Episode 2895 CWSA 07/12/25

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It's Saturday, also known as Saturday, and that means the all the lazy podcasters take the day off.

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So Beth, this is the real show.

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Well, after uh after our show today, you might want to join Owen Gregorian who's going to be hosting a spaces event right after we're done.

Spaces is the audio service on X.

So, just go there and look for Owen Gregorian or you can find the uh link in my X feed as Scott Adams says.

Well, I wonder if there's any news about the health benefits of coffee.

H oh yeah.

uh according to the times of India there's a new study out of uh uh the UK somewhere and uh turns out that if you have three cups of coffee every day you can reduce your uh risk of liver disease by 49%.

Right?

So, what I recommend is that when you drink alcohol, you drink one cup of coffee for every drink cuz the alcohol will destroy your liver cuz it's poison, but the coffee will just rejuvenate it.

You'll break even.

No, do not listen to any medical advice from cartoonist podcasters.

Bad idea.

Bad idea.

see what else is happening.

Um, let's do some fake news.

There's some fake news today on social media.

O is reporting uh that uh the this is not true by the way.

So before I even say what it is, uh according to Grock, there's no truth to this whatsoever.

But the rumor is that Bridget Mcronone's plastic surgeon uh who was gonna give a tell all uh has been found dead fell out of window.

But it turns out that it's probably a Russian disinformation campaign and there's no there's no credible source and there's no credible source for the story.

Does Grock really know?

Marcela asks.

And the answer is, well, it's pretty good at checking sources, so there's no other source that uh that says it.

All right, here's my favorite story.

Um, I was doing a pre-show before we went live here and I couldn't stop laughing for about 10 minutes.

So Trump just published another truth social in which he in which he opines that Rosie O'Donnell who as you know moved to Ireland because she's so unhappy with the United States and Trump says that since Rosie is so bad for the United States he's considering removing her citizenship.

ship.

Now, I went to Grock and I said, "Can a president remove somebody's citizenship?" And he said, "No, no, a president does not have that power." Yeah.

I I think it would be in some weird situation where they had lied on a uh you know lied on some official forms to become a citizen or something.

There's a special case but basically no.

So, the thing that makes me laugh is wondering what Trump was thinking or saying or who was in the room when he wrote that when he wrote that message because if he wrote it alone, uh, it wouldn't be as funny.

But I just imagine him sitting there with with some of his, you know, best friends or, you know, maybe just Melania or something like, "All right, watch this.

I'm gonna send out a true social that says I'm gonna take Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship away because she complained about the United States from Ireland.

I I don't believe that he believes he has the power to do that.

And you know that it it's it's a slow news day.

So the last thing that Trump wants is people talking about Epstein.

So when whenever the the shelf of news is a little bear, Trump just comes up with he just comes up with something that he just creates out of nothing that that creates a story you can't not talk about.

Do do you think that the news can ignore the fact that that Trump has called for maybe removing the citizenship of a of a US citizen for complaining from Ireland.

All right.

I hope you liked it as much as I did.

To me, that's just hilarious.

He obviously knows exactly what he's doing.

All right.

Well, according to the Daily Mail, the New York Times is admitting their fake news from last year where I guess they uh they're accusing Trump of lying or exaggerating about the Venezuelan gangs allegedly taking over a Colorado apartment building.

And then the New York Times said, "We looked into it.

That's not true." And then a year later they publish an article says well you know turns out it's a little bit complicated and we can't really say it's not true.

It's uh trueish maybe kind of true maybe maybe it was fake news.

So, you know, they they might uh they might describe what they did a little differently, but the Daily Mail is uh blaming them of admitting their fake news.

That was a big one.

As as the fake news goes, that was kind of bold because could they really not figure out what was going on there?

Did the New York Times really really did they really not have the resources or the talent or the time or something to look into that and find out that yes, there were armed gang members standing outside the apartment building.

There was no way they could have figured that out on their own for a year.

Sorry.

Trust in the media pretty low.

pretty pretty low.

All right, here's a story that as far as I know has not been debunked, but it doesn't sound real to me.

So, I'm going to tell you the story, but you we're going to play a game where you tell me, does this sound real or does this sound a little too on the nose, like a little too perfect?

All right, here's the story.

Um, I see Ian Miller is reporting this for Outkick, but I believe there were other other outlets that are reporting it.

All right.

And the report is that JP Morgan Chase CEO, the famous JB Diamond, um said the following while at a overseas event.

Um he said that uh quote, "I have a lot of friends who are Democrats and they're idiots.

Um this Bloomberg is reporting this while I was speaking at a foreign ministry event in Ireland." Oh well, I guess Ireland is where you go to say terrible things like Rosie.

Then uh allegedly uh Jamie Diamond went on and said, "I always say they have big hearts and little brains.

They do not understand how the real world works.

Almost every single policy rolled out has failed.

Doesn't that sound a little bit like me?

for uh you know maybe Greg Guffeld.

One of the things that uh criticized well one of the things that uh Democrats are often criticized for is policies that don't seem to understand how human beings work that we have incentives and stuff like that.

So that is so on the nose that that makes me a little suspicious.

Um, and then it goes further and he describes how the Democrats, you know, lost their way.

And allegedly, and again, I'm not totally sure this is real, but allegedly Jaime Diamond said they overdid DEI.

We all were devoted to reaching out to the black community, Hispanic and LGBT community, the disabled.

We do all of that, Diamond said.

But the extent they got to stop it and they got to go back to being more practical, they're very ideological.

And I'm thinking to myself, all right, well, it's sort of realish, but he would have known he would have been quoted.

Would he really say that all of his Democrat friends are idiots?

Would he say that and then go back to New York City where his subordinates and his friends are Democrats?

Who says that?

He He's a little bit too smart and too savvy to insult 75% of all of his friends knowing that it will get back to them.

So, is that real?

All right.

But it goes further.

Um, I guess he was asked about Zoran Mandani, who by the way, you could call him Zoran Mandani, or you could call him Zamani.

So, it's either Zoron or Pick one.

Anyway, um, what JB Diamond allegedly said, and here I'm still a little skeptical.

He really did.

But uh allegedly, quote, he's more of a Marxist than a socialist.

And now you see these Democrats falling all over themselves saying, well, he's pointing out some real problems, affordable housing and grocery prices.

Okay, maybe uh there's the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world.

Now again, that's the sort of thing that I would say that it's sort of a word salad mean meaningless nothing.

Does that sound real to you?

I'm I'm going to put a pin in this one and say I'm not sure cuz a lot of the news today is fake or looks fake.

This one I don't know.

I'm not buying it.

I I'm willing to be talked into it being real if if Jamie Diamond says, "Yeah, I said that." Or there's a video that comes out someday, but at the moment, I'm going to say probably not.

I'm leaning I'm leaning toward fake news on this one, but I could be wrong.

I'm going to say 55% fake news, 45% real.

That'll be my That's my final answer.

Well, somebody named Eddie Zoo has developed AI glasses that will be used to train robots.

And the way it will do that is they'll put these AI glasses on Chinese factory workers and it will watch them work.

So the glasses will be on the the human and it will be watching the human doing something with their hands that's assembling something or doing some kind of a you know assembly line kind of thing and that's how they will train robots.

So they'll collect all that data and feed it into robots and then robots will know how to put everyone in China out of work.

I think the Chinese government is going to have to throw him out a window because uh I don't think you can put a hundred few hundred million Chinese factory workers out of work with robots.

But maybe maybe it's coming.

Well, uh Sam Alman was talking about delay at chat GPT.

and he says uh they're planning to to launch their openw weight model next week, but they're going to delay it for more safety testing.

And you might say, "What the heck is an open weight model?" Well, I didn't know.

So, I went to Grock.

I had to go to Grock today five times while I was reading in the news.

Five times the news told me something that I just said, "I don't even know what that is.

like why don't you tell me what that means and then maybe I'll know what I'm looking at.

Um but the open weight model is an AI that is uh a little bit open sourced not completely but it allows developers to know how the model works.

So if they want to build their own product on top of it, it operates with the AI in the best way.

Now, so so he's saying the tech got delayed because they they want to review the high-risk areas.

Now, when he's talking about high risk, he's not really just talking about it having a bug, right?

They're talking about, well, it might be the end of all civilization, but we're going to take an extra week to make sure that it doesn't destroy civilization.

Well, it's possible that all humankind will be eviscerated and possibly incinerated by the end of next week, but just in case, we're going to take an extra week.

Um, I can't tell how much of this is real because there's almost nothing I've heard about AI that I understand and also scares me.

So, why is it that the people who know the most way more than I know, why are they so scared of AI?

Is it like a mass hysteria?

Is it possible that they don't want to be the one who didn't say it was dangerous when everybody else does?

So maybe they just have to take that position because it sounds more socially responsible.

If something bad happens, they'll say, "Well, we told you it wasn't fully safe." Yeah.

I've been saying since the beginning, good things might go wrong.

And then at least you would think, "Oh, well, they're not morons, but something did go wrong and now we're all dead." So, I'm a little bit worried about what the smartest people know that I don't know about AI, but still, I'm not afraid of it.

Does anybody else have that feeling that you're watching the news, you're hearing what the smart people say and they tell you, you know, might be a 10 or 20% chance it will destroy all humankind and I still don't worry about it.

What's up with that?

How how many of you actually worry about it?

I don't understand the risk enough to be actually worried.

I just it just you know it's like news that just passes through.

But I'm going to add my own prediction.

I would say that we could say at this point there's a 100% chance that human evolution, you know, with our organic bodies will be replaced by machine evolution and robots.

And I don't mean cyborgs, I mean just machines.

And that the the obvious evolutionary path is for the organic humans to die off from one thing or another, not necessarily from AI.

You know, could be, I don't know, could be we last a million years and then the sun explodes and we haven't gotten to another planet.

So, could be there's a new virus that comes out of a lab and kills all the humans, but we're not there yet.

But we're very close to having these uh, you know, artificial general intelligence and artificial super intelligence robots that could potentially take over civilization and keep things running.

after all human organic people are gone.

So if you look at the history of other species and you look at the history of like civilizations that that were here 20,000 years ago but somehow they all got wiped out.

Is it more likely that we humans will find a way to be permanent and just keep evolving for millions of years?

Is that more likely than all the organic people being killed?

Not even not even being murdered, but just, you know, apparently if you you wait long enough, there's going to be a meteor, something's going to hit the Earth, you know, something's going to go wrong.

But the robots might be capable of, you know, as long as they can get electricity, of just rebuilding civilization.

So, I'm going to make my prediction right now that human civilization will turn into machine evolution and it might live forever but as machines maybe.

All right.

Uh Trump and Melania visited the Texas flood zone and he did his presidential thing.

Trump is very good at the uh empathy and you know meeting with people who have had tragedy and whatever.

But uh Melania was very good as well.

She was at the the table with him and and uh and Trump said you Melania might have a few words.

And I wasn't sure if Melania was happy about that.

I didn't know if she was prepared to speak.

And I still don't know if she was prepared, but she very effortlessly um went into an empathy related we feel your pain, I'll come back kind of a thing.

And I was watching Trump cuz you know Trump will be very careful about managing his brand and would certainly want his family members and especially his wife to uh to look good in public.

And I thought to myself that he was looking at her with a lot of pride cuz she was really good.

Very good.

I I didn't know I don't know how much game she has, but uh yeah, she nailed it.

She got all the she had all the notes and looked very capable and uh um I think he was probably quite happy with her uh response.

Uh let's see what else.

According to just the news, Ben Weeden is writing that the Treasury has announced that in June the government will have a 27 billion surplus from tariff revenues.

Surplus meaning that after the government paid all of its bills, it would have an extra 27 billion left over.

And that happens to be the amount that came in from tariffs.

Does that sound real?

Doesn't that sound a little bit too impossible?

Did we just go from uh deficits that could never be solved to, oh, looks like June we spent less than we made?

So I went to Grock and said, is this true?

Is it possible that even for one month of the year that we would take in more revenue as a country, we would take in more revenue than we spend?

And uh Grock said yes.

But it also said that in May u that we spent $316 billion more than we made.

