Episode 2949 CWSA 09/05/25

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Well, stocks are up and Tesla is up 4.76%.

We'll talk about Tesla a little bit.

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Well, here's a little Tesla news.

Apparently, the Tesla robo taxi app that allows you to use your private car as a sort of a self-driving Uber is the number one download on Apple.

Now, I don't think there's any place that it's approved for that yet, but they must be really close.

So, the totally self-driving uh car is right around the corner.

And it turns out that the Trump administration, in related news, is uh getting ready to ease a bunch of self-driving car rules.

Boy, do we need that.

Shan Duffy, transportation secretary.

Now, is it my imagination or is Shan Duffy?

Is he also the NASA guy now?

Am I crazy?

It's just funny how some of the Trump people have like more than one job.

That's just showing off, isn't it?

Like, oh, Biden needed a secretary of this and a secretary of that.

Well, ah, I'll just have one person do all three of those jobs.

And somehow everything seems to be working out.

So amazing.

Anyway, um and um yeah, Sean Duffy says it's critical to keep us moving ahead.

Well, absolutely.

So, I'm loving how pro business the Trump administration is and how dedicated they are to getting rid of useless and bothersome impediments to business.

They are really well the only thing I know for sure is that the publicity around it is really good.

So it seems like almost every day you hear of somebody in the administration got rid of some regulation.

So that's pretty good.

Well, speaking of Tesla, apparently this is wild.

The Tesla board has proposed a new compensation package for Elon Musk.

Um, it's got some targets that they want to hit like uh a million robo t taxis for commercial use.

Um, shipping out a million energy storage units and producing and delivering 20 million vehicles over I don't know what period of time and aim for a a market um market cap for the company.

So, this would just be the value of Tesla.

They want him to hit a market cap of $ 8.5 trillion.

That'd be pretty good.

And they wanted to commit to up to 10 years in the CEO role.

I I'm guessing he'd be okay with that.

I don't know.

And uh he gets 12% of the company stock.

I guess somebody estimated that he could make a trillion dollars.

A trillion dollars.

You know, if there's one thing I could teach you about money and uh you could take this to the bank.

You know, a lot of times people will give you financial advice and you'll say, "Oh, I don't know." You know, maybe you're being paid to say that or something.

But here is some honest and useful financial advice and I don't think anybody will ever contradict it.

It goes like this.

Making the first trillion, that's the hard part.

Yeah.

Hey, you're welcome.

All right.

Um, I love this, too.

President Trump says he's going to make some big announcement at 400 p.m.

Eastern time today.

Now, does anybody else have the have the same impression I do that uh he's turned the government into a really good reality show?

And when he does this the big announcement, you might not think it's a big announcement when it happens.

Like it might not be a, you know, worldchanging announcement.

It might be just a thing that he could have put out in a in a truth social, you know, post if he wanted to.

But don't you love the fact that he teases you that there's something big coming?

Because you don't interpret that as something big and bad, right?

So you don't assume he's going to start a war or something, but he says it's a big announcement.

So it feels like it would be something positive.

And then he makes us wait.

Best showman ever.

So I guess last night uh the White House and Trump and Melania hosted a dinner for a whole bunch of tech leaders.

So Trump was sitting next to uh uh Zuckerberg and if you saw some of the clips um Trump really looked like he was having fun.

That that is the most uh sort of laughing and smiling I've seen on Trump maybe ever.

He he seemed like he just like really liked that table full of people who he called you know the geniuses and they are all the geniuses now.

He was I guess he had uh Bill Gates was on the other side of Melania and there's some clips of him talking and so there's this big drama because Trump was too nice to Bill Gates and so many people think Bill Gates is the devil and um I'm going to come down strongly in the well it's probably a gray area.

There are probably some things that Bill Gates has done or will do that you would really really not like.

I don't know what they would be exactly.

And there probably some things he's going to do that are just, you know, flat out good for the world.

And we can argue about, you know, which list is bigger and all that.

So, I would say that Bill Gates is probably uh a complicated situation because he's definitely got some plans for the world that I know you think you would rather have an option and not have him, you know, filling the air with vaccinations or whatever it is he's planning to do that would affect you somehow.

So, I get that you don't want to be controlled by Bill Gates.

Um, and even uh Nicole Shanahan um posted that if President Trump is so concerned about getting into heaven, this is not the way.

And she was referring to simply listening to Bill Gates talk at dinner.

You won't get to heaven just hosting him at the the party.

So there are a lot of smart people who believe that Bill Gates is uh some form of the devil incarnate.

Uh I assume that that's overblown, but in what ways?

I don't know.

It it just feels like something that couldn't possibly be as bad as people explain it.

So, so my BS detector says there's probably some real things there that you don't like, but I'll bet you there's a bunch of things that we just suspect that is that aren't exactly what they look like.

But certainly anything that he's doing that might end up like a mandate for you, you definitely have a right to not like that.

If if somebody is running around creating mandates and chemicals and air or whatever else you you don't want to be imposed upon you, I get it.

So, um, who was it?

Uh, I think Sam Alman was at the the meeting and, uh, thanked Trump for being I hope I have the right guy.

I think it was Sam Alman.

um thanking Trump for being so pro business.

Like I was saying, he really is pro business.

I mean, he's doing a great pro business kind of an administration so far.

Well, it looks like the White House is going to go ahead.

Oh, maybe this will be the big announcement.

I don't know.

But we already know that they're going to change the Department of Defense to the Department of War.

Now, I already told you that I wasn't crazy about that because you get more of whatever words you're focusing on.

So, I thought, hm, I wonder if this would get us more wars.

But the more I think about it, the more I think uh Trump is right on this, because he's got a better instinct about this than most people.

So, here's me walking it back and saying, "I don't know if I'm wrong, but let me give you the opposite argument." The opposite argument is pretty strong.

And the argument for it is that if you call yourself the Department of Defense, you can call anything that's happening in the world as somehow related to your own defense or an allies defense.

So, I might have had it backwards that when you call it defense, you can really easily make the argument that you should send some people over there to die.

Well, sure, it's happening in the forest and the other side of the world, but if you let that get bigger, it's coming for us.

So, our national defense requires that we go attack it right now.

So, you would have an infinite number of those.

And if you call it the department of war, pretty much nobody, at least in the public, wants a war.

You know, there might be somebody in the military-industrial complex or neocons or something.

But, uh, calling it war would probably make everybody want to avoid it, and it would certainly make our adversaries want to avoid it, too, because we're not going to, if you cause a problem for us, we're not going to bring you our defense.

we're going to bring you a war.

So, it is a little bit better.

It's a little bit more threatening.

I'll give you that.

So, I'm softening on this and I will take the L.

Um, Department of War might be might be just right.

Maybe.

We'll see.

Um, and you know, it's also likely that it doesn't change anything at all.

But I do believe this is the hypnotist training in me that the exact words you use to refer to things, it does change behavior.

You know, maybe in a subtle way, but when you're talking about war, you know, any little subtle movement needs to be thought about carefully.

All right, let's check my uh BS detector.

Now, the one thing that I tell you I might um be able to do well, you know, I'm sort of a grabag of things I do well and things I don't do well like everybody else.

But one of the things I think I do well, not 100%.

Cuz this is not the sort of thing you could be flawless, but I think I'm pretty good at detecting BS.

And so I mean you can uh grade me on that or judge me yourself, but the other day there was this story that allegedly the uh head of the European Union was uh going into Bulgaria and the story said that they believe that Russia jammed the GPS in her plane and so they had to land with maps instead of GPS.

And do you remember what I said about that story?

I said, "There's something wrong with that story." That doesn't that doesn't really feel like something Russia would do, you know, if if there were a way to pin it on him.

I mean, they wouldn't do it if they were going to get caught doing it.

And if if they allegedly did get caught, then it makes me think it's not the sort of thing they would have done.

And today we learned that the Bulgarian government reversed what it had announced and said there was no evidence whatsoever that Russia jammed the GPS.

Boom.

I will take the W for that.

So I don't.

So ask yourself, did you see anybody else in the news call that story Probably I was the only one.

Was there anybody on CNN or MSNBC who said, you know, maybe we should wait a little bit on that story because, you know, it's not quite tracking.

Doesn't doesn't quite smell right.

You can you can grade me on that yourself, but I believe I'm the only one in the world who said, "Nah, that's not right." So, but prove me wrong if somebody else said the same thing.

They might have.

Um, Dr.

Andrew Uberman is uh yet again dunking on alcohol.

He's not against it completely, but he wants you to know the health uh risks of it.

And he points out that drinking can raise your level of cortisol, but not just not while you're doing it, but after you're done.

So, it raises your baseline of cortisol.

