Thank you everyone.

In the last few members of our recorded audience or found their way to their seats, And it is a delightful end to a tumultuous year, this twenty twenty five.

Not a fan, to be honest, really, yeah, really, not much in twenty twenty five that I liked.

I know, maybe sports teams one that you were attached to, or somebody got married, or you know, there was some you know, wondrous new project you started, and that's specific to your life.

I'm talking about kind of a broader sense of humanity really when I talk about twenty twenty five, and sadly a lot of the issues with humanity reside with a change in leadership in this country.

So I know we're coming to you from the United States of a troubled America and we're happy to be with you.

Live today, the two poor in the East eleven to one in the western part of the US.

You know what I meant to bring in, Damn it, You've got some fol mail.

I'll bring it tomorrow.

Tomorrow is my last day to try to make it right.

There's a scramble before we start, and lost in the scramble.

It's something I wanted to do, but we've got a great show for you today.

In fact, some breaking news.

There's a new story a DC Report, which is the website co founded by David K.

Johnston, who joins us in the second hour, and it's a pretty big story.

It's about a bank bailout and a series of bank bailouts that you, the US taxpayer, are very much a part of, whether or not you're aware of it or not.

And so we'll get into that with David K.

Johnston an hour two.

There is a couring out of the American economy.

I think that is brutally intense.

And the way in which the American president has messed around with these tariffs, he doesn't really know what he's doing.

There's chaos, there's aggression, there's a power play, there's a system of patronage where he kind of sets it up and you have to make your own deal, personal deal with the president.

In fact, the entire presidency, the Trump presidency, is a monument to payoff and corruption from the very start, and you would say, what do you what do you mean?

From the very start, well before he was even in office, there were massive contributions to his inauguration.

Remember the inaugural fund.

Yeah, a million millionaire.

Yeah, and you had all of these tech jillionaires, you know, elbowing each other out of the way to donate to that to then get favors on the other side when the guy was actually inaugurated and became president.

That's exactly what's happened.

There are examples of this across the board.

I was just talking to Kim and when I and I'm going to go back and pick up on Brigitte Bardout and the Kennedy Center.

I got a lot of stuff to get to today, and as I say, David K.

Johnson, I got a lot to get to.

But just because we're on this, I was mentioning to Kim that Boeing I saw that America is going to sell more Boeing jets to Israel.

This is the Net and Yahoo Trump conversation of yesterday.

By the way, there's a great hot mic moment that I'll play for you in a second from that meeting.

Anyway, Nen, Yahoo and Trump meet, and one of the things that that meeting yields is this announcement that we're going to be selling more Boeing planes fighter jets to the Israelis Now that in itself may be disturbing to you.

You may not be down with that, but it's kind of what we've grown used to.

But there's a bigger story of that, and it's kind of what I was talking about, because Boeing was among those companies elbowing each other out of the way to donate to the inaugural fund.

Here it is, you can see it.

Inauguration beats funding record as donors line up is the headline.

This from Statista.

Thank you Tony for finding this.

So they invest in the inauguration.

It's really a payoff and on the other side they get the payback.

And what happened.

Kim, You've got the story, I think, don't you?

The Boeing story.

I do have that.

I do have that story.

Apparently, according to documents, Trump bought between a million and five million worth of Boeing bonds August twenty eighth.

September nineteenth, he bought more Boeing bonds worth five hundred and a million.

In all, he appears to have purchased at least one hundred and eighty five million dollars worth of corporate and municipal bond since the start of his presidency.

And apparently Boeing is making out very well because they're getting government contracts.

Now, yeah, they already were getting, of course, government contracts.

What I'm suggesting is that they were getting government contracts at a certain level, and there's been a much steeper buy in by the US government.

The most recent buy in is those Israeli warjets or US warjets that are being sold to Israel.

So there are two things going on there, right, Boeing creating the line of communication, if you want to think about that way through their inaugural donation, Trump excuse me, he buys in heavily into the Boeing bonds, and then Trump, in the area of self enrichment that one can only imagine under this administration, pays Boeing off with huge government contracts.

Look, this is illegal.

It should be something that the Congress actually brings to light, and it should be something that is a hard no.

But instead there is a Congress that's sitting on its hands, a party that's completely scared of this president, and as a result, you don't hear about what I'm talking about.

And so the reality of the open corruption of this administration is something that goes widely unreported, although there drips and drabs of it because it's undeniable and it's so ubiquitous.

I mean's absolutely everywhere you go, it's self enrichment from this guy.

But what I'm suggesting is that you're not even seeing a lot of the self enrichment day to day because there's just so much of it.

It's a fire hose of corruption.

So we know that in April, right he was buying the bonds.

In March, Trump announced Boeing would receive the coveted twenty billion dollar development contract for the Air Force's future F forty seven fighter jet.

The government also, when it reopened after the closure, announces a nearly nine hundred million sale of Boeing's Chinook helicopter to Germany, and Boeing won a series of contracts worth two point seven billion to produce missile seekers alongside Lockheed Martin.

They say that Trump is not violating any ethics rules, but there is a norm that presidents don't own investments in individual companies, but that rule is not being followed here.

It's funny about those norms.

They're all kind of being left at the border.

Sorry to interruew you go, but.

The important thing is that, as a Tom points out, ubiquitous is a dang word.

And so that's what you can take away from that story.

The other thing I'll just mention to you is that this coffee today is so good.

It's Coachella Valley Coffee.

You can find it at Coachella Valley Coffee dot com.

I'm drinking it from the Project nineteen eighty four point five mug, which matches my Project nineteen eighty four point five t shirt to get markmerch dot com.

I mean, this is I think you're dealing with an Orwellian disinformation blast from this administration.

Everything's great, this economy is terrific.

Americans have never had it better.

I have a better healthcare plan than the ACA, and it's coming in two weeks.

I'm just saying everything that is told you by these people is straight out of the disinformation that you'd find in the Orwell novel nineteen eighty four.

And so nineteen eighty four point five is our T shirt Project eighteen four point five.

You can get it at the at the website get mark merch dot com.

But as I say, there's also the mug, which I like, the Project nineteen eighty four point five.

My god, it's in that.

I think it's kind of like a seventies sort of which is very chic.

Now the font style, yeah, I like it.

Yeah, there it is.

Thank you, Tony.

And that's the mug from which I drink the Coachella Valley Coffee dot Com teller again the last thing I mentioned on that, and then I'll move on.

If and when you go to Coachella Valley Coffee dot Com stock up, just get whatever you want Tease Coffee Spices.

This is a terrific curation of some of the best tastes you will ever experience.

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The Martinson.

I'm excited about going back to pick up a story from yesterday that we wanted to get to.

We just ran out of time.

Brigitte Bardeaux passed away.

She was the what would you call her, the the sex kitten kind of I don't know, what would you call it selle.

She's watch to bomb tell you, oh yeah, blonde bombshell.

She was known as the Marilyn Monroe of France.

And tell me about Brigitte Bardow kim into a little before my time.

She was a very attractive gal.

As you've said, she was beautiful.

She was a movie star in the nineteen sixties, called sultry by many.

She just passed away at the age of ninety one.

And she kind of treated her movie star career to become an animal rights activist.

But also she kind of had some other things going on.

She got a little political.

Do you had a thing against It appears she had a thing against Muslim people.

Before you get to that.

Give me the little something on the animals.

Great animal rights advocate, but Waco politically, says Jim Shields.

She literally gave up her movie startop she would become an advocate for animals, right.

Yeah, she had the Bridget Bardou Foundation for the Protection of Animals.

She's called a militant animal rights activist and she, yeah, she.

Thought she.

Super beautiful.

She had this thing where she was going to give up her French citizenship and move to Russia because she was fighting over the treatment of a couple of elephants that she felt weren't being treated properly, that were sickly, and and so she had threatened to leave France didn't end up doing that.

She was a staunchly on the side of the La Penn family, real right winger.

Yeah, yeah, she didn't.

Apparently had some issues with with immigrants and Muslims in particular.

She also was proud of not being a feminist.

She said she was not a feminist because because.

She likes men.

Man.

Yeah, well, she was, I guess, a creature of that world, you know, from the fifties and the sixties.

She was not a fan of the me too movement.

She called it hypocritical and ridiculous.

Yeah, m h man.

Liz says, disappointing to hear what she was truly like, Yeah, I always heard, you know, she gave up this clamor and all that success to become an animal rights advocate.

Yeah, but then there's this.

Delette says, no, no, no, she was not a friend to animals.

No, I'd like to hear more about that.

All we hear is about she was this friend, Adam, I need more, I need more and more and more from the no, no, no, so will follow up on this, but in any case, she passes away.

She was ninety what did you say, ninety ninety one, ninety one wow.

Ago.

Also, I'm told in the chat that Chris ray, the British singer songwriter died.

Chris ray You'll have to help me.

He was a kind of blues.

Balladeer seventy four years old.

Yeah, soft rock ballads like Driving Home for Christmas and Fool If you think It's over.

Oh yeah.

Chris Ray Rea, a British singer, songwriter and hit maker, dies at the age of seventy four.

Yeah.

Different than Chris Ray, the former director of the FBI.

Although it would be great to have an FBI director who is also writing hits and singing as a balladeer on the side.

I'm just saying it would be a change, but we'd normally gotten.

But there's Chris ray who got a picture of him up.

Yeah, and sad Raya?

Is that how you say it?

Okay?

Is right?

Chris Raya?

Is that right?

I hadn't heard of him before today.

You note his song Fool if you think It's Over.

I'm betting you'd note the song if it played.

Bardeaux was married four times, says H.

C.

C Ryder, wondering if all of her husbands shared her extreme views.

I don't know four times that truly, that's commitment to marriage.

It's it's weird because marriage is all about commitment, and yet four times would suggest you're committing over and over again.

You know, I'm just what can you tell us about the scene.

Yeah, Larry Kim had eight marriages, so she lived.

For ninety one years.

That's a lot of time to pack some husbands in there.

That's true when you're saying, when you average it out, it's not so bad.

Yeah, there's some nice long marriages in there.

Probably, yeah, probably we couldn't.

We could find that out if she wanted to just look it up.

I mean, I love how we just kind of wed such as guess.

Her fourth marriage.

She married a man in nineteen ninety two.

That was her longest marriage.

Yeah, is that Roger Vadeen, No, that's de Yeah, Roger Vadein was her So Roger Vadim I think was also married to Jane Fonda.

Wow.

Yeah, so exactly.

That's a noble thing.

But well, you'd expect you know, this kind of as you suggest, sort of sex kitten type person to be, you know, this desirable type womanhood.

What would you call her?