So is that a thing?

Can can the month of May be spending over 300 billion more than you have and yet by June you're making 27 billion more than you spend?

Is it possible that the way budgets work in the government is that they do most of their spending in a few months so they don't don't necessarily smooth it out.

Is that what's going on?

There's something about this story that doesn't seem like it could possibly be real.

Does it?

Do you think it's real that the government took in more revenue than it has spent even in one month?

Any one month?

I don't know.

I'm going to put a pin in this one and say I don't believe it.

Don't believe it.

Well, Peter Navaro um wrote an article for Fox News, an opinion piece, and he's talking about the uh CBO and how their estimates were failures.

Now the CBO is the entity that um tells the public if your Congress does this or that this will this will be what happens with the the deficit and GDP and all that.

So if you have a plan to do something for the country, you want the CBO to say that's a good plan because that's the supposedly would be the independent nonpartisan analysis.

However, what if I told you about complicated 10-year projections of anything?

could be uh something about the budget with lots of variables and lots of people and years and assumptions or or it could be something about the climate.

What do I say about all of those situations?

There's no human being who can predict any of that.

Those are not predictable things.

Um, but Peter Nvaro points out some specific things that the CBO does wrong.

And in there there's a lesson.

And so I wanted to share that with you.

So one of the things that they uh they don't do, well, I guess they they frontload spending.

So they act like the spending happens right away which would push up maybe your your inflation and your interest rates and then bad things would happen.

And they also don't calculate the benefit of economic growth that might be the whole point of your spending bill.

So Trump's spending bill, whatever you want to call it, the the latest one is designed to give money back to taxpayers, which presumably they would spend, which would be good for the GDP, um, and a bunch of other stuff, which should goose the economy.

But when the CBO does their analysis, they do not assume that the GDP goes up more than it normally would, you know, historically.

So, long story short, um, whoever is ever in charge of these big complicated estimates of what's going to happen in the future, the result is always based on their assumptions.

It's not really based on some kind of factual thing.

We like to think it is.

It's not based on facts and it's not based on math.

is based on the assumptions.

So if the people who do the analysis make an assumption that's friendly to the Trump administration, it might look like we made money by cutting taxes, but you could very easily make different assumptions and make it look like it's a huge economic disaster.

So, Peter Navaro does a good job of simply pointing out that these are assumption-based estimates and not necessarily some kind of fact that you should trust.

And he is quite confident that the uh latest moves by the administration will be good for the economy and reduce the deficit if the CBO were good at doing estimates.

Well, the postmillennial is talking about how there's a Gallup poll uh that says only 17% of American adults believe climate change will impact where they live.

Where they live.

Now, isn't that funny?

As soon as you put the where you live part on climate change, then suddenly the number of people who believe in it just drops way down because people have usually, if they're adults, have lived it wherever they lived for a number of years.

And they probably said to themselves, uh, I've been here for a long time and the weather looks the same to me.

So, I've been in California for 35 36 years, something like that.

No, how long have I been here?

Longer than that.

40 uh 46 years I've been in California in roughly the same area of California.

Do you know how much the climate has changed in my 46 years of being here?

Not really at all.

As far as I know, it feels and looks the same to me.

We go through some periods of drought, but California always did, and then we have some rainy years and everything's okay for a while.

So, is this the same where you live?

How many of you live somewhere where when you first moved there uh it was a different climate than it is now?

Is there anybody?

No.

If if you have your own experience, you just look around and you go, I doesn't seem like it's any different where I live.

So that's going to have an impact over time and uh people are less worried about uh big horrible weather disasters uh than than they used to be and they should because we get better at handling weather disasters every year of human existence.

Uh let's see.

Um according to Princeton University, Colton Poor is writing about this.

Um did you know that geothermal energy has a lot of potential?

Yes, you did because you listened to my podcast.

Now, geothermal means that if you dig a hole that's deep enough, you'll get to where the uh the earth is super hot.

And if you were to pump some water down there, or if there was a natural water source, um you could superheat that water and create energy from it and it would be a real clean source of energy.

No, no CO2 if you if you don't like CO2.

But it's not really economical.

Um, most places don't have the ideal place where you could dig a hole that was deep enough and the rocks would be in the right place close to the surface and all that stuff.

So if you were to look at should we go hog wild and geothermal right away?

Well, somebody would do a CBO like economic analysis and they would say, "hm, doesn't look like the economics are good." However, according to this article, which seems uh right to me, the thing they don't include when they look at the economics of geothermal is that we would start by picking the ideal places.

So the the place you put geothermal on day one is going to be where it is economical.

And then you're going to learn much more about how to do it economically.

And then you'll do the next one where there's yet another place where it's perfect for geothermal.

So the costs would be much lower than if you were in a place that's bad for it.

And so the thinking is that uh we are underestimating uh how much of an impact geothermal will someday have because we assume that the economics will not improve that much but in fact it wouldn't be hard to improve the economics.

All you have to do is make sure you're starting in the places where it's economical and then the rest would be sort of the the normal decrease in technology costs over time.

So they think maybe it could be the third best green source of energy until until uh until we get to better nuclear, I guess.

Um, meanwhile over at Harvard, Harvard's having a tough time because all the pressure from the Trump administration, but according to Newsmax, um, they're thinking about creating a conservative think tank.

So, would that help?

Well, wouldn't be nothing because uh, Harvard has almost no conservatives there.

So if they said, "Hey, here's our big old Harvard conservative think tank," that would maybe, you know, give them a little bit of relief from the criticism.

But reportedly also the Crimson, that would be the Harvard newspaper, um, is reporting that Harvard is dismantling some, they say some, of its DEI apparatus.

So, it looks like Harvard is at least doing a lot of talking and scrambling and maybe trying some stuff to get back in the good graces of the government because the government has them in a in kind of a vice grip that says if you continue to be anti-semitic and not open to let's say different points of view such as conservative ones uh we will not give you the funding that you require from the government, federal government.

So Harvard, they had been trying to hang tight and not do what they're told, but there might be a little movement there.

Um, I missed part of this story, so it's a few days old.

Um, but Roger Stone, I guess said in a post uh a few days ago, um, why would Bannon, Steve Bannon, meet with Jeffrey Epstein, both at his New York home and in Paris after Epstein was convicted on sex crimes in Florida?

Uh, why would he coach Epstein for his 60 minutes appearance?

And allegedly Bannon took 15 hours of film of Epstein for a documentary that never got produced.

So um here's what Elon Musk said when he saw Roger Stone's accusation.

Now I don't know I don't know independently if any of this is true but you know Roger Stone is saying it and Elon Musk um commented Bannon is in the Epstein files.

Okay.

Now is he just joking?

Is is uh Elon Musk just screwing with us because he knows we won't believe that?

Or does he know something we don't know?

Or is he just guessing?

I don't know.

But that would explain why Bannon is going all in on trying to destroy Musk, uh destroy all of his businesses, nationalize SpaceX, and then deport him.

deport Musk.

And I thought to I heard that the other day and I thought, wait, is he serious?

I mean, I could understand why you don't want Elon Musk to be involved in politics.

I can understand that.

But do you really need to nationalize SpaceX, which would ruin it, and do you really need to deport him?

What?

What?

So, I wondered like where where was any of this coming from?

So, I don't know who started the fight, but it looks like it's a cage match to the death because um when Elon Musk says that Ben is is in the Epstein files, again, this is a claim which I'm not aware of any evidence to support it.

It's just a social media claim.

It feels like he's going for a kill shot.

And when Bannon talks about essentially destroying Elon Musk's, you know, US connection and deporting him, that feels like he's trying to take a kill shot.

Is that really Is that really what we want?

Um, I don't I don't want either one of them to kill either one of them, but I don't know what's real and I don't know how to value any of these claims.

It's just out there.

Now, let's follow up with the summer rumors about Bonino, Patel, and Bondi.

So, as you know, we were supposed to get a big reveal about the Epstein files, and Pam Bondi had suggested that, you know, maybe there was something more there.

And now we hear and again this is all rumors.

Um I would say that the credibility of this story is about as low as you could get.

We don't really know what people are thinking, feeling said to each other privately.

We don't really know.

But the rumor is that Dan Bonino um stopped coming to work for a few days so that he could think about whether he would resign presumably over the fact that Pam Bondi uh either botched the Epstein reveal or Jay just can't work with her for some reason.

And then further the rumor said, and I don't think the second part is real for sure, is that Cash Patel had said that if Bonino quits because Bondi is still there, I guess he would want her to quit first or something.

Uh that he would quit.

Now, how much of that do you believe?

I do believe that they probably are a little angry at each other.

I don't know who would be angry who or for what, but beyond that, how much do we really know about what they think and why they're doing what they're doing?

If you tell me that Bino took some days off from work, I'm going to say, you mean around the 4th of July in the middle of July when he's been working like a dog for months and months and he took a few days off around a weekend and I'm supposed to make something out of that.

Uh, almost everybody in the government has taken a week off in the summer.

Does that really mean anything?

Well, here are some of the other facts around this story.

Um, number one, do you remember when Pam Bondi gave some influencers some special access to the first wave of Epstein files and she invited him to the White House and had them all hold up their own file that they had been given secret, you know, advanced knowledge of the Epstein information.

And then when they looked at it, they found out it was all public information.

There was nothing new in it whatsoever, which was some say almost like intentionally trying to embarrass the influencers.

Now, I think that goes too far.

I doubt anybody would have done it intentionally, but it was a bad play and it looked like it was a little bit, you know, a blown opportunity, I guess.

So there's uh there there's some reason to believe that some people would have a reason to be mad at Bondi.

And we don't know exactly who said um tell everybody that there's nothing to see here.

But don't you assume it was Trump?

Don't you believe that whatever uh Cash Patel and Bino and Bondi said about Epstein, don't you assume that that was all run past Trump and he said this is what you're going to say?

Don't you believe that?

Cuz I definitely don't believe that any of them went rogue and said, you know, I'll just say what I think and this is what I think.

Oh, there's nothing there.

I don't buy it.

So, I think it's Trump's decisions, but maybe he was influenced by one of them more than the other.

Something like that.

But if you're if you're going to try to bet whether Dan Bino is really going to quit his job over any of the subp stuff, um I would give you the following equation.

So, Bonino went from the top of the pile in the best job you could ever have, what I'm doing right now.

Yeah.

I I laugh because even though I monetized my podcast, um I wouldn't do it unless I sort of enjoyed it every day.

Well, not even sort of.

I enjoy it.

I have absolute enjoyment of doing it.

Even the prep, you know, which takes hours.

absolutely enjoy it.

Now, do you think that Dan Bonino went from the top of the pile, one of the top podcasters in the country, and the podcasting is, you know, sort of the hottest area you could be in, and then he left there to have some government job that probably involves commuting and people hating him and all this drama and the rumors.

How much do you think he wishes he had his old job back?

Just, you know, just use your common sense.

Do you think he goes into the FBI every day and says, "Man, I made a good choice." I don't think so.

I think he made the patriotic choice.

I believe he took the job because he is a genuine patriot.

That's my belief.

Now again I can't read his mind and I don't know him personally but you know we all have to be judges of character because you can't avoid it.

My judge of his character is that he's the real deal.

Meaning that he would have only taken the job if he thought he could do something that would help the president and help the country because he was giving up a lot.

giving up the best job for the worst job.

Who does that?

Well, I mean, it's like somebody joining the military because the country got attacked.

It's a really big sacrifice and he made it.

Now, suppose that he found out he couldn't do the honest job that he thought he wanted to do because let's say somebody, we don't have to know who, said, um, well, you know the truth, but you're not allowed to say it.

What would Dan Bino say?

If somebody who had enough power to make it happen said, uh, you're not allowed to tell the truth on this issue, let's say the Epstein issue that your your base and your fans really really care about, but you're not allowed to tell the truth.

What would you do or what would you assume that Dan Bonino would do?

Well, at the very least, I would make some threats and I would say, "Look, here's the deal.

I think we botched that Epstein roll out, but if we can fix it, maybe I'll stay, but if we can't fix it, I don't want to be part of a fraud.

