Episode 3049 CWSA 12/21/25

How you doing?

That's my impression of Joey from Friends.

How you doing?

Well, if you didn't expect the show to go back to its normal time, you're surprised.

So, here we are.

Uh, I am officially back home from a week in the hospital.

Uh, we we will not dwell on my medical situation, but suffice to say, I'm feeling terrific this morning.

and I'm going to give you the best the best podcast show you've ever seen.

Now, I say that, of course, jokingly, but it might actually be the best one you'll ever see.

I have a high standard to beat because just the other day I was saying and I meant it by the way.

I said that the all-in pod most recent episode is just one of the best things I've ever seen in a podcast.

You was about AI and economics and you know just a bunch of things that interest me and were perfectly debated and described.

It was just such a great show.

But because I'm competitive, uh, I've put together for you a special show today, a Sunday edition that will combine all the things you normally like with a new framing that I think you'll like a lot.

I'm predicting that.

That is my stomach growling.

I'm not using my normal microphone, so it might get picked up on the microphone if you don't mind.

But uh has anybody missed the simultaneous sip?

Wouldn't you like it to go back to normal?

Yeah, you would.

Guess what's coming.

Get your beverage ready cuz we're back, baby.

We're back.

All right.

I know why you're here.

You're here for the simultaneous sip.

All you need is a copper mug or a glass of tanker chalice or sign.

A canteen sugar flask, a vessel of any kind.

Fill it with your favorite liquid.

Now, I like coffee.

And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day.

The thing that makes everything better.

It's called the simultaneous sip.

And it happens now.

Go.

Oh god.

So good.

Sometimes the best thing in the world is just to get back to your routine.

So, pretty happy this morning.

All right, here's what's special about today.

I'm going to give an extended shout out to three artists who blew my mind this week.

Now, I'm using the word artist and art in a expansive way.

So it's not exactly what you would call art perhaps, but there are people who have raised what they're doing to in my opinion an art form.

And I'm going to start with uh a long windup so that you've got a context that will make this much more meaningful.

You ready?

All right.

So, I mentioned the a few of these things I mentioned before, but I've never tied them together in the way you're going to see.

One of them is I've always been a not always, but for years I've been a student of the Beatles, you know, the musical group The Beatles.

And what I what I'm interested in is not just that how much I liked them, you know, especially when I was young, but their processes and the systems that they used and how did they get to be so great.

Because one of the things you would note about the Beatles is if you looked at any one of their skills, they have lots of skills across a variety of domains.

None of them look like the best in the world.

So, they're not the best lyricists.

Uh, in fact, a lot of their lyrics were random.

Uh, they're not the best musicians in terms of playing their instruments, which they would even have told you themselves.

You could argue that Ringo was actually world class you, but you know, there'd be some debate on that.

Um, but I was trying to count in my head after studying them for years how many skills they had combined because they had everything from the style to the sense of humor to the the marketing, the business.

Um they they played multiple instruments like you said they did their own lyrics and but on top of all that um I think Mc.

Cartney was the the unsung genius of the group.

You know everybody gets their their credit.

They were all amazing.

But Mc.

Cartney was sort of a systems over goals kind of a guy.

He just didn't call it that.

And I think he was also a talent sack kind of a guy because they were acquiring so many talents over time.

I'll just give you an example.

Uh I might have this wrong but the example still works.

I believe it was Mc.

Cartney who said they had a rule.

Let's call it a system.

If they started to write a song, they they wouldn't end the night until they finished it.

Now, presumably there were some exceptions to that, but one of the things that they're famous for is completing more, you know, writing more songs than anybody's could even imagine.

So, if you took just Mc.

Cartney's skill stack, I'll bet he had at least 20 skills that worked perfectly together.

And the magic sauce that I I write about and I talk about is not that he had a lot of skills because if he'd been, let's say, really good at badmitten, well, that wouldn't really mix with anything else he was doing.

But if you're really good at studio work plus, you know, uh, drums plus guitar plus blah blah, every one of those work together, including the the business end of it.

So if you combine the four Beatles and their skills, I think you would end up with something like 20 to 50 skills that are not random.

They all work together.

And I don't think we've ever seen anything like that.

Now, time goes by and uh here's some more context.

And remember, I'm going to tie this all together.

So just just make a mental note that the Beatles were not the best in the world at anything, but they were probably above average at 20 to 50 different skills.

And that that's in my opinion, that's the magic sauce.

So time goes by, we're going to change the context a little bit to my early uh career when I was a younger man.

Um, I had the idea that most people have, which is if you have a big problem in your life, uh, could be career, could be personal, could be health, that what you would try to do is recover from the problem.

And that makes sense, right?

If you have a big problem, obviously you should set as your objective to get back to where you were.

Now, I'll give you an example where I tried that and learned it's a bad idea.

So, you've heard this story again, but I'm putting it in a different context.

When I was in my 20s, worked for a bank.

Uh, I had a cubicle job.

It looked like I had potential for promotion.

One day, my boss called me in and said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but the word has come down from management that we can't promote white men." So that would be a big problem because I was young and ambitious and if they told me directly I couldn't be promoted.

Well, I very quickly put my resume together and quit uh to take a better job, slightly better job.

I would say it's more of a lateral um lateral move from the bank to a phone company, but it was really just another cubical job.

So that was an example of uh not using the system I'm going to describe.

But once that turned out the same way, the phone company eventually called me into my boss's office and said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but word has come down that we can't promote a white male." So you see what I did was I set my objective to get back to where I was, you know, working in the cubicle and maybe getting promoted.

and I got right back to where I was.

But where I was wasn't good.

So sometime around that point in my life, I came up with a different strategy.

You could call it a system.

And the system was that no matter how bad the problem was, I would set as my objective to take advantage of the problem to be way better, like way way better than wherever I was before the problem.

And you've also heard this story.

Again, I'm going to put it in a different context that when I turned 49, I had a rare neurological problem, the effect of my vocal cords, and they would clench when I tried to form words.

So, I could make noise, but people couldn't understand what I was saying.

So, instead of talking the way you hear me now, talk like that.

And people would say, "What?

What?" I couldn't use the telephone etc.

So it took me a few years to even find out that it had a name spasmotic dysphonia and the bad news was the experts told me it was incurable.

So I had an incurable voice problem and half of my job was public speaking and doing interviews and I really kind of needed to be able to talk.

Now, I was lucky that half of my job was cartooning because that didn't require the talking.

But boy, did I need to get back to where I was.

However, by that time, I had learned my new system, which is to set my goal as being way better, way better than wherever I was before I had the problem.

Now, in this case, getting back to where I was would have been a rather poor voice.

Because long before I had spasmmonic dysphonia, uh, I had a weak nasly sounding voice that I hated to listen to.

Most of you have that, right?

When you listen to your own voice on recording, you go.

However, for those years where I was trying to find a solution to the speaking, I did an affirmation usually in my car.

And you know, because I couldn't speak intelligently, but it didn't matter because I was just alone driving my car.

I would do it out loud, but it would sound like nonsense to anybody else, but I knew what I was thinking and saying.

And the affirmation went like this.

I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly.

Now, remember, I never spoke perfectly.

And it's also a a subjective standard, right?

So what exactly is speaking perfectly?

And I'm going to tell you in a minute what that means to me.

So again, time goes by and in 2013 or so, I I published a book called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win.

And that included my advice about building a talent stack.

It included my advice about having a system over a goal.

And it also talked about my strategy of setting my recovery to be way better, way better than what I started with.

So now that the scene is set, turns out that one of the people who read that book and absorbed a whole bunch of the skills that it described is an artist called Akira the Dan.

Akira the Dan.

And for the last several years, he has been using the techniques from the book.

And by the way, he he tells me this.

I'm not I'm not guessing.

So he told me this, you know, uh directly that he learned the whole talent sack systems over goals and a whole bunch of other advice.

He absorbed it.

He put it together and he added it to his existing skills of music.

and he also runs the business of producing music.

He's learned to obviously do video marketing, social media, and I would estimate that he has now compiled somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 different skills that like the Beatles, this is the magic part, like the Beatles, they're not 20 random skills.

They're designed because they work together.

So, he's been cranking away at a new form of music, art, entertainment that most of you have seen by now that he calls Meaning Wave, which combines a background beat in music with some kind of podcaster or um some kind of philosopher who says interesting things that independently you would like to hear.

Uh, for example, I think he did uh Alan Watts and Jordan Peterson and they combined their voices just talking with the music and oh my god is it powerful.

But he also did it with me.

So he he took clips from many of my podcasts and then this past week he uh after all this practice and assembling of many talents he dropped an album.

It's an entire album.

Uh you can find it on You.

Tube or just go to the internet.

You can search for it.

Akira Leon plus my name.

It'll pop right up.

And he launches it last week.

And last I checked it had 6 million views.

Now by the time the podcast clips were made, I had discovered a uh solution to my voice problem surgery.

Um, and it took several years for me to get my voice back to strong enough that I could podcast.

So, by the time he took the clips, I had learned persuasion.

I'd written books uh that were part of my talent stack uh on advice, affirmations, and I'd found a way to be persuasively verbal.

So, I wasn't trying to do any music because I have no musical talent whatsoever, but I was I was trying to make my voice as compelling and useful as possible.

Now, I'm going to I'm going to expand the definition of my voice to include not just how it sounded, but what I said, because by then I'd learned to speak persuasively.

And when you listen to it, you'll see that the persuasion part, the the clips are really unusually well picked.

So, it's not everything I've ever said.

A Cure of the Dawn was also talented in figuring out what clips would work well in the music, what would affect people, maybe what affected him, I'm not sure.

And he puts it together.

And if you haven't heard it yet, you will be blown away because he's literally invented an entirely new form of entertainment.

And I've never seen anything in a musical domain.

And you could argue whether it's music or a whole new art form, but I've never seen anything with that.

Nearly 100% of the people listen to it say, "My god, that's good." Uh people put it on and play it all day.

People use it to go to sleep.

Um so back to my definition and my system.

Remember my system was not to get back to where I was because that would be a nasely unpleasant voice that even I would not want to listen to.

But by that time I had learned to speak in a pleasant way.

I had recovered the strength of my voice which took years.

And the podcasting was part of that strategy to make sure that I talked for an hour a day at least.

And the net result is that I produced without any effort on my own part.

I guess I'll say Akira the Don produced with my clips an art form that's better than just about anything you've ever seen.

just unbelievably mind-blowingly uh innovative and just so good.

So good.

So I would recommend that you at least give it a sample.

At least give it a sample.

So now that's an example of uh both he and I using the same system.

I was combining skills.

He was reading about my suggestion to combine skills.

I have a system.

He had a system.

Lots of systems.

And uh it was just many.

It was amazing.

Anyway, so here's my first shout out.

Uh you're going to ask me because you're curious and it's a fair question.

Uh am I sharing in the economics of this?

The answer is no.

No, I have no economic stake.

Not not directly, not indirectly.

And that's exactly what I want to say publicly in case someday my estate decides to decides to challenge it.

I want my estate to know because I'm now saying it in public that it is not my wishes to share economically.

One of the reasons for that is that he has already rewarded me more than money.

You know, money can't compensate.

So the the feeling that I got from watching my voice become not just serviceable but put it in context where it was way better than way better than it ever was that even when I listen to it I say to myself wow I really enjoy listening to me and that is rare.

So you could say that that is perfect because what would be more perfect than going from not being able to speak to being the featured vocalist in a in a special way just talking uh on a hugely successful and influential form of art that didn't exist before.

If that's not perfect, well, I mean, you tell me what is.

So, that's my first compliment and shout out.

The cure the don give it a give it a sample.

Second is somebody I've talked about a lot and you're going to say, "Scott, he's no artist." And I get it.

I get it.

But he does what he does so well that I think is elevated to art, right?

You know, if somebody's just really good at what they do, then they're just really good at what they do.

But some people can take that to such a level that you look at it and you go, "Wow, nobody could do that.

Who who else could do that?

That's art." And the second person is Mike Benz, especially because of what he did the past week.

Now, if you don't know Mike Benz, Benz, you should follow him because I can't really reproduce what he talks about or says, and that's really the point.

He he is uh unreproducible because he's so artistically gifted.

Now, he like Akira the Dan um has told me that I had some influence over his talent stack.

Now I assume that means maybe just in the domain of persuasion.

I don't know the details but I had some influence.

And what his special talent is that I've never seen anybody close is he has this insane encyclopedic memory and knowledge of the intelligence and uh and government structures so that he knows exactly who is connected to whom, what organizations and people are connected, who's married to who, who used to work with who, who where the money flowed And he combines that incredible knowledge that I don't think honestly I don't think there's another person in the world who has his knowledge of just how things are fit together.

But he combines that with just crazy uh pattern recognition.

And so he has this unique ability um that has made a lot of MAGA people happy.

I don't know if he would call himself MAGA, but he, you know, he he sort of operates in that world more than the other.

Um, so he does a podcast and he's developed all these skills.

You know, he's musical and he combines that.

Um, he plays a piano.

So, you can see that, you know, his brain is a a certain structure.

That's amazing.

Um, so he's learned to podcast.

He's got the business end of it.

He's made lots of network networking connections.

But on top of that, if you add the encyclopedic memory, his knowledge of how everything is connected and now his pattern recognition, he was the first one to untangle in my mind the NGO badness because because the theft that was massive, we'll talk about that later, seemed to be hidden in the complexity.

So you needed someone who could look at this amazing complexity and pick out what mattered and what was noise.

Nobody else can do that.

So first and this is not what he did this week.

He he sort of demystified the whole NGO world and I think I would give him the most credit.

Now obviously Elon Musk is huge part of that and Doge but it was Benz who kind of explained it all to me for the first time but you take that forward and uh this past week in my opinion he's the first one who completely explained the Epstein situation.

Now I can't reproduce his explanation but I'll give you the sort of you know idiot summary.

The idiot summary is that while he was doing a while he was doing a podcast and he was starting to do some pattern recognition of everything we've learned so far, he realized that uh Epstein has been connected to at least four um intelligence agencies.

Again, this is because of his encyclopedic knowledge of who works with who, who was a roommate, who literally literally who was a roommate, who stayed with somebody for an extended period of time, things you would never know, but he does.

And I guess as he was doing the podcast, he suddenly put it all together.

Now, if you haven't heard it, I would tell you to go listen to his version because you want to get the full thing.

But the basic idea is that Epstein has clearly been associated with giant intelligence related money um laundering for several decades, starting way back with something called the BCCI, a big financial entity that apparently was sort of a CIA, you know, money laundering operation.

So, so Benton's ties Epstein back to uh Bear Sterns again all the way back to I think if I'm not mistaken Iran Contra where money was laundered around for the CIA and others.

But so Ben finds the connection not just to the CIA but uh to I believe British intelligence, Saudi intelligence and Israeli intelligence.