So, cortisol is the thing you don't want because that's what's making you feel stressed and everything.

So that you know now this is just uh one more story about why alcohol is bad for you but it made me think about uh one of the reframes I did as probably a 12y old.

So I this one was so successful that I'd almost forgotten it was the biggest reframe of my life.

perhaps might have been the biggest reframe of my life.

At about 12 years old, I was a stressed kid and, you know, anxious and stressed and worried about everything.

And so I reframed my my job.

You know, when you're a kid, do you have a job?

I mean, you might have some like chores to get some money or something, but um I I decided to set myself a mission.

And and this is how I explained it to myself.

My full-time job is working on my um how I feel, you know, my my anxiousness or my worry.

And what that meant was that I would put it as a higher priority than just about everything.

Now, of course, you have to get your work done.

You know, you have to go to school, you have to do your homework or whatever.

So, those things actually lowered my stress because it feels good to do something and do it well.

So, I didn't mind doing the work.

But, so I so I would make sure that I exercise and you know, I would uh I tried uh meditation etc.

But my point is I decided it was my lifelong primary job and that if you if you reframe your primary job as working on your own let's say uh impression of the world which causes you to have more cortisol or less more dopamine or less etc.

It's your main job because if you get that right everything else is better.

you can work longer, you can exercise better, everything.

So, uh, I've been so successful at it that recently, you know, as as I'm at that age where you evaluate your life and you say to yourself, well, how'd I do?

How'd I do?

I couldn't remember with maybe one exception um a time in decades where I was especially worried about something, you know, where where it just your chest is on fire or your stomach's going crazy or something.

And it's not like I haven't had some challenges.

I've had a few.

Some of you have been with me along the way.

You know exactly what challenges I'm talking about.

Um but even through the hardest ones, I had developed so many um sort of tricks and hacks to to you know monitor my own sense of anxiety that I just haven't worried about anything in decades.

So if you treat it as a full-time job, you can make incredible gains in just how you feel.

But everybody's going to have to do it their own way, which is try lots of things.

But don't uh Yeah.

And here's here's a bad idea.

I always feel bad for people who need a vacation to set their mind right.

I'm all for vacations, but if you don't have a way to make it right all the other times that you're not on a vacation, I don't see how your life is going to be great.

So you really need to make it your mission to figure out what it is that relaxes you every day.

All right, that's your advice for the day.

So Anthropic, the AI company, as you know, is in this lawsuit with bunch of authors who say that it trained on their books and violated their copyright in doing so.

And I guess they're suing for 150,000 per book for 7 million pirated books.

And so if uh Anthropic lost, it might cost them something like a trillion dollars, somebody estimated, which would presumably put them out of business.

Um and then this made me think, remember I predicted right in the beginning of AI exploding, I predicted that humans would find a whole bunch of ways to stop AI from growing to what it could be.

Um, here's one, you know, that they'll be sued for copyright stuff.

And I'm not saying that they shouldn't be sued.

I'm just saying it's, you know, a predictable thing that will happen that the humans will slow down the AI.

But also, AIs are being sued for um helping people harm themselves.

I'll just say it that way.

You know what I'm talking about, especially children.

So, so that's one more way that the AI companies could be put out of business lawsuits.

And then there's uh uh XAI is suing Meta because one of the engineers stole all the the XAI code.

So that's one way that their entire business models could become worth nothing if if the only thing they're selling is, you know, the specifically trained models and their specific code and somebody steals the entire thing.

Was that to the whole company?

I mean, if it became public or or if it became public enough that their competitors could all get it and copy it.

So that's a big problem.

I don't know what uh what they do about that because if it's an insider job, you can never stop it, can you?

There's always going to be some insider engineer who can get access to it.

Then you got the problem that um apparently students are using uh AI for her cheating um mostly homework because that's when they're not being observed.

But the whole idea of homework is now ridiculous because the kids are just using AI to do their homework so they can get on with life.

Now interestingly that may not be bad because what might come out of that is that the schools will say all right forget about homework unless they give them homework which requires them to use AI so they learn how to use AI or something.

But uh I remember several years ago when I had young stepkids in school, there was a big push locally to stop giving, you know, crushing levels of homework to kids every night, which is what they do in the local school system.

You know, if you have a school system that is graded as one of the top school systems, there's a really high chance that they're just killing your kid with homework, like just abusive levels of homework.

And so the there was a big push to drop it to nothing because the apparently the science did not back up the idea that the student would be smarter if they had homework.

It would just sort of ruin their social life and their family life.

So um I could see that AI would make it so absurd to give people homework because they're not learning anything.

They're just copying down what the AI told them.

Then maybe homework will go away.

It might.

That might be a positive.

Anyway, so also experts won't fully trust AI and it hallucinates and um obviously AI is being taught to let's say parrot the narrative that polite society and whoever is running the country at that time wants you to believe.

So it won't be totally truth seeking even though Elon Musk I believe he genuinely wants to make it maximally truth seeking but you know it can't be right it would be too it would be too destructive to civilization if it were too honest.

So yeah, there's some topics where maybe it'll be a little bit well, some people say this and some people say that.

And there's also the thought that maybe the LLMs have plateaued.

They're not getting that much better.

But we'll see.

Maybe Elon will prove me wrong by taking Grock to the level that nobody ever understood was possible.

Um, well, speaking of Anthropic, the AI company, it's going to stop selling its AI services to anything that's majority Chinese-owned.

So, apparently, if they're just customers for the AI, um, they can sort of use it for banned, you know, military things in China.

So, I'm kind of surprised it took this long to figure out that if they just signed up for the service and paid for it like everybody else that they would therefore have access to the the very best AI that they wouldn't have to invent.

They could just say, "So, you're selling subscriptions to your API?" Yeah.

Uh, all right.

We'll take that and hook it up to our missiles or whatever the hell they're doing using it on their using it using it to run their drone swarm someday.

I don't know what they were doing with it, but here's a question I asked.

Um, and this is another micro lesson.

So, I give micro lessons.

I've taken kind of a pause, but I need to get back to it on the uh subscription service locals, but I'm going to give you all one right now.

One of the most useful things you can do besides have all the answers is to know what questions you should always ask.

If you know what questions to ask, you have sort of a superpower.

And one of the best questions, the one I recommend is, "What if I'm wrong about everything?

Or the other version of that is what if it's exactly the opposite of that.

Now, as a cartoonist, that's also part of my job.

You know, if I look at a normal situation, I'll go, okay, what if it worked on exactly the opposite?

Or what if the the doctor character in my comic instead of having a good bedside manner, what if he's actually a serial killer?

You know, it's whatever is the opposite.

So, I'm sort of a tuned to the question, what if it's exactly the opposite of that?

And that allows you to um I think it protects you from cognitive dissonance.

If you were to find out someday that it was exactly the opposite of what you believed all your life that you would at least have the comfort of knowing that you had asked it, meaning that you would suspect it maybe, maybe it's the opposite.

And I think that every time I hear about China being behind us in AI, oh, they'll never catch up to our AI.

Really?

What if it's exactly the opposite?

What if China was smart enough to develop their best AI in total secret and not not reveal it as like a free app?

How would we really know?

Would we really know if AI was behind us?

And if if China was behind this on AI, we would not know.

So if someday we find out that AI really had or China really had a secret AI thing that was just like, you know, Iran's underground bunkers and it was just really massive and they had better AI.

They were just they were just hiding the good stuff.

I wouldn't be surprised.

All right.

Uh, Tech.

Crunch has a story about Mark Zuckerberg is suing Mark Zuckerberg.

So, it turns out that there's there are at least two Mark Zuckerbergs.

One is a lawyer and every time he uses Facebook to advertise his legal practice, uh, Facebook's uh, uh, bots u spotted as a fake page because it's Mark Zuckerberg.

So they think it's a parody and so they they delete his account or they block him.

So for years for years he's been he's been getting blocked because they think he's a joker and now he's just going to sue him.

Oh, Gary the cat coming in to say hi.

And now your day is complete.

That's what you wanted.

All right.

Oh.

Um, get your tail out of my mouth.

Yeah.

All right.

So, there's a new story about a uh topy to a Newark mayor who just pled guilty to a corruption scheme for it's a payto-play thing.

He got 20 years in prison.

Now, paytoplay means that you would give contracts to, you know, preferred people and do favors in return for bribes and stuff.

So I will say again what I always say with these corruption stories.

I believe that all government is just designed for maximum corruption.

Because if you've got, you know, some one or two people who can control what favors are doowled out, there's really no way to control that people will find some indirect or clever way to pay them for it.

And so over time it's going to attract the people who have figured out how to monetize the office.