And I'm going to go back to my perfect job." Now, if he quit and even if he didn't tell you all the details, so this will be hypothetical.

If Bonino quits and the only public statement he makes is something like um my ethics were incompatible with the job I was asked to do.

Suppose that's it.

No details.

my ethics, my my moral center was incompatible with the job I was being asked to do.

So, I'm going to go back to podcasting.

Would he retain his audience?

Because it would be a little bit like admitting admitting that he lied but telling you that he was asked to do it and then you would be noticing that he quit his job in protest which is a very clean way to tell you that he didn't mean what he said and that he's not in favor of it.

Would you then say, you know what, I really respect that guy because he he resigned.

You know, we always say if you really believe that, why didn't you resign?

We say that all the time about other people.

So, if we thought that he was forced to be a little uh disingenuous and then you saw him quit and then he said, "I'm not going to give you details, but you know, let's be honest, you probably know exactly why I quit." Now, going back to my podcasting job, what would his audience do?

I think they would go back, wouldn't they?

I think they would say, "You're an honest man who got caught in a bad situation.

You did the best you could.

It doesn't make sense for you to stay there any longer.

Glad you're back to podcasting." And then his family would say, "Oh, finally you're back to doing what you love.

You're not commuting to Washington.

Wouldn't this be the very best time for him to quit if he wanted to quit anyway?

Do you think he wanted to quit anyway?

Probably.

And I'm only saying that because he left the best job you could ever have, podcasting, to go to the worst job you could ever have, which is you have to do what you're told and you can't do what you think is right.

The worst.

So, um I don't believe he's made a decision because, you know, he probably is going to wait till the last minute to make one.

But if he decided to go back to podcasting with just a general statement about why he's leaving, I would fully respect that.

Now, I would also respect if he stayed because I don't have any negative knowledge about him at all.

Um, but I wouldn't believe anything about this story until it's really confirmed.

I don't believe all the who's mad at whom and why they're mad and who thinks who botched or whatever and who's talking to who.

I don't know if I believe any of that, but let's watch him.

So Bino is kind of the canary in the coal mine because we just assume he's going to do whatever is the right thing and we don't know what that is because we don't know what pressure he's under or anything like that.

But I do think I'd expect him to do the right thing.

And given that his own personal interest would suggest that quitting kind of soon and making this the reason for quitting that might that might kill two birds with one stone.

One bird would be he could get back to his awesome career without without destroying his reputation.

And the other is it would tell you exactly what was going on there.

Um, at that point you would know for sure that there's something going on with the the Epstein files.

So anyway, so we'll keep an eye on that.

Um, I like all three of them.

I like Bondi, I like Bungino, and I like Cash Patel.

So I'll tell you what I'm not going to do is take sides.

uh unless some new information comes up that I've never heard.

To me, they all look like they're loyal Trump mega compatible people and uh you know, I wouldn't want anything bad to happen to any of them.

Anyway, um Bill O'Reilly um is pretty sure that the president is behind whatever happened.

He had the the Epstein file release.

He thinks that the president was behind how it was handled.

Um and then uh let's see.

All right.

According to uh Glenn Beck at the Blaze, um his team has filed a foyer request, freedom of information request to get all of Dan Bonino's texts and emails regarding Epstein to Pam Bondi.

Now, that's something you could do.

Are you telling me that the Freedom of Information Act would allow any citizen to just file some paperwork and then we could see the private emails of two people who are currently in the government?

Is that real?

When did when did that become real?

Has that always been real?

Now I understand if people were not in government anymore or you know maybe time had gone by or something or maybe it was part of a you know let's say part of a legal action or something but oh with the redactions with the redactions okay so that's the catch so as long as the government can redact anything they want I'm just gleaning this from the comments as long as the government has the option of redacting whatever they want, then I guess the citizens can ask for whatever they want.

Doesn't mean they'll get it.

But, uh, interesting play.

It's an interesting play.

All right.

Um, here's some more fake news, maybe.

Um, I saw a claim on social media that Epstein gave all of his money to his brother right before he died, like two days before he died.

Um, Grock says that's not technically true, but that Epstein did um he put all of his money in a trust.

I think it was an overseas trust.

Virgin Islands.

Oh, US Virgin Islands.

And we assume that the trust beneficiary was his only relative which was his brother.

So in a way he did sign over his money to his brother but probably probably through the mechanism of the trust.

We don't know the details.

Um and then allegedly the brother claimed uh his um his brother's body and buried it in an unmarked grave next to his parents in Palm Beach.

Unmarked grave.

So if you were if you were Jeffrey Epstein and you wanted to fake your own death, would you make sure that your body could be not be examined check?

And would you make sure that all of your money went to a trusted person so you still had access to it after your debt?

You know, allegedly dead.

Yeah.

Now, I don't I don't have uh a belief that he's still alive.

I have a belief that if you rule that out, I don't know if we can rule that out.

Can we?

I'm not going to say I believe it, that he's still alive.

I'm just going to say, if you're asking me to rule it out, I don't have any basis upon which to rule it out either.

It looks like coincidentally he did the very things you would do if you were trying to fake your own death and still have still have resources when you were done.

So, we'll keep an eye on that.

Um, I saw a post on X by Patrick Burn about John Brennan.

Um, apparently Patrick has some in inside information that says John Brennan is abroad operating from a recreated MSNBC set somewhere.

Um, and that at one point he was operating from a skiff in Australia continuing to coordinate against Trump.

So, do you think that John Brennan left the country because he's worried about consequences?

Um, I don't know.

Maybe apparently uh some more seven more people who had worked with the Jack Smith team that was working on the cases against Trump, they have been let go.

And uh I guess there were already a whole bunch of them who had been fired for the same reason that they worked with Jack Smith as part of the prosecution attempt or the attempt to lawfare Trump.

And what's interesting is these are not even lawyers.

They were support staff.

Now does that seem like going a little too far?

I can totally understand why Trump would get rid of the lawyers who were acting against him for years, of course.

But the support staff really that's going a little deep, but you know, it would be fair to assume that the support staff was not pro.

Trump.

So maybe that's all he needs.

He doesn't need a reason.

Um, so he's cutting pretty deep there.

Um, Hillary Clinton was on Smirkish on CNN with that big old Hill Hillary Clinton pumpkin smile and she said, quote, "If social media platforms don't moderate content, then we lose total control." Well, I guess that's saying it directly, isn't it?

You could interpret that sentence two different ways.

One is just that bad things will happen.

The other way is exactly what she said.

We will lose total control.

We Who's we?

And what kind of total control are they going to lose?

Did Did Hillary say it exactly the way she meant it?

That the Democrats and and her posi would lose total control of the narrative if they let social media just do what it does.

Unbelievable.

So, yeah.

And you wouldn't believe if you didn't see the video of her talking about this.

She could not get the smile off her face when she talked about the need to censor people on social media.

I mean, she seemed so genuinely happy.

It's like, "Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

We're going to lose control unless we we censor the hell out of them." Yeah.

Can't wait.

Oh, she says she's the personification of evil.

The U State Department, Marco Rubio, um I guess I got 1,300 staffers as part of a big overhaul of the State Department.

And I when I see something like that, 1300 people have been downsized.

What were those 1300 people doing?

How can you take any organization?

I mean, I know the answer, but uh it's it's still mindboggling.

That there were,300 people that according to management were unnecessary and they were all being paid.

They're all commuting to work.

How would you like to be one of the 1300 when you'd been working every day for, you know, maybe years and years and then somebody says, "Oh, we just realized, you know, all that work that you did for decades probably didn't need any of it." That that was my corporate experience that gave birth to Dilbert.

One day I realized in my corporate jobs that if uh if I had never existed in my job, nothing would be different.

Nothing about the company would be different.

nothing about the stock price that every day I was going to work and getting paid, putting all the in these hours and I was completely aware that none of it made any difference to anybody and and you could just take me away from history.

I think uh comedian Nate Bargati, he has this little uh little joke he says that if he went back in time was that if he goes back in time that uh nothing would change.

I forget his exact punchline, but it was something like, "Oh, so how do you make a nuclear power plant?" and he'd be like, I don't really know that.

That wasn't his punchline.

He had a better one.

But the idea was that he wouldn't be able to affect history because he doesn't know enough about even our current time.

That's pretty funny.

All right.

Um, so what about this story that after lots of investigation, uh, several of the agents who were protecting Trump at the Butler, Pennsylvania event where he got shot in the ear, that several of the agents were suspended.

Now, only for days or weeks, right?

Not a permanent suspension.

But here's my question.

How could there be so many agents who on the same day and at the same time and in the same place all of them independently were doing something worthy of suspension?

What?

How was that even possible?

What What the hell were they doing that several of them were worthy of suspension?

Now, if they said to me, "Well, you know, one of these people should have kept the door locked, or one of these people should have said, make sure there's somebody on the roof." Or one of these people should have said, "Hey, there's a guy walking around with a rangefinder and a drone.

Maybe we should stop what we're doing and check this out." Now, you could easily understand how there'd be one or two people there who did something that was sketchy enough that you think they should be suspended for temporarily, but how could there be several?

Like, how could you have a handful of people who all independently did something so non-standard to their job at the same time that they all get suspended?

I would love to know what their particular crimes were because it does get to the question of were they doing it intentionally.

Now, I doubt it was a big um wellorganized anything because if you're going to do an assassination like that, you're not going to have a dozen people in on it.

And this would assume that, you know, something like a dozen people did all the wrong things to get him killed.

It doesn't feel like that would be the way anybody would do a plot to have too many people involved in it.

But anyway, so uh as you know the uh the border enforcement people, ICE, uh they raided two different cannabis farms in California on Thursday and collectively they they got 300 people detained for deportation.

300.

So these were two businesses.

They were both pop farms and collectively they had 300 people who were undocumented and working there.

What kind of power farm these 300 people?

Um I would say that's a 10 robot situation.

So uh eventually robots but apparently one person died in the process of these raids.

I didn't see the details of how they died or what they died of, but uh that's tragic.

Um and I guess one of the can cannabis farms had been donating to uh to Governor Nuomo.

So, but that doesn't mean anything.

Um the thing that bothered me is that the price of weed in California is going to go up now.

Hey, I thought Trump was going to reduce the price of my essentials, but no.

No.

Apparently, the supply of uh marijuana will go down quite a bit and uh prices might go higher.

I don't know if you know this, but the prices for marijuana have dropped quite a bit in recent years since it was legal.

When it was um first legalized, I think an ounce cost sometimes $400 or $500.

And at the moment, the same amount and same quality would be $250.

So, the price of weed um did in fact respond to supply and demand, and at least there was no uh no inflation on weed.

But maybe there will be.

Um there's a uh new poll that says Democrats look uh out of touch and woke and weak.

We may have talked about this one and uh the there there was a super PAC who did the poll and they've decided that the Democrats focusing on fighting for democracy.

Um, it was still popular within the party but not in the general electorate.

How much are you surprised?

Remember how many times I told you that it was ridiculous that the Democrats thought that fighting to sup to to uh maintain your democracy was not going to resonate with the public.

That's just something that, you know, news geeks say.

But I don't know anybody who's just living their life that who is worried about democracy being taken away by Trump.

And here's the poll that supports my hunch that the public didn't really care about the stealing democracy part because they didn't see it as real.

They also didn't care about the oligarchy.

I'm seeing in the comments.

Yeah, they didn't care about the oligarchy either.

If you're really into politics, that's the stuff you debate.

But if you're just a casual citizen and somebody said maybe your biggest problems, how many just soccer moms who are and dads who are not paying attention to politics, how many of them would say, "Well, I'm worried about the oligarchy or I'm worried about the attack on democracy." Probably none.

But when you see um that Mandani guy when he gets all this purchase and all this attention because he said the right thing which is we're going to work on affordability.

Affordability was really a good kill shot.

You know, I'm not a M Dani fan because he's a socialist, but when he when he found a message, he just had energy and the right policy message.

He didn't even have solutions really.

I mean, not practical ones, but it reminded me of Trump.

When people looked at Trump in the very beginning, they just said, "Oh, there's no way." I mean, we see that he's exciting.

and he's he's bringing a lot of energy.

