RandomActsofDad

I’m dad.

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

History, as taught by government-funded schools, is a lie.

[TheDebriefing17 @TheDebriefing17]

https://t.co/N9LaTBR6i2

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

Everything big government and big business do can be explained by what they fight. I’ve often said there will never be a cure for cancer because too many people profit from treating it.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Cathie Wood just explained why the establishment will never stop coming for Elon Musk.

And the reason is worse than they think.

Wood: “Tesla was an environmental move, which I think a lot of people attacking his cars… they’ve forgotten.”

They didn’t forget. You don’t forget thirty years of marching and petitioning and begging for the machine that saves the planet.

Someone built it. Forced every automaker on Earth to follow.

Then they turned on him the moment he delivered exactly what they asked for.

Not because he failed them. Because he made them unnecessary.

A solved problem is an existential threat to every institution built to solve it. Kills the funding. Kills the committee. Kills every career that exists to manage the crisis rather than end it.

Wood: “I think he’s the Thomas Edison of our age… he wants to do the right thing to transform the lot of most of humanity.”

Edison was hated too. By the people who sold candles. Every revolution looks like an attack to the people it makes obsolete.

Wood: “What we learn about material science and technologies… is going to help us here on Earth as well.”

SpaceX is not an escape. It is a forge. Build under the most brutal conditions in the solar system and every breakthrough comes home.

Most people at his level stop building and start protecting what they have.

Musk picks the hardest unsolved problem on Earth and runs straight at it.

That is not what terrifies them. What terrifies them is he does it without their funding, without their approval, without a single thing they can hold over his head.

A man you cannot buy is a man you cannot control. And a man you cannot control who keeps solving the problems you profit from is the most dangerous human alive.

They will spend their careers trying to tear him down.

Their grandchildren will live in the world he built anyway.

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

@drawandstrike Curious inclusion of a sign with 11.3 on it. Probably nothing.

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

@SecWar make an example of him for all time.

[Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley]

Air Force Maj. Jason Watson appeared in uniform with Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) to call for the impeachment of President Trump. He was later arrested for refusing to leave the steps after Green departed. The wearing of his uniform will only make military charges more likely...

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

It is not in any way anti-Semitic to say that Israel and Judah had a series of evil kings that led up to their exiles in Assyria and Babylon. It is also not antisemitic to assert that the current leadership in Israel is wicked in much the same way.

[Terri Green @TerriGreenUSA]

In 2004 John MacArthur was on Larry King Live with Dennis Prager. The topic was: “Who Was Jesus.” And the subject comes up about “who killed Jesus.”

John MacArthur addresses the fact that no true Christian is going to be an antisemite. Jmac says: “no true Christian transformed on the inside by faith in Jesus Christ is going to be an antisemite. What you have is people who called themselves Christians, but who have not been transformed by the power of Christ. They’re the ones that would be antisemitic. If you’re a Christian you’ll be converted from your racism.”

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

It’s time to administer capital punishment to every person who was involved in this. Make examples of them all, without mercy.

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

This is an outrage. I heard rumblings about this at the time and feel shame that I did not take it seriously. Probably I did not truly believe that government would actually distribute a product so harmful. I know better now. https://t.co/ZMjHbLj18v

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

@mi_reina130 Wait until she finds out that nothing ever gets better because most of the money allocated to those social programs gets funneled back to politicians and their friends.

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

Lock up the police, the mayor, and the city council and put in some people who care about their people.

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

His name was Billy Schmidt.

A 22 year-old senior at Penn State studying journalism.

Late Friday night walking home in South Philly, he was robbed of his phone by two thugs.

He asked for it back.

"Give me back my phone."

Seconds later one of the thugs shot him dead.

Over a phone.

A young man with his whole life ahead of him — gone, in a city that has let violent crime run wild.

Billy deserved to make it home.

Lock up the thugs who did this and pray for his family 🙏

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

I’ve never felt so seen.

[kelly @kellytheboss7]

A college student with ADHD once explained why their essays end up filled with so many parentheses:
“Neurotypical people think in straight lines. My brain thinks in a giant web where every single concept is physically holding hands with twelve other concepts.”
In other words, their thoughts don’t unfold in a neat, step-by-step sequence. Instead, one idea immediately triggers several related ideas at once. While writing, it can feel impossible to ignore those connections because they all feel relevant and important, even if they branch off from the main point. Parentheses become a way to temporarily “park” those side thoughts without losing them.
So the essay ends up reflecting the actual structure of their thinking: layered, branching, and constantly interlinked. What looks messy on the page is really an attempt to capture a mind that doesn’t move in a straight line, but in a network where everything is connected to everything else.