So the pattern that he identified and he he shows receipts of who's involved and who Epstein knew and worked with and all that.

It's very clear and now for the first time if you're wondering hey was he working for Israel sometimes.

Hey was he working for the CIA sometimes.

Was he was he taking that skill and using it for the British um intelligence or Saudi Arabia?

Apparently yes.

So he wasn't really wedded to one spy organization.

He was very clearly somebody who worked for all of them.

Now I haven't gotten to the big aha because I know what some of you are thinking.

Some of you are thinking but Scott really it's not about that.

It's about the rich and powerful people that are being protected, right?

And we we already knew he was working with some spy agencies.

So, he's really added nothing, right?

Oh, no.

It completely changes how you see it because once you realize how embedded he was with the intelligence agencies, let's call them the the spy entities, you realize the following.

Uh Ro Connor said, I think yesterday that he wants to I'll tie this together in a minute, that uh that he thinks that uh Pam Bondi broke the law by not releasing all of the Epstein files.

Do you think the Epstein files will be released even if all of the rich and powerful people who might be named could be named?

And the answer is no.

you will never know what all the spy agencies were doing with him because they wouldn't want you to know.

So if the Department of Justice and the Trump administration genuinely wanted to release the entire files, could they do it?

No.

There's not any chance they can do it because the CIA, I'll just use them as a standin for the other intelligence agencies.

the CIA, if they block it, and of course they would have the power, they would have all the power they needed to block anything.

They could literally threaten you with death and total destruction if you didn't do what they said and block their secrets.

And they don't even have to be the kind of secrets that protect the world.

It can just be whatever they wanted blocked.

So here's the thing.

Even if uh well I'll put it another way.

So what this causes is the rich and powerful people who obviously are part of the guilty uh guilty entities.

It wouldn't matter if they even told you go ahead and use my name.

It wouldn't matter if there was, you know, great desire within the Department of Justice and the FBI to actually ounce the rich and powerful.

As long as the CIA could keep that secret, they have a little bit more ownership of those rich people.

So, let me put this in practical terms.

If you were in the CIA and you knew, for example, that Bill Gates had something to to hide, would you be better off uh making sure that that got blocked and it was never released so that you could blackmail him without blackmailing him?

You would never have to say to him, you know, Bill Gates, if you don't do what we want, you know, you're in trouble.

You would never have to say it.

You would just have to be the CIA and say to the say to the rich people, "Here's the deal.

We're going to protect you, but we own you." So, have you noticed how many of the rich and powerful people have government contracts?

So, if you're the CIA, and again, I'm just using them as a standin for um spy agencies, um your best case scenario is that you have a an unspoken threat to make all the rich and powerful people do what you want.

But you combine it with an incentive such as, you know, your multi-billion dollar company could get a lot of government contracts if you're just really good to us.

But if you become kind of a dick and you out us for what we've done, maybe you won't make billions of dollars.

Maybe you'll never get another government contract.

So here's my aha.

My aha is this is not about the rich and powerful being protected.

They get protected for free because the spy agencies want to keep control of both the powerful people and also hide their own secrets and they would be 100% capable of blocking any kind of information.

Now, one of the things that Roana and Thomas Massie may have been blinded to is that uh is that if they allowed within their legislation that u anything that's too sensitive or mentioned a victim could be redacted.

that guarantees that the people who want to redact other stuff can easily do it and just say, "Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we're just protecting the victims." Of course, duh.

Obviously.

And even if those rich and powerful people and even if those victims did want to be protected, they're not the decision makers.

The the spy agency would be in control of those people uh as well as the, you know, what gets blocked and what doesn't.

So to me that answered um the questions that will be answered.

It guarantees that we'll never be satisfied with what comes out of the Epstein files.

Would you agree?

We'll never know why exactly, but once you see that Mike Ben's frame on this and you realize how deeply embedded Epstein had been with the spy agencies for decades, you realize that uh it wouldn't matter what anybody thought about the rich and powerful.

They're just not in charge.

So if your frame was, oh, I think the rich people, you know, called up Pam Bondi and said, you know, hey, I'm a billionaire.

don't out me.

They might have tried, but they don't have the power of the CIA.

If the CIA calls the Department of Justice or the FBI and says, "Here's the deal.

You will not release us, and we don't have to tell you what will happen to you if you do, but you won't." That would put the Department of Justice and the FBI in a very awkward situation, and that's what we see.

So, uh, the big aha here and why I call, uh, Mike Benz an artist is that nobody else could have pulled this together.

And once you realize that the intelligence spy part of it is not just an also, but it's the the dominant theme, then you realize you're never going to see the the bottom of the barrel.

They will completely nickel and dime us to death.

They will drag it out.

They might blame other people.

Maybe there'll be a distraction.

Maybe a UFO will land.

But one thing you can guarantee won't happen is that the public will never be satisfied that they saw what really was going on.

So just to be clear, I assume I assume it's obvious that rich and powerful people are being protected, but not for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

they would be protected for the benefit of the spy agencies who would then have greater control over them for whatever it is that they wanted to control it.

Pretty impressive.

All right, so that's artist number two.

You should follow Mike Pence.

Artist number three, you may have heard of this one.

Donald Trump.

Now, in my opinion, Trump has raised the art of trolling, maybe persuasion, too, to a level that we'll never see again, completely unparalleled, and so successful that I laugh when I see it.

Let me give you some examples.

Um, so he did the Hall of Presidents where he put a president auto pan instead of Biden and then he put insulting descriptions of Obama and the Obama presidency.

And what did that cause?

Well, all the Democrats and the and the legitimate news are like, "Oh, you can't do that." Ah, and it and it made them focus on what had to be the least important thing happening in the world.

Meanwhile, while all that shelf space was being eaten up by what Magga thought was funny, most of us uh and the and the uh his critics thought, "Oh, here's an easy one.

You know, he's left us this easy attack.

we're gonna say that he's a narcissistic bad person and it's like a real easy story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, that's just one thing.

He also did the Rob Reiner insults sort of insults that everybody said that's too soon.

Like even even MAGA people were saying no no I don't support that.

It's too soon.

But like the Hall of Presidents, it was a troll.

Meaning that uh it wasn't just about uh what he thought was funny.

He was again distracting Democrats and distracting the news into the least important thing that was happening.

Was there anything in the world that Trump was doing that was less important than what he said about uh Rob Reiner?

No.

No.

So again, he's got the Democrats and the the press that doesn't like him thinking, "Oh, you put a oh, you put an easy target on your back this time.

Watch what bad things we say about your character." And then the the the my favorite part is renaming the Kennedy uh center or whatever it's called into the Trump Trump Kennedy Performing Arts.

Is that what it is?

Now, you might say, "But Scott, he's not the one who decided on the name change." But obviously, he had to approve it.

Obviously, if he said, "Don't put my name in that building," they wouldn't do it.

So, clearly, he's behind it.

Now, how was that interpreted?

Well, once again, the Democrats and his critics treated it like it was the most important thing happening because it was a real easy story to write about.

They can't resist an easy one.

No research, no context.

Uh all you have to do is say, "Oh, there he goes again." Being a bad person.

Now, one of the one of the things that these all had in common, and this is why he's a genius at persuasion, is that they were really easy to do.

Super easy to do.

It guaranteed that his enemies fell into their own trap.

So what do I mean by their own trap?

So for years now, the Democrats have tried to frame Trump as a narcissist, right?

They try to frame him as a narcissist with a terrible character who would do things like what I just mentioned and that that's more evidence that he's an authoritarian, narcissistic u monster.

Now, you've probably noticed that a 100% of the people who meet him in person, including Bill Maher and uh the CEO of Nvidia and a bunch of other people who would not necessarily have been pro.

Trump, they've said that when you meet him in person, he's not the character that people talk about.

That he's a really good listener.

And that I experienced the same thing.

He's way smarter than you think.

I also experienced that.

and uh and he and he genuinely has empathy for the things you would want him to have empathy.

So his reality is quite different from what the Democrats believe he is and have been framed of.

So having created their own frame, they can't get out of it.

So if you looked at the Hall of Presidents, the auto pen and the Rob Reiner comment and you were already primed and they have primed themselves to think the only way you can explain this is that he's a narcissistic bastard, then that's what you'll believe is happening.

So there all of his critics, every one of them is interpreting this as well more proof that we were right.

He's a narcissistic bastard.

Now, I've told you this before, but narcissism can have a a bad version and a good version.

I would consider myself a narcissist, but in I'd prefer uh to be the good version.

And what I mean by that is I'd love to get attention and credit, but only if I've done something that is genuinely good for the world or generally good for somebody, right?

I would not want to get credit.

It wouldn't really give me any dopamine if you know somebody accidentally think I thought I did something good.

I want to give credit for what I actually did and it gives me a dopamine high.

But is there anybody who loses in that scenario?

Nobody loses.

If I do something that's good for me because it brings me attention or credit and dopamine, but it's also good for you.

Don't we all win?

If you look at what Trump does, he definitely likes putting his name on things.

He's definitely a type of narcissist who likes to get credit.

We all do.

He's just transparent about it.

He likes to get credit, but he likes to get credit for things he actually did.

He's He's not pretending to help the country.

He's trying to actually turn around the country, actually end wars, actually improve the economy, actually help everybody.

So once you realize that he's got the entire uh Democrat and critics and press doing what I call uh turning into cats, chasing a laser pointer while he's doing useful stuff.

You can see the the genius of it.

Now, I predict I predict and you know I've been right about this sort of thing that history will eventually come to understand his cat with the laser pointer strategy and they'll know that once the Democrats trap themselves in the frame that the only way you can understand him is as a evil narcissist with a broken personality, they can't get out of it.

So, they've trapped themselves in their own frame.

Meanwhile, he can go uh lower pharmaceutical costs, you know, negotiate the end of wars.

He he can lower taxes, he could get bills passed, he can write a 100red EOS.

Uh and then once I introduced this idea on X, and by the way, if you don't think he has elevated trolling to an actual art form, pay attention.

He he has elevated it to an art form.

There will never be another president, I'm I'm assuming, who can match what you're watching happen right now.

But people don't understand what they're seeing because they're mostly trapped in the other frame.

Oh, he has a broken personality.

That's why he's doing all this.

No, he is a narcissist just as I am.

But only the kind who tries to help.

you know, if if I don't do something good for you or if he doesn't do something good for you, it's not going to be that enjoyable to get some credit.

I mean, might be better than that, but but it's not really the the aim anybody would have.

So, uh, the best brander of all time who's famous for putting his name on things, put his name on a few things.

I I saw somebody, you know, one of his critics said to me on X, they said, "Scott, Scott, you fool, what do you think is going to happen when the Democrats get back in power?

You know, don't you think they're going to change the name of the Trump Kennedy Center back to where it was?" To which I say, "Yeah, of course.

That's exactly what I expect that if Democrats get in charge, they will change the name back to whatever they want it to be.

And will that bother me?

No.

I will say three years of making them chase the laser pointer was all he wanted.

Now if you know Republicans stayed in charge for longer, he would like it better.

And then somebody said to me, "But Scott, you know, sure you say he's persuasive, but why hasn't uh why why are his popularity numbers low?" to which I say,"Well, did I miss an election?

Was there some kind of election this week where it mattered what Trump's popularity was?" No.

He can allow you to think bad things about him so long as he's building a record of doing successful things, which he is.

And uh yeah, you're going to have to wait, you know, until the actual midterms to see where his popularity stands by then.

All right.

So, I call that art.

Speaking of persuasion, there's an article in Fox News that this is the year that conservative groups declared the tipping point on climate hysteria.

Do you think there would be a tipping point on climate hysteria just because people like me and lots of other people on the right especially um have presented the facts?

Well, it helps.

But I think it was Trump who has been steadfast in saying that at least the climate alarm part is overdone.

not not necessarily that we are or not getting warmer but how much worry we have about it makes sense.

He has also removed a lot of the impediments to nuclear power and also said if you're going to build a you know giant AI data center uh you'd better you'd better build your own power center.

Now suddenly suddenly all these big companies believe they can build nuclear power plants that they would use for their own operations.

H how good is that?

I mean, the the benefit that that should bring to the world, even if just one of those big companies figures out how to build a a functional, modular, smalish, but but big enough uh nuclear power center, either fision or fusion um is one of the biggest things will ever happen in humanity.

And that would be because Trump persuasively has been pro- energy energy energy in every form.

He's been pro getting rid of uh regulations which allowed these big companies to have a path to do this and he's approved the idea that individuals could have their own power plants and he's pro AI.

So he's exactly exactly where we need him to be for society to get to that next level.

So that's pretty persuasive.

Um, I haven't talked about this much, but you know the story about US senator from Utah, Mike Lee.

He introduced this legislation uh to have uh letters of mark m a r q ue.

Apparently, the constitution specifies that you can do this.

And what it does is it allows the federal government to authorize private citizens, should they be qualified to do it, to form their own little military to go after pirate ships.

Now, in this case, they're sort of defining the pirate ships as the drug smugglers.

So the idea is that uh that free market people would get to attack these uh cartel assets and keep what they they got.

So if they, you know, found $10 million sitting around in some cartel asset, they could just keep it.

And that that's what the the law specifically allows.

So we're not talking about people who don't know how to do this business.

We're talking about, you know, retired uh SEALs, you know, retired top operators who might want to bring together their own private little army uh just for plundering the cartels.

Now, I saw a comment by Elon Musk that I haven't figured out how to interpret.

Uh, I don't have the exact quote, but in response to um Mike Lee's post about it, uh, Musk said something like, "That should work out super well." Does that sound like sarcasm or does it sound like he's agreeing that should work out super well?

So, I don't know what Elon thinks.

Uh it could go it could be either way.

But in my opinion, if you just look at it from a persuasion perspective, every time you make it harder for the cartel to operate or you suggest that it will very soon become harder because we don't know if this will pass, it might not pass.

Um, it should change the behavior of the target group because if nobody had ever brought up the idea of letters of mark, you could assume that your only risk was the US military and that at some point maybe the public would get tired of it or or whatever.

But by even suggesting, which Mike Lee's legislation does, it suggests that there's a way to make it zero expense for the government while being completely legal and constitutional and almost certainly having some big impact on smugglers.

The mere risk that things could go to that level should already make them change their behavior because they don't want to be easy targets.

And the free market would create these little battle groups that would certainly take down some of them.

You know, it wouldn't have to take down all of the drug dealers and all of their assets.

It would just have to introduce this new level of risk.

And imagine if you will that the first letter of mark uh private battle group.

Let's say they they take over a uh cartel shipment and they they capture $300 million in cash.

How many how many of those new battle groups would form the next day?

A lot.

It would only take one success where somebody essentially pirate stole the cartel assets and made it work and it was all legal.

Only have to do it once and it would the free market would flood it with other participants.

So I don't know what Elon meant.

