are you’re not going to be able to evaluate it very well. If the subject is farming and you’ve read three books on it, but you’ve never actually farmed, you may be easy to fool. If someone is talking about the war between Ukraine and Russia and you think those countries are in Africa, you don’t have much hope of getting to the truth.

Once you get beyond that, a lot of determining the truth comes down to the questions you ask. Questions like…

1) How credible is the source of the claim, and what is their motivation? Are we talking about a claim made by a newspaper or podcaster based on an anonymous source? A rando on the Internet? A divorced woman being asked about her husband? An article created by a liberal think tank full of claims that reflect badly on conservatives? A conspiracy theorist? A criminal who says his friend was shot by a cop after saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot?” A representative of a supplement company telling you about how great their new product is? Is there real video or confirmable proof that you can see for yourself or do you have to basically take their word for it?

Some sources should be treated as extremely suspect from the beginning. On others, the topic matters a lot. I’d believe movie times for a theater in NYC printed in the New York Times but would be highly skeptical of claims they made about politics.

You also have to remember that in the modern world, very few people are truly trying to appeal to everyone. Everybody has a niche, and that niche has usually CAPTURED THEM. By that, I mean the vegetarian podcaster isn’t going to tell you how great meat is, the conservative radio host isn’t going to talk up Hillary Clinton, the anti-Semitic guy on X isn’t going to admit Israel is right, and Chrysler isn’t going to tell you if they think Ford makes a better car.

If you don’t understand what the slant of the source is, you don’t have much of a chance of really getting to the truth.

2) What is their track record? One of the weirder tics of the modern world is how many people simply don’t seem to care if the news sources they’re following are accurate or not. This used to be THE METRIC people evaluated news sources by, but today, at best, it’s a distant third behind entertainment value and telling people what they want to hear.

If you don’t penalize sources for regularly getting the story wrong or outright lying, you’re going to constantly be fed lies. Unfortunately, a big slice of the American population falls into this category. Is it a majority? A large minority? It’s hard to say because no one wants to admit that they don’t care about the truth, but it’s not a small number of people, and they make the world a worse place for all of us by making dishonesty monetizable.

3) How does their claim compare to competing evidence? Sometimes there isn’t a lot of competing evidence (Example: “I woke up, looked out my window, and saw Tom and Paul Jenkins toilet papering my house at 3 AM.”), but oftentimes there is. If someone tells you that our own government knocked down the Twin Towers, Charlie Kirk was killed by someone other than Tyler Robinson, or that the Earth is flat, their explanation needs to be BETTER THAN the accepted, heavily documented, conventional wisdom. As the saying goes:

If it doesn’t meet that standard or, even more importantly, doesn’t even try, it is unlikely to be true.

You may notice that properly evaluating these claims requires you to understand the other side of the argument well enough to compare it to the claim that’s being made. If you can’t do that, if you can’t effectively argue the opposing position, you’re not even in a position to evaluate what’s true and false in the first place.

4) Is it verifiable? There are a lot of people out there who claim to have “special knowledge” based on everything from access to anonymous sources to dreams. These people are usually full of sh*t.

For every person who genuinely has some special knowledge, there are probably 50 that are liars, propagandists, or nuts – more like 100+ if you’re talking about people on social media.

If it’s real, the source will be making great strides to provide strong evidence for what they’re saying that holds up under scrutiny, you will be able to find reliable sources pointing out the same thing, or at least you will have smart, trustworthy, non-flaky people going, “Yes, this could be the case.” If you have none of that, it’s highly likely to be fake.

5) Is it the whole truth? I’m very interested in health and longevity research, and so, if I see some really big claim on social media about some drug, supplement, or therapy that interests me, I will dig deeper into it to see how true what’s being said happens to be. Want to know how many of them seem to be almost entirely true? Pretty much none of them, although a lot of them will be based on grains of truth. There will be ONE STUDY that shows some promise in some area, then someone will extrapolate from those results and declare that if that’s true, something else which sounds much better must be true – except it isn’t.

Of course, there are lots of other ways to lie with a partial truth. Remember, the “very fine people” hoax, where Trump seemed to be saying the white supremacists at Charlottesville were “very fine people?” Except, when you look at all of what he said, he was actually saying exactly the opposite of that:

How about when Nick Sandman was falsely portrayed as intimidating an Indian activist who walked up and got in his face? They showed you the video, but not all of it. They told you the story, but they left out a lot to trick you into believing the narrative they wanted to push. Incidentally, both the WAPO and CNN settled with Sandman over the lies they told about him:

If you don’t have a good understanding of the whole story, it’s easy for dishonest people with an agenda to mislead you.

6) Is it too good to be true? When I was younger and knew nothing about investing, I would hear about supposedly extremely profitable investing ideas, and I’d run them by my much more experienced father. One thing he liked to say was, “If the opportunity was really that good, there’s no way it would ever make it down to someone like you.” In other words, if there was a guaranteed way to make, say, 40% interest with no risk, people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos would pour billions of dollars into it, and they’d never need to pitch it to normal people.

That African prince, “beautiful girl” or “country music star” who wants you to give them a few thousand dollars for lawyer fees in return for half a million isn’t real. Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk isn’t writing to you out of the blue to give you investment advice. The “four minutes a week” solution to make you lean, healthy, or cure your cancer is fake. It’s too good to be true.

Let me also add that it’s highly unlikely that the super entertaining, emotionally unstable host who seems to come up with crazy new scoops all the time is some kind of hyperaware genius as opposed to just making things up all the time.

7) What evidence would make me change my mind? Many religious people, me included, can make a case for God, but it’s much more dependent on faith than logic:

There may be a few other things that fall into that bucket, but you should not have a lot of beliefs like this in life. On the contrary, you should have REASONS why you believe things are true or false. Those reasons should be, at least to some extent, VERIFIABLE.

If I really believe an apple a day keeps the doctor away to such an extent that I don’t bother to get healthcare, then I get sick and have to go to the doctor, it should make me reevaluate my belief.

If you believe most southerners are racists dating their cousins, but you meet a hundred southerners, and none of them are like that, it should cause you to reevaluate your belief. If you believe feminists hate men, and you keep meeting feminist after feminist who loves men (I mean, you won’t, but let’s say you did), it should cause you to shift your thinking.

If you don’t know what would make you change your mind, or worse yet, nothing would make you change your mind, then you have something much more akin to a religious belief than a logical belief. That makes you a prime candidate to be deceived by people playing to your prejudices.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

There was a track meet. Anthony went to another team’s tent, which he almost certainly knew he wasn’t supposed to do. He was asked to leave something like 12-15 times, nicely at first, but more insistently when he refused and became belligerent. Anthony began trying to goad Austin Metcalf into a fight. He dared him to touch him. He called the people in the tent “p*ssies” who couldn’t make him move. He challenged Metcalf to a fistfight, which Metcalf responded to by saying, “I’m not going to fight at a track meet.” Eventually, Anthony baited Metcalf into shoving him and immediately stabbed him, which killed him.

In other words, Anthony was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, he was asked many times to leave, and instead of doing so, he tried to start a fistfight, and then, when he finally got a reaction, he immediately responded with lethal force.

It all seems very clear-cut, right? Yet, what have we seen in this case?

Karmelo Anthony’s family raised 630k in a GiveSendGo (that was happily pulled after his murder conviction in accordance with their rules). Setting aside the fact that a large number of black Americans pretty clearly chipped in money just because Karmelo Anthony murdered a white guy, what happened to those funds is still a bit of a mystery. Anthony’s family has been staying in a 900k home in a gated community (this was apparently rented), and he had a public defender.

During the trial, Anthony’s supporters showed up regularly, in person and online, to spew hatred at white people and claim Anthony should get a free pass because of racism. His own grandmother even got in on the act after the trial:

Then, to top it all off, Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett chimed in with some extraordinarily ignorant comments:

Racism is commonly offered up as an excuse for why black Americans lag behind other groups in America.

This was a decent excuse in America at one time, long ago, but today, it’s 100% bullsh*t.

Instead, if you want to know why black Americans lag behind other racial groups in America, there are three things you can see on display here that explain it perfectly.

1) Bad decisions: Whoever you are in America and whatever your race may be, chances are that almost every problem you have is downstream from your own bad decisions. There are exceptions to that rule, but that’s exactly what they are: Exceptions.

Black Americans tend to have worse outcomes than other groups in America, percentagewise, because they commonly make worse decisions than people in other groups.

If you don’t believe that, just look at these charts and consider the implications:

If you took absolutely nothing into consideration other than these charts, statistically, you’d expect to see ENORMOUS differences between black Americans as a group and other races – and you do. Yet ultimately, what are we talking about here? Choices made by individuals and/or their parents that will have a huge impact on how their lives turn out.

We all know what the right choices are, but people still have to choose to make them. Percentagewise, far fewer black Americans make choices that are likely to lead to success to begin with.

2) Other black Americans: When I was younger, for a while, I worked in a group home that had almost all black kids. Sometimes, I had to drive into some bad neighborhoods to take them home on the weekends. When I did, the kids would often duck down so no one would see them as we drove by. Why? They told me it was because many people in their neighborhood would assume a white guy driving by was a cop, and if they were seen with a cop, it could be dangerous for them.

That highlights an important point. It is true that percentagewise, there’s much more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime, but overwhelmingly, crime tends to be intraracial. In other words, black Americans do have a crime problem, and the people that hurts the most are other black Americans. I don’t know how many people are going to get gunned down in Chicago this weekend, but the chances that the KKK will be pulling the trigger are extremely low, while the chances that black gangbangers will be the ones shooting are extremely high.

Getting beyond the crime, black culture in America is toxic.

It’s openly pro-crime, encourages trashy behavior, and lionizes the worst of “ghetto” conduct as the way “real” black people behave, while chalking up every failure of black Americans to vicimization by racism.

In the Tom MacDonald/Ben Shapiro song, “Facts,” (Which, fun fact, went top #10 on the Billboard rap charts – good job Ben!) there’s a line that goes, “We won’t turn your sons into thugs and your daughters into hoes.” They won’t? But then, who is doing that?

Who’s encouraging black men to settle disputes with violence, talking up gangster culture, telling people not to cooperate with the police, and encouraging black women to act like whores around rich and famous men?

Other black Americans.

3) The Democratic Party: Black support for Republicans completely collapsed and never really recovered when Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964 and had too much of a Libertarian lean to support the Civil Rights Act of that year.

Still, that highlights an important point: For over half a century, black Americans have been a monolithic voting bloc for the Democratic Party. Just to give you an example of how strong this effect is, there is not a single majority black district in America that has sent a Republican to Congress in all that time.

Yet, what’s the message the Democratic Party pushes non-stop to black Americans? It’s basically, “All your problems are because of racist, white Republicans!” Except there often aren’t any Republicans in charge of anything in the Democratic cities, and white people, especially white Republicans, are rarely in charge of anything in majority black districts.

Also, you know what the great thing about claiming that “racism” is really what’s holding black Americans back from the perspective of the Democrats is? It doesn’t require them to tell black Americans that they need to change anything, and it doesn’t require Democrats to do anything. All they have to do is blame “racism” and declare that when that’s gone (Hint: It never will be), then everything will be great. It’s a mirage that leaves a lot of black Americans wondering when things will get better, but voting in lockstep for Democrats ensures that it never will.

Aside from horribly mismanaging communities many black Americans live in, Democrats also work incessantly to try to convince black Americans that they’re in terrible danger from the police, people of other races, and Republicans. This is an extraordinarily toxic political tactic that is horrible for the country, and it’s all based on lies. The police kill somewhere around 10-armed black men each year, and roughly 85-90% of homicides against black Americans are committed by other black Americans.

So, what exactly do Democrats do for black Americans? They provide terrible schools, allow crime to run wild, and pretend to care about black Americans for a few weeks before elections. They also try to convince black Americans that they can’t succeed without the help of DEI and Affirmative Action provided by white liberals, which makes everyone else quite reasonably doubt the success of black Americans, even when they earn it. “Is this guy really good, or did he just get passed along to a position he didn’t deserve because of DEI?” It’s incredibly corrosive, not just because it rewards mediocrity and undermines the achievements of successful black Americans, but because it gives up on the idea that black Americans can compete on merit in the first place.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of smart, honest, hardworking, successful black Americans out there. Personally, like many conservatives, my favorite Supreme Court Justice is Clarence Thomas, and I think Thomas Sowell is the smartest man in politics. The best boss I ever had was black (thank you, LaSalle), and the guy with the best mathematical mind on our Math Counts team in high school was a black guy (I think he’s a doctor now). David Goggins is one of the most motivational people on earth…

…and we’re not even getting into athletes I grew up admiring like Muhammad Ali or Daniel Cormier, who’s probably my favorite mixed martial artist of all time. We can go on and on talking about black Americans who are admirable people. Hell, Victor Glover, the black astronaut who recently piloted the Artemis 2 Lunar flyby mission, sounds like he eats, drinks, sweats, and probably even craps excellence every time you hear him talk:

People like that? They didn’t get where they are by making a lifetime full of bad choices, being submerged in a victimhood mentality, and waiting for Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer to finally, for the first time in human history, eradicate racism so they can try to achieve something.

Black Americans can do a lot better than they have in this country, but that’s not going to happen unless the path they’ve been on as a group for the last few decades starts to change.

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101 Things All Adults Should Know

In Japan, they have completely unmanned stores full of cool stuff that are open all night long:

As an experiment, this guy left his laptop unattended in a coffee shop for an hour in Singapore, and UNSURPRISINGLY, it was still there when he returned:

In the Netherlands, you may see thousands of sometimes very expensive bikes, unattended and unsecured:

This begs two obvious questions.