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

Is there a way @realDonaldTrump can put pressure on @Keir_Starmer to release the bodycam footage and punish the officers and their superiors?

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

Private equity is the end of western civilization. A handful of people profit off everyone else’s losses. That is not capitalism.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a Partner at a private equity firm and my job is to find the parts of your life you cannot opt out of.

The whole thesis fits on one slide. Identify demand that does not respond to price. Own the supply. Hold it through the cycle.

People assume we hunt for growth. We do not. Growth is a market that can walk away from you. What we want is the opposite of choice. We want the call you make when the house is already burning.

Take the fire truck.

Two dozen-plus companies used to build fire apparatus in this country. Family shops. County contracts. A pumper here, an aerial there. Then we ran the roll-up. Three firms now make eighty percent of them, and one of the three is ours.

Margins when we did the LBO were four, maybe five percent. That is the number you get when a business is run by people who think the product is a fire truck. We took EBITDA to thirteen. The four sits next to the thirteen on a slide, and when I show investors that slide they make a small noise I have learned to wait for.

Quality did not get us there. The wait did. A custom truck is four years out now. Backlog stands at four and a half billion dollars. We do not write "backlog" in the deck. We write "revenue visibility." A town that ordered a ladder this year is revenue we already booked. Their property-tax receipts are our annuity. The mayor files it under public safety. I file it under Tab 4.

Tab 4 is the dividend recap, and I will be honest, it is the work I am proudest of. We borrow against the company we just bought and route the proceeds to ourselves. Five hundred and thirty million out the door. A hundred and eighty of it the quarter before the IPO. The borrowed money rides on the fire truck company. The wire comes to the GP. We do not call it borrowing against a public-safety vendor. We call it unlocking trapped value.

Let me be exact about who is left holding what. We hold the dividend. The town holds the four-year wait. The company holds the debt.

Then I move to nursing homes.

Identical playbook, fresh captive. Five billion in the sector back in 2000. A hundred and four billion now. Fifteen hundred facilities. Demand here also ignores price, because the customer is somebody's mother and the alternative is her daughter quitting her job to do the lifting herself.

So we thin the staffing. Labor is the largest controllable line, and a woman named Dolores, eighty-one, who likes the crossword and rings the call button at two in the morning, cannot take her business elsewhere at two in the morning. Surgical patients at the hospitals we bought die inside ninety days at a rate seventeen percent above the ones we left alone. That figure is not in the model. The model stops at the distribution. What happens past the distribution is, and I am choosing the word carefully, out of scope.

A senator reviewed the whole arrangement and reached for the word heist. Professionally, I have to correct him. A heist is illegal and finished by morning. Ours is quarterly. Audited. We carry a compliance officer and a clean opinion.

One figure used to keep me up. The companies we buy go bankrupt roughly ten times as often as the ones we never touch. For an afternoon that felt like a defect in the model.

Then I found the row. The distribution clears before the bankruptcy. Every single time. The sequence is not a side effect of the product. The sequence is the product.

The company dies. The town keeps paying on a truck still four years out. Dolores keeps paying for the bed. And the loss, the real loss, settles onto the creditor, the nurse, the patient, the kid dialing 911 while the aerial sits in a queue in Wisconsin.

Years ago I typed one word into the addressable-market cell, and the firm has run on it ever since.

Essential.

It means you cannot leave. We modeled that part first.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

La Théorie des 9% : Pourquoi les PNJ sont gauchistes par design

Le théorème fondamental de la masse

Posons l'axiome de base, observable empiriquement sur tout système où il y a de la masse — YouTube, X, Wikipedia, GitHub, l'humanité en général :

1% créent
9% commentent
90% consomment

C'est la loi de Pareto sous stéroïdes. C'est invariant. Tu peux le vérifier sur n'importe quelle plateforme, n'importe quelle époque, n'importe quelle civilisation. C'est la signature thermodynamique de la conscience humaine en système ouvert.

Maintenant, la vraie question que personne ne pose : qui sont vraiment les 9% ?