He may have easily meant that this is exactly the kind of thing that could go wrong or he might have meant what I just said.

I don't know.

But it wouldn't change my opinion that even if it doesn't get approved from a persuasion uh perspective, it's one more good kick in the ass for the the cartels.

Well, according to Sai Post Karina Pachova, there's a non- intoxicating cannabis compound that might reverse opioid induced brain changes.

So, it's possible that there's something in cannabis, not not smoking it, but some kind of chemical in it that would make a big deal in your brain if you had opioid induced problems.

Now, obviously, I don't believe, you know, all the the science about weed or anything else, but it's kind of interesting.

So apparently today there's going to be another Epstein file dump.

I already told you don't expect you'll ever see the bottom of the barrel that it might be just a nickel and dime drip drip drip until you give up.

So, I would imagine that even if the CIA or somebody else is blocking the good stuff, I would imagine that they would still have to do a little trickle.

So, it feels like they are doing something.

But you'll never know.

You'll never know what they held back.

And indeed, now there claims that 16 files so far among the many thousands that were taken down from the website that had the the Epstein files on it.

Why?

Don't know.

Will we ever know?

No.

Do you think uh do you think that was because Pam Bondi wanted to do it or because uh the DOJ wanted to do it or do you think that rich and powerful people wanted to do it?

We'll never know.

You'll never know.

All right.

So, in other news, Scientific America says that AI video streaming is coming.

So apparently Disney did the smartest thing they can do in the age of AI.

They inked a deal with Open AI so that instead of Open AI essentially stealing their IP, they have an agreement where Open AI can make videos.

They have some uh Disney assets if they if they pay for it and they reach some kind of standards.

But we're still at a point where you could only get a few minutes.

So even if you had all the IP rights from Disney and you had the best technology that Open AI can give you today, you wouldn't be able to make a movie, but you can make, you know, little clips.

And some say that we might only be a year away if you added some other technologies to it from making a featurelength movie just with AI and some existing assets for IP.

Now, here's what I think.

What's missing in this analysis is that nobody wants to watch a three-hour movie.

that the days of watching long form movies are really kind of coming to an end.

And if you have not experienced that yet, uh let me recommend the best video entertainment platform that exists today.

If you're on X, if you haven't tried the video button, so there's a there's a button that just produces an endless string of video that apparently the AI that's built into X uh knows you would be interested in.

What's magic about it is they're all they're all short.

Um almost none of them are AI produced.

The AI is simply finding things that exist.

Um they scroll automatically.

And that's the magic sauce.

If you go to Instagram and you play a short video, you might love that video, but your finger still has to scroll to the next one.

So, you have to be physically involved like every, you know, 30 seconds.

If you go to X, you just hit that video button once, put your phone down, and you can listen to videos that it correctly knows you would be interested in all day long.

It will just give you endless dopamine hits in short form.

Once you get addicted to that endless dopamine in short form, you're not really going to want to watch a three-hour movie.

Uh to me, it's intolerable to watch anything over an hour.

Well, it's almost intolerable to watch anything over five minutes at this point.

So, I do not believe that the Disney Open AI collaboration is going to invent something like, oh, we have all new long- form movies that are fully approved and people like watching.

I don't think you can get there from here.

And it's not because you can't do it technologically.

Probably that will happen eventually.

is that you'll never want to watch it because the alternative which is infinite small hits way better just way better.

So again if you haven't tried it try it for five minutes and you're going to see that Musk has again done the impossible which is he leapfrogged every video every video platform.

It's now by far the best one.

It's not even close.

Well, let's talk about Venezuela.

According to Axios, now you know that uh Trump has put a blockade on them shipping their oil, but the blockade for whatever reason uh does not include every tanker all the time.

So the news said that Venezuela was sending a military escort with its blockaded tankers so that the US would, you know, maybe leave them alone.

Now, that never made sense because if the US wanted to take down a Venezuelan tanker, it wouldn't take too long.

But it turns out that they're not even escorting um the banned tankers.

There were some that just were not included.

But he wanted to make it look like he was being tough.

Madura did.

So to make it look like Venezuela was acting tough, they put a military escort on some tankers that didn't need it because nobody could have blockaded them anyway.

So what did the US do?

The US The US boarded them anyway.

So they weren't even included in the blockade.

But because Venezuela was trying to, you know, make this move that would that would make it look like they were, you know, they were somehow had some control of their own fate, which they don't.

Uh Trump matched that by boarding them anyway.

So, I thought that was funny.

It's not important, but it shows you that in the chess game of, you know, who's got the power and who's got the risk, uh, the US, I think they won that round.

And by the way, who would Venezuela complain to about the fact that the US blockaded them and boarded them?

there's nobody to complain to.

You know, if you're in our hemisphere and we've got gigantic naval assets and Trump says, you know, why don't why don't you board that thing and see what's in there or even seize it.

Who's going to stop it?

So again, Venezuela is just flailing around.

They don't have any any real response.

Well, according to the Spanish National Research Council, there's some research that says there's a compound that could revolutionize traumatic brain injury treatment.

So, apparently they found a compound that if you give it to a brain damaged mouse somewhat immediately after the mouse is damaged, you know, at least close, um it will just reverse the brain damage.

So finally we will not have so many brain damaged mice.

I was worried about all the mice with the brain damage, but apparently they've got a got a handle on that now.

So on CNN there was a one of the talking heads is uh Aisha Mills who describes herself as a black lesbian and uh she was mad about Trump and she said the following sentence on the air.

I'm not going to be lectured by some white man who has no idea what he's talking about.

Now, she was talking about another guest.

I forget his name, but he was a you a right-leaning guest.

It wasn't Scott Jennings.

It was somebody else.

and she said although he's never said that Trump has never said he has better genes than her or black lesbians or what uh he has said he has good genes and that some of the people coming in the immigrants don't have good genes now is the problem that he said it or is the problem that it's not true because it does seem to me that uh regardless of, you know, gender or sexual orientation, regardless of ethnicity.

Are there not some people in the world who got lucky?

You know, I'm I'm 5'8.

Do I have good jeans?

Well, I would say if I were 6'4, even same ethnicity, etc., I would say I have better jeans.

If I were like Bo Jackson, you know, one of the greatest athletes of all time, would I say I have good jeans?

Privately, I would.

Of course.

So, nobody disagrees with Trump that the people who were coming in as immigrants would include some people with good genes, some people with bad genes.

If you imagine that that makes a difference in your performance and you could control for the good genes and let's say the thing you controlled for was intelligence and competency.

Wouldn't you prefer allowing in only people who had genetic potential for success?

Again, that could be within an ethnic group.

So you don't you don't have to say we don't admit any Albonians.

You just say we do admit Albonians, but they have to have demonstrated some level of success, which would indirectly be an indication that at least your genes were not holding you back.

So just to be clear, I think I have good genes for some intellectual capacities.

I think I have bad genes for surviving to old age.

Apparently my my medical genes are not so good.

So if you can imagine the burden I put in the health care system this past month, oh my god, am I getting my money's worth?

So, would you want, if I were not already an American, would you want to let me in the country knowing that I'm spending, I don't know, a million dollars a month of the country's money in the form of a health insurance.

Uh, and I'm not adding that much back in.

Well, you know, saying that I have a genetic problem seems a little cruel, but is it wrong?

And it's not racist because again, I'd be a typical white guy.

I just have flawed genes in an area that would become very expensive for the country.

And even I wouldn't let me in.

If I had a choice, I'd be like, "Oh, are you British?" Well, why don't you let the British take care of your expensive health problems and you know, stay where you are, Scott.

So the the thing about this story is that you can't imagine anybody but a black lesbian, again, that would be her own description of herself, would be able to get away with that and then someday also be back on the air on CNN.

So we don't expect that kind of behavior, but uh we'll see if she gets away with it.

We'll see if she's ever back in there.

Um, so House Minority Leader Hakee Jeff was asked about Representative James Comr and Comr is putting together uh some investigation into Somali taxpayer fraud in Minnesota.

So when asked about that, Keem Jeffy's answer was that Representative Comr is quote a joke, an embarrassment, an unserious individual, and a malignant clown.

Now, is that the right answer to a question about him investigating massive, well understood, and known fraud in Minnesota?

Not really.

But what it highlights is that the Democrats are springloaded to go for personal attacks because they don't have um arguments and they don't have policies.

So if you don't have popular policies or arguments, you make it about the person.

So with Trump, no matter what he's doing, the cats chasing the pointer go, "Oh, narcissist, narcissist.

He's trying to make money for himself.

he's a clown.

And then they extend that because they think it works, I guess, to other Republican leaders.

So, this Republican leader has an idea how to fix something, in this case, an investigation.

And the answer is not investigating is good and it's not investigating is bad.

It's there's something wrong with that guy's character.

Next question.

Does that work?

I mean, is that a strategy that you could imagine works?

Is it time for an interstitial sip?

I think it's time for another sip.

Yes, it's true.

I have paid lots more taxes than I've used in healthcare.

But still, I think he made my point.

Well, according to interesting engineering, China now has unmanned drones that can autonomously refill the fuel in other drones.

So, assuming that technology works, and apparently it does, um the distance that China can send a drone just massively increased.

There's always a lot of drone news.

I won't give you all of it, but it is kind of fascinating to watch how fast drone warfare is is uh extending because obviously that's the future.

According to Newsmax, gas prices dropped to the lowest December level since 2020.

Now, I know Democrats argue, "Oh, that's cherrypicking." And you know, I saw Jessica Catalof make this point.

This a good point that um if you cherrypick a few states it looks like gas prices are super low but if you took the average it wouldn't look as low.

I get that but still you have to you have to say that gas prices have gone down that there's no doubt that they've gone down.

Um I'm going to make the following persuasion point and we talk about some fun stuff.

Um, every time Trump solves a problem before the midterms is bad for Republicans.

Does that make sense?

Every time Trump solves a big national problem, should he be ending a war?

Should he be lowering gas prices?

Should he be lowering pharmaceutical prices?

These are all things he's likely to have accomplished before the midterms.

Will that cause more people to vote for for Republicans?

No.

And the reason it won't persuasion wise, the reason it won't is because people instantly bank those successes and they say, "What do you got for me next?

They're not going to vote for anybody because of something that somebody already did." They just say, "That's done." Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm happy that gas prices are low.

Yeah.

I'm happy that that war ended, but I'm not going to vote for you for that because it's done.

It's off the table.

So Trump is in this weird situation where the more big problems he solves, the less likely Republicans can stay in power because voters would be rational.

And they say, "We're not voting for the past.

We're voting for what you're going to do next." So, so, so Democrats will of course make a case that they would be better for the future.

Republicans will try to do the same, but they'll spend a bunch of time talking about what they've already done, and that won't activate anybody.

So, what would you do if you were advising Republicans on how to get out of that trap that what you've already succeeded at will not motivate anybody to vote?

it's only what they expect in the future.

Here is my suggestion.

I'll probably talk about this a lot more in the future.

Um, you need, if you're Republicans, you need to show that you're going to solve whatever people think is their biggest problem.

And I'm going to say cost of living.

And I'm going to say grocery prices generally, even though we did a good job with eggs, right?

Here's what you would do.

you would admit that that's a big problem.

Step one, don't don't say I already lowered egg prices.

Don't say you did a good job on gas.

And Trump is making that mistake.

And that is a mistake.

What he should say is, yeah, we haven't made a dent yet in grocery prices, but here's our plan.

Because the plan, if it's good enough, would motivate people to say, "All right, that's a good plan." you know, we don't know if you'll succeed, but you're describing a real good free market um path that is better than whatever the Democrats have.

So, let me give you a concrete example.

Suppose Trump said something like this.

Uh yes, we have not done a good enough job with grocery prices overall.

Now, it would not be limited to grocery prices.

I'll extend this later to everything from transportation to medical expenses.

So, we have not done a good job.

Here's our plan.

By this date, we're going to try to get from this this number to some smaller number.

And here's what we're going to do to get there.

Not everything we try will work, but we're going to keep hammering on this like a top priority because there are several things we can do that have a good chance of working, but it might take you a year and nobody has a better idea than that.

So, here are some examples.

So, let's say um Trump said part of the reason food is expensive is because of too much regulation.

Republicans like to hear that.

Oh, too much regulation.

I think Thomas Massie would be the the best one to talk to this.

So, Trump might say, "One of the things we're going to do is we're going to change the following regulations so that if you're a farmer, you could directly sell your food to consumers who are nearby." Now, that would take away the transportation, the middle man.

Um, it would take away just a whole bunch of expenses and turn some of your grocery buying into more of a local farmers market situation.

Now, these are just examples.

So, if you think that wouldn't work, just focus on the concept, right?

So would you be convinced if Thomas Massie agreed with Trump that if you cut these these specific regulations and you let the free market and farmers compete and sell what they want locally etc.

Would that feel like it would lower grocery prices?

The answer is yes.

So instead of saying you haven't done it yet, you could look at the plan.

You could say okay one year from now uh you will have unleashed the free market.

Yes.

Yes.

But that's not enough.

It's not enough.

So you need more to it.

Suppose uh because a big part of the expense of farming is power.

Suppose Trump said we're going to allow farms to have their own power plants and we're going to make that easy and we'll get rid of regulation.

So, we'll take the cost of electricity or just power in general, and we'll greatly decrease it, maybe not overnight, but by making the cost of producing the food way less because they've got cheap energy.

Maybe that's one thing.

Um, it would be similar to the strategy with AI.

Then you say, "We're going to use AI and maybe something like the Boring Company to build underground uh farms.

Uh you're going to use Optimus to pick the food.

You're going to have self-driving trucks.

So basically, you you tell a story where a year from now you'll have experimental because it would be trials.

It'd be experimental.

You'll have experimental farms.

They're local.

They're completely AIdriven.

They got robots, they got self-driving trucks, and they're, you know, and they're producing their own energy.

That's a compelling story because you can imagine that so well.

And then produce some pictures that show the the robots bringing down the cost, etc.

So the idea is for Republicans to admit that you can't make grocery prices list go down overnight, but what you can do is have a rational plan to get there that Democrats would not have.

Because you got Bernie who's trying to stop AI.

So if you've got one guy who's trying to stop AI and another one that says, "Here's our plan to use AI to reduce grocery prices by 40%." It's just going to take a year or two.

Which one would you pick?

There's only one who has a plan.

All right.

So, that's my persuasion suggestion is you have to have a one or twoear plan.

It has to be something that's based on something you really do.

You know, AI, remove regulations, etc.

You have to have a very specific target that's not crazy.

Even if you get your critics to argue whether your target is achievable, you still win because they would still be comparing it to the Democrats with no plan at all or or some socialist plan.

That doesn't sound good.

All right.

In other news, No Ridge says there's a study that low glycemic index carbs in your diet uh may be the key to dementia prevention.