You called her the blonde bombshell.

She was also called a movie siren.

There you go.

Bardo and Jane Fonda were once married to Roger Vedem at different times, of course, says Rain, Yeah, there you go.

That's what I was getting at.

So Vadim puts her in this movie, and God created woman, and then they get married, and then they divorce after she starts a relationship with another actor.

It's all very french.

Wow, very french Man.

Well, it's that's the word.

A look back on a couple of losses from the high profile world of entertainment.

Thomson, let me get you to some big changes.

That's right.

Even as the American economy struggles, as the subsidies for healthcare vanish, as more and more ICE agents pursue their thuggery on the streets of the US, and as the US finds itself in the middle of more and more conflicts either off the coast of Venezuela or now in Nigeria, the President of the United States is focused on the important things, first of which would be his name on the Kennedy Center.

And he is not only putting his name on the Kennedy Center, as we've shown you, it is there and is referred to as the Trump Kennedy Center.

But he is making changes.

He wants to put some taxpayer dollars to work.

You know, all that money saved by Doge he can now put into the Kennedy Center.

And by the way, when I say all that money saved by Doge, you know, I'm really referring to a program that actually didn't save any money and cost tens of thousands of federal employees their livelihood, not to mention a nation losing its expertise and losing many of the agencies on which it depends, from Social Security to the EPA.

But more on that as we continue back to the Trump Kennedy Center.

He's making some changes, Kim, What are those changes?

Please?

He's going to be doing some renovations and putting in new armrests.

Mark.

They are marble armrests, you know, the marble, the white with the gray veins running.

Sure.

Sure, I have to tell you that I'm not a fan.

I mean, I like a nice slab of marble.

But this looks very uncomfortable.

He posts this, go back, if you would please, potential marble armrests for the seating at the Trump Kennedy Center.

Yeah, and then he says this, and he really does say it unlike anything ever done or seen before.

I've never seen anything like that.

Ye, so Kim is not a fan.

Nobody has ever put something like this together that I've ever seen.

Marble armrests are a bit hard on the arms.

I would say, we've never seen anything like it before.

I mean it, it looks like an elbow injury waiting to happen.

This.

Yeah, do you thank you?

Yeah?

Yeah.

But this is a this is a big deal, and it's just part of his renovation.

As you say, I mean, it's just the armres.

There is nothing in our history that compares.

He wants to continue to bring a mar Lago touch to this wondrous institution, the John F.

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

And what I mean by that is, you know, the gilded Saudi palatial feel that he's brought to the White House.

He wants to bring that to the Kennedy Center.

Now, what's happening at the Kennedy Center apart from the fact that they're slapping gold and marble onto everything as per the president's orders, And of course, he cleaned the house with the board, assigned his own people to the board, replaced everybody there, so it has become a highly partisan institution.

Now this is a weird thing to say, because it's sort of been this at least always quacked.

It seemed as a non partisan institution.

But more to the point, this institution now is staffed by people who are very much in Trump's thrall, and they're here to support the president and so pretty much whatever he wants to do gets greenlit.

Look well, look I mean not only pretty much, whatever he wants to do, I mean literally anything he wants to do, like put his name on it, gets overwhelming support, unanimous support from the board.

So we get to the entertainment and that there is a list of holiday entertainment of a New Year's Eve show, et cetera.

But many of the entertainers, because the entertainers have I guess, bigger balls than any politician in Washington, many entertainers are pulling out of commitments to perform at the Kennedy Center.

Isn't that right, Kim?

That's right.

There's now a long list including someone who was scheduled to perform at New Year's Eve.

That was the veteran jazz ensemble that was Is it Billy Hart.

There's another group called the Cookers.

They were scheduled to perform on New Year's Eve, but now they're not going to and there's apparently some kind of thread of a lawsuit.

But they're not the only ones.

There's a long list of entertainers that are pulling out of their performances that were scheduled at the quote Trump Kennedy Center.

Well, the cancelation of that performance the annual Christmas Eve Jazz Jam scheduled on the evening of Christmas Eve, which is a good time to have the annual Christmas Eve Jazz Jam.

The cancelation, indeed, has produced anger on the part of the Trump people and on the part of that guy Grinnell, I forget his first name.

He runs the Kennedy Center now.

He's sort of like the Trump henchman who runs the Kennedy Center now.

And they are threatening a one million dollar lawsuit.

Here's what the letter threatening the lawsuit says.

Your decision to withdraw out the last moment, explicitly in response to the center's recent renaming, which honors President Trump's extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure, is classic intolerance and very costly to a nonprofit arts institution.

Regrettably, your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting performances at our national Cultural Center.

Your dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support, combined with your last minute cancelation, has cost us considerably.

It's a classic Trump letter, right, you attack the person personally, then you talk about what a hack they are, you know, like, we're angry at you for canceling, but you're so bad anyway tickets that we're glad.

Yeah, this is your official notice.

This letter goes on that we will seek one million dollars in damages from you for this political stunt.

So it said, any artist canceling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn't courageous or principled.

They are selfish and tolerant and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist to perform for old people.

That's uh, maybe there's just pr office at the Kennedy Center.

The Cookers, a jazz ensemble, saying they're now unable to perform as planned on New Year's Eve, there is a dance troupe Doug Vone and the dancers they're canceling their April performances because of the name change as well.

And they're not the only ones.

So the list keeps growing of artists who are saying, you know what, I just can't get on the stage at a place called the Trump Kennedy Center.

Can't stand there.

And I would suggest here's a pro tip.

Given these guys are really nasty, I would suggest that instead of expressly explicitly saying that I can't get on stage because of the renaming, I understand that that's a perfectly legitimate, better than legitimate reason.

And as I say, you had greater courage in that act than most legislators in Washington.

But I would suggest that you do kind of a you know, that sick out thing that people do when they're ill or whatever.

You say, something's come up, somebody in my family's gotten very sick.

Whatever that you do that it'll be clear what's happening.

The same way there was the sick out during the shutdown when all the air traffic controllers had to work and they weren't being paid, and you start to see this kind of no show thing.

But I would suggest that by proclaiming it as the thing that you're that you're pulling out to essentially make a statement about that, you expose yourself maybe to all kinds of crap that you don't want to deal with, static from MAGA static legally.

So, or you take a stand because here's what the Varoni Dancer said in a post.

With the latest act of Donald J.

Trump renaming the Center after himself, we can no longer permit ourselves nor ask our audiences to step inside this once great institution.

The Kennedy Center was named in honor of our thirty fifth President, who fervently believed the arts were the beating heart of our nation as well as an integral part of international diplomacy.

We hope in three years time the Center and its reputation will return to that glory.

Yeah, I mean, as you say, not stepping away from that.

No, you're right, they get that jump right on it.

So all right.

I also wanted to mention I mentioned the meeting between net and Yahoo and Trump.

And I'll tell you something.

I'm I think on this show pretty good about predicting things.

I know that I sometimes can be sort of pessimistic, and I would suggest that that pessimism is actually realism.

I think I called out the Trump corruption.

I mean, I wasn't alone.

Please don't get me wrong, But I'm just saying we don't pull our punches.

But I'm making a point.

It sounds like I'm paying myself a compliment.

I'm actually putting myself down on a level.

And here it is.

I was wrong about something I said yesterday, and I'm astounded.

I know it's very I know it's incredible.

It's incredible.

I really do know who I am.

I know I'm kind of a big deal.

I don't miss on many but I thought that Donald Trump and Nettan Yahoo when they met, would have have a different kind of atmosphere around that meeting than was typical of a net and Yahoo Trump meeting.

And by that, I won't spend a whole lot of time on this, and then I'm gonna give you this hot mic moment that we captured.

But I thought that first go round or first few go rounds with Netanyahu and Trump, I mean, he got Trump to jump on the Iran thing, you know, bomb that nuclear plant.

He got huge buying with Trump on Gaza, all of these things associated with Net and Yahoo policy that was really troubled and really had a stink to it.

And I thought that that stink would affect this meeting and that he wouldn't Net Yahoo find the same buy in with Trump on Net and Yahoo policy is moving forward.

I think that that was wrong.

Based on what I'm reading, he's getting buy in from Trump.

It might even include a second hit on Iran.

I don't know that hasn't.

That's something that Natana who wants who wants our support on a second Iran strike?

Itifts at the Israelis if it's the Americans.

So of course we told you about already the sale of fighter planes to Israel.

So there is all of that going on, and as I say, I didn't expect that there would be that degree of warmth now the Israelis for their part, the Israeli government, and again on the Israeli street, there's not a lot of love for Netan Yahoo.

They're big protests and all the rest.

So I always feel bad when I'm saying Israelis, especially in this this atmosphere of Jew hating which is everywhere.

I think anti Semitism is just it's an epidemic and a poison that I see extending in violence.

And you know what happened in Australia and all of these other places in which Jews and the Jewish community warships and all the rest.

So I really I think there's this conflation of Jewish people and Israeli policy under net Yahoo that's really not fair.

But anyway to continue, the Israeli government sees that Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and the Israeli government is going to concoct another sort of prize for him.

Isn't that right, Kim?

They're kind of putting together another presentation because Trump is a great man of peace who's been forgotten by the Nobel Committee.

Isn't that right, Kim?

Yes?

Net Yah who is creating the Israel Peace Prize for Donald Trump.

Yeah, it's going to be the highest civilian honor.

And Netah who is announcing that Israel will the ward Trump the Israel Prize for Peace, and they're recognizing his support for the country.

Right, it has never been anything like this.

So he has the FIFA Peace Prize and the Israel Prize for Peace.

I mean, who needs a uh Phineas whoopee, says the Schlamazole award right, my Larison says net Yahoo has put Jews everywhere in danger.

I think it really is true that the brutal policies of net Yahoo spilled over under the Jewish community all over the world.

But here was the hot mike moment as Trump was complaining to net and Yahoo at this huge table at which Jared Kushner and Pete Hegseth and all of the Trump both sycophants and those who, of course benefit immensely from their association with the administration, like Kushner himself and his pals, they sat and listened.

Trump prattled on about how the Nobel Committee has really overlooked the great man of peace that Trump is.

Here at the hot mic moment, put.

To both of them, I said, We're going to cut you off some more trade.

Then I put two hundred percent tariffs.

On the next day they called, We'd looked at thirty five years of fighting and they they stepped.

Do I get credit for it?

Now?

They gave them.

I did eight of them India, how about India and Pakistan?

And then so I did eight of them and then I'll tell you the rest of it.

How are you doing okay?

He now realizes that, you know, we'll be outside the beautiful signs.

Good, enjoy your lunch.

It was a very good group.