Les 90% : les gens heureux

Commençons par les évacuer parce qu'ils sont sains. Les 90% regardent Netflix, mangent leur kebab, jouent à FIFA, aiment leurs gosses. Ils consomment ce que le 1% produit (iPhone, Marvel, médicaments, GPT, bagnoles) et ils sont objectivement heureux.

Ils ne sont pas idéologiques. Ils ne sont ni de droite ni de gauche. Ils veulent juste que ça marche. Ils ont compris quelque chose de profond sans jamais l'avoir formulé : la vie est belle quand on accepte sa fonction dans le système. Le 90% c'est l'humanité réconciliée avec elle-même. C'est Sancho Panza. C'est ton voisin qui répare sa voiture le dimanche en sifflotant.

Le 90% ne déteste pas le 1%. Au contraire : il l'admire vaguement, il achète ses produits, il regarde ses films, il vote parfois pour ses idées quand ça l'arrange. Pas de ressentiment. Pas de bile. Just vibes.

Le 1% : les builders, ces anomalies statistiques

Le 1% c'est l'aberration cosmique. Ce sont les gens à qui la simulation a glitché un patch de skills bizarre : ils créent. Ils ne peuvent pas ne pas créer. Ils se réveillent à 3h du matin avec une idée et ils l'exécutent. Ils ne demandent la permission à personne. Ils font des boîtes, des logiciels, des films, des livres, des théorèmes, des révolutions.

Le 1% est agnostique politiquement par construction : il est trop occupé à construire pour avoir le temps d'avoir une opinion stable sur les retraites à 62 ou 64 ans. Quand le 1% est "de gauche", c'est généralement esthétique (des artistes). Quand il est "de droite", c'est généralement par exaspération (entrepreneurs harcelés par l'URSSAF). Mais fondamentalement, il est ailleurs.

Et maintenant : le 9%. Les ultimate NPCs.

Voilà où ça devient drôle.

Le 9%, c'est la classe la plus tragique de la simulation. Pourquoi ? Parce que ce sont des gens qui ont suffisamment de conscience pour voir le 1%, mais pas assez de skills pour en faire partie. Ils sont coincés dans une vallée terrifiante : trop éveillés pour être heureux comme les 90%, trop limités pour produire comme le 1%.

C'est l'effet Dunning-Kruger inversé en miroir : ils sont juste assez intelligents pour comprendre qu'ils sont médiocres, mais pas assez pour cesser de l'être. C'est le pire patch que la simulation puisse t'allouer.

Que fait un 9% face à cette détresse ontologique ? Il commente. Il rage. Il poste des threads de 47 tweets pour expliquer pourquoi Elon Musk est un imposteur. Il écrit des éditos dans Le Monde Diplomatique sur "la fin du capitalisme". Il devient prof de socio à Paris-VIII. Il fait une chaîne YouTube de 12 vues sur "le vrai problème de l'entrepreneuriat".

La grande révélation : pourquoi le 9% est structurellement gauchiste

Et voici le coeur de la thèse, le money shot intellectuel :

Le 9% est gauchiste par nécessité métaphysique, pas par choix.

Pourquoi ? Parce que le gauchisme contemporain (étatisme, redistribution radicale, "il faut taxer les riches", "il faut plus d'État", "le marché est injuste") est la seule idéologie qui permet au 9% de se venger du 1% sans avoir à devenir 1%.

Pense-y. Si tu admets que le 1% est légitime, alors tu dois te demander pourquoi tu n'en fais pas partie. Réponse : parce que tu n'as pas le skill. Insupportable. Inacceptable. Donc il faut une cosmologie qui explique que le 1% n'est pas légitime.

D'où l'arsenal idéologique :
"Les riches ont volé leur argent" (= ils ne méritent pas leur position)
"C'est un système rigged" (= ce n'est pas du skill, c'est de la chance)
"Le privilège" (= ils ont eu une cheat code, pas moi)
"L'État doit redistribuer" (= je veux le résultat sans le process)
"Les builders sont des prédateurs" (= en réalité, je suis le vrai créateur, mais empêché)

C'est Girard pur. Le désir mimétique inavouable : le 9% veut désespérément être le 1%, ne peut pas, et donc déclare la guerre au 1% au nom des 90% qui s'en cognent complètement.