The first is. “How is this possible?” and the second is, “How can we have that here?”

The answer to the first question isn’t as clear-cut as you might think, although success leaves clues.

There’s no universal agreement on what makes for a “high-trust society,” but the general consensus would probably revolve around it being honest, safe, low-crime, low-corruption, and a general belief by the people there that most people can be trusted. If we were coming up with a list of countries that generally fit that definition, it would probably include these nations:

· Denmark

· Finland

· Iceland

· Japan

· Netherlands

· Norway

· Qatar

· Singapore

· Sweden

· Switzerland

· United Arab Emirates

You’ll note that these countries are not uniform. There are a number of white, mostly protestant Scandinavian countries, Asian nations, and Islamic countries. Not all of them are democracies either.

That being said, these countries are mostly ethnically homogenous (Singapore and Switzerland could arguably be exceptions depending on how you look at it).

Crime is harshly punished in some nations, particularly the Arabic ones, but not so much in the Scandinavian countries, although they would argue that even if they don’t hand out draconian punishments, they’re very good at tracking down criminals, so the likelihood of being caught after committing a crime is high.

What you would see in all these countries across the board is a lot of pressure to conform, effective governments, and a lot of social/civic cooperation.

Now, we get to the second question: How can we have that in America?

There is no simple answer, because there is no one template for a high-trust society, but remember what I said about success leaving clues?

Well, there are many Americans who are alive today who were also around when America actually was a high-trust society.

What differences are there between then and today?

Well, many people may not like hearing this, but we were a much less diverse society, which is something you see in almost all of the current high-trust societies. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act has been a disaster for America on a lot of fronts, including this one.

It’s also no coincidence that America was much more devoutly Christian then:

People who listen to sermons about morality every week at church and see their neighbors there are a lot more likely to be trustworthy members of the community than people who don’t.

Back then, Americans were also much less tolerant of what they viewed as bad or immoral behavior. If you ran your mouth to a cop, you could expect to get a beating. If you had a child out of wedlock or got divorced, you were considered a bit scandalous. Kids were expected not to talk back to adults, you didn’t typically see married couples sleeping together on TV, and there was genuine moral concern about things like Elvis shaking his hips on TV.

There was also a lot more sense of community back then. People saw each other at church, at dances, at the Elk’s club, Rotary clubs, on bowling night – in a whole host of places that a large portion of the population has since abandoned.

It’s very easy to spew venom anonymously at someone you’ll never see online, but when you’re seeing people in person regularly, and you might need to borrow their lawnmower or want to get an invite to their barbecue next week, you tend to be a lot more polite.

The country was also more patriotic and more concerned with the good of the community back then. After fighting two World Wars and being involved in a Cold War with the Soviets, Americans understood that we were all in it together, and how well our country functioned mattered a great deal not just to us, but to the free world.

Today, our society is much more individualistic, often in a deeply unhealthy way, where many people simply don’t care about the impact of the things they do on other Americans. Our sick influencer-centered culture that often rewards terrible behavior with attention and money is only making things worse on that front.

So, how do we get back to that high trust society? Back to a culture where you can leave your doors unlocked, people treat each other with respect, and everything isn’t just so TOXIC?

There’s no perfect roadmap, but we can make some educated guesses.

We need…

* …more Americans to start going back to church.

* …to be orders of magnitude less tolerant of anti-social, disgusting, and selfish behavior across our society and much more willing to shame people who deserve it.

* …to insist on competence from our government and institutions without giving them a pass for being on “our side” (And that goes for all sides).

* …to create on a merit-based immigration system, refuse to allow immigrants to collect welfare, denaturalize immigrants who engage in crime, and harshly treat people who enter or stay in our country illegally.

* …to find ways to get together more in the real world with our friends and neighbors.

* …to become much more concerned with making everyone live up to the same standards and much less interested in looking for exceptions to the rules.

* …to hold people accountable in the real world for their bad behavior online.

* …to get better at tracking down criminals and punish them more harshly.

* …to become less self-centered, more patriotic, and concerned with what’s good for people around us.

Can America do these things? Of course, we can. In fact, we HAVE DONE THESE MOST OF THESE THINGS, and our society generally functioned much, much better when we did. On the other hand, there is a huge difference between theoretically doing something and trying to get people in an increasingly decadent and self-centered society to adopt practices because they’re good for everyone else.

All I can tell you is that if you want a country where you can trust the media, don’t have to worry about your child playing in the yard, and can walk down a dark alley in a big city without worrying about your safety, you can have it, but it won’t happen by magic. We could continue on for a million years, but we’d never get to a high-trust society behaving the way we do today. It’s going to require different choices and changing the way we do things to get there. Would it be worth it? Absolutely, but a large part of our population has to feel that way to make it happen.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Conservatives love capitalism, and liberals extol the virtues of socialism. Conservatives believe it’s wrong to murder babies in the womb, while liberals think it’s okay to kill them for any reason, including inconvenience. The Right wants to move toward a free-market healthcare system while the Left wants government to control the whole thing. Conservatives are serious about law and order, having a border, discouraging people from living off of their fellow citizens, and think we should have a merit-based world, while liberals do not.

These are not small differences, and two societies that follow the principles of each side to their logical conclusions will look radically different when all is said and done.

Still, somehow, some way, America has managed to navigate these seemingly irrevocable differences for a long time. We live in a country where big government liberals like FDR and Lyndon Johnson have each been president along with conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and yet we’ve always somehow made it work. It’s not always smooth sailing, but if JUST THE IDEOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES were the problem, we probably wouldn’t need to worry much about continuing to do so.

The problem we have today is that liberalism in America is increasingly intertwined with absolutely batsh*t crazy extremism to such an extent that we often don’t know where the mental illness stops and the politics begins. In other words, we’ve increasingly moved past ideological differences that can be papered over to trying to find some middle ground with some of the most deranged beliefs on planet earth.

This is really what makes our political system today so untenable and unsustainable.

Let’s take one that most people don’t think about in these terms: Our debt. Our country is 39 trillion dollars in debt, and our projected deficit this year is 2 trillion dollars. Realistically, the only way to get this under control is to cut spending, and we can’t because liberals absolutely, unconditionally, refuse to do it. Republicans have tried doing it many times, but when we do, liberals go nuts, use it as a campaign issue, and it ends up failing.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t even ideological. Liberals embrace Keynesian economics, which is a popular, though deeply flawed, way of looking at economic policy, but even John Keynes didn’t believe you could run up endless debt with no consequences:

In other words, the absolute refusal of liberals to cut govenrment spending is just irrational. It’s refusing to recognize an obvious (and important!) fact because it isn’t what liberals want to hear (you’re going to see this pattern repeated a lot in this column).

Conservatives and liberals generally don’t agree on how to deal with criminals. Conservatives believe in being tough on crime. Liberals tend to blame society, the police, poverty – pretty much anything other than the criminal for what the criminal does. Still, what’s the reasonable explanation for this?

At a certain point, you’d think even liberals would go, “Poverty, police, society, whatever, there’s no way someone with 30 arrests should be walking the streets,” but no, that point doesn’t come up for them in a lot of left-wing cities. Even after repeated high-profile incidents involving criminals who should have been in prison, not on the streets, nothing changes in their attitude.

The same thing goes for homeless people. Conservatives tend to be less tolerant of chronic homelessness, while liberals cater to the homeless to the point of enabling them. The mind-blowing thing with the Left is that they allow the homeless to do things like crap in the street, use drugs publicly (I’ve literally seen a homeless guy shooting up what I assume was fentanyl in NYC), and perhaps worst of all, set up tents on public sidewalks. Why would you put the people who are paying taxes to support the homeless in a position where they have to walk through homeless encampments to get to work, dodge needles and human feces, or endure crazy bums screaming or punching the air (also things I have seen in NYC)?

Liberals don’t just want to bring in more immigrants than conservatives; they believe in open borders to such an extent that they refuse to hand over illegal alien wife beaters and rapists to ICE. Liberals believe anybody can cross into our country at will, regardless of what American citizens think of it, and shouldn’t be deported, even if they diddle kids. It’s not an ideological position, it’s MADNESS.

Similarly, liberals see no danger in bringing in hordes of Third World immigrants, a large percentage of whom end up on welfare or large numbers of Muslims, even though it inevitably leads to more terrorist attacks, antisemitism, and toxic culture clashes between the more backward aspects of Islam and Western culture, which it seems to be largely incompatible with. In California, they’re even bringing illegal aliens with AIDS to America.

Most of the debate over immigration has less to do with immigration and more to do with the fact that the Left insists on trying to bring many of the worst, least compatible people on earth to our country followed by giving them welfare or letting them get away with breaking our laws at will.

The whole trans issue also revolves around this kind of insanity. At a certain point, liberals just decided for no good reason that men could be women if they decided to be, that it was okay to surgically mutilate small children to make it easier for them to “change sexes,” and that it was fine for deviant men in dresses to wave their penises at women in the bathrooms and locker rooms, take women’s positions in sporting events, and room with women in prison.

All of this is utter lunacy and just doesn’t stop.

”Hey, let’s put kids around drag queens doing sex shows. Let’s give gay porn comics to kids in schools. Let’s actively celebrate Charlie Kirk being murdered by the millions, burn Tesla dealerships down for disagreeing with us, chase ICE agents around in our cars, allow rioters to burn, loot, and attack ICE agents at will as long as they agree with us, and reward liberals who call for violence against conservatives.”

Even Paul Krugman, a 73-year-old economist who was considered a mainstream voice on the Left for decades, is essentially calling for prison camps, jail, and society-wide discrimination against more than half of all voters who didn’t support his party in 2024:

The things that have been talked about in this column are treated like political differences between the Left and Right, but it’s more like the differences between the therapists and the patients in an asylum. So much of what the Left is advocating isn’t normal, it’s not politics as usual, it’s a DANGEROUS level of radicalism that is putting the future of our country at risk. At some point, if liberals don’t decide to police themselves and demand a certain basic level of sanity, both they and all the rest of us are going to pay a terrible price for it.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

With that in mind, how many times have you heard someone say, “Why can’t we just print money to pay for whatever we want?”

You might say, “No one could really believe that, could they?” But, in fact, they do. There’s a whole school of economics that basically pushes this idea called Modern Monetary Theory. Modern Monetary Theory is admittedly unpopular because it’s quite obviously stupid, but it has still drawn attention from some very prominent liberal politicians like AOC:

All this came to mind because of a tweet on X:

What she says is, “All I’m saying is I’ve never seen a valid argument explaining why we can’t just print more money.” The video goes on to mock her for this but doesn’t explain why it’s foolish.

However, I am going to take the time to explain it, and I’m going to start that process by showing you this coupon:

First of all, this is a coupon for a free car. What is it worth? By the way, that’s not a trick question. I am asking you what this image you are looking at would be worth if you printed it out on your home computer.

The answer would be pretty close to zero, although you could argue it’s perhaps worth some fraction of a penny because you could scribble notes on it.

Yet, this says, “One Free Car!” and a car is worth far more than a fraction of a penny. I was looking at cars yesterday. A new Toyota Camry? It starts at S29,300. A new Cybertruck? $69,900. A BMW M4 Coupe? $82,000.

So, why is this coupon for a free car not worth that much? Because it’s not the actual car, it’s just a piece of paper that says you get a car with no one guaranteeing that transaction.

Similarly, what is a hundred-dollar bill worth? It’s not $100 worth of goods or services; it’s just a piece of paper representing $100 worth of goods and services.

Well, if that’s true, when does the coupon become valuable? When someone says, “I’m going to give you a car in exchange for that coupon,” and backs it up. Suddenly, that coupon has real value. If, let’s say, that coupon really got you a Cybertruck, someone might suddenly be willing to pay you a very large amount of money for that coupon since they could trade it in for a vehicle.

Similarly, when do the dollars in your wallet start to become valuable? When they actually represent something of value, like gold.

For example, from 1879 to 1933 in the United States, you could literally exchange a dollar bill for gold held by the government. Eventually, the government stopped doing that, but from 1944 to 1971, foreign governments could still trade dollars for gold.

In other words, dollars were representations of value that were backed by real value, which was gold. We don’t know the exact date, but probably until some point in the 1950s or 1960s, the federal government literally had enough gold to match the value of all the dollars it had released to the public.

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

So, what happens when it doesn’t work that way? What happens when people say, “Why don’t we just print more money?”

This is a complicated question, but let’s explain the basics.

What do you think would happen if the actual VALUE of something like a pizza stayed the same, but the number of REPRESENTATIONS OF VALUE that were used to pay for it were doubled?

If you’re wondering why everything got radically more expensive after COVID, this concept explains it. There are estimates that the money supply increased as much as 80% during COVID, but most sources I’m finding today seem to agree that the real number was closer to 40%, which is still a huge increase. So, what happened as a result of that? Inflation. The cost of everything SURGED. You can see it in the cost of cars, houses, rent, electricity, groceries – pretty much everything went up a lot in a hurry.

Why?

Because that’s what happens when we print more money. You end up with a lot more dollars representing the same amount of value, so practically by default, dollars have to represent less value in the real world.

How bad can it get? Really, really bad. Here’s a famous picture from Weimar Germany in 1923 that gives you an idea of how bad that is:

Once you start to understand this, you start to understand why our massive debt is going to economically doom us all down the road. It’s because paying the US debt off is functionally impossible at this point, UNLESS the value of the dollar radically decreases. If inflation rises so that a trillion dollars in today’s money is only worth a billion dollars tomorrow, paying off the debt becomes trivial.

