Episode 2948 CWSA 09/04/25
Trump versus Rosie O'Donnell and more fun form the headlines ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
I hope you have your beverage, because you know what's coming up, right? Yeah, there'll be some simultaneous sipping, but I'm checking the stock market. It's a little bit up. Little bit up. Not nearly enough. But as soon as I get my comments going, we will launch into the best thing that will ever…
View segment →e never had a better time. But if you'd like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that? Well, all you need is a copper mug or a glass, a chalice or stein, a canteen, jug, a flask, a vessel of…
View segment →that's just topping it off right there. Well, apparently today the RoboTaxi app from Tesla is available for download. I don't know what that implies for when you will be able to use your Tesla as a driverless sort of an Uber, but at least you've got the app. I imagine it will depend on your state a…
View segment →lane. This is not your expertise." Well, how are the experts doing compared to the people who have no expertise and are just guessing? It's pretty close to a tie, I would say. So if your argument is that the person involved is no expert in that field, you really have to consider what the experts ve…
View segment →ence*, there's now an AI-powered robot dog that can play badminton against humans, which makes sense because most of the other animals, they don't play badminton. So if you're going to make a robot that plays badminton, you should make it so it can play against a human. Because if you make it to pla…
View segment →through the Van Allen radiation belt and that therefore you believe that no one has ever been to the moon in the real world and it's all been faked? How many of you believe that? And if you believe that it's not possible and also has never been done, obviously, then I'm being visited by a cat. How…
View segment →t you could wait until the beginning of next year and see if somebody survives doing it. Then you wouldn't have to wonder. You could watch it if you believe the news. All right. Now, you know what people will be saying? People will be saying, "Oh, s
View segment →o you're telling me it's a total coincidence that the first time that we seem to be able to prove that we went to the moon is exactly when AI can make an image that's fake that looks exactly like it happened." So those two things just coincidentally happened at the same time. Just when you wanted to…
View segment →fun story in the news is that President Trump is fed up with Rosie O'Donnell, who as you know moved to Ireland and she's living there right now. And so Trump has said in a Truth Social, he said, not a great American, because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interest of our great c…
View segment →absorb the press's attention and they're going to use up all of their time with the public talking about this ridiculous story. And he knows it. He knows they're just going to chew up all their criticism time talking about this and that the public's just gonna be sort of laughing at it. But the bes…
View segment →dying Trump, has probably read his share of materials about how to be persuasive. His coach has absorbed some of my materials and I just noticed this morning that Conor follows me on X. So I guess he's also used the book *The Secret*, which is sort of an affirmations kind of approach. So I believe…
View segment →people the least that they can with whatever good AI argument they can make for not helping people. Now of course the objective is to reject the fraud and the things that they're not supposed to be paying for. But if the AI company gets paid for how much they can stop, what do you think's going to…
View segment →e worth $200 million? So my first assumption is there's probably something wrong with the reporting. Because it might be like $200 million if you meet these goals over X number of years or something like that. I have trouble believing that whoever owns all the equity would get collectively a $200 mi…
View segment →whether it's evolution and chance or any other model, once you're here you don't need to refer to God to say that we have all the rights that have not been yet restricted by our government. So it's just cleaner and easier to say that we all have every right to do everything except what the governme…
View segment →surprise me that Harvard of all places could put up a good legal battle because the whole point of Harvard is it's the best of the best and even with DEI there still it's like smartest people around. But they also have the Harvard Law School and they're the most connected people in the world. So you…
View segment →just heard horrible things and it was every day and it was continuous and lots of people were involved. Now one of the things preventing any of them from naming names might be that they'd all signed settlements in court because there was some large amount of money for settlements. And they're just…
View segment →d it's stuff that will really help. Send us the resources we need. We want to work with you." Exactly. So this is Axelrod with good advice for his team, which is you need to stop acting like you're pro-crime. You know that's my version of it. But his version is why don't you act a little bit more l…
View segment →r-year high. So it's still not more than 50% but 44% now, which is much higher than it used to be. Think things are on the right track. So as I often remind you, the economy is based on expectations and resources. We usually can find ways to get the resources in today's world. So the expectations a…
View segment →that work. It might not be illegal. It just feels like one of those things that feels like it should be illegal. I don't know. But if it's not illegal and it works, I suppose it's on the table. The *Epoch Times* is reporting that one of the engineers in Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, an engineer is b…
View segment →at the company Polymarket, that's an online gambling firm so you can gamble on political things happening, stuff like that, it's been cleared for US adoption after some board CFTC ruling. *Zero Hedge* is writing about this. But what's interesting about it is that one of the investors of Polymarket i…
View segment →w. Rubio said, Marco Rubio said, Secretary of State, he said the US has a long and for many many years established intelligence that allows us to interdict and stop drug boats. So in other words they get tips or they've got some kind of intelligence where they can tell where the boat's going to be…
View segment →chemical companies were openly marketing and selling the precursors used for fentanyl, cocaine and heroin. And so apparently they've indicted Chinese companies. So the FBI knows the name of the companies and has indicted them. What happens when you indict a Chinese company? Nothing, right? It's not…
View segment →than working. And I suppose you could work too, right? Because they're doing a daycare. So I guess you don't have to quit your job if you're a woman. So you can get the $72,000. You could also get leave. Looks pretty good. I saw a post from Peter Diamandis. He says if you retire at 55, you're 89% m…
View segment →bout any kind of protection. And it's from Paragon Solutions and some say it's the strongest weapon of its type. Are you comfortable with anybody, whether it's even if it's in Israel, are you comfortable that that exists, that there's a known piece of spyware that can basically puncture everything?…
View segment →I hope you have your beverage, because you know what's coming up, right?
Yeah, there'll be some simultaneous sipping, but I'm checking the stock market. It's a little bit up. Little bit up. Not nearly enough.
But as soon as I get my comments going, we will launch into the best thing that will ever happen to you.
Good morning, everybody, everyone, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's called *Coffee with Scott Adams*, and you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that? Well, all you need is a copper mug or a glass, a chalice or stein, a canteen, jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens right now.
Go.
Oh yeah, that's just topping it off right there.
Well, apparently today the RoboTaxi app from Tesla is available for download. I don't know what that implies for when you will be able to use your Tesla as a driverless sort of an Uber, but at least you've got the app. I imagine it will depend on your state and local.
In case I haven't mentioned it, my book *Loserthink*, which was published a few years ago but got cancelled when I got cancelled, and it's back, but it's a second edition now. It's basically the same as the first, but it's the only way I could make it available by independently publishing with Joshua Lisec, who's amazing, and you should work with him if you get a chance.
But I thought I would share with you one tip from the book *Loserthink*. Now, as you might imagine, loserthink is what you would like to avoid. So you don't want to be the person who makes the mental mistake when other people are watching. So this is how to avoid those mental mistakes. And I'll give you one.
If you ever find yourself online telling somebody to stay in their lane, you are a loserthinker. You know why? That's such bad advice. "Stay in your lane. This is not your expertise."
Well, how are the experts doing compared to the people who have no expertise and are just guessing? It's pretty close to a tie, I would say. So if your argument is that the person involved is no expert in that field, you really have to consider what the experts versus the non-expert track record is, right?
You don't sound smart. I think there was a time when that would sound smart. So you have to adjust that to the current day. And you also have to think, tell me anything important in the world.
Whoa, cats destroying something in another room.
Tell me anything in the world that was made that was important, like a real big breakthrough, by somebody who was an expert at that thing. It's like, you know, Steve Jobs couldn't program. Yeah, I can go down the list. Basically, nobody was an expert until they figured it out.
So "stay in your lane" is the worst advice. And if you happen to say that to somebody, well, there might be a little loserthink going on.
All right, that's my commercial. It's only available on Amazon, but you can get it in three different forms. The audiobook will follow. That's not available yet.
Well, apparently according to *Live Science*, there's now an AI-powered robot dog that can play badminton against humans, which makes sense because most of the other animals, they don't play badminton. So if you're going to make a robot that plays badminton, you should make it so it can play against a human. Because if you make it to play against, let's say, a beaver or a squirrel, well, you're not really gonna have any good matches because the beaver and the squirrel don't actually play badminton. So that's important.
But I want one. I really want a robot dog that can play actual badminton. According to the video, it looked like it was pretty good. I would totally play badminton every single day with a badminton robot. So give me a price.
Well, American Eagle, the clothing maker, says that the Sydney Sweeney commercial everybody's talking about with their great jeans campaign did so well that in just six weeks they're making all kinds of money and their stock is up 25%. So according to *Variety*, well, I know it was a powerful marketing blitz because I bought three pair. And they're all women's jeans and I thought that they would look better on me, but you know, maybe it's just me, but man, that commercial was good.
Well, NASA Administrator Sean Duffy is telling us that the US is going to send four men up to the moon at the beginning of next year. Now, how many of you believe, because you watched Joe Rogan's podcast, that it might be impossible to get through the Van Allen radiation belt and that therefore you believe that no one has ever been to the moon in the real world and it's all been faked? How many of you believe that?
And if you believe that it's not possible and also has never been done, obviously, then I'm being visited by a cat. How many times will this cat put his tail in my face? That's three. I think there's more to come. That's four.
All right. So what's fun about this moon launch, besides the fact that moon launches are obviously fun, is that it might convince people that the original moonshot either happened or didn't. If for some reason they decide they can't do it or the astronauts died on the way through the radiation belt, then you would be quite justified in saying, huh, maybe nobody's ever done it.
But the fact that China is trying to get to the moon and Russia is trying to get to the moon and we're trying to get to the moon, I feel like the theory that the Van Allen belt has prevented anybody from getting to the moon could be retired. Don't you think? If you believe that, are you ready to retire it? But you could wait until the beginning of next year and see if somebody survives doing it. Then you wouldn't have to wonder. You could watch it if you believe the news.
All right. Now, you know what people will be saying? People will be saying, "Oh, so you're telling me it's a total coincidence that the first time that we seem to be able to prove that we went to the moon is exactly when AI can make an image that's fake that looks exactly like it happened." So those two things just coincidentally happened at the same time. Just when you wanted to fake a moon landing, oh look, by coincidence, the exact technology you would need to fake video of a moon landing is available.
Huh. So I guess the conspiracy theorists will have something to play with there.
Well, is there any study that they could have avoided by just asking me? Yes. Cambridge University Press is talking about how there was a new study in the *British Journal of Political Science* and it showed that small business owners are more likely to be right-leaning. Now I would call that conservative or right-leaning.
Do you think that they needed to do a survey to know that if you spend five minutes running your own business, the one thing you're going to want less of is the government? It feels to me that anybody who's had the small business experience, and I have with two restaurants, that you're battling the government and the law.
So it turns out that as a restaurant owner, you know, small business owner, that I thought I was going to be doing fun decisions about the decorations and what's on the menu and stuff, but you spend half of your time at least battling with lawyers and lawsuits and insurance problems and your bank is mad at you and regulations. I mean, we couldn't even put up a sign that was big enough for people to see that we had a new restaurant. Now that's a government problem.
Anyway, the most fun story in the news is that President Trump is fed up with Rosie O'Donnell, who as you know moved to Ireland and she's living there right now. And so Trump has said in a Truth Social, he said, not a great American, because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interest of our great country. This is the president of the United States talking about one person, Rosie O'Donnell, who's in Ireland, is not in the best interest of our great country. I am giving serious consideration to taking away her citizenship. She is a threat to humanity and should remain in the wonderful country of Ireland if they want her. God bless America.
He is the best shitposter in the history of the world. Do you know what my favorite part of this is? Well, I've got a few favorite parts. One is it will absorb the press's attention and they're going to use up all of their time with the public talking about this ridiculous story. And he knows it. He knows they're just going to chew up all their criticism time talking about this and that the public's just gonna be sort of laughing at it.
But the best part is this. Sooner or later some member of the press is going to say, "Are you really serious about this?" And he'll probably say something in a Trump-like fashion of, "Well, we'll see. You know, I haven't made a decision, but you know, there's a good argument for it." Something like that.
And then what will the member of the press of course ask next? What would be the most obvious guaranteed question that will come up if Trump actually keeps with this theme? The question will be, are you going to consider taking away anyone else's citizenship? Do you see the trap yet?
And then when they say, "Are you going to do that to anyone else?" What would be his answer? Only Rosie O'Donnell. Boom. And the prank is complete. The best troll in the history of trolling.
Jonathan Turley helpfully points out that the president cannot take away somebody's citizenship, which makes it even funnier because I'm sure he knows he can't do it. And if he tried, I'm sure he knows the courts would throw it out. So the fact that this is even a story is just the most wonderful troll. Just good presidenting. The president knows that entertaining us is part of the job. I don't think any other president has ever understood that the way he does, that if you keep us entertained, we're more likely to be on your team. It just works that way. We like to be entertained.
Well, speaking of entertainment, over in Ireland, Conor McGregor is trying to get some things changed in their system so that he could be possibly nominated to run for president of Ireland. Now, apparently president of Ireland is kind of a ceremonial position. It's not so much a powerful position, but I believe that Conor wants to champion the idea of closing down excess immigration into Ireland because it's changing the character of Ireland. So he might be able to do that from the president's office.
Now, I asked Grok and he said it was unlikely that he would be able to beat through the nomination process because it requires people who are already elected, I guess, some number of them to agree. So it's not up to the public. It's not like our system where if enough voters want him to run in the primary that he's the candidate. They have some other system.
So he's got a petition going to see if he can get the system changed so that he could be on the ballot. But what I would like to add to this conversation is that although he has many drawbacks, as in people have strong opinions about him, he's been accused of sex crimes and he's got some baggage if you know what I mean.
But do you think it's impossible for someone who is accused of sex crimes to become the president of a nation? Well, I think it might be. But here's the part that I think is the hidden magic.
Conor McGregor is a student of success, meaning he's known to absorb a great deal of practical advice about how to be successful at anything and that helped him win his titles, etc. He is probably studying Trump, has probably read his share of materials about how to be persuasive. His coach has absorbed some of my materials and I just noticed this morning that Conor follows me on X. So I guess he's also used the book *The Secret*, which is sort of an affirmations kind of approach.
So I believe he's sort of an affirmations guy, which would just be one small corner of the process for success. He's a systems-over-goals guy. He's a talent stack guy. And even though the deck is stacked way against him, even getting nominated, much less getting elected, the level of specific talent that he brings to that domain should not be overlooked. He's got some superpowers in his toolbox.
He's not Trump. There's only one Trump. But I guarantee, without knowing it, I don't have any special knowledge, but I guarantee that he's studying Trump to figure out what works. And unlike maybe other observers, he might figure out what works. So don't count him out.
Anyway, President Trump is reportedly, according to Axios, expected to ask the Supreme Court to reverse the E. Jean Carroll verdict. Now that verdict was a civil, not a criminal, trial, if I'm correct. I'm terrible at all the legal topics, but in what I read I didn't see the argument. So I didn't see what argument they would propose using to have that reversed, unless the argument is that it was so obviously contrived as a political move that even if they crossed all the T's and dotted all the I's to make it legal, it might be just so obviously a plot to keep him out of the presidency as opposed to a more legitimate Department of Justice action, that it might be reversible.
