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Episodes Episode #2948

Episode 2948 CWSA 09/04/25

Episode #2948 Sep 4, 2025 1:08:44 23,126 views

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.

Opening General Commentary

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…

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SimultaneousSip General Commentary

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…

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NewsReaction AI & Technology

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…

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MainContent Cognitive Reframing

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…

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NewsReaction AI & Technology

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…

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NewsReaction Media & Fake News

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…

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Tangent General Commentary

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

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MainContent Media & Fake News

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…

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NewsReaction Economics & Finance

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…

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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

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…

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MainContent Career & Life Strategy

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…

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NewsReaction Politics as Persuasion

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…

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NewsReaction AI & Technology

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…

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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

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…

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NewsReaction Politics as Persuasion

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…

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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

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…

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NewsReaction Politics as Persuasion

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…

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NewsReaction Economics & Finance

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…

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MainContent Decision Making

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…

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NewsReaction AI & Technology

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…

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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

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…

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NewsReaction Health & Biohacking

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…

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MainContent General Commentary

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…

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Closing General Commentary

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?…

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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.

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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

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Well, all you need is a copper mug or a

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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,