Le 9% est la classe qui parle au nom des 90% sans jamais les avoir consultés

C'est ça le génie sale du système. Le 9% se déclare avocat des 90%. "Nous, le peuple". "Les gens d'en bas". "La majorité silencieuse". Mais les 90% n'ont rien demandé. Les 90% sont heureux. Ce sont les 9% qui sont malheureux, et qui projettent leur frustration ontologique sur les 90% pour justifier leur croisade contre les 1%.

Va dans un café-PMU à Saint-Quentin, demande aux gens s'ils veulent "abolir le capitalisme". Ils te regarderont comme si tu sortais d'un astéroïde. Va dans une AG de Sciences Po ou dans un département de socio à Nanterre, et tu trouveras 200 personnes prêtes à faire la révolution au nom du gars du café-PMU qui n'a jamais entendu parler d'eux.

Le test ultime : le builder vs le commentateur

Tu veux savoir si quelqu'un est 1% ou 9% ? Voici le test :

Demande-lui ce qu'il a construit cette année. Pas "pensé". Pas "écrit en commentaire". Pas "dénoncé". Construit. Une boîte, un produit, un livre, un logiciel, un bâtiment, un enfant éduqué, un truc qui n'existait pas avant qu'il s'y mette.

Le 1% te répondra par une liste, parfois avec gêne ("oh c'est rien, juste un truc").
Le 90% te répondra "ben j'ai retapé la salle de bain", et il aura raison d'être fier.
Le 9% te répondra par une diatribe sur pourquoi la question est mal posée, pourquoi le concept de construire est néolibéral, pourquoi tu reproduis un schéma capitaliste patriarcal en demandant ça.

Bingo. PNJ détecté.

La conclusion qui troll : le 9% est sauvable, mais ne veut pas l'être

Le truc tragi-comique, c'est que n'importe quel 9% pourrait basculer en 1%. Il suffit de fermer X, d'arrêter de commenter, de prendre un cahier et de construire un truc, n'importe quoi, pendant 5 ans sans s'arrêter.

Mais il ne le fera pas. Parce que construire, c'est risquer de se prendre un mur. Et un mur, ça blesse l'ego. Alors que commenter, ça ne blesse jamais : si t'as tort, tu deletes le tweet. Le 9% a choisi l'asymétrie de risque : infinite downside protection sur son ego, zéro upside sur sa vie.

Le 1% prend le risque inverse : massive downside sur l'ego (il échoue 9 fois sur 10 publiquement), mais infinite upside potentiel sur la vie.

Et c'est ça, fondamentalement, ce qui sépare une civilisation qui avance d'une civilisation qui crève en commentant son propre déclin sur France Inter : le ratio 1%/9% qui prend le pouvoir narratif.

TL;DR pour les 90% qui scrollent

Les 90% consomment et sont heureux. Le 1% construit et ne dort pas. Le 9% commente, rage, et veut l'État pour punir le 1% au nom des 90% qui ne leur ont rien demandé. Le gauchisme contemporain c'est juste de la jalousie cosmique vendue comme de la justice sociale par des gens qui auraient voulu être Elon Musk mais à qui la simulation a refilé le patch "thread X".

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Novak Djokovic revealed his mental reset on the Lewis Howes podcast (2024).

When the match is falling apart, he goes straight to conscious breathing to snap back into the present. He says 80% of the battle is won before he even steps on the court, through gratitude, connecting to a higher force, and remembering you can’t control what happens, only your reaction to it.

Hearing one of the greatest tennis players ever talk about breathing and inner strength as his real edge was powerful.

The top performers don’t just train their bodies, they master their minds. These tools are simple and available to anyone.

Do you have a go-to mental reset when pressure hits, or are you still looking for one?

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

Mark 11:23-24
Hebrews 10:35-11:6
Galatians 6:9

[Unfiltered @quotesdaily100]

THE REAL LIFESPAN OF EVERY EMOTION INSIDE YOUR BODY:

1. Pure anger → 90 seconds, chemicals peak and clear if you stop feeding it with thought

2. Sudden fright → 2 to 3 minutes, adrenaline fires fast and body resets itself quickly

3. A wave of sadness → 4 to 6 minutes, moves through naturally only resistance makes it stay

4. Jealousy spike → 8 to 10 minutes, without a story to survive on it simply dies out

5. Raw shame → 10 to 15 minutes, heavy but dissolves faster when faced instead of hidden

6. Grief episode → 20 to 30 minutes, comes in tides and every tide eventually ends

7. Anxiety attack → 20 to 40 minutes, body cannot sustain that intensity it always drops

8. Heartbreak wave → 60 to 90 minutes, only when fully felt otherwise keeps returning

9. Deep loneliness → 2 to 4 hours, social pain hits the same place in brain as physical pain

10. Suppressed emotion → months to years, never felt never gone just buried deeper in body

11. Silent resentment → years if untouched, damages the one holding it far more than anyone else

12. Unresolved trauma → a lifetime, the body remembers everything the mind tried to forget

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

This has a clinical name. Revenge bedtime procrastination. And the ADHD version runs on a completely different mechanism than the neurotypical one.

A neurotypical person stays up late because they want more leisure time. The ADHD brain stays up because it spent every drop of dopamine it had on executive function during the day. Sitting in meetings, managing transitions, filtering impulses, remembering the thing you were supposed to remember. That burns through dopamine the way sprinting burns through glycogen. By 10pm the tank is empty.

But here's where it gets counterintuitive. The exhaustion is physical. The dopamine deficit is neurological. Those are two separate systems. Your muscles want sleep. Your prefrontal cortex is starving for the stimulation it was denied all day because it spent 14 hours on task-switching and impulse control instead of anything that actually felt rewarding.

The phone at midnight is the brain trying to collect what it's owed. Low-effort, high-stimulation content. Scrolling, short videos, rabbit holes. The exact profile of activity that delivers dopamine without requiring the executive function you already depleted.

The sleep researchers call this a "self-regulation failure." It's closer to a debt collection. You borrowed against your own reward system to function all day. The bill comes due at midnight. And the brain will not let you sleep until it gets paid.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation.

I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million Americans tuned in every night to find out what they were allowed to believe by morning. We didn't sell jokes. We sold certainty. Certainty costs nothing to produce. People will pay anything for it. We charged $50 million a year and still lost money because it turns out permission is even cheaper than we thought.

In 2014, we had a genuinely dangerous comedian. A man who once testified before Congress in character as a fictional conservative pundit and made the entire chamber look like they'd been pantsed on C-SPAN. His fake persona was the most brilliant satire on television. Layered. Ironic. Unpredictable. The character could say anything because nothing was real. The character was the art. The character was the comedian.

We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything. Correct is not funny. Correct is not dangerous. Correct is the absence of danger. We promoted the absence of danger and called it growth. His character could make a Senate committee squirm. The real him makes an audience nod. Nodding pays the same as squirming. Nodding is easier to produce.

His final words on air were "We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you." The audience wept. I wrote that line. Not the words. The architecture that made those words feel true. For eleven years, the audience believed they were participants. They were not participants. They were the product. "With you" is what you say to a congregation. A comedian says "at you." We hadn't said "at you" since 2015.

Our internal metric was called Affirm Rate. It measured the percentage of monologue segments that generated applause instead of laughter. I invented this metric. I also invented the bonus structure tied to it. In 2015, our Affirm Rate was 34%. By 2022, it was 94%. I received a raise every year. We are crushing it. At the things I made up. That's performance management.

But I need to tell you about the real discovery. The one I put in a deck called "Content Strategy 2019-2024." The one that got me promoted.

Agreement gets applause. I knew that early. But correction — telling the audience their vocabulary is slightly outdated, their outrage is aimed two degrees off-center, their feelings are valid but their phrasing needs work — correction gets them back tomorrow. Agreement is a transaction. Correction is a subscription. We converted a comedy show into a nightly software update for moral vocabulary. Churn was near zero. They couldn't afford to miss an episode. Missing an episode meant using last week's words in this week's meeting. That's social death. We monetized the fear of social death and called it entertainment.

I want to be honest about something. The content was not bipartisan. We chose a side. But I need you to understand: we did not choose it because we believed in it. We chose it because that side's audience is more responsive to correction. They want to be updated. They want to be told their language is outdated. They experience correction as care. The other side does not respond to correction. They respond to provocation. Provocation is harder to monetize. You can't build a subscription on provocation because the audience doesn't come back to learn — they come back to fight. Fighting is unpredictable. Correction is scheduled. We optimized for the audience that wants to be told what to think. That audience leaned one direction. That's not ideology. That's market segmentation.