You know, I didn't know you could even take the civil cases to the Supreme Court. And I also don't know what I'm talking about. But if they're going to argue that it wasn't a legitimate thing to even look into, that might be a strong argument. So we might get surprised by that one.
All right, I've got a cat as a table here. All right, Gary the cat. You're going to have to hold my notes. So that's Gary. He's sleeping in front of me between me and my camera. So he'll be holding my notes on his belly while we continue. Good job, Gary. All right, don't move. Stay right there.
So apparently according to Futurism, there's writing that Medicare might start paying some AI companies. I think they're going to do a test to see if they can find AI companies that would reject some claims for service, some claims for medical care. So I think the idea would be that the AI would do all the tough work of deciding what things to accept or reject.
But here's the problem. The *New York Times* reports that the AI companies selected for the experiment will get paid a share of the money they save by blocking people from their healthcare. So in other words, the AI will be optimized and the AI company will be incentivized to help people the least that they can with whatever good AI argument they can make for not helping people.
Now of course the objective is to reject the fraud and the things that they're not supposed to be paying for. But if the AI company gets paid for how much they can stop, what do you think's going to happen? Now it's an experiment. So maybe they'll experiment and they'll find out what they can do. Just ask me. You could stop this and just ask me, what do you think will happen when you incentivize the AI to block people's healthcare by using clever arguments that would sound valid?
Well, it's probably not good because you probably want to err on the side of allowing more than you should, you know, because there's nothing perfect. You don't really want the errors on the side of denying more than it should. And I think the AI would obviously be that.
But here's the fun part. At the same time, there's that story. CBS News is reporting that there's some healthcare companies that consumers can use to fight against the denial of service. So if somebody uses an AI company to deny you service, you could call your own AI company. One of them is called Counterforce Health that uses AI to make phone calls and to pester whoever denied you the healthcare. So you can fight for your healthcare using AI that might be fighting against another AI. So that's where everything's going.
Well, in puzzling news, Paramount is going to buy Bari Weiss's Free Press. So Bari Weiss founded the Free Press. And apparently it's doing gangbusters because it's only been a few years and it's the hardest market that anybody could ever make value, which is the most crowded, difficult market, which is news. But the Free Press has been offered up to $200 million and they would offer her a senior editorial role at CBS News. So I don't know if it means it would be rolled into CBS News or she would just have a dual role, but does that make sense to you?
Does it make sense that it would be worth $200 million? So my first assumption is there's probably something wrong with the reporting. Because it might be like $200 million if you meet these goals over X number of years or something like that. I have trouble believing that whoever owns all the equity would get collectively a $200 million check up front. That feels high. I don't know. But Paramount knows what it's doing, so I'm sure they've looked into it.
It could also be, isn't Paramount run by Larry Ellison's son? So he would be sort of pro-America First, Trump. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it would sort of make CBS under the control of somebody who's a lot more independent and would have a lot more, of course everybody's controversial these days. I think there's some controversy about Bari Weiss. I don't even know what it is or whether it's valid, but everybody's controversial after a certain point of notoriety.
All right. So Tim Kaine, you know Tim Kaine who didn't become vice president. Apparently he had a little debate with Ted Cruz about where our rights come from. And the question was from God or from the government. And Tim Kaine was scoffing at the notion that rights come from God and didn't think that the Constitution would suggest that that would be the case.
Ted Cruz, who knows his Constitution, argued back on X anyway that he better read the work of the founding fathers because he argued that God is the source of our rights. And Tim Kaine argued that the government determines your rights.
Now I'm going to take a third approach. You don't need God to make the same point that Ted Cruz would be happy with. So let me explain. Whether God created everything or we're just here for some other reason, whatever that reason is, so whether it's evolution and chance or any other model, once you're here you don't need to refer to God to say that we have all the rights that have not been yet restricted by our government.
So it's just cleaner and easier to say that we all have every right to do everything except what the government restricts. And that gets you to exactly the same place as if you say God created these rights and we're interpreting what God had in mind. Because that brings with it a small but real risk, which is if something happens in our form of government or who's in charge changes, it might be a different god that they're looking at for your rights, you know what I mean?
So if we or let's say someone else became a Muslim-dominated country, they might also agree that your rights are assigned by God but their version of what God would design would be very different. So there is some risk of interpreting what God meant for your rights.
So I would say you can maintain your God belief and even that God gave you rights, but when you're debating it in the public forum, it's just cleaner and easier to say no, you have a right to do everything. Everything except what the government specifically takes from you. Governments don't give rights. As soon as you imagine that somebody's giving you rights, be it God or be it the government, then you don't really understand rights in the most productive way.
The most productive way is you have every right until somebody who can put you in jail tells you you don't. And well, then I could argue you still have the right. You just better not do it.
All right. Apparently a judge has invalidated Trump's work against Harvard. You know, he wanted to make them give him large amounts of money and all that. And apparently Harvard did a good job of suing to stop that. And the US District Judge Allison Burroughs is trying to restore the funding, government funding to Harvard.
Now I have to say that I'm not surprised. I don't know how it'll end. Maybe a higher court will still back Trump, but it doesn't surprise me that Harvard of all places could put up a good legal battle because the whole point of Harvard is it's the best of the best and even with DEI there still it's like smartest people around. But they also have the Harvard Law School and they're the most connected people in the world. So you would expect that the most connected, capable, high-level lawyers in the world would know how to get to a judge who could give them what they want, which is half of the game, maybe more than half.
So don't be surprised when you see Harvard able to put up a good fight in the legal sense.
Well, here's some Epstein news. Surprise. There's no new news, but there's lots of people making actions and activities. We'll see if any of it turns into anything new. The latest is there's a small group, well I don't know how small, maybe a dozen or more of Jeffrey Epstein accusers who seem to be getting organized at the moment and they made an announcement, or one of them did, that maybe the victims should put together a list of the people who were the regulars on the island.
Now I heard one of them say that she had been victimized as many as three times a day as a minor. And that, you know, well, just heard horrible things and it was every day and it was continuous and lots of people were involved.
Now one of the things preventing any of them from naming names might be that they'd all signed settlements in court because there was some large amount of money for settlements. And they're just not allowed to talk about it without risking losing whatever substantial money they got. And so that's part of it.
But there's also the problem that if the only thing you knew is that somebody was a regular or that you knew that they had visited the island, you have that problem of people who literally broke no laws and didn't do any of the naughty stuff whose lives would be pretty well ruined by the release. So what do they do? And then how do they prevent payback and getting sued and all that? Because they would all get sued if they mention a name of some billionaire and there's no hard proof that they did anything wrong. I mean the lawyers are going to just destroy these poor victims.
So I think was it Marjorie Taylor Greene and maybe somebody else were noodling with the idea that they would be the ones who would read them out loud because if you do it on the House floor, apparently there's some kind of law that gives you legal immunity so that you can say any damn thing in that specific context so nobody can sue you.
So they need a way to get the names out that won't get them sued. And so they might pull together names, give them to Marjorie Taylor Greene, and have her read them. Now Marjorie Taylor Greene then would have the problem of being the agent of possibly ruining the lives of people who got pulled into something that they didn't quite know what it was about but maybe didn't do anything wrong. So how do you handle that? I don't know.
But I would like to suggest the following. It shouldn't be one list. If they pull together something, it should be something like here's the people that we have a living human who says I watched it or I participated or I was the specific victim or I walked into the room and saw it or my best friend described it to me and I knew it was true. So that should be one list. But the other list should be people who maybe visited or associated but there's no accusation. So it might be the accused list and then literally called the not-accused list because that would at least give the people on the not-accused list the easy out. Say, just look at the news. I'm on the not-accused list. It literally is the not-accused list. So leave me alone.
So that would probably be, even though that's not enough, the best you could do. Yeah. You need to give the people who don't have a real hard accusation with a witness or something, you need to give them some kind of constitutional protection in this situation. And I think just clarifying that there's two sets of people, the ones you know did some bad stuff and the ones who just sort of were around, that you've got to make that distinction. I hope they do. Anyway, who knows if that will even go anywhere. Nothing else has.
Mayor Bowser of DC is not only in favor of Trump helping with crime by putting in some National Guard, she's also saying that they need a lot more regular police and they've got openings and they're hiring as fast as they can and that's all good. So Muriel Bowser, good job in not being ridiculous.
So many Democrats act in ways that are just ridiculous except the farthest left people that we might be seeing a little bit of a movement back to the middle. You've already seen that, right? The Bill Mahers and such saying we're going to need to get back to something more reasonable. David Axelrod was on CNN saying the same. He said the right answer to this whole crime stuff is, quote, "We'll take all the help we can get as long as it's appropriate and it's stuff that will really help. Send us the resources we need. We want to work with you."
Exactly. So this is Axelrod with good advice for his team, which is you need to stop acting like you're pro-crime. You know that's my version of it. But his version is why don't you act a little bit more like you're legitimately anti-crime, if I could paraphrase it.
I would give you the additional advice. Here's my advice. Don't join any group that needs that kind of advice. Don't ever join a group that needs to be advised to not take the side of the criminals. That's the best advice you'll ever get.
Well, there's a whole bunch of employment and job numbers coming out and they don't look so hot. They're not terrible, but they're moving in the wrong direction. Don't know if that's because all our numbers are bad and nothing's reliable or because, I don't know, weather sometimes. Maybe because of the threat of tariffs. So it might be temporary. I don't know.
But for the first time the unemployed workers outnumber the number of jobs since 2021. But you know 2021 wasn't that long ago. So *The Hill* was reporting that. And then the open jobs fell down a little bit but I don't know that our numbers are that accurate. We can tell that things move a little bit.
And yeah, so anyway, then jobless claims were up to 237,000. They thought it would only be 230,000. So that's a little bit worse. So all the job stuff is a little softer. And some of the oil companies have announced that they're cutting. ConocoPhillips might cut 20 to 25%. But that's coming off a few high years because oil was expensive and therefore they had big profits during the original Ukraine situation, but things have settled down there. They had a couple other oil companies looking to make pretty big employment cuts.
But if you put it all together, because the economy is a weird thing and not as predictable as common sense tells you it should be, that might be the reason that the interest rates get cut because generally if employment is looking bad and inflation is somewhat under control, that's when you get the rate cuts. And when you get the rate cuts, that's really good for the economy and really good for the stock market. So bad jobs report equals weirdly maybe things are going to speed up in the next few months.
And the *Washington Examiner* says that the Trump economy has raised optimism to a four-year high. So it's still not more than 50% but 44% now, which is much higher than it used to be. Think things are on the right track.
So as I often remind you, the economy is based on expectations and resources. We usually can find ways to get the resources in today's world. So the expectations are what are kind of dominant. And when people think things are going in the right direction, then they invest and they hire people and then things do go in the right direction. So that's important.
Apparently Bill Cassidy, who's a Republican, and also the Pfizer CEO have both said that Trump should be considered for the Nobel Prize for peace based on his warp speed COVID vaccination work. So do you think that the warp speed project which brought vaccinations to us, well don't call them vaccinations, I got it, shots to us faster, is that a peace operation? Was there a war I didn't know about?
What's funny about this is that Trump has planted in people's heads the idea that there's some reason he should get a Nobel Peace Prize. So he's made it a thing that we think about. If you had never thought about it, the odds of him getting one would be lower, I think. But the fact that everyone sort of just thinks about it now because he's just inserted it into our minds.
And this is a good example because I don't think most of you would think that no matter what you thought of the shot that that had anything to do with peace. It had nothing to do with peace. But everybody sort of understands that if you want Trump on your side, it would be really helpful to publicly say he should get a Nobel Peace Prize. I feel like everyone has tried that now. Like everyone who wants him to be on their side thinks, you know what would be the best way to get him on our side? I've got an idea about he gets the Nobel Peace Prize for whatever. Doesn't matter what.
Anyway, I do respect President Trump for demanding that we find out for sure whether his Project Warp Speed saved lives or killed people. And he wants it to be that it was the greatest thing, that he saved lives, but he's also clearly open to the argument of a lot of people in his base that the data doesn't support that. So he's asking for better data. And I like that because so easily he could have stuck to his guns and just said no, it's the best thing ever, give me the Nobel Prize. But he's not. He's saying I don't know if it was good or bad because the data is sketchy and he's demanding that they have better data. So I don't know whichever way that goes I'm happy that he's asking for it.
There are some reports that are being denied, I think, *Post Millennial* is writing about this, that Trump might at least be considering giving Curtis Sliwa and Eric Adams, who are both running for mayor of New York, some kind of job offer to get them out of the race so that Cuomo would have a better chance of beating Mamdani. I think there's some question about whether that's real. You know, maybe it's just something some advisors talked about but not too serious.
But my question was, why would that be legal? Would it be legal to effectively bribe somebody to get out of a race? Is there no law against that if doing so would guarantee who won the race? It wouldn't be illegal to bribe somebody to quit. I don't know how does that work. It might not be illegal. It just feels like one of those things that feels like it should be illegal. I don't know. But if it's not illegal and it works, I suppose it's on the table.
The *Epoch Times* is reporting that one of the engineers in Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, an engineer is being sued for allegedly stealing trade secrets. And I wonder how common that is. You know, part of me thinks that every AI company has somebody who's already stolen their code. What do you think?
And then I asked myself, how many employees have access to the really important parts of the code for an AI company that's all code? How many people? Wouldn't you imagine that there would only be three to five people who would have that access and they would all have to agree to make any kind of a change? I don't know what kind of controls they put on that, but it kind of makes me wonder if every AI company's code will be stolen and maybe even released to the public under the hypothesis that the world is a better place if all the code is public, which would be bad for the AI companies but maybe somebody would think it's good for the public in some way. I don't know that it would be, but you can imagine somebody arguing that. It's like no, you can't have some companies owning AI. It must be set free for everybody.
So I'm going to say even though the people who steal that stuff might get caught, I'll bet it will still happen because people always think they can get away with it. So I don't know how you solve that.
Well, I saw a report that the company Polymarket, that's an online gambling firm so you can gamble on political things happening, stuff like that, it's been cleared for US adoption after some board CFTC ruling. *Zero Hedge* is writing about this. But what's interesting about it is that one of the investors of Polymarket is Don Trump Jr. and he's also an adviser.
So right after, fairly soon after Don Jr. became an investor, they got approved to operate in the United States. Now do you think there will be any pushback as in he got some special treatment? Well, I don't know that he got any special treatment, but don't you think that the reason that he was maybe who they courted to be an investor is because they knew that if he were an investor, maybe some doors would open that wouldn't ordinarily open? It would be a smart thing to do.
So every company tries to put on their board or have investors who have more than just the ability to be on a board or the ability to invest. They look for people who are twofers, that they have some kind of network of contacts or they have some superpower or they operate some other company that's vital to what you're doing. So it's the most ordinary thing in the world to have investors and/or board members who can give you that extra advantage. It's all legal.
But it made me wonder this. If you're Don Jr., isn't every single serious company in the world some kind of a conflict of interest like everything? If Don Jr. had invested in Nvidia or been on the board of Nvidia, wouldn't that look like some kind of conflict of interest? It would look like it. And almost anything you touched, whether it was a defense business or an AI or one of the platforms, just about anything he touched, somebody would say, now that you're involved, the government's going to give them some big contracts and stuff.