Of course, the downside of that would be that your savings would become nearly worthless, the salary you’d get paid would quickly fall far behind real-world prices, and meaningful amounts of cash would be extraordinarily hard to come by, which would crash the economy. Even many of the rich tend to struggle hard in a situation like that, while the middle class and poor quickly become paupers.

The more money we print, the closer we get to the day that becomes a reality for all of us. So, if anyone is wondering why we can’t just print as much money as we want, that is the actual reason why.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Who wants to live forever? Ooh

Who dares to love forever

Oh, when love must die?” – Queen, Who Wants to Live Forever

Myths about “eternal life” (or close to it) have been floating around for a long time.

There was Ponce De Leon and the Fountain of Youth, Vampires, the Norse Gods eating Golden Apples that kept them young, elves living for thousands of years, or even a modern movie like “In Time,” where the rich could essentially buy time that theoretically would let them live forever barring an accident, suicide or murder:

Well, today, we’ve moved on from myths, legends, and stories to real people declaring, like Dave Asprey, that he intends to live until 180:

We also can’t forget Bryan Johnson, who calls himself “the most measured man alive,” and spends millions of dollars per year measuring his health. Johnson is particularly interesting (or you may think weird) because he relentlessly tests how different things impact his health and does extreme things like eating the same food every day, having his “last meal” at 11 AM, measuring his nighttime erections, and going to bed at 8:30 PM every night:

Personally?

I pay a great deal of attention to the latest longevity research, not so much because I want to live forever, but because it’s important to me to have a HEALTHSPAN as long as possible. If I could live to 180 but had to spend the last 90 years in a lot of pain, barely able to move around or enjoy life, I wouldn’t consider that a good outcome. To me, it’s not about living forever; it’s about being healthy, strong, mobile, and able to do what you want to do all the way until whenever it is that you check out. In my book, that’s worth spending a lot of money, time, and effort on, while, at the moment, at least, trying to “live forever” is not.

What do I mean by that? I mean that there are a lot of things you can do to greatly improve your health, most of which, happily, are free. If you eat mostly healthy whole foods, aren’t overweight (I’m still working on this one), don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, don’t drink a lot of alcohol (maybe any), avoid chemical exposure, get 7-8 quality hours of sleep each night, add some muscle, work on your frame (mobility and stretching), and have yearly testing to see how you’re doing, it will go a long way toward keeping you far healthier than the vast majority of the population.

If you do all those things, you probably have a decent shot of hitting 90 if your genetics aren’t too bad, and there are roughly something like 100,000 Americans currently at 100 or over. Only hundreds of Americans have ever been verified to have hit 110, and one lone human being, Jeanne Calment, has been confirmed to have cracked 120.

Is there anything currently available to the public that seems likely to break that pattern and help us live much longer? You know: stem cells, GLP-1s, PCSK9 inhibitors, rapamycin, young plasma, therapeutic plasma exchange, or gene therapy?Unfortunately, there’s no real evidence yet that any of those things would get us over the hump and allow us to dramatically extend lifespans, although it seems entirely possible some of those things could extend the HEALTHSPAN of the general public, which is extremely important.

However, that brings us to a concept called “Escape Velocity” that people like Ray Kuzweil helped implant into the public consciousness.

The basic concept behind “Escape Velocity,” which seems orders of magnitude more plausible in the age of AI, is that we could get to a point where medical advances come so quickly that they extend our lives faster than we age. In other words, if you age five years, but medical advances extend human life for another 10 years during that same time period, your chances of dying have DECREASED even though you’re older.

So, what are the chances of that actually happening?

Well, if you’re trying to judge what’s going to happen in the future, the first place you should look at is the past. In this case, that may not be particularly encouraging.

After making some significant advances in lifespan with better sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, better treatment of cardiovascular problems, and improved medicines, Americans added 30 years to their lifespans between 1900 and 2000. On the other hand, from 1990 to the present, we’ve basically just been treading water with just a three-to-four-year jump in lifespan since then.

On the other hand, the future looks more promising than the immediate past for three reasons:

1) The first is that much more money has started to flow into the field thanks to billionaires getting interested in the problem.

2) AI is going to help tremendously with this problem as it advances because what it does so well is comb through extraordinary amounts of data and find connections that humans miss. It’s going to teach us a lot of things about how the body works that we’ve never understood before. When you hear people like Dave Asprey and Bryan Johnson talking about living much longer than currently normal lives, what both of them have said is that they believe that new information that comes to light via AI is going to make it possible. They may be right.

3) The third key thing is that there are already some very plausible strategies in the pipeline. Some of them revolve around fixing failing parts like better organ replacement, repairing DNA, and getting rid of senescent cells, but to me, the much more promising direction seems to be rejuvenating tissues.

On that front, epigenetic reprogramming is particularly exciting because they’ve already had success with mice. They’ve dramatically increased their lifespans and effectively made their eyes, heart, brain, skin, and muscle tissue YOUNGER. In other words, they have successfully REVERSED aging damage in mice.

Is that ready to go for humans? Nope, but could it be in, say, a decade or two? Absolutely.

Of course, as we all know, “could” and “will” are two very different things. Still, does it change how you approach life to know that “could” is a genuine possibility? That if you’re still around 10, 15, or 20 years from now, MAYBE you might be able to live a much longer, healthier life than anyone does today? Does it make you want to take better care of yourself? Does it make you want to save up more money to be able to potentially buy into these things? None of us know for sure what the future holds, but it’s good to know that this is a genuine possibility.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

In one sense, this is just standard, nonsensical socialist talk.

Jeff Bezos works hard, but nurses and teachers work hard, too. Okay, but so what? Work is one metric out of many that determines how much people get paid. If a streamer who put in 80 hours per week on his stream, but only had a hundred viewers, said that he and Hasan deserved to switch payouts because he worked harder, I think Hasan would suddenly tell you that how hard you work is no longer the only thing that matters.

Similarly, it’s true Jeff Bezos wouldn’t have been successful without the labor of others, but that applies to every one of us. Hasan didn’t build the Internet he’s streaming over all by himself. I didn’t build the road I drove on today. Nurses don’t build the hospitals they work in. Teachers don’t write the textbooks they hand out to their classes. Everyone, from the richest to the poorest American, is reliant on the labor of other people.

All of this is a transparent scam anyway.

It’s takers trying to get clout, money, and benefits off of something makers created. In this case, we’re talking about Jeff Bezos, the guy who created Amazon, one of the largest, most important, and most revolutionary corporations created in the history of planet Earth.

Meanwhile, Hasan Piker is an asshole socialist who talks up communist dictatorships, talks down America, calls for conservatives to be murdered, and is well known for shocking his dog to keep it in place as a prop for his stream:

Bernie Sanders is cut out of the same kind of cloth. He goes on and on about oligarchs, by which he means rich people who give money to Republicans instead of Democrats, and declares that takers like him can do better. There are dozens of examples of this we could give, but this one will do just as well as any other:

Just as a starting point here, Bezos is right.

For example, in NYC, where Ugandan communist Zohran Mamdani is threatening to confiscate buildings from “bad landlords,” over 50% of the housing isn’t allowed to be rented at market value because of “rent control” and “rent stabilization” policies.

So if you’re a landlord and you have expensive repairs, you may quickly get in a position where you either need to leave an apartment empty because you can’t profitably rent it (there are more than 50,000 like this in NYC) or you get into a Catch-22 situation where you need to make repairs, but you can’t afford to do so because you can’t charge enough to make the money back. Then, you get tagged as a slumlord, and the idea from there is that the government will take it over and everything will get better. Except, do you know who the biggest slumlord in NYC is? It’s the government of NYC:

This is how it always goes with takers. They know exactly how someone else’s money should be spent, but surprise, surprise, surprise, it always turns out to be on people or programs that benefit their side politically, and it never seems to work, thus necessitating even higher taxes on those bad old makers later on.

For example, in that tweet, Bernie Sanders is talking about all the great things he’d do with the money that would be collected with his wealth tax. He’s going to expand Medicare and guarantee childcare and raise teacher pay, and the government is going to personally guarantee everyone gets a pet unicorn, a brand-new Lambo, and a beachfront condo in Miami.

Yet, when you look at the details on what he wants to do with his wealth tax, the whole thing is insane. It applies to unrealized gains (if something goes up on paper, but hasn’t been sold), and it’s yearly. In other words, within a few years, it would make it impossible for someone like Elon Musk to own corporations at all because he’d end up having to sell them all to pay the taxes on gains he hadn’t actually realized in the real world.

And what kind of revenue would be raised by that? The Bernie Sanders estimate (which is almost certainly wildly high) is 4.4 trillion dollars over a decade, or 440 billion dollars per year.

But, you might say, “Wouldn’t it be worth it to do all that great stuff?” First of all, “No, it would not,” but look at this chart, and then we can address the real question:

If 440 billion dollars in spending will make the country into Nirvana, and we spent 7 trillion dollars in 2025, why do we need more tax revenue to get there? 7 trillion dollars should be enough to fix any problem that is fixable with money. On top of that, I bet if we just started shutting down government fraud, stopped wasting at least 100 billion (that may be way low) in money on illegal aliens each year, and stopped pouring money into useless projects like Gavin Newsom’s high-speed choo-choo to nowhere in California (over a hundred billion down the tubes so far), we could afford this. Why isn’t Bernie Sanders calling for that to be done? Because all of this is another taker scam.

Personally, I admire makers. I admire the people who create products, create a business, or bring something new and meaningful into the world. The people who change the way we think for the better, who come up with new and improved ways of doing things, the people who turn desert into farmland, vacant lots into parks, and empty lots into homes – those people are moving things forward for the human race in a way that matters. They’re turning their time, their skills, and their vision into something that betters the world.

Nothing is easier than sitting on the sidelines, holding your begging bowl out, and criticizing what those people are doing and how they live their lives. It’s easy to be a taker. It’s easy to be a critic. It’s easy to envy other people for what they’ve accomplished. Jeff Bezos created Amazon. Bill Gates created Microsoft. Steve Jobs created Apple. Those are real accomplishments that impacted the human race in a positive way. No taker will ever do that.

If Bernie Sanders, Hasan Piker, and Zohran Mamdani somehow created a new company that made enough profit to provide free childcare to everyone in America or raise teachers’ pay, I would at least RESPECT what they accomplished. They don’t think like that, though, because they’re takers. Takers want to loot people who actually make something and get credit for giving away things they never earned in the first place. They deserve no respect at all for that.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Did he think Tom was a bad guy? Did he think he wasn’t competent? Not at all. He just thought he wasn’t the right man for that job at the time.

Maybe this is a strange juxtaposition, but it’s reminiscent of that famous passage from the Bible that goes:

Conservatives have increasingly been of two minds about what “season we’re in” over the last decade.

Trump, especially in his 2^nd term, could be said to represent one side of things.

That’s the side, let’s call them the populist, MAGA, GOP activist base, that’s basically saying, “Every election these days is a ‘Flight 93’ election because the Left has gone nuts. They want to put Republicans in prison for their political beliefs. They murdered Charlie Kirk and then publicly celebrated it. They’re trying to rig our elections, open our borders, trans our kids, and turn America into a one-party state by getting rid of the Senate filibuster for legislation, stacking the Supreme Court, and then rewriting the rules. Either we start pushing conservative ideals and drag the country back to sanity, or we risk a civil war, losing our country, or some other disaster. This is an URGENT SITUATION.”

However, there’s another take that could best be summed up as the Country Club Republican, Establishment Republican, and all too often, Republican leadership position that goes more like this:

“What’s going on now is just business as usual, nothing out of the ordinary. We just need to stick to the status quo, not rock the apple cart, keep the Left from getting too upset, and portray ourselves as the reasonable ones. That’s our best ticket to power, and as long as we’re in power, we’ll keep taxes low, stop the Left from doing too many bad things, and keep everything on a nice, even keel.”

If you want a great example of this kind of thinking, Mike Pence wrote a piece for National Review called “The Next Generation of Conservative Leaders Must Embrace Civility.”

Before I continue writing about this, let me note I have written for National Review before and like them, and I don’t even really dislike Mike Pence, but writing this piece, which was deservedly, brutally criticized by conservatives online, shows you how completely out-of-touch his wing of the Republican Party… I want to say, “has become,” but it would be better to say, “still is after all this time.”

The Jeb Bush/Mike Pence/Jon Thune/Mitch McConnell/John Boehner/Bill Cassidy/John Cornyn/Thom Tillis/Mitt Romney wing of the party is very worried about civility, making the New York Times mad at them, or pursuing any policies that will get Democrats really upset.

Meanwhile, Democrats are talking about putting ICE agents and Republicans in prison when they get back into power, getting rid of the Senate filibuster for legislation, making Puerto Rico and DC into states to pad their Senate numbers, and stacking the Supreme Court to make it into a rubber stamp for their policies, while they tacitly encourage people to try to murder prominent conservatives.

Biden and the Left already opened up the borders during his presidency to allow in tens of millions of illegal aliens that they intend to make into citizens, they aimed politicized prosecutions at Trump (even if you think some of them were legit, all of them certainly weren’t), they’re holding the police back in multiple cities to allow left-wingers to riot, they’re calling for the end of ICE, they’ve managed to funnel tens of billions (probably more like hundreds of billions) in taxpayer dollars into their coffers through USAID and outright fraud, they have prosecutors allowing criminals to break the law at will in multiple cities, and they murdered Charlie Kirk and then celebrated it by the millions. Outside of a few exceptions, like John Fetterman, this is who we’re dealing with from top-to-bottom on the Left.