So other people will say,"Well, I have lots of capabilities, so I'll just go into some, you know, honest job." But the people who decide to work in government and put their whole life into government, I feel like they would only do it if they had some ill intent.

It just feels like that.

It's like maybe 80% of the people go into government are thinking well once I get that cushy job in the Senate my my net worth is going to zoom.

So we need some kind of mechanism so that the elected officials especially at the state level and below uh are at least fully transparent about where all the contracts are being given and the favors and stuff.

I don't know.

We need a better system.

We We have a system that guarantees by its design that eventually all the cities in the states will be criminal enterprises.

It's designed that way.

There's no other way it could go because it's just follow the money.

If if people can easily and almost never get caught, I would imagine uh do all these favors and and stuff.

Yeah, there's no way it's going to go the other way.

People are going to take the free money.

Well, Breitbart News, Sean Moran is talking about an exclusive poll uh doing a matchup.

Let's see who did this poll uh exclusively obtained by Breitbart.

It's a Plymouth Union public research poll and it uh looked at JD Vance running against Gavin Newsome for president in 2028 and it found that in the battleground states that JD would win conclusively but only by like 51 to 49.

Now, does does that shock you and make you mad that there's even any possibility that uh Nuome would be just like a couple of points behind JD Vance running for president in 2028?

I mean, I I I don't think they're even on anywhere in the same level.

I I believe you could put absolutely anyone in that poll and the Democrats would say, "Yeah, give me the Democrat." And the Republicans would say, "Give me the Republic." And that's all it is.

And uh but it's mind-blowing that every day we talk about the news and you know how one of them or one team or the other did something terrible or something awesome and none of it matters.

Absolutely nothing.

they do or say really makes any difference.

It's going to be about 5050 no matter what because I assume that the poll has a margin of error which means it could be a tie no matter what you do.

It's a tie.

I mean that that's u everything you need to know about everything that none of the facts mattered at all and never will.

All right.

Uh the new conspiracy theory um is that uh Trump's going to run for a third term or he's not going to leave office and it'll just stay there forever.

So here's what's fun about it.

Trump is obviously trolling about that.

So, he's he's very intentionally making news and laughing about it and quoting about it and bringing it up in weird context so that you think, "Oh, maybe he's really testing the sound to see if he can get away with it." And then the news is going to fully embrace it because it fits with their whole uh he's an authoritarian dictator, you know, he wants to get he wants to steal your democracy.

it just sort of fits with that perfectly.

But because all of that stuff was also absurd, um adding like the extra absurdity to it that you somehow going to figure out how to do a third term, there's no way that's going to happen, right?

There's there's no way that's going to happen.

So, um, so it's one of the best trolls because, uh, he's going to make the the Democrats talk about it incessantly.

You'll probably just keep pushing that button.

And I love that.

But here's what made made me laugh about it.

So, imagine you're you're a Democrat.

So, now even the Democrats know that the Biden brain uh, he's fine.

There's nothing wrong with Biden.

They all know that was a hoax, right?

Like even the Democrats know that that was a big old lie.

And they should know if they're paying attention that the Russia collusion thing was a total lie.

But I don't think their news shows it the way the the right-wing news shows it every day.

And if they look at scopes or have put any effort into it, they would know the finding people hoax is a lie.

But they still think that the Trump third term thing is right on.

How do how do you look at all the hoaxes that came out of your own team and not notice the pattern?

Well, I they probably don't think they're hoaxes.

you know, maybe that's why they can't spot the p the pattern, but they are, you know, the the pattern is pretty pretty clear.

And uh once again, the thing that the Democrats are running on is a thing that hasn't happened, but they they tell you, man, it's going to happen.

If you let that Trump stay around much longer, it's going to happen.

He'll steal your he's going to snatch your democracy right off your head.

He's a democracy snatcher.

So yeah, so the imaginary things that Democrats are worried about.

Trump is trolling hard and it's hilarious.

Well, Pam Bondi, US Attorney General's announced they're uh looks like they're beefing up their joint task force alpha that's uh fighting against the drug smuggling and trafficking at the southern and maritime borders.

So, whatever you're doing, cat, I don't appreciate it.

All right.

She wants it.

She wants attention.

Um, so that's good.

And apparently the US is sending some 10 uh 10, not some F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to be part of the fight against the cartels.

So, that's pretty serious.

And it makes me think that Trump has pioneered a new kind of way to use the military.

I call it the zero casualty military.

Now, it's not that he wouldn't employ the military in a way that would, you know, have casualties.

It's not that he wouldn't do it, but he keeps finding ways to use the military that that, you know, fingers crossed, have been zero casualties.

For example, the the bombing of Iran, zero casualties, American casualties.

Um, remember we we bombed the Hoodis.

I believe there were zero casualties on our side, right?

Um, remember uh Panama, we threatened with our military, but didn't need to use them, so no casualties.

And uh now they took out one of those uh drug smuggling boats from Venezuela.

No American casualties.

So it it's like he's he's picking up the free money, the things you can do with your military that probably will be zero casualties.

And so I kind of like that he just looks for all the ways that you could get away with it basically.

Well, if you saw any of the clips of RFK Jr.

looked like he was testifying in the Senate there and it was hilarious.

The Democrats went show were so bent crazy and it was like the craziest among them like uh Bernie Sanders and Pocahontas, Elizabeth Warren.

So, it's the ones who sort of act a little bit crazy naturally, but here's what's funny about it.

the the whole thing looked like a Saturday Night Live parody of Democrats.

It looked like a parody of Democrats.

And the reason it looked like a parody is that they were so over the top because the there's a set of circumstances that guaranteed they would look ridiculous.

Number one, they've decided that they have to fight, right?

They have to fight, fight, fight.

So, so they have to shout down Kennedy whenever he's answering the question.

So, the main thing they wanted to do is prevent him from talking and use their their angry question asking as the only thing anybody remembered.

But they had to shut up Kennedy every time he tried to respond because when he responds, he sounds completely reasonable.

So what that meant is that they had to interrupt him before they had concocted something smart to say and they were not clever enough to be both interrupterss and to say a smart thing with the interruption.

So what happened was their interruptions which was the main thing the main thing was to interrupt to prevent him from speaking.

So, it didn't matter what they said.

They just had to say something.

And it looked like several times they didn't have anything smart to say and probably knew it.

So, they just said something.

So, you have to watch it and then ask yourself how many times they they interrupted and they just said like word salad and Kennedy was saying stuff like, "You're just babbling now.

You're talking nonsense." And it was true.

They were talking nonsense because if they didn't interrupt him, he would say completely reasonable things.

And they've tried to create this hoax that Kennedy is the only person in the country who doesn't like science and wouldn't use it if he had it.

The only one.

I I dare you to go out in the street and say, uh uh we're just wondering if you were in charge of, you know, these big decisions at the CDC, etc.

Uh do you think that science should be used to make the decisions?

How many people in the United States would say, "Oh, no, don't use the science." None.

None.

Well, 100% of all living humans believe that if you have science that can be depended on, you should use it for these decisions.

But somehow the Democrats have convinced their idiot base that he's the only one and that Trump appointed the only person who doesn't believe in science.

Now, I will acknowledge that he may have gotten some things wrong in his, you know, pregovern uh work.

He may have gotten some things wrong.

Who doesn't get some things wrong?

But in his current job, he's completely committed to using science and he says that the science we have isn't good enough.

And he shows his work.

I mean, he can tell you, okay, did they or did they not do a randomized control trial?

Did they?

If they didn't, then all he's saying is we need to do that.

Um, did they prove that, you know, this or that is safe for children?

Did they?

I mean, you you show us where's the study that says you prove that was uh safe.

So, all he's really doing is having a completely transparent and public conversation about do we have enough science for these things that we're pushing on people?

and and they try to confuse the public by conflating dropping uh mandates from making it unavailable.

He's not making anything unavailable yet as far as I know.

So, do you believe that there's any scenario in which Kennedy alone would say, "Well, I've seen some secret data and so I'm going to ban this vaccination or this this or that." Do you think that he would ban the COVID stuff based on the current level of science?

Probably not because the current level of science may be inadequate for anything to know whether it's good or bad.

So, as long as everything he's doing is transparent and it's all based on data and everybody can look at it, I feel like we're pretty safe.

No, I don't believe he's the only person the only person in the whole world who believes that you should ignore science.

I don't think so.

But at least 3/4ers of Democrats will be convinced that he is that one person.

Anyway, uh apparently three lawyers for Act Blue, that's that uh entity that puts together donations from small donors for the Democrats specifically.

And they've been accused of really money laundering big donations that they're not supposed to be doing and then making them, you know, pretending that they came from lots of little donors.

So that's the accusation.

New York Post is writing about this, but it just it just made me think how much of the Democrat machine has already been um disabled.