We get it.

And uh yeah, yeah, when he talks about the border and the wall, those are popular with his base, but but that's not enough.

You know, you're going to have to be an experienced politician to win an election.

That's what people said.

But it turns out that Trump needed two things.

The right policies and the right amount of energy.

and everything else we were willing to forgive or just enjoy as a show in my case.

And I think that mom Donnie is another example of that.

He definitely got the right policy affordability um better than I've seen anybody do it really.

So he nailed the policy, not the solutions, but at least he said, "I feel your pain." You know, sort of the Bill Clinton thing.

I feel your pain.

it's affordability and then he brought the energy.

You know, you could talk about, you know, um all different things that he did that you might like in both cases, Trump and Manny, but I feel like it just came down to that.

Do you have the right policy?

I mean, have you even identified the problem?

And then do you have the energy to make it happen?

and they both fit that energy plus the right policy according to their base.

Anyway, um Jen Saki and her TV show on MSNBC that replaced uh Rachel Matto's time slot is doing terrible in the ratings.

Uh lost 44% of her audience.

You know, I'm always surprised.

Was Rachel Maddau so popular that if you replace her with somebody who is in my opinion a bit of a clone, you know, it's not like it's not like Jen Saki is a completely different person than Rachel Matto.

So, why would the why would the viewership go down so much?

It doesn't seem like that much of a change, but um one of my favorite uh hobbies is looking at Fox News and what they do right and comparing it to MSNBC and what they do wrong.

MSNBC and CNN appear to be under the impression that news is something informing people especially about the bad news.

So if you turn on CNN or you turn on MSNBC, you're mostly going to get some bad news.

And it's not all political.

you know, some of it might be natural disasters and stuff and those will be on every network.

But the the thing that Fox News has been getting right for a long time is the understanding that people watch news as entertainment.

How many of you are in that category?

When I turn on the news, I'm sort of a little bit trying to find out what's new, but mostly I'm looking to be entertained.

And when I when I'm watching Fox News, I'm often entertained depending on what show I'm watching.

And if I turn on CNN or MSNBC, cuz I do cycle through the three of them, they're not trying to entertain.

They're trying to get you worked up or angry.

And I can feel the difference.

But I I also note that um Greg Guffeld completely changes the nature of Fox News in a way that's made them dominant.

Um I think he's he more than anybody else he's proven that people will watch for the entertainment which is why he has two shows you know that he's on the five which is the top ratings uh thing at that time slot and then he's got his own show Gutfeld which again is you know tops in the ratings.

So, so he's now got, you know, two important time slots in which it's very clear to the viewer that, you know, entertainment is why you turned it on.

You learn some stuff cuz, you know, they're dealing with the same news that the other networks are.

So, it's not like you're going to be uninformed, but the intent is to make it entertaining.

And then I realized the other day that uh Jesse Waters is a similar kind of vibe.

When you watch him on the five, he's playing it for laughs and he does a great job.

And now he has his own show, so he's got his own hour, is it?

Um, in which, you know, he he plays a little bit more seriously, but you know, you can tell he's he's always got a smile on his face.

So they have something like, you know, 3 hours every night during the week in which it's unambiguously true that you know you're going to get entertained if you watch either of those or any of those shows.

And it's amazing to me that CNN and MSNBC have not taken any kind of a learning from that.

CNN u I think they're still doing it.

Maybe they had, maybe not.

But they launched that show that was like a game show um in which they would make fun of the news and uh Michael Ian Black was on that and some other people and I never found it funny because it was a little too forced.

So I don't know if that's even still on but they tried.

Um let's see what else.

Um, there's some uh crypto executive orders that are expected from the White House.

And I always have trouble following this topic, but the reason that Bitcoin is going up in value, it had a good run this week.

I didn't know why.

Um, but apparently it's in anticipation of it becoming a better uh I don't know if I want to call it an investment.

I guess I would um because of the upcoming executive orders and they would do among other things ban a central bank digital currency.

I guess that would be taking away a competitor to Bitcoin.

Uh would protect self custody so you don't have to keep it in the bank.

Um and stable coins which are coins that are pegged to the dollar meaning if the dollar goes up they go up to the same amount.

uh would be backed by the treasuries and then um there' be some market structure blah blah blah.

So some of it I don't understand but O is reporting this.

So there might be something big coming with crypto if you're watching the uh Trump and Jerome Powell saga which is always fun.

Um, so of course, uh, you know, Trump wants Jerome Powell to quit as soon as possible or better yet just lower interest rates because that's what he really wants.

Uh but the gateway pundit is reporting that uh that Jerome Powell is getting some uh pressure now and that uh according to uh Bill PE who's a chairman of the board of Fanny May and Freddy Mack um Bill Posted on X quote I'm encouraged by reports that Jerome Pal was considering resigning.

I think this will be the right decision for America and the economy will boom.

Now, I don't I don't know what uh what those rumors are.

Um and I'm not sure that rumors can necessarily be trusted, but uh there's quite a push and I think uh Bill Py is the right person to be pushing this because he's in the domain where the interest rates are going to, you know, affect affordability of housing in a big way.

So, he certainly has a he has a dog in this fight.

Um, Intel CEO was talking to his own company and told them it's too late for Intel to catch up in AI chips.

What can you imagine?

You're CEO of a chip company saying, "Yeah, it's too late." Um, and that the big companies like AMD and Nvidia basically have already captured the market.

And uh, he said on training, I think it is too late for us.

So, Intel, uh, that's a little too honest.

It must He must have been an engineer before he was the CEO.

That's a little bit too honest.

Yeah, it's too late for us.

We'll never catch up.

So, we're doomed.

He He didn't say they're doomed, but it feels like it.

Well, in uh good news, um the US is opening its first rare earth mine in more than 70 years and apparently it will provide six of the 17 rare earth materials and has tons and tons of supply.

Now, it has to be refined.

I don't know who's going to do that or if we've solved that.

But if you're wondering, is the US moving in a useful way to be free of China's um control of rare earth minerals?

The answer is yes, at least for six of 17.

And I expect we'll see more movement there.

All right, let me give you a lesson in economics so that I can say that you were smarter when you left.

Um, I had made the observation that if it's true that Trump has decided that Russia and Ukraine will never agree to a ceasefire and it does look true.

I don't know that that's true, but from my perspective, it looks very much like Trump has given up and probably should that at least for now, Russia and Ukraine prefer to fight.

Now, a bunch of people said to me, "Scott, you stupid freaking idiot.

Ukraine isn't choosing to fight." To which I say, "Did they stop?

If they didn't stop, they choose to fight.

Now, you what you really mean is they have a good reason to fight.

I'm not talking about the reason, and I'm not arguing that they don't have a good reason.

I'm just saying that neither side has made a decision to stop and they would prefer fighting over whatever they see as the reasonable alternatives.

So, as long as they both want to fight, what would be the best thing for the greatest president in our history to do?

Let me tell you, if you know you can't fix it, you should monetize it.

And it looks like Trump might be doing that.

So, what he's done is he's uh he's providing weapons to Ukraine, but he's making NATO pay for it.

Now, what's the next thing you're going to say to me, Scott?

You idiot.

I thought you understood things like this.

You know that we're one of the biggest funders of NATO, so it's not like it's free.

We're putting the money into NATO and then taking it right back out to buy our weapons.

So, it's not really monetizing it, right?

It's not monetizing it.

Because a lot of it's our own money.

Here's why you're wrong about that.

It's a concept called sunk costs.

Here's how you should do that analysis.

Were we going to pay our 5% to NATO like the other countries were supposed to?

Yes.

We were going to give NATO money no matter what they did with it.

That's called a sunk cost.

Meaning that part's not going to change.

The money will come out of our pockets and it will go to NATO.

Nothing will change that.

that that's that's the most public agreed upon thing that all of the countries will try to get to their 5% you know in the not right away but there's a schedule for that but the United States most certainly is signed up for a certain amount of money that we will definitely take out of our pockets and definitely give to NATO.

If you know that that won't change and can't change in any reasonable way, then that doesn't count in the analysis.

So, in other words, if we're going to give NATO money anyway, the only question is, do we want some of it back in the form of buying weapons from the US?

And that's apparently what Trump's doing.

So if you understand the concept of sunk costs, the money we give to NATO is just going to be there no matter what, no matter what they do with it.

Wouldn't it make more sense for us to have as much of that as possible come right back to the United States in terms of purchasing American products, in this case warfighting products?

Of course it would.

Of course it would.

So we may have created a situation or Trump may have in which we don't have to solve the problem at all because the two sides that are fighting prefer the war.

And again when I say they prefer the war they would both like the other side to stop fighting and for their side to get everything they wanted out of it.

But that's not going to happen.

So instead, they don't prefer stopping because that would give the other one the win.

So they prefer to fight.

So Trump monetized it.

I could not be more proud of my president.

If that's what's really happening, and you know, I'm I'm getting ahead of it a little bit.

Maybe that's not what's happening, but if that's what he came up with, well, we can't stop it.

We might as well monetize it.

I would be so impressed.

I mean, I would just be so so impressed if he monetized it.

Anyway, um Russian President Vladimir Putin uh allegedly is in favor of an Iran nuclear deal in which Iran would not be allowed to enrich uranium on their own.

But since Putin is a weasel, do we think he's just trying to be useful for world peace?

Or is it more likely that if uh Iran is not allowed to enrich that they would have to depend on other countries such as Russia to provide them with the uranium that's already enriched for their medical use and for their domestic nuclear energy use.

And that would give Russia some uh leverage over Iran.

So, I feel like this is more about Russia having some leverage over Iran, but I doubt it's because he's trying to be useful in Great Britain.

According to the Telegraph, um there are some serious people who think that Britain should build more bomb shelters because they expect to be in a war with Russia.

Are you following that?

that the UK is acting like it's preparing for war with Russia.

Why would the UK want to have a war with Russia?

That seems like the worst idea in the world for both teams.

Anyway, that's all I got for today.

Um, as I reminded you, Owen Gregorian will have a spaces event in a few minutes as soon as we're done here.

And you can continue talking about this stuff or maybe some other stuff if you want, but go to X and look for Owen Gregorian and you'll find the link to the spaces which will begin pretty soon.

All right.

Um, and I'm going to say a few words privately to the people on locals, my beloveds subscribers to you.

Thanks for joining and I will see you tomorrow.

Same time, same place.

I hope.

Bye for now.

Oh no, it's not working again.

All right.

for reasons which I cannot determine.

Um, I can't go private without turning off the studio and getting back in.

So, I'll just see you on locals.

Um, or I'll see you on uh spaces.

All right, everybody.

Say see you later.

I probably have to end it a different way.

Uh, end and close room.

All right.

Going to have to close it and reopen

Come on in here.

Let's have some fun. It's Saturday, also

known as Saturday,

and that means the all the lazy

podcasters take the day off. But not me.

No, I'm here for you.

I'm here for you and especially Beth.

So Beth, this is the real show.

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Oh, you feel better. You do. Yeah, you

do.

Well,

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you might want to join Owen Gregorian

who's going to be hosting a spaces event

right after we're done. Spaces is the

audio service on X. So, just go there

and look for Owen Gregorian or you can

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Adams says.

Well, I wonder if there's any news about

the health benefits of coffee. H oh

yeah. uh according to the times of India

there's a new study out of uh uh the UK

somewhere and uh turns out that if you

have three cups of coffee every day you

can reduce your uh risk of liver disease

by 49%.

Right? So, what I recommend is that when

you drink alcohol, you drink one cup of

coffee for every drink cuz the alcohol

will destroy your liver cuz it's poison,

but the coffee will just rejuvenate it.

You'll break even. No, do not listen to

any medical advice from cartoonist

podcasters. Bad idea. Bad idea.

see what else is happening.

Um, let's do some fake news. There's

some fake news today on social media. O

is reporting

uh that uh the this is not true by the

way. So before I even say what it is, uh

according to Grock, there's no truth to

this whatsoever. But the rumor is that

Bridget Mcronone's plastic surgeon uh

who was gonna give a tell all uh has

been found dead fell out of window.