This is not an “everything is basically fine, let’s not do anything too crazy and ride it out situation.” We can’t just sit on our thumbs and keep ceding ground to the Left when they believe it’s wrong to even deport pedophiles and rapists if they’re illegals while murdering people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump has the support of around 50% of people on the Left:

This is not a “Ho-hum, we’ll get around to doing what our voters want if it’s not too inconvenient, maybe, someday,” state of affairs. This is a serious, all-hands-on-deck situation.

Whatever his flaws may be, Trump fully understands that and is attacking the problems of the country like time is not on our side – and guess what? He’s right about that. We’re increasingly teetering on the edge of losing America as it is today for future generations, and if Kamala Harris had beaten Trump, it may have already happened.

Too many people in DC, John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy included, don’t understand that. That’s why they don’t have jobs anymore. Incidentally, it’s also why Marjorie Taylor Greene, Dan Crenshaw, and Thomas Massie are on their way out, too. This is not the time to be complacent, and it’s also not the time to grandstand for attention at the expense of Trump, the Republican Party, and the country.

If we’re lucky, the season will again come for America where we don’t need a “wartime consigliere,” but we’re not there today. We also won’t be there for the rest of Trump’s presidency, and we may not be there for a while. So, all these so-called Republican “leaders” in Congress need to start putting foot to ass for the country or get the hell out of the way because it’s go-time for the future of our nation.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

I’ve long been a fan of Elon Musk because of his incredible accomplishments and his work ethic, so I’ve certainly paid a lot of attention to what he’s been doing and saying in the past. However, on top of that, I just got back from a vacation in Phoenix and while I was there and traveling to-and-fro, I took the opportunity to read, “The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success” and I spent more than 20 hours listening to Walter Isaacson’s fascinating Elon Musk autobiography, which I think is highly likely to make a extrtaordinary mini-series one day.

After consuming all of this, it felt possible to condense the essence of Elon Musk’s success down to a very small number of thoughts and quotes that can be extraordinarily useful in the lives of a lot of people. That goes double because, contrary to what you may have heard, he did not start by being “rich.” When he was eighteen years old, Elon was working an $18 per hour job. Of course, that doesn’t mean absorbing these ideas will turn you into Elon Musk.

Musk has an extremely high IQ. His actual IQ has never been released, but as someone who has been around some extraordinarily gifted intellects throughout his life, my guess would probably be in the 160-170 range.

Musk has also taken an enormous number of highly aggressive risks in his life, where the odds were heavily against him, and somehow, someway, he has beaten the odds over and over again. Are his extraordinary talent, work ethic, and leadership skills part of that? Yes, but he’s also clearly had some incredibly good luck. That’s not discounting his accomplishments, it’s just acknowledging he has been within a hair’s breadth of failure multiple times. Musk himself has said this.

“There have been many times where I expected to lose everything. Who starts a car company and a rocket company expecting them to succeed? Certainly not me. I thought they both had a low chance of success, less than 10 percent. Maybe 1 percent, I don’t know.”

It’s also worth noting that Elon Musk is a guy who lives to work, pushes himself, and tries to do big, impossible things. That may be a recipe for incredible accomplishment, but it’s not necessarily a roadmap to a happy, balanced life, although he certainly seems to love his kids, has people in his life who care about him, and he certainly has more than a few good and cheerful days.

So, keep all that in mind and then start soaking in these quotes and thinking about how you can apply them to your life. None of the rest of us can be Elon, but what we learn from him may take us a lot further in life than we would have gone otherwise.

1) “A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.” Musk’s philosophy is to get brilliant engineers, push them to the absolute limit of what they can do every day, and then, when they eventually burn out, replace them with another great engineer who he will also push to the limits. Musk does not believe in “balance” or “pacing,” he believes that EVERY DAY is a race against the clock for himself, his companies, and his employees. As the Romans said:

All of us only have so much time. Musk would tell you to get hardcore about making the most of it.

2) “Optimism, pessimism, f*ck that. We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.” One thing you will see over and over again with Elon Musk is that he will think about something that’s desperately needed or what he believes is the right way to design something, and then he will set out after it, even if people say it’s not unrealistic. Does it always work? No. But still, time and time again, he’s pulled a rabbit out of his hat and done something nobody thought he could do because he put everything he and his team had into trying to do something that looked impossible. What is there in your life that you’re willing to pour EVERYTHING into to make it happen?

3) “If you’re not adding deleted things back in 10 percent of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough. Somewhat illogically, people often feel they’ve succeeded if they are not forced to put anything back in. But actually, they have failed in a different way, because they’ve been overly conservative and have left things in there that shouldn’t be.” Elon very much believes in aggressively optimizing and trying new things that may or may not work. If you have that philosophy, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to screw things up. You’ll fail sometimes. However, over the long haul, you’re also going to get 10 times further than the people who never experimented and took any risks at all.

4) “For internal timelines, we set the most aggressive timelines we can. I do this because there’s a kind of ‘law of gaseous expansion’ for schedules. Whatever time you set, it’s not going to be less than that. It’s rare that something will ever get done faster than the schedule.” Elon is famous for his aggressive deadlines, and often, he misses them. However, the fact that he is always pushing his people to do much more than they think, faster than they think is possible, has enabled him to do a lot of things most people never thought they could do in the first place. What could you do if you set a big goal and pushed yourself to hit it faster than you think is possible?

5) “But there’s something else I’ve found this year. It’s that fighting to survive keeps you going for quite a while. When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day.” Musk is someone who always seems to have some kind of powerful external motivation, even if he has to create it himself. He pushes for heroic goals, sets arbitrary deadlines, makes himself the point person for every crisis in his companies, and convinces himself that the success of humanity in some areas is dependent upon his getting one of his companies to a certain goal. This keeps him pushing, working, and driven far beyond what most other human beings can manage. What is pushing you to go further and faster than you thought you could?

6) “All bad news should be given loudly and often. Good news can be said quietly and once.” One of the keys to Elon’s success is that he applies himself to whatever the hardest problem is at his companies. If there’s a big problem people don’t know how to solve, that’s where Elon will be. Eventually, if you fix enough problems, you will succeed practically by default.

7) “I think it’s a real weakness to want to be liked. A real weakness. And I do not have that.” Elon Musk expects excellence at all times in his companies, and if his standards are not met, he does not let it slide. To him, the mission is everything, and friendships, “being nice,” or babying people along are nothing. Not everyone can or should try to do that, but there is something to be said for doing what you think is right even if the whole world disagrees with you.

8) “If your hand is on a stove and it gets hot, you pull it right off. But if it’s someone else’s hand on the stove, it will take you longer to do something about it.” Elon very much believes in collapsing boundaries between departments and layers of management in his companies. He wants the engineers to create the products right next to the people assembling and installing them. The more everyone can talk to each other and see what each other’s problems are, the easier problems become to solve.

9) “If there was a crisis situation, I slept on the floor. Most of the time, I did not sleep in a conference room because people could not see me in the conference room—I slept on the floor in the factory. Otherwise, how would people know? They wouldn’t. Seeing is believing. I slept on the floor outside the conference room so they could see I was there. When the team is being asked to work super hard, I have to be right there with them, and they have to see it. If I fall asleep in the middle of the factory floor at four in the morning and wake up four hours later, they see that. They are like, ‘If the CEO is willing to take that level of pain, I can do it too.’” It’s true that Musk asks AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT out of his employees, but he also leads from the front in a crisis. If he’s asking an employee at Tesla or SpaceX to give everything they have in some urgent push, they will see him walking around on the floor and yes, even SLEEPING WHERE THEY CAN SEE HIM, so they know he’s right there with them. There’s a lot to be said for never asking people to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself.

10) “For any company, ask, ‘Are the efforts we’re expending resulting in a better product or service?’ If they’re not, stop those efforts.” This feels like another way of saying Stephen Covey’s famous quote:

Never lose sight of what matters most in your life and keep your focus there.

11) “I don’t look at ideas and ask, ‘What is the rank-ordered list of best business opportunities from a financial standpoint?’ I look for problems that are important to fix for people now and for the future to be good.” This is one of the most amazing things about Elon Musk. In pretty much every case, he’s started a business to tackle what he thinks is an important problem for humanity, and he’s figured out how to make it profitable later. Imagine what the world would look like if all of us started trying to figure out how to do things that benefit everyone else first and then figured out how to get rewarded ourselves later.

12) “The other way to think is to imagine the Platonic ideal of the perfect product or technology. What is the perfect arrangement of atoms that would be the best possible product? Now try to figure out how to get the atoms in that shape. Think through things in both directions. What can we build with the tools that we have? But also, what does the “theoretically perfect” product look like? The idea of the “theoretically perfect” product is going to be a moving target because, as you learn more, the definition for that perfect product will change. You don’t actually know what the perfect product is, but you can approximate a more perfect product. Then ask, ‘What tools, methods, or materials do we need to create to get the atoms in that shape?’ People rarely think this way.” Elon uses this technique as a way to work backward from the ideal to make his products today better, but it’s also a powerful way to improve your life. What is your perfect life? What would it look like if it were as good as possible? Once you envision that, you can start working backward to think about how to make it more like that today. Some people find that scary or frustrating, but Elon believes that if, for example, he can think about what a rocket that goes to Mars will need to look like to make it possible, he can make little changes today to make his rockets better, and over time, it will help lead him to his ultimate goal.

13) “The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist.” In Elon’s view, everything should be as easy, simple, and fast as possible. He ruthlessly optimizes everything to do this. Over the long haul, this saves enormous amounts of money, effort, and time. How many of us fail to do this in our own lives and spend time trying to fix, adapt to, or work around something we shouldn’t be doing in the first place?

14) “Better to pick a path and keep moving than just vacillate endlessly on a decision.” Elon Musk is someone who is willing to make decisions, even when they’re hard, even when smart people disagree, even when he knows they may be wrong. If he gets new information, he may change his mind, but he understands that being indecisive has a high price to it. It paralyzes you, squanders momentum, and can drag on endlessly. Just make a decision, move forward decisively, and then at least something good may happen. Nothing good will ever happen until you make a decision.

15) “That first-principles thought process around the rocket became general purpose for all parts. I call it the ‘Idiot Index.’ How much more does a finished product cost than the cost of its materials? If a part or product had a high Idiot Index, we could cut the cost with more efficient manufacturing techniques. A component that costs $1,000 when the aluminum it was made of costs only ten dollars likely has a design that is too complex or an inefficient manufacturing process. If the ratio is high, you’re an idiot.” The “Idiot Index” is particularly useful for manufacturing, but the idea of going back to first principles is useful across your entire life. What are your dreams? What are your goals? What are your core beliefs? What are your beliefs about how the world works? Are the things you’re doing on a day-in, day-out basis aligned with those things? If not, Elon would probably tell you that you’re doing something wrong.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Donald Trump has floated the idea of using tariffs to replace all income taxes several times. Incidentally, that is how it used to work in the early days of the United States, long before the income tax came around in 1913:

However, Trump’s proposal isn’t realistic because there’s an enormous gap between how much money tariffs are bringing in and the amount of revenue the government collects with income taxes. Without massively cutting spending or dramtically raising tariffs, we couldn’t come close to replacing the amount of revenue raised by income taxes, and realistically, both things are highly unlikely.

That being said, could tariffs replace what the bottom 50% of Americans pay in income taxes? Absolutely, because despite all the claims that rich Americans don’t pay their “fair share,” the truth is that percentagewise, the bottom 50% don’t account for a major share of our income tax revenue:

Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and is now the world’s 4^th richest man, has also gotten in on the act recently and you’ll notice that Cory Booker already has proposed a bill that could do something similar:

Jeff Bezos is calling for a dramatic rewrite of the US tax code, arguing that the bottom half of American taxpayers should pay no federal income tax at all. Speaking Wednesday in an interview with CNBC International’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Amazon founder said he would “advocate” for reducing the federal income tax burden on lower-income households from roughly 3% of total tax collections to zero.

“I think it should be zero, and not 3%,” Bezos said after Sorkin noted that the top 1% of taxpayers contribute about 40% of all federal income tax revenue, while the bottom half account for roughly 3%.

...Data compiled by the Tax Foundation using the latest IRS statistics show that the bottom half of taxpayers reported adjusted gross income of roughly $54,000 in 2023 and paid an average of $913 in federal income taxes. Their effective tax rate was 3.7%. By comparison, the top 1% earned at least $676,000 and paid an average federal income tax rate of 26.3%.

Bezos’ comments come as several lawmakers push tax relief for working Americans. Cory Booker has proposed the “Keep Your Pay Act,” which would exempt the first $75,000 of income from federal income tax for many households.

In other words, what we have here is something that is actually doable, that would be politically popular, and that would inarguably help a lot of the people who need it most. Additionally, with all the concerns about AI taking jobs, this could be a hedge against that, at least to a certain degree. Furthermore, we’re not talking about giving people welfare here; we’re talking about allowing them to keep money that they earned. There’s a moral case to be made for that.

Those are all good arguments for this policy, and of course, we can’t forget what legendary economist Milton Friedman said:

That being said, there are still some rather obvious problems with this from a common sense and good governance standpoint, although things like that seem to mostly be ignored these days when it comes to policy.

As a starter, the very fact that we have a progressive tax, instead of a flat tax, is a big part of the reason our spending is so out of control in the first place. If everyone paid the same percentage, everyone would also be heavily incentivized to protest wasteful government spending because we’d all want the percentage of revenue we paid in income taxes to be as small as possible.