Remember when Zuckerberg spent the what $400 million and but now Zuckerberg is sitting next to Trump and he's not really doing that stuff in the election.

That's a pretty big deal.

$400 million.

Act blue.

If it's if it's true that they had some bad behavior, they might not be able to do what they've done in the past, whether it was legal or illegal, they might be crippled.

So, act blue might be taken out of the game partially.

uh the fact that USAD and all the NOS's we now know that game where they're really ways to fund the Democrats.

I'm assuming that uh Marco Rubio and the administration are finding ways to uh starve the Democrat candidates anyway from making money through those NOS.

Um then of course Trump's looking at the voter roles and Tom Fedin was talking about this uh cleaning up the voter roles in the problem states and uh and if he gets away if Trump gets away with uh making uh federal IDs necess I guess it would be federal IDs necessary to vote in federal elections.

I think he won something like that.

And if he bans the mail-in votes and maybe even bans electronic voting machines, um if you assume that he got away with all of that and then also the Republicans put massive lawyers at every polling place so that they can monitor for, you know, stuff.

What would happen if we got an unusual result again where where something looked like it didn't make any sense?

You know, sort of like the 2020 election did where there was that big zoom for Biden votes that didn't seem to have a legitimate explanation?

I don't know.

Do you think that the Republicans have such a clamp on this now that the Democrats shouldn't be able to win any federal election?

I mean, these things of course change in a heartbeat, so anything can reverse.

But it does seem to me like the uh Trump administration is putting a fullcourt press or trying to figure out all the ways that cheating could happen and get rid of them.

Um, but what we don't know if was there any like major real cheating involved with most of those things.

So, we don't know.

We don't know.

So, Trump again in his uh ongoing move to change regulations when they get in the way, they're going to reclassify military drones so that they don't fall under the missile category because there's some restrictions on that.

So, they can sell drones to other allied countries like Saudi Arabia, these Reaper drones.

So, I mean, it's a small smaller story, but do you believe that the Biden administration would have done that?

You know, just drop that regulation because it's outdated and do it fairly uh rapidly.

So, there's something about the speed that the Trump administration is doing stuff just ordinary stuff like that.

Uh it just looks like a whole different speed for the for a government to do stuff.

Um according to futurism, there's a AI startup that wants to put a camera basically everywhere in public.

what I didn't understand.

Um, and I thought it'd be a really good idea if it were possible.

And by good idea, I mean you won't like it ethically or morally or lifestyle-wise.

You won't like anything about it.

But as a business model, it would be good for somebody.

And that would be to if you could get access to everybody's um security cameras, then when there was a problem, instead of having to go to every person, all right, can you show us your security from the front of your store?

If there was some way that like all of those would be on a network for everybody's benefit because they would be, you know, cameras facing, you know, public places.

Um the so there is a there's a company that's trying to have cameras everywhere that they can you know see you basically watch a bad guy from beginning to end wherever they go and I don't know if they're using existing cameras or it has to be one of their cameras.

So that wasn't really in the story weirdly, but the general idea that there will be cameras everywhere because of crime.

Um, I predicted in the mid90s and in my book, The Dilmer Future, that there would be cameras everywhere.

And I'm going to double down on one part of the prediction.

It hasn't happened, but I think it will.

I believe there will be cameras in almost every private space, let's say indoor space except for maybe bathrooms, uh maybe bedrooms, but you know, like living rooms and kitchens and stuff.

I believe that every house will end up having a camera.

Maybe it'll be built into light bulbs or something.

And but it will be deeply encrypted so that even the government can't get in it.

And the one and only way anybody could penetrate it is if there's a court order uh and then some kind of password is revealed or whatever.

So that way the homeowner would never give up their privacy unless let's say there was a house invasion and they wanted to give up their privacy to show the criminals and then they get a court order and then it get opened up.

So, my prediction is that there will somebody's going to find a way.

And I'm not saying this is good.

I'm not saying you should like it.

You're all going to dislike the uh the risk to your privacy.

I get it.

You don't have to explain it.

I'm just predicting it.

I'm not telling you it's a good idea or that you should like it.

I'm just saying I feel like it's I feel like there's going to be 100% recording cameras in all interior spaces and we'll just figure out some way to keep it private until it needs to be not private and you're not going to like it.

Well, there's yet another story.

How many of these have you heard of scientists trying to turn some living organic thing into a processor?

And the story is always the same that organic things could possibly, you know, process things faster than digital things.

And, you know, this might be the future, blah blah blah.

So, here's another one that they're trying to turn bacteria into digital processors.

And every time I see this kind of story, I say to myself, I feel like this will never work.

Um, as soon as you put in organic parts, they become unpredictable and they die.

They don't live forever.

I mean, is it my imagination or is it sort of obvious that you can never have a sturdy commercial application of an organic computer?

Doesn't it seem like a total waste of time?

And even if you made one and it worked, you know, it'd be like a year before the silicon version with lasers or whatever was faster.

So these are these stories just seem dumb to me.

Well, here's another uh what's going on with China story.

um you know that they were making electric cars like crazy and they were subsidizing their electric car business and they had uh they were even selling more electric cars I think in China anyway with a Chinese company even more than Tesla in China.

Um, but now we're hearing that uh it's turned into this big price war because there's so many electric car companies in China that they're competing with each other a little bit.

They're sort of oversupported.

And I don't know how my cat is finding ways to throw additional things on the floor.

She must have found or he must have found some like some some continuous thing to destroy.

I just hear the sound.

I don't know what's happening over there.

Doesn't sound good.

Anyway, so my question on China is uh again I'll ask the same question.

Is China about ready to have a economic collapse or is China getting ready to dominate the economy of the whole globe?

because I feel like I'm getting both stories.

You know, this electronic car one sounds like, you know, they're in trouble.

Then you have the ghost cities that they built that nobody moved into.

And you've got the the bad uh consumers spending because they're all saving money.

You've got the demographic problem where, you know, they don't have enough females and they don't have enough babies and they're running out of people and blah blah blah.

But on the other hand, you know, they're building the Silk Road, although the Silk Road is running into some trouble, I hear.

They're uh they're building the biggest navy in the world.

They're they're building power plants faster than anybody.

So, is China collapsing economically?

Because there's lots of evidence that it is, or is it going to be dominating everything economically?

I I feel like both of those movies are running at the same time and I'm not really sure which way it's going to go.

I do know that China is not going to get a lot of more foreign investment because people have figured out it's too risky to do business in China, but uh maybe they find a way to get around that.

I don't know, just do business with other countries.

Anyway, that's all I had for you today.

It's sort of a weird news day.

Um, I'm going to speak privately to the wonderful and beloved members of Locals Subscriptionbased.

I will remind you that my book, Loser Think, second edition, which is basically the same as the first edition, but it wasn't available in stores cuz I got cancelled and now it is.

So, it's only available on Amazon, though.

Amazon's the only place you can get it.

Um, what I didn't ever explain to you, which I should have, is that loser think is sort of a companion to win biggly.

So, win biggly teaches you how to learn how to persuade through the story of how Trump does it.

But lose or think is about how to not persuade, but you think you are.

So, it's basically the wrong way to think about things that are that would be unpersuasive.

So, you need two things.

You need you need to know how to be persuasive, but you should also learn how to avoid arguments that are unpersuasive and to figure out what the persuasive version of those is.

So, that's what loser think will teach you.

People seem to like it.

That's the only reason I made it available because people said they really liked it.

Um, if they hadn't, I wouldn't have bothered.

All right.

Uh, locals coming at you privately in 30 seconds.

The rest of you, hope to see you tomorrow.

Same time, same place.

I'm so happy you could make it. Why

don't you come on in and grab a seat?

I'll check your stocks for you. Well,

stocks are up and Tesla is up 4.76%.

We'll talk about Tesla a little bit. Get

yourself uh comfortable. Grab a

beverage. You're going to need it

as I prepare to see all your comments

in the optimal way.

Because we're optimizers, damn it. We're

not simplifiers.

Come on, computer.

Go. There we go. All our problems are

solved. It's going to be that kind of a

day.

Good morning everybody and welcome to

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Oh, it's all coming together now.

Well, here's a little Tesla news.

Apparently, the Tesla robo taxi app that

allows you to use your private car as a

sort of a self-driving Uber is the

number one download on Apple. Now, I

don't think there's any place that it's

approved for that yet, but they must be

really close. So, the totally

self-driving uh car is right around the

corner. And it turns out that the Trump

administration, in related news, is uh

getting ready to ease a bunch of

self-driving car rules. Boy, do we need

that. Shan Duffy, transportation

secretary.

Now, is it my imagination or is Shan

Duffy? Is he also the NASA guy now? Am I

crazy?