And I don't think it should be illegal for a non-elected family member, you know, just a family member to be blocked from doing ordinary things as long as it's somewhat transparent. Like everybody knows who Don Jr. is, right? So and if it's a public fact that he invested in it and it's a public fact that it got allowed to do business in the US, that's probably all you can do. It's probably all you can do is just make sure everybody knows. I don't think you should make that illegal. If he were elected to office, if you were the one in office, then yeah, maybe. But unelected people, even close family members, I don't know. Seems too far if you block them from doing things that are ordinary business.
Well, you know the story of the Venezuelan drug boat that got blown up by the US military and that happened the other day and it made me wonder how much of the ocean can we survey? Do you ever wonder that? Was it pure luck or some kind of tip that allowed them to catch this one particular boat or do they have some kind of advanced technology that they can see everything and they know where all the smuggling boats are and maybe they act on the ones that are actable?
So I asked Grok to estimate what percentage of the ocean around Venezuela they could actually monitor somewhat continuously and it said maybe 70 to 90% of the ocean within 200 to 300 nautical miles of Venezuela. Now that's Grok. So I don't know if it really could make a reasonable estimate, but it did describe to me all the ways in which they watch the water. So they've got a number of aircraft that are flying all the time, but you know there's not an aircraft over every inch of the water all the time. They've got satellites, but again those are sporadic. They've got drones and then they've got the ships themselves and they would have some kind of perimeter that they're watching all the time.
But apparently what makes this feasible is that there are some places that are far more likely to have this traffic. So they're going to put more resources where they know they've got a higher chance of catching somebody. So I don't know.
Rubio said, Marco Rubio said, Secretary of State, he said the US has a long and for many many years established intelligence that allows us to interdict and stop drug boats. So in other words they get tips or they've got some kind of intelligence where they can tell where the boat's going to be and stop drug boats. And we did that and it doesn't work. What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them. Well, I don't know if it will stop them. We'll find out. But it's a heck of a theory. I mean I'm pretty in favor of it, as you know.
And saw a video this morning. Judge Jeanine was standing in front of a gigantic warehouse full of barrels. And the barrels, 1,300 of them, were seized by law enforcement. And they were full of precursors that were headed to the cartels. 1,300 full-size barrels.
Now I'm no math user, but correct me if I'm wrong. The physical amount of meth is very small, right? So these are just precursors. It's not the meth itself. But 1,300 barrels kind of suggest I would think that would be all the meth that the entire country would use for months. I mean I'm kind of wondering if that will actually make a difference like people will notice it in their supply and demand but that's a big deal.
So the Trump administration is getting pretty hardcore on this, stopping the big dealers. And at the same time maybe looking at dropping the scheduling for marijuana. So I do kind of like the idea of going easier on the users and harder on the dealers of the hard stuff.
According to *Newsweek*, there's a surge in employees who are testing positive for fentanyl. So even though the number of OD deaths is going down for fentanyl, there are more people apparently using it. One of the reasons the deaths are going down is because they got Narcan so they can save you when you're on death's door. But a lot of employees are taking stuff apparently that has some fentanyl in it. I don't know if they know it. They might not know it, but that's a huge problem.
All right, here's an interesting story. According to Fox News, Pilar Arias is reporting. So the FBI did something called Operation Box Cutter and it indicted 22 Chinese nationals and companies for fentanyl precursors. 22 Chinese nationals and companies. So companies.
So Kash Patel says they've seized enough fentanyl to kill 70 million people and they targeted the fentanyl at a source which is what we've always wanted them to do, right, and that led to identifying some companies in China that were making the chemicals that were precursors.
But here's the thing that just frosts me. The companies in China that were making the precursors were openly advertising it. Openly advertising it that they were making precursors for fentanyl for the cartels. So according to this story the chemical companies were openly marketing and selling the precursors used for fentanyl, cocaine and heroin. And so apparently they've indicted Chinese companies. So the FBI knows the name of the companies and has indicted them.
What happens when you indict a Chinese company? Nothing, right? It's not like the Chinese company is going to say, oh okay, we throw ourselves at the mercy of the American justice system. They just ignore it, right? Because it has no impact on them in China.
So I would imagine that nothing will come of this unless there's something about this I don't understand. But indicting them shouldn't make any difference at all. They'll just keep their signs out and keep advertising what they're doing. And obviously the government of China knows what they're doing and is allowing it. Obviously.
So here's what I think. I think that now we have enough information since we know the exact companies and we know they were operating openly that it's time to embarrass President Xi until he can't stay in office, until his own people remove him. So I think he should be embarrassed at being the world's biggest drug dealer. Now that might not be the answer, but the thing is at some point you can embarrass Xi out of office. And I don't know that Trump should do it necessarily because he's got to talk to him, but the world could do it.
And President Xi, I think you could accurately say, is the world's biggest drug dealer. Now that doesn't mean that we're going to treat him like a cartel for all practical reasons, but we can refer to him that way from now on. So to me, President Xi is the biggest drug dealer in the world. It's the most disrespected thing you could ever imagine. And it's humiliating to live in a country of China and have your leader be the biggest drug dealer in the world. So it's sort of the Venezuela problem, isn't it?
So here we assume that Xi could shut down those companies anytime he wants.
Florida is going to, maybe assuming that they vote for it, it looks like they will, end school vaccine mandates. I don't know if that's a good idea. I understand the argument. You know, you should have freedom and choice about what gets put in your body. I get it. This is a strong argument and I won't argue against it. What I will point out is it's kind of nice that we have states that will try different things because maybe in several years we'll say to ourselves, well that was a brilliant idea, Florida. We'll all follow your lead.
So I like the fact that it's like a laboratory. So I don't have an opinion on it. We'll just watch it, see if it works. You know, and anybody can get the vaccinations if they want them. So that should be enough.
In South Korea, their birth rate problem is so bad that it's only at 0.75. So every person is only replacing themselves with three quarters of a person, statistically. It's the lowest birth rate on Earth. Yowser. And their population is on track to shrink by nearly a third by 2072. *Bloomberg* is reporting this.
So one of the things that's happening as a result of that is that some big companies in South Korea are offering bonuses to women who have babies. Employees, I assume, must be employees. Yeah, employees and their families. $72,000 per baby. $72,000 to have a baby and plus in-house daycare until 9:30 p.m., emergency babysitting and temporary cover for parental leave.
So they're basically, let me ask you this. Why is it true that birth rates used to be higher? And the answer is because it used to be a cash-positive operation. If you were running a farm, having more kids probably was all good because you had more people to work and protect you and protect your assets and all that stuff.
But when it became, because of the way we've organized modern economies, when it became an expense, then immediately there was less of it. And when it became a really burdening expense then it became an emergency. So far what we've noticed is that if you get the economic incentive right, things move in the right direction. And they do say it moved a little bit already but $72,000 per child is sort of on the borderline of being a profit center, isn't it? I mean later the child will cost them enough money that it's not worth it or it's not cash positive. It might still be worth it but it won't be cash positive.
I don't know, might work but maybe it'll take $150,000. Almost anybody would have a baby for $150,000. You might get a third of the people say I'll do that. That's better than working. And I suppose you could work too, right? Because they're doing a daycare. So I guess you don't have to quit your job if you're a woman. So you can get the $72,000. You could also get leave. Looks pretty good.
I saw a post from Peter Diamandis. He says if you retire at 55, you're 89% more likely to die within 10 years. And the idea is that people who have a purpose in life seem to live longer.
But I would like to put some doubt in that study, which I'm sure was not a double blind because the only way you could do a double blind would be to select some people and tell them they're going to retire even if they weren't planning to. How would you do a double blind? I don't know that you could. So that's the first red flag is it's not a whatever study did this is just some correlation they found.
But I would like to inject this possibility. I believe that one of the biggest factors in when people decide to retire, assuming they can afford it, is how long their parents lived. Has anybody had that thought? If your parents both live to 100, then you probably think, I think I'd better work until I'm late 70s just to be able to even afford to retire. And you might think, well I'm going to be so bored if I'm retired for 40 years. I'll just be bored.
So I believe that if your parents died at 70, you say to yourself, I better retire as soon as possible so I get a little fun retirement. I might not have long. So it could be that the self-selection of when people retire is because they look at their own health and then they look at the genes of their parents and how long they lasted. And if it doesn't look good, they retire faster. And so that would suggest that people who retire were the ones with the medical disadvantages that would suggest they're more likely to die.
Anyway, apparently ICE, you know the not the frozen water kind but the ICE people who guard our borders or go after the immigrants who got through the borders. Apparently they are now going to use an Israeli-made spyware that can hack phones and encrypted apps. *The Guardian* was reporting that. So it looks like it can just slice through just about any kind of protection. And it's from Paragon Solutions and some say it's the strongest weapon of its type.
Are you comfortable with anybody, whether it's even if it's in Israel, are you comfortable that that exists, that there's a known piece of spyware that can basically puncture everything? Terrific.
As I've been saying for a while, your privacy is purely illusionary. It's a pure illusion. And I like to say this until it sinks in, until everybody agrees with me, that the only privacy you have, the only protection you have in your privacy is being uninteresting. Nothing else. If you're uninteresting, and that would be uninteresting to law enforcement because you didn't do any crimes, uninteresting to your neighbors because nobody saw you cheating on your wife, nobody saw you doing anything interesting. So as long as you remain really uninteresting, you've got all the privacy you'd ever want because nobody gives a what you do or even who you are.
But the moment you're doing anything interesting, say you're a Fed governor just to pick one example, then people are going to find out everything they need to find out about you. Sometimes critics and enemies, sometimes law enforcement, but you don't have any privacy. You have only the ability to be uninteresting. And it's been that way for a long time because the government could always get some kind of warrant to look into your stuff.
Anyway, that ladies and gentlemen is what I wanted to say. If you just joined late, I remind you that the second edition of *Loserthink*, my book that teaches you how not to evaluate things, you know what mistakes commonly people make arguing online especially. It's basically the same as the first edition, but I had to republish it independently with Joshua Lisec because I got cancelled worldwide. So it wasn't the book itself that got cancelled, but my publisher cancelled everything I had and people were saying, Scott, can you make that one available again because it's quite popular.
So the best way to use it is if you see somebody using a bad way of thinking, I encourage you to take a picture of the page in the book in which I describe why it's a bad way of thinking and you just post it on X. So because it's in a book, it will make you feel like it's official. You'll win every argument.
All right, I'm going to talk privately to my beloved subscribers on Locals. The rest of you, thanks for joining. You'll only see me for another 30 seconds before I...
I hope you have your beverage cuz you know what's coming up, right?
Yeah, there'll be some simultaneous sipping, but I'm checking the stock market.
It's a little bit up.
Little bit up.
Not nearly enough.
But soon as I get my comments going, we will launch into the best thing that will ever happen to you.
Good morning everybody.
Everyone and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams and you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny shiny human brains, all you need for that?
Well, all you need is a copper mug or a glass attacker Charles or Stein, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit day of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens right now.
Go.
Oh yeah, that's just that's called topping it off right there.
Well, apparently today the uh Robo Taxi app from Tesla is available for download.
I don't know what that implies for when you will be able to use your Tesla as a driverless uh sort of an Uber, but uh at least you've got the app.
I imagine it will depend on your state and local.
Um, in case I haven't mentioned it, my book, Loser Think, which was published a few years ago, but got cancelled when I got cancelled, and it's back, but it's a second edition now.
It's basically the same as the first, but uh, it's the only way I could make it available by independently publishing with Joshua Lysk.
who's amazing and you should uh use them if you get a chance or work with him I should say.
Don't use them, work with him if you get a chance.
Um, but I thought I would share with you one tip from the book Loser Think.
Now, as you might imagine, lose or think is what you would like to avoid.
So, you don't want to be the person who makes the the mental mistake when other people are watching.
So, this is how to avoid those mental mistakes.
And I'll give you one.
If you ever find yourself on online telling somebody to stay in their lane, you are a loser thinker.
You know why?
That's such bad advice.
Stay in your lane.
You This is not your expertise.
Well, how are the experts doing compared to the people who have no expertise and are just guessing?
It's pretty close to a tie, I would say.
So, if your argument is that the person involved is no expert in that field, you really have to consider what the experts versus the non-expert track record is, right?
You don't sound smart.
I think there was a time when that would sound smart.
So, you have to adjust that to the current day.
And you also have to think, tell me anything important in the world.
Whoa, cats destroying something in another room.
Tell me anything in the world that was made that was important, like a real big breakthrough by somebody who was an expert at that thing.
It's like, you know, Steve Jobs couldn't program.
Um, yeah, I can go down go down the list.
Basically, nobody was an expert until they figured it out.
So, stay in your lane is the worst advice.
And if you happen to say that to somebody, well, might be a little loser thing going on.
All right, that's my commercial.
It's only available on Amazon, but you can get it in three different forms.
The audio book will follow.
That's not available yet.
Well, apparently according to live science, there's now an AI powered robot dog that can play bad against humans, which makes sense because most of the other animals, uh, they don't play bad.
So, if you're going to make a robot that plays bad, um, you should make it so it can play against a human.
Because if you make it to play against, let's say, a beaver or a squirrel, well, you're not really gonna have any good matches because the beaver and the squirrel don't actually play bad.
So, that's important.
But, uh, I want one.
I really want a robot dog that can play actual badman.
According to the video, it looked like it was pretty good.
I would totally play bad every single day with a badman robot.
So, give me a price.
Well, American Eagle, the clothing maker, um, says that the, uh, the Sydney Sweeney commercial everybody's talking about with their great jeans campaign, uh, did so well that in just six weeks, they're making all kinds of money and their stock is up 25%.
So, according to a variety, um, well, I know it was a powerful uh, marketing blitz because, uh, I bought three pair.
Um, and they're all women's jeans and I thought that they would look better on me, but, you know, maybe it's just me, but man, that commercial was good.
Well, NASA administrator Shan Duffy is telling us that uh the US is going to send four men up to the moon uh at the beginning of next year.
Now, how many of you believe um because you watched Joe Rogan's podcast that it might be impossible to get through the what is it the Van Allen radiation belt and that therefore you believe that no one has ever been to the moon in the real world and it's all been faked.
How many of you believe that?
And if you believe that it's not possible and and also has never been done obviously, then I'm being visited by a cat.
Um, how many times will this cat put his tail in my face?
That's three.
I think there's more to come.
That's four.
All right.
So, what's fun about this uh moon launch, besides the fact that moon launches are obviously fun, is that it might convince people that the original moonshot either happened or didn't.
If for some reason they they decide they can't do it or the I don't know the astronauts died on the way through the radiation belt then you would be quite justified in saying huh maybe nobody's ever done it.
But the fact that China is trying to get to the moon and Russia is trying to get to the moon and we're trying to get to the moon.
I feel like the the theory that the Van Allen belt has prevented anybody from getting to the moon could be retired.
Don't you think?
If you believe that, are you ready to retire it?
But you could wait until the, you know, the beginning of next year and see if somebody survives doing it.
Then you wouldn't have to wonder.
You could you could watch it if you believe the news.
All right.
Now, you know what people will be saying?
