Gavin Newsom Under Federal Scrutiny & The GOP’s Vetting Disaster

Ultimize. Retirement used to be your reward for working 40 years. Apparently, retirement is now a second career in television, with longer hours, no salary, and an employer that sells your attention to pharmaceutical companies. MarketWatch reports, citing the longevity consultancy Agewave, that the average retiree in America watches 47 hours of television every week. 47 hours. That isn't relaxation. That's a full-time job with mandatory overtime, except there's no salary, no health insurance, and your supervisor is Netflix asking, are you still watching? Yes, Netflix, I am. I haven't moved since Tuesday. Thank you for noticing. Retired Americans are showing more devotion to television than many of us ever showed to our actual careers. Nobody ever spent 47 hours a week studying accounting, but millions of retirees can identify every Golden Girls episode from the first cheesecake. They're experts on Wheel of Fortune, scholars of Jeopardy, historians of every crime committed within 50 miles of Jessica Fletcher. It is perhaps the most advanced study of completely useless expertise in human history, useful only to advertisers selling diabetes drugs, reverse mortgages, and medications whose side effects include everything Except missing the next episode. You spend 47 hours working for television companies, technology platforms, and advertisers. They collect the money. You collect intimate knowledge of Colonial Penn. This may be the only job where the employee pays for cable, supplies the chair, and develops the diabetes required by the commercials. And this is sad because 47 hours is enough time to build something. teach something, or help someone. You could volunteer at a homeless shelter. You could tutor children. You could plant a community garden. You could renovate a playground. You could make 20 new friends, or you could watch 4 strangers renovate a kitchen in Waco and become furious because they chose the wrong backsplash. People say America faces a retirement crisis because Social Security might be cut. Believe me, politicians will close every school, pave every national park, and sell Rhode Island to Amazon Before they knowingly disappoint older voters. Older Americans vote. Children don't. That's why politicians kiss babies. It's the last time they intend to listen to them. The deeper retirement crisis is purpose. Millions of people spend decades dreaming about the day nobody needs them and then discover that being needed was one of the things keeping them alive. Yeah, work can be exhausting. But work makes you get dressed. It makes you leave the house. It forces you to talk to human beings who are not trying to solve a murder in Cabot Cove. I'm not recommending poverty. Poverty is stressful, dangerous, and terrible. But if the choice is between a part-time job and 47 hours of television, the job may be the mental health program that also gives you a paycheck. Retirement should not mean withdrawing from usefulness. Volunteer, mentor someone, work 10 hours a week, help a nonprofit, coach a team, do anything that gives another human being a reason to say, I'm glad you showed up. Television doesn't care about whether you show up. It will play the next episode over your body. The goal of retirement shouldn't be to eliminate work. It should be to eliminate work you hate and replace it with usefulness. you choose. I'm optimistic. I believe everyone can find a new purpose at any age. And if you can't find one, volunteer at a television network. Apparently you already work there. Republicans in America are constantly being unfairly caricaturized as sympathetic to racism and fascism. It's a genuine shame. It's a cruel stereotype. It is completely unsupported Except by an almost artisanal selection of people they keep hiring. Republican Senator Jon Husted of Ohio recently hired 25-year-old Steven Witek as political director for his competitive Senate campaign. Political director. That is, the person responsible for political judgment, public perception, and preventing the campaign from being photographed next to anything resembling the Third Reich. Unfortunately, Wotek once used a photograph of actual Waffen-SS soldiers as his Facebook profile picture. But let's not rush to judgment. Plenty of people accidentally select Nazi soldiers as their public identity. Facebook profiles are confusing. You think you clicked family vacation, and suddenly you're Hitler's bodyguard. As a teenager, Wotek reportedly dressed in an SS uniform and participated in military reenactments. He says he rejects Nazi ideology and was pursuing his interest in military history. His public Spotify account also reported featuring a playlist celebrating Rhodesia, the former white minority-ruled African state that has become a symbol for white supremacists. Again, probably coincidence. Sometimes Spotify's algorithm goes directly from Taylor Swift to colonial apartheid. Happens to everyone. You listen to one podcast about lower taxes, and suddenly Spotify says, because you enjoy fiscal responsibility, here's White Minority Rule. It is deeply, deeply unfair to draw conclusions about someone from the uniform he wears, the soldiers he selects as his public image, and the racial regime he celebrates musically. That would be like seeing a man with his face painted green and gold, wearing a foam cheese wedge on his head, and screaming, go Pack, go! and