We made a lot of progress already.

We had about a five minute meeting and we've already settled about three of the difficulties.

So thank you very much for being here.

Yahoo cast from Trump you saw with the Deep with the Russians and Cushioner there on the end.

So heg Seth sitting alongside Trump to his left.

It's a you know, it's it's nuts how completely obsessed he is with this narrative, but he keeps it out there, you know, ended eight wars and you know, what can one say?

But I think what oftentimes happens, and we've seen this with Trump is presidents, and typically this happens towards the end of their presidency, in their last term, when they are lame ducks.

The desire to get involved in various international moves becomes amplified because you don't really need a whole lot of congressional buy in.

I mean, typically and legally, to declare war, you'd need a war declaration that would be approved by Congress.

But even that, as you know, has you know, workarounds and really has been ignored by a lot of Chief executives.

And so it is with Trump, these bombing raids that he's in, these completely illegal bombing missions off the coast of Venezuela.

This is horrifying, it's immoral, it's unethical, it's illegal, but he can do it.

The bombing in Nigeria, with the smoke screen story about how he's going after Christians who have been persecuted there, Yet the reality is in that part of Nigeria there isn't the kind of persecution of Christians to which he's referred.

So there are a lot of things going on internationally.

Of course, the tariffs which are wildly illegal, and the Supreme Court may rule against him on that.

These are all things that he's done.

He's got himself into international state.

But what I'm leading up to is domestically, he's going to have huge issues in the new year.

I mean, and when I say he's going to have them, we're going to have them.

America is going to have them.

We're all going to have them.

We're all going to know that the Trump stink is going to be all over all of US because you can't impose these wild tariffs, this chaotic forty six percent at noon, dropped to ten percent at five pm, back up to four hundred percent on Friday.

You can't do it without serious international repercussions.

And that's exactly what's happened.

Trump gets in office, he smack talks.

Mexico and Canada are two biggest trade partners.

What's happened with Canada?

Have you seen what's happened with Canada.

There's been a watershed decision made in Canada that never could have happened had it not been for Trump and Trump policy.

Because Trump has smacked talked the Canadians, has put all of these tariffs in place.

The Canadian leadership has been able to push through huge infrastructure programs.

You never could have gotten these infrastructure programs through because they're just not politically viable most of the time, they're so expensive.

But given the way Canada has seen America look at it as a fifty first state, as sort of an American colony, as subjected to the whims of the president.

When it comes to all of these terrafs, Canada sees that they need to build other supply chains.

They need to build other trade partners, and that's exactly what they've done.

And they've also built and invested huge infrastructure, so infrastructure in railroad and train transport in their ports so that they'll be able to now export in ways that they were not able to before and import.

But the real economic engine Canada is not going to find many other clients all around the world.

They have a relationship with China now, they have a sort of neutral relationship with China.

They don't have an adversarial relationship with China or an expressed adversarial relationship with China, and that's because they see the economic incentive in doing business with the Chinese.

So Trump has forced that in a way that will benefit Canadians over the long term, and that will hurt Americans over the short term.

And it's already hurt of farmers across many of the Red States that were targeted by Canada.

You'll recall when these tariffs went in.

So this tit for tat is starting to really have an impact on America, will have a lasting impact because the soybean farmers who are getting bailed out by Trump right now, they are going to see a loss of clients that is to say, of consumers in China trading partners who found soybeans elsewhere.

Brazil is the perfect example, Argentina is another.

So all I'm trying to say is that these things that you can bail out farmers for a season about or somehow cover up with headlines and distraction for the first year of your presidency, they will weigh in a real way on the American economy and the American worker and an American lifestyle.

And I think there'll be a huge price to pay.

All of us are going to pay it.

When I see the economy happiness, have any here everybody, When I see the economic inequality, that's you know already there was a Gulf right even under Biden as well.

This is sort of the American coman now with a completely unfettered, unregulated M and A, you have, you know, four companies running everything and owning every sort of major institution associated with media and banking, et cetera.

You are going to pay a price for that, and it's going to be noticed.

Tony.

Do you have the preacher who was speaking to the congregation about economic inequality, it's to this is exactly what I'm talking about.

This is a preacher speaking to his congregation about this problem that is now unleashed in America over the last couple of decades.

Go ahead, want to repeat that, and if you need to fact check it, use your chat GPT, go to Bernie Sanders dot com.

It's all over the place.

If you paid one dollar in federal income tax last year, you paid more than SpaceX and Tesla combined.

I mentioned that to you because.

While all of that so, I'm just showing you the.

Injustice and you can say what you want, Well, it's not in justice.

He's just clever.

He knows how to get at faxies.

It's actually called stealing, but now you can call it clever.

I call it stealing because if me, as a human, pays as much money as I get in taxes and can't afford healthcare, and tell me, in God's.

In Jesus' name, tell me how.

A man that is about to be the wealthiest man on this planet many times over, with trillions, tell me how no taxes were paid.

Okay, Now I say all that to say, as all of that's happening, as all that's happening, the man in the White House leading the way, his net worth has grown three billions since being in office, and that's not including how enriched his family is becoming with.

Saudi Arabia right now.

So you're like, man, you're really going for it.

I'm telling you the reason I say this is because I think we've misunderstood Christmas.

We put on the sweaters and we're playing the bread and s and we're like, oh and I got all love for it, Give warm and cozy, do your thing.

I'm just telling you my line.

Of work is in the in the flow of the province and Jesus in a mile on of work.

I just don't think those people are going to show up and be like, put on your sweater, let's get nice and cozy and have some treats.

I think they're turning over the tables that the treats are on one, keep your bread and circus.

We need to address the economic injustice happening in this country.

Then it gets a standing ovation on the crowd.

That's good, that's funny, but you can get a sense for that's a small congregation, you know, but that's a preacher who is really speaking truth to those who are beginning to live it.

And I think you're going to see more of that.

You're already seeing cracks in mag nation, and I think you're going to see a lot more of this in the months ahead, particularly this year when the ACA subsidies are no longer around.

So there's a cold slap in the face that is I think going to become all too evident.

That's the economic reality.

There is more.

When David K.

Johnston joins about bank bailouts, as we told you, there's big breaking news.

It's being carried as an exclusive of DC Report and talked to David, of course is a co founder of that website, and David'll be along in just a few minutes.

So I wanted to also mention Mark Thompson there is a broker truce between Magnation and Trump, and that's on one side, Magnation and Trump and Elon Musk, who, as you know, is very much a part of a Trump world.

To begin this administration, he cobbled together his a team of fifteen year olds with laptops and they trashed an entire federal govern They started with institutions and governmental agencies that had business with Elon Musk.

Lawsuits, investigations, regulations, USAID was one.

It was the first one EPA was another, the irs was a third.

Google this stuff.

This is the stuff I'm making up, Okay, you can find it.

Musk was the target of all of these agencies, and as a result, it was no coincidence that when those fifteen year olds with laptops went in without any kind of government clearance.

I get it.

They weren't literally fifteen, They were like eighteen to twenty six or whatever it was.

What I'm really doing, what I say they're fifteen, is I'm in a shorthand way telling you that they don't know what waste is in government.

They can barely spell government.

These are people who've dedicated their lives those in government, many of them to public service.

Is there a waste in government?

Of course there is.

But you don't just go in and fire everybody and close stuff down.

That's not a way to distinguish waste from money well spent.

You can't just cut twenty five percent across the board.

This isn't a startup, This isn't some Silicon Valley project.

They're real people who are affected by the Social Security administration.

Have you tried to reach Social Security lately?

Good luck?

The weight is over two hours to get anybody on the phone.

You've taken agencies that already are stressed from the standpoint of demand, and you've made them so hobbled that they're unable to meet that demand.

That's if they exist at all.

I mean, of course EPA has been almost completely dismantled.

Same thing with USAID.

They just closed it down.

But I mentioned this because that was Musk's first project, and he went in and he made a lot of noise.

He did something, in my view, completely illegal.

Doges was an illegal concoction of Musk and Trump, and he got the stink of what he did onto him.

People were dumping Tesla's all of a sudden, Musk found himself in the middle of this political thing.

So he left politics right to go focus on his world.

And there was this backlash that continued against Musk and so jd Vance during this whole time, because as you know, jd Vance is the creation of Peter Teel.

Tel hired him initially, put him in three different jobs, than put him into a Senate race, funded that Senate race with seven million dollars that allowed him to win that Senate race.

I mean, you just dumped so much money in there.

That it was a cakewalk, and then he moved to the next cakewalk, which is the vice presidency, which was something to be fair that that Trump Junior supported the movement of JD.

Vance into this position.

So Vance has felt and feels a connection to all the tech bros, the jillionaires who are in that orbit, and JD Vance has helped broker this elon Musk return into the MAGA orbit.

And you'll remember there was a falling out between Trump and Musk that was pretty brutal.

He said, you know that Trump's name is in the Epstein files, and Trump couldn't have won the election without him.

But Musk represents tremendous money, right, I mean, the deepest pockets in the world, a lot of reach through all the ways in which Musk owns social media and the amplification of any message through those same medium.

So Trump wants that and JD.

Vance again realizing that was able to broker this connection.

And now it looks as though Musk is going to come back, but in a much lower profile way.

Again, Musk is unpredictable, just as Trump is unpredictable.

I mean, there's a sense that he may have broken government and we'll have to see how Maga Nation responds to him.

But the return of Elon Musk to Maga and to Trump and for this brotherhood, this fraternity to get back together, it's a net win for Trump and of course for Musk it's a net win as well, if he doesn't make too much noise.

And I say that because he has so many government contracts.

That's essentially what's propping up his empire.

But the third component is the first component, and it's neither Trump nor Musk.

It's jd Vance.

Jd Vance sees in Musk the platform on which he can spring to the presidency.

Jd Vance is looking past Trump and sees an alliance with Musk and Peter Thiel and you know the palatier people.

In other words, that's when the tech jillionaires really have their guy in jd Vance and so Vance, it doesn't surprise me in the least, is responsible for this reconnection of the Musk Trump relationship because jd vance has been texting with Musk.

Jd vance has been meeting with Musk.

Jd Vance has been ent with Musk through this entire period.

Jd Vance knows that he can be propelled to the White House largely because of the kind of push that Elon Musk can provide him.

Is Elon Musk the world's richest man, now, I think, isn't isn't he?

That's right?

Yeah?

I mean so yeah.

I mean he's already bought one presidency, why not another?

Well, And the thing is, I would say that the sort of corruption that has defined this administration and continues to define this administration very much in line with Musk's eye idea of success.

I mean he sees a government that's for sale, and he's got all the money, to your point, so he can get already huge government contracts even bigger.