People will be saying, "Oh, so you're telling me it's a total coincidence that the first time that we seem to be able to prove that we went to the moon is exactly when AI can make a an image that's fake that looks exactly like it happened." So, those two things just coincidentally happened at the same time.
Just when you wanted to fake a moon landing, oh look, by coincidence, the exact technology you would need to fake video of a moon landing is available.
Huh.
So I guess the conspiracy theorists will have something to play with there.
Well, is there any uh studies that they could have avoided by just asking me?
Yes.
Cambridge University Press is talking about how there was a news study uh Cambridge it uh in the British Journal of Political Science and it showed that small business owners are more likely to be rightwing.
Now I would call that conservative or rightle leading.
Do you think that they needed to do did they really need to do a survey to know that if you spend five minutes running your own business, the one thing you're going to want less less of is the government.
It feels to me that anybody who's had the small business experience, and I have with two restaurants, um that you're battling the government and the law.
So, it turns out that as a restaurant owner, you know, small business owner, that I thought I was going to be doing, you know, making fun decisions about the decorations and, you know, what's on the menu and stuff, but you spend half of your time at least battling with lawyers and lawsuits and insurance problems and your bank is mad at you and it's uh and regulations.
I mean, we could even put up a sign that was big enough for people to see that we had a new restaurant.
Now, that's a government problem.
Anyway, uh there's a the the most fun story in the news is that um President Trump is fed up with Rosie O'Donnell, who as you know, uh moved to Ireland and uh she's living there right now.
And uh so Trump has said in a truth social he said not a great American uh he says because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interest of our great country.
This is the president of the United States talking about one person Rosie O'Donnell who's in Ireland.
Uh is not in the best interest of our great country.
I am giving serious consideration to taking away her citizenship.
She is a threat to humanity.
She's a threat to humanity and should remain in the wonderful country of Ireland if they water.
God bless America.
He is the best ship poster in the history of the world.
Do you do you know what my favorite part of this is?
Well, I've got a few favorite parts.
One is it will absorb the press's attention and they're going to use up all of their time with the public talking about this ridiculous story.
And he he knows it.
he knows they're just going to chew up all their criticism time talking about this and that the public's just gonna be sort of laughing at it.
Um but the best part is this.
Sooner or later, um some member of the press is going to say, "Are you really serious about this?" And he'll probably say something in a Trump-like fashion of, "Well, we'll see.
You know, I'm haven't made a decision, but you know, there's a good argument for it." Something like that.
And then what will the member of the press of course ask next?
What would be the most obvious guaranteed question that will come up if if Trump actually, you know, keeps with this keeps with this theme?
The question will be um is are you going to consider taking away anyone else's citizenship?
Do you see the trap yet?
And and then when they say, "Are you going to do that to anyone else?" What would be his answer?
Only Rosie O'Donnell.
Boom.
And the prank is complete.
The the best troll, best troll in the history of trolling.
Uh Jonathan Turley helpfully points out that the president cannot take away somebody's citizenship, which makes it even funnier because I'm sure he knows he can't do it.
And if he tried, I'm sure he knows the courts would, you know, throw it out.
So the the the fact that this is even a story is just the most wonderful troll.
um just good presidenting.
The the president knows that entertaining us is part of the job.
No, I don't think any other president has ever understood that the way he does that.
That if you keep us entertained, we're more likely, you know, to to be on your team.
It just works that way.
We like to be entertained.
Well, speaking of entertainment, over in Ireland, Conor Mc.
Gregor is trying to get some things changed in their system so that he could be possibly nominated to run for president of Ireland.
Now, apparently, president of Ireland is, you know, kind of a ceremonial position.
It's not so much a powerful position, but I believe that Connor wants to champion the idea of uh closing down excess immigration into Ireland because it's changing the character of Ireland.
So, he might be able to do that from the president's office.
Now, it's I asked Grock and he said it was uh unlikely that he would be able to beat through the nomination process cuz it requires people who are already elected, I guess, some number of them to agree.
So, it's not up to the public.
It's not like our system where if enough voters want him to run in the primary that he's the candidate.
They they have some other uh system.
So, he's got a uh looks like he's got a petition going to see if he can get the system changed so that he could be on the ballot.
But what I would like to add to this conversation is that although he has many many drawbacks as in people have strong opinions about him, he's been uh accused of sex crimes and uh you he's got a he's got you know sort of some baggage if you know what I mean.
But do you think it's impossible for someone who is accused of sex crimes to become the president of a nation?
Well, I think it might be.
But here's the part that I think is a the hidden the uh the hidden magic.
Conor Mc.
Gre Mc.
Gregor is a student of success, meaning he's known to absorb a great deal of uh um let's say practical advice about how to be successful at anything and that helped him win, you know, his titles, etc.
He is probably studying Trump has probably read his share of materials about how to be persuasive.
Um his his coach um has absorbed some of my materials and I just noticed this morning that Connor follows me on X.
So he and I guess he's also used uh he's referred to the book the secret which is sort of an affirmations kind of approach.
So I believe he's he's sort of an affirmations guy which would just be you know one small corner of the the process for success.
He's a systems over a goal guy.
He's a talent stack guy.
And even though the the deck is stacked way against him, you know, even getting nominated, much less get elected, the the level of specific talent that he brings to that domain, should not be overlooked.
He he he's got some superpowers in his toolbox.
Um he's not Trump.
You know, there's only one Trump, but I guarantee without knowing it, I don't have any special knowledge, but I guarantee that he's studying Trump to figure out what works.
And that unlike maybe other observers, he will he might figure out what works.
So, don't uh don't count him out.
Anyway, uh, President Trump is reportedly, according to Axios, expected to ask the Supreme Court to reverse the Eugene Carol verdict.
Now, that verdict was a civil, not a criminal, trial, if I'm correct.
Uh, I'm terrible at all the the legal topics, but uh, I don't know what um, in what I read, I didn't see the argument.
So, I didn't see what argument they would propose using to have that reversed, unless the argument is that it was so obviously contrived as a political move that even if they crossed all the tees and dotted all the eyes to make it legal, it might be just so obviously a plot to keep him out of the presidency as opposed to a, you know, more legitimate uh Department of Justice action.
that um it might be reversible.
You know, I didn't know you could even take the civil cases to the Supreme Court.
And I also don't know what I'm talking about.
But if they're going to argue that it wasn't like a legitimate thing to even look into, that might be a strong argument.
So, we might get surprised by that one.
All right, I've got a cat as a table here.
All right, Gary the cat.
You're going to have to hold my notes.
So, that's Gary.
He's sleeping in front of me between me and my my camera.
So, he'll be holding my notes on his belly while we continue.
Good job, Gary.
All right, don't move.
Stay right there.
So apparently according to futurism, Frank Landmore is writing that uh um Medicare might start paying some AI companies.
I think they're going to do a test to see if they can find AI companies uh that would uh reject some claims for service, some claims for medical care.
So I think the idea would be um that the AI would do all the that you know the tough work of deciding what things to accept or reject.
But here's the problem.
Um the New York Times reports that the AI companies selected for the experiment will get paid a share of the money they save by blocking people from their healthcare.
So in other words, the AI will be optimized and the AI company will be incentivized to help people the least that they can with whatever, you know, good AI argument they can make for not helping people.
Now, of course, the objective is to, you know, reject the fraud and the things that they're not supposed to be paying for.
But if the AI company gets paid for how much they can stop, what do you think's going to happen?
Now, it's an experiment.
So, maybe they'll experiment and they'll find out what they can do.
Just ask me.
You could stop this and just ask me, what do you think will happen when you incentivize the AI to block people's health care by using clever arguments?
That would sound valid.
Well, it's probably not good because you you probably want to heir on the side of uh allowing more than you should, you know, because there's nothing perfect.
You don't really want to assist in the errors on the side of denying more than it should.
And I think the AI would obviously be that.
But here's the fun part.
At the same time, there's that story.
CBS News is reporting that um there's some health care companies that consumers can use to fight against the denial of service.
So if somebody uses an AI company to deny you service, you could call your own AI company.
One of them is called Counterforce Health that uses AI to make phone calls and to pester the uh um whoever denied you the healthcare.
So you can fight for your healthcare using AI that might be fighting against another AI.
So that's where everything's going.
Well, in puzzling news, Paramount is going to buy Barry Weiss's Free Press.
So, Barry Weiss founded the Free Press.
Uh, and apparently it's doing gang busters because it's only been a few years and it's the I would think the hardest market that anybody could ever make value, which is the most crowded uh difficult market, which is news.
But the free press has been offered up to $200 million and they would uh offer her a senior editorial ro role as CBS News.
So I don't know if it means it would be rolled into CBS News or she would just have a dual role, but does that make sense to you?
Um, does it make sense that it would be worth $200 million?
Doesn't that Uh, so my first assumption is there's probably something wrong with the reporting.
Um, because it might be like 200 million if you meet these goals over X number of years or something like that.
You know, I I I have trouble believing that whoever owns all the equity would get, you know, collectively $200 million check up front.
That feels high.
I don't know.
But Paramount knows what it's doing, so I'm sure they've looked into it.
Uh it could also be Isn't Paramount run by Larry Ellison's son?
Um, so he would be sort of pro- uh, America first, Trump.
I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it would sort of make CBS under the control of somebody who's a lot more independent and would have a lot more uh, of course, everybody's controversial these days.
Um, I think there's some controversy about Barry Weiss.
I don't even know what it is or whether it's valid, but uh everybody's controversial after a certain point of notoriety.
All right.
So, Tim Kaine, you know, Tim Kaine who didn't become vice president.
Apparently, he he had a little debate with Ted Cruz about where our rights come from.
And the question was uh from God or from the government.
And Tim Kaine was scoffing at the notion that rights come from God and didn't think that the Constitution would suggest that that would be the case.
Ted Cruz who know he knows his constitution uh argued back on X anyway that he better read the read the work of the founding fathers because he argued that uh uh God is the source of our rights.
And Tim Ga argued that the government determines your rights.
Now, I'm going to take a third approach.
Um, whether or not it's Let's see.
You don't need God to make the same point that Ted Cruz would be happy with.
So, let me explain.
whether God created everything or we're just here for some other reason, whatever that reason is.
So whether it's evolution and chance or any other model, once you're here, you don't need to refer to God to say that we have all the rights that have not been yet restricted by our government.
So, it's just cleaner and easier to say that we all have every right to do everything except what the government restricts.
And that gets you to exactly the same place as if you say God created these rights and we're interpreting what God had in mind.
because that brings with it a small but real risk which is if something happens in our form of government or who's in charge changes it might be a different god that they're looking at for your rights you know what I mean so if we you know or let's say someone else became a Muslim dominated country they might also agree that your rights are assigned by God but their version of what God would design would be very different.
So there is some risk of interpreting what God meant for your rights.
So I would say you can you can maintain your God belief and even that God gave you rights, but when you're debating it in the public forum, it's just cleaner and easier to say no, you have a right to do everything.
Everything except what the government specifically takes from you.
Governments don't give rights.
As soon as you imagine that somebody's giving you rights, be it God or be it the government, then you don't really understand rights in the most productive way.
The most productive way is you have every right until somebody who can put you in jail tells you you don't.
And well, then I could argue you still have the right.
You just better not do it.
All right.
Uh, apparently a judge has invalidated Trump's work against Harvard.
You know, he wanted to uh make them give him large amounts of money and all that.
And apparently Harvard did a good job of suing uh to stop to stop that.
And the US District Judge Allison Burroughs is trying to restore the funding, government funding to Harvard.
Now, I have to say that um I'm not surprised.
I don't know how it'll end.
You know, maybe maybe a higher court will still back Trump, but it doesn't surprise me that Harvard of all places could put up a good legal battle because the whole point of Harvard is it's you know the best of the best and you even with DEI there still it's like smartest people around.
So, but they're also have, you know, the Harvard Law School and they're the most connected people in the world.
So, you would expect that the most connected, capable, high level uh lawyers in the world would know how to get to a judge who could give them what they want, which is half of the game, maybe more than half.
So, don't be surprised when you see Harvard able to put up a good fight in the legal sense.
Well, here's some Epstein news.
Uh, surprise.
There's no new news, but there's lots of people making actions and activities.
We'll see if any of it turns into anything new.
The latest is there's a small group of uh well I don't know how small uh maybe a dozen or more of Jeffrey Epstein accusers who seem to be getting organized at the moment and they made an announcement or one of them did that maybe the victims should put together a list of um the people who were the regulars on the island.
Now, I heard one of them say that she had been victimized as many as three times a day as a minor.
Uh, and that, you know, well, just heard horrible things and it was every day and it was continuous and lots of people were involved.
Now, um, one of the things preventing any of them from naming names might be that they'd all signed signed, let's say, settlements in court because there was some large amount of money for settlements.
And uh, they're just not allowed to talk about it without risking losing whatever substantial money they got.
And so that's part of it.
But uh there's also the problem that if the only thing you knew is that somebody was a regular or that you knew that they had visited the island.
You have that problem of people who literally broke no laws and didn't do any of the naughty stuff whose lives would be pretty well ruined by the release.
So what do they do?
Well, um and then how do they prevent, you know, pay back and getting sued and all that?
because they would all get sued if they mention a name of some billionaire and there's no hard proof that they did anything wrong.
I mean, the lawyers are going to just destroy these poor victims.
So, uh I think was it Marjorie Taylor Green and maybe somebody else uh were noodling with the idea that they would be the ones who would read them out loud because if you do it in the House uh floor, apparently there's some kind of law that gives you legal immunity so that you can say any damn thing, you know, in that specific context so nobody can sue you.
So, they need a way to get the names out um that won't get them sued.
And so, they might pull together names, give them to Marjorie Taylor Green, and have her read them.
Now, Marjorie Taylor Green then would have the problem of, you know, being the agent of possibly ruining the lives of people who got pulled into something that they didn't quite know what it was about, but maybe didn't do anything wrong.
So, how do you handle that?
I don't know.
But I would like to suggest the following.
It shouldn't be one list.
If they pull together something, it should be something like here's the people that we have a living human who says, "I watched it or I participated it or I was the specific victim or I walked into the room and saw it or my best friend described it to me and I knew it was true." So that should be one one list but the other list should be people who had uh you maybe visited or associated but there's no accusation.
So it might be the accused list and then literally called the not accused list because that would at least give the people on the not accused list the the easy out.
Say just look at the news.
I'm on the not accused list.
It literally is the not accused list.
So leave me alone.
So that would probably be and even though that's not enough, the best you could do.
Yeah.
You need to give the people who don't have a real hard accusation with a witness or something, you need to give them some kind of uh constitutional protection in this situation.
And I think just clarifying that there's two sets of people.
The ones you know did some bad bad stuff and the ones who just sort of were around that you got to make that distinction.
I hope they do.
Anyway, who knows if that will even go anywhere.
Nothing else has.
Uh, Mayor Bowser of DC is not only in favor of Trump's helping with crime by uh putting in some um National Guard, she's also saying that they need a lot more regular police and they've got openings and they're hiring as fast as they can and that's all good.
So, Muriel Browser, um, good job in, you know, not being ridiculous.
Um, so so many so many Democrats act in ways that are just ridiculous except the farthest left people that uh we might be seeing a little bit of a movement back to the middle.