It's just funny how some of the Trump

people have like more than one job.

That's just showing off, isn't it? Like,

oh, Biden needed a secretary of this and

a secretary of that. Well, ah, I'll just

have one person do all three of those

jobs. And somehow everything seems to be

working out. So amazing. Anyway,

um

and um yeah, Sean Duffy says it's

critical to keep us moving ahead. Well,

absolutely.

So, I'm loving how pro business the

Trump administration is and how

dedicated they are to getting rid of

useless and bothersome impediments to

business. They are really well the only

thing I know for sure is that the

publicity around it is really good. So

it seems like almost every day you hear

of somebody in the administration got

rid of some regulation. So that's pretty

good.

Well, speaking of Tesla, apparently this

is wild. The Tesla board has proposed a

new compensation package for Elon Musk.

Um, it's got some targets that they want

to hit like uh a million robo t taxis

for commercial use. Um, shipping out a

million energy storage units and

producing and delivering 20 million

vehicles over I don't know what period

of time and aim for a a market um market

cap for the company. So, this would just

be the value of Tesla. They want him to

hit a market cap of $ 8.5 trillion.

That'd be pretty good. And they wanted

to commit to up to 10 years in the CEO

role.

I I'm guessing he'd be okay with that. I

don't know. And uh he gets 12% of the

company stock. I guess somebody

estimated that he could make a trillion

dollars.

A trillion dollars.

You know, if there's one thing I could

teach you about money and uh you could

take this to the bank. You know, a lot

of times people will give you financial

advice and you'll say, "Oh, I don't

know." You know, maybe you're being paid

to say that or something. But here is

some honest and useful financial advice

and I don't think anybody will ever

contradict it. It goes like this.

Making the first trillion, that's the

hard part.

Yeah. Hey, you're welcome.

All right. Um,

I love this, too. President Trump says

he's going to make some big announcement

at 400 p.m. Eastern time today. Now,

does anybody else have the have the same

impression I do that uh he's turned the

government into a really good reality

show? And when he does this the big

announcement, you might not think it's a

big announcement when it happens. Like

it might not be a, you know,

worldchanging announcement. It might be

just a thing that he could have put out

in a in a truth social, you know, post

if he wanted to. But don't you love the

fact that he teases you that there's

something big coming?

Because you don't interpret that as

something big and bad, right? So you

don't assume he's going to start a war

or something, but he says it's a big

announcement.

So it feels like it would be something

positive. And then he makes us wait.

Best showman ever. So I guess last night

uh the White House and Trump and Melania

hosted a dinner for a whole bunch of

tech leaders. So Trump was sitting next

to uh uh Zuckerberg and if you saw some

of the clips um Trump really looked like

he was having fun. That that is the most

uh sort of laughing and smiling I've

seen on Trump maybe ever. He he seemed

like he just like really liked that

table full of people who he called you

know the geniuses and they are all the

geniuses now. He was I guess he had uh

Bill Gates was on the other side of

Melania and there's some clips of him

talking and so there's this big drama

because Trump was too nice to Bill Gates

and so many people think Bill Gates is

the devil and

um I'm going to come down strongly in

the well it's probably a gray area.

There are probably some things that Bill

Gates has done or will do that you would

really really not like. I don't know

what they would be exactly. And there

probably some things he's going to do

that are just, you know, flat out good

for the world.

And we can argue about, you know, which

list is bigger and all that. So, I would

say that Bill Gates is probably uh a

complicated situation because he's

definitely got some plans for the world

that I know you think you would rather

have an option and not have him, you

know, filling the air with vaccinations

or whatever it is he's planning to do

that would affect you somehow. So, I get

that you don't want to be controlled by

Bill Gates.

Um, and even uh Nicole Shanahan

um posted that if President Trump is so

concerned about getting into heaven,

this is not the way. And she was

referring to simply listening to Bill

Gates talk at dinner.

You won't get to heaven just hosting him

at the the party. So there are a lot of

smart people who believe that Bill Gates

is uh some form of the devil incarnate.

Uh I assume that that's overblown,

but in what ways? I don't know. It it

just feels like something that couldn't

possibly be as bad as people explain it.

So, so my BS detector says there's

probably some real things there that you

don't like, but I'll bet you there's a

bunch of things that we just suspect

that is that aren't exactly what they

look like. But certainly anything that

he's doing that might end up like a

mandate for you, you definitely have a

right to not like that. If if somebody

is running around creating mandates and

chemicals and air or whatever else you

you don't want to be imposed upon you, I

get it.

So,

um, who was it? Uh, I think Sam Alman

was at the the meeting and, uh, thanked

Trump for being I hope I have the right

guy. I think it was Sam Alman. um

thanking Trump for being so pro

business. Like I was saying, he really

is pro business. I mean, he's doing a

great pro business kind of an

administration so far.

Well, it looks like the White House is

going to go ahead. Oh, maybe this will

be the big announcement. I don't know.

But we already know that they're going

to change the Department of Defense to

the Department of War.

Now, I already told you that I wasn't

crazy about that because you get more of

whatever words you're focusing on. So, I

thought, hm, I wonder if this would get

us more wars.

But the more I think about it, the more

I think uh Trump is right on this,

because he's got a better instinct about

this than most people. So, here's me

walking it back and saying, "I don't

know if I'm wrong, but let me give you

the opposite argument." The opposite

argument is pretty strong. And the

argument for it is that if you call

yourself the Department of Defense, you

can call anything that's happening in

the world as somehow related to your own

defense or an allies defense.

So, I might have had it backwards that

when you call it defense, you can really

easily make the argument that you should

send some people over there to die.

Well, sure, it's happening in the forest

and the other side of the world, but if

you let that get bigger, it's coming for

us. So, our national defense requires

that we go attack it right now. So, you

would have an infinite number of those.

And if you call it the department of

war,

pretty much

nobody, at least in the public, wants a

war.

You know, there might be somebody in the

military-industrial complex or neocons

or something. But, uh, calling it war

would probably make everybody want to

avoid it, and it would certainly make

our adversaries want to avoid it, too,

because we're not going to, if you cause

a problem for us, we're not going to

bring you our defense.

we're going to bring you a war. So, it

is a little bit better. It's a little

bit more threatening. I'll give you

that. So, I'm softening on this and I

will take the L. Um, Department of War

might be might be just right. Maybe.

We'll see. Um, and you know, it's also

likely that it doesn't change anything

at all. But I do believe this is the

hypnotist training in me that the exact

words you use to refer to things, it

does change behavior. You know, maybe in

a subtle way, but when you're talking

about war, you know, any little subtle

movement needs to be thought about

carefully.

All right, let's check my uh BS

detector.

Now, the one thing that I tell you I

might um be able to do well, you know,

I'm sort of a grabag of things I do well

and things I don't do well like

everybody else. But one of the things I

think I do well, not 100%. Cuz this is

not the sort of thing you could be

flawless, but I think I'm pretty good at

detecting BS.

And so I mean you can uh grade me on

that or judge me yourself, but the other

day there was this story that allegedly

the uh head of the European Union was uh

going into Bulgaria and the story said

that they believe that Russia jammed the

GPS in her plane and so they had to land

with maps instead of GPS.

And do you remember what I said about

that story?

I said, "There's something wrong with

that story." That doesn't that doesn't

really feel like something Russia would

do, you know, if if there were a way to

pin it on him. I mean, they wouldn't do

it if they were going to get caught

doing it. And if if they allegedly did

get caught, then it makes me think it's

not the sort of thing they would have

done. And today we learned that the

Bulgarian government reversed what it

had announced and said there was no

evidence whatsoever that Russia jammed

the GPS. Boom. I will take the W for

that.

So I don't. So ask yourself,

did you see anybody else in the news

call that story

Probably I was the only one.

Was there anybody on CNN or MSNBC who

said, you know, maybe we should wait a

little bit on that story because, you

know, it's not quite tracking. Doesn't

doesn't quite smell right.

You can you can grade me on that

yourself, but I believe I'm the only one

in the world who said, "Nah, that's not

right." So, but prove me wrong if

somebody else said the same thing. They

might have. Um, Dr. Andrew Uberman is uh

yet again dunking on alcohol. He's not

against it completely, but he wants you

to know the health uh risks of it. And

he points out that drinking can raise

your level of cortisol, but not just not

while you're doing it, but after you're

done. So, it raises your baseline of

cortisol. So, cortisol is the thing you

don't want because that's what's making

you feel stressed and everything. So

that you know now this is just uh one

more story about why alcohol is bad for

you but it made me think about uh one of

the reframes I did as probably a 12y

old.