I mean it's it's a win win, you know.

So he got his his pick, Musk did.

Jared Isaacman is his name with is now confirmed.

This is the guy that was nominated to be the director of NASA.

Then Trump and Musk have a falling out the yank isaacs Men's name off.

Vance then goes to bat for Isaacman because Musk is really important to him that Isaac Isaacman gets in at NASA and even makes a bunch of phone calls to pave the way for him to be confirmed.

So now Isaacman is confirmed as the director of NASA, and I wonder what that means for Musk having the director of NASA in your back pocket and you own a company like SpaceX.

Yeah, what does that mean?

Like how does that pave the way for SpaceX and what kind of contracts does SpaceX get?

Yeah, there it is.

There's Musk and Isaacs men.

I mean it's exactly what Kim is talking about that this, this appointment to NASA was everything to Musk.

You understand, SpaceX is a lot of technology, and it's a lot of research, and it's a lot of stuff that will never happen.

I mean, for example, the Mars program is a total pipe dream.

I mean it really is like a bunch of college freshmen sitting around getting high and talking about what they would do with the jillions of dollars.

A manned mission to Mars is ridiculous, and a colony on Mars is insane.

I mean, the radiation alone would kill everybody.

I mean inside an hour.

It's absurd.

And you say, well, you know, technology will have there isn't a technology in your way out of that.

There's certain limitations to space travel.

Space travel, of course, is captured so many of our imaginations.

This that Tony's showing you was truly innovated, the reusable rockets, you know.

And this isn't to say that some of what SpaceX and Tesla is doing, particularly when it comes to battery and energy storage, is not valuable.

It is.

But what I'm suggesting is that there's a bunch of other money and a lot of it that's being poured into this institution that Musk owns, SpaceX.

That is just money, it's just stuff.

It's the kind of thing that the Doge people would go through and close down.

So I think this appointment at NASA and the relationships that Musk has in government, they are critical to a robust economic future for Elon Musk, not for the American taxpayer.

You're such a naysayer.

Didn't you see total recall?

I mean, come on, I thought you were going to say, didn't you see the Martian?

Oh yeah, the Matt Damon movie.

Yeah that was a good one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But anyway, that's that's the story there.

And I do think that this is big news again for the Vance Musk connection, already looking past the Trump Musk connection and everybody's welcoming Musk back with kind of nervous laughter because they know the last Yeah, is this guy exactly?

Is this going to last?

So uh, that's the word on Musk and Trump and Magot and maybe they can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

I have to ask you to smash the like button like a boss.

I know it's a crazy thing in the world of the world of YouTube, but it helps us and do a subscribe to the show and hit the notification bell.

I'll remind you.

On New Year's Day we have the or Your Lawyer marathon going on.

Isn't that right, Tony?

Tony's getting it together?

The the Trump and Biden pardon attorney that was dismissed by Trump.

We have a marathon with her.

I think it's an hour on New Year's Day, so don't miss that.

This a twenty dollars super chat from James Bliss heading to Currosow soon, forty miles north of Venezuela.

Curs How is a big Is it a diving destination?

I know it's a big it's a big tourist destination anyway, James says, Heading to Curisow soon, forty miles north of Venezuela.

Yes, I will rent a boat.

Bring it on, hag Seth James A.

Wow, Columbia, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and curisow in twelve months.

You won't ruin my good times.

Happy New Year to the Mark Thompson Show crew.

Thank you, James Bliss, save travel to you, James.

Wow.

Look at that.

That's beautiful, beautiful.

Wow, it's a beautiful part of the world.

Is it curse?

How the name of a liquor, A blue liquor, I.

Think it is.

Actually yeah, yeah, well there's that.

I only know that because they put it in blue Hawaii's.

That's my drink of choice.

All Right, we continue, uh, The Mark Thompson Show.

Thompson, Yeah, there it is that the currosel liquor.

Yeah, very well done.

Well, it's the end of the year, and I must tell you that one of the things I'm grateful for, no matter how dim things get, no matter how dark it gets, I love that we have a regular conversation on Tuesdays with this guy.

He's a Pulitzer Prize winner, best selling author, uh, the co founder of dcreport dot org, where there was major news broken just today.

And we'll talk about that with the great David K.

Johnston.

Hello, well Mark, Happy New Year to you, as the kids say, good to see you, Good to see you always.

So I want to start with the news that you broke at DC report, which is associated with a bank bailout that is huge, and it's not just one bank.

Well, we don't know actually if it's one or more banks.

I mean, we have very good reason to suspect JP Morgan is at the center of this.

But the story that we broke is that for more than five years, there were virtually no cash infusions into the banks that deal with the New York Federal Reserve Bank, a handful of transactions, most of them in the neighborhood, one hundred million dollars bupkus in American banking, and then on Halloween, more than fifty billion dollars was suddenly infused into or more banks.

We think JP Morgan, but we don't know that.

Since then, every third business day, basically there's been a multi billion dollar infusion.

So we went from no business to tens of tens of billions of dollars all together one hundred billion dollars in less than two months.

And David just to be clear.

This information comes from reporting that was done by someone at DC Report.

Yes, James s.

Henry is our economics correspondent.

Jim is a Harvard educated lawyer who will in his twenties became the chief economist at Mackenzie and Company, the biggest business consulting firm in the country, and for a while, as a very young man, he was a direct report to General Electrics chairman Jack Welch.

And he threw all that away forty five year or so years ago to spend his life pursue doing illicit finance, corrupt banking, etc.

And Jim discovered this sudden change of pattern with all of these cash infusions into the banks.

I then discovered that on December tenth, the New York Federal Reserve Bank, that's the local branch of the Central Bank in the United States, adopted a new policy that was not reported anywhere except in some very specialized financial publications.

It essentially said that the limits we've put on how big of a cash infusion you can get in any day are now gone.

Unlimited amounts of cash will be made available on demand.

They did limit individual banks, and depending on how you read the announcement, which was very poorly worded.

Frankly, it's vague and hard to understand.

It appears that individual banks could borrow as much as two hundred and forty billion dollars in a single day.

Let me give you a little perspective on that.

There are six banks we call the too big to fail banks, JP, Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, UBS, HSBC, and there's one other.

Last year, their total combined profits were one hundred and fifty two billion dollars.

So one way of reading the new rule is an individual bank could borrow more than all the profits all those banks made last year.

Now, if you read it more narrowly, they can borrow eighty billion dollars.

But either way, why would the federal reserve suddenly go from we have limits on how much cash you can get to there are no limits.

Well, the only logical explanation for that is we're expecting huge demands for cash from the biggest banks.

Now, why should you care?

As someone who follows this show, this is what happened when the economy collapsed in two thousand and eight, and I wrote a piece to make clear on the public record I saw this coming in two thousand and four actually wrote two pieces in two thousand and four.

Alan Greenspan, who was the TRED chairman at the time, you know, said nobody could have seen this coming after it happened, and gee, I don't know.

I'm just a reporter.

I saw it coming, so did some other people.

You didn't see it because of wilful blindness.

And at the moment the reason you should be very scared about this.

And I was on a podcast earlier today with five people who are experts in this field, including Bill Black, the lawyer who figured out the savings and loan crisis back at the end of the nineteen eighties and got the show before the high level banker sent to prison.

We all see the same thing that this may well be an early and ominous sign that there's a big, huge crisis coming.

And what all of us agreed we're troubled by is when the economy collapsed in two thousand and eight, and some of the naysayers were saying, well, this kid sink us.

For ten years, Ben Bernanki, the head of the FED, did a pretty good job of mitigating the damage because he was a highly competent person who knew what he was doing and there were other highly competent people who knew what they were doing, who mitigated the circumstances.

Lots of terrible things done, including huge giveaways to the banks.

But we have not spent the last ten years in a recession either.

Right now we have a clown car group of people.

And shortly Jerome Powell's tenure as the head of the Federal Reserve.

He was appointed by Trump and his first term ends, and you're going to end up with people who have no idea what to do.

Trump will have no idea what to do.

He has a degree in economics, but he didn't earn it.

It was given to him by Penn.

And we could really be in a terrible disaster here.

And why would there be a big need suddenly for cash by the biggest bank in the country or other big banks.

Well.

J.

P.

Morgan, the biggest bank, sold five thousand, nine hundred tons of silver that it doesn't own one hundred and seventy one million troy ounces.

It sold it hoping to sell at a high price and then buy it back at lower price because they thought the price would fall.

Well.

Instead, the price is nearly tripled.

That means they're in what's called a short squeeze, and.

There's not enough.

Silver available to trade out there for them to replace all the silver that they sold, and as calls come in they for the money they have to pony up cash.

In addition, they made a bet on cryptocurrency.

In that case, they bet that crypto like bitcoin was going to go up in price.

Instead, Bitcoin has fallen by roughly one third.

And all of this puts you and me and everybody else at risk because Congress repealed something called the Glass Stegele Act from the nineteen thirties.

The Glass Stegle Act said, Hey, Wall Street, if you want to be in the business of underwriting stocks, which is a very risky business, you go right ahead.

If you want to be in insurance, you go right ahead.

You want to be in retail banking, where we have our checking accounts and local merchants have their accounts, you go right ahead.

But you can only be in one, pick one, that's your lane.

Because of the ideas that Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman brought about, no no, no, no, bankers know what they're doing.

How would they have be trusted with all this money if they didn't know what they're doing.

You can put all three of those together, and it creates terrible incentives if you take risk.

He gambles like selling silver short because you expect the price will fall, and you can make a lot of money by selling high and buying cheap.

The stocks, the stock and the stock options of the executives and the board of directors go up.

And if you make a wrong bet, then what happens is the government steps in and covers your losses.

And that's corporate socialism.

Jim Henry, who dug this up, calls it says that what we have our banksters supplying gangsters.

And he's spent decades, you know, exposing unbelievable corruption in the banking business, and right now there's no serious regulation of the banking business going on.

It's very clear the directions from this White House are, you know, you're not supposed to be bothering these business people, and so bureaucracies do what they're told they're not And this could be the earliest warning of a severe drop in the economy where the stock market falls by twenty thirty fifty percent.

It will recover eventually, but it falls, lots of people lose their jobs, lots of people lose their homes, it becomes very difficult to borrow money.

The same thing we saw happen in two thousand and eight, and by some measures, mark economists have shown that the Great Recession of two thousand and eight to ten did more harm and more lasting harm than the Great Depression of nineteen twenty nine to thirty two.

Think about that.

It more harm.