So, if you eat the right kind of carbs and the ones who have a low glycemic index, you can protect your brain.

Do you think that study is reliable?

I'm going to say it depends if they controlled for other lifestyle correlations because it seems to me that the people who eat more bad carbs would be lower income.

you know, it there would be something about the way they live or what they have access to that might affect their brain health.

So, I don't know if I would trust that study.

I mean, it's believable.

I would think that eating the right food is better than eating the bad food if you're protecting your brain, but it might be just correlation with lifestyle.

All right.

Tulsi Gabbard had an interesting post on X and I'm going to read it to you because her exact wording matters.

So she said deep state wararm mongers and their propaganda media are again trying to undermine President Trump's effort to be bring peace to Ukraine and indeed Europe by falsely claiming that the US intelligence community in quotes agrees to and supports the EU NATO viewpoint that Russia's aim is to invade slashconquer Europe in order to jin up support for their pro-war policies.

The truth is, now here's the the money shot.

The truth is that US intelligence assesses that Russia does not even have the capability to conquer and occupy Ukraine uh uh much less invading and occupy Europe.

Does that sound accurate to you?

Do you think that historians will record that it was ridiculous that anybody was worried that Russia would try to conquer all of Europe that that they can't even take over the rest of Ukraine?

Well, she might be right.

I'm leaning toward thinking that's a good take, but the part that's not included is we don't know what the future holds.

So if your definition of war expands from, you know, a Ukraine-like shooting war to include economic war, AI war, space platforms, you know, weapons we've never seen before at whatever cost.

So you could easily imagine that Russia is not capable of of taking over Ukraine, much less Europe, but that they could get there if they were incentivized to do it.

So, I'm not 100% on board with it's impossible, but I think I agree with Tulsi that the smarter take is that Russia doesn't really have that capability even if they had that ambition.

What do you think?

You we can't read Putin's mind.

He might want to take over Europe, but I do think that would be a reach.

Well, in other technology, Rohan Paul is reporting on X that China has a new capsule, a pill, uh, that can give you a stomach exam in eight minutes, and all you have to do is swallow the swallow the pill, uh, and it's priced around $280.

Now, that gets us back to what I was talking about earlier.

Healthcare is too expensive and I don't believe that beyond the pharmaceutical costs that Trump is doing a good job on that the Republicans have the greatest plan.

Wouldn't it be great if they said, "Hey, uh, we're going to work on using AI to lower your um your health care costs.

And here's what we're going to do and here's how much it will lower it by what time and how we're going to get there." For example, you can just figure out what's the most expensive stuff in healthcare.

And then you say, "All right, Amazon.

Amazon, you've got to tell us what you can do to lower health care costs." And they're actually doing things.

Uh Mark Cuban, you have to tell us what you can do maybe with our help uh to lower pharmaceutical costs.

Um Elon Musk um I don't know what he's doing in the healthcare realm, but you can say tell us how you could use AI and Grock that's AI and robots to lower health care costs.

So you basically put all the billionaires on notice that you're expecting them to use the free market, not the government, free market to figure out how to lower health care costs and to do it in a way that only the free market can and that the government will help them by getting out of the way, you know, cutting regulations where you need.

That would be a compelling story.

So So you see the concept, you should talk about the future.

You should not pretend you can do it overnight.

You have a timeline and you have a little bit, but you don't oversp specify how you get there.

You say, "We're going to look at these things as a primary way and in a year and a half this is what we want to see for healthcare." And then of course fraud is a gigantic part of health care costs and maybe maybe all of our costs.

So apparently uh you know Anna Kasparian you've seen her a lot online.

Um she said the California money is that was supposed to be spent on homelessness.

She said is being funneled into NOS's and executives making half million a year.

And she said just experience what I've seen on the ground in California has you know made her mad I guess.

So here's what I think.

I think the Republicans should offer the following solution to all this fraud.

That there should be some kind of mandatory auditing structure that accompanies every kind of government expense, whether it's federal or state.

Now, you're going to say to me, but Scott, you're adding a layer of, you know, bureaucracy.

No, I would say that the only people who could do the auditing would be the free market.

So the government would not be an auditor.

The government would simply require that there be one and that the free market would provide the auditor.

Now would the free market want to be in the business of catching fraud?

Oh yeah.

if if it's like the letters of Mark and they can get a piece of the fraud or a piece of the savings.

So if you said okay big consulting company you've been largely worthless but how would you elect to form a free market um auditing function that you can sell to anybody who's doing anything with spending and then the government when they get some money approved they absolutely can't spend the money until they picked one of the free market entities that will audit them.

It has to be like a real serious audit.

Now the first thing you're gonna say is Scott then the auditors will become the frauds because the the the people who uh let's say are watchd dogs they generally get captured by industry.

So here's the next part.

You would use some kind of AI structure to monitor the auditors.

So the auditors would monitor the actual expense, but the AI structure, which doesn't yet exist, but could, would monitor the auditors.

Does that make sense?

If if you let the auditors just do what they do in a free market way, they would become the criminals.

But if they knew that there was no way they could get away with it because AI could easily identify, hey, it looks like that money is not going to the right place and it looks like the auditor is lying about it.

Uh you wouldn't want the AI to be the auditor, although I wouldn't rule that out.

But in stage one, you you'd want the AI to simply uh make transparency so we can all see what the auditors are up to.

That's my idea for that.

And I think that the entire country, left and right, would be on board with all of our money being audited.

Now, you might say, Scott, it will cost so much to pay the auditors that you would you would basically lose as much money as a fraud.

To which I think, I doubt it.

You know, I'll bet you could pay an auditing company $10 million a year to prevent $100 million in fraud and that that would probably never stop.

So, that's just my assumption.

Then you can tweak it as you go.

You know, you don't have to be sold on it being exactly one way forever.

Speaking of all these things, the postmillennial is reporting, Hayden Cunningham, that apparently a bunch of American tech billionaires are already looking to create tech cities abroad.

I assume they're doing it abroad to avoid US um red tape.

So, the first question is, do they really need to do it abroad or should they be doing these tech cities and I'll describe them in a minute.

Should they be doing it in the US?

Um, probably Trump could help them there by saying, "All right, here here are some zones in the US so you don't have to take your your cool city to some island somewhere.

We we'll keep it on shore." So, here's what the proposed and they're not built yet, but the proposed tech cities look like.

So, you would organize a city around a specific industry.

This is something that China already does.

And you get all kinds of benefits if you created a city where for example they become the experts on building robot actu what do you call them actuaries well it doesn't matter so whatever that tech industry is you build your city around it so the first thing is gigantic benefits from having all the experts in one geographic place but they would also be looking to build this thing so that has all the smartest ways to build a community.

And no, I'm not talking about a 15 minutes city and stop being a dick.

Uh this is something that they can endlessly tweak.

So they would basically look to um optimize every part of a city.

So optimize transportation, optimize health care, optimize food production and all that.

Now here's the good part.

Nobody believes that you could do this on the first try.

So, it only makes sense if the people who are funding it and backing it are the kind of entrepreneurs who have ridiculous wealth and they already know how to tweak things until they work.

Because again, things like this don't work on the first try.

But if you could say, "All right, that didn't work.

Let's try this.

That didn't work.

Let's try this." You could get there.

And it turns out that some of the people involved would be Lincoln co-founder Reed Hoffman, uh, VC Capitalist Mark and Trees, and that was my ding-ding ding ding ding name.

So, you might not love Reed Hoffman, but he's good at what he does.

And if you hear that Mark Andre is involved in something big and important, take that seriously.

He's one he's one of the good guys.

And if he says this is worth doing and he puts his companies or his own money behind it, that's important.

So this I'm sort of being a mini version of Mike Ben for you.

If you don't know the players, you can't really understand how much potential this is.

But if I told you that Peter Teal was involved and I told you that Mark Andre was involved and I told you that Reed Hoffman was involved and forget about his politics just just focus on his technical and entrepreneurial ability which is extreme.

If I told you they were involved you would know that they could tweak and they wouldn't run out of money and everything they did made sense.

So, so basically you tell a story about how in the United States and again these are planned for overseas but uh Trump could bring them bring at least some of them domestic.

Um I think this is exactly the right direction.

I've been talking about this for years that you should design a city, not move into a city that is designed itself over time because they would be, you know, they would be so inefficient.

So you you have to start with a, you know, just a blank field and that's what they're doing.

All right.

Uh the study the New York Post is writing about that late night comedians are going even harder against conservatives than before.

Across all late night comedy shows, 90% of the jokes targeted conservatives.

And one of the few exceptions were when Greg Guffeld was on the Tonight Show, I think.

So if you thought that the Trump administration was going to censor all the lefties, nothing like that happened.

They they got worse instead of better.

Here's another one.

Another story from the Daily Neuron.

Somebody is speculating that consciousness may be a belief system, not a scientific fact.

Does that sound right?

That consciousness might be a belief system and not a scientific fact.

When I talk about consciousness, people say, "But Scott, you because I talk about AI having consciousness." The the way I define consciousness, and this is my own definition, is the ability to predict what's going to happen, you know, even in your immediate environment, to observe what does happen and then to adjust accordingly.

So, three parts.

If you have all three parts, I would say you're conscious.

You predict that, for example, that if I drop this banana, I predict it will hit the floor.

When I let go of it and it does drop, there's very little difference between what I expected and what happened.

So, I don't need to make an adjustment.

But suppose something unexpected happened.

Then my feeling, my my the friction I'm going to call it, would be greater.

It's like, whoa.

If you go to the mailbox and you open your mailbox and a spider monkey jumps out, that would be so different from what you expect that you would have a big reaction.

So the the bigger the difference between what you predicted and what actually happened, the bigger the sensation.

So that's my own definition of consciousness.

By that definition, uh there there's a new study that says AI doesn't make uh corrections.

Um meaning that if you told AI to do a task, it doesn't observe that it's doing it wrong and then accurately make an adjustment.

It just keeps trying to do the task.

And that might not be fixable with any kind of technology we currently have.

But if you get to the point where AI could do that where it would predict what's going to happen next, watches what happens next and then adjust adjust accordingly in an intelligent way.

I would call that a new life form.

That would be a new life form in my opinion because that would be genuine um consciousness.

Now, people who disagree with me say things like this, but Scott, consciousness is a subjective experience, and your AI doesn't have subjective experiences.

To which I say, what's an what is a subjective experience?

That's an indefinable word salad definition.

What is it?

Ju just stop for a moment and ask yourself what exactly would be a subjective experience.

Isn't everything you do something you're looking at and interpreting through your own frame?

So I would say that AI might not have feelings, you know, like it wouldn't feel the same as me tapping my hand, but that's not consciousness.

You could have consciousness without your body even having feeling.

So, if you were completely paralyzed, but your brain could still predict what's going to happen, notice what happens, and then think differently because you can't you can't move, but you would think differently because of what happened, would you be conscious?

You would have no feeling.

So, would that be a subjective experience?

So I would argue that when people say consciousness is based on a subjective experience, that's just word salad.

There there's no meaning to that if you dig down.

But my definition of consciousness is purely mechanical.

So if the AI could tell you later, oh, I was very surprised that the spider monkey jumped out of my mailbox.

So I had to make a big, you know, big correction to my next prediction.

That would be conscious to me.

I don't know that AI could ever get there.

It's not, it's not really close to it now.

And there was a new paper uh that suggested that people don't realize that it can't do that.

It can't adjust.

All right, I'm going long today because I told you it's a it's a special podcast.

All right, apparently Starbucks is uh being sued by the state of California for hundred billion dollars over their DEI policy.

So apparently the attorney general in Florida is suing Starbucks because uh they discriminated against non-black employees.

Well, I'm happy every time uh discrimination is reduced.

So I wish them luck.

Um Wall Street Journal had an article that you're going to recognize as very compatible with things I've been saying.

So, the Wall Street Journal said, I think it was yesterday, quote, "Something is profoundly wrong with the US welfare system." Duh.

A problem that runs far deeper, and the far deeper is the the key here, and is more dangerous than the shocking fraud in Minnesota and has been making headlines.

Real federal welfare spending.

Real federal welfare spending has soared by 765% more than twice as fast as blah blah blah other spending and now cost $1.4 trillion annually.

Uh where that money was simply doled out evenly to about 20 million families that the government defines as poor.

And each household would have received more than $70,000 a year.

$70,000 a year from my tax tax money.

Now, here's the part you might recognize as being compatible with my opinions.

Somewhere around a year ago, and I'm not sure about the timing.

It occurred to me that there was no way our deficits or government deficits could be as big as they are.

There was just no way unless something like a trillion dollars a year was being stolen.

And at the time I said to myself, well, I mean, there's no way that a trillion dollars a year could be stolen and I would be unaware of it.

But then Doge happened and then Mike Ben happened and we learned about the NOS's and how there's this entire gigantic complicated structure that is designed entirely for stealing our money.

Now once you realize that there's a whole mechanism for stealing your money and it's pervasive everywhere at the state level at the federal level and that it's been running for years and that the people who are hiding it are benefiting from it and that and that the entire thing was invisible because we didn't have a sense of breaking the complexity.

So back to earlier comments, the way we pierced we I didn't do anything but the way the country pierced the complexity to discover that we have a fraudbased system is Mike Benz and Doge.

If we did not have both of those things, and I'll I'll just say Elon Musk as a proxy for Doge.

If we didn't have both of those brains figuring out what the hell went on, we still wouldn't know that a trillion dollars a year, that's my own estimate, trillion a year, was being stolen.

Now, we know, and the Wall Street Journal is sort of signaling, uh, you think this was big, you have no idea how big this is.

So, here's my reframe.

My reframe is we all assumed that the government had a spending problem as in it spends too much.

My current view is that it has a lack of auditing problem.

It doesn't have a spending problem.

It has a nobody's watching the spending problem.

And that if we could solve that using the concept I talked about earlier with guaranteed audits.

If you could solve that, would you reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars a year?

And I think the answer is yes.

And if you had asked me that a year ago, I would have said not.

Well, not a trillion.

You know, maybe you'll find 50 billion.

I think it's closer to a trillion.

And this is based on and I think I've mentioned this before.

I used to work in corporate America where I was the budget guy and you know I would have to estimate expenses for everything mostly in the tech world and you develop this instinct where you can just look at a budget and you instantly know what's wrong with it.

And I watched my boss develop that skill and I was amazed.

like I could send I could hand her a spreadsheet and she had done it longer than I had and she could just take a spreadsheet and look at it for five seconds and immediately pick out what numbers probably don't track and then she'd be right and I would say how the hell did you do that?

Like how did you just look at this sea of numbers and you knew that one of them or more than one were wrong?

like how how could you possibly have that intuition because she did it over and over again.

But she couldn't really answer the question except it was based on experience and pattern recognition etc.

But after I had done that same job where I was the one who had to find the problems with the spreadsheet, I also developed that intuition.

