He crashed a million-dollar car he never insured, then told the friend sitting next to him he thought it would never happen to him. “Watch this.” That’s what Elon Musk said right before he lost control of his own McLaren F1. His name is Elon Musk. The year was 2000. He’d just pocketed $22 million selling his first company, Zip2, and used $1 million of it on one of only 106 McLaren F1s ever built. He was driving Peter Thiel to pitch Sequoia Capital for what would become PayPal when Thiel asked what the car could do. Musk floored it. The F1 had 640 horsepower, weighed barely a ton, and had zero traction control. The back end snapped out instantly, spun the car backward into an embankment, and launched it into the air spinning like a discus. Both men walked away unhurt. The car didn’t. According to Thiel, Musk’s first words afterward were that he’d read plenty of stories about guys who made money, bought a supercar, and crashed it, and figured it would never happen to him, which is also why he never bought insurance. They hitchhiked separately to the meeting instead of showing up together. Honestly, the detail that stays with me isn’t the crash, it’s that he still made the pitch meeting that same day, uninsured wreck and all, like the car was just a line item he’d deal with later. Would you have skipped insurance on a million-dollar car too, or is that exactly the kind of bet that only looks smart once you’re already a billionaire?

So weird how the red/green podcastistan lizard people fall silent whenever these stories run (which they do regularly).

🚨 MASSIVE FRAUD EXPOSED: A shocking investigation has revealed extreme government waste in California, where dozens of fake hospices allegedly managed to bill Medicare for billions in fraudulent claims out of a single strip mall. Rather than cracking down on the scammers, critics note that authorities instead targeted the investigative journalist who uncovered the massive scheme. Outraged taxpayers are demanding immediate transparency and federal oversight. Do you believe states should face strict federal audits when massive Medicare fraud goes unchecked? YES or NO?

I am getting lots of incoming questions about the public execution of Nidal Hasan, mostly because I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade. My position is simple: Executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized. They are the ultimate example of the state's monopoly on violence, and the only way to keep that from running out of control is to confront voters with the trade they have made every single time, that they might have appropiate confidence or revulsion in the institution. This is not new thinking. George Washington thought the same. The way we have shifted from hanging to firing squads to doctors quietly injecting chemicals that send our worst gently off to sleep is awful and dystopian, a total short-circuiting of important feedback mechanisms. It makes needless executions more likely, not less so. People who demean this as barbaric or yucky miss the whole point. It doesn't somehow become torture or inhumane (as the UN is suddenly claiming) just because we decline to hide the act behind a curtain. And then there are those who suggest any revel in the death of those who truly deserve it is an indicator of a broken or diseased mind. To the contrary. It is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order. That it has not been done here in 60 years is an indictment in and of itself. And that is without even getting into the fact that men were not hung for stealing horse, but that horses may not be stolen. "I would to God that one of the most attrocious in each State was hung in Gibbets, up on a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the Man, who can build his greatness upon his Country’s ruin." - George Washington, 1778