There's a professor at Santa Clair University, a business professor who's done a very detailed study of the Great Recession, and he concludes that basically, we lost two years of the complete economic output of the country at the time of it happened twenty I'm sorry, forty dollars, So if we do it in today's dollars, it would be about sixty trillion dollars of economic output just gone.

This is why, wow, you said so much.

First of all, I love the Yeah, I'm sorry about that.

No, no, no, it's great.

In fact, you and you anticipated a couple of questions.

I was going to have.

H I love the term banksters.

First of all, I think that that's a I mean and and the other thing just as again, as a digression or as an aside.

It's interesting to me always when people who we certainly see in the banking world, the Jamie Diamonds of the world, the very well educated Harvard graduates, make these huge plays like the silver futures, et cetera, and they're that wrong about crypto, about whatever there.

In other words, you know, it's not as gamed as the system is.

It's not a lead pipe, since that wherever these guys put their money, it's it's going to be a profit.

In fact, it's backstopped sadly by us.

Well and in.

Twenty twelve, yeah, twenty twelve, So this is after the Great Recession.

There was a trade made in the London office of JP Morgan.

When they realized it had gone badly, they went to a very Wall Street friendly journalist who wrote a story saying, well, they're going to have to announce a JP Morgan that a rogue trader made mistakes and it's going to cost them maybe a billion dollars.

Well a, it was about six billion dollars and the company's claim.

JP Morgan's claim was, well, we bought a hedge.

A hedge is a way to reduce risk that the price will go very down or very up.

You're pretty much guaranteed a profit a certain zone, and that it morphed into a speculative bet.

Well, a hedge, And I don't think most people have any idea this.

If you do your Telly audience, a hedge is a complicated legal document with all sorts of obligations and dates and obligations to be met.

And a hedge can no more morph into a speculative bet than my marriage can morph into a dot.

That's what I wrote at the top.

It was an absurd thing.

But most of the reporters who cover Wall Street, many of whom are very well paid, the ones on TV or a million dollar salary, Folks, they don't know anything about how banking actually works.

They've never read the regulations and the statutes, and you know, they depend on access and interviews.

And since we broke our story it was actually yesterday morning that we broke the story, we have been completely wided out.

That's a newsroom phrase, meaning nobody picked up on our story except overseas.

And one of the reasons I want to mention this with you today is that if it turns out that we're right that there is big trouble coming, we get credit.

Little tiny DC report, which struggles to stay in business because we run it on a shoe string.

Almost everybody, including James, Henry and I are volunteers.

Wow, we have to pay for you know, the technical costs of these things were taken in less money than you do.

That says a lot.

I would say also that we're gonna well we were there first.

We will link to the story under this video, and I'll also, of course I'll tweet it and put on social media.

But more to the point, because I think a lot of people check out these videos, we'll have a link to it right under the video.

Depressed Canadian says the Great Recession also fueled right wing populism like the Tea Party of twenty ten twenty twelve, which gave us their nominal leader in Trump.

And that was actually astro turf, you know, fake grass This was not a grassroots movement.

It was funded by the Koch brothers, but they did a very good job of making it appear it was a grass roots movement though it was not.

And you'll notice it's pretty much faded away and been replaced by MAGA and the people who are in Mega fall basically into two categories.

The cynics typically those with education and money who see a chance to exploit something, and the rest of it is people who they don't know anything, but their economics are terrible and they now have an enemy to blame for it.

Anybody who was in Maga, it's your fault.

But that's one of the dangers.

One of the dangers in nineteen twenty nine was are we going to follow the Europeans and become a fascist or communist country because of the economic damage done through these through you know, casino capitalism.

And one of the things that's been very nice today is that a whole bunch of websites because I and some other people have been trying to monitor what gets picked up about this.

There's post after posts that says things like David K.

Johnston doesn't publish bs or if Johnston says that you can rely on it, and a few people said, well, I no, no, And I've gone in and said go read the story.

The graphic is there for you to see the details and the dates.

Of course, JP Morgan, we went to five different spokespersons.

Nobody's gotten back to us, and I don't expect they will.

They only talked to friendly journalists, and the New York Fed tried to tell a journalist, the one we know of who called them, because they came back to us and said, oh, this is routine.

These are called repo deals, where you swap securities for cash.

These go on all the time.

They're absolutely ordinary.

And the person said, no, wait a minute, your own chart shows essentially no deals for more than five years, and then suddenly this explosion of deals.

Well, we'll have to get back to you about that.

There's the repo chart that David's talking about, with nothing going on, then all of a sudden, off the scale.

Yeah, from July, and you know, in the collapse in two thousand to eight, one of the key things that happened is there were what are we called credit default swaps.

So if some loan I've made were to sour, I'm going to make a swap with somebody else to reduce my risk, to hedge my risk of loss.

Well, there were so many credit default swaps sold because of nice fat fees for relatively little work.

That's something like ten times the total value net worth of the planet was in these swaps.

So as soon as they began to fail, it's a house of cards, they all fall apart.

Right now, there are very good indications that we have all sorts of these speculative bets on crypto, particularly, but silver, some other commodities at levels that exceed the total value of the available commodities.

And that's exactly what happened before.

And by the way, four years before the collapse, in two thousand and eight, I wrote two stories in the New York Times, short little stories, but in the Sunday paper that essentially said to anybody who was reading them, housing prices are overly inflated and cannot continue at this rate because of a very simple metric.

You know, if you make one hundred thousand dollars a year, you can't finance a million dollar house.

You don't qualify.

And wages were growing at about one third.

No, I'm sorry, I get that backwards.

House prices are going about thirty percent faster than wages for a long period of time, and it just can't continue.

That's just not possible.

There has to be an adjustment down the road.

But Alan Greenspan, the you know, the head of the Federal Reserve at the time when when the collapse came, said nobody could have seen this coming.

Yeah, right, I'm a reporter and I saw it coming.

Back then, David, And then I'll get to this one.

What was the right way in which the economy needed to be treated?

What was the right way to stop that bleeding?

Well, I think that several things should have happened.

I think first of all, the Bush administration in its closing days wanted to get something like seven hundred almost eight hundred billion dollars and be able to spend it as it saw fit, with a proviso that no one could challenge or question what they were doing.

And they had a treasury at the times before I head of former head of Golden Sacks, the biggest investment bank, and I was the first person to jump on that and say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes, that's not at all right.

You have to be accountable for what you do.

But I think the key things that should have happened is we should have prosecuted a lot of these bankers.

Bill Black, who I'm sure you've had on the show, was the guy who figured out what was going on in the savings and loans back in the late eighties and the two thousand and eight collapse was one hundred and seventy five, five times bigger.

Yeah, and then the sonl to which you've referred people did go to prison.

People, Well, because of Bill, almost nine hundred high level bankers, not one of the mole people, I mean CEOs and coos of companies, chief operating officers went to prison.

They were convicted and went to prison.

When the two thousand and eight collapse came, Bill was persona on grated, no one would speak to him.

The Obama administration came in.

Eric Holder, the corporate lawyer who became Attorney General, said, oh, we're going after everybody on Wall Street.

He was told by the Inspector General, No, we're not.

You're not going after anybody on Wall Street.

The FBI during the Bush administration literally put out a statement saying that there are two kinds of mortgage fraud in America.

Both of those frauds involved corrupt borrowers.

What Bill showed was the corruption was the bankers who were looting their own companies.

And he later wrote a book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank Own One yea.

There should have been massive prosecutions.

Barack Obama said on sixty Minutes, Well, all of these things are terrible, but they're not crimes.

And when that happened, I remember flying out of my chair and going fraud is always an everywhere crime.

Sure, Obama made a decision he wanted to rebuild the economy rather than get retributions.

So people like Jamie Diamond still have their jobs and they're fabulously wealthier today.

And the six too big to Fail banks have a much bigger share of American banking.

So we should have protected ordinary people.

Number one, we should have infused the banks with the cash that they needed, but under onerous terms for the top managers.

You know you can't get any more stock options or cash in any of your stock and tell you've repaid these notes on ownerous terms.

I analyzed one of the terms that was in the public record where Warren Buffett put up some money and the federal government put up money, and with a little chart, and I showed that the federal government just gave away the store, whereas Warren Buffett made a very smart deal for a lot of money, of the kind you can make when your borrower is in trouble financially, and so they mitigated it.

We didn't have a ten year long recession mark but nobody was held to account for this.

And one of the things I point out at DC Report is that as the rules exist now, there's every incentive for the people.

Jim Henry calls banksters to take these dangerous bets because they make them richer if they pay off, and if they don't, well, the government's going to have to step in and save you, because otherwise the whole economy will go into a long recession.

Yeah, socialize the losses.

Asy egletarian.

I think it's hard for me to see the name on the small screen.

Nineteen twenty nine, written by Andrew Ross Sorkin, a must read history.

Yeah.

Yeah, the reporter who is considered the most friendly to Wall Street, the one who wrote the earlier book that basically said, you know who the victims were the two thousand economic collapse, It was the bankers.

The Wall Street bankers are the ones who were the victims.

Ross Sorkin, the guy who wrote this book.

He is you know, he's on TV.

He is very, very sympathetic to Wall Street, and well, everything he writes is literally true.

It's the it's the tone and the approach, and of course it's made him a very, very wealthy and influential man because you know, he provides these people what they want.

I mean, JP Morgan, you know, is ruthless in trying to make sure that you toe the line with them, that you don't write what they don't want.

And I believe me, I've been on the front line of that without ever speaking to anybody at JP Morgan, but clearly being told that you know, they want to get me, and I'm not the only ones happened to Jim Henry.

I have no doubt that that that that they're not.

They're not happy to hear that David K.

Johnsin's written anything about them, But I on sork and everything I'd seen and read was him suggesting that we're basically dealing with an overheated market and that we're another I think he's.

Absolutely fundamentally right about that.

The level of the stock market compared to the profits reported by companies are completely out of whack and the only reason the economy isn't in deep trouble right now because more than a million people have been laid off this year.

The polite term for fired is because of these massive investments being made in artificial intelligence, and what's going on there is a race to create the big monopoly of the future.

So you've got Microsoft, Meta Alphabet, which owns Google and Facebook.

There's one more company I'm missing anyhow, four big companies pouring unbelievable sums of money hiring some coders who reported they are getting million dollars signing bonuses because they believe whoever gets the win on artificial intelligence will have an effective monopoly and the profits will be off the chart.

A lot of that money will turn out to be wasted, and people who use the Internet regularly, if you're on this show, you know you know that.

Right now, AI is at a stage where it produces ridiculous results.

I said to AI today that I wanted to send an email to Mark Thompson and it kept saying you don't have a listing for Charles Dayton.

I even reset my phone and repeated it and think crazy things.