But it turns out that it's probably a

Russian disinformation campaign and

there's no there's no credible source

and there's no credible source for the

story. Does Grock really know? Marcela

asks. And the answer is, well, it's

pretty good at checking sources, so

there's no other source that uh that

says it.

All right, here's my favorite story. Um,

I was doing a pre-show before we went

live here and I couldn't stop laughing

for about 10 minutes.

So Trump just published another truth

social in which he

in which he opines that Rosie O'Donnell

who as you know moved to Ireland because

she's so unhappy with the United States

and Trump says that since Rosie is so

bad for the United States he's

considering removing her citizenship.

ship.

Now, I went to Grock and I said, "Can a

president remove somebody's

citizenship?"

And he said, "No,

no, a president does not have that

power." Yeah. I I think it would be in

some weird situation where they had lied

on a uh you know lied on some official

forms to become a citizen or something.

There's a special case but basically no.

So, the thing that makes me laugh is

wondering what Trump was thinking or

saying or who was in the room when he

wrote that when he wrote that message

because if he wrote it alone,

uh, it wouldn't be as funny. But I just

imagine him sitting there with with some

of his, you know, best friends or, you

know, maybe just Melania or something

like, "All right, watch this. I'm gonna

send out a true social

that says I'm gonna take Rosie

O'Donnell's citizenship away because she

complained about the United States from

Ireland.

I I don't believe that he believes he

has the power to do that. And you know

that it it's it's a slow news day.

So the last thing that Trump wants is

people talking about Epstein.

So when whenever the the shelf of news

is a little bear,

Trump just comes up with

he just comes up with something that he

just creates out of nothing that that

creates a story you can't not talk

about.

Do do you think that the news can ignore

the fact that that Trump has called for

maybe removing the citizenship of a of a

US citizen for complaining from Ireland.

All right. I hope you liked it as much

as I did. To me, that's just hilarious.

He obviously knows exactly what he's

doing.

All right. Well, according to the Daily

Mail,

the New York Times is admitting their

fake news from last year where I guess

they uh they're accusing Trump of lying

or exaggerating about the Venezuelan

gangs allegedly taking over a Colorado

apartment building. And then the New

York Times said, "We looked into it.

That's not true." And then a year later

they publish an article says well you

know turns out it's a little bit

complicated

and we can't really say it's not true.

It's uh trueish maybe kind of true maybe

maybe it was fake news.

So,

you know, they they might uh they might

describe what they did a little

differently, but the Daily Mail is uh

blaming them of admitting their fake

news. That was a big one. As as the fake

news goes, that was kind of bold because

could they really not figure out what

was going on there? Did the New York

Times really really did they really not

have the resources or the talent or the

time or something to look into that and

find out that yes, there were armed gang

members standing outside the apartment

building.

There was no way they could have figured

that out on their own for a year.

Sorry. Trust in the media pretty low.

pretty pretty low.

All right, here's a story

that as far as I know has not been

debunked,

but it doesn't sound real to me.

So, I'm going to tell you the story, but

you we're going to play a game where you

tell me, does this sound real or does

this sound a little too on the nose,

like a little too perfect?

All right, here's the story. Um, I see

Ian Miller is reporting this for

Outkick, but I believe there were other

other outlets that are reporting it. All

right. And the report is that JP Morgan

Chase CEO, the famous JB Diamond,

um said the following while at a

overseas event.

Um he said that uh quote, "I have a lot

of friends who are Democrats and they're

idiots.

Um this Bloomberg is reporting this

while I was speaking at a foreign

ministry event in Ireland." Oh well, I

guess Ireland is where you go to say

terrible things like Rosie.

Then uh allegedly

uh Jamie Diamond went on and said, "I

always say they have big hearts and

little brains. They do not understand

how the real world works. Almost every

single policy rolled out has failed.

Doesn't that sound a little bit like me?

for uh you know maybe Greg Guffeld.

One of the things that uh criticized

well one of the things that uh Democrats

are often criticized for is policies

that don't seem to understand how human

beings work that we have incentives and

stuff like that. So that is so on the

nose that that makes me a little

suspicious.

Um, and then it goes further and he

describes how the Democrats, you know,

lost their way. And allegedly, and

again, I'm not totally sure this is

real, but allegedly Jaime Diamond said

they overdid DEI. We all were devoted to

reaching out to the black community,

Hispanic and LGBT community, the

disabled. We do all of that, Diamond

said. But the extent they got to stop it

and they got to go back to being more

practical, they're very ideological. And

I'm thinking to myself, all right, well,

it's sort of realish,

but he would have known he would have

been quoted.

Would he really say that all of his

Democrat friends are idiots? Would he

say that and then go back to New York

City where his subordinates and his

friends are Democrats?

Who says that? He He's a little bit too

smart and too savvy to insult 75% of all

of his friends knowing that it will get

back to them. So, is that real? All

right. But it goes further.

Um, I guess he was asked about Zoran

Mandani, who by the way, you could call

him Zoran Mandani,

or you could call him Zamani.

So, it's either Zoron or Pick

one. Anyway, um, what JB Diamond

allegedly said, and here I'm still a

little skeptical. He really did. But uh

allegedly, quote, he's more of a Marxist

than a socialist. And now you see these

Democrats falling all over themselves

saying, well, he's pointing out some

real problems, affordable housing and

grocery prices. Okay, maybe uh there's

the same ideological

mush that means nothing in the real

world.

Now again, that's the sort of thing that

I would say that it's sort of a word

salad mean meaningless nothing.

Does that sound real to you?

I'm I'm going to put a pin in this one

and say I'm not sure cuz a lot of the

news today is fake or looks fake. This

one

I don't know. I'm not buying it.

I I'm willing to be talked into it being

real if if Jamie Diamond says, "Yeah, I

said that." Or there's a video that

comes out someday, but at the moment,

I'm going to say probably not. I'm

leaning I'm leaning toward fake news on

this one, but I could be wrong. I'm

going to say 55% fake news, 45% real.

That'll be my That's my final answer.

Well, somebody named Eddie Zoo has

developed AI glasses that will be used

to train robots. And the way it will do

that is they'll put these AI glasses on

Chinese factory workers and it will

watch them work. So the glasses will be

on the the human and it will be watching

the human doing something with their

hands that's assembling something or

doing some kind of a you know assembly

line kind of thing and that's how they

will train robots.

So they'll collect all that data and

feed it into robots and then robots will

know how to put everyone in China out of

work.

I think the

Chinese government is going to have to

throw him out a window because uh I

don't think you can put a hundred few

hundred million Chinese factory workers

out of work with robots. But maybe maybe

it's coming.

Well, uh Sam Alman

was talking about delay at chat GPT.

and he says uh they're planning to to

launch their openw weight model next

week, but they're going to delay it for

more safety testing. And you might say,

"What the heck is an open weight model?"

Well, I didn't know. So, I went to

Grock. I had to go to Grock today

five times while I was reading in the

news. Five times the news told me

something that I just said, "I don't

even know what that is.

like why don't you tell me what that

means and then maybe I'll know what I'm

looking at. Um but the open weight model

is an AI that is uh a little bit open

sourced not completely but it allows

developers to know how the model works.

So if they want to build their own

product on top of it, it operates with

the AI in the best way.

Now, so so he's saying the tech got

delayed because they they want to review

the high-risk areas.

Now, when he's talking about high risk,

he's not really just talking about it

having a bug, right?

They're talking about, well, it might be

the end of all civilization,

but we're going to take an extra week to

make sure that it doesn't destroy

civilization.

Well, it's possible that all humankind

will be eviscerated and possibly

incinerated by the end of next week, but

just in case, we're going to take an

extra week.

Um,

I can't tell how much of this is real

because there's almost nothing I've

heard about AI that I understand and

also scares me.

So, why is it that the people who know

the most way more than I know, why are

they so scared of AI?

Is it like a mass hysteria? Is it

possible that they don't want to be the

one who didn't say it was dangerous when

everybody else does? So maybe they just

have to take that position because it

sounds more socially responsible. If

something bad happens, they'll say,

"Well, we told you it wasn't fully

safe." Yeah. I've been saying since the

beginning, good things might go wrong.

And then at least you would think, "Oh,

well, they're not morons, but something

did go wrong and now we're all dead."

So, I'm a little bit worried

about what the smartest people know that

I don't know about AI, but still, I'm

not afraid of it.

Does anybody else have that feeling that

you're watching the news, you're hearing

what the smart people say and they tell

you, you know, might be a 10 or 20%

chance it will destroy all humankind

and I still don't worry about it. What's

up with that?

How how many of you actually worry about

it? I don't understand the risk enough

to be actually worried. I just it just

you know it's like news that just passes

through.

But I'm going to add my own prediction.

I would say that we could say at this

point there's a 100% chance that human

evolution,

you know, with our organic bodies

will be replaced by machine evolution

and robots. And I don't mean cyborgs,

I mean just machines.

And that the the obvious evolutionary

path is for the organic humans to die

off from one thing or another, not

necessarily from AI. You know, could be,

I don't know, could be we last a million

years and then the sun explodes and we

haven't gotten to another planet. So,

could be there's a new virus that comes

out of a lab and kills all the humans,

but we're not there yet.

But we're very close to having these uh,

you know, artificial general

intelligence and artificial super

intelligence robots that could

potentially

take over civilization and keep things

running. after all human organic people

are gone.

So if you look at the history of other

species

and you look at the history of like

civilizations that that were here 20,000

years ago but somehow they all got wiped

out. Is it more likely

that we humans will find a way to be

permanent and just keep evolving for

millions of years? Is that more likely

than all the organic people being

killed?

Not even not even being murdered, but

just, you know, apparently if you you

wait long enough, there's going to be a

meteor,

something's going to hit the Earth, you

know, something's going to go wrong. But

the robots

might be capable of, you know, as long

as they can get electricity, of just

rebuilding civilization.

So, I'm going to make my prediction

right now that human civilization will

turn into machine evolution

and it might live forever but as

machines

maybe. All right. Uh Trump and Melania

visited the Texas flood zone and he did

his presidential thing. Trump is very

good at the uh empathy and you know

meeting with people who have had tragedy

and whatever. But uh Melania was very

good as well. She was at the the table

with him and and uh and Trump said you

Melania might have a few words. And I

wasn't sure if Melania was happy about

that. I didn't know if she was prepared

to speak. And I still don't know if she

was prepared, but she very effortlessly

um went into an empathy related we feel

your pain, I'll come back kind of a

thing. And I was watching Trump cuz you

know Trump will be very careful about

managing his brand and would certainly

want his family members and especially

his wife to uh to look good in public.

And I thought to myself that he was

looking at her with a lot of pride cuz

she was really good. Very good. I I

didn't know I don't know how much game

she has, but uh yeah, she nailed it. She

got all the she had all the notes and

looked very capable and uh

um I think he was probably quite happy

with her uh response.

Uh let's see what else. According to

just the news, Ben Weeden is writing

that the Treasury has announced that in

June the government will have a 27

billion surplus from tariff revenues.

Surplus meaning that after the

government paid all of its bills,

it would have an extra 27 billion left

over. And that happens to be the amount

that came in from tariffs.

Does that sound real?

Doesn't that sound a little bit too

impossible?

Did we just go from uh deficits that

could never be solved to, oh, looks like

June we spent less than we made?

So I went to Grock and said, is this

true?

Is it possible that even for one month

of the year that we would take in more

revenue as a country, we would take in

more revenue than we spend?

And uh Grock said yes.

But it also said that in May

u that we spent $316 billion more than

we made.

So is that a thing? Can can the month of

May be spending over 300 billion more

than you have and yet by June you're

making 27 billion more than you spend?

Is it possible that the way budgets work

in the government is that they do most

of their spending in a few months so

they don't don't necessarily smooth it

out. Is that what's going on?

There's something about this story that

doesn't seem like it could possibly be

real. Does it?

Do you think it's real that the

government took in more revenue than it

has spent even in one month? Any one

month? I don't know. I'm going to put a

pin in this one and say I don't believe

it. Don't believe it.

Well, Peter Navaro

um wrote an article for Fox News, an

opinion piece, and he's talking about

the uh CBO

and how their estimates were failures.