You've you've already seen that, right?
The Bill Mars and and such saying uh we're going to need to get back to something more reasonable.
David Axelrod was on CNN saying the same.
He said the right answer to this whole crime stuff is quote we'll take all the help we can get as long as it's appropriate and it's stuff that will really help.
Send us the resources we need.
We want to work with you.
Exactly.
So this is Axel Rod with good advice for his team which is you need to stop acting like you're pro crime.
You know that's my version of it.
But his version is, "Why don't you act a little bit more like you're legitimately anti-grime?" Uh, if I could paraphrase it.
Um, I would give you the additional advice.
Here's my advice.
Don't join any group that needs that kind of advice.
Don't ever join a group that needs to be advised to not take the side of the criminals.
That's the best advice you'll ever get.
Um, well, there's a whole bunch of employment and job numbers coming out and they don't look so hot.
Um, they're not terrible, but they're moving in the wrong direction.
Don't know if that's because all our numbers are bad and nothing's reliable or because, I don't know, weather sometimes.
Uh, maybe because of the threat of tariffs.
So, it might be temporary.
I don't know.
But uh let's see for the first time the uh unemployed workers outnumber the number of jobs since 2021.
But you know 2021 wasn't that long ago.
So the Hill was reporting that.
Um and then what the open jobs fell fell down a little bit but I don't know that our numbers are that accurate.
We can tell that things move a little bit.
Um and yeah, so anyway, then jobless claims were up to 237,000.
They thought it would only be 230,000.
So that's a little bit worse.
So all the job stuff is a little softer.
And some of the uh oil companies have announced that they're cutting.
Kico Phillips might cut 20 to 25%.
But that's coming off a few high years because uh oil was uh expensive and therefore they had big profits during the original Ukraine situation, but things have settled down there.
They had a couple other oil companies looking to make pretty big uh employment cuts.
But if you put it all together, because the economy is a weird thing and not as predictable as as common sense tells you it should be.
Um that might be the reason that the interest rates get cut because generally if employment is looking bad and uh inflation is somewhat under control, that's when you get the rate cuts.
And when you get the rate cuts, that's really good for the economy and really good for the stock market.
So bad jobs report equals weirdly maybe things are going to, you know, speed up in the next few months.
Um, and the Washington Examiner says that the Trump economy has raised optimism to a four-year high.
So it's still not more than 50% but uh what 44% now which is much higher than it used to be.
Think things are on the right track.
So as I often remind you the economy is based on expectations and resources.
We usually can find ways to get the resources in in today's world.
So the expectations are what are are kind of dominant.
And when people think things are going in the right direction, then they invest and they hire people and then things do go in the right direction.
So that's important.
Um, apparently, uh, Bill Cassidy, who's a Republican, and also the Fiser CEO have both, uh, said that Trump should be considered for the Nobel Prize for peace based on his warp speed co vaccination work.
So, do you think that the warp speed project which brought vaccinations to us?
Well, don't call them vaccinations.
I got it.
Shots to us uh faster.
Is that a peace operation?
Was there a Was there a war I didn't know about?
Right.
What's funny about this is that um Trump has planted in people's heads the idea that there's some reason he should get a Nobel Peace Prize.
So, he's made it a thing that we think about.
If you had never thought about it, the odds of him getting one would be lower, I think.
But the fact that everyone sort of just thinks about it now because he's just inserted it into our minds.
Uh, and this is a good example because I don't think most of you would think that no matter what you thought of the shot that that had anything to do with peace.
It had nothing to do with peace.
But everybody uh sort of understands that if you want Trump on your side, it would be really helpful to publicly say he should get a Nobel Peace Prize.
I I feel like everyone has tried that now.
like everyone who wants him to be on their side thinks, you know what would be the best way to get him on our side.
I've got an idea about he gets the Nobel Peace Prize for whatever.
Doesn't matter what.
Anyway, I do respect President Trump for demanding that we we find out for sure whether his project warp speed saved lives or killed people.
And he, you know what he wants?
I mean, he wants it to be that it was the greatest thing that he saved lives, but he's also clearly open to the argument of a lot of people in his base that the data doesn't support that.
So, he's asking for better data.
And uh I like that because so easily he could have stuck to his guns and just said, "No, it's the best thing ever.
Give me the Nobel Prize." But he's not.
He's saying I don't know if it was good or bad and because the data is uh sketchy and he's demanding that they have better data.
So I don't know whichever way that goes I'm happy that he's asking for it.
There are some reports that are being denied, I think, postmillennials writing about this, that uh uh Trump might uh at least be considering giving Curtis uh Zilwa and Eric Adams, who are both running for mayor of New York, some kind of job offer to get them out of the race so that Cuomo would have a better chance of beating beating Mandami Kami.
Um, I think there's some question about whether that's real.
You know, maybe it's just something some advisors talked about, but not too serious.
But my question was, why would that be legal?
Would it be legal to effectively bribe somebody to get out of a race?
Is there there's no law against that?
if doing so um kind of would guarantee who won the race.
It wouldn't be illegal to bribe somebody to quit.
I don't know how does that work.
It might not be illegal.
I It just see feels like one of those things that feels like it should be illegal.
I don't know.
But if it's not illegal and it works, I suppose it's on the table.
The uh Epoch Times is uh reporting that one of the engineers in uh Elon Musk's AI company, X AI, an engineer is being sued for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
And I wonder how common that is.
You know, part of me thinks that every AI company has somebody who's already stole their code, stolen the code.
What do you think?
And then I asked myself, how many employees have access to the the really important parts of the code for an AI company that's all code?
How many people?
Wouldn't you imagine that there would only be, I don't know, three to five people who would have that access and they would all have to agree to make any kind of a change.
I don't know what kind of controls they put on that, but um it kind of makes me wonder if every AI company's code will be stolen and maybe even released to the public under the hypothesis that the world is a better place if all the code is public, which would be bad for the AI companies, but maybe somebody would think it's good for the public in some way.
I don't know that it would be, but you can imagine somebody arguing that.
It's like, no, you can't have some companies owning AI.
It must be set free for everybody.
So, I'm going to say uh even though the people who steal that stuff might get caught, I'll bet it will still happen because people always think they can get away with it.
So, I don't know how you solve that.
Well, I saw a report that the company Poly Market, that's an online gambling firm, so you can gamble on, you know, political things happening, stuff like that.
It uh it's been cleared for uh US adoption after some board CFTC ruling.
Zero Hedge is writing about this.
But what's interesting about it is that one of the investors of Poly Market is uh Don Trump Jr.
and he's uh also an an adviser.
So right after fairly soon after Don Jr.
became an investor um they got approved to operate in the United States.
Now do you think there will be any push back as in uh you know he got some special treatment?
Well, I don't know that he got any special treatment, but don't you think that the reason that he was, you know, maybe who they courted to be an investor because they knew that if he were an investor, uh, maybe some doors would open that wouldn't ordinarily open.
It would be a smart thing to do.
So every company tries to put on their board or have investors who have more than just the ability to be on a board or the ability to invest.
They look for people who are twofers that they have some kind of network of contacts or they have some superpower or they operate some other company that's vital to what you're doing.
So, it's the most ordinary thing in the world to have investors andor board members who can give you that extra, you know, that extra advantage.
Um, it's all legal, but um it it made me it made me wonder this.
If you're Don Jr., Isn't every single serious company in the world some kind of a conflict of interest like everything?
If Don Jr.
had invested in Nvidia or been on the board of Nvidia, wouldn't that look like some kind of conflict of interest?
It would look like it.
And almost anything you touched, whether it was a defense business or an AI or one of the platforms, just about anything he touched, somebody would say, uh, you know, now that you're involved, the government's going to give them some big contracts and stuff.
And I don't think it should be illegal for a non-elected family, you know, just a family member to be blocked from doing ordinary things as long as it's, you know, somewhat transparent.
Like everybody knows who Don Jr.
is, right?
So, and if it's a public fact that he invested in it and it's a public fact that um it got allowed to do business in the US, that's probably that's all you can do.
It's probably all you can do is just make sure everybody knows.
I don't think you should make that illegal.
>> If if he were elected to office, if you were the one in office, then yeah, maybe.
But unelected people, even close family members, I don't know.
Seems too far if you block them from doing things that are ordinary business.
Well, you know the story of the Venezuelan drug boat that got blown up by the US military and that happened the other day and it made me wonder how much of the ocean can we survey?
Do you ever wonder that?
Did they was it pure luck or some kind of chip that allowed them to catch this one particular boat or do they have some kind of advanced technology that they can see everything and they know where all the smuggling boats are and maybe you know maybe they act on the ones that are actable.
So I asked Grock to estimate what percentage of the ocean around Venezuela they could actually monitor somewhat continuously and it said maybe 70 to 90% of the ocean within 200 to 300 nautical miles of Venezuela.
Now that's Grock.
So, I don't know.
I don't know if it really could make a reasonable uh estimate, but it did describe to me all the ways in which they watch the water.
So, they've got a number of aircraft that are flying all the time, but you know, there's not an aircraft over every inch of the water all the time.
They got satellites, but again, those are sporadic.
um they've got uh drones and then they've got the ships themselves and you know they would have some kind of perimeter that they're watching all the time.
So, but apparently what makes this feasible is that there there's some places that are far more likely to have this traffic.
So, they're going to put more resources where they know they got a higher chance of catching somebody.
So, I don't know.
You know, Rubio said, Marco Rubio said, Secretary of State, he said, "The US has a long and for many, many years established intelligence that allows us to interdict and stop drug boats." So, in other words, uh they get tips.
They or they've got some kind of intelligence where they can tell where the boat's going to be and stop drug boats.
And we did that and it doesn't work.
What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.
Well, I don't know if it will stop them.
We'll find out.
But it's a heck of a theory.
I mean, you know, I'm pretty in favor of it, as you know.
And uh saw a video this morning.
Judge Janine was standing in front of a gigantic warehouse full of barrels.
And the barrels, 1300 of them were seized by law enforcement.
Uh, and they were full of precursors that uh were were added to the cartels.
1,300 fulls size barrels.
Now, I'm no math user, but correct me if I'm wrong.
The the physical amount of meth is very small, right?
So, these are just precursors.
It's not the meth itself.
But 1300 B barrels kind of suggest I would I would think that would be all the meth that the entire country would use for months.
I mean what I I'm kind of wondering if that will actually make a difference like people will notice it in their in their supply and demand but that's a big deal.
So, the Trump administration is getting pretty hardcore on this stopping the big dealers.
Um, and at the same time, you know, maybe looking at dropping the scheduling for marijuana.
So, I do kind of like the idea of going easier on the users and harder on the dealers of the hard stuff.
Um, according to Newsweek, there's a surge in employees who are testing positive for fentinel.
So, even though the number of OD deaths is going down for fentinel, um, there are more people apparently using it.
One of the reasons the deaths are going down is because they got Narcan, so they can save you when you're on death store.
Um, but a lot of employees are taking stuff apparently that have some fentinyl in it.
I don't know if they know it.
They might not know it, but that's a huge problem.
All right, here's an interesting story.
According to Fox News, Pylar Aras is reporting.
So, the FBI did something called Operation Box Cutter and it indicted 22 Chinese nationals and companies for fentinel precursors.
22 Chinese nationals and companies.
So, companies.
So Cash Patel says they they've uh seized enough fentinel to kill 70 million people and they they targeted the fentinel at a source which is what we've always wanted them to do right and uh that led to identifying some companies in China that were making the uh the the chemicals that were precursors.
And but here's the thing that just frosts me.
um that the companies in China that were making the precursors were openly advertising it.
Openly advertising it that they were making precursors for fentinyl for the cartels.
Um so according to this story uh the chemical companies were openly marketing and selling the precursors used for fentinyl, cocaine and heroin.
And so apparently they've indicted Chinese companies.
So the FBI knows the name of the companies and he's indicted them.
What happens when you indict a Chinese company?
Nothing, right?
It's not like the Chinese company is going to say, "Oh, okay.
We, you know, we uh we throw ourselves at the mercy of the American justice system." they just ignore it, right?
Because it has no has no impact on them in China.
So, I would imagine that nothing will come of this unless there's something about this I don't understand.
But indicting them shouldn't make any difference at all.
They'll just keep their signs out and keep advertising what they're doing.
And obviously, the government of China knows what they're doing and is allowing it.
Obviously.
So, here's what I think.
I think that now we have enough information since we know the exact companies and we know they were operating openly that it's time to embarrass President Xi until he can't stay in office until his own people remove him.
So I think he should be embarrassed at being the the world's biggest drug dealer.
Um, now that might not be the answer, but the thing is at some point you can embarrass she out of office.
And I don't know that Trump should do it necessarily because he's got to talk to him, but uh, the world could do it.
And President Xi, I think you could accurately say, is the world's biggest drug dealer.
Now, that doesn't mean that we're going to treat them like a cartel for all practical reasons, but we can refer to him that way from now on.
So, to me, President Xi is the biggest drug dealer in the world.
It's the most disrespected thing you could ever imagine.
And it's humiliating to live in a country of China and have your leader be the biggest drug dealer in the world.
So, it's sort of the Venezuela problem, isn't it?
So, here we assume that she could shut down those companies anytime you want.
Florida is going to um maybe assuming that they vote for it.
It looks like they will.
And uh school vaccine mandates.
I don't know if that's a good idea.
Um I understand the argument.
You know, you should have freedom and choice about what gets put in your body.
I get it.
This is strong argument and I won't argue against it.
What I will point out is it's kind of nice that we have states that will try different things cuz maybe in several years we'll we'll say to ourselves, well, that was a brilliant idea, Florida.
We'll all follow your lead.
So, I like the fact that it's like a laboratory, you know, so I don't have an opinion on it.
We'll just watch it, see if it works, you know, and anybody can get the vaccinations if they want them.
So that that should be enough.
In South Korea, their birth rate problem is so bad that it's only at 75.
So every person is only replacing themselves with three quarters of a person, you know, statistically.
Um, it's the lowest Oh, wow.
the lowest birth rate on Earth.
Yowser and their population is on track to shrink by nearly a third by 2072.
Bloomberg is reporting this.
Um, so one of the things that's happening as a result of that is that some big companies in South Korea are offering bonuses to women who have babies.
Employees, I assume, must be employees.
Uh, yeah, employees and their families.
$72,000 per baby.
$72,000 to have a baby and uh plus in-house daycare until 9:30 p.m.
emergency babysitting and temporary cover for parental leave.
So they're basically uh let me ask you this.
Why is it true that birth rates used to be higher?
And the answer is because it used to be cash positive operation.
If you were running a farm, having more kids probably was all good because you had more people to work and protect you and protect your assets and all that stuff.
Um, but when it became because of the way we've organized modern economies, when it became an expense, then immediately there was less of it.
And when it became a a really burdening suspense expense then then it became an emergency.
So so far what we've noticed is that if you get the economic incentive right things move in the right direction.
And they do say it moved a little bit already but um 72,000 per child is sort of on the borderline of being a profit center isn't it?
I mean later the child will cost them enough money that it's not worth it or it's not cash positive.
It might it will still be worth it but it won't be cash positive.