Like that happen.

Yeah.

No, the voice recognition is a trouble, but so is the factual.

The fact finding is off to I mean, I'll get stuff back from them that all the time is way off, and then when I corrected, it'll say good catch, and it was like wow.

Well, in fact, somebody on one of the social media today said that they went to AI and it said that I didn't write this article.

It's a fraud, and I posted, well, you need to check your AI because it's what the software writers called delusional.

It's I don't want to be clear by an Enteros Sarkan.

He's factually completely accurate all the time.

It's a function of the tone and approach you take to it.

And you know that troubles me a great deal.

But he's fundamentally right that we are in something eerily similar to both nineteen twenty nine and two thousand and eight.

And the scary part, the really scary part, is in nineteen thirty two we elected a president who brought in a team of people who knew what to do to repair the economy.

In two thousand and eight to nine, well, they didn't prosecute people.

Uh, they did nonetheless prevent a long term decline.

Not this gang in the White House today.

They have no idea what they're doing.

They are complete philistines.

The Washington Post just reported that they're seeking emergency permission to tear down twelve historic buildings in Washington why they could be used in an active shooter situation.

Yeah, that was the part of all the ability.

Yeah, saw that piece.

Yeah, it's.

But but you're right, the clown car that is there, as you suggest, it is no match for the kind of crash that you suggest.

We are, you know, sort of on the precipice of and for those who are in our audience hanging on to what we have.

You know, we've built through a life and we still have mortgages and still have commitments of one sort or another.

Is there high ground in an economy that's teetering.

Well, time is always the recovery.

If you go look at a market stock market chart, if you've got your money in the Vanguard five hundred or similar fund, which is what Warren Buffett and other people recommend most people should do, including me, if you're not going to spend the money in the next three or five years, don't worry about it.

It's going to fall in price, it'll come back up.

If you sell when you're at the bottom, you will never recover.

So pardon me while I.

Turn off my phone.

I thought I turned it off.

So the.

Money market funds are not safe.

In two thousand and eight, they did what's called breaking the buck.

The money markets are always set to be a dollar per share and then you get whatever interest is on top of that.

So if it's a dollar two, you get two pennies of interest.

And they broke the buck, but it came back.

So is this your retirement money?

Just don't worry about it, and in fact, look at it as an opportunity to put more money in while prices are cheap if you can, if you don't lose your job, because you can buy cheaply.

But if you're you know, if you're my age, I just turned seventy seven Christmas.

Eve, you don't have got there.

You don't have that very long term outlook.

So it depends on your circumstances.

But I would not do things if I unless I had to, not go buy a new car today unless I need to because my car's failing.

I wouldn't take on a new mortgage.

I certainly wouldn't borrow money to go on a vacation or financial wedding or something.

I would try to hoard cash, increase your savings, even if the bank's only paying you one percent interest, because if the economy gets in trouble, there's nothing better for you than cash.

And I think we will.

I mean it could be tomorrow and it could be two years from now.

But the current conditions, as Andrew Ross Sarkin points out in this book nineteen twenty nine, and we've been pointing out, they cannot continue.

Yeah.

Well, I mean this reporting, a DCER report, is really strong.

We'll have a link to it under this video.

Look, we've talked a lot about Trump and this incoming administration.

When we were beginning this year, they wasted no time in pardoning all the J sixers.

They wasted no time and pardoning some of the biggest white collar offenders in the history of white collar offenses.

The Justice Department is stocked with the henchmen for Trump, as is the FBI, as is essentially every other institution in Washington.

They just recalled all the diplomats from overseas that were appointed during the Biden administration.

This all the career diplomat, the career diplomats, thank you.

They'll get reassigned and then apparently many of those positions populated by Trump appointments.

So as we finished the year, David K.

Johnson, and by the way, I'm gratified to learn that you're a Christmas Eve.

I'm the day after Christmas, so we have Christmas book ended with our birthdays.

Give me a state of this year.

Trump has done tremendous damage to some serious, long standing American institutions.

So what stands out to you.

Well, let me rely on the title of my twenty eighteen book, the Middle Book in my Trump Trilogy.

It's even worse than you think, and it is.

It's vastly worse than you think.

First of all, they're selling pardons.

I don't think anybody can miss that they are selling pardons.

And well, Trump may not be liable, I think he can be despite the Supreme Court ruling that he has community for official acts.

Giving me pardons an official act.

Taking money is not an official act, so I think he can be prosecuted for this.

And remember, we pardoned a guy who was convicted of bringing four hundred tons of cocaine into this country.

They are.

Not paying attention to cyber threats.

Pete hag Seth announced the Pentagon was going to stop putting all this effort into who's trying to break into the Pentagon's computers, which goes on tens of thousands of times a day, including by foreign governments.

They by the way, what was the what was the political reasoning or the twisted perverse reasoning on the part of heg seth in.

That I do not remember, but I think he didn't see cyber as part of the warrior ethos and lethality ahead.

Yeah, the.

The economic damage that is being done because of the tariffs that Trump continues to tell people, and I continue to get emails from people.

You know the tariffs.

I mean, China's paying our taxes.

No, you're paying the tariff.

The Chinese aren't paying a dime.

And by the way, the Chinese just hit their first trillion dollar export year.

They're just pivoting away from US and doing business everywhere else in the world.

And at the same time, they're putting more money into science, and they are making massive loans to poor countries, which are going to give them tremendous leverage over countries in Asia and Africa going forward.

They're buying up water rights and land so they can grow crops if the climate change, as we expect, gets much worse.

And Trump has no clue to what's going on here.

He is an appallingly ignorant man.

So I think things are much worse than they even appear.

I think Donald's mental decline, and remember I've known him for thirty seven more than thirty seven years now is getting rapidly worse.

His rants and things are all indicative of serious dementia issues.

And with a handful of exceptions like Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobart, of all people, the Republican establishment continues to bow down to Trump.

And on the Democratic side, the two leaders on Capitol Hill, Keem Jeffreys and Charles Schumer, continue to represent what some people call the corporate Democrats.

They're not in touch with what's going on here, and so I think that next year will be economically worse.

I'd point out that Jamie Diamond Diamond of JP Morgan Chase said about six months ago that the American economy is deteriorating, and he hasn't changed his position about that.

So I'd be very concerned going forward.

I would be especially concerned about things like measles, which we had essentially eradicated.

Measles is an incredibly deadly disease.

When I was a boy in the fifties, parents were just terrified about polio, measles and mumps and long and behold, we now have measles in the Bay area.

Yeah, the San Francisco Bay Area, unheard of for more than a decade.

Were not properly going to be vaccinating children.

We are putting women at risk if they get pregnant.

And you know, about one in six pregnancies just that we know of, because you got to be pregnant for a while, because before you know you're pregnant, about one in six known pregnancies just on its own doesn't work out.

But the Trump administration doesn't get that.

They don't understand biology, and we're infuriating our friends.

I mean, the Danes now have people on duty twenty four hours a day to monitor everything that comes out of Trump's mouth.

He's renewed his suggestion that we might just seize Greenland, which is owned by Denmark.

He's talked about invading Mexico and he won't, you know, clearly threatening a war which he has no authority to do in Venezuela.

And so long the Republican leadership bows down to him, he's going to continue in his dictatorial way.

So I'm sorry.

As somebody who is an incurable optimist, I often say nobody has eight children as I do.

Unless they're incurable optimists.

I actually see very dark period, at least in the next year.

If the Democrats can avoid their habituals snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and actually get control of the House and the Senate, then Trump is stymied and things he can do will be very limited.

He'll do some terrible things, but he'll be highly limited, and there will be investigations that will lead to prosecutions for people.

But you know that means people have to not go, Oh, I don't want to hear about politics.

You know, it's all dirty.

I don't care.

They're all the same, They're not all the same.

And that's the whole point of citizenship.

We're not going to have some king, whether it's the third or demented Donald, tell us what to do.

We're gonna choose our own fate, and we can choose.

We absolutely can choose to throw away our liberty, to throw away our prosperity, and to decide to live like people did in the Soviet Union, like they live today in China, under a dictator who doesn't care about you one wit.

Yeah, isn't true here here, David, thank you for a great year and I look forward to next year again.

Links to the new piece from DC Report with some revelations when it comes to the future at dcreport dot org, but also under this video.

Thanks David K.

Johnston, Thank you best, Happy New year, good stuff.

Love that guy, the Mark Thompson Show.

It was great it.

How would you have this?

We could try ignoring it.

You cannot say you love your country?

Where am I weed?

Smokers at, stay at home and get baked.

Right on?

Everybody, Thank you for being here.

It is our live presentation as we close in on the end of the year.

I'm very grateful for everyone who supported this show and joined us live or you listen on Spotify or on Apple podcasts or on iHeartRadio, however you do it, we appreciate you taking us in or joining us as I say live on YouTube.

Chaplain Fred, who is an OG of the show, Hi, Mark, Kim Tony, I'm back from my long and needed can kon vacation.

Welcome home.

It's hard to come back to so much sad news.

Indeed, it's been a pretty rough period.

Chaplain Fred, and big shout out to you Big Luis.

Please book a grand opening festival at the new Trumps with rage against the machine system of down I can't and Metallica to help lot and Metallica to help with remodeling a hashtag burn Yes, big shoutout Louise's Luis has always got something to say.

Jim Slaton, let me try to make this bigger so I can read these things.

Gosh, I'm so irsolating for five says I declined to participate in this event because it conflicts with my beliefs consistent with the Colorado cake baking ruling.

Big shout out, big shout out, Jim Slayton.

Yeah, we're talking about people and performers declining to perform at the Kennedy Center.

That's where it comes from.

Yeah, and I read this on the Era of Arizona Eagletarrian about the Assorcin book Love David K.

Johnston says, Cindy, even when he promises that twenty twenty six is going to be worse than nineteen twenty nine, thanks and happy.

New Year, big shoutout.

Yeah, it is a true that it wasn't the best news, but David is such a welcome chronicle of that which is happening now and also as a terrific historian as to what's happened before and how the two connect.

We'll have Bill Black, by the way, to whom he referred, joining us either next week or the week after to talk about many of these same issues affecting the American economy and the regulatory structure.

I guess it's a little late.

When does When is he supposed to come on?

Jefferson Graham?

Twelve forty five?

Yeah, so it's on the West coast.

That's twelve forty five, So it's forty five, So he can wait because he's early.

I see him there.

We like early car.

Yeah, you can wait there in the car for a few minutes while Kim does news, can't you.

Jeff?

Yeah, sure, Oh there is Yeah, there he is.

Don't get too close to him.