So you could hand me a spreadsheet and and I would go bam.

And literally within 5 seconds I could find the wrong number.

Even if it wasn't like wildly wrong, it was just wrong.

I could do it too.

And I never lost that ability.

It was some kind of some kind of learned skill that you would not imagine could be learned.

So, a year ago when I started thinking about how big the the deficits were, the the alarm went off in the back of my head.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

There is no way we could get the deficits that big.

You can't explain it with a pandemic.

You can't explain it with anything except massive fraud.

And that the fraud would have to be in the range of a trillion dollars a year for everything to make sense.

And that's where I'm at.

I I think we're losing a trillion dollars a year.

So, for a long time, I thought our deficit problems were literally unsolvable, and they might be.

You know, Elon Musk talks about everything becoming free in the world of AI and robots.

And maybe that's what saves us.

But I do feel like you could cut our money problems in half if you had the right kind of auditing.

And you could probably do it within two to three years.

And I think we're talking at least a trillion dollars.

All right, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the end of my longest podcast.

I told you it'd be very special.

How'd you like it?

Did you uh did you enjoy the extra?

I'm going to sign off in a minute here, but I think it's time for a closing sip.

See?

So good.

Well, I think being on the steroids helped my show production.

All right.

How many of you like the idea because I can't I can't follow the comments while I'm talking.

So, well, how many of you like the idea the Republicans should build a timeline of what they can do in the future and stop hammering on their past accomplishments, as impressive as they are?

Did that make sense to you?

Did you feel more hopeful because I painted a picture where we have a lot of solvable problems and that the solutions are not super complicated or out of our domain?

They're they're well within our capabilities.

Good.

All right.

Looks like we did well today.

You know, I give you guys credit for any of my successes because would I do any of this if you weren't here?

So, if you're wondering, you know, what have you done that's useful today?

It's this.

It's this.

So, you're my energy source and my reason for continuing to do it.

So, without you collectively, uh you wouldn't have me.

So, if I produce something that you thought had value potentially to the country, you should give yourself a pat in the back because you're definitely part of that uh value stream.

Yeah.

You know, obviously I'm not going anywhere because I'm paralyzed.

So, Oh, my power bricks.

Yeah.

I told this I guess I didn't tell you the story on live stream.

I told the locals people, but uh yeah, my my power brick for my computer got fried by the electricity in the hospital.

And then my other power bricks simply didn't work in the outlets, no matter which outlet we used, but they they seem to be functional at least.

There's a longer story there, but I won't repeat it.

So, remember I told you that one of my persuasion techniques is to sort of monitor if people start using my frames.

So, watch after today if there's any change in the way Republicans talk about their uh midterm approach, meaning lowering lowering expenses and painting a better picture.

If it looks like anybody starts talking differently, it would take it wouldn't happen today, but maybe two weeks from now, if you start see people falling into my frame, then you'll know how powerful persuasion is.

For example, my earliest frame where I was talking about uh Trump making his critics run around like cats following a laser pointer.

If you hear anyone quote that, you'll know I made a dent.

Because once you hear that, you cannot unhear it.

You know, I' I've taught you that visual persuasion is stronger than any other kind.

You can immediately see the cat and immediately see Trump with laser pointer and you'll never forget that.

You just have to hear it once and it's permanently in your brain.

So that's the difference between knowing how to persuade and just saying some things you want people to believe.

Thank you.

Might be time for breakfast.

All right.

I'm just enjoying looking at your comments go by.

If you don't mind, we've got oh god, we got 63,000 people live.

That's some kind of a record.

So, if you don't mind hanging out here for another minute, uh I'm enjoying just watching the show go by.

It makes it kind of problematic to put them online because they get too big, but we'll try to try to make that work.

got what?

Let me see if I can stop that comment.

I I generally can't see the multi-sentence comments.

So, if you're wondering what could get my attention, think in terms of something like a maximum of five words in the comments because the short ones I can often get, but if it's sort of a two or three sentence comment, I can't get that at all.

Now I'll miss the best part of your comment.

The success lessons went well last week.

Good to hear.

You don't have that many.

Maybe five.

Oh, well I see I see all the platforms at the same time.

It could be that the 63,000 number is a cumulative and not what's live watching.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I think you're right.

The live the live watchers are probably closer to 5,000.

You're right.

So, live is closer to 5,000, but uh it's sort of signaling that when people watch it in recorded form, it's going to be a big number.

A comment in five words.

Boom.

I saw it.

Uncle Fungus, you tested my system.

and it worked.

What's the deal with Amfest?

Well, so you notice that all the conservative influencers are obsessed, even if they act like they're not with the, you know, the the Charlie Kirk drama, the Israel drama.

I don't have to be involved in that.

Um, and that's all I have to say.

if they want to do that game, I don't criticize them.

As long as you know what what business they're all in, I think you can just take it for what it is.

So, if you think if you think Candace Owens is trying to be, you know, the news, well, you're probably confused.

If you think she's trying to be interesting and provocative and, you know, any other thing, well, you might be right, but it's interesting.

So, I don't have to love her.

I don't have to hate her.

And part of my problem is I like all the people involved in the fight.

So, you know, whether I agree with or don't agree with Tuck or Carlson, I like him.

Whe whether I agree with or don't agree with Candace, I like her.

You know, I met her once.

Very warm, very talented.

Anything else you want to say about her?

I'll listen to it.

But I don't have to embrace it.

So I don't have to get worked up about it.

And part of the reason is, you know, if push comes to shove and the war starts, we're all going to be on the same team, right?

When the midterms roll around, do you think any of those people are going to prefer a a Democrat victory?

I don't know.

I think none of them would prefer a Democrat midterm victory.

So, we're going to be in the same team.

We're a little bit bored because things are actually working pretty well.

We don't have as much to talk about.

So, I just say it's an interesting show and I can like all the people involved even if I might disagree.

Uh, Rob Schneider give a great speech.

All right, I think we've hung out enough.

I'm going to take my leave.

I appreciate you greatly and uh we'll see you tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be shorter, I think.

But for now, have an amazing Sunday.

Oh, I went way too long.

How you doing? That's my impression of

Joey from Friends. How you doing?

Well, if you didn't expect the show to

go back to its normal time, you're

surprised.

So, here we are. Uh, I am officially

back home from a week in the hospital.

Uh, we we will not dwell on my medical

situation, but suffice to say, I'm

feeling terrific this morning.

and I'm going to give you the best the

best podcast show you've ever seen.

Now, I say that, of course, jokingly,

but it might actually be the best one

you'll ever see.

I have a high standard to beat because

just the other day I was saying and I

meant it by the way. I said that the

all-in pod most recent episode is just

one of the best things I've ever seen in

a podcast. You was about AI and

economics and you know just a bunch of

things that interest me and were

perfectly debated and described. It was

just such a great show. But because I'm

competitive,

uh, I've put together for you a special

show today, a Sunday edition that will

combine all the things you normally like

with a new framing

that I think you'll like a lot. I'm

predicting that. That is my stomach

growling. I'm not using my normal

microphone, so it might get picked up on

the microphone if you don't mind.

But uh has anybody missed the

simultaneous sip?

Wouldn't you like it to go back to

normal?

Yeah, you would. Guess what's coming.

Get your beverage ready cuz we're back,

baby. We're back.

All right. I know why you're here.

You're here for the simultaneous sip.

All you need is a copper mug or a glass

of tanker chalice or sign. A canteen

sugar flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill

it with your favorite liquid. Now, I

like coffee. And join me now for the

unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of

the day. The thing that makes everything

better. It's called the simultaneous

sip. And it happens now. Go.

Oh god.

So good.

Sometimes the best thing in the world is

just to get back to your routine.

So, pretty happy this morning.

All right, here's what's special about

today. I'm going to give an extended

shout out to three artists who blew my

mind this week. Now, I'm using the word

artist and art in a expansive way. So

it's not exactly what you would call art

perhaps, but there are people who have

raised what they're doing to in my

opinion an art form. And I'm going to

start with uh a long windup so that

you've got a context that will make this

much more meaningful. You ready? All

right. So, I mentioned the a few of

these things I mentioned before, but

I've never tied them together in the way

you're going to see. One of them is I've

always been a not always, but for years

I've been a student of the Beatles, you

know, the musical group The Beatles. And

what I what I'm interested in is not

just that how much I liked them, you

know, especially when I was young, but

their processes

and the systems that they used and how

did they get to be so great. Because one

of the things you would note about the

Beatles is if you looked at any one of

their skills, they have lots of skills

across a variety of domains. None of

them look like the best in the world.

So, they're not the best lyricists.

Uh, in fact, a lot of their lyrics were

random.

Uh, they're not the best musicians in

terms of playing their instruments,

which they would even have told you

themselves. You could argue that Ringo

was actually world class you,

but you know, there'd be some debate on

that. Um,

but I was trying to count in my head

after studying them for years how many

skills they had combined because they

had everything from the style to the

sense of humor to the the marketing, the

business. Um they they played multiple

instruments like you said they did their

own lyrics and but on top of all that

um I think McCartney was the the unsung

genius of the group. You know everybody

gets their their credit. They were all

amazing. But McCartney was sort of a

systems over goals kind of a guy. He

just didn't call it that. And I think he

was also a talent sack kind of a guy

because they were acquiring so many

talents over time. I'll just give you an

example. Uh I might have this wrong but

the example still works. I believe it

was McCartney who said they had a rule.

Let's call it a system. If they started

to write a song, they they wouldn't end

the night until they finished it. Now,

presumably there were some exceptions to

that, but one of the things that they're

famous for is completing more, you know,

writing more songs than anybody's could

even imagine. So, if you took just

McCartney's skill stack, I'll bet he had

at least 20 skills that worked perfectly

together. And the magic sauce that I I

write about and I talk about is not that

he had a lot of skills because if he'd

been, let's say, really good at

badmitten,

well, that wouldn't really mix with

anything else he was doing. But if

you're really good at studio work

plus, you know, uh, drums plus guitar

plus blah blah, every one of those work

together, including the the business end

of it. So if you combine the four

Beatles and their skills, I think you

would end up with something like 20 to

50

skills that are not random. They all

work together. [laughter] And I don't

think we've ever seen anything like

that. Now, time goes by and uh here's

some more context. And remember, I'm

going to tie this all together. So just

just make a mental note that the Beatles

were not the best in the world at

anything, but they were probably above

average at 20 to 50 different skills.

And that that's in my opinion, that's

the magic sauce. So time goes by, we're

going to [clears throat] change the

context a little bit to my early uh

career when I was a younger man. Um, I

had the idea that most people have,

which is if you have a big problem in

your life, uh, could be career, could be

personal, could be health, that what you

would try to do is recover from the

problem. And that makes sense, right? If

you have a big problem,

obviously you should set as your

objective to get back to where you were.

Now, I'll give you an example where I

tried that and learned it's a bad idea.

So, you've heard this story again, but

I'm putting it in a different context.

When I was in my 20s, worked for a bank.

Uh, I had a cubicle job. It looked like

I had potential for promotion. One day,

my boss called me in and said, "I don't

know how to tell you this, but the word

has come down from management that we

can't promote white men."

So that would be a big problem because I

was young and ambitious and if they told

me directly I couldn't be promoted.

Well, I very quickly put my resume

together and quit

uh to take a better job, slightly better

job. I would say it's more of a lateral

um lateral move from the bank to a phone

company, but it was really just another

cubical job. So that was an example of

uh not using the system I'm going to

describe.

But once that turned out the same way,

the phone company eventually called me

into my boss's office and said, "I don't

know how to tell you this, but word has

come down that we can't promote a white

male." So you see what I did was I set

my objective to get back to where I was,

you know, working in the cubicle and

maybe getting promoted. and I got right

back to where I was. But where I was

wasn't good. So sometime around that

point in my life, I came up with a

different strategy. You could call it a

system. And the system was that no

matter how bad the problem was, I would

set as my objective to take advantage of

the problem to be way better, like way

way better than wherever I was before

the problem.

And you've also heard this story. Again,

I'm going to put it in a different

context that when I turned 49, I had a

rare neurological problem, the effect of

my vocal cords, and they would clench

when I tried to form words. So, I could

make noise, but people couldn't

understand what I was saying. So,

instead of talking the way you hear me

now, talk like that. And people would

say, "What? What?" I couldn't use the

telephone etc. So it took me a few years

to even find out that it had a name

spasmotic dysphonia and the bad news was

the experts told me it was incurable.

So I had an incurable

voice problem and half of my job was

public speaking and doing interviews and

I really kind of needed to be able to

talk. Now, I was lucky that half of my

job was cartooning because that didn't

require the talking. But boy, did I need

to get back to where I was. However, by

that time, I had learned my new system,

which is to set my goal as being way

better, way better than wherever I was

before I had the problem. Now, in this

case, getting back to where I was would

have been a rather poor voice.

Because long before I had spasmmonic

dysphonia,

uh, I had a weak nasly

sounding voice that I hated to listen

to. Most of you have that, right? When

you listen to your own voice on

recording, you go.

However, for those years where I was

trying to find a solution to the

speaking, I did an affirmation usually

in my car. And you know, because I

couldn't speak intelligently,

but it didn't matter because I was just

alone driving my car. I would do it out

loud, but it would sound like nonsense

to anybody else, but I knew what I was

thinking and saying. And the affirmation

went like this. I, Scott Adams, will

speak perfectly.

Now, remember, I never spoke perfectly.

And it's also a a subjective standard,

right?

So what exactly is speaking perfectly?

And I'm going to tell you in a minute

what that means to me. So again, time

goes by and in 2013 or so, I I published

a book called How to Fail at Almost

Everything and Still Win. And that

included my advice about building a

talent stack. It included my advice

about having a system over a goal. And

it also talked about my strategy of

setting my recovery to be way better,

way better than what I started with. So

now that the scene is set,

turns out that one of the people who

read that book and absorbed a whole

bunch of the skills that it described is

an artist called Akira the Dan. Akira

the Dan. And for the last several years,

he has been using the techniques from

the book. And by the way, he he tells me

this. I'm not I'm not guessing. So he

told me this, you know, uh directly that

he learned the whole talent sack systems

over goals and a whole bunch of other

advice. He absorbed it. He put it

together and he added it to his existing

skills of music. and he also runs the

business of producing music. He's

learned to obviously do video marketing,

social media, and I would estimate that

he has now compiled somewhere in the

neighborhood of

20 different skills that like the

Beatles, this is the magic part, like

the Beatles, they're not 20 random

skills. They're designed because they

work together.