Um I don't know might work but maybe it maybe it'll take $150,000.
Almost anybody would have a baby for $150 72.
You might get a third of the people say I'll do that.
That's better than working.
And I I suppose you could work too, right?
Because they're they're doing a a daycare.
So I guess you don't have to quit your job if you're working, if you're a woman.
So you can get the 72,000.
You could also get leave.
Looks pretty good.
Um I saw a uh post from Peter Diamandis, Diamandis, MD.
He says if you retire at 55, you're 89% more likely to die within 10 years.
And the idea is that, you know, people who have a purpose in life seem to to live longer.
But I would like to put some doubt in that study, which I'm sure was not a double blind because the only way you could do a double blind would be to what?
Uh select some people and tell them they're going to retire even if they weren't planning to.
How would you do a double blind?
I I don't know that you could.
So that's the first red flag is it's not a whatever study did this is just some correlation they found.
But I would like to inject this possibility.
I believe that one of the biggest factors in when people decide to retire, assuming they they can afford it, is how long their parents lived.
Has has anybody had that thought?
If your parents both live to 100, then you probably think, I think I'd better work until I'm late 70s just to be able to even afford to, you know, retire.
And you might think, well, I'm going to, you know, I'll be so bored if I'm retired for, I don't know, 40 years.
I'll just be bored.
So I believe that if your parents died at 70, you say to yourself, uh, I better retire as soon as possible so I get a little a little uh fun retirement.
I might not have long.
So it could be that the self- selection of when people retire is because they look at their own health and then they look at the genes of their parents and how long they lasted.
And if they if it doesn't look good, they retire faster.
And so that would suggest that people retire were the ones, you know, with the the medical disadvantages that would suggest they more likely to die.
Anyway, uh apparently ice, you know, the not the frozen water kind, but the uh oops, got something going on here.
the uh the ICE people who uh guard our borders or uh go after the immigrants who got through the borders.
Apparently, they are now going to use an Israeli made spyware that can hack phones and encrypted apps.
Uh Guardian was reporting that.
So, it looks like it can just slice through just about any kind of any kind of protection.
And it's from Paragon Solutions.
and some say it's the strongest um weapon of its type.
Uh are you comfortable with uh any anybody whether it's even if it's in Israel, are you comfortable that that exists that there's a known piece of spyware that can basically puncture everything?
Terrific.
Uh, as I've been saying for a while, your um your privacy is purely illusionary.
Illusionary.
It's a pure illusion.
The and and I like to say this until it sinks in, until everybody agrees with me, that the only privacy you have, the only protection you have in your privacy is being uninteresting.
Nothing else.
If you're uninteresting, and that would be uninteresting to law enforcement because you didn't do any crimes, uninteresting to your neighbors because nobody saw you, you know, cheating on your wife, you know, uh, nobody saw you, I don't know, doing anything interesting.
So, as long as you remain really uninteresting, you've got all the privacy you'd ever want because nobody gives a what you do or even who you are.
But the moment you're doing anything interesting, say you're a Fed governor, just to pick one example, then people are going to find out everything they need to find out about you.
You know, sometimes critics and enemies, sometimes law enforcement, but you don't have any privacy.
You have only the ability to be uninteresting.
And that's it's been that way for a long time because the the government could always get some kind of warrant to look into your stuff.
Anyway, that ladies and gentlemen is what I wanted to say.
If you just joined late, I remind you that the second edition of Loser Think, my book that teaches you how not to evaluate things.
You know, what what mistakes commonly people make arguing online especially.
It's uh basically the same as the first edition, but I had to republish it independently with Joshua Lysk um because I got cancelled worldwide.
So, it wasn't the book itself that got cancelled, but my publisher canled everything I had and uh people were saying, Scott, can you make that one available again because it's quite popular.
Um, so the best way to use it is if you see somebody using a bad way of thinking, um, I encourage you to take a picture of the page in the book in which I describe why it's a bad way of thinking and you just post it on X.
So, because it's in a book, it will make you feel like it's official.
You'll win every argument.
All right, I'm going to talk uh privately to my beloved subscribers on locals.
The rest of you, thanks for joining.
I will you'll only see me for another 30 seconds before I Oh,
I hope you have your beverage cuz you
know what's coming up, right? Yeah,
there'll be some simultaneous sipping,
but I'm checking the stock market. It's
a little bit up. Little bit up. Not
nearly enough.
But soon as I get my comments going, we
will launch into the best thing that
will ever happen to you.
[Music]
Good morning everybody. Everyone
and welcome to the highlight of human
civilization. It's called Coffee with
Scott Adams and you've never had a
better time. But if you'd like to take a
chance on elevating your experience up
to levels that no one can even
understand with their tiny shiny human
brains, all you need for that?
Well, all you need is a copper mug or a
glass attacker Charles or Stein, a
canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any
kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the
unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit
day of the day, the thing that makes
everything better. It's called the
simultaneous sip and it happens right
now. Go.
Oh yeah, that's just that's called
topping it off right there.
Well, apparently today the uh Robo Taxi
app from Tesla is available for
download. I don't know what that implies
for when you will be able to use your
Tesla as a driverless uh sort of an
Uber, but uh at least you've got the
app. I imagine it will depend on your
state and local.
Um, in case I haven't mentioned it, my
book, Loser Think, which was published a
few years ago, but got cancelled when I
got cancelled, and it's back, but it's a
second edition now. It's basically the
same as the first, but uh, it's the only
way I could make it available by
independently publishing with Joshua
Lysk.
who's amazing and you should uh use them
if you get a chance or work with him I
should say. Don't use them, work with
him if you get a chance. Um, but I
thought I would share with you one tip
from the book Loser Think. Now, as you
might imagine, lose or think is what you
would like to avoid.
So, you don't want to be the person who
makes the the mental mistake when other
people are watching. So, this is how to
avoid those mental mistakes. And I'll
give you one. If you ever find yourself
on online
telling somebody to stay in their lane,
you are a loser thinker. You know why?
That's such bad advice. Stay in your
lane. You This is not your expertise.
Well, how are the experts doing compared
to the people who have no expertise and
are just guessing?
It's pretty close to a tie, I would say.
So, if your argument
is that the person involved is no expert
in that field, you really have to
consider what the experts versus the
non-expert track record is,
right? You don't sound smart. I think
there was a time when that would sound
smart. So, you have to adjust that to
the current day. And you also have to
think, tell me anything important in the
world.
Whoa, cats destroying something in
another room. Tell me anything in the
world that was made that was important,
like a real big breakthrough by somebody
who was an expert at that thing.
It's like, you know, Steve Jobs couldn't
program. Um, yeah, I can go down go down
the list. Basically, nobody was an
expert until they figured it out. So,
stay in your lane is the worst advice.
And if you happen to say that to
somebody, well, might be a little loser
thing going on. All right, that's my
commercial. It's only available on
Amazon, but you can get it in three
different forms. The audio book will
follow. That's not available yet.
Well, apparently according to live
science, there's now an AI powered robot
dog that can play bad against humans,
which makes sense because most of the
other animals, uh, they don't play bad.
So, if you're going to make a robot that
plays bad, um, you should make it so it
can play against a human. Because if you
make it to play against, let's say, a
beaver or a squirrel, well, you're not
really gonna have any good matches
because the beaver and the squirrel
don't actually play bad. So, that's
important. But, uh, I want one. I really
want a robot dog that can play actual
badman. According to the video, it
looked like it was pretty good. I would
totally play bad every single day with a
badman robot. So, give me a price.
Well, American Eagle, the clothing
maker,
um, says that the, uh, the Sydney
Sweeney commercial everybody's talking
about with their great jeans campaign,
uh, did so well that in just six weeks,
they're making all kinds of money and
their stock is up 25%.
So, according to a variety,
um, well, I know it was a powerful uh,
marketing blitz because, uh, I bought
three pair. Um, and they're all women's
jeans and I thought that they would look
better on me, but, you know, maybe it's
just me, but man, that commercial was
good.
Well, NASA administrator Shan Duffy is
telling us that uh the US is going to
send four men up to the moon uh at the
beginning of next year. Now, how many of
you believe um because you watched Joe
Rogan's podcast that it might be
impossible to get through the what is it
the Van Allen radiation belt and that
therefore you believe that no one has
ever been to the moon in the real world
and it's all been faked. How many of you
believe that?
And if you believe that it's not
possible and and also has never been
done obviously, then
I'm being visited by a cat.
Um, how many times will this cat put his
tail in my face? That's three.
I think there's more to come. That's
four. All right. So, what's fun about
this uh moon launch, besides the fact
that moon launches are obviously fun, is
that it might convince people that the
original moonshot either happened or
didn't.
If for some reason they they decide they
can't do it
or the I don't know the astronauts died
on the way through the radiation belt
then you would be quite justified in
saying huh maybe nobody's ever done it.
But the fact that China is trying to get
to the moon and Russia is trying to get
to the moon and we're trying to get to
the moon. I feel like the the theory
that the Van Allen belt has prevented
anybody from getting to the moon could
be retired. Don't you think? If you
believe that, are you ready to retire
it? But you could wait until the, you
know, the beginning of next year and see
if somebody survives doing it. Then you
wouldn't have to wonder. You could you
could watch it if you believe the news.
All right. Now, you know what people
will be saying? People will be saying,
"Oh, so you're telling me it's a total
coincidence
that the first time that we seem to be
able to prove that we went to the moon
is exactly when AI can make a an image
that's fake that looks exactly like it
happened." So, those two things just
coincidentally happened at the same
time. Just when you wanted to fake a
moon landing, oh look, by coincidence,
the exact technology you would need to
fake video of a moon landing is
available. Huh.
So I guess the conspiracy theorists will
have something to play with there.
Well, is there any uh studies that they
could have avoided by just asking me?
Yes. Cambridge University Press is
talking about how there was a news study
uh Cambridge
it uh in the British Journal of
Political Science and it showed that
small business owners are more likely to
be rightwing.
Now I would call that conservative or
rightle leading. Do you think that they
needed to do
did they really need to do a survey to
know that if you spend five minutes
running your own business, the one thing
you're going to want less less of is the
government. It feels to me that anybody
who's had the small business experience,
and I have with two restaurants,
um that you're battling the government
and the law. So, it turns out that as a
restaurant owner, you know, small
business owner, that I thought I was
going to be doing, you know, making fun
decisions about the decorations and, you
know, what's on the menu and stuff, but
you spend half of your time at least
battling with lawyers and lawsuits and
insurance problems and your bank is mad
at you and it's uh and regulations. I
mean, we could even put up a sign that
was big enough for people to see that we
had a new restaurant.
Now, that's a government problem.
Anyway, uh there's a the the most fun
story in the news is that um President
Trump is fed up with Rosie O'Donnell,
who as you know, uh moved to Ireland and
uh she's living there right now. And uh
so Trump has said in a truth social he
said not a great American
uh he says because of the fact that
Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best
interest of our great country. This is
the president of the United States
talking about one person Rosie O'Donnell
who's in Ireland. Uh is not in the best
interest of our great country. I am
giving serious consideration to taking
away her citizenship.
She is a threat to humanity.
She's a threat to humanity
and should remain in the wonderful
country of Ireland if they water.
God bless America.
He is the best ship poster in the
history of the world. Do you do you know
what my favorite part of this is?
Well, I've got a few favorite parts. One
is it will absorb the press's attention
and they're going to use up all of their
time with the public talking about this
ridiculous story. And he he knows it. he
knows they're just going to chew up all
their criticism time talking about this
and that the public's just gonna be sort
of laughing at it. Um
but the best part is this. Sooner or
later,
um some member of the press is going to
say, "Are you really serious about
this?" And he'll probably say something
in a Trump-like fashion of, "Well, we'll
see. You know, I'm haven't made a
decision, but you know, there's a good
argument for it." Something like that.
And then what will the member of the
press of course ask next?
What would be the most obvious
guaranteed question that will come up if
if Trump actually, you know, keeps with
this keeps with this theme?
The question will be um is are you going
to consider taking away anyone else's
citizenship?
Do you see the trap yet?
And and then when they say, "Are you
going to do that to anyone else?" What
would be his answer?
Only Rosie O'Donnell. Boom.
And the prank is complete. The the best
troll, best troll in the history of
trolling.
Uh Jonathan Turley helpfully points out
that the president cannot take away
somebody's citizenship, which makes it
even funnier because I'm sure he knows
he can't do it. And if he tried, I'm
sure he knows the courts would, you
know, throw it out. So the the the fact
that this is even a story is just the
most wonderful troll.
um just good presidenting. The the
president knows that entertaining us is
part of the job. No, I don't think any
other president has ever understood that
the way he does that. That if you keep
us entertained, we're more likely,
you know, to to be on your team. It just
works that way. We like to be
entertained.
Well, speaking of entertainment, over in
Ireland, Conor McGregor is trying to get
some things changed in their system so
that he could be possibly nominated to
run for president of Ireland. Now,
apparently, president of Ireland is, you
know, kind of a ceremonial position.
It's not so much a powerful position,
but I believe that Connor wants to
champion the idea of uh closing down
excess immigration into Ireland because
it's changing the character of Ireland.
So, he might be able to do that from the
president's office. Now, it's I asked
Grock and he said it was uh unlikely
that he would be able to beat through
the nomination process cuz it requires
people who are already elected, I guess,
some number of them to agree. So, it's
not up to the public. It's not like our
system where if enough voters want him
to run in the primary that he's the
candidate. They they have some other
uh system. So, he's got a uh looks like
he's got a petition going to see if he
can get the system changed so that he
could be on the ballot.
But what I would like to add to this
conversation is that although he has
many many drawbacks
as in people have strong opinions about
him, he's been uh accused of sex crimes
and uh you he's got a he's got you know
sort of some baggage if you know what I
mean. But do you think it's impossible
for someone who is accused of sex crimes
to become the president of a nation?
Well, I think it might be. But here's
the part that I think is a the hidden
the uh the hidden magic. Conor McGre
McGregor is a student of success,
meaning he's known to absorb a great
deal of uh um let's say practical advice
about how to be successful at anything
and that helped him win, you know, his
titles, etc. He is probably studying
Trump has probably read his share of
materials about how to be persuasive.
Um his
his coach
um has absorbed some of my materials and
I just noticed this morning that Connor
follows me on X. So
he and I guess he's also used uh he's
referred to the book the secret which is
sort of an affirmations kind of
approach. So I believe he's he's sort of
an affirmations guy which would just be
you know one small corner of the the
process for success. He's a systems over
a goal guy. He's a talent stack guy. And
even though the the deck is stacked way
against him, you know, even getting
nominated, much less get elected, the
the level of specific talent that he
brings to that domain, should not be
overlooked.
He he he's got some superpowers in his
toolbox. Um he's not Trump. You know,
there's only one Trump, but I guarantee
without knowing it, I don't have any
special knowledge, but I guarantee that
he's studying Trump to figure out what
works. And that unlike maybe other
observers, he will he might figure out
what works. So, don't uh don't count him
out.
Anyway, uh, President Trump
is reportedly, according to Axios,
expected to ask the Supreme Court to
reverse the Eugene Carol verdict.