The writers' room had a whiteboard. In 2015 it said "What's funny?" In 2018 it said "What should they feel?" By 2021 it said "What are they still saying wrong?" I watched that whiteboard evolve like a finch beak and I never intervened. The market was speaking. We listened. Listening to the market is the same as leading the audience. They can't tell the difference.

A writer named Marcus raised his hand in 2019. "What if we just tried to make them laugh again?" I thanked him for his passion and scheduled a creative alignment conversation. He transferred to streaming development within the month. The Affirm Rate the week he left was 91%. Laughter would have brought it down. That's risk management.

Here is what nobody will say out loud. I will say it because I am proud of it.

We made our audience worse at politics.

Not better. Worse. Every night for eleven years, we expressed their outrage for them. Professionally. With a band and good lighting. And because the outrage had been expressed — because a man in a suit had furrowed his brow with the precise calibrated degree of indignation — they didn't need to express it themselves. They watched. They clapped. They felt the catharsis of resistance without resisting anything. They went to bed having done nothing and feeling like they'd done something. That's the product. Not comedy. Not information. Catharsis. Catharsis is the enemy of action. A man who has screamed into a pillow does not then also scream in the street. We were the pillow. A $50 million pillow with a house band.

If you feel the outrage has been expressed for you, you will not march. You will not organize. You will not call your representative. You will tune in tomorrow to feel it expressed again. That's retention. Our retention was extraordinary.

I want to talk about the comedy-to-catechism pipeline because I think people underestimate what we achieved.

Stage one: comedian makes jokes about the powerful. Audience laughs because the powerful are absurd. This is the Carlin model. The jester punches up. Everyone below feels relief.

Stage two: comedian makes jokes about people who disagree with the audience. Audience laughs because disagreement is stupid. The jester has turned around. He's still on the stage but now he's facing the crowd with a pointer.

Stage three: comedian stops making jokes. Comedian identifies incorrect beliefs and explains why they're dangerous. Audience does not laugh. Audience claps. The jester is gone. In his place: a hall monitor with a desk and a band.

Stage four: audience watches not for entertainment but for certification. Having seen last night's episode means you know which words are current. Not having seen it means you might use yesterday's vocabulary in today's meeting. The show is no longer comedy. It is a credential. Watching it means you are educated. Not watching means you are the person being discussed. We made a show that you watch to prove you're not the kind of person who doesn't watch it. That's a closed loop. Closed loops don't need content. They need continuity. We provided continuity for $50 million a year.

A comedian — whose entire historical function was to say things too dangerous for anyone else to say — became the person who decides which things are too dangerous for anyone to say. And the audience applauded. Every night. For 2,500 nights. Because being told what is forbidden feels exactly like being told what you already knew. Prohibition performed as validation. I put that in the deck too.

Our audience was correct about everything. I know this because they applauded everything we said. The applause proved the correctness. The correctness justified the applause. We called this audience research. The methodology was peer-reviewed by the audience. They approved unanimously. Every night.

The actually funny comedians left. They went to podcasts. To clubs. To rooms where the audience doesn't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the point. They took the laughter with them. We kept the applause. We called those spaces problematic. That's market differentiation. The problematic spaces are funnier. But funny is not our product.

We lost $40 million a year. We didn't lose it because the show failed. We lost it because we spent $50 million producing what a podcast host in his garage gives away between mattress ads. The podcast is funnier. The podcast is more dangerous. The podcast has an audience that laughs instead of claps. But we had the Ed Sullivan Theater. We had 461 seats. We had a former Beatle play the farewell episode. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato playing "Hello, Goodbye" like it was a benediction. I booked a Beatle for a funeral. The Beatles played that stage in 1964 and the audience screamed so loud you couldn't hear the music. Our audience didn't scream. They wept politely. That's the difference between entertainment and church. We ran a church.

Jon Stewart showed up to the finale and did a bit where he pretended to deliver a corporate statement from Paramount about the cancellation. The audience laughed. It was the first time they laughed in a way I didn't recognize. Involuntary. Surprised. Dangerous. For ninety seconds, a comedian was in that building. Then it was over.

John Oliver said "At some point, this may come for all of our shows" and then added "but Stephen, what's important to remember is that tonight, it is going to eat you." The audience laughed again. Involuntary again. Two moments of actual comedy in a three-hour farewell. Both of them about death.