So, he's been cranking away at a new

form of music, art, entertainment that

most of you have seen by now that he

calls Meaning Wave, which combines a

background beat in music with some kind

of podcaster or um some kind of

philosopher who says interesting things

that independently

you would like to hear. Uh, for example,

I think he did uh Alan Watts and Jordan

Peterson and they combined their voices

just talking with the music and oh my

god is it powerful. But he also did it

with me. So he he took clips from many

of my podcasts and then this past week

he uh after all this practice and

assembling of many talents he dropped an

album. It's an entire album. Uh you can

find it on YouTube or just go to the

internet. You can search for it. Akira

Leon plus my name. It'll pop right up.

And he launches it last week. And last I

checked it had 6 million views.

Now by the time the podcast clips were

made, I had discovered a uh solution to

my voice problem surgery. [snorts] Um,

and it took several years for me to get

my voice back to strong enough that I

could podcast. So, by the time he took

the clips, I had learned persuasion. I'd

written books uh that were part of my

talent stack uh on advice, affirmations,

and I'd found a way to be persuasively

verbal. [snorts]

So, I wasn't trying to do any music

because I have no musical talent

whatsoever, but I was I was trying to

make my voice as compelling and useful

as possible. Now, I'm going to I'm going

to expand the definition of my voice to

include not just how it sounded, but

what I said, because by then I'd learned

to speak persuasively.

And when you listen to it, you'll see

that the persuasion part, the the clips

are really unusually well picked. So,

it's not everything I've ever said. A

Cure of the Dawn was also talented in

figuring out what clips would work well

in the music, what would affect people,

maybe what affected him, I'm not sure.

And he puts it together. And if you

haven't heard it yet, you will be blown

away because he's literally invented an

entirely new form of entertainment. And

I've never seen anything in a musical

domain. And you could argue whether it's

music or a whole new art form, but I've

never seen anything with that. Nearly

100% of the people listen to it

say, "My god, that's good." Uh people

put it on and play it all day. People

use it to go to sleep. Um so

back to my definition and my system.

Remember my system was not to get back

to where I was because that would be a

nasely unpleasant voice that even I

would not want to listen to. But by that

time I had learned to speak in a

pleasant way. I had recovered the

strength of my voice which took years.

And the podcasting was part of that

strategy to make sure that I talked for

an hour a day at least.

And the net result is that

I produced without any effort on my own

part. I guess I'll say Akira the Don

produced with my clips

an art form that's better than just

about anything you've ever seen. just

unbelievably mind-blowingly

uh innovative and just so good. So good.

So I would recommend that you at least

give it a sample.

At least give it a sample. So now that's

an example

of uh both he and I using the same

system. I was combining skills. He was

reading about my suggestion to combine

skills.

I have a system. He had a system. Lots

of systems. And uh it was just many. It

was amazing. Anyway, so here's my first

shout out. Uh you're going to ask me

because you're curious and it's a fair

question. Uh am I sharing in the

economics of this? The answer is no. No,

I have no economic stake. Not not

directly, not indirectly. And that's

exactly what I want to say publicly in

case someday my estate decides to

decides to challenge it. I want my

estate to know because I'm now saying it

in public that it is not my wishes to

share economically. One of the reasons

for that is that he has already rewarded

me more than money. You know, money

can't compensate. So the the feeling

that I got from watching my voice become

not just serviceable but put it in

context where it was way better than way

better than it ever was that even when I

listen to it I say to myself wow I

really enjoy listening to me and that is

rare. So you could say that that is

perfect

because what would be more perfect than

going from not being able to speak

[snorts]

to being the featured vocalist in a in a

special way just talking uh on a hugely

successful and influential form of art

that didn't exist before. If that's not

perfect,

well, I mean, you tell me what is. So,

that's my first compliment and shout

out. The cure the don give it a give it

a sample. Second is somebody I've talked

about a lot and you're going to say,

"Scott, he's no artist." And I get it. I

get it. But he does what he does so well

that I think is elevated to art, right?

You know, if somebody's just really good

at what they do, then they're just

really good at what they do. But some

people can take that to such a level

that you look at it and you go, "Wow,

nobody could do that. Who who else could

do that? That's art." And the second

person is Mike Benz,

especially because of what he did the

past week. Now, if you don't know Mike

Benz, Benz, you should follow him

because I can't really reproduce what he

talks about or says, and that's really

the point. He he is uh unreproducible

because he's so artistically gifted.

Now, he like Akira the Dan um has told

me that I had some influence over his

talent stack. Now I assume that means

maybe just in the domain of persuasion.

I don't know the details but I had some

influence. And what his special talent

is that I've never seen anybody close is

he has this insane encyclopedic memory

and knowledge of the intelligence and uh

and government structures so that he

knows exactly who is connected to whom,

what organizations and people are

connected, who's married to who, who

used to work with who, who where the

money flowed And he combines that

[clears throat] incredible knowledge

that I don't think honestly I don't

think there's another person in the

world who has his knowledge of just how

things are fit together.

But he combines that with just crazy uh

pattern recognition.

[snorts] And so he has this unique

ability

um that has made a lot of MAGA people

happy. I don't know if he would call

himself MAGA, but he, you know, he he

sort of operates in that world more than

the other. Um, so he does a podcast and

he's developed all these skills. You

know, he's musical and he combines that.

Um, he plays a piano. So, you can see

that, you know, his brain is a a certain

structure. That's amazing. Um, so he's

learned to podcast. He's got the

business end of it. He's made lots of

network networking connections. But on

top of that, if you add the encyclopedic

memory, his knowledge of how everything

is connected and now his pattern

recognition, he was the first one to

untangle in my mind the NGO badness

because because the theft

that was massive, we'll talk about that

later,

seemed to be hidden in the complexity.

So you needed someone who could look at

this amazing complexity and pick out

what mattered and what was noise.

Nobody else can do that. So first and

this is not what he did this week. He he

sort of demystified the whole NGO

world and I think I would give him the

most credit. Now obviously Elon Musk is

huge part of that and Doge but it was

Benz who kind of explained it all to me

for the first time

but you take that forward and uh this

past week in my opinion he's the first

one who completely explained the Epstein

situation.

Now I can't reproduce his explanation

but I'll give you the sort of you know

idiot summary. The idiot summary is that

while he was doing a while he was doing

a podcast and he was starting to do some

pattern recognition of everything we've

learned so far, he realized that uh

Epstein has been connected to at least

four um intelligence agencies. Again,

this is because of his encyclopedic

knowledge of who works with who, who was

a roommate, who literally literally who

was a roommate, who stayed with somebody

for an extended period of time, things

you would never know, but he does. And I

guess as he was doing the podcast, he

suddenly put it all together. Now, if

you haven't heard it, I would tell you

to go listen to his version because you

want to get the full thing. But the

basic idea is that Epstein has clearly

been associated with giant intelligence

related money um laundering for several

decades, starting way back with

something called the BCCI,

a big financial entity that apparently

was sort of a CIA, you know, money

laundering operation. So,

so Benton's ties Epstein back to uh Bear

Sterns again all the way back to I think

if I'm not mistaken Iran Contra where

money was laundered around for the CIA

and others. But so Ben finds the

connection not just to the CIA but uh to

I believe British intelligence, Saudi

intelligence and Israeli intelligence.

So the pattern that he identified and he

he shows receipts of who's involved and

who Epstein knew and worked with and all

that. It's very clear and now for the

first time if you're wondering hey was

he working for Israel sometimes. Hey was

he working for the CIA

sometimes. Was he was he taking that

skill and using it for the British um

intelligence or Saudi Arabia? Apparently

yes. So he wasn't really wedded to one

spy organization. He was very clearly

somebody who worked for all of them. Now

I haven't gotten to the big aha because

I know what some of you are thinking.

Some of you are thinking but Scott

really it's not about that. It's about

the rich and powerful people that are

being protected, right? And we we

already knew he was working with some

spy agencies. So, he's really added

nothing, right? Oh, no. It completely

changes how you see it because once you

realize how embedded he was with the

intelligence agencies, let's call them

the the spy entities, you realize the

following. Uh Ro Connor said, I think

yesterday that he wants to I'll tie this

together in a minute, that uh that he

thinks that uh Pam Bondi broke the law

by not releasing all of the Epstein

files.

Do you think the Epstein files will be

released even if

all of the rich and powerful people who

might be named

could be named? And the answer is no.

you will never know what all the spy

agencies were doing with him because

they wouldn't want you to know. So if

the Department of Justice and the Trump

administration

genuinely wanted to release the entire

files, could they do it? No. There's not

any chance they can do it because the

CIA, I'll just use them as a standin for

the other intelligence agencies. the

CIA, if they block it, and of course

they would have the power, they would

have all the power they needed to block

anything. They could literally threaten

you with death and total destruction if

you didn't do what they said and block

their secrets. And they don't even have

to be the kind of secrets that protect

the world. It can just be whatever they

wanted blocked. So here's the thing.

Even if

uh well I'll put it another way. So what

this causes is the rich and powerful

people who obviously are part of the

guilty uh guilty entities. It wouldn't

matter if they even told you go ahead

and use my name. It wouldn't matter if

there was, you know, great desire within

the Department of Justice and the FBI to

actually ounce the rich and powerful. As

long as the CIA could keep that secret,

they have a little bit more ownership of

those rich people. So, let me put this

in practical terms.

If you were in the CIA

and you knew, for example, that Bill

Gates had something to to hide, would

you be better off uh making sure that

that got blocked and it was never

released so that you could blackmail him

without blackmailing him? You would

never have to say to him, you know, Bill

Gates, if you don't do what we want,

you know, you're in trouble. You would

never have to say it. You would just

have to be the CIA and say to the say to

the rich people, "Here's the deal. We're

going to protect you, but we own you."

So, have you noticed how many of the

rich and powerful people have government

contracts?

So, if you're the CIA, and again, I'm

just using them as a standin for um spy

agencies, um your best case scenario is

that you have a an unspoken threat to

make all the rich and powerful people do

what you want.

But you combine it with an incentive

such as, you know, your multi-billion

dollar company could get a lot of

government contracts if you're just

really good to us.

But if you become kind of a dick and you

out us for what we've done, maybe you

won't make billions of dollars. Maybe

you'll never get another government

contract. So here's my aha.

My aha is this is not about the rich and

powerful being protected. They get

protected for free

because the spy agencies

want to keep control of both the

powerful people and also hide their own

secrets and they would be 100% capable

of blocking any kind of information.

Now, one of the things that Roana and

Thomas Massie may have been blinded to

is that uh

is that if they allowed within their

legislation

that u anything that's too sensitive or

mentioned a victim could be redacted.

that guarantees that the people who want

to redact other stuff can easily do it

and just say, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're

just protecting the victims." Of course,

duh. Obviously. And even if those rich

and powerful people and even if those

victims did want to be protected,

they're not the decision makers. The the

spy agency would be in control of those

people

uh as well as the, you know, what gets

blocked and what doesn't. So to me that

answered um the questions that will be

answered. It guarantees that we'll never

be satisfied with what comes out of the

Epstein files. Would you agree?

We'll never know why exactly, but once

you see that Mike Ben's frame on this

and you realize how deeply embedded

Epstein had been with the spy agencies

for decades, you realize that uh it

wouldn't matter

what anybody thought about the rich and

powerful. They're just not in charge. So

if your frame was, oh, I think the rich

people, you know, called up Pam Bondi

and said, you know, hey, I'm a

billionaire. don't out me. They might

have tried, but they don't have the

power of the CIA. If the CIA calls the

Department of Justice or the FBI and

says, "Here's the deal. You will not

release us, and we don't have to tell

you what will happen to you if you do,

but you won't." That would put the

Department of Justice and the FBI in a

very

awkward situation, and that's what we

see. So, uh, the big aha here and why I

call, uh, Mike Benz an artist is that

nobody else could have pulled this

together. And once you realize that the

intelligence spy part of it is not just

an also, but it's the the dominant

theme, then you realize you're never

going to see the the bottom of the

barrel. They will completely nickel and

dime us to death. They will drag it out.

They might blame other people. Maybe

there'll be a distraction. Maybe a UFO

will land. But one thing you can

guarantee won't happen is that the

public will never be satisfied that they

saw what really was going on.

So just to be clear,

I assume I assume it's obvious that rich

and powerful people are being protected,

but not for the benefit of the rich and

powerful. they would be protected for

the benefit of the spy agencies who

would then have greater control over

them for whatever it is that they wanted

to control

it. Pretty impressive. All right, so

that's artist number two. You should

follow Mike Pence. Artist number three,

you may have heard of this one. Donald

Trump.

Now, in my opinion, Trump has raised the

art of trolling, maybe persuasion, too,

to a level that we'll never see again,

completely unparalleled,

and so successful that I laugh when I

see it. Let me give you some examples.

Um, so he did the Hall of Presidents

where he put a president auto pan

instead of Biden and then he put

insulting descriptions of Obama and the

Obama presidency. And what did that

cause? Well, all the Democrats and the

and the legitimate news are like, "Oh,

you can't do that." Ah, and it and it

made them focus on what had to be the

least important thing happening in the

world. Meanwhile, while all that shelf

space was being eaten up by what Magga

thought was funny, most of us uh and the

and the uh his critics thought, "Oh,

here's an easy one. You know, he's left

us this easy attack. we're gonna say

that he's a narcissistic

bad person and it's like a real easy

story. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's just one

thing. He also did the Rob Reiner

insults sort of insults that everybody

said that's too soon. Like even even

MAGA people were saying no no I don't

support that. It's too soon. But like

the Hall of Presidents, it was a troll.

Meaning that uh it wasn't just about uh

what he thought was funny. He was again

distracting

Democrats and distracting the news into

the least important thing that was

happening. Was there anything in the

world that Trump was doing that was less

important than what he said about uh Rob

Reiner? No. No. So again, he's got the

Democrats and the the press that doesn't

like him thinking, "Oh, you put a oh,

you put an easy target on your back this

time. Watch what bad things we say about

your character." And then the the the my

favorite part is renaming the Kennedy uh

center or whatever it's called into the

Trump Trump Kennedy Performing Arts. Is

that what it is? Now, you might say,

"But Scott, he's not the one who decided

on the name change." But obviously, he

had to approve it. Obviously, if he

said, "Don't put my name in that

building," they wouldn't do it. So,

clearly,

he's behind it. Now, how was that

interpreted?

Well, once again, the Democrats and his

critics treated it like it was the most

important thing happening because it was

a real easy story to write about. They

can't resist an easy one. No research,

no context. Uh all you have to do is

say, "Oh, there he goes again." Being a

bad person.

Now, one of the one of the things that

these all had in common, and this is why

he's a genius at persuasion, is that

they were really easy to do. Super easy

to do. It guaranteed that his enemies

fell into their own trap.

So what do I mean by their own trap? So

for years now, the Democrats have tried

to frame Trump as a narcissist, right?

They try to frame him as a narcissist

with a terrible character who would do

things like what I just mentioned and

that that's more evidence that he's an

authoritarian,

narcissistic

u monster.