So I this one was so successful

that I'd almost forgotten it was the

biggest reframe of my life. perhaps

might have been the biggest reframe of

my life. At about 12 years old,

I was a stressed kid

and, you know, anxious and stressed and

worried about everything.

And so I reframed my my job.

You know, when you're a kid, do you have

a job? I mean, you might have some like

chores to get some money or something,

but um I I decided to set myself a

mission. And and this is how I explained

it to myself. My full-time job is

working on my um how I feel, you know,

my my anxiousness or my worry.

And what that meant was that I would put

it as a higher priority than just about

everything. Now, of course, you have to

get your work done. You know, you have

to go to school, you have to do your

homework or whatever. So, those things

actually lowered my stress because it

feels good to do something and do it

well. So, I didn't mind doing the work.

But, so I so I would make sure that I

exercise and you know, I would uh I

tried uh meditation

etc. But my point is I decided it was my

lifelong

primary job

and that if you if you reframe your

primary job as working on your own let's

say uh impression of the world which

causes you to have more cortisol or less

more dopamine or less etc. It's your

main job because if you get that right

everything else is better.

you can work longer, you can exercise

better, everything. So, uh, I've been so

successful at it that recently, you

know, as as I'm at that age where you

evaluate your life and you say to

yourself, well, how'd I do? How'd I do?

I couldn't remember with maybe one

exception um a time in decades where I

was especially worried about something,

you know, where where it just your chest

is on fire or your stomach's going crazy

or something. And it's not like I

haven't had some challenges. I've had a

few. Some of you have been with me along

the way. You know exactly what

challenges I'm talking about. Um but

even through the hardest ones,

I had developed so many um sort of

tricks and hacks to to you know monitor

my own sense of anxiety that I just

haven't worried about anything in

decades. So if you treat it as a

full-time job, you can make incredible

gains in just how you feel. But

everybody's going to have to do it their

own way, which is try lots of things.

But don't uh Yeah. And here's here's a

bad idea. I always feel bad for people

who need a vacation to set their mind

right. I'm all for vacations, but if you

don't have a way to make it right all

the other times that you're not on a

vacation, I don't see how your life is

going to be great. So you really need to

make it your mission to figure out what

it is that relaxes you every day.

All right, that's your advice for the

day. So Anthropic, the AI company, as

you know, is in this lawsuit with bunch

of authors who say that it trained on

their books and violated their copyright

in doing so. And I guess they're suing

for 150,000 per book for 7 million

pirated books. And so if uh Anthropic

lost, it might cost them something like

a trillion dollars, somebody estimated,

which would presumably put them out of

business. Um

and then this made me think, remember I

predicted right in the beginning of AI

exploding, I predicted that humans would

find a whole bunch of ways to stop AI

from growing to what it could be.

Um, here's one, you know, that they'll

be sued for copyright stuff. And I'm not

saying that they shouldn't be sued. I'm

just saying it's, you know, a

predictable thing that will happen that

the humans will slow down the AI. But

also, AIs are being sued for um helping

people harm themselves. I'll just say it

that way. You know what I'm talking

about, especially children. So, so

that's one more way that the AI

companies could be put out of business

lawsuits. And then there's uh uh XAI is

suing Meta because one of the engineers

stole all the the XAI code. So that's

one way that their entire business

models could become worth nothing if if

the only thing they're selling is, you

know, the specifically trained models

and their specific code and somebody

steals the entire thing.

Was that to the whole company? I mean,

if it became public or or if it became

public enough that their competitors

could all get it and copy it. So that's

a big problem. I don't know what uh what

they do about that because if it's an

insider job, you can never stop it, can

you? There's always going to be some

insider engineer who can get access to

it.

Then you got the problem that um

apparently students are using uh AI for

her cheating um mostly homework because

that's when they're not being observed.

But the whole idea of homework is now

ridiculous because the kids are just

using AI to do their homework so they

can get on with life. Now interestingly

that may not be bad because what might

come out of that is that the schools

will say all right forget about homework

unless they give them homework which

requires them to use AI so they learn

how to use AI or something. But uh I

remember several years ago when I had

young stepkids in school, there was a

big push locally to stop giving, you

know, crushing levels of homework to

kids every night, which is what they do

in the local school system. You know, if

you have a school system that is graded

as one of the top school systems,

there's a really high chance that

they're just killing your kid with

homework, like just abusive levels of

homework. And so the there was a big

push to drop it to nothing because the

apparently the science did not back up

the idea that the student would be

smarter if they had homework. It would

just sort of ruin their social life and

their family life. So um I could see

that AI would make it so absurd to give

people homework because they're not

learning anything. They're just copying

down what the AI told them. Then maybe

homework will go away. It might. That

might be a positive.

Anyway, so also experts won't fully

trust AI and it hallucinates and um

obviously AI is being taught to let's

say parrot the narrative that polite

society and whoever is running the

country at that time wants you to

believe. So it won't be totally truth

seeking even though Elon Musk I believe

he genuinely wants to make it maximally

truth seeking but you know it can't be

right it would be too it would be too

destructive to civilization if it were

too honest. So yeah, there's some topics

where

maybe it'll be a little bit well, some

people say this and some people say

that. And there's also the thought that

maybe the LLMs have plateaued. They're

not getting that much better. But we'll

see. Maybe Elon will prove me wrong by

taking Grock to the level that nobody

ever understood was possible.

Um,

well, speaking of Anthropic, the AI

company, it's going to stop selling its

AI services to anything that's majority

Chinese-owned.

So, apparently, if they're just

customers for the AI,

um, they can sort of use it for banned,

you know, military things in China.

So, I'm kind of surprised it took this

long to figure out that if they just

signed up for the service and paid for

it like everybody else that they would

therefore have access to the the very

best AI that they wouldn't have to

invent. They could just say, "So, you're

selling subscriptions to your API?"

Yeah. Uh, all right. We'll take that and

hook it up to our missiles or whatever

the hell they're doing using it on their

using it using it to run their drone

swarm someday. I don't know what they

were doing with it,

but here's a question I asked.

Um,

and

this is another micro lesson. So, I give

micro lessons. I've taken kind of a

pause, but I need to get back to it on

the uh subscription service locals, but

I'm going to give you all one right now.

One of the most useful things you can do

besides have all the answers is to know

what questions you should always ask. If

you know what questions to ask,

you have sort of a superpower. And one

of the best questions, the one I

recommend is, "What if I'm wrong about

everything?

Or the other version of that is what if

it's exactly the opposite of that. Now,

as a cartoonist,

that's also part of my job. You know, if

I look at a normal situation, I'll go,

okay, what if it worked on exactly the

opposite? Or what if the the doctor

character in my comic instead of having

a good bedside manner, what if he's

actually a serial killer? You know, it's

whatever is the opposite. So, I'm sort

of a tuned

to the question, what if it's exactly

the opposite of that? And that allows

you to

um I think it protects you from

cognitive dissonance. If you were to

find out someday that it was exactly the

opposite of what you believed all your

life that you would at least have the

comfort of knowing that you had asked

it, meaning that you would suspect it

maybe, maybe it's the opposite. And I

think that every time I hear about China

being behind us in AI, oh, they'll never

catch up to our AI. Really? What if it's

exactly the opposite? What if China was

smart enough to develop their best AI in

total secret and not not reveal it as

like a free app?

How would we really know? Would we

really know if AI was behind us? And if

if China was behind this on AI, we would

not know. So if someday we find out that

AI really had or China really had a

secret AI thing that was just like, you

know, Iran's underground bunkers and it

was just really massive and they had

better AI. They were just they were just

hiding the good stuff.

I wouldn't be surprised.

All right. Uh, TechCrunch has a

story about Mark Zuckerberg is suing

Mark Zuckerberg.

So, it turns out that there's there are

at least two Mark Zuckerbergs. One is a

lawyer and every time he uses Facebook

to advertise his legal practice, uh,

Facebook's uh, uh, bots u spotted as a

fake page because it's Mark Zuckerberg.

So they think it's a parody and so they

they delete his account or they block

him. So for years for years he's been

he's been getting blocked because they

think he's a joker and now he's just

going to sue him.

Oh, Gary the cat coming in to say hi.

And now your day is complete. That's

what you wanted.

All right.

Oh. Um, get your tail out of my mouth.

Yeah.

All right. So, there's a new story about

a uh topy to a Newark mayor who just

pled guilty to a corruption scheme for

it's a payto-play thing. He got 20 years

in prison. Now, paytoplay means that you

would give contracts to, you know,

preferred people and do favors in return

for bribes and stuff. So I will say

again what I always say with these

corruption stories.

I believe that all government is just

designed for maximum corruption. Because

if you've got, you know, some one or two

people who can control what favors are

doowled out, there's really no way to

control that people will find some

indirect or clever way to pay them for

it.