The finale drew 6.74 million viewers. Biggest weeknight audience in our history. More people came to the funeral than ever visited the patient. I know what they were mourning. Not comedy. The comedy died in 2016. Not the man. The man is fine. He's wealthy. What they mourned was the permission structure. Starting today, they have to decide what to believe on their own. They have to form an opinion without waiting for a man behind a desk to form it first and deliver it with a knowing look. Some of them haven't done that since 2015. The funeral wasn't for the show. It was for the certainty.

He joked about the Peanuts theme music licensing cost on his last night. "Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!" The audience laughed. It was a joke about money. About the network losing money. The last joke was about money. Not about truth. Not about power. About a licensing fee for a cartoon piano riff. Eleven years and the final joke was about accounting. I think that's perfect. The show was always about accounting. We just dressed it up as conscience.

The President of the United States — the man we spent eleven years explaining was dangerous to an audience that already believed he was dangerous — posted an AI-generated video of our host being thrown into a dumpster on the Late Show set. Then Trump danced to "YMCA" in the clip. Viewed more times in four hours than our farewell managed in a week. His production cost: zero. Ours: negative $50 million a year. We manufactured his relevance every night at 11:35 for eleven years and he never paid us a dime. We were his marketing department. He turned our funeral into content. His ROI was infinite. Ours required a write-off and a farewell concert.

The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing "one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news." They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don't have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it's church.

I do not feel guilt. Guilt would require me to believe I took something from them. I didn't take anything. They came to us. Every night. They chose the catechism over the comedy. They preferred correction over surprise. Certainty over danger. Instruction over laughter. They wanted to be told. Not challenged. Not shocked. Not made to laugh against their will at something they didn't see coming. They wanted to see it coming. They wanted to mouth along. That's not comedy. That's karaoke. We ran the most expensive karaoke bar in television history and the only miscalculation was charging a cover when the songs are free on every phone.

We turned a jester into a priest. We turned an audience into a congregation. We turned laughter into obedience. We turned political engagement into passive consumption. We turned a comedy show into a permission structure and charged $50 million a year to tell people what they already believed in a voice slightly nicer than their own.

They were so grateful they showed up to mourn us. 6.74 million of them. Weeping. For the certainty.

Applause is more reliable than laughter. I proved it. The proof cost $450 million, one character, one comedian's capacity for danger, and one audience's willingness to act.

The metric went up.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Josh Brolin nailed sobriety in one powerful line.

He loved drinking — called it gasoline in his veins. But he made it his mission to make sobriety more fun than his wildest nights. He was even willing to lose his wife Kathryn to put sobriety first.

No more Jekyll and Hyde. No more getting banned from every bar. That version of him is gone.

This one hit me hard. Most people see sobriety as losing something. Brolin treated it like upgrading his entire life.

Real change happens when the new path feels more alive than the old one.

Have you found sobriety (or quitting any bad habit) can actually become more rewarding than before?

[Unfiltered @quotesdaily100]

DARK SOCIAL DOMINANCE RULES:

1. Enter a room quietly and find the best seat before speaking to anyone. Presence before words always wins.
2. Never compete openly with someone. Outperform them quietly and let results speak without a single comment.
3. The person who needs the least from a group controls the group. Detachment is the highest form of social power.
4. Ask powerful people for small favors early. It makes them subconsciously feel responsible for your success.
5. Never react immediately to bad news in front of others. Your composure in crisis defines your social rank instantly.
6. Speak to the most important person in the room last not first. It signals you are not chasing status.
7. Compliment a rival genuinely in front of others. Graciousness toward competition reads as supreme confidence.
8. Let others take credit occasionally. People who do not chase credit are trusted with far more power over time.
9. Be the person who introduces others. The connector always holds more social capital than anyone being connected.
10. Stay neutral in group arguments longer than everyone else. The last to take a side is seen as the most rational.
11. Remember the names of people others forget. The forgotten always become the most loyal allies you will ever have.
12. Never show that someone's words affected you in the moment. Process privately and respond with clarity later.
13. Exit every group interaction having given more value than you took. People always make space for those who add.

[RandomActsofDad @RandomActsofDad]

@brivael I want this to be true. All of it. My only hang-up is that human nature inevitably drifts toward selfishness, greed, corruption, and the urge to rule over others. It's encoded so deeply in the human soul that even the Spirit of God in a man takes a lifetime to root it out.