Now,

you've probably noticed that a 100% of

the people who meet him in person,

including Bill Maher and uh the CEO of

Nvidia and a bunch of other people who

would not necessarily have been

proTrump, they've said that when you

meet him in person, he's not the

character that people talk about. That

he's a really good listener. And that I

experienced the same thing. He's way

smarter than you think. I also

experienced that. and uh

and he and he genuinely has empathy for

the things you would want him to have

empathy. So his reality is quite

different from what the Democrats

believe he is and have been framed of.

So having created their own frame, they

can't get out of it. So if you looked at

the Hall of Presidents, the auto pen and

the Rob Reiner comment and you were

already primed and they have primed

themselves to think the only way you can

explain this is that he's a narcissistic

bastard, then that's what you'll believe

is happening. So there all of his

critics, every one of them is

interpreting this as well more proof

that we were right. He's a narcissistic

bastard. Now, I've told you this before,

but narcissism can have a a bad version

and a good version. I would consider

myself a narcissist, but in I'd prefer

uh to be the good version. And what I

mean by that is I'd love to get

attention and credit, but only if I've

done something that is genuinely good

for the world or generally good for

somebody, right? I would not want to get

credit. It wouldn't really give me any

dopamine if you know somebody

accidentally think I thought I did

something good. I want to give credit

for what I actually did and it gives me

a dopamine high. But is there anybody

who loses in that scenario? Nobody

loses. If I do something that's good for

me because it brings me attention or

credit and dopamine, but it's also good

for you. Don't we all win? If you look

at what Trump does, he definitely likes

putting his name on things. He's

definitely a type of narcissist who

likes to get credit.

We all do. He's just transparent about

it. He likes to get credit, but he likes

to get credit for things he actually

did. He's He's not pretending to help

the country. He's trying to actually

turn around the country, actually end

wars, actually improve the economy,

actually help everybody.

So once you realize that he's got the

entire uh Democrat and critics and press

doing what I call uh turning into cats,

chasing a laser pointer while he's doing

useful stuff. You can see the the genius

of it. Now, I predict I predict and you

know I've been right about this sort of

thing that history will eventually come

to understand his cat with the laser

pointer strategy and they'll know that

once the Democrats trap themselves in

the frame that the only way you can

understand him is as a evil narcissist

with a broken personality, they can't

get out of it. So, they've trapped

themselves in their own frame.

Meanwhile, he can go uh lower

pharmaceutical costs, you know,

negotiate the end of wars.

[gasps] He he can lower taxes, he could

get bills passed, he can write a 100red

EOS. Uh and then once I introduced this

idea on X,

and by the way, if you don't think he

has elevated trolling to an actual art

form,

pay attention.

He he has elevated it to an art form.

There will never be another president,

I'm I'm assuming, who can match what

you're watching happen right now. But

people don't understand what they're

seeing because they're mostly trapped in

the other frame. Oh, he has a broken

personality. That's why he's doing all

this.

No, he is a narcissist just as I am. But

only the kind who tries to help. you

know, if if I don't do something good

for you or if he doesn't do something

good for you, it's not going to be that

enjoyable to get some credit. I mean,

might be better than that, but but it's

not really the the aim anybody would

have.

So, uh, the best brander of all time

who's famous for putting his name on

things, put his name on a few things. I

I saw somebody, you know, one of his

critics said to me on X, they said,

"Scott,

Scott, you fool, what do you think is

going to happen when the Democrats get

back in power? You know, don't you think

they're going to change the name of the

Trump Kennedy Center back to where it

was?" To which I say, "Yeah, of course.

That's exactly what I expect that if

Democrats get in charge, they will

change the name back to whatever they

want it to be. And will that bother me?

No. I will say three years of making

them chase the laser pointer was all he

wanted. Now if you know Republicans

stayed in charge for longer, he would

like it better. And then somebody said

to me, "But Scott, you know, sure you

say he's persuasive, but why hasn't uh

why why are his popularity numbers low?"

to which I say,"Well, did I miss an

election?

Was there some kind of election this

week where it mattered what Trump's

popularity was?" No. He can allow you to

think bad things about him so long as

he's building a record of doing

successful things, which he is.

And uh yeah, you're going to have to

wait, you know, until the actual

midterms to see where his popularity

stands by then.

All right. So, I call that art. Speaking

of persuasion,

there's an article in Fox News that this

is the year that conservative groups

declared

the tipping point on climate hysteria.

Do you think

there would be a tipping point on

climate hysteria just because people

like me and lots of other people on the

right especially um have presented the

facts? Well, it helps. But I think it

was Trump who has been steadfast in

saying that at least the climate alarm

part is overdone. not not necessarily

that we are or not getting warmer but

how much worry we have about it makes

sense. He has also removed a lot of the

impediments to nuclear power

and also said if you're going to build a

you know giant AI data center uh you'd

better you'd better build your own power

center. Now suddenly suddenly all these

big companies believe they can build

nuclear power plants that they would use

for their own operations.

H how good is that? I mean, the the

benefit that that should bring to the

world, even if just one of those big

companies figures out how to build a a

functional, modular,

smalish, but but big enough uh nuclear

power center, either fision or fusion um

is one of the biggest things will ever

happen in humanity. And that would be

because Trump persuasively

has been pro- energy energy energy in

every form. He's been pro getting rid of

uh regulations which allowed these big

companies to have a path to do this and

he's approved the idea that individuals

could have their own power plants

and he's pro AI. So he's exactly

exactly where we need him to be for

society to get to that next level.

So that's pretty persuasive.

Um, I haven't talked about this much,

but you know the story about US senator

from Utah, Mike Lee. He introduced this

legislation

uh to have uh letters of mark m a r q

ue. Apparently, the constitution

specifies that you can do this. And what

it does is it allows the federal

government to authorize private

citizens, should they be qualified to do

it, to form their own little military to

go after pirate ships. Now, in this

case, they're sort of defining the

pirate ships as the drug smugglers.

So the idea is that uh that free market

people would get to

attack these uh cartel assets and keep

what they they got. So if they, you

know, found $10 million sitting around

in some cartel asset, they could just

keep it. And that that's what the the

law specifically allows.

So we're not talking about people who

don't know how to do this business.

We're talking about, you know, retired

uh SEALs, you know, retired top

operators who might want to bring

together their own private little army

uh just for plundering the cartels. Now,

I saw a comment by Elon Musk that I

haven't figured out how to interpret.

Uh, I don't have the exact quote, but in

response to um Mike Lee's post about it,

uh, Musk said something like, "That

should work out super well." Does that

sound like sarcasm

or does it sound like he's agreeing that

should work out super well? So, I don't

know what Elon thinks. Uh it could go it

could be either way.

But in my opinion, if you just look at

it from a persuasion perspective, every

time you make it harder for the cartel

to operate or you suggest that it will

very soon become harder because we don't

know if this will pass, it might not

pass.

Um,

it should change the behavior of the

target group

because if nobody had ever brought up

the idea of letters of mark, you could

assume that your only risk was the US

military and that at some point maybe

the public would get tired [snorts] of

it or or whatever. But by even

suggesting, which Mike Lee's legislation

does, it suggests that there's a way to

make it zero expense for the government

while being completely legal and

constitutional

and almost certainly having some big

impact on smugglers.

The mere risk that things could go to

that level should already make them

change their behavior because they don't

want to be easy targets.

And the free market would create these

little battle groups that would

certainly take down some of them. You

know, it wouldn't have to take down all

of the drug dealers and all of their

assets. It would just have to introduce

this new level of risk. And imagine if

you will that the first letter of mark

uh private battle group. Let's say they

they take over a uh cartel shipment and

they they capture $300 million in cash.

How many how many of those new battle

groups would form the next day? A lot.

It would only take one success where

somebody essentially pirate stole the

cartel assets and made it work and it

was all legal. Only have to do it once

and it would the free market would flood

it with other participants.

So I don't know what Elon meant. He may

have easily meant that this is exactly

the kind of thing that could go wrong or

he might have meant what I just said.

I don't know. But it wouldn't change my

opinion that even if it doesn't get

approved from a persuasion uh

perspective, it's one more good kick in

the ass for the the cartels.

Well, according to Sai Post Karina

Pachova, there's a non- intoxicating

cannabis compound that might reverse

opioid induced brain changes. So, it's

possible

that there's something in cannabis, not

not smoking it, but some kind of

chemical in it that would make a big

deal in your brain if you had opioid

induced problems. Now, obviously, I

don't believe, you know, all the the

science about weed or anything else, but

it's kind of interesting.

So apparently today there's going to be

another Epstein file dump. I already

told you don't expect you'll ever see

the bottom of the barrel that it might

be just a nickel and dime drip drip drip

until you give up.

So, I would imagine

that even if the CIA or somebody else is

blocking the good stuff, I would imagine

that they would still have to do a

little trickle. So, it feels like they

are doing something.

But you'll never know. You'll never know

what they held back. And indeed, now

there claims that 16 files so far among

the many thousands that were taken down

from the website that had the the

Epstein files on it.

Why? Don't know. Will we ever know? No.

Do you think uh do you think that was

because Pam Bondi wanted to do it or

because uh the DOJ wanted to do it or do

you think that rich and powerful people

wanted to do it? We'll never know.

You'll never know.

All right. So,

in other news, Scientific America says

that AI video streaming is coming.

So apparently Disney did the smartest

thing they can do in the age of AI. They

inked a deal with Open AI

so that instead of Open AI essentially

stealing their IP, they have an

agreement where Open AI can make videos.

They have some uh Disney assets if they

if they pay for it and they reach some

kind of standards. But we're still at a

point where you could only get a few

minutes.

So even if you had all the IP rights

from Disney and you had the best

technology that Open AI can give you

today, you wouldn't be able to make a

movie, but you can make, you know,

little clips. And some say that we might

only be a year away if you added some

other technologies to it from making a

featurelength movie

just with AI and some existing assets

for IP.

Now, here's what I think. What's missing

in this analysis is that nobody wants to

watch a three-hour movie.

that the days of watching long form

movies are really kind of coming to an

end. And if you have not experienced

that yet, uh let me recommend the best

video entertainment platform that exists

today.

If you're on X, if you haven't tried the

video button, so there's a there's a

button that just produces an endless

string of video that apparently the AI

that's built into X uh knows you would

be interested in. What's magic about it

is they're all they're all short.

[snorts] Um almost none of them are AI

produced. The AI is simply finding

things that exist.

Um they scroll automatically. And that's

the magic sauce. If you go to Instagram

and you play a short video, you might

love that video, but your finger still

has to scroll to the next one. So, you

have to be physically involved like

every, you know, 30 seconds. If you go

to X, you just hit that video button

once, put your phone down, and you can

listen to videos that it correctly knows

you would be interested in all day long.

It will just give you endless dopamine

hits in short form. Once you get

addicted to that endless dopamine in

short form, you're not really going to

want to watch a three-hour movie. Uh to

me, it's intolerable

to watch anything over an hour. Well,

it's almost intolerable to watch

anything over five minutes at this

point. So, I do not believe that the

Disney Open AI collaboration is going to

invent something like, oh, we have all

new long- form movies that are fully

approved and people like watching. I

don't think you can get there from here.

And it's [snorts] not because you can't

do it technologically. Probably that

will happen eventually. is that you'll

never want to watch it because the

alternative which is infinite small hits

way better just way better. So again if

you haven't tried it try it for five

minutes and you're going to see that

Musk has again done the impossible which

is he leapfrogged every video

every video platform. It's now by far

the best one. It's not even close.

Well, let's talk about Venezuela.

According to Axios, now you know that uh

Trump has put a blockade on them

shipping their oil, but the blockade for

whatever reason uh does not include

every tanker all the time. So the news

said that Venezuela was sending a

military escort with its blockaded

tankers so that the US would, you know,

maybe leave them alone. Now, that never

made sense because if the US wanted to

take down a Venezuelan tanker, it

wouldn't take too long. [gasps] But it

turns out that they're not even

escorting um the banned tankers. There

were some that just were not included.

But he wanted to make it look like he

was being tough. Madura did. So to make

it look like Venezuela was acting tough,

they put a military escort on some

tankers that didn't need it because

nobody could have blockaded them anyway.

So what did the US do?

The US The US boarded them anyway. So

they weren't even included in the

blockade. But because Venezuela was

trying to, you know, make this move that

would that would make it look like they

were, you know, they were somehow had

some control of their own fate, which

they don't. Uh Trump matched that by

boarding them anyway.

So, I thought that was funny. It's not

important,

but it shows you that in the chess game

of, you know, who's got the power and

who's got the risk, uh, the US, I think

they won that round. And by the way, who

would Venezuela complain to about the

fact that the US blockaded them and

boarded them? there's nobody to complain

to. You know, if you're in our

hemisphere and we've got gigantic naval

assets and Trump says, you know, why

don't why don't you board that thing and

see what's in there or even seize it.

Who's going to stop it? So again,

Venezuela is just flailing around. They

don't have any any real response.

Well, according to the Spanish National

Research Council,

there's some research that says there's

a compound that could revolutionize

traumatic brain injury treatment. So,

apparently they found a compound that if

you give it to a brain damaged mouse

somewhat immediately after the mouse is

damaged, you know, at least close, um it

will just reverse the brain damage.

So finally we will not have so many

brain damaged mice. I was worried about

all the mice with the brain damage, but

apparently they've got a got a handle on

that now.

So on CNN there was a one of the talking

heads is uh Aisha Mills who describes

herself as a black lesbian and uh she

was mad about Trump and she said the

following sentence on the air. I'm not

going to be lectured by some white man

who has no idea what he's talking about.

Now, she was talking about another

guest. I forget his name, but he was a

you a right-leaning guest. It wasn't

Scott Jennings. It was somebody else.

and she said although he's never said

that Trump has never said he has better

genes than her or black lesbians or what

uh he has said he has good genes and

that some of the people coming in the

immigrants don't have good genes now is

the problem that he said it

or is the problem that it's not true

because it does seem to me that uh

regardless of, you know, gender or

sexual orientation, regardless of

ethnicity.

Are there not some people in the world

who got lucky?

You know, I'm I'm 5'8.

Do I have good jeans?

Well, I would say if I were 6'4,

even same ethnicity, etc.,

I would say I have better jeans. If I

were like Bo Jackson, you know, one of

the greatest athletes of all time, would

I say I have good jeans? Privately, I

would. Of course. So, nobody disagrees

with Trump that the people who were

coming in as immigrants would include

some people with good genes, some people

with bad genes. If you imagine that that

makes a difference in your performance

and you could control for the good genes

and let's say the thing you controlled

for was intelligence and competency.

Wouldn't you prefer allowing in only

people who had genetic potential for

success?

Again,

that could be within an ethnic group. So

you don't you don't have to say we don't

admit any Albonians.