Now, that verdict was a civil, not a
criminal, trial, if I'm correct. Uh, I'm
terrible at all the the legal topics,
but uh, I don't know what um, in what I
read, I didn't see the argument. So, I
didn't see what argument they would
propose using to have that reversed,
unless the argument is that it was so
obviously contrived as a political move
that even if they crossed all the tees
and dotted all the eyes to make it
legal, it might be just so obviously a
plot to keep him out of the presidency
as opposed to a, you know, more
legitimate
uh Department of Justice action.
that um
it might be reversible.
You know, I didn't know you could even
take the civil cases to the Supreme
Court. And I also don't know what I'm
talking about. But if they're going to
argue that it wasn't like a legitimate
thing to even look into,
that might be a strong argument. So, we
might get surprised by that one.
All right, I've got a cat as a table
here.
All right, Gary the cat. You're going to
have to
hold my notes. So, that's Gary. He's
sleeping in front of me between me and
my my camera. So, he'll be holding my
notes on his belly while we continue.
Good job, Gary.
All right, don't move. Stay right there.
So apparently according to futurism,
Frank Landmore is writing that uh
um Medicare
might start paying some AI companies. I
think they're going to do a test
to see if they can find AI companies
uh that would uh
reject some claims for service, some
claims for medical care. So I think the
idea would be
um
that the AI would do all the that you
know the tough work of deciding what
things to accept or reject. But here's
the problem. Um the New York Times
reports that the AI companies selected
for the experiment will get paid a share
of the money they save by blocking
people from their healthcare.
So in other words, the AI will be
optimized and the AI company will be
incentivized
to help people the least that they can
with whatever, you know, good AI
argument they can make for not helping
people. Now, of course, the objective
is to, you know, reject the fraud and
the things that they're not supposed to
be paying for. But if the AI company
gets paid for how much they can stop,
what do you think's going to happen?
Now, it's an experiment. So, maybe
they'll experiment and they'll find out
what they can do. Just ask me. You could
stop this and just ask me, what do you
think will happen when you incentivize
the AI to block people's health care by
using clever arguments? That would sound
valid. Well, it's probably not good
because you you probably want to heir on
the side of uh allowing more than you
should,
you know, because there's nothing
perfect. You don't really want to assist
in the errors on the side of denying
more than it should. And I think the AI
would obviously be that. But here's the
fun part.
At the same time, there's that story.
CBS News is reporting that um there's
some health care companies that
consumers can use to fight against the
denial of service. So if somebody uses
an AI company to deny you service, you
could call your own AI company. One of
them is called Counterforce Health that
uses AI to make phone calls and to
pester the uh um whoever denied you the
healthcare. So you can fight for your
healthcare using AI that might be
fighting against another AI. So that's
where everything's going.
Well, in puzzling news, Paramount is
going to buy Barry Weiss's Free Press.
So, Barry Weiss founded the Free Press.
Uh, and apparently it's doing gang
busters because it's only been a few
years and it's the I would think the
hardest market that anybody could ever
make value, which is the most crowded uh
difficult market, which is news. But the
free press has been offered up to $200
million
and they would uh offer her a senior
editorial ro role as CBS News. So I
don't know if it means it would be
rolled into CBS News or she would just
have a dual role, but does that make
sense to you?
Um,
does it make sense that it would be
worth $200 million? Doesn't that Uh, so
my first assumption is there's probably
something wrong with the reporting.
Um, because it might be like 200 million
if you meet these goals over X number of
years or something like that. You know,
I I I have trouble believing that
whoever owns all the equity would get,
you know, collectively $200 million
check up front. That feels high. I don't
know. But Paramount knows what it's
doing,
so I'm sure they've looked into it. Uh
it could also be Isn't Paramount run by
Larry Ellison's
son?
Um, so he would be sort of pro- uh,
America first, Trump. I don't want to
put words in his mouth, but it would
sort of make CBS under the control of
somebody who's a lot more independent
and would have a lot more uh, of course,
everybody's controversial these days.
Um, I think there's some controversy
about Barry Weiss. I don't even know
what it is or whether it's valid, but uh
everybody's controversial after a
certain point of notoriety.
All right. So, Tim Kaine, you know, Tim
Kaine who didn't become vice president.
Apparently, he he had a little debate
with Ted Cruz about where our rights
come from. And the question was uh from
God or from the government. And Tim
Kaine was scoffing at the notion that
rights come from God and didn't think
that the Constitution would suggest that
that would be the case. Ted Cruz who
know he knows his constitution
uh argued back on X anyway that he
better read the read the work of the
founding fathers because he argued that
uh uh God is the source of our rights.
And Tim Ga argued that the government
determines your rights.
Now, I'm going to take a third approach.
Um,
whether or not it's Let's see. You don't
need God to make the same point that Ted
Cruz would be happy with. So, let me
explain.
whether God created everything or we're
just here for some other reason,
whatever that reason is. So whether it's
evolution and chance or any other model,
once you're here,
you don't need to refer to God to say
that we have all the rights that have
not been yet restricted by our
government.
So, it's just cleaner and easier to say
that we all have every right to do
everything except what the government
restricts. And that gets you to exactly
the same place as if you say God created
these rights and we're interpreting what
God had in mind. because that brings
with it a small but real risk which is
if something happens in our form of
government or who's in charge changes it
might be a different god that they're
looking at for your rights you know what
I mean so if we you know or let's say
someone else became a Muslim dominated
country they might also agree that your
rights are assigned by God but their
version of what God would design would
be very different. So there is some risk
of interpreting what God meant for your
rights. So I would say you can you can
maintain your God belief and even that
God gave you rights, but when you're
debating it in the public forum, it's
just cleaner and easier to say no, you
have a right to do everything.
Everything except what the government
specifically takes from you. Governments
don't give rights.
As soon as you imagine that somebody's
giving you rights, be it God or be it
the government, then you don't really
understand rights in the most productive
way. The most productive way is you have
every right until somebody who can put
you in jail tells you you don't. And
well, then I could argue you still have
the right. You just better not do it.
All right. Uh, apparently a judge has
invalidated Trump's
work against Harvard. You know, he
wanted to uh make them give him large
amounts of money and all that. And
apparently Harvard did a good job of
suing uh to stop to stop that. And the
US District Judge Allison Burroughs is
trying to restore the funding,
government funding to Harvard. Now, I
have to say that um I'm not surprised. I
don't know how it'll end. You know,
maybe maybe a higher court will still
back Trump, but it doesn't surprise me
that Harvard of all places could put up
a good legal battle because the whole
point of Harvard is it's you know the
best of the best and you even with DEI
there still it's like smartest people
around. So, but they're also have, you
know, the Harvard Law School and they're
the most connected people in the world.
So, you would expect that the most
connected, capable, high level uh
lawyers in the world
would know how to get to a judge who
could give them what they want,
which is half of the game, maybe more
than half.
So, don't be surprised when you see
Harvard able to put up a good fight in
the legal sense.
Well, here's some Epstein news. Uh,
surprise. There's no new news, but
there's lots of people making actions
and activities. We'll see if any of it
turns into anything new. The latest is
there's a small group of uh well I don't
know how small uh maybe a dozen or more
of Jeffrey Epstein accusers
who seem to be getting organized at the
moment and they made an announcement or
one of them did that maybe the victims
should put together a list of um the
people who were the regulars on the
island. Now, I heard one of them say
that she had been victimized as many as
three times a day as a minor.
Uh, and that, you know, well, just heard
horrible things and it was every day and
it was continuous and lots of people
were involved. Now, um, one of the
things preventing any of them from
naming names might be that they'd all
signed
signed, let's say, settlements in court
because there was some large amount of
money for settlements. And uh, they're
just not allowed to talk about it
without risking losing whatever
substantial money they got. And so
that's part of it. But uh there's also
the problem that if the only thing you
knew is that somebody was a regular or
that you knew that they had visited the
island. You have that problem of people
who literally
broke no laws and didn't do any of the
naughty stuff whose lives would be
pretty well ruined by the release. So
what do they do?
Well, um and then how do they prevent,
you know, pay back and getting sued and
all that? because they would all get
sued if they mention a name of some
billionaire and there's no hard proof
that they did anything wrong. I mean,
the lawyers are going to just destroy
these poor victims. So, uh I think was
it Marjorie Taylor Green and maybe
somebody else uh were noodling with the
idea that they would be the ones who
would read them out loud because if you
do it in the House uh floor, apparently
there's some kind of law that gives you
legal immunity so that you can say any
damn thing, you know, in that specific
context so nobody can sue you. So, they
need a way to get the names out um
that won't get them sued. And so, they
might pull together names, give them to
Marjorie Taylor Green, and have her read
them. Now, Marjorie Taylor Green then
would have the problem of, you know,
being the agent of possibly ruining the
lives of people who got pulled into
something that they didn't quite know
what it was about, but maybe didn't do
anything wrong.
So, how do you handle that? I don't
know. But I would like to suggest the
following. It shouldn't be one list. If
they pull together something, it should
be something like here's the people that
we have a living human who says, "I
watched it or I participated it or I was
the specific victim or I walked into the
room and saw it or my best friend
described it to me and I knew it was
true." So that should be one one list
but the other list should be people who
had uh you maybe visited or associated
but there's no accusation. So it might
be the accused list
and then literally called the not
accused list because that would at least
give the people on the not accused list
the the easy out. Say just look at the
news. I'm on the not accused list. It
literally is the not accused list. So
leave me alone. So that would probably
be and even though that's not enough,
the best you could do. Yeah. You need to
give the people who don't have a real
hard accusation with a witness or
something, you need to give them some
kind of
uh constitutional protection in this
situation. And I think just clarifying
that there's two sets of people. The
ones you know did some bad bad stuff and
the ones who just sort of were around
that you got to make that distinction. I
hope they do.
Anyway, who knows if that will even go
anywhere. Nothing else has. Uh, Mayor
Bowser of DC is not only in favor of
Trump's helping with crime by uh putting
in some um National Guard, she's also
saying that they need a lot more regular
police and they've got openings and
they're hiring as fast as they can and
that's all good. So, Muriel Browser, um,
good job in, you know, not being
ridiculous. Um, so so many so many
Democrats
act in ways that are just ridiculous
except the farthest left people that uh
we might be seeing a little bit of a
movement back to the middle. You've
you've already seen that, right? The
Bill Mars and and such saying uh we're
going to need to get back to something
more reasonable. David Axelrod was on
CNN saying the same. He said the right
answer to this whole crime stuff is
quote we'll take all the help we can get
as long as it's appropriate and it's
stuff that will really help. Send us the
resources we need. We want to work with
you. Exactly. So this is Axel Rod with
good advice for his team which is you
need to stop acting like you're pro
crime. You know that's my version of it.
But his version is, "Why don't you act a
little bit more like you're legitimately
anti-grime?"
Uh, if I could paraphrase it.
Um, I would give you the additional
advice. Here's my advice. Don't join any
group that needs that kind of advice.
Don't ever join a group that needs to be
advised to not take the side of the
criminals.
That's the best advice you'll ever get.
Um, well, there's a whole bunch of
employment and job numbers coming out
and they don't look so hot. Um, they're
not terrible, but they're moving in the
wrong direction. Don't know if that's
because all our numbers are bad and
nothing's reliable or because, I don't
know, weather sometimes. Uh, maybe
because of the threat of tariffs. So, it
might be temporary. I don't know.
But uh let's see for the first time the
uh unemployed workers outnumber the
number of jobs since 2021.
But you know 2021 wasn't that long ago.
So the Hill was reporting that. Um and
then what the open jobs fell fell down a
little bit but I don't know that our
numbers are that accurate. We can tell
that things move a little bit. Um and
yeah, so anyway, then jobless claims
were up to 237,000.
They thought it would only be 230,000.
So that's a little bit worse. So all the
job stuff is a little softer. And some
of the uh oil companies have announced
that they're cutting. Kico Phillips
might cut 20 to 25%. But that's coming
off a few high years because uh oil was
uh expensive and therefore they had big
profits during the original Ukraine
situation, but things have settled down
there.
They had a couple other oil companies
looking to make pretty big uh employment
cuts. But if you put it all together,
because the economy is a weird thing and
not as predictable as as common sense
tells you it should be. Um that might be
the reason that the interest rates get
cut because generally if employment is
looking bad and uh inflation is somewhat
under control, that's when you get the
rate cuts. And when you get the rate
cuts, that's really good for the economy
and really good for the stock market. So
bad jobs report equals weirdly maybe
things are going to, you know, speed up
in the next few months. Um, and the
Washington Examiner says that the Trump
economy has raised optimism to a
four-year high. So it's still not more
than 50% but uh what 44% now which is
much higher than it used to be. Think
things are on the right track. So as I
often remind you the economy is based on
expectations and resources. We usually
can find ways to get the resources in in
today's world. So the expectations are
what are are kind of dominant. And when
people think things are going in the
right direction, then they invest and
they hire people and then things do go
in the right direction. So that's
important.
Um, apparently, uh, Bill Cassidy, who's
a Republican, and also the Fiser CEO
have both, uh, said that Trump should be
considered for the Nobel Prize for peace
based on his warp speed co vaccination
work.
So, do you think that the warp speed
project which brought vaccinations to
us? Well, don't call them vaccinations.
I got it. Shots to us uh faster. Is that
a peace operation?
Was there a Was there a war I didn't
know about?
Right. What's funny about this is that
um Trump has planted in people's heads
the idea that there's some reason he
should get a Nobel Peace Prize. So, he's
made it a thing that we think about. If
you had never thought about it, the odds
of him getting one would be lower, I
think. But the fact that everyone sort
of just thinks about it now because he's
just inserted it into our minds. Uh, and
this is a good example because I don't
think most of you would think that no
matter what you thought of the shot
that that had anything to do with peace.
It had nothing to do with peace. But
everybody uh sort of understands that if
you want Trump on your side, it would be
really helpful to publicly say he should
get a Nobel Peace Prize. I I feel like
everyone has tried that now. like
everyone who wants him to be on their
side thinks, you know what would be the
best way to get him on our side. I've
got an idea about he gets the Nobel
Peace Prize for whatever. Doesn't matter
what.
Anyway, I do respect President Trump for
demanding that we we find out for sure
whether his project warp speed saved
lives or killed people.
And he, you know what he wants? I mean,
he wants it to be that it was the
greatest thing that he saved lives, but
he's also clearly open to the argument
of a lot of people in his base that the
data doesn't support that. So, he's
asking for better data. And uh I like
that because so easily he could have
stuck to his guns and just said, "No,
it's the best thing ever. Give me the
Nobel Prize." But he's not. He's saying
I don't know if it was good or bad and
because the data is uh sketchy and he's
demanding that they have better data. So
I don't know whichever way that goes
I'm happy that he's asking for it.
There are some reports that are being
denied, I think, postmillennials writing
about this, that uh uh Trump might uh at
least be considering giving Curtis uh
Zilwa and Eric Adams, who are both
running for mayor of New York, some kind
of job offer to get them out of the race
so that Cuomo would have a better chance
of beating beating Mandami Kami. Um, I
think there's some question about
whether that's real. You know, maybe
it's just something some advisors talked
about, but not too serious. But my
question was, why would that be legal?