By creating a progressive tax system, we’ve created a world where people paying very little in taxes see no problem with massively increasing government spending for the most frivolous reasons imaginable because they quite correctly understand that they won’t be the ones paying for it.

Getting rid of income taxes for the bottom 50% of Americans would be like putting that problem on steroids because suddenly half the country would be able to vote for politicians who would give them things that they would be sure that they wouldn’t have to pay for at all.

The only way this would definitely be a good idea would be if people who didn’t pay income or capital gains taxes also didn’t get to vote. Is that in the cards? No, so this policy runs the risk of essentially turning the taxpaying half of the country into a slave class for the people who don’t pay taxes. You know, “Don’t be so greedy! We need to raise your taxes even higher so we can give the 50% of Americans who don’t pay income taxes more free stuff at your expense.”

In other words, we seem to increasingly be headed in a direction that will genuinely benefit a lot of Americans at first, but that will also ultimately lead us further and faster toward a debt-fueled economic collapse. Our only hope of avoiding that is getting our spending under control, and this policy would make that even less likely.

So, would this be popular? Yes. Would it genuinely help a lot of people? Yes. Is it likely to be good for the country? No. Not at all.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Not me.

Because in my mind, “I deserve better than this” is an incomplete statement. A correct, complete statement would be, “I deserve better than this IF I EARN IT.” If you pass over the last few words in that statement, it can literally turn you into a failure and keep you poor forever.

In fact, most people who are poor long term are poor for EXACTLY that reason. They’ve embraced the FIRST half of that statement, “I deserve better than this,” while leaving off the part about, “If I earn it.”

You can see a great example of how this works on X, as people debated a surprising subject: The cost of lunch:

What he basically says there is that he can’t stand it when he sees younger adults making 70k per year, spending $28 on lunch. He asks people to think about how much money that would amount to if they put it in an index fund and made 8 to 10% per year for 50 years.

Incidentally, before we go any further, let’s do some math on that. Let’s conservatively assume 50 weeks per year (two weeks of vacation) and $5 lunches instead of 28-dollar lunches (so $23 per day invested), at the lower number he suggested – 8%. How much money would that be over the course of 50 years? Let’s ask ChatGPT…

So, really tasty lunches or 1.8 million dollars in 50 years? Kevin O’Leary certainly has his preference. What might surprise a lot of people is how many people are bitterly resisting what he’s saying, seemingly because they prefer the expensive lunches:

Here’s a guy who was born middle class, founded a company, is now worth 400 million dollars, and he’s telling people how to become millionaires using the money they’d otherwise spend on lunch. Sounds pretty valuable, right? Yet, what are the replies? Basically, “Shut up, boomer,” and “It’s too hard,” and “Don’t I deserve a nice lunch?”

There are two things at play here.

The first is our victim-oriented culture, where everyone pretends that they’ve got it SOOOOOO TOUGH. Oh my gosh, NOBODY HAS EVER HAD IT AS BAD as Gen Z! Look at the cost of housing! Fast food is super expensive! Everything is so bad!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, if you were really generous, you could argue that MAYBE the Baby Boomers and Generation X had it slightly better than Generation Z. I wouldn’t even agree with the idea that Generation Z has had it tougher than Generation X, but still, let’s act as if it’s true.

What that would mean is that out of the 8,000-12,000 generations of humans that have lived on Planet Earth throughout history, Generation Z in America has had it the third easiest out of all of them. I don’t really think some caveman trying not to get eaten by a wild animal, an American taken as a slave by Barbary Pirates, or some poor bastard bleeding out after being shot in the Vietnamese jungle is going to think a bunch of pampered 20 year olds in air conditioned rooms, playing on the Internet and working 40 hours a week to pay their bills in some safe, clean, cool office have it particularly tough.

Setting all that aside, there are a lot of people who have embraced the idea that they shouldn’t have to make any sacrifices or have any challenges to get somewhere, which is something that has never really been present in American culture before.

Financial success doesn’t “just happen” for 99% of people. For almost everyone who makes it, there’s a lot of time, work, and sacrifice involved. You might say, “Oh yeah? What about you? You own a house. You live at the beach. Didn’t you just get back from a week long vacation? You seem like you’re doing okay. What sacrifices have you ever had to make?”

Well, I’ve moved to get better job opportunities. I’ve worked two jobs to save up money several times. I put in 80-hour weeks for a year, 70-hour weeks for many years, worked 7 days a week for a long time, and even worked on vacations for years. I’ve slept in my car because I couldn’t afford a hotel room, wore clothes with holes in them, driven a beater with both rearview mirrors held on by duct tape, and spent a year+ getting 4 hours sleep per night M-F to build my business. I worked terrible jobs, had my water and power cut off, went over a decade without a credit card, and went without cable TV for years. I lived with roommates several times, went for LONG periods with very little in my bank account, and have done everything from bouncing to Wal-Mart Portrait studio manager, to laying sod. I didn’t have a house before I was 30, I still don’t live in a giant house, and my current car is over a decade old, although I could easily buy a new one if I wanted to do it.

When I tell you that you need to sacrifice to get ahead, I speak from experience. Incidentally, many people have had those experiences. I’m sure there are plenty of people in the world who’ve had everything handed to them on a silver platter, but everyone I know who has been successful worked their asses off for it, made a lot of hard choices, and did a lot of things they’d rather not have done.

If you insist on ignoring all the good advice that’s out there from people trying to tell you what it takes to really make it financially, you can expect to spend your life on a treadmill, never really getting anywhere, eating your $28 lunches and wondering why you’re one of the roughly 60% of Americans who always seem to be living paycheck-to-paycheck, no matter who’s in office. If that’s too harsh, well, life’s harsh, and it’s a lot harsher if you don’t want to listen to smart people trying to help you.

Stop treading water, quit eating expensive lunches every day, and start doing the tough things it takes to really get ahead. You won’t be sorry.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

PS: Not all of these accounts are conservative, but the few non-conservatives that are on here are contrarian enough that you will probably enjoy reading their takes.

PS #2: For this article, we’re sticking to political and news accounts. There are obviously other fantastic accounts on X that don’t deal with news or politics, but we didn’t include them.

PS: #3: I am on Twitter @Johnhawkinsrwn and if you aren’t following me yet, you should rectify that mistake right before you tweet out this article.

1) AlphaFox: X Fox 🇺🇸🦊✝️

2) ALX: American Supremacist.

3) American AF: America First • Breaking News • Interesting Videos——— just a dude with an IPhone ✝️🔥

4) Andrew Kolvet: Christian. Proud husband and father. TPUSA Spokesman. Executive Producer of The Charlie Kirk Show. Son of Nevada. American

5) Andy Ngo: NYT bestselling journalist. Senior editor @TPostMillennial. Subscribe to my X; support my journalism and send news tips at: http://linktr.ee/andyngo

6) Ben Shapiro: Daily Wire co-founder, host of @benshapiroshow, #1 NYT bestselling author, America’s #1 ex-rapper. Order my new book, Lions and Scavengers below

7) Benny Johnson: Your Front Seat to the Golden Era

8) Bethany S. Mandel: Wife to @sethamandel| Co-author of Stolen Youth | Writer & Communications | ✍️ 🎙️ @TheMomWars| Homeschooling mom to 👩🏻‍🦰🧑🏻‍🦰🧑🏻 👩🏻‍🦰🧑🏻‍🦰👱🏻‍♂️

9) Billboard Chris: Traveling the world to stop child transition, one conversation at a time. http://youtube.com/billboardchris http://billboardchris.com/donate

10) Bonchie: Writer for http://RedState.com.

11) Bridget Phetasy: Writer and Joker.

12) Cam Higby: News & Commentary | On The Ground Reporting | Undercover Infiltrations | Pentagon Correspondent Inquiry: press@camhigbyusa.com | Tips: dcbhigbyy@gmail.com

13) Chaya Raichik: Creator of @libsoftiktok. “Social media menace” - MSNBC. 📧 partnerships@libsoftiktok.com. “fucking monster” - NSA

14) Chief Nerd: Software Engineer | Podcast Clipper | DM for Removal | Merch http://trustthescilenced.com | Tips http://buymeacoffee.com/chiefnerd

15) Chloe Cole: 21 y/o detransitioner & advocate ⋆ Sharing my story to expose the abuses of childhood gender transition, debunking radical ideology & igniting optimism ⋆ ✞

16) Chris Martz: Meteorologist / science policy analyst @CFACT | Politically incorrect | Lukewarmer | “The Anti-Greta Thunberg” – NY Post | 📧 cmartz@cfact.org

17) Chrissie Mayr: Comedian, SimpCast, NightMayr, My album ‘Live from January 6th’ is on Amazon/iTunes, Friday Night Tights Fridays 4pmET on @Nerdroticschannel

18) Christian Heiens: The Oracle of Virginia Emeritus • Historian • Postliberal Reactionary • Counter-Revolutionary • Austrian School Acolyte

19) Christina Pushaw: Team @GovRonDeSantis • Grateful to live in the Free State of Florida! ✝️🇺🇸 (Note: DMs not monitored or used)

20) Christopher F. Rufo: Working with @CityJournal, @ManhattanInst, @Hillsdale. Sign up for my free Substack: https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe.

21) Clandestine: Jacob Creech - Astute Observer - 11B

22) Colin Wright: Evolutionary Biology PhD | CEO/Editor-in-Chief @RealLastStand| Fellow @ManhattanInst | Advisor @AtheistsLiberty| Truth First.

23) Commentary Donald J. Trump Posts From Truth Social: Reposting Trump’s Truth Social posts (with date/time) on X + news/commentary. Unofficial. Profile Artist: @ElenaRuseva1 Not affiliated with @realdonaldtrump.

24) Crémieux: I write about genetics, ‘metrics, and demographics. Read my long-form writing at http://cremieux.xyz.

25) Daily Wire: Official X account of The Daily Wire.

26) Dan Bongino: Just here for the comments.

27) Dana Loesch: Throttled. Host @DanaLoeschRadio 12-3pm ET weekdays. Author, 2A advocate. Daughter of thunder trying to live Proverbs 31:30.

28) DataRepublican (small r): I’m just a tool builder. • Elon Musk - “Worth following” • Charlie Kirk - “You’re a must follow” • Contact: datarepublicanx@proton.me • Substack: datarepublican

29) David Limbaugh: A lawyer and author.

30) Devon Eriksen: Scifi Author, Engineer, Sharpshooter, part-time Dæmon Prince of Tzeentch. Not a cat. http://DevonEriksen.com

31) Donald J. Trump: 45th & 47th President of the United States of America

32) Dr. Sydney Watson: Very important doctor. 🇦🇺 Vlad the Impaler fangirl.

33) Drew Pavlou: Western civilisation enjoyer. Patriot. Adventurer. Anti-communist counter-revolutionary. Survived CCP kidnap plot. FREE TIBET.

34) Elon Musk: Terafab.ai

35) End Wokeness: Fighting, exposing, and mocking wokeness. DM for submissions

36) Erika Kirk: “…the joy of the Lord is my strength.” - Nehemiah 8:10

37) Eylon Levy: 🇮🇱 Former Spokesman for the State of Israel 🎙️ Host, @eylontherecord

38) Frank J. Fleming: Computer engineer, humor writer, married dad of 4, DS dad, novelist

39) Green Beret Nap Time: 18 Series Army Veteran. Conservative. Geopolitics. Irregular Republic Podcast. DOL 🇺🇸 https://youtube.com/@GBNT1952

40) Gunther Eagleman™: David J. Freeman - Political Commentator - America First - MAGA - Christian

41) Hans Mahncke: Author of Swiftboating America, the definitive account of the greatest political crime in history.

42) Harmeet K. Dhillon: Personal account of American knitter, gardener, chef, student. Official government account is @AAGDhillon --please like & follow there too! Opinions are my own!

43) Inez Stepman: @IWF // @ClaremontInst Lincoln Fellow. American. Anti-feminist. Palo Alto disrespecter. Tax the Universities author. @JarrettStepman ‘s wife.

44) instapundit: Blogger, long dormant on Twitter, I’m back, baby!

45) Insurrection Barbie: “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” Ephesians 6:11-13

46) J.K. Rowling: Author, founder of Lumos and Beira’s Place, surname rhymes with bowling, not growling.

47) James Lindsay, anti-Communist: Chief Anti-totalitarianism Officer @NewDiscourses.

48) James O’Keefe: Subscribe to American Swiper Series. Guerrilla Journalist. Founder, Project Veritas (CEO ‘09-‘22) SIGNAL: 9144919395

49) JD Vance: Christian, husband, dad. Vice President of the United States.

50) Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON*: Polls, politics, postpunk. Friendly Writer and cohost of @Political_Beats at @NRO. Dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening.

51) Jennifer Van Laar: Investigative journo/Mg Editor @redstate; former Rep . Katie Hill and Ronna McDaniel lost their jobs bc of me. @BU_Tweets alum. Mom, Gramie, and CA girl.

52) Jeremy Boreing: Host of The Jeremy Boreing Show Series Creator: The Pendragon Cycle, Co-Founder of @realDailyWire and @JeremysRazors.

53) Jesse Kelly: Host of the nationally syndicated Jesse Kelly Show. Host of ‘I’m Right’ on The First. Anti-Communist. World Famous Author.