And so over time it's going to attract

the people who have figured out how to

monetize the office.

So other people will say,"Well, I have

lots of capabilities, so I'll just go

into some, you know, honest job."

But the people who decide to work in

government and put their whole life into

government, I feel like they would only

do it if they had some ill intent.

It just feels like that. It's like maybe

80% of the people go into government are

thinking well once I get that cushy job

in the Senate

my my net worth is going to zoom.

So we need some kind of mechanism

so that the elected officials especially

at the state level and below uh are at

least fully transparent about where all

the contracts are being given and the

favors and stuff. I don't know. We need

a better system. We We have a system

that guarantees by its design that

eventually all the cities in the states

will be criminal enterprises. It's

designed that way. There's no other way

it could go

because it's just follow the money. If

if people can easily and almost never

get caught, I would imagine uh do all

these favors and and stuff. Yeah,

there's no way it's going to go the

other way. People are going to take the

free money.

Well, Breitbart News, Sean Moran is

talking about an exclusive poll uh doing

a matchup. Let's see who did this poll

uh exclusively obtained by Breitbart.

It's a Plymouth Union public research

poll and it uh looked at JD Vance

running against Gavin Newsome for

president in 2028

and it found that in the battleground

states

[Music]

that JD would win conclusively but only

by like 51 to 49.

Now,

does does that shock you and make you

mad

that there's even any possibility that

uh Nuome would be just like a couple of

points behind JD Vance running for

president in 2028?

I mean,

I I I don't think they're even on

anywhere in the same level. I I believe

you could put absolutely anyone in that

poll and the Democrats would say, "Yeah,

give me the Democrat." And the

Republicans would say, "Give me the

Republic." And that's all it is. And uh

but it's mind-blowing that every day we

talk about the news and you know how one

of them or one team or the other did

something terrible or something awesome

and none of it matters.

Absolutely nothing. they do or say

really makes any difference. It's going

to be about 5050 no matter what because

I assume that the poll has a margin of

error which means it could be a tie

no matter what you do. It's a tie. I

mean that that's u everything you need

to know about everything that none of

the facts mattered at all

and never will.

All right. Uh the new conspiracy theory

um is that uh Trump's going to run for a

third term or he's not going to leave

office and it'll just stay there

forever. So here's what's fun about it.

Trump is obviously trolling about that.

So, he's he's very intentionally making

news and laughing about it and quoting

about it and bringing it up in weird

context so that you think, "Oh, maybe

he's really testing the sound to see if

he can get away with it." And then the

news is going to fully embrace it

because it fits with their whole uh he's

an authoritarian dictator, you know, he

wants to get he wants to steal your

democracy. it just sort of fits with

that perfectly. But because all of that

stuff was also absurd,

um adding like the extra absurdity to it

that you somehow going to figure out how

to do a third term, there's no way

that's going to happen, right? There's

there's no way that's going to happen.

So, um,

so it's one of the best trolls because,

uh, he's going to make the the Democrats

talk about it incessantly. You'll

probably just keep pushing that button.

And I love that. But here's what made

made me laugh about it. So, imagine

you're you're a Democrat.

So, now even the Democrats know that the

Biden brain uh, he's fine. There's

nothing wrong with Biden. They all know

that was a hoax, right? Like even the

Democrats know that that was a big old

lie. And

they should know if they're paying

attention that the Russia collusion

thing was a total lie. But I don't think

their news shows it the way the the

right-wing news shows it every day.

And if they look at scopes or have put

any effort into it, they would know the

finding people hoax is a lie.

But they still think that the Trump

third term thing is right on.

How do how do you look at all the hoaxes

that came out of your own team and not

notice the pattern? Well, I they

probably don't think they're hoaxes. you

know, maybe that's why they can't spot

the p the pattern, but they are, you

know, the the pattern is pretty pretty

clear. And uh once again, the thing that

the Democrats are running on is a thing

that hasn't happened, but they they tell

you, man, it's going to happen. If you

let that Trump stay around much longer,

it's going to happen. He'll steal your

he's going to snatch your democracy

right off your head. He's a democracy

snatcher. So yeah, so the imaginary

things that Democrats are worried about.

Trump is trolling hard and it's

hilarious.

Well, Pam Bondi, US Attorney General's

announced they're uh looks like they're

beefing up their joint task force alpha

that's uh fighting against the drug

smuggling and trafficking at the

southern and maritime borders.

So,

whatever you're doing, cat, I don't

appreciate it.

All right. She wants it. She wants

attention.

Um, so that's good. And apparently the

US is sending some 10 uh 10, not some

F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to be

part of the fight against the cartels.

So, that's pretty serious. And it makes

me think that Trump has pioneered a new

kind of way to use the military. I call

it the zero casualty military. Now, it's

not that he wouldn't employ the military

in a way that would, you know, have

casualties. It's not that he wouldn't do

it, but he keeps finding ways to use the

military that that, you know, fingers

crossed, have been zero casualties. For

example, the the bombing of Iran,

zero casualties, American casualties.

Um, remember we we bombed the Hoodis. I

believe there were zero casualties on

our side, right? Um, remember uh Panama,

we threatened with our military, but

didn't need to use them, so no

casualties. And uh now they took out one

of those uh drug smuggling boats from

Venezuela.

No American casualties.

So it it's like he's he's picking up the

free money, the things you can do with

your military that probably will be zero

casualties.

And so I kind of like that he just looks

for all the ways that you could get away

with it basically.

Well, if you saw any of the clips of RFK

Jr. looked like he was testifying in the

Senate there and it was hilarious. The

Democrats went show were so bent crazy

and it was like the craziest among them

like uh Bernie Sanders and Pocahontas,

Elizabeth Warren. So, it's the ones who

sort of act a little bit crazy

naturally,

but here's what's funny about it. the

the whole thing looked like a Saturday

Night Live parody of Democrats. It

looked like a parody of Democrats. And

the reason it looked like a parody is

that they were so over the top because

the there's a set of circumstances that

guaranteed they would look ridiculous.

Number one, they've decided that they

have to fight, right? They have to

fight, fight, fight. So, so they have to

shout down Kennedy whenever he's

answering the question. So, the main

thing they wanted to do is prevent him

from talking and use their their angry

question asking as the only thing

anybody remembered. But they had to shut

up Kennedy every time he tried to

respond because when he responds, he

sounds completely reasonable.

So what that meant is that they had to

interrupt him before they had concocted

something smart to say and they were not

clever enough to be both interrupterss

and to say a smart thing with the

interruption. So what happened was their

interruptions which was the main thing

the main thing was to interrupt to

prevent him from speaking. So, it didn't

matter what they said. They just had to

say something. And it looked like

several times they didn't have anything

smart to say and probably knew it. So,

they just said something.

So, you have to watch it and then ask

yourself how many times they they

interrupted and they just said like word

salad and Kennedy was saying stuff like,

"You're just babbling now. You're

talking nonsense."

And it was true. They were talking

nonsense because if they didn't

interrupt him, he would say completely

reasonable things. And they've tried to

create this hoax that Kennedy is the

only person in the country who doesn't

like science and wouldn't use it if he

had it. The only one. I I dare you to go

out in the street and say, uh uh we're

just wondering if you were in charge of,

you know, these big decisions at the

CDC, etc. Uh do you think that science

should be used to make the decisions?

How many people in the United States

would say, "Oh, no, don't use the

science." None. None. Well, 100% of all

living humans believe that if you have

science that can be depended on, you

should use it for these decisions. But

somehow the Democrats have convinced

their idiot base that he's the only one

and that Trump appointed the only person

who doesn't believe in science. Now, I

will acknowledge that he may have gotten

some things wrong in his, you know,

pregovern uh work. He may have gotten

some things wrong.

Who doesn't get some things wrong? But

in his current job, he's completely

committed to using science and he says

that the science we have isn't good

enough. And he shows his work. I mean,

he can tell you, okay, did they or did

they not do a randomized control trial?

Did they? If they didn't, then all he's

saying is we need to do that. Um, did

they prove that, you know, this or that

is safe for children? Did they? I mean,

you you show us where's the study that

says you prove that was uh safe. So, all

he's really doing is having a completely

transparent and public conversation

about do we have enough science for

these things that we're pushing on

people? and and they try to confuse the

public by conflating dropping uh

mandates

from making it unavailable. He's not

making anything unavailable yet as far

as I know.

So, do you believe that there's any

scenario in which Kennedy alone would

say, "Well, I've seen some secret data

and so I'm going to ban this vaccination

or this this or that." Do you think that

he would ban the COVID stuff based on

the current level of science? Probably

not because the current level of science

may be inadequate for anything to know

whether it's good or bad. So, as long as

everything he's doing is transparent and

it's all based on data and everybody can

look at it, I feel like we're pretty

safe. No, I don't believe he's the only

person the only person in the whole

world who believes that you should

ignore science.