Just we're not we're not connecting with him right now, all right?

I am what well, I just I appreciate that he's joining us in the car, and he pulled all the way over.

I know you'd think that I would appreciate it to the point that I put him right on, But no, you've got to come out at the pointed time, am I right?

Kim?

It's true.

It's a very strict schedule here at the Mark Thompson.

Yeah that we keep it very very tight deal.

Yeah, but it gives him a few minutes to go get a slurpy or a slushie or whatever he wants and then take a few pictures perhaps, Yeah, take a few pictures, share them.

And speaking of which, I got some great pictures into the mother Ship that I'm gonna grab in the first story or two that you do during news.

I'll just step out of the studio for a quick second.

But I'm looking forward to some news, Kim's news, and we'll talk to Jeff on the Tech Tuesday and a quick update from him on a lot of consumer products and the future.

Smashed the lot of your iron rod.

Get to that smash the like button if you would please.

It helps us in the world of YouTube, just helps the algorithm.

And do please subscribe and hit the notification bell and that way you'll know whenever we dropped a new video again.

December thirty first, we have what do we have a video?

December thirty first, Tony, do we have an We're on the air December thirty first, Friday, Friday, No Friday is oh tomorrow, Yeah, tomorrow tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the thirty first we're on the air.

We're live, but on no on New Year's Day we do the Oil Lawyer Marathon.

Yeah, so you will like that.

The Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer.

We have put together all of her appearances and you will.

Like that with your Iron Ride.

Okay, Mark Thompson Show, thanks for being.

Thompson on the Mark the Compson Show.

I'm Kim McCallister and this report is sponsored by the Amazing Coachella Valleycoffee dot Com.

A new report as the United States land strike in Venezuela was carried out by the CIA.

Both the New York Times and CNN reporting yesterday that a CIA drone hit a remote dock on the Venezuelan coast earlier this month, The network, citing sources, saying the US believed the facility was being used by the Trend de Aragua gang as part of its operation to store and ship drugs.

The latest word is that no one was at the facility when the strike happened.

There were no casualties.

President Trump saying Monday the US had targeted a dock connected to drug trafficking.

That's as about as specific as he got on that.

President Trump says the United States will go after Iran if the country tries to build up a missile stockpile and re establish its nuclear program.

Speaking Monday alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin net and Yahoo, Trump said it would be much smarter if Iran decides to negotiate.

Trump also said he would support Israeli military strikes on Iran.

It all comes as protests have erupted in Iran over the economic situation in that country.

Iran threatening a harsh, regrettable response to any aggressive action from the United States Following President Trump's warning, a federal judge in California is ruling that the federal government can share medicaid information with ICE.

This comes as the Trump administration works to locate individuals it believes are illegally in America.

Sharing medicaid information had been blocked by a preliminary injunction involving twenty states, a federal judge temporarily blocking the Trump administration as well from ending deportation protections for about two hundred South Sudanese nationals.

The order intended to ensure the migrants can remain in the country until a judge can considers that case more fully.

The granddaughter of John F.

Kennedy has died.

The JFK Library Foundation announcing thirty five year old Tatiana Schlosberg died from cancer.

She leaves behind two small children.

Schlosberg revealed last month that she had less than a year to live after being diagnosed with leukemia.

She was diagnosed right after she gave birth to her second baby, and really sad she passes away at the age young age of thirty five years old.

President Trump says the new White House Ballroom will feature a drone free roof.

President praising the new construction during a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin nettan Yahoo, sharing that the building will have all bullet proof glass.

Trump expected to provide plans for the construction in January as the first step of a review to be conducted by the National Capital Planning Commission.

Construction on the ballroom expected to be completed by twenty two, twenty eight.

It is now estimated that it will cost four hundred million dollars.

Jesus, that's crazy.

The whole thing's absolutely insane.

Well, this guy is a wrecking ball literally, I guess to the White House a wrecking ball.

But to watch him run amuck in Washington and over these institutions, and to just build stuff with American taxpayer money while you say you're, you know, saving the American taxpayers money of you know, redoing the Kennedy Center and all that.

I mean, it's just as the guys are mad king.

I wonder how you build a drone free roof.

You put like, I don't know, disruptors up there so that you know, the electronically they all fall to their death.

How does that work?

I mean, it's absurd because the American airspace is pretty well protected.

I mean, so I don't understand.

The entire argument is pretty bankrupt of any kind of foundation.

But I mean you can, you can jam in all kinds of ways.

I mean, I think the White House already isn't pretty well protected.

I don't know, I really, I literally don't know, but it sounds pretty specious.

The channel, the streaming channel Netflix, is reporting its best Christmas viewership ever recorded, The streaming giant, highlighting a second volume of Stranger Things season five as a major contributor to that achievement.

It can be expected that the series will soon join Netflix's list of its most popular English language TV titles of all time.

Given the new entry strong performance so far, they're still.

There and they're in the lead to you know, buy Warner Brothers.

Sure, that's so.

We can talk to jeff about that too when he comes on.

There is a woman facing charges after allegedly Pepper spring an entire family during a road rage incident happened here in the Bay Area in the city of Palo Alto.

Police say the woman struck a man's car, got out of her car, threatened him, and then pepper sprayed him.

His wife and his four young children then drove off, later arrested, but a day later arrested.

There's the mug shot there of the suspect.

In that case.

Troubled, Yeah, it turns out.

Lastly, before we get to Jefferson Graham, we have a new billionaire among us, and that would be Beyonce.

According to Forbes, Beyonce is now the fifth musician to become a billionaire thanks to the success of her Cowboy Carter tour.

The other musicians on the list Beyonce's husband, Jay z.

So they're doing pretty well.

Rihanna, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift and now Beyonce, the Billionaire bees all around.

M hmm.

This report sponsored by Coachella Valleycoffee dot Com.

I'm so so loving my tea will carry me into twenty twenty six with silver linings.

And Mark loves the Holiday Blend, the Ocatillo Espresso, the Elgato.

It's love.

I love it all right, very very good.

Put that coffee down.

The people at Coachella Valley Coffee, I just have to say, are so nice.

I got a little package with so nice, but the product is just amazing.

They're tasting notes that are highly accurate, and we'll tell you exactly what you're going to get on the website Coachella Valleycoffee dot com.

And should you find something to purchase, please use the Mark Thompson Show discount.

It is Mark T M A r K T and that will get you ten percent off.

At Coachella Vallecoffee dot com.

Greg is saying the ballroom is really an AI center.

Cam oh last reporting on that out there ballroom is a cover story?

Said anything on that, kim No.

Greg Deckleman is saying that the ballroom is really an AI center, So what does that mean?

Like it's surrounded by Computers.

Yeah, exactly, Greg.

What does that mean?

You know what?

I mean that every time they want AI they go into the into the ballroom area and the AI something.

I don't even know what that means.

Does that mean there's no dancing?

I mean, so you know, when they're going to have a reception for some dignitary, just step into our AI ballroom.

Love to ask Jefferson Graham about it.

Maybe Jefferson does know this.

If he doesn't, I would definitely get it together.

Jeff You should know that something on this I've heard AI is getting very very big.

I'm Kim McAllister.

This is the Mark Thompson Show.

Yeah, the Mark Thompson Show.

I got a card into Mark Thompson's show Land cheers to you today.

It's a birthday card wishing you a happy birthday Mark.

Can you see that?

It's from a listener, Tricia Saint George, and she writes, uh, I love Mark Thompson and Mark Thompson Show.

Happy birthday Mark.

She's like, you know, she's she's done it all herself.

Kim.

Can you see the kind of work that's gone into this card.

It's really cute.

She drew those balloons those aren't, Like, did a really nice job with it.

That's cute.

Who's it from?

From?

Tricia Saint George.

She is a viewer listener and she met me at this event.

Oh she can see us together.

There's Tricia and myself and she's wearing a can you see the tech the T shirt?

She's wearing?

What she's wearing?

A what T shirt?

With our logo on booked?

I didn't even know we made those shirts the back.

Yeah, that's cute, it really is.

That's why.

What's that she made our bootleg shirt?

I love it?

And then she uh shared this, which is somewhere at Bucky's in Texas, traveling east to west in November, and she's wearing the same shirt I'm wearing now Project four point five?

Nice.

Can you can you see that?

It's it's the same.

I see the same.

And Tricia, you are my new favorite person for the day.

Look at that.

Look how happy she is.

Kim, another devoted fan, says Glenn.

Yeah, it's pretty pretty cool.

And anyway, thank you for the birthday shout, really really cool, and thank you for the birthday card and the love and for grabbing all the merch you can get your own merchant get Mark March dot com.

Yeah, that Mark Thompson show project.

I think Tenny four point five says a lot.

You guys have heard me talk about it before, so I won't bore you with it again now, especially, I don't want to make this guy wait any longer.

He is a longtime tech writer at USA Today.

Then he told them to go shove it and he left USA Today and he started his own thing.

And it's become even more successful.

I checked.

It's more successful than USA Today, I know.

So check it out.

It's a photo Walks TV.

He joins us to talk technology on Tuesdays, the Great Jefferson Graham.

Hi, Jeff, I'm Mark.

How you doing.

What have you been to BUCkies before?

Have you been to BUCkies?

No?

I'll bet you have, Huh I have twice?

Yes?

Yeah, that's great book.

Is it a what's it like?

What is BUCkies?

Take seven eleven?

You've ever seen in your life?

Again, that's why in this picture BUCkies?

Can you see it?

Yeah?

Imagine fifty fifty seven eleven's all under one roof, large and the big thing there is the brisket and not your thing.

But they in the middle of the store.

They are slicing brisket and putting it into sandwiches and it's awfully good.

That's pretty great.

That's pretty great.

Well, I figured you'd been there, since you've been most everywhere.

Well, I went to one and you know the root sixty six trip got made a few BUCkies.

Right.

Yeah, aren't they the size of a Walmart?

Says san Jose Lola.

Yeah, there they are slicing their brisket.

Wow, John doesn't love the brisket there.

We tried the brisket there was pretty bad, he says, Wow, Okay, taste a good.

Yeah, maybe you just got some bad brisket, all right, Jeff.

Yesterday we talked about Kim had the story of Apple's entry into this folding mobile phone market where the essentially the phone is the size of like an iPad, and then it folds over and then it's the size of a phone, and it's coming out next year.

I think she was saying, maybe maybe Apple hasn't announced anything, so it's it's it's all speculation, Kim, Did you know that that they.

Were that's pure speculation.

Did you know that, Kim?

I thought you told us that it's coming out.

Would you like to defend your position.

I said that there was a guy who was leaking pictures of it.