Now the CBO is the entity that um tells

the public if your Congress does this or

that this will this will be what happens

with the the deficit and GDP and all

that. So if you have a plan to do

something for the country, you want the

CBO to say that's a good plan because

that's the supposedly would be the

independent nonpartisan

analysis.

However,

what if I told you about complicated

10-year

projections of anything?

could be uh something about the budget

with lots of variables and lots of

people and years and assumptions or or

it could be something about the climate.

What do I say about all of those

situations?

There's no human being who can predict

any of that. Those are not predictable

things.

Um,

but Peter Nvaro points out some specific

things that the CBO does wrong. And in

there there's a lesson. And so I wanted

to share that with you. So one of the

things that they uh they don't do, well,

I guess they they frontload spending. So

they act like the spending happens right

away which would push up maybe your your

inflation and your interest rates and

then bad things would happen. And they

also don't calculate the benefit of

economic growth that might be the whole

point of your spending bill. So Trump's

spending bill, whatever you want to call

it, the the latest one is designed to

give money back to taxpayers, which

presumably they would spend, which would

be good for the GDP,

um, and a bunch of other stuff, which

should goose the economy. But when the

CBO does their analysis,

they do not assume that the GDP goes up

more than it normally would, you know,

historically.

So, long story short,

um, whoever is ever in charge of these

big complicated estimates of what's

going to happen in the future, the

result is always

based on their assumptions.

It's not really based on some kind of

factual thing. We like to think it is.

It's not based on facts and it's not

based on math. is based on the

assumptions. So if the people who do the

analysis make an assumption that's

friendly to the Trump administration, it

might look like we made money by cutting

taxes,

but you could very easily make different

assumptions and make it look like it's a

huge economic disaster.

So, Peter Navaro does a good job of

simply pointing out that these are

assumption-based estimates and not

necessarily some kind of fact that you

should trust.

And he is quite confident that the uh

latest moves by the administration will

be good for the economy and reduce the

deficit if the CBO were good at doing

estimates.

Well, the postmillennial

is talking about how there's a Gallup

poll

uh that says only 17% of American adults

believe climate change will impact where

they live. Where they live. Now, isn't

that funny? As soon as you put the where

you live part on climate change, then

suddenly the number of people who

believe in it just drops way down

because people have usually, if they're

adults, have lived it wherever they

lived for a number of years. And they

probably said to themselves, uh, I've

been here for a long time and the

weather looks the same to me. So, I've

been in California for

35 36 years, something like that. No,

how long have I been here? Longer than

that.

40

uh 46 years I've been in California in

roughly the same area of California. Do

you know how much the climate has

changed in my 46 years of being here?

Not really at all. As far as I know, it

feels and looks the same to me. We go

through some periods of drought, but

California always did, and then we have

some rainy years and everything's okay

for a while. So, is this the same where

you live? How many of you live somewhere

where when you first moved there

uh it was a different climate than it is

now?

Is there anybody?

No. If if you have your own experience,

you just look around and you go, I

doesn't seem like it's any different

where I live. So that's going to have an

impact over time

and uh people are less worried about uh

big horrible weather disasters

uh than than they used to be and they

should because we get better at handling

weather disasters every year of human

existence.

[Music]

Uh let's see.

Um according to Princeton University,

Colton Poor is writing about this. Um

did you know that geothermal energy has

a lot of potential? Yes, you did because

you listened to my podcast. Now,

geothermal means that if you dig a hole

that's deep enough, you'll get to where

the uh the earth is super hot. And if

you were to pump some water down there,

or if there was a natural water source,

um you could superheat that water and

create energy from it and it would be a

real clean source of energy. No, no CO2

if you if you don't like CO2.

But it's not really economical.

Um, most places don't have the ideal

place where you could dig a hole that

was deep enough and the rocks would be

in the right place close to the surface

and all that stuff. So if you were to

look at should we go hog wild and

geothermal right away?

Well, somebody would do a CBO like

economic analysis and they would say,

"hm, doesn't look like the economics are

good."

However, according to this article,

which seems uh right to me, the thing

they don't include when they look at the

economics of geothermal is

that we would start by picking the ideal

places.

So the the place you put geothermal on

day one is going to be where it is

economical.

And then you're going to learn much more

about how to do it economically.

And then you'll do the next one where

there's yet another place where it's

perfect for geothermal. So the costs

would be much lower than if you were in

a place that's bad for it.

And so the thinking is that uh we are

underestimating

uh how much of an impact geothermal will

someday have because we assume that the

economics will not improve that much but

in fact it wouldn't be hard to improve

the economics. All you have to do is

make sure you're starting in the places

where it's economical and then the rest

would be sort of the the normal decrease

in technology costs over time. So they

think maybe it could be the third best

green source of energy until until uh

until we get to better nuclear, I guess.

Um, meanwhile over at Harvard,

Harvard's having a tough time because

all the pressure from the Trump

administration,

but according to Newsmax, um, they're

thinking about creating a

conservative think tank.

So, would that help?

Well, wouldn't be nothing because uh,

Harvard has almost no conservatives

there. So if they said, "Hey, here's our

big old Harvard conservative think

tank," that would maybe, you know, give

them a little bit of relief from the

criticism.

But reportedly also the Crimson, that

would be the Harvard newspaper,

um, is reporting that Harvard is

dismantling some, they say some, of its

DEI apparatus.

So, it looks like Harvard is at least

doing a lot of talking and scrambling

and maybe trying some stuff to get back

in the good graces of the government

because the government has them in a in

kind of a vice grip that says if you

continue to be anti-semitic

and not open to let's say different

points of view such as conservative ones

uh we will not give you the funding that

you require from the government, federal

government. So Harvard, they had been

trying to hang tight and not do what

they're told, but there might be a

little movement there.

Um, I missed part of this story, so it's

a few days old.

Um, but Roger Stone, I guess said in a

post uh a few days ago, um, why would

Bannon, Steve Bannon, meet with Jeffrey

Epstein, both at his New York home and

in Paris after Epstein was convicted on

sex crimes in Florida? Uh, why would he

coach Epstein for his 60 minutes

appearance?

And allegedly

Bannon took 15 hours of film of Epstein

for a documentary that never got

produced.

So

um here's what Elon Musk said when he

saw Roger Stone's accusation. Now I

don't know I don't know independently if

any of this is true

but you know Roger Stone is saying it

and Elon Musk um commented Bannon is in

the Epstein files.

Okay.

Now is he just joking?

Is is

uh Elon Musk just screwing with us

because he knows we won't believe that?

Or does he know something we don't know?

Or is he just guessing? I don't know.

But that would explain why Bannon is

going all in on trying to destroy Musk,

uh destroy all of his businesses,

nationalize SpaceX, and then deport him.

deport Musk. And I thought to I heard

that the other day and I thought, wait,

is he serious? I mean, I could

understand why you don't want Elon Musk

to be involved in politics. I can

understand that. But do you really need

to nationalize SpaceX, which would ruin

it, and do you really need to deport

him? What? What? So, I wondered like

where where was any of this coming from?

So, I don't know who started the fight,

but it looks like it's a cage match to

the death because

um when Elon Musk says that Ben is is in

the Epstein files, again, this is a

claim which I'm not aware of any

evidence to support it. It's just a

social media claim. It feels like he's

going for a kill shot. And when Bannon

talks about essentially destroying Elon

Musk's, you know, US connection and

deporting him, that feels like he's

trying to take a kill shot.

Is that really Is that really what we

want? Um, I don't

I don't want either one of them to kill

either one of them, but I don't know

what's real and I don't know how to

value any of these claims. It's just out

there. Now,

let's follow up with the summer rumors

about Bonino, Patel, and Bondi.

So, as you know, we were supposed to get

a big reveal about the Epstein files,

and Pam Bondi had suggested that, you

know, maybe there was something more

there. And now we hear and again this is

all rumors. Um I would say that the

credibility of this story is about as

low as you could get. We don't really

know what people are thinking, feeling

said to each other privately. We don't

really know. But the rumor is that Dan

Bonino um stopped coming to work for a

few days so that he could think about

whether he would resign presumably over

the fact that Pam Bondi uh either

botched the Epstein reveal

or Jay just can't work with her for some

reason. And then further the rumor said,

and I don't think the second part is

real for sure, is that Cash Patel had

said that if Bonino quits because Bondi

is still there, I guess he would want

her to quit first or something. Uh that

he would quit. Now, how much of that do

you believe?

I do believe that they probably are a

little angry at each other. I don't know

who would be angry who or for what, but

beyond that,

how much do we really know about what

they think and why they're doing what

they're doing?

If you tell me that Bino took some days

off from work,

I'm going to say, you mean around the

4th of July in the middle of July when

he's been working like a dog for months

and months and he took a few days off

around a weekend and I'm supposed to

make something out of that.

Uh, almost everybody in the government

has taken a week off in the summer.

Does that really mean anything?

Well,

here are some of the other facts around

this story. Um,

number one, do you remember when Pam

Bondi gave some influencers some special

access to the first wave of Epstein

files and she invited him to the White

House and had them all hold up their own

file that they had been given secret,

you know, advanced knowledge of the

Epstein information. And then when they

looked at it, they found out it was all

public information. There was nothing

new in it whatsoever, which was some say

almost like intentionally trying to

embarrass the influencers.

Now, I think that goes too far. I doubt

anybody would have done it

intentionally,

but it was a bad play and it looked like

it was a little bit, you know, a blown

opportunity, I guess.

So

there's uh there there's some reason to

believe that some people would have a

reason to be mad at Bondi. And we don't

know exactly who said um tell everybody

that there's nothing to see here. But

don't you assume it was Trump?

Don't you believe that whatever uh Cash

Patel and Bino and Bondi said about

Epstein,

don't you assume

that that was all run past Trump and he

said this is what you're going to say?

Don't you believe that? Cuz I definitely

don't believe that any of them went

rogue and said, you know, I'll just say

what I think and this is what I think.

Oh, there's nothing there.

I don't buy it. So, I think it's Trump's

decisions,

but maybe he was influenced by one of

them more than the other. Something like

that. But if you're if you're going to

try to bet whether Dan Bino is really

going to quit his job over any of the

subp stuff,

um I would give you the following

equation.

So, Bonino went from the top of the pile

in the best job you could ever have,

what I'm doing right now.

Yeah. I I laugh because even though I

monetized my podcast,

um I wouldn't do it unless I sort of

enjoyed it every day. Well, not even

sort of. I enjoy it. I have absolute

enjoyment of doing it. Even the prep,

you know, which takes hours. absolutely

enjoy it. Now, do you think that Dan

Bonino went from the top of the pile,

one of the top podcasters in the

country, and the podcasting is, you

know, sort of the hottest area you could

be in, and then he left there to have

some government job

that probably involves commuting and

people hating him and all this drama and

the rumors. How much do you think he

wishes he had his old job back?

Just, you know, just use your common

sense. Do you think he goes into the FBI

every day and says, "Man, I made a good

choice." I don't think so.

I think he made the patriotic choice.

I believe he took the job because he is

a genuine patriot. That's my belief. Now

again I can't read his mind and I don't

know him personally but you know we all

have to be judges of character because

you can't avoid it. My judge of his

character is that he's the real deal.

Meaning that he would have only taken

the job if he thought he could do

something that would help the president

and help the country because he was

giving up a lot.

giving up the best job

for the worst job. Who does that? Well,

I mean, it's like somebody joining the

military because the country got

attacked.

It's a really big sacrifice

and he made it. Now, suppose that he

found out he couldn't do the honest job

that he thought he wanted to do because

let's say somebody, we don't have to

know who, said, um, well, you know the

truth, but you're not allowed to say it.

What would Dan Bino say? If somebody who

had enough power to make it happen said,

uh, you're not allowed to tell the truth

on this issue, let's say the Epstein

issue that your your base and your fans

really really care about, but you're not

allowed to tell the truth.

What would you do or what would you

assume that Dan Bonino would do? Well,

at the very least, I would make some

threats and I would say, "Look, here's

the deal. I think we botched that

Epstein roll out, but if we can fix it,

maybe I'll stay,

but if we can't fix it, I don't want to

be part of a fraud.