assuming he supports the Green Bay Packers. Ridiculous. Maybe he's an independent dairy historian. Sports fans understand this. When someone wears the jersey, paints his face, studies the team, and fills his playlist with its fight songs, we still cannot conclusively determine whether he likes the team. We need more evidence. Perhaps a small tattoo. Maybe an invasion of Poland. To Senator Husted's credit, his campaign fired Wotek immediately after reporters brought the material to its attention. That was the correct response, but it does raise one teeny tiny question. How did the campaign vet the person in charge of political judgment without examining his public Facebook profile? Did they conduct the background check on a rotary phone? This wasn't an obscure comment buried on page 900 of an abandoned message board. It was his profile picture. That is the photograph you deliberately select to tell the world This represents me. Mine is a picture of me smiling. I hope people don't conclude I'm happy. You can't continually complain that your political movement is being unfairly associated with fascism while people inside the movement keep arriving with Nazi imagery in their resumes. Perceptions don't come only from hostile media coverage. They come from whom you hire, whom you promote, and whom you tolerate, and whom you fire only when a newspaper calls. A political party cannot solve its fascist image problem with better messaging while its own staff keeps supplying the stock photographs. I teach communication. Here's my free communications tip for every political campaign in America: before hiring someone, check whether his public profile picture features history's most recognizable villains. That's not cancel culture. That is onboarding. Would you like to be the sort of successful person who is dominating news, at least in your industry? Well, if so, it's time to up your skills. At ultimize.com, I've created online courses to help you do that. Now, here's the thing: no obligation. You can get a free course on communication skills, a free course on how to build better habits. All you have to do is go to ultimize.com. That's U L T A M I. ZE.com. No obligation. Go there now. Okay, moving on. Gavin Newsom has reached a major milestone for an American politician. He's now important enough for the federal government to investigate him before telling the public what crime he supposedly committed. Federal investigators have expanded a criminal, criminal investigation involving the California governor's international travel outside funding and certain residence and personal expenses. Subpoenas reportedly seek 6 years of records involving a nonprofit that has helped finance official travel for California governors. 6 years of travel receipts? That isn't an investigation. That's the worst expense report meeting in human history. The subpoenas don't identify a single alleged crime. Apparently, the working allegation is being Gavin Newsom in a manner visible to Donald Trump. Investigators are searching through his travel, his expenses, his aides, his advisors, and his family. This is not a fishing expedition. Fishing requires you to pick a lake. Maybe federal agents will search Newsom's bathroom and charge him with possession of excessively confident hair. Being named in a subpoena does not mean someone committed a crime or is even a target It means the government would like information. In this case, apparently all the information. Somewhere, an FBI agent is demanding Newsom's receipt from a hotel minibar in 2021. We know you took the cashews, Governor. Don't make this harder than it needs to be. If investigators possess real evidence of improper gifts or influence peddling, present it. Charge the appropriate person. Let a court examine the evidence. Nobody should be immune because I like his politics or his hair. But based on what has been made public, investigators have selected one of President Trump's most visible political adversaries and are now searching through years of his life without identifying the suspected federal offenses. That reverses the order in which justice is supposed to work. In a democracy, evidence leads investigators to a suspect. In an authoritarian regime, the leader selects the suspect, and tells investigators, bring me back some evidence and don't be picky. It's Pokémon Go for felonies. Wander around your opponent's life long enough and eventually you may catch something— a parking ticket, an unreported upgrade, an aide who once used the governor's Netflix password. The process itself becomes the punishment. Subpoena the staff, question the family, collect years of communications, generate ominous headlines. Then, if no charge ever emerges, the public still remembers the phrase criminal investigation. It's like spraying someone with the word skunk, then publishing a correction 3 years later saying he smelled perfectly fine. This is precisely how politicized law enforcement becomes normalized. Every individual document request can sound reasonable. Every official says he's merely following procedure. But the overall procedure begins with the president's enemy list and works backward toward a crime. My optimistic personal development advice to the Justice Department is simple: begin with a goal, but perhaps don't put the president's political opponent on the vision board. Finally, I found some technology news that makes me wildly optimistic. Hey, I'm a personal development guy. My first recommendation for improving your life is incredibly simple. Try not to die, especially if you're young, healthy, and still have several streaming services left to cancel. The automobile has improved billions of lives, and full disclosure, I own automobiles. It's also created a worldwide slaughter that we barely notice because the bodies arrive one intersection at a time. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 1.19 million people die in road crashes every year. That's more than 3,200 human beings every day worldwide, more than 2 deaths per minute. We don't call it a massacre. We call it Tuesday traffic. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the September 11th attacks. At the current global road death rate, crashes produce an equivalent numerical death toll approximately every 22 hours. This is not a comparison of motives; it's a comparison of bodies. If 3,000 people died in one catastrophe every day, the entire planet would stop. Presidents would address their nations. Flags would be lowered. Congress might even return from lunch. But when the same number die gradually on separate roads, we call the radio station and complain that traffic is making us late. No trustworthy worldwide total exists for every road death since automobiles were invented, but Consider a conservative scale calculation. Global traffic deaths were estimated at roughly 990,000 in 1990 and approximately 1.2 million today. Even using a simple average across the last 35 years puts the cumulative toll since 1990 at roughly 40 million people dead. 40 million, and that ignores nearly the entire first century of automobiles. Cars are not dictators, and crashes are not murders. But if one dictator caused more than a million preventable— note to editor, redo. But if one dictator caused more than a million preventable deaths every year, we would call him one of history's great monsters. Because the killer has cupholders, we call it transportation. That's why autonomous vehicles could be one of the greatest life-saving developments in history. We may not be getting flying cars anytime soon. That's probably wise. Most Americans can't merge correctly in 2 dimensions. But autonomous cars are becoming real. Waymo now reportedly operates nearly 4,000 vehicles in 15 cities and provides more than half a million rides per week. Amazon-owned Zoox remains far behind with roughly 100 autonomous vehicles And about 10,000 weekly rides. Zoox's vehicles look like toasters on wheels. There's no steering wheel and no traditional driver's seat. Passengers face one another, which means the car of the future has recreated the most uncomfortable part of a train. Zoox is trying to challenge Waymo in San Francisco with free rides, festivals, influencers, and even wine promotions. That is Silicon Valley's entire business strategy. Offer something free, give you wine, collect data, and explain the price after you're dependent. But the larger development is extraordinary. Imagine someone who works from 9 to 5 and currently has a 2-hour commute in each direction. Today, that person leaves home at 7, reaches the office at 9, works until 5, gets home at 7. 4 hours of life disappear every day into traffic, brake lights, and radio advertisements for personal injury lawyers. With a genuinely safe autonomous vehicle, that person could leave home at 9 and begin work immediately— conference calls, emails, and documents from 9 until 11— walk into the office, work with colleagues until 3, then work during the ride home and finish at 5. Same 8-hour workday, same productivity, but instead of sacrificing 12 hours to work and transportation, you sacrifice 8. That brings you back 20 hours every week, roughly 1,000 hours every year. Over a 40-year career, that's 40,000 hours, more than 4.5 entire years of life returned to you, including nights. That's time to exercise, time to see friends, time to play with your children, time to develop a hobby, time to volunteer, or based on our retirement statistics, time to watch an additional 47 hours of television. I want a world in which people remain free to drive if they want, but eventually manual driving should become an eccentric hobby, like riding your own horse or piloting your own private airplane. Perfectly legal, occasionally exciting, and something that makes everyone else quietly check whether your insurance is current. Of course, autonomous vehicles must prove that they are safer. Regulators need transparent evidence, accountability, and protection for passengers, pedestrians, and everyone else on the road. But perfection cannot be the standard when human drivers are already eating breakfast, applying makeup, texting— oh, are they texting— and attempting emotional closure during rush hour. We tolerate more than a million road deaths annually because human driving feels normal. If autonomous vehicles killed even a tiny fraction of that number, we would hold congressional hearings until the cars developed shame. The goal is not to prove that computers never make mistakes. The goal is to prove that computers make dramatically fewer mistakes than tired, distracted, emotional humans operating 2-ton machinery after happy hour. I'll confess, I hate driving. I cannot wait for a vehicle that drives itself. I'm just hoping it arrives before retirement because apparently after that, I already have a full-time job. I'm TJ Walker. See you tomorrow. Ultimize.