Oh okay, okay, Yeah, just just to remember, they also were coming out with a car and that never happened.

And there were other products that people were rumoring that they were coming out with that they decided not to come out with.

So the all turns out.

And then, just to be Kim didn't say they were coming out with it.

She said that they are leaking pictures of it.

It sort of was implied they're coming out with it.

But Apple, Apple didn't leak.

Somebody else did.

But and sometimes those are AI pictures and all made up.

So take it with the greatest salt until until September twenty fifth ish happens and they sit on stage and say here's a new product.

Yeah, that's when you know it.

But anyway, the foldable phone has been out for a few years.

Samsung's had them for five years.

And what do you think of the Samsung foldables?

One percent, less than one percent market share.

It's a nice phone.

It's very expensive, it's roughly two thousand dollars, and it's beautiful.

It's beautiful.

At Google has one too.

They're beautiful.

It'd be great to have a phone that's that big.

I wouldn't want to spend the money on it, and so I didn't do it.

But the people who haven't like it though.

There is a crack in the middle, and apparently it can get messed up.

Oh interesting, Okay, So what else do you have for us today?

I want to talk to you about one of your one of our our fans named Cheryl Okay.

Cheryl left me a note on Facebook that said, I watch you on the Mark Thompson Show.

You're so knowledgeable.

I'm wondering if you have any ideas why I can't Why can't I send any emails from my Yahoo male?

Yeah, and to which I don't have an answer for her.

But I do have a suggestion, a suggestion contact Yahoo's help department.

It's something that a lot of people actually don't think about doing because they assume that they'll never get a response.

But most companies, except for Facebook and Google, will actually get back to you and not give up until you come up with a solution, and which brings you back to Apple.

Apple has the best tech support of any company I've ever come across.

They answer the phone right away, They don't say what's your serial number, They don't say, well that's out of warranty.

They just will talk to you.

Your product could be twenty years old and they will still talk to you.

Getting into the store.

Getting into the store to see the genius is another story.

Takes a lot of work, but calling them on the phone is really effective.

And Yahoo has contact on the ahu mal page that shall should go check out, which is what I suggested to her.

Wow, I a real suggestion and real help from Jefferson Graham.

No one is more surprised by that than I am.

I thought he would tell you the story that we often hear, which is that these big companies they're not big into customer support.

You're basically screwed.

But no, you think that there actually might be something there.

They will always get back to you, some better than the other.

I just dealt with a company called small Rig.

It's a Chinese company.

I bought a product, big mistake.

Don't buy a product from a Facebook ad.

So I bought it, and I always want to buy from Amazon.

I know they're evil, but at least I can return things.

You know, it's really easy to return.

So small Rig it was two hundred and twenty five dollars.

I got the product.

It's an iPhone cage something I hold.

It's heavy, heavy, and I don't want it.

So I had to write to them and they said, well, take a picture of the box, and take a picture of this, and do this and do this.

And then when I said I'm returning it, they said, fine, but you have to pay for shipping.

Okay, And I just came back from the UPS store where they said sixty five dollars.

Right, that's how they screw you.

I've been in those spots.

It's absolutely you're right the return policy on the Amazon world.

And sadly Amazon has driven so many businesses, you know, to the edge of bankruptcy and over the edge.

But wow, their return policy is so clean, Ron says, Ask Jefferson Graham if there's a way around signing into Samsung on a new TV.

Not sure why I need to involve my TUV company to use non related apps?

Why?

Ye?

Yeah, Well I don't have a Samsung TV, so I haven't gone through the process.

I assume that you're not going to be able to get the menu, the smart TV menu, that's the problem.

Yes, yeah, unless you sign in but you know, come up with some make up a make up an email address, get a botus email address that you're going to do nothing with and just use that to sign in, and then you're kind of off the hook, you know.

Oh that's a good idea.

Yeah, just create an email address just for the TV.

I mean, Gmail will let you create hundreds of emails if you want them.

I hate Samsung at gmail dot com or whatever.

You know.

Marcus Aurelius says, I hate my TV.

Well, I worship anyone who uh hate something, as long as it's in animic in aimes.

Okay, well, I have an Amazon TV that I don't love because do you know that when you have streaming, you're supposed to just see a bunch of apps on there and you're supposed to p take a pick whatever you want to see.

Now Amazon's giving me dishwasher ads and tied and this just when you turn the TV on.

I don't think that's right.

Yeah, no, you're right.

I mean it was supposed to be free of all that stuff, but now all that clutter has made it to those other streaming platforms.

Amazon return shipping is free, but if you bought from a third party, Amazon seller.

Are they sometimes charged for return shipping?

Says Western Florida.

You should be aware of that.

Thank you for the super chat.

My I love this kind of thing, Jeff.

My TV is sixteen years old.

Panasonic plasma still works, so why buy another?

Wow?

Right?

Why buy another plasma?

Was great?

Good for you.

I used to have one of those once upon a time.

I remember paying so much one of the first plasma consumer TVs.

I put it on the and I was so proud of that, like I wanted to be the first.

And then, you know, then I just felt like an idiot as the price lowered show dramatically so that by you know, two years later, you could buy that same TV for thousands less than.

I paid, and now it would be two hundred dollars.

Yeah right, exactly exactly.

So as we finished the year, Jeff, what what more can you share with us?

And then we'll shake.

On Sunday, I leave for Las Vegas for the annual CEES Electronic Show.

One hundred and fifty thousand people in Las Vegas.

The latest and greatest, all the new gizmos and gadgets.

The big theme is a I.

Right, It's gonna be a.

I everything I'm just not surprised, I guess.

Yeah.

So you know, I've been getting NonStop pitches.

Right, come see me, Come see me, Come see me.

This one I really like was we came up with a new way to make ice with AI.

Please come see us.

I'm going to see them.

No, no, no, oh that is hilarious.

Well, and by the way, you know you always introduced me and say he used to write for USA Today and always found other things.

Script's News is sending me to report.

Yes, all of these big companies they knew what they had in Jefferson Graham, and when he walked out, they were like, uh, jilted lovers.

They they huffed and they puffed and they stewed, and then eventually they came back around.

That's right, we'll have a good time.

Did they change the name of CES.

It's not called the Consumer Electronics Show anymore.

We changed it about six years ago.

And they always get mad at you when you say Consumer Electronics Show and they say no, see us.

Yeah see, yes, okay, all right, Well, well you'll be with us next Tuesday or not.

I don't think I'll be able to get a connection.

Oh, it's it's very hard from the from the trade show.

So you're going to be shooting a lot of stuff there and.

Yeah, maybe i'll let you guys know next week if I watch.

The last thing.

Jefferson Graham, what is the fallout from this drone company that's being shut down?

Yeah, provides most of the drones to the consumer market.

Very interesting question.

Now it's not just Dji, it's Chinese made drones.

The band is like, but only one company makes them and they're based in China, and that would be Dji.

You can still get the drone of first of all, if you own a drone, it's still you can still use it.

And in any drone that is being sold right now in the in the in the leftover inventory is available for sale.

So the big question that I have should I go buy a second drone even though my my regular drone is fine.

Maybe I'll never be able to buy another drone again.

Maybe I should just be stockpiling it just just in case.

Or maybe I could resell it for five thousand dollars.

I mean that's a that's a market.

Sure.

Yeah, you like those follow along drones.

I don't think they follow so good.

That's so the answer is no, you don't love them so much.

Yeah, I have a little Mini and it works pretty well.

Yeah, well it's I've considered.

I don't really have any use for the drone though.

I don't know, but it seems like it would be a cool thing to have.

But yeah, when you make travel videos, you want to have a drone.

You definitely need one, at least one, and I think you have, you know, your eyes on more than one.

All Right, have fun at the cees and we'll look forward to next Tuesday again.

If you want to check out Photo Walks TV, his YouTube series is up and you can check it out.

There's some great stuff in there, how to photograph things best, also just wondrous sorts of samples of cities and communities and experiences worldwide.

Really cool.

And Jeff was so helpful to us years ago when we were first coming on the air, and I will never forget that.

Jefferson Graham, thank you sir.

Happy New Year, Happy New Year.

I I'm so excited about all of you who have decided to check in with us.

Along the way.

The ballroom is really an AI center, as I was saying.

This is from Greg Decklman, and he says that the east wing had an underground room, and that is true.

It was a kind of a bunker type thing.

From what I understand.

The Presidential Emergency Operations Center is built by FDR.

The new one being modeled after the one in Israel, has the same contractors that the Israelis used on their says Greg Deckleman.

Thank you for both the update and the super chat so shout out.

Just hoping that the new underground room the Emergency Operations Center.

I just hope that Donald Trump is able to add some old and marble to it to give it sort of that same feel that you have above ground, because underground should feel the same way.

Thanks for all you do, says Carrie Fisher.

What a great team.

Thank you as you and Tony was showing you the artist conception of the ballroom.

Uh, we do have a great team.

I'm really in love with our team sometimes.

What I.

Mean, I think when they're paying attention, they're really doing well.

But you could have stopped it.

I'm really in love with our team.

I mean that would have been would have been yeah, kissing as I have to keep going.

I want to know what happened to the pictures I was supposed to see.

Thank you.

I also want to know what happened to the pictures I was supposed to see this week.

I don't know what.

Thank you for reminding me.

Adam is alive and I want you to remember this.

I'm not going to I'll shorten it.

This is in relation to the statement from Donald Trump that Kim was referencing, which is that the ballroom one of the reasons it has to be so much more expensive is because it's sort of being drone protected.

And bulletproof glass.

I mean, it's this is a state of pa.

Any Breach says it's BS.

Kim, remember everything he says is BS.

So there's that.

Don't talk to me that way.

I'm just saying that the peers that it was very inappropriate.

Are you saying I'm reporting the BS?

All right?

Yeah, you can take that there.

Yes, so it goes.

I'm excited about the last day of twenty twenty five, and we will be live.

A lot of shows are running recorded stuff.

Fill in people all the rest, not us.

We will all be here tomorrow.

The Donald is building his crypt below the ballroom, says Melfody in Wow.

Oh that's a good well, that's a gold ticket man that's a gold ticket.

Tomorrow you'll have John Rothman, a special treat, Michael Snyder with his year end Culture Blaster top ten the best movies of the last year.

Also, you know he does his fight in fifteen, like the extra five.

A lot of people on do the ten.

He does the fight in fifteen.

So we'll get all of that tomorrow, and we'll all be here tomorrow and can't wait to see you.

I'm SELFE Stevens for the Mark Johnson Show.

Babe BA.

Thanks for all the love everyone, thanks for all the support, and until tomorrow, Hi all the time.

Bye bye,