And I'm going to go back to my perfect

job." Now, if he quit and even if he

didn't tell you all the details, so this

will be hypothetical. If Bonino quits

and the only public statement he makes

is something like um my ethics were

incompatible with the job I was asked to

do.

Suppose that's it. No details. my

ethics, my my moral center was

incompatible with the job I was being

asked to do. So, I'm going to go back to

podcasting.

Would he retain his audience?

Because it would be a little bit like

admitting

admitting that he lied but telling you

that he was asked to do it and then you

would be noticing that he quit his job

in protest which is a very clean way to

tell you that he didn't mean what he

said and that he's not in favor of it.

Would you then say, you know what, I

really respect that guy because he he

resigned. You know, we always say if you

really believe that, why didn't you

resign? We say that all the time about

other people. So, if we thought that he

was forced to be a little uh

disingenuous

and then you saw him quit and then he

said, "I'm not going to give you

details, but you know, let's be honest,

you probably know exactly why I quit."

Now, going back to my podcasting job,

what would his audience do?

I think they would go back, wouldn't

they? I think they would say, "You're an

honest man who got caught in a bad

situation. You did the best you could.

It doesn't make sense for you to stay

there any longer. Glad you're back to

podcasting." And then his family would

say, "Oh, finally you're back to doing

what you love. You're not commuting to

Washington. Wouldn't

this be the very best time for him to

quit if he wanted to quit anyway?

Do you think he wanted to quit anyway?

Probably.

And I'm only saying that because he left

the best job you could ever have,

podcasting, to go to the worst job you

could ever have, which is you have to do

what you're told and you can't do what

you think is right. The worst.

So, um I don't believe he's made a

decision

because, you know, he probably is going

to wait till the last minute to make

one. But if he decided

to go back to podcasting with just a

general statement about why he's

leaving, I would fully respect that.

Now, I would also respect if he stayed

because I don't have any negative

knowledge about him at all. Um,

but I wouldn't believe anything about

this story until it's really confirmed.

I don't believe all the who's mad at

whom and why they're mad and who thinks

who botched or whatever and who's

talking to who. I don't know if I

believe any of that, but let's watch

him. So Bino is kind of the canary in

the coal mine because we just assume

he's going to do whatever is the right

thing

and we don't know what that is because

we don't know what pressure he's under

or anything like that. But I do think

I'd expect him to do the right thing.

And given that his own personal interest

would suggest that quitting kind of soon

and making this the reason for quitting

that might that might kill two birds

with one stone. One bird would be he

could get back to his awesome career

without without destroying his

reputation. And the other is it would

tell you exactly what was going on

there.

Um,

at that point you would know for sure

that there's something going on with the

the Epstein files. So

anyway, so we'll keep an eye on that.

Um, I like all three of them. I like

Bondi, I like Bungino, and I like Cash

Patel. So I'll tell you what I'm not

going to do is take sides.

uh unless some new information comes up

that I've never heard. To me, they all

look like they're loyal Trump

mega compatible people

and uh you know,

I wouldn't want anything bad to happen

to any of them.

Anyway,

um

Bill O'Reilly

um is pretty sure that the president is

behind whatever happened. He had the the

Epstein file release. He thinks that the

president was behind how it was handled.

Um

and then uh let's see.

All right. According to uh Glenn Beck at

the Blaze,

um his team has filed a foyer request,

freedom of information request to get

all of Dan Bonino's texts and emails

regarding Epstein to Pam Bondi.

Now, that's something you could do. Are

you telling me that the Freedom of

Information Act would allow any citizen

to just file some paperwork and then we

could see the private emails of two

people who are currently in the

government?

Is that real?

When did when did that become real? Has

that always been real? Now I understand

if people were not in government anymore

or you know maybe time had gone by or

something or maybe it was part of a you

know let's say part of a legal action or

something but oh with the redactions

with the redactions okay so that's the

catch so as long as the government can

redact anything they want I'm just

gleaning this from the comments as long

as the government has the option of

redacting whatever they want, then I

guess the citizens can ask for whatever

they want. Doesn't mean they'll get it.

But, uh, interesting play. It's an

interesting play.

All right. Um, here's some more fake

news, maybe. Um, I saw a claim on social

media that Epstein gave all of his money

to his brother right before he died,

like two days before he died. Um, Grock

says that's not technically true, but

that Epstein did um he put all of his

money in a trust. I think it was an

overseas trust. Virgin Islands. Oh, US

Virgin Islands.

And we assume that the trust beneficiary

was his only relative which was his

brother. So in a way

he did sign over his money to his

brother but probably probably through

the mechanism of the trust. We don't

know the details.

Um and then allegedly the brother

claimed uh his um his brother's body and

buried it in an unmarked grave next to

his parents in Palm Beach.

Unmarked grave. So

if you were

if you were Jeffrey Epstein and you

wanted to fake your own death,

would you make sure that your body could

be not be examined check?

And would you make sure that all of your

money went to a trusted person so you

still had access to it after your debt?

You know, allegedly dead. Yeah.

Now, I don't I don't have

uh a belief that he's still alive. I

have a belief that if you rule that out,

I don't know if we can rule that out.

Can we? I'm not going to say I believe

it, that he's still alive. I'm just

going to say,

if you're asking me to rule it out, I

don't have any basis upon which to rule

it out either. It looks like

coincidentally he did the very things

you would do if you were trying to fake

your own death and still have still have

resources when you were done.

So, we'll keep an eye on that.

Um,

I saw a post on X by Patrick Burn about

John Brennan.

Um, apparently Patrick has some in

inside information that says John

Brennan is abroad operating from a

recreated MSNBC set somewhere.

Um, and that at one point he was

operating from a skiff in Australia

continuing to coordinate against Trump.

So, do you think that John Brennan left

the country

because he's worried about

consequences?

Um, I don't know. Maybe

apparently uh some more seven more

people who had worked with the Jack

Smith team that was working on the cases

against Trump, they have been let go.

And uh I guess there were already a

whole bunch of them who had been fired

for the same reason that they worked

with Jack Smith as part of the

prosecution attempt or the attempt to

lawfare Trump. And what's interesting is

these are not even lawyers. They were

support staff.

Now does that seem like going a little

too far? I can totally understand why

Trump would get rid of the lawyers who

were acting against him for years, of

course. But the support staff

really

that's going a little deep, but you

know, it would be fair to assume that

the support staff was not proTrump. So

maybe that's all he needs. He doesn't

need a reason. Um, so he's cutting

pretty deep there.

Um, Hillary Clinton was on Smirkish on

CNN with that big old Hill Hillary

Clinton pumpkin smile and she said,

quote, "If social media platforms don't

moderate content, then we lose total

control."

Well, I guess that's saying it directly,

isn't it? You could interpret that

sentence two different ways. One is just

that bad things will happen. The other

way is exactly what she said. We will

lose total control. We Who's we?

And what kind of total control are they

going to lose?

Did Did Hillary say it exactly the way

she meant it? That the Democrats and and

her posi would lose total control of the

narrative if they let social media just

do what it does.

Unbelievable.

So, yeah. And you wouldn't believe if

you didn't see the video of her talking

about this. She could not get the smile

off her face when she talked about the

need to censor people on social media. I

mean, she seemed so genuinely happy.

It's like, "Oh, yeah.

Yeah. We're going to lose control unless

we we censor the hell out of them."

Yeah.

Can't wait.

Oh, she says she's the personification

of evil. The U State Department, Marco

Rubio,

um I guess I got 1,300 staffers as part

of a big overhaul of the State

Department.

And

I when I see something like that, 1300

people have been downsized.

What were those 1300 people doing?

How can you take any organization? I

mean, I know the answer, but uh it's

it's still mindboggling. That there

were,300 people that according to

management were unnecessary

and they were all being paid. They're

all commuting to work. How would you

like to be one of the 1300

when you'd been working every day for,

you know, maybe years and years and then

somebody says, "Oh, we just realized,

you know, all that work that you did for

decades probably didn't need any of it."

That that was my corporate experience

that gave birth to Dilbert.

One day I realized in my corporate jobs

that if uh

if I had never existed in my job,

nothing would be different. Nothing

about the company would be different.

nothing about the stock price

that every day I was going to work and

getting paid, putting all the in these

hours and I was completely aware that

none of it made any difference to

anybody and and you could just take me

away from history.

I think uh comedian Nate Bargati, he has

this little uh little joke he says that

if he went back in time

was that if he goes back in time that uh

nothing would change.

I forget his exact punchline, but it was

something like, "Oh, so how do you make

a nuclear power plant?" and he'd be

like,

I don't really know

that. That wasn't his punchline. He had

a better one. But the idea was that he

wouldn't be able to affect history

because he doesn't know enough about

even our current time.

That's pretty funny. All right.

Um,

so what about this story that after lots

of investigation,

uh, several of the agents who were

protecting Trump at the Butler,

Pennsylvania event where he got shot in

the ear, that several of the agents were

suspended. Now, only for days or weeks,

right? Not a permanent suspension. But

here's my question. How could there be

so many agents

who on the same day and at the same time

and in the same place all of them

independently

were doing something worthy of

suspension?

What? How was that even possible?

What What the hell were they doing that

several of them were worthy of

suspension? Now, if they said to me,

"Well, you know, one of these people

should have kept the door locked, or one

of these people should have said, make

sure there's somebody on the roof."

Or one of these people should have said,

"Hey, there's a guy walking around with

a rangefinder and a drone. Maybe we

should stop what we're doing and check

this out." Now, you could easily

understand how there'd be one or two

people there who did something that was

sketchy enough

that you think they should be suspended

for temporarily,

but how could there be several?

Like, how could you have a handful of

people who all independently

did something so non-standard to their

job at the same time that they all get

suspended?

I would love to know what their

particular crimes were

because it does get to the question of

were they doing it intentionally.

Now, I doubt it was a big um

wellorganized anything because if you're

going to do an assassination like that,

you're not going to have a dozen people

in on it. And this would assume that,

you know, something like a dozen people

did all the wrong things to get him

killed.

It doesn't feel like that would be the

way anybody would do a plot to have too

many people involved in it. But anyway,

so uh as you know the uh the border

enforcement people, ICE,

uh they raided two different cannabis

farms in California on Thursday

and collectively they they got 300

people detained for deportation. 300.

So these were two businesses. They were

both pop farms and collectively they had

300 people who were undocumented and

working there. What kind of power farm

these 300 people? Um I would say that's

a 10 robot situation. So uh eventually

robots

but apparently one person died in the

process of these raids. I didn't see the

details of how they died or what they

died of, but uh that's tragic.

Um and I guess one of the can cannabis

farms had been donating to

uh to Governor Nuomo.

So, but that doesn't mean anything. Um

the thing that bothered me is that the

price of weed in California is going to

go up now. Hey, I thought Trump was

going to reduce the price of my

essentials, but no. No. Apparently, the

supply of uh marijuana will go down

quite a bit and uh prices might go

higher. I don't know if you know this,

but the prices for marijuana have

dropped quite a bit in recent years

since it was legal. When it was um first

legalized,

I think an ounce cost

sometimes $400 or $500.

And at the moment, the same amount and

same quality would be

$250.

So, the price of weed um did in fact

respond to supply and demand, and at

least there was no uh

no inflation on weed. But maybe there

will be.

Um

there's a uh new poll that says

Democrats look uh out of touch and woke

and weak. We may have talked about this

one and uh

the there there was a super PAC who did

the poll and they've decided that the

Democrats focusing on fighting for

democracy.

Um, it was still popular within the

party but not in the general electorate.

How much are you surprised?

Remember how many times I told you that

it was ridiculous that the Democrats

thought that fighting to sup to to

uh maintain your democracy

was not going to resonate with the

public. That's just something that, you

know, news geeks say. But I don't know

anybody who's just living their life

that who is worried about democracy

being taken away by Trump.

And here's the poll that supports my

hunch that the public didn't really care

about the stealing democracy part

because they didn't see it as real. They

also didn't care about the oligarchy.