I don't think so. But at least 3/4ers of

Democrats will be convinced that he is

that one person.

Anyway,

uh apparently three lawyers for Act

Blue, that's that uh entity that puts

together donations from small donors for

the Democrats specifically. And they've

been accused of really money laundering

big donations that they're not supposed

to be doing and then making them, you

know, pretending that they came from

lots of little donors. So that's the

accusation. New York Post is writing

about this, but it just it just made me

think how much of the Democrat machine

has already been um disabled.

Remember when Zuckerberg spent the what

$400 million

and but now Zuckerberg is sitting next

to Trump and he's not really doing that

stuff in the election. That's a pretty

big deal. $400 million. Act blue. If

it's if it's true that they had some bad

behavior, they might not be able to do

what they've done in the past, whether

it was legal or illegal, they might be

crippled. So, act blue might be taken

out of the game partially. uh the fact

that USAD and all the NOS's we now know

that game where they're really ways to

fund the Democrats. I'm assuming that uh

Marco Rubio and the administration are

finding ways to uh starve the Democrat

candidates anyway from making money

through those NOS.

Um then of course Trump's looking at the

voter roles and Tom Fedin was talking

about this uh cleaning up the voter

roles in the problem states and uh and

if he gets away if Trump gets away with

uh making uh federal IDs necess I guess

it would be federal IDs necessary to

vote in federal elections. I think he

won something like that. And if he bans

the mail-in votes

and maybe even bans electronic voting

machines, um if you assume that he got

away with all of that and then also the

Republicans put massive lawyers at every

polling place so that they can monitor

for, you know, stuff.

What would happen

if we got an unusual result again where

where something looked like it didn't

make any sense? You know, sort of like

the 2020 election did where there was

that big zoom for Biden votes that

didn't seem to have a legitimate

explanation? I don't know. Do you think

that the Republicans have such a clamp

on this now that the Democrats shouldn't

be able to win any federal election?

I mean, these things of course change in

a heartbeat, so anything can reverse.

But it does seem to me like the uh Trump

administration is putting a fullcourt

press or trying to figure out all the

ways that cheating could happen and get

rid of them. Um,

but what we don't know if was there any

like major real cheating involved with

most of those things. So, we don't know.

We don't know. So, Trump again in his uh

ongoing move to change regulations when

they get in the way, they're going to

reclassify military drones

so that they don't fall under the

missile category because there's some

restrictions on that. So, they can sell

drones to other allied countries like

Saudi Arabia,

these Reaper drones. So, I mean, it's a

small smaller story, but do you believe

that the Biden administration

would have done that? You know, just

drop that regulation because it's

outdated and do it fairly

uh rapidly. So, there's something about

the speed that the Trump administration

is doing stuff just ordinary stuff like

that. Uh it just looks like a whole

different speed for the for a government

to do stuff.

Um according to futurism, there's a AI

startup that wants to put a camera

basically everywhere in public. what I

didn't understand.

Um, and I thought it'd be a really good

idea if it were possible. And by good

idea, I mean you won't like it ethically

or morally or lifestyle-wise.

You won't like anything about it. But as

a business model, it would be good for

somebody. And that would be to if you

could get access to everybody's um

security cameras, then when there was a

problem, instead of having to go to

every person, all right, can you show us

your security from the front of your

store? If there was some way that like

all of those would be on a network for

everybody's benefit because they would

be, you know, cameras facing, you know,

public places. Um

the so there is a there's a company

that's trying to have cameras everywhere

that they can you know see you basically

watch a bad guy from beginning to end

wherever they go and I don't know if

they're using existing cameras or it has

to be one of their cameras. So that

wasn't really in the story weirdly, but

the general idea that there will be

cameras everywhere because of crime. Um,

I predicted in the mid90s and in my

book, The Dilmer Future, that there

would be cameras everywhere. And I'm

going to double down on one part of the

prediction. It hasn't happened, but I

think it will. I believe there will be

cameras in almost every private space,

let's say indoor space except for maybe

bathrooms,

uh maybe bedrooms, but you know, like

living rooms and kitchens and stuff. I

believe that every house will end up

having a camera. Maybe it'll be built

into light bulbs or something. And but

it will be deeply encrypted

so that even the government can't get in

it. And the one and only way anybody

could penetrate it is if there's a court

order uh and then some kind of password

is revealed or whatever. So that way the

homeowner would never give up their

privacy unless let's say there was a

house invasion and they wanted to give

up their privacy to show the criminals

and then they get a court order and then

it get opened up. So, my prediction is

that there will somebody's going to find

a way. And I'm not saying this is good.

I'm not saying you should like it.

You're all going to dislike the uh the

risk to your privacy. I get it. You

don't have to explain it.

I'm just predicting it. I'm not telling

you it's a good idea or that you should

like it. I'm just saying I feel like

it's I feel like there's going to be

100% recording cameras in all interior

spaces and we'll just figure out some

way to keep it private until

it needs to be not private and you're

not going to like it.

Well, there's yet another story. How

many of these have you heard of

scientists trying to turn some living

organic thing into a processor? And the

story is always the same that organic

things could possibly, you know, process

things faster than digital things. And,

you know, this might be the future, blah

blah blah. So, here's another one that

they're trying to turn bacteria into

digital processors. And every time I see

this kind of story, I say to myself, I

feel like this will never work. Um, as

soon as you put in organic parts, they

become unpredictable and they die. They

don't live forever. I mean, is it my

imagination or is it sort of obvious

that you can never have a sturdy

commercial application of an organic

computer?

Doesn't it seem like a total waste of

time? And even if you made one and it

worked, you know, it'd be like a year

before the silicon version with lasers

or whatever was faster. So these are

these stories just seem dumb to me.

Well, here's another uh what's going on

with China story. um you know that they

were making electric cars like crazy and

they were subsidizing their electric car

business and they had uh they were even

selling more electric cars I think in

China anyway with a Chinese company even

more than Tesla

in China. Um, but now we're hearing that

uh it's turned into this big price war

because there's so many electric car

companies in China that they're

competing with each other a little bit.

They're sort of oversupported.

And

I don't know how my cat is finding ways

to throw additional things on the floor.

She must have found or he must have

found some like

some some continuous thing to destroy. I

just hear the sound. I don't know what's

happening over there. Doesn't sound

good. Anyway, so my question on China is

uh again I'll ask the same question. Is

China about ready to have a economic

collapse

or is China getting ready to dominate

the economy of the whole globe? because

I feel like I'm getting both stories.

You know, this electronic car one sounds

like, you know, they're in trouble. Then

you have the ghost cities that they

built that nobody moved into. And you've

got the the bad uh consumers spending

because they're all saving money. You've

got the demographic problem where, you

know, they don't have enough females and

they don't have enough babies and

they're running out of people and blah

blah blah. But on the other hand, you

know, they're building the Silk Road,

although the Silk Road is running into

some trouble, I hear. They're uh they're

building the biggest navy in the world.

They're they're building power plants

faster than anybody.

So,

is China collapsing economically?

Because there's lots of evidence that it

is, or

is it going to be dominating everything

economically? I I feel like both of

those movies are running at the same

time and I'm not really sure which way

it's going to go.

I do know that China is not going to get

a lot of more foreign investment because

people have figured out it's too risky

to do business in China, but uh maybe

they find a way to get around that. I

don't know, just do business with other

countries.

Anyway, that's all I had for you today.

It's sort of a weird news day. Um, I'm

going to speak privately to the

wonderful and beloved members of Locals

Subscriptionbased.

I will remind you

that my book, Loser Think, second

edition, which is basically the same as

the first edition, but it wasn't

available in stores cuz I got cancelled

and now it is. So, it's only available

on Amazon, though. Amazon's the only

place you can get it. Um, what I didn't

ever explain to you, which I should

have, is that loser think is sort of a

companion to win biggly. So, win biggly

teaches you how to learn how to persuade

through the story of how Trump does it.

But lose or think is about how to not

persuade, but you think you are. So,

it's basically the wrong way to think

about things that are that would be

unpersuasive. So, you need two things.

You need you need to know how to be

persuasive,

but you should also learn how to avoid

arguments

that are unpersuasive and to figure out

what the persuasive version of those is.

So, that's what loser think will teach

you. People seem to like it. That's the

only reason I made it available because

people said they really liked it. Um, if

they hadn't, I wouldn't have bothered.

All right. Uh, locals coming at you

privately

in 30 seconds. The rest of you, hope to

see you tomorrow. Same time, same place.