54) Joel Berry: Writer, speaker, former @TheBabylonBee, bestselling author of Postmodern Pilgrim’s Progress, USMC vet, grumpy dad

55) Joel Pollak: Opinion Editor at California Post. Co-host, “3 Homeless Guys.” Scott Adams biographer. Born South Africa, raised Chicago, embraced LA. jpollak at californiapost

56) Justin Hart: CMO http://JustinHart.biz http://RationalGround.com http://helloai.substack.com claimed by @jennyerikson // Father to 9 // LDS.

57) KanekoaTheGreat: Learn the system I used to gain 1M+ followers, 5.5B impressions, & $217K on 𝕏. Join 1300+ students, go viral, & start earning:

https://thexaccelerator.com

58) Karol Markowicz: Born USSR | raised Brooklyn | now south Florida. Jew. Columnist @nypost & @foxnews. Host of the Karol Markowicz Show, co-host of Normally, both on @iheartradio.

59) Kurt Schlichter: All views are my own | PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC graphic novel BLUE FLAME! TRAILER: https://tinyurl.com/52zz554k | Sr Columnist @Townhallcom| Lawyer | Army COL®

60) Kyle Becker: Explain America podcast host. News commentator. Fantasy author. Former: Fox News writer for #1 cable news show. Available as podcast guest. http://hypernea.com

61) Kyle Mann: Editor-in-chief of The Babylon Bee. Beer, baseball, board games. looking for the place where all the beauty came from

62) Leftism: Exposing Leftism | Exposing Leftists | Exposing Fake Republicans | Some Commentary & Opinions | Sometimes I Post Memes & Satire

63) Libs of TikTok: News you can’t see anywhere else. submissions@libsoftiktok.com. DM submissions. Bookings: Partnerships@libsoftiktok.com. Subscribe to our newsletter

64) Matt Van Swol: Former Nuclear Scientist for US Dept of Energy | Ex-Photographer for @apple, @united, and @hyatt

65) Matt Walsh: Theocratic fascist, bestselling children’s author, world renowned DEI consultant

66) Megan Basham: Journalist, NYT bestselling author, @realDailyWire. Other words: @wsj @firstthingsmag @telegraph. Unabashed church lady. Aspiring matriarch. “Christian pitbull”

67) Mike Lee: Restore federalism and separation of powers by passing the REINS Act now!

68) Murdered By Crayons: Citizen Journalist sued by the Tate Brothers for covering their legal cases, debunking propaganda, and sharing my opinions based on case evidence. | DMs closed

69) Natalie F Danelishen: Conscientious objector • Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito • Administrative Assistant @freecitiesfound • Duchess of @SealandGov

70) Nathan Livingstone (MilkBarTV): Freelance Filmmaker/Video Editor “Totally deranged human being” Candace Owens

71) Nick Sortor: On-scene covering stories MSM won’t. | Seen on @TuckerCarlson Tonight, Fox News, Newsmax, Timcast, etc. • Donate: http://sortor.us/x • media@sortor.us

72) Nikki Moonitz: The “Abuse of Language” always precedes the “Abuse of Power.” Josef Pieper

73) Oilfield Rando: Creator of @Morse_Research. “The internet’s favorite clown” -Grok. Subscribe for $1.

74) Oli London: 📖Author of Gender Madness | 📺 News Contributor

75) Paul A. Szypula: SAVE AMERICA NOW

76) Rapid Response 47: Official White House Rapid Response account. Supporting @POTUS’s America First agenda and holding the Fake News accountable. MAGA!

77) Riley Gaines: Host of the Riley Gaines Show on @foxnews | Best-selling Author | TPUSA contributor

78) Robby Starbuck: Filmmaker/Host • Latino • America 1st • Used to Direct Stars, Now I Fight For 🇺🇸 • ❤️ @LandonStarbuck • Dad • Visiting Fellow @Heritage • http://TheWarOnChildren.com

79) Ron Coleman: Lawyer (NY/NJ) (litigation). Conservative; orthodox (the Jewish kind). Husband of @janebcoleman . Father of four rabbis. Podcast: @colemannation1.

80) Ron DeSantis: Governor of Florida. Husband to @CaseyDeSantis. Father to Madison, Mason, and Mamie. Iraq Veteran.

81) Rothmus: Memes. Rugged Individualism. Voluntaryism. Laissez-faire. Propertarianism.

82) Sarah Fields: Republican Precinct Chair. Constitutionalist. Investigative Journalism. Army Veteran. Parent/Child Advocate. FOIA Queen.

83) Scott Jennings: America’s favorite pundit. @CNN. BEST SELLING AUTHOR: Revolution of Common Sense https://a.co/d/hP9topk. HOST: Scott Jennings Show on Salem 1-3pm Eastern.

84) Seth Dillon: |Satire| Reality → 1

85) Shipwreckedcrew: 22 years as DOJ prosecutor; Rep’d 91 Jan 6 clients. Comments not legal advice. https://buymeacoffee.com/shipwreckedcrew, https://shipwreckedcrew.substack.com

86) Stephen L. Miller: Versus Media Podcast on @substackinc Commentary archive @TheSpectator @nro @FoxNews @nypost

87) Stephen Miller: @WhiteHouse Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor | 45 & 47

88) Steve Deace: Believer, husband, father, grandpa. BlazeTV host. 4x best-selling author. I even got to executive produce a movie once. Go. Hard.

89) The Drunk Republican: Keeping conservatism alive with a little help from the grape and the grain. “Genius.” - Rush Limbaugh. “Hilarious.” - Dan Bongino. “Lazy sack of shit.” - Wife.

90) The Misfit Patriot: 🇺🇸 Proud Patriot 🇺🇸 MAGA. #banchamp #uncancellable. Hated by all the right people. Host of The Daily Breakdown on @lfatv , 👇🏼 Latest episode pinned.

91) The Rabbit Hole: Navigating the discourse

92) The Vigilant Fox: Stories the mainstream buries. Banned during COVID. Built and led by a healthcare professional turned citizen journalist.

93) ThePersistence: I helped defeat Hillary, Kamala, & organized the Baltimore cleanup. We delivered Pennsylvania for President Trump. 👀 ➡️ @EarlyVoteAction MAGA 🤝 MAHA 🤝 BARBZ

94) The🐰FOO: Smile @ ppl who hate you. Mgr. Ed at @TwitchyTeam. Top of the Bitch List. IWF Sr. Visiting Fellow 🧡 Opinions mine. #HappyWarrior #FAFO #Problematic #WordNerd

95) Wall Street Mav: Finance, economics, news, memes. Follow and Tap the .... (🔔 +Notify)

96) Western Lensman: Video Producer | Politics | Media | American

97) Wokal Distance: Fellow @amrenewctr ‘His passion for understanding left-wing ideology was a constant inspiration to keep digging, keep thinking, and keep pushing’ -Chris Rufo

98) Zack: Professional Neckbeard--Daily streams on https://kick.com/asmongold and https://twitch.tv/Zackrawrr https://rumble.com/c/Asmongold

99) zerohedge:

100) ZUBY: Rapper. Author. Speaker. Coach. Husband. Father. Host of ‘Real Talk with Zuby’ - http://youtube.com/zubymusic | My fitness book - https://zubymusic.gumroad.com

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

So obviously, reaching a billion dollars is an incredible financial milestone that sets you apart from the rest of humanity financially. While I’m not sure how good an idea it would be to get advice about something like health, relationships, or living a balanced life from billionaires, as a group, they can at least tell you something about the sort of thinking it takes to reach the pinnacle of financial success. With that in mind, enjoy the 25 best success quotes from billionaires.

1) “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness’ sake, don’t do anything new.” -- Jeff Bezos

2) “No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.” -- Warren Buffett

3) “Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a much better indicator of future success than great answers.” -- Ray Dalio

4) “If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you’re going to lose. The only way to really be ahead is to ‘be different’.” -- Larry Ellison

5) “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” -- Bill Gates

6) “The #1 guideline to success is you must be in business for yourself. When you work for someone else, you sell your time at wholesale to your employer, who then resells it at retail to the customer.” -- J. Paul Getty

7) “I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” -- Steve Jobs

8) “You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them.” -- Michael Jordan

9) “Ten minutes are not just one-sixth of your hourly pay; ten minutes is a piece of yourself. Divide yourself into ten units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activities. Most things still remain to be done.” -- Ingvar Kamprad

10) “I’d tell men and women in their mid-twenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.” -- Jack Knight

11) “Opportunities lie in the place where the complaints are.” -- Jack Ma

12) “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time -- none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads -- and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.” -- Charlie Munger

13) “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” -- Elon Musk

14) “The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.” -- Ross Perot

15) “People say the truth hurts. Hell no, it hurts even more if you do a whole bunch of foolishness to try and avoid it.” -- Tyler Perry

16) “When the rate of change outside is more than what is inside, be sure that the end is near.” -- Azim Premji

17) “If you want to succeed, you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.” -- John Rockefeller

18) “A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm.” -- Charles Schwab

19) “You have to remember something: Everybody pities the weak; jealousy you have to earn.” -- Arnold Schwarzenegger

20) “It’s not whether you’re right or wrong, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” -- George Soros

21) “Don’t bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don’t do it, it won’t get done.” -- Peter Thiel

22) “Protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself... I happen to be very conservative in business. I always go into a deal anticipating the worst. If you plan for the worst -- if you can live with the worst -- the good will always take care of itself.” -- Donald Trump

23) “What we guard against around here is people saying, ‘Let’s think about it.’ We make a decision. Then we act on it.” -- Sam Walton

24) “Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.” -- Oprah Winfrey

25) “There’s always stuff to work on. You’re never there.” -- Tiger Woods

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

With that in mind, it seemed worth taking a little time to translate what liberals actually mean when they use certain words and phrases. I haven’t seen one of these lists in quite a while, so it seemed like a good time to create a new translation guide to capture some of the more current liberal rhetoric. Hopefully, you’ll find it helpful.

The American Flag: A frightening symbol that should be burned in protest at every opportunity, unless an election is coming up, at which point it should be waved in an effort to impress the rubes in flyover country.

Anti-Intellectual: Someone who isn’t overly impressed with the opinions of a communist basket-weaving professor from Harvard.

Bipartisanship: When Republicans do exactly what Democrats want them to do in return for being called Nazis.

Birthing Person: A woman.

CIS: A normal person.

Common Sense Gun Control: A policy designed to build toward total gun confiscation.

The Constitution: A stupid, irrelevant document written by dead, old white men, unless liberals are finding some right they claim has escaped everyone else’s attention for hundreds of years.

The Constitution is a Living, Breathing Document: The Constitution means whatever liberals want it to mean, whenever they want it to mean that, as long as it benefits them.

Courage: Something liberals display when they get on stage in front of a group of other liberals and insult people they all hate while saying what they all believe.

Cultural Appropriation: Mainly just something liberals toss out when they want to claim control of who eats tacos, listens to rap music, or uses the word “woke.”

DEI: Racial discrimination against white people or Asians in general, and white men in particular.

Diversity: Hiring people of many races who believe exactly the same things white liberals do.

Engaging in a War on Women: Being against killing babies.

Fact-checked and Found False: A fact that is either false or true, but very inconvenient for liberals.

Fascists: People who oppose liberals.

Gender Affirming Care: Encouraging mental illness.

Genocide: Terrorists we like are losing a war they started.

Greedy: This is a word applied to people who don’t want to give more of the money they earn to the government so it can be used to fund homo-erotic poetry in Nigeria.

A “Hate Has No Home Here” Sign: A way of identifying people that will be celebrating if a prominent Republican is murdered.

Hate Speech: Words that make liberals uncomfortable for one reason or another.

Heartless: Wanting to actually enforce the law, punish criminals, or require people liberals like to live up to some agreement they made or basic standard of human behavior.

Heteronormative: How life is for normal people outside of gay sex clubs in San Francisco.

Intersectionality: Something liberals talk about in an effort to explain why people of their particular race/sex/sexuality/religion/nationality/disability/etc. should be treated like bigger victims than other people and thus given more unearned privileges than other groups.

Jesus Christ: Someone who is completely and utterly irrelevant to all moral and political matters in the United States unless you are declaring that he would absolutely agree with liberals about something if he were around today.

Literally Hitler: Whoever the latest Republican president happens to be.

Lived Experience: Self-serving bullsh*t made up to justify an obviously wrong position.

Make the Rich Pay Their Fair Share: Something liberals say because the envious losers that make up much of their base love it when they attack people who are more successful than they are.

Microaggression: An inconsequential thing that liberals seize upon so they can pretend to be victims to other liberals.

Misgendering: Correctly identifying someone’s gender when they’re pretending to be the opposite sex.

Misinformation: True or false information liberals don’t want people to believe.

Mostly Peaceful Protest: A riot.

Nazis: People who oppose liberals.

Oligarchs: Rich people who support Republicans instead of Democrats.

Patriarchy: The word feminists use as a justification when they’re pressed about why all their ideas lead to disaster.

Problematic: Sane things that make liberals uncomfortable for some reason.

Punch a Nazi: Physically attacking people who oppose the Left as long as liberals outnumber them and can get away with it.

Racists: People who oppose liberals.

The Right to Choose: The right to kill a baby.

Safe space: A roundabout way of saying conservative ideas are dangerous and should be censored.

Save the Planet: Wasting trillions of dollars on left-wing projects that have no hope of changing the global climate, as if the global climate needed changing in the first place.

Science Denier: People who insist on getting real scientific evidence to prove manmade global warming is happening instead of accepting sad stories about polar bears and third-rate pseudo-science trumpeted by Al Gore and Greta Thunberg.

Sexism: The only possible explanation for why Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris didn’t get elected as president.

Threat to Democracy: Attempts to prevent cheating at the ballot box.