Would it be legal to effectively bribe
somebody to get out of a race? Is there
there's no law against that?
if doing so um kind of would guarantee
who won the race. It wouldn't be illegal
to bribe somebody to quit.
I don't know how does that work. It
might not be illegal. I It just see
feels like one of those things that
feels like it should be illegal. I don't
know. But if it's not illegal and it
works, I suppose it's on the table.
The uh Epoch Times is uh reporting that
one of the engineers in uh Elon Musk's
AI company, X AI, an engineer is being
sued for allegedly stealing trade
secrets. And I wonder how common that
is.
You know, part of me thinks that every
AI company has somebody who's already
stole their code, stolen the code. What
do you think? And then I asked myself,
how many employees have access to the
the really important parts of the code
for an AI company that's all code?
How many people?
Wouldn't you imagine that there would
only be, I don't know, three to five
people who would have that access and
they would all have to agree to make any
kind of a change. I don't know what kind
of controls they put on that, but um it
kind of makes me wonder if every AI
company's code will be stolen and maybe
even released to the public under the
hypothesis
that the world is a better place if all
the code is public, which would be bad
for the AI companies, but maybe somebody
would think it's good for the public in
some way. I don't know that it would be,
but you can imagine somebody arguing
that. It's like, no, you can't have some
companies owning AI. It must be set free
for everybody.
So, I'm going to say
uh even though the people who steal that
stuff might get caught, I'll bet it will
still happen because people always think
they can get away with it. So, I don't
know how you solve that.
Well, I saw a report that the company
Poly Market, that's an online gambling
firm, so you can gamble on, you know,
political things happening, stuff like
that. It uh it's been cleared for uh US
adoption after some board CFTC
ruling. Zero Hedge is writing about
this. But what's interesting about it is
that one of the investors of Poly Market
is uh Don Trump Jr.
and he's uh also an an adviser. So right
after fairly soon after Don Jr. became
an investor
um they got approved to operate in the
United States.
Now do you think there will be any push
back as in uh you know he got some
special treatment? Well, I don't know
that he got any special treatment, but
don't you think that the reason that he
was, you know, maybe who they courted to
be an investor because they knew that if
he were an investor, uh, maybe some
doors would open that wouldn't
ordinarily open. It would be a smart
thing to do. So every company tries to
put on their board or have investors who
have more than just the ability to be on
a board or the ability to invest. They
look for people who are twofers that
they have some kind of network of
contacts or they have some superpower or
they operate some other company that's
vital to what you're doing. So, it's the
most ordinary thing in the world to have
investors andor board members who can
give you that extra, you know, that
extra advantage. Um, it's all legal,
but
um it it made me it made me wonder this.
If you're Don Jr.,
Isn't every single serious company in
the world some kind of a conflict of
interest
like everything? If Don Jr. had invested
in Nvidia or been on the board of
Nvidia, wouldn't that look like some
kind of conflict of interest? It would
look like it. And almost anything you
touched, whether it was a defense
business or an AI or one of the
platforms, just about anything he
touched, somebody would say, uh, you
know, now that you're involved, the
government's going to give them some big
contracts and stuff. And I don't think
it should be illegal for a non-elected
family, you know, just a family member
to be blocked from doing ordinary things
as long as it's, you know, somewhat
transparent. Like everybody knows who
Don Jr. is, right? So, and if it's a
public fact that he invested in it and
it's a public fact that um it got
allowed to do business in the US, that's
probably that's all you can do.
It's probably all you can do is just
make sure everybody knows. I don't think
you should make that illegal.
>> If if he were elected to office, if you
were the one in office, then yeah,
maybe. But unelected people, even close
family members, I don't know. Seems too
far if you block them from doing things
that are ordinary business.
Well, you know the story of the
Venezuelan drug boat that got blown up
by the US military and that happened the
other day and it made me wonder how much
of the ocean can we survey? Do you ever
wonder that? Did they was it pure luck
or some kind of chip that allowed them
to catch this one particular boat or do
they have some kind of advanced
technology that they can see everything
and they know where all the smuggling
boats are and maybe you know maybe they
act on the ones that are actable. So I
asked Grock to estimate what percentage
of the ocean around Venezuela they could
actually monitor somewhat continuously
and it said maybe 70 to 90% of the ocean
within 200 to 300 nautical miles of
Venezuela. Now that's Grock. So, I don't
know. I don't know if it really could
make a reasonable uh estimate, but it
did describe to me all the ways in which
they watch the water. So, they've got a
number of aircraft that are flying all
the time, but you know, there's not an
aircraft over every inch of the water
all the time. They got satellites, but
again, those are sporadic. um they've
got uh drones and then they've got the
ships themselves and you know they would
have some kind of perimeter that they're
watching all the time. So, but
apparently what makes this feasible
is that there there's some places that
are far more likely to have this
traffic. So, they're going to put more
resources where they know they got a
higher chance of catching somebody. So,
I don't know. You know, Rubio said,
Marco Rubio said, Secretary of State, he
said, "The US has a long and for many,
many years established intelligence that
allows us to interdict and stop drug
boats." So, in other words, uh they get
tips. They or they've got some kind of
intelligence where they can tell where
the boat's going to be and stop drug
boats. And we did that and it doesn't
work. What will stop them is when you
blow them up, when you get rid of them.
Well, I don't know if it will stop them.
We'll find out. But it's a heck of a
theory. I mean, you know, I'm pretty in
favor of it, as you know.
And uh saw a video this morning. Judge
Janine was standing in front of a
gigantic warehouse full of barrels. And
the barrels, 1300 of them were seized by
law enforcement. Uh, and they were full
of precursors
that uh
were were added to the cartels. 1,300
fulls size barrels.
Now, I'm no math user, but correct me if
I'm wrong. The the physical amount of
meth is very small, right? So, these are
just precursors. It's not the meth
itself. But 1300 B barrels kind of
suggest
I would I would think that would be all
the meth that the entire country would
use for months. I mean what I I'm kind
of wondering if that will actually make
a difference like people will notice it
in their in their supply and demand but
that's a big deal. So, the Trump
administration is getting pretty
hardcore on this stopping the big
dealers.
Um, and at the same time, you know,
maybe looking at dropping the scheduling
for marijuana. So, I do kind of like the
idea of going easier on the users and
harder on the dealers of the hard stuff.
Um, according to Newsweek, there's a
surge in employees who are testing
positive for fentinel. So, even though
the number of OD deaths is going down
for fentinel, um, there are more people
apparently using it. One of the reasons
the deaths are going down is because
they got Narcan, so they can save you
when you're on death store. Um, but a
lot of employees are taking stuff
apparently that have some fentinyl in
it. I don't know if they know it. They
might not know it, but that's a huge
problem.
All right, here's an interesting story.
According to Fox News, Pylar Aras is
reporting. So, the FBI did something
called Operation Box Cutter and it
indicted 22 Chinese nationals and
companies for fentinel precursors.
22 Chinese nationals and companies. So,
companies. So Cash Patel says they
they've uh seized enough fentinel to
kill 70 million people and they they
targeted the fentinel at a source which
is what we've always wanted them to do
right and uh that led to identifying
some companies in China that were making
the uh the the chemicals that were
precursors. And but here's the thing
that just frosts me.
um that the companies in China that were
making the precursors were openly
advertising it.
Openly advertising it that they were
making precursors for fentinyl for the
cartels.
Um
so according to this story uh the
chemical companies were openly marketing
and selling the precursors
used for fentinyl, cocaine and heroin.
And
so apparently they've indicted Chinese
companies.
So the FBI knows the name of the
companies and he's indicted them. What
happens when you indict a Chinese
company? Nothing, right? It's not like
the Chinese company is going to say,
"Oh, okay. We, you know, we uh we throw
ourselves at the mercy of the American
justice system." they just ignore it,
right? Because it has no has no impact
on them in China. So, I would imagine
that nothing will come of this unless
there's something about this I don't
understand. But indicting them shouldn't
make any difference at all. They'll just
keep their signs out and keep
advertising what they're doing. And
obviously, the government of China knows
what they're doing and is allowing it.
Obviously.
So, here's what I think. I think that
now we have enough information since we
know the exact companies and we know
they were operating openly that it's
time to embarrass President Xi until he
can't stay in office until his own
people remove him.
So I think he should be embarrassed at
being the the world's biggest drug
dealer.
Um, now that might not be the answer,
but the thing is at some point you can
embarrass she out of office.
And I don't know that Trump should do it
necessarily because he's got to talk to
him, but uh, the world could do it. And
President Xi, I think you could
accurately say, is the world's biggest
drug dealer. Now, that doesn't mean that
we're going to treat them like a cartel
for all practical reasons, but we can
refer to him that way from now on. So,
to me, President Xi is the biggest drug
dealer in the world. It's the most
disrespected thing you could ever
imagine. And it's humiliating to live in
a country of China and have your leader
be the biggest drug dealer in the world.
So, it's sort of the Venezuela problem,
isn't it?
So, here we assume that she could shut
down those companies anytime you want.
Florida is going to um maybe assuming
that they vote for it. It looks like
they will. And uh school vaccine
mandates. I don't know if that's a good
idea. Um I understand the argument. You
know, you should have freedom and choice
about what gets put in your body. I get
it. This is strong argument and I won't
argue against it. What I will point out
is it's kind of nice that we have states
that will try different things cuz maybe
in several years we'll we'll say to
ourselves, well, that was a brilliant
idea, Florida. We'll all follow your
lead. So, I like the fact that it's like
a laboratory, you know, so I don't have
an opinion on it. We'll just watch it,
see if it works,
you know, and anybody can get the
vaccinations if they want them. So that
that should be enough.
In South Korea, their birth rate problem
is so bad that it's only at 75. So every
person is only replacing themselves with
three quarters of a person, you know,
statistically. Um, it's the lowest Oh,
wow. the lowest birth rate on Earth.
Yowser and their population is on track
to shrink by nearly a third by 2072.
Bloomberg is reporting this. Um, so one
of the things that's happening as a
result of that is that some big
companies in South Korea are offering
bonuses to women who have babies.
Employees, I assume, must be employees.
Uh, yeah, employees and their families.
$72,000 per baby.
$72,000
to have a baby and
uh plus in-house daycare until 9:30 p.m.
emergency babysitting and temporary
cover for parental leave.
So they're basically uh let me ask you
this. Why is it true that birth rates
used to be higher? And the answer is
because it used to be cash positive
operation. If you were running a farm,
having more kids probably was all good
because you had more people to work and
protect you and protect your assets and
all that stuff. Um, but when it became
because of the way we've organized
modern economies, when it became an
expense, then immediately there was less
of it. And when it became a a really
burdening suspense expense then then it
became an emergency.
So so far what we've noticed is that if
you get the economic incentive right
things move in the right direction. And
they do say it moved a little bit
already but um 72,000 per child
is sort of on the borderline of being a
profit center isn't it? I mean later the
child will cost them enough money that
it's not worth it or it's not cash
positive. It might it will still be
worth it but it won't be cash positive.
Um
I don't know might work but maybe it
maybe it'll take $150,000.
Almost anybody would have a baby for
$150
72. You might get a third of the people
say I'll do that. That's better than
working.
And I I suppose you could work too,
right? Because they're they're doing a a
daycare.
So I guess you don't have to quit your
job if you're working, if you're a
woman. So you can get the 72,000. You
could also get leave.
Looks pretty good.
Um
I saw a uh
post from Peter Diamandis,
Diamandis, MD. He says if you retire at
55, you're 89% more likely to die within
10 years. And the idea is that, you
know, people who have a purpose in life
seem to to live longer. But I would like
to put some doubt in that study, which
I'm sure was not a double blind because
the only way you could do a double blind
would be to what? Uh select some people
and tell them they're going to retire
even if they weren't planning to. How
would you do a double blind?
I I don't know that you could. So that's
the first red flag is it's not a
whatever study did this is just some
correlation they found.
But I would like to inject this
possibility.
I believe that one of the biggest
factors in when people decide to retire,
assuming they they can afford it, is how
long their parents lived.
Has has anybody had that thought? If
your parents both live to 100, then you
probably think, I think I'd better work
until I'm late 70s just to be able to
even afford to, you know, retire. And
you might think, well, I'm going to, you
know, I'll be so bored if I'm retired
for, I don't know, 40 years. I'll just
be bored. So I believe that if your
parents died at 70,
you say to yourself, uh, I better retire
as soon as possible so I get a little a
little uh fun retirement. I might not
have long. So it could be that the self-
selection of when people retire is
because they look at their own health
and then they look at the genes of their
parents and how long they lasted. And if
they if it doesn't look good, they
retire faster.
And so that would suggest that people
retire were the ones, you know, with the
the medical disadvantages that would
suggest they more likely to die.
Anyway, uh apparently ice, you know, the
not the frozen water kind, but the uh
oops, got something going on here.
the uh the ICE people who uh guard our
borders or uh go after the immigrants
who got through the borders. Apparently,
they are now going to use an Israeli
made spyware that can hack phones and
encrypted apps. Uh Guardian was
reporting that. So, it looks like it can
just slice through just about any kind
of any kind of protection.
And it's from Paragon Solutions. and
some say it's the strongest
um weapon of its type. Uh are you
comfortable with
uh any anybody whether it's even if it's
in Israel, are you comfortable that that
exists
that there's a known piece of spyware
that can basically puncture everything?
Terrific. Uh, as I've been saying for a
while, your um your privacy is purely
illusionary. Illusionary. It's a pure
illusion.
The and and I like to say this until it
sinks in, until everybody agrees with
me, that the only privacy you have, the
only protection you have in your privacy
is being uninteresting.
Nothing else. If you're uninteresting,
and that would be uninteresting to law
enforcement because you didn't do any
crimes, uninteresting to your neighbors
because nobody saw you, you know,
cheating on your wife, you know, uh,
nobody saw you, I don't know, doing
anything interesting. So, as long as you
remain really uninteresting,
you've got all the privacy you'd ever
want because nobody gives a what
you do or even who you are. But the
moment you're doing anything
interesting, say you're a Fed governor,
just to pick one example, then people
are going to find out everything they
need to find out about you. You know,
sometimes critics and enemies, sometimes
law enforcement, but you don't have any
privacy. You have only the ability to be
uninteresting. And that's it's been that
way for a long time because the the
government could always get some kind of
warrant to look into your stuff.
Anyway, that ladies and gentlemen is
what I wanted to say. If you just joined
late, I remind you that the second
edition of Loser Think, my book that
teaches you how not to evaluate things.
You know, what what mistakes commonly
people make arguing online especially.
It's uh basically the same as the first
edition, but I had to republish it
independently with Joshua Lysk um
because I got cancelled worldwide. So,
it wasn't the book itself that got
cancelled, but my publisher canled
everything I had and uh people were
saying, Scott, can you make that one
available again because it's quite
popular. Um, so the best way to use it
is if you see somebody using a bad way
of thinking, um, I encourage you to take
a picture of the page in the book in
which I describe why it's a bad way of
thinking and you just post it on X. So,
because it's in a book, it will make you
feel like it's official.
You'll win every argument. All right,
I'm going to talk uh privately to my
beloved subscribers on locals. The rest
of you, thanks for joining. I will
you'll only see me for another 30
seconds before I Oh,