I'm seeing in the comments. Yeah, they

didn't care about the oligarchy either.

If you're really into politics,

that's the stuff you debate. But if

you're just a casual citizen and

somebody said maybe your biggest

problems, how many just soccer moms who

are and dads who are not paying

attention to politics, how many of them

would say, "Well, I'm worried about the

oligarchy or I'm worried about the

attack on democracy."

Probably none.

But when you see um that Mandani guy

when he gets all this purchase and all

this attention because he said the right

thing which is we're going to work on

affordability.

Affordability

was really a good kill shot.

You know, I'm not a M Dani fan because

he's a socialist, but when he when he

found a message,

he just had energy

and the right policy message. He didn't

even have solutions really. I mean, not

practical ones, but it reminded me of

Trump.

When people looked at Trump in the very

beginning, they just said, "Oh, there's

no way." I mean, we see that he's

exciting. and he's he's bringing a lot

of energy. We get it. And uh yeah, yeah,

when he talks about the border and the

wall, those are popular with his base,

but but that's not enough. You know,

you're going to have to be an

experienced politician to win an

election. That's what people said. But

it turns out that Trump needed two

things.

The right policies and the right amount

of energy.

and everything else we were willing to

forgive or just enjoy as a show in my

case. And I think that mom Donnie is

another example of that. He definitely

got the right policy affordability

um better than I've seen anybody do it

really. So he nailed the policy, not the

solutions, but at least he said, "I feel

your pain." You know, sort of the Bill

Clinton thing. I feel your pain. it's

affordability

and then he brought the energy. You

know, you could talk about, you know, um

all different things that he did that

you might like in both cases, Trump and

Manny, but I feel like it just came down

to that. Do you have the right policy? I

mean, have you even identified the

problem? And then do you have the energy

to make it happen? and they both fit

that energy plus the right policy

according to their base.

Anyway,

um Jen Saki and her TV show on MSNBC

that replaced uh Rachel Matto's time

slot is doing terrible in the ratings.

Uh lost 44% of her audience.

You know, I'm always surprised.

Was Rachel Maddau so popular

that if you replace her with somebody

who is in my opinion a bit of a clone,

you know, it's not like it's not like

Jen Saki is a completely different

person than Rachel Matto.

So, why would the why would the

viewership go down so much? It doesn't

seem like that much of a change, but

um one of my favorite uh hobbies is

looking at Fox News and what they do

right and comparing it to MSNBC and what

they do wrong. MSNBC

and CNN appear to be under the

impression that news

is something informing people

especially about the bad news. So if you

turn on CNN or you turn on MSNBC, you're

mostly going to get some bad news.

And

it's not all political. you know, some

of it might be natural disasters and

stuff and those will be on every

network. But the the thing that Fox News

has been getting right for a long time

is the understanding that people watch

news as entertainment.

How many of you are in that category?

When I turn on the news, I'm sort of a

little bit trying to find out what's

new,

but mostly I'm looking to be

entertained.

And when I when I'm watching Fox News,

I'm often entertained depending on what

show I'm watching. And if I turn on CNN

or MSNBC, cuz I do cycle through the

three of them, they're not trying to

entertain.

They're trying to get you worked up or

angry. And I can feel the difference.

But I I also note that um Greg Guffeld

completely changes the nature of Fox

News in a way that's made them dominant.

Um I think he's he more than anybody

else he's proven that people will watch

for the entertainment which is why he

has two shows you know that he's on the

five which is the top ratings uh thing

at that time slot and then he's got his

own show Gutfeld which again is you know

tops in the ratings. So, so he's now

got, you know, two important time slots

in which it's very clear to the viewer

that, you know, entertainment is why you

turned it on. You learn some stuff cuz,

you know, they're dealing with the same

news that the other networks are. So,

it's not like you're going to be

uninformed, but the intent is to make it

entertaining. And then I realized the

other day that uh Jesse Waters is a

similar kind of vibe. When you watch him

on the five, he's playing it for laughs

and he does a great job. And now he has

his own show, so he's got his own hour,

is it? Um, in which, you know, he he

plays a little bit more seriously, but

you know, you can tell he's he's always

got a smile on his face. So

they have something like, you know, 3

hours every night during the week in

which it's unambiguously true that you

know you're going to get entertained if

you watch either of those or any of

those shows. And it's amazing to me that

CNN and MSNBC have not taken any kind of

a learning from that.

CNN u I think they're still doing it.

Maybe they had, maybe not. But they

launched that show that was like a game

show

um in which they would make fun of the

news and uh Michael Ian Black was on

that and some other people and I never

found it funny because it was a little

too forced. So I don't know if that's

even still on but they tried.

Um let's see what else.

Um, there's some uh crypto executive

orders that are expected from the White

House.

And I always have trouble following this

topic, but the reason that Bitcoin is

going up in value, it had a good run

this week. I didn't know why. Um, but

apparently it's in anticipation of it

becoming a better uh I don't know if I

want to call it an investment. I guess I

would um because of the upcoming

executive orders and they would do among

other things ban a central bank digital

currency. I guess that would be taking

away a competitor to Bitcoin. Uh would

protect self custody so you don't have

to keep it in the bank. Um and stable

coins which are coins that are pegged to

the dollar meaning if the dollar goes up

they go up to the same amount. uh would

be backed by the treasuries and then

um there' be some market structure blah

blah blah. So some of it I don't

understand but

O is reporting this. So there might be

something big coming with crypto

if you're watching the uh Trump and

Jerome Powell saga which is always fun.

Um,

so of course, uh, you know, Trump wants

Jerome Powell to quit as soon as

possible or better yet just lower

interest rates because that's what he

really wants. Uh but the gateway pundit

is reporting that uh that Jerome Powell

is getting some uh pressure now and that

uh according to uh Bill PE who's a

chairman of the board of Fanny May and

Freddy Mack um Bill Posted on X quote

I'm encouraged by reports that Jerome

Pal was considering resigning. I think

this will be the right decision for

America and the economy will boom.

Now, I don't I don't know what uh what

those rumors are.

Um and I'm not sure that rumors can

necessarily be trusted,

but uh there's quite a push

and I think uh Bill Py is the right

person to be pushing this because he's

in the domain where the interest rates

are going to, you know, affect

affordability of housing in a big way.

So, he certainly has a he has a dog in

this fight.

Um, Intel CEO was talking to his own

company and told them it's too late for

Intel to catch up in AI chips. What can

you imagine? You're CEO of a chip

company saying, "Yeah, it's too late."

Um, and that the big companies like AMD

and Nvidia

basically have already captured the

market. And uh, he said on training, I

think it is too late for us.

So, Intel,

uh, that's a little too honest. It must

He must have been an engineer before he

was the CEO. That's a little bit too

honest. Yeah, it's too late for us.

We'll never catch up. So, we're doomed.

He He didn't say they're doomed, but it

feels like it.

Well, in uh good news, um the US is

opening its first rare earth mine in

more than 70 years

and apparently it will provide six of

the 17 rare earth materials

and has tons and tons of supply. Now, it

has to be refined. I don't know who's

going to do that or if we've solved

that. But if you're wondering, is the US

moving in a useful way to be free of

China's um control of rare earth

minerals? The answer is yes, at least

for six of 17. And I expect we'll see

more movement there. All right, let me

give you a lesson in economics

so that I can say that you were smarter

when you left. Um,

I had made the observation that if it's

true that Trump has decided that Russia

and Ukraine will never agree to a

ceasefire and it does look true. I don't

know that that's true, but from my

perspective, it looks very much like

Trump has given up and probably should

that at least for now, Russia and

Ukraine

prefer to fight. Now, a bunch of people

said to me, "Scott, you stupid freaking

idiot. Ukraine isn't choosing to fight."

To which I say, "Did they stop?

If they didn't stop, they choose to

fight. Now, you what you really mean is

they have a good reason to fight. I'm

not talking about the reason, and I'm

not arguing that they don't have a good

reason. I'm just saying that neither

side has made a decision to stop and

they would prefer fighting over whatever

they see as the reasonable alternatives.

So, as long as they both want to fight,

what would be the best thing for the

greatest president in our history to do?

Let me tell you,

if you know you can't fix it,

you should monetize it.

And it looks like Trump might be doing

that.

So, what he's done is he's uh he's

providing weapons to Ukraine, but he's

making NATO pay for it.

Now, what's the next thing you're going

to say to me, Scott? You idiot. I

thought you understood things like this.

You know that we're one of the biggest

funders of NATO,

so it's not like it's free. We're

putting the money into NATO and then

taking it right back out to buy our

weapons. So, it's not really monetizing

it, right? It's not monetizing it.

Because a lot of it's our own money.

Here's why you're wrong about that. It's

a concept called sunk costs.

Here's how you should do that analysis.

Were we going to pay our 5% to NATO like

the other countries were supposed to?

Yes. We were going to give NATO money no

matter what they did with it. That's

called a sunk cost. Meaning that part's

not going to change. The money will come

out of our pockets and it will go to

NATO. Nothing will change that. that

that's that's the most public agreed

upon thing that all of the countries

will try to get to their 5% you know in

the not right away but there's a

schedule for that

but the United States most certainly is

signed up for a certain amount of money

that we will definitely take out of our

pockets and definitely give to NATO.

If you know that that won't change and

can't change in any reasonable way, then

that doesn't count in the analysis.

So, in other words, if we're going to

give NATO money anyway, the only

question is, do we want some of it back

in the form of buying weapons from the

US? And that's apparently what Trump's

doing. So if you understand the concept

of sunk costs, the money we give to NATO

is just going to be there no matter

what, no matter what they do with it.

Wouldn't it make more sense for us to

have as much of that as possible come

right back to the United States in terms

of purchasing American products, in this

case warfighting products? Of course it

would. Of course it would.

So

we may have created a situation or Trump

may have in which we don't have to solve

the problem at all because the two sides

that are fighting

prefer

the war. And again when I say they

prefer the war they would both like the

other side to stop fighting and for

their side to get everything they wanted

out of it. But that's not going to

happen.

So instead, they don't prefer stopping

because that would give the other one

the win.

So they prefer to fight. So Trump

monetized it.

I could not be more proud of my

president. If that's what's really

happening, and you know, I'm I'm getting

ahead of it a little bit. Maybe that's

not what's happening, but if that's what

he came up with, well, we can't stop it.

We might as well monetize it.

I would be so impressed. I mean, I would

just be so so impressed if he monetized

it. Anyway,

um Russian President Vladimir Putin

uh allegedly is in favor of an Iran

nuclear deal in which Iran would not be

allowed to enrich uranium on their own.

But since Putin is a weasel, do we think

he's just trying to be useful for world

peace? Or is it more likely that if uh

Iran is not allowed to enrich

that they would have to depend on other

countries such as Russia

to provide them with the uranium that's

already enriched for their medical use

and for their domestic nuclear energy

use. And that would give Russia some uh

leverage over Iran.

So, I feel like this is more about

Russia having some leverage over Iran,

but I doubt it's because he's trying to

be useful

in Great Britain. According to the

Telegraph,

um

there are some serious people who think

that Britain should build more bomb

shelters because they expect to be in a

war with Russia. Are you following that?

that the UK is acting like it's

preparing for war with Russia.

Why would the UK want to have a war with

Russia?

That seems like the worst idea in the

world for both teams. Anyway, that's all

I got for today. Um, as I reminded you,

Owen Gregorian will have a spaces event

in a few minutes as soon as we're done

here. And you can continue talking about

this stuff or maybe some other stuff if

you want, but go to X and look for Owen

Gregorian and you'll find the link to

the spaces which will begin pretty soon.

All right.

Um,

and I'm going to say a few words

privately to the people on locals, my

beloveds

subscribers

to you. Thanks for joining and I will

see you tomorrow. Same time, same place.

I hope. Bye for now.

Oh no, it's not working again. All

right. for reasons which I cannot

determine.

Um, I can't go private without turning

off the studio and getting back in. So,

I'll just see you on locals. Um, or I'll

see you on uh spaces. All right,

everybody. Say see you later. I probably

have to end it a different way.

Uh, end and close room. All

right.

Going to have to close it and reopen