Trans-Woman: A man in a dress.

Voter Suppression: Any type of measure that makes it harder for dead people or illegal immigrants to vote.

We Live on Stolen Land: Something liberals say to throw shade at America while trying to appear sensitive to Native American issues, despite the fact that they’re certainly not giving back any land they say is stolen that they happen to live on.

Women’s Healthcare: Abortion.

White Privilege: One of the phrases white liberals use to show they’re one of the “good” white people, and black liberals use as a roundabout way of saying they should just be handed whatever they want.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

For example, consider this quote:

How many of America’s problems are simple to solve, but seem nearly impossible because of politics? A surprising number of them actually.

That was brought to mind by this article about attempts to clean up the dirty, dangerous subways in NYC.

Local lawmakers and the mayor’s office need to “assess and address” a surge in people being arrested and taken to court for lying down or spreading out in New York City’s public transit system, the leader of the City Council committee that oversees homeless services said in response to a Gothamist data analysis this week.

“It feels problematic to me to know there’s a significant spike in people who are being charged for lying down or sleeping on the train,” said Councilmember Crystal Hudson, chair of the Committee on General Welfare. “I would say that if they had a safe, stable bed to sleep in, then they wouldn’t be sleeping on the train.”

Rather than criminally charge people, she said, “I think we need to be thinking about what types of resources we can actually offer.”

The number of court cases in which the most serious charge someone faced was for lying down or taking up more than one seat in public transit climbed more than 3,000% — from 19 to 591 — between 2024 and 2025, Gothamist found. Cases for the first three months of this year outpaced the number during the same period last year, according to a review of state court data. In nearly all of these cases, the person was taken into custody rather than given a ticket.

...But Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, a former public defender, said the city “absolutely” needs to change the way it addresses homelessness in the public transit system. Cabán has proposed legislation that would require government employees who do homeless outreach to receive training in how to interact with vulnerable people. It would also prohibit police or sanitation officials from participating in this work.

“Why is somebody finding themselves exhausted on a train, or precariously housed, or unhoused, sleeping on a train?” she said. “Rather than focusing on the failed systems that need to be changed to fix that big problem, we focus on individuals as people to be managed or corrected or disappeared or cast aside or disciplined for conditions that really are put upon them.”

Cabán, a Mamdani supporter, has urged him to hold his police commissioner accountable and ensure she abandons policies that target homeless people.

Within the last three years on the NYC subways, deranged lunatic Jordan Neely died in a conflict with Daniel Penny and other passengers in a nationally controversial incident. A random woman was burned alive. The police shot a guy slashing random people with a machete, and multiple people were pushed onto the tracks:

In a real sense, this dramatically undersells how bad it is because the subway cars there are disgusting, and it’s not unusual to have homeless people acting like lunatics or making threats. Even if that’s as far as it goes, why should people just trying to get home from work have to deal with that?

Yet, what do we see? Left-wingers trying to keep the insanity going by blocking a small, common-sense fix that would be likely to help improve it.

Remember when Joe Biden was president and he said he needed Congress to pass a new immigration bill to give him the power to shut down the river of illegals he was allowing in (It also would have codified much of the disastrous mess Biden allowed into law)?

Well, guess what? That horrible bill never became law, but when Donald Trump got into office, he was able to shut down the border much more tightly than Biden was even promising to do, without any new legislation:

Everyone seems to think, “Oh, there’s nothing we can do. We’re just stuck.” As this chart shows you, that’s not even remotely true. There are obvious solutions to many of the worst problems Americans face, if we’re willing to do them.

For example, what problem seems more hopeless and intractable than the deficit? Democrats started a terror campaign against TESLA because Elon Musk was trying to get rid of fraud and waste in the US government, and even Republicans in Congress could at best be described as lukewarm about what he was doing.

But, do you know what it would take to balance the budget? Freezing spending at the current level for 6 or 7 years would probably be enough to get it done. Granted, that means if let’s say the interest on the debt or payments on Social Security went up, we’d have to make cuts elsewhere to do it, AND wiping out the deficit isn’t the same thing as getting rid of debt, but is it not just doable, but SIMPLE? Yes, it is.

Could America DRAMATICALLY reduce our crime rate by simply permanently jailing anyone with say 3 felonies or 10 arrests? Since a large amount of crime can be traced back to a tiny number of career criminals, we absolutely can.

How do you stop shoplifting? When you catch shoplifters, you arrest and punish them. If someone gets caught doing it multiple times, they get significant jail time. It’s not a heavy lift.

Want to dramatically improve the quality of immigrants coming to America? Put a merit-based system in place. If you’re not marrying an American, you only get here if you obey our laws, add to the tax base, and adopt our culture. We could literally make immigrants ineligible for welfare and denaturalize them if they commit a serious offense. You want to take immigration from a never ending source of controversy to something that undeniably benefits America? This is how you do it.

How many illegal aliens do you think we’d have here if we wrote into law that anyone caught here illegally could never come here legally again, could never be a citizen, and would have to spend 5 years doing FREE manual labor with the checks they earned going to the American taxpayers? It would be pretty close to zero, right?

Want better, more honest representation in Congress? Okay, how about we raise the pay to $500,000 per year to discourage bribery and insider trading, term limit everyone in the House to three terms, everyone in the Senate to two terms, and make it illegal for members of Congress or their family members to work as lobbyists in the future? Do you think that would dramatically improve the quality of people we have in office while dramatically reducing the amount of corruption? Of course, it would.

Want to cut government waste? Okay, how about putting every single government agency on the same kind of accounting software and making all of it searchable by the public (with a few exceptions for military and intelligence buys). Sunlight is the best disinfectant and allowing anyone and everyone to see exactly where their tax dollars are spent would do more to eliminate fraud than anything else we could do.

What about improving education? There are a lot of things we could do here, but how about just paying teachers based on performance? What percentage of your kids graduate? How do they perform on tests? How do they compare to kids in similar school systems across the country, so we’re not comparing Compton public schools to the “Thurston Howell III School for Gifted Geniuses” in Whitebread, Connecticut? Do you think that would dramatically improve the performance of kids across the country? It absolutely would.

How do you permanently fix chronic homelessness? Make it illegal and force people who are chronically homeless to get mental health treatment and/or get off drugs, then live in a halfway house and work until they can buy a home. If they don’t want to do that, then they go to jail. Guess what? That would literally end chronic homelessness for good.

Many of America’s problems are SIMPLE to solve if our country is willing to adopt the obvious fixes staring us in the face. We don’t need some radical shift in America; we just need to adopt the simple solutions everyone can see that aren’t politically easy to do.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

By that, I mean Mötley Crüe was also legendary for their sexual exploits. After every show, they could literally just have their pick attractive young women who would be brought to them like offerings by their groupies. They did things like sleep with a grandmother, mother and daughter at the same time, have contests to see how long they could go without taking a bath and still get groupies to sleep with them, and specify some nights that they wouldn’t sleep with a woman who wasn’t a virgin.

That level of sexual freedom and choice is so extreme that many men would probably see it as an unachievable utopian fantasy, but they did it in the real world. Yet, guess what? ALL FOUR members of the band got married. In fact, not only did all of them get married, but all of them got married and divorced at least three times (perhaps it’s not surprising that rock stars with drug habits and unlimited opportunities to cheat don’t make very good husbands, but still).

This begs an obvious question: Why would any man with unlimited sexual opportunities choose to (at least theoretically) limit those opportunities to one person?

Before we answer that question, let me point to the Tweet that prompted me to think about it. At first, it may seem like quite an odd juxtaposition:

Have you ever heard of “DINKs?” That stands for “Double Income, No Kids,” and people who refer to themselves that way are typically VERY PROUD that they’re choosing not to have kids so they can spend more money on their lifestyles:

You may have also heard of a number of mostly left-wing women explicitly say that they don’t want to get married or have kids, so that they can use all their income on themselves. This topic also calls to mind a semi-famous scene from the first Sex and the City movie, where 49-year-old Samantha Jones dumps her younger, successful, famous, extremely good-looking boyfriend who has been doting on her for years, almost entirely so she can bang other guys with the line, “I love you, but I love me more”:

After reading this, many people are probably ready to make some “wine and cats” jokes or talk about how desperate “DINKS” almost always seem to justify what they’re doing, and I get that. In fact, I never mind making good “wine and cats” jokes myself:

But, let’s go a little further down this line.

How many people do you know who game OBSESSIVELY or spend all of their time in Internet chat rooms or social media sites of one sort or another? Maybe they’re diehard podcast junkies who spend hours each day listening to streamers or worse yet, simping for some OnlyFans model who leeches tens of thousands of dollars per year from them? What about junkies or alcoholics who found a drug that reliably changed how they feel and made it a central part of their lives? What about travel junkies or people who obsessively focus on acquiring things? On the lower level, we could be talking about a hoarder, but we could also be talking about wealthier people chasing the next big high from buying a fancy car, purchasing something expensive for their summer home, or obsessing over which expensive new purse or watch they’re going to wear.

Our society doesn’t exactly tell people to be hedonistic pleasure junkies, but you certainly can’t miss that message in our society. We coddle kids to the point where many of them aren’t really even functional adults at 18, we drown them in entertainment options to the point where they can barely stand to be bored for 30 seconds, and we deluge them with images of people living their “best” lives. Drive that expensive car, go on that fancy vacation, drink that expensive liquor, eat what tastes best, get that Gucci purse, and obsess over video games, YouTube, and the latest entertaining news and gossip. At least wait until you’re 30 to get married because you don’t want to start living that responsible life too soon. Spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on that concert, ticket to the Super Bowl, or that “once in a lifetime” vacation you’ll hope to repeat several times over the next few years. Go into debt to get what you want because you only live once, and life is all about looking good and feeling good!

These are the kind of messages you get pummeled with when you’re young in America, and they may even make a certain kind of sense to people when you look at social media and consider the people our culture idolizes.

However, those of us who are older know better.

You’re talking to someone who loves to travel, but there are only so many cool places to go in the world, and even the best of them are not quite as much fun the 2^nd and 3^rd time you go there. Like any red-blooded male, I love sex, but not all sex is good. Sometimes it’s awkward, it’s bad, or, even as a man, you just want it to be over. I’m not much of a video game guy, but I’ve played games before where I enjoyed it so much that I was a little OBSESSIVE about wanting to get back to it. But guess what? Most games aren’t that great. I’ve binge-watched series that are so good I would rip through a whole season in a day or two, but most TV is boring. I love a good movie and a good book, but for every one that hooks you, there are an awful lot that are “tolerable” or “just okay.”

At a certain point, the parties aren’t as much fun, the night out with the boys feels a little stale, and you wonder if the hours on the road were worth it to see the cool view you’re looking at.

Now you may be thinking, “Wait, what are you trying to say? That pleasure is bad?”

Not at all.

Have a good time and enjoy your life, but remember, life is supposed to be about things like meaning, purpose, potential, relationships, and making the world a better place, not hedonism. Not gorging yourself on lust and self-indulgence, so that you become sick of the things that once brought you joy. Pleasure is an IMPORTANT PIECE of a healthy, meaningful life, but if you end up making it into the centerpiece of your life, it eventually becomes a kind of hell. Certainly not the worst kind of hell (there are much, much worse kinds), but it can turn into the sort of addiction that makes you ask, “Is this all there is?” and “What’s the point of life?” when the thrill is gone.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

You might say, “Wait, what? We have a constitution. Our system doesn’t work that way!”

Au contraire, my naïve friend. We CURRENTLY have a constitution, and our system hasn’t worked that way in the past, but there is still a cheat code that allows us to do this.

Let me explain to you how we can get started on it IMMEDIATELY.

First of all, the filibuster for legislation in the Senate has to go. Perhaps ironically, we wouldn’t need 60 votes to do that. Only 51. Since we have 53 Senators, if everyone votes in lockstep, this is easy to do.

Keep in mind, though, that is just the first step because even after the filibuster for legislation in the Senate is gone, there would still be constraints on our party’s power even if Republicans in the House and Senate voted in lockstep on every bill.

Currently, we have a constitution that does not allow us to do whatever we want. However, there is a way to fix that if we stand united. All we need to do is pass a bill to change the size of the court. Again, this would be easy if we voted in lockstep.

You see, although 6 of the 9 members of the Supreme Court were appointed by Republicans, unlike Democrats, who believe the Constitution is “living” and can mean whatever they want it to mean, conservative justices believe in originalism. Although they may disagree with each other about exactly how that’s interpreted, they do care about sticking to the law and Constitution, which would make it impossible to have a one-party state because our own justices would constantly block what we wanted to do.

How do we get around that? By adding 10 new justices of the right sort on the court. The same kind of third-rate hacks Democrats put on the court. You know, Republican Ketanji Brown Jackson types.

Once that happens, the Constitution effectively no longer exists because anything we want to do, the new justices we’ve put on the Supreme Court will just rubber-stamp it. What is the end result of all that?

ANYTHING we want becomes legal. Donald Trump as president for life? DOABLE. How about no longer allowing California or New York’s votes to count in an election because of “Too many illegals,” “Insurrection,” “Too much debt,” or something else we come up with? Absolutely. Could we create several new states or have only Republicans count the votes from now on? Yes, we could. What about mass-arresting prominent liberals and permanently jailing them? Under the new law of the land, which would be, “Whatever we want is legal now,” we could absolutely do that, and it would be declared “constitutional” by the new Supreme Court.

Of course, we’d CLAIM all this was perfectly above board, legal, and done constitutionally. In fact, all our judges would talk about how much they loved the Constitution, while Republicans in Congress would declare that they loved nothing more than democracy, while they systematically turned America into a one-party state where no one other than Republicans would ever have real power again. Granted, we might have to shoot a few people who don’t like these changes, but how does that old saying go?

Sound good? Are you ready to get started? Wait… what is this reluctance? What do you mean you like living in a Republic and don’t want to rule your neighbors that disagree with you by force?

Okay, so maybe I was being JUST A BIT facetious here in that conservatives have no interest in doing this. Granted, a few misguided Republicans are calling for us to get rid of the filibuster for legislation in the Senate so we can pass the SAVE Act, but this is strategically dumb. It’s the equivalent of pointing a toy gun at a cop to try to intimidate him, when he has a real gun he’s ready to pull out and shoot you with.

We’re not going to go all the way with this, but ending democracy in America and trying to create a one-party state is actually a MAINSTREAM POSTION ON THE LEFT. Let me repeat that for the slow people. All the things I’ve just described doing? There are many prominent liberals publicly calling for doing them, although they are tactfully leaving off the part about locking us up in camps and rigging all the elections, even though that’s exactly what they’d end up doing.

There are an enormous number of prominent Democrats who want to do this, but just to name a few…

Former Attorney General Eric Holder was telling anyone who would listen this week, suggesting that once Democrats take control, they intend to keep it permanently.

Holder explained on a podcast: “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power, if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.” When asked about the priority in wielding that power, Holder declared that the court was hopelessly broken and had to be fundamentally changed: “It’s something that has to be, I think, a part of the national conversation in ‘26 and in ‘28, ‘What are we going to do about the Supreme Court?’”

In practice, what these Democrats actually want to do is end democracy in America and institute a one-party state like China. They aren’t saying that out loud for obvious reasons, but that is where all of this unavoidably leads. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the moment the filibuster for legislation goes away, the question will no longer be, “Who gets the votes?” It will become, “Who is going to seize power and rule from now on?”

Getting rid of the legislative filibuster is certain to lead to economic disaster, widespread strife, and quite possibly millions of dead Americans. No matter who comes out on top in a struggle like this, whatever “America” is after it’s over will be deeply inferior to what it is today. More Americans need to acknowledge that and make it clear that this is a red line that cannot be crossed under any circumstances without the sort of consequences the American people experienced during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

…and gotten a massage from robotic arms (it was probably better than 80% of the humans that have ever worked on me):

Furthermore, the future potential of AI? It’s almost limitless. It will make extraordinary medical advances possible, advance our civilization in a myriad of ways, and has the potential to dramatically improve the life of the average person.

The flip side of that is that AI, especially if it transitions to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), is genuinely a threat that could wipe out our species in a variety of ways or create a totalitarian superstate worse than anything even George Orwell could imagine.

That’s why I’m a big believer that one of the most important things we can do as a species is come together and create a worldwide treaty that doesn’t stop AI, but puts some basic safeguards in place across the globe to try to make sure that the AI arms race that is currently going on between every government and corporation on the planet doesn’t lead to us blowing past basic safety protocols and dooming us all. The particulars can be left to the experts, but things are moving so fast that there’s very little time to waste on this front.

Why?

Well, as an example, let me describe a scenario that Internet ethicist Tristan Harris described earlier this month in a discussion with one of the most interesting podcasters on the planet right now, Chris Williamson.

There are two things of note about this. The first is how familiar it will seem to you at first. The second is how disastrous that familiar scenario could end up being, even without any terminator robots or surveillance states. That’s what is so scary about this; In many respects, it’s a description of the IDEAL AI scenario.

First of all, let’s set the parameters here. We’ll assume that AI doesn’t kill us all or lead to a totalitarian state. Instead, let’s just assume that it turns out to essentially create the equivalent of the Computer and DATA from Star Trek. Highly intelligent, competent programs/robots that want to help humanity and do any work that human beings can do:

Granted, that may overstate the effectiveness of AI because there are MANY people who don’t see AI swallowing up most jobs any time soon, if ever. However, two of the people who do seem to believe AI is going to make a huge impact on jobs within the next couple of decades are Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Elon Musk, CEO of xAI. Amodei believes AI could wipe out 50% of white-collar jobs in the next five years, and Musk thinks it’s on track to essentially make work optional in the next one to two decades. Of course, time will tell, but I think they’re a lot closer to right than the people who think AI is going to be just a job helper or replace a few people around the margins.

So, we’re going to assume that the more aggressive scenario is somewhat on track. Within 10-20 years, jobs for humans are going to be scarce because AI and robots are doing everything for us.

If that were to happen, it begs some super obvious questions like: If nobody has jobs, how do people live? Heck, how do the companies and robots making AI keep going with no one working jobs to pay money for their services? Does the economy just grind to a halt? What happens in that scenario?

The truth is that nobody really knows, and there’s not an OBVIOUS answer, although at this early juncture, there seem to be better and worse scenarios that will be compounded by a wide variety of factors.

As a starting point, we live in an interconnected world where many of us, perhaps justifiably, feel very little concern about some of those connected pieces. For example, countries like India, Mexico, and the Philippines have an awful lot of workers who get paid to do customer service over the phone for Americans. If, let’s say, Anthropic, xAI, or ChatGPT create AI agents who completely replace those jobs, those countries would take a huge hit, but the attitude here would almost certainly be, “Too bad, so sad, not our problem.”

Of course, closer to home, here’s something to consider: When have extremely wealthy people and corporations WIILINGLY given the majority of the wealth they collected to the general public? MAYBE when they’re approaching the ends of their lives and realize they “can’t take it with them,” but nobody at the top, that’s in their prime, ever goes, “I want the majority of the money I make to go to other people.”

Yet, what would be the best solution in a world where a handful of corporations earn all the money? Something like the Alaska Permanent Fund, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, or the UAE’s subsidization of its citizens based on the revenues those places collect from oil. In other words, if nearly all revenue flows through a few AI companies, then a big part of the money from those AI companies would necessarily need to go to the public.

How do we get to that point, though?

Certainly, the AI companies won’t willingly agree to it. Most people are probably thinking, “Duh, we vote in the government, and the government will MAKE THEM agree to it.” However, as Tristan Harris notes, if AI companies actually become that dominant, the relationship between the voters and the government may break because of the “intelligence curse”:

So, there’s something in economics called the resource curse. So think of countries like Venezuela or Sudan, where you discover that that country is sitting on top of a really valuable resource like oil. And then once a bunch of your GDP comes from oil and not from the labor or innovation or development of your people, you invest more in oil infrastructure and not investing in people. You don’t invest in education. You don’t invest in healthcare because oil is where you get your GDP and your growth from. Okay. Okay. This is a well-known fact in economics. It’s called the resource curse.

There’s a wonderful guy named Luke Drago who wrote a piece called The Intelligence Curse. We are about to enter a world where GDP for countries comes more from data centers and intelligence in AI, than it is going to come from the labor of human beings. So everyone’s talking about how AI is going to automate all these jobs, and then we’ll all just sit back with a universal basic income and become painters and poets. And is that actually what’s going to happen? Or when countries get almost all of their revenue from AI and a smaller and smaller percentage from people, do they have an incentive to invest in child care, healthcare, education, the well-being of their people? Or is it basically just hook them up to the social media addiction economy, keep them busy, while basically all the revenue comes from AI companies? And so what I’m trying to get at is this is not a human future. This is not a future that’s in service of regular people. This is a future that’s in service of eight soon-to-be trillionaires who will consolidate all the wealth and disempower basically everybody else. Does that make sense?

If you’re the government in that scenario, who are you more interested in pleasing? A small number of infinitely wealthy, powerful, and influential corporations around which all of our nation’s tax revenue revolves, or what you view as masses of poor, jobless, hapless mouths to feed (incidentally, that’s you and me, along with almost everyone else in this scenario). How does this play out? It’s hard to say for sure, but there certainly are enough incredibly powerful evil corporations in the movies to make you think, “Yeah, the bad guys very well might win”:

That means maybe we go back to sustenance farming, get some kind of minimal allowance, cool VR helmets, and happy drugs, or try our hands at fighting Terminators that work for the government creates to deal with people that don’t do what they’re told:

What it all comes down to is that AI is unlike any technology that has come before. It has the potential to revolutionize not just an industry or a society, but the way all human beings live from beginning to end. Although many of the changes AI brings may be POSITIVE, it will change so many things, to such a great extent, that it could also be a complete disaster for the human race before it’s all said and done. It would be terrific if we were smart enough to realize that and take the most basic steps to figure out how to make sure that doesn’t happen, but it’s looking increasingly likely that won’t be the case.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

…there were many, many other great lines from those books. After the latest assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the endless encouragement of political violence before and after it by the Left, one of those quotes from Conan came back to me because it’s very relevant to what’s happening in America today:

Online, especially on forums or places like X, extraordinarily rude behavior is extremely common. Ever notice it’s a lot less common in person? Personally, I can’t remember the last time a human being went out of their way to be deliberately rude when we were face-to-face. It literally may have been DECADES ago. So, why is there such a big difference between the real world and online? Well, because if two people are talking face-to-face, their fists are in range of each other’s noses.

This reminds me of the punk on the Internet who was trolling boxer Curtis Woodward. After Woodward lost a title fight, the troll mocked him online. Woodward offered to pay anyone who would give him the troll’s address. Someone did, then Woodward DROVE TO HIS HOUSE to give him a beating and posted pictures of his street to prove he was there. Suddenly, the troll’s attitude changed:

“I am sorry it’s getting a bit out of hand,” he wrote. “I am in the wrong. I accept that.” He added that the abuse was merely a “bit of harmless fun.”

Woodward left without pummeling him, but it still makes for a great story… and you know what? It’s HEALTHY for trolls to fear being beaten up. Some people may find that statement shocking. “Why, no one should fear violence, John!” I disagree with that statement, but to explain why, I’m going to need to explain something about the way societies restrain bad behavior.

Contrary to what many people believe, the law is one of the WORST WAYS to prevent behavior detrimental to society. That’s because the law is supposed to be the LAST RESORT. The thing you use to deal with ne'er-do-wells and hardened criminals who are unable to fit into lawful society. You know Billy the Kid, Jeffrey Dahmer, Al Capone, Jeffrey Epstein, Charles Ponzi and that no good Hatfield clan that makes moonshine, steals horses and gets into blood feuds with their neighbors.

When the law moves to the frontlines and becomes the determinant of what’s allowable and what isn’t, you end up with an immoral society barely held in check by legalism. You have people acting as if changing the law changes what’s right, people finding loopholes in the law, and all sorts of horrible behavior that’s justified by the fact that “It’s not illegal.”

On the other hand, speaking of morals, if you are truly surrounded by genuinely moral people, you almost don’t need laws at all. If you let me pick 100 people and stuck all of us together in some little community for a decade, where no one else came or went, there would be no murders or rapes and the number of thefts would be zero unless someone borrowed a lawnmower and forgot to bring it back. This is why even diehard atheists should want to encourage Christianity, even if they don’t believe in God. It makes the people around you more likely to be moral, which means less strife, crime, and problems.

We also can’t forget mores, customs, and societal expectations.

For example, when I went to Tokyo, one of the things that stuck out to me was that the Japanese were such sticklers about following rules that NOBODY would cross the street until the sign changed, telling them they were allowed to do so. It didn’t matter if it was day or night, there was nobody coming, or there was 1 person or 50 people waiting, they did not move until the light changed and told them they could go. It’s no coincidence that Tokyo is arguably the safest large city in the world.

Going in a different direction, there used to be certain almost universal assumptions around dating. If let’s say a woman got drunk with a man, made out with him in public, and willingly went back to his room with him, nobody would take her seriously if she later said that she didn’t intend to sleep with him. Along similar lines, if you spat at a cop or let’s say, told him to go, “f*** himself,” you could expect to receive an ass-whooping. There was a time in American history when divorce was considered a personal failure, having children outside of marriage was viewed extremely negatively, and people didn’t publicly discuss race, politics, or religion.

We could go on, but do you know what all these things really were? Societally enforced guideposts designed to keep people out of trouble and keep our culture functional. Know what else? They worked EXTREMELY WELL. As a society and as individuals, we would be much, much better off if all of these expectations were still in place.

So why aren’t they?

Because there were real, but relatively rare examples where these societal rules created unfair situations. Because we became hyper-individualistic. Because too many of us rejected our culture, our morality, and the customs that made us successful, to do what sounded good instead.

That led to what we have now. People being deluged in hateful comments online, open calls for attacking and murdering people who disagree with the Left, complete disrespect for the police, our leaders, our religions, and our nation. Far too often today, the law is used to protect the worst of us. It’s, “I’m legally allowed to block your car, call you slurs, call for your death, and push destructive ideas, but you’re not legally allowed to stop me from doing it.”

This is not an improvement; it’s a degeneration of our civilization. We should have higher moral standards, expect more from people, and be much more willing to collectively punish people who don’t meet those moral expectations.

Do you think the world would be better or worse if we aimed the same kind of disdain at people who call for political violence as we do at people who abuse animals? Do you think life would be better or worse if we LOOKED DOWN on people who had kids out of wedlock or got divorced for frivolous reasons? Do you think we’d be safer or in more danger if the police started using nightsticks on people who cursed them out or threw things at them? You can pretend otherwise if you want, but all of us know the answer.

We’re a society that needs more shame, more judgment, and more restraints on bad behavior. Until those things start happening, ultimately, you won’t see our degenerate culture really move back in the right direction again.

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101 Things All Young Adults Should Know