You just say we do admit Albonians, but

they have to have demonstrated some

level of success, which would indirectly

be an indication that at least your

genes were not holding you back. So just

to be clear, I think I have good genes

for some intellectual capacities.

I think I have bad genes for surviving

to old age. [laughter]

Apparently my my medical genes are not

so good. So if you can imagine the

burden I put in the health care system

this past month, oh my god, am I getting

my money's worth? So, would you want, if

I were not already an American, would

you want to let me in the country

knowing that I'm spending, I don't know,

a million dollars a month of the

country's money in the form of a health

insurance. Uh, and I'm not adding that

much back in.

Well, you know, saying that I have a

genetic problem seems a little cruel,

but is it wrong? And it's not racist

because again, I'd be a typical white

guy. I just have flawed genes in an area

that would become very expensive for the

country. And even I wouldn't let me in.

If I had a choice, I'd be like, "Oh, are

you British?" Well, why don't you let

the British take care of your expensive

health problems and you know, stay where

you are, Scott.

So the the thing about this story is

that you can't imagine anybody but a

black lesbian, again, that would be her

own description of herself, would be

able to get away with that and then

someday also be back on the air on CNN.

So we don't expect that kind of

behavior,

but uh we'll see if she gets away with

it. We'll see if she's ever back in

there.

Um,

so House Minority Leader

Hakee Jeff was asked about

Representative James Comr and Comr is

putting together uh some investigation

into Somali taxpayer fraud in Minnesota.

So when asked about that, Keem Jeffy's

answer was that Representative Comr is

quote a joke, an embarrassment, an

unserious individual, and a malignant

clown.

Now, is that the right answer

to a question about him investigating

massive, well understood, and known

fraud in Minnesota?

Not really. But what it highlights is

that the Democrats are springloaded

to go for personal attacks because they

don't have um arguments and they don't

have policies. So if you don't have

popular policies or arguments, you make

it about the person. So with Trump, no

matter what he's doing, the cats chasing

the pointer go, "Oh, narcissist,

narcissist. He's trying to make money

for himself. he's a clown. And then they

extend that because they think it works,

I guess, to other Republican leaders.

So, this Republican leader has an idea

how to fix something, in this case, an

investigation. And the answer is

not investigating is good and it's not

investigating is bad. It's there's

something wrong with that guy's

character. Next question. Does that

work? I mean, is that a strategy that

you could imagine works?

[snorts] Is it time for an interstitial

sip? [clears throat] I think it's time

for another sip.

Yes, it's true. I have paid lots more

taxes than I've used in healthcare. But

still, I think he made my point. Well,

according to interesting engineering,

[clears throat] China now has unmanned

drones that can autonomously refill the

fuel in other drones.

So,

assuming that technology works, and

apparently it does,

um the distance that China can send a

drone just massively increased.

There's always a lot of drone news. I

won't give you all of it, but it is kind

of fascinating to watch how fast drone

warfare is is uh extending because

obviously that's the future. According

to Newsmax, gas prices dropped to the

lowest December level since 2020. Now, I

know Democrats argue, "Oh, that's

cherrypicking." And you know, I saw

Jessica Catalof make this point. This a

good point that um if you cherrypick a

few states it looks like gas prices are

super low but if you took the average it

wouldn't look as low. I get that but

still you have to you have to say that

gas prices have gone down that there's

no doubt that they've gone down.

Um I'm going to make the following

persuasion point and we talk about some

fun stuff.

Um, every time Trump solves a problem

before the midterms is bad for

Republicans.

Does that make sense? Every time Trump

solves a big national problem, should he

be ending a war? Should he be lowering

gas prices? Should he be lowering

pharmaceutical prices? These are all

things he's likely to have accomplished

before the midterms. Will that cause

more people to vote for for Republicans?

No. And the reason it won't

persuasion wise, the reason it won't is

because people instantly bank those

successes and they say, "What do you got

for me next? They're not going to vote

for anybody because of something that

somebody already did." They just say,

"That's done." Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy

that gas prices are low. Yeah. I'm happy

that that war ended, but I'm not going

to vote for you for that because it's

done. It's off the table.

So Trump is in this weird situation

where the more big problems he solves,

the less likely Republicans can stay in

power because voters would be rational.

And they say, "We're not voting for the

past. We're voting for what you're going

to do next." So, so, so Democrats will

of course make a case that they would be

better for the future. Republicans will

try to do the same, but they'll spend a

bunch of time talking about what they've

already done, and that won't activate

anybody.

So, what would you do if you were

advising Republicans on how to get out

of that trap that what you've already

succeeded at will not motivate anybody

to vote? it's only what they expect in

the future. Here is my suggestion.

I'll probably talk about this a lot more

in the future. Um,

you need, if you're Republicans, you

need to show that you're going to solve

whatever people think is their biggest

problem. And I'm going to say cost of

living. And I'm going to say grocery

prices generally, even though we did a

good job with eggs, right? Here's what

you would do. you would admit that

that's a big problem. Step one, don't

don't say I already lowered egg prices.

Don't say you did a good job on gas. And

Trump is making that mistake. And that

is a mistake. What he should say is,

yeah, we haven't made a dent yet in

grocery prices, but here's our plan.

Because the plan, if it's good enough,

would motivate people to say, "All

right, that's a good plan." you know, we

don't know if you'll succeed, but you're

describing a real good free market um

path that is better than whatever the

Democrats have. So, let me give you a

concrete example.

Suppose

Trump said something like this. Uh yes,

we have not done a good enough job with

grocery prices overall. Now, it would

not be limited to grocery prices. I'll

extend this later to everything from

transportation to medical expenses. So,

we have not done a good job. Here's our

plan.

By this date, we're going to try to get

from this this number to some smaller

number.

And here's what we're going to do to get

there. Not everything we try will work,

but we're going to keep hammering on

this like a top priority because there

are several things we can do that have a

good chance of working, but it might

take you a year and nobody has a better

idea than that. So, here are some

examples. So, let's say um Trump said

part of the reason food is expensive is

because of too much regulation.

Republicans like to hear that. Oh, too

much regulation. I think Thomas Massie

would be the the best one to talk to

this. So, Trump might say, "One of the

things we're going to do is we're going

to change the following regulations so

that if you're a farmer, you could

directly sell your food to consumers who

are nearby." Now, that would take away

the transportation, the middle man. Um,

it would take away just a whole bunch of

expenses and turn some of your grocery

buying into more of a local farmers

market situation. Now, these are just

examples. So, if you think that wouldn't

work, just focus on the concept, right?

So would you be convinced if Thomas

Massie agreed with Trump that if you cut

these these specific regulations and you

let the free market and farmers

compete and sell what they want locally

etc. Would that feel like it would lower

grocery prices? The answer is yes.

So instead of saying you haven't done it

yet, you could look at the plan. You

could say okay one year from now uh you

will have unleashed the free market.

Yes. Yes. But that's not enough. It's

not enough. So you need more to it.

Suppose uh because a big part of the

expense of farming is power. Suppose

Trump said we're going to allow farms to

have their own power plants and we're

going to make that easy and we'll get

rid of regulation. So, we'll take the

cost of electricity or just power in

general, and we'll greatly decrease it,

maybe not overnight, but by making the

cost of producing the food way less

because they've got cheap energy.

Maybe that's one thing. Um, it would be

similar to the strategy with AI. Then

you say, "We're going to use AI and

maybe something like the Boring Company

to build underground uh farms. Uh you're

going to use Optimus to pick the food.

You're going to have self-driving

trucks. So basically, you you tell a

story where a year from now you'll have

experimental because it would be trials.

It'd be experimental. You'll have

experimental farms. They're local.

They're completely AIdriven.

They got robots, they got self-driving

trucks, and they're, you know, and

they're producing their own energy.

That's a compelling story because you

can imagine that so well. And then

produce some pictures that show the the

robots bringing down the cost, etc.

So the idea is for Republicans to admit

that you can't make grocery prices list

go down overnight,

but what you can do is have a rational

plan to get there that Democrats would

not have. Because you got Bernie who's

trying to stop AI.

So if you've got one guy who's trying to

stop AI and another one that says,

"Here's our plan to use AI to reduce

grocery prices by 40%."

It's just going to take a year or two.

Which one would you pick?

There's only one who has a plan. All

right. So, that's my persuasion

suggestion is you have to have a one or

twoear plan. It has to be something

that's based on something you really do.

You know, AI, remove regulations, etc.

You have to have a very specific target

that's not crazy. Even if you get your

critics to argue whether your target is

achievable, you still win because they

would still be comparing it to the

Democrats with no plan at all or or some

socialist plan. That doesn't sound good.

[snorts] All right. In other news,

No Ridge says there's a study that low

glycemic index carbs in your diet uh may

be the key to dementia prevention. So,

if you eat the right kind of carbs and

the ones who have a low glycemic index,

you can protect your brain. Do you think

that study is reliable?

I'm going to say it depends if they

controlled for other lifestyle

correlations

because it seems to me that the people

who eat more bad carbs

would be lower income. you know, it

there would be something about the way

they live or what they have access to

that might affect their brain health.

So, I don't know if I would trust that

study. I mean, it's believable.

I would think that eating the right food

is better than eating the bad food if

you're protecting your brain, but it

might be just correlation with

lifestyle.

All right. Tulsi Gabbard had an

interesting post on X and I'm going to

read it to you because her exact wording

matters.

So she said deep state wararm mongers

and their propaganda media are again

trying to undermine President Trump's

effort to be bring peace to Ukraine and

indeed Europe by falsely claiming that

the US intelligence community in quotes

agrees to and supports the EU NATO

viewpoint that Russia's aim is to invade

slashconquer Europe in order to jin up

support for their pro-war policies. The

truth is, now here's the the money shot.

The truth is that US intelligence

assesses that Russia does not even have

the capability to conquer and occupy

Ukraine uh uh much less invading and

occupy Europe.

Does that sound accurate to you? Do you

think that historians will record that

it was ridiculous that anybody was

worried that Russia would try to conquer

all of Europe that that they can't even

take over the rest of Ukraine?

Well, she might be right.

I'm leaning toward thinking that's a

good take, but the part that's not

included is we don't know what the

future holds. So if your definition of

war expands from, you know, a

Ukraine-like

shooting war to include economic war, AI

war, space platforms, you know, weapons

we've never seen before at whatever

cost. So you could easily imagine that

Russia is not capable of of taking over

Ukraine, much less Europe, but that they

could get there if they were

incentivized to do it.

So, I'm not 100%

on board with it's impossible, but I

think I agree with Tulsi that the

smarter take is that Russia doesn't

really have that capability even if they

had that ambition.

What do you think? You we can't read

Putin's mind. He might want to take over

Europe, but I do think that would be a

reach.

Well, in other technology, Rohan Paul is

reporting on X that China has a new

capsule, a pill, uh, that can give you a

stomach exam in eight minutes, and all

you have to do is swallow the swallow

the pill, uh, and it's priced around

$280.

Now, that gets us back to what I was

talking about earlier.

Healthcare is too expensive and I don't

believe that beyond the pharmaceutical

costs that Trump is doing a good job on

that the Republicans have the greatest

plan. Wouldn't it be great if they said,

"Hey, uh, we're going to work on using

AI to lower your um your health care

costs. And here's what we're going to do

and here's how much it will lower it by

what time and how we're going to get

there." For example,

you can just figure out what's the most

expensive stuff in healthcare. And then

you say, "All right, Amazon.

Amazon, you've got to tell us what you

can do to lower health care costs." And

they're actually doing things. Uh Mark

Cuban, you have to tell us what you can

do maybe with our help uh to lower

pharmaceutical costs. Um Elon Musk

um I don't know what he's doing in the

healthcare realm, but you can say tell

us how you could use AI and Grock that's

AI

and robots to lower health care costs.

So you basically put all the

billionaires on notice that you're

expecting them to use the free market,

not the government, free market to

figure out how to lower health care

costs and to do it in a way that only

the free market can and that the

government will help them by getting out

of the way, you know, cutting

regulations where you need. That would

be a compelling story. So So you see the

concept, you should talk about the

future. You should not pretend you can

do it overnight.

You have a timeline and you have a

little bit, but you don't oversp specify

how you get there. You say, "We're going

to look at these things as a primary way

and in a year and a half this is what we

want to see for healthcare."

And then of course fraud is a gigantic

part of health care costs and maybe

maybe all of our costs. So apparently uh

you know Anna Kasparian

you've seen her a lot online. Um she

said the California money is that was

supposed to be spent on homelessness.

She said is being funneled into NOS's

and executives making half million a

year. And she said just experience what

I've seen on the ground in California

has you know made her mad I guess. So

here's what I think. I think the

Republicans should offer the following

solution to all this fraud. [snorts]

That there should be some kind of

mandatory auditing structure that

accompanies every kind of government

expense, whether it's federal or state.

Now, you're going to say to me, but

Scott, you're adding a layer of, you

know, bureaucracy.

No, I would say that the only people who

could do the auditing would be the free

market. So the government would not be

an auditor. The government would simply

require that there be one and that the

free market would provide the auditor.

Now would the free market want to be in

the business of catching fraud? Oh yeah.

if if it's like the letters of Mark and

they can get a piece of the fraud

or a piece of the savings. So if you

said okay big consulting company you've

been largely worthless but how would you

elect to form a free market

um auditing function that you can sell

to anybody who's doing anything with

spending and then the government when

they get some money approved they

absolutely can't spend the money until

they picked one of the free market

entities that will audit them. It has to

be like a real

serious audit. Now the first thing

you're gonna say is Scott then the

auditors will become the frauds [snorts]

because the the the people who uh let's

say are watchd dogs they generally get

captured by industry. So here's the next

part. You would use some kind of AI

structure

to monitor the auditors.

So the auditors would monitor the actual

expense, but the AI structure, which

doesn't yet exist, but could, would

monitor the auditors.

Does that make sense? If if you let the

auditors just do what they do in a free

market way, they would become the

criminals. But if they knew that there

was no way they could get away with it

because AI could easily identify, hey,

it looks like that money is not going to

the right place and it looks like the

auditor is lying about it. Uh you

wouldn't want the AI to be the auditor,

although I wouldn't rule that out. But

in stage one, you you'd want the AI to

simply uh make transparency so we can

all see what the auditors are up to.

That's my idea for that. And I think

that the entire country, left and right,

would be on board with all of our money

being audited.

Now, you might say, Scott, it will cost

so much to pay the auditors that you

would you would basically lose as much

money as a fraud. To which I think, I

doubt it. You know, I'll bet you could

pay an auditing company

$10 million a year to prevent

$100 million in fraud and that that

would probably never stop.

So, that's just my assumption. Then you

can tweak it as you go. You know, you

don't have to be sold on it being

exactly one way forever.

Speaking of all these things, the

postmillennial is reporting, Hayden

Cunningham, that apparently a bunch of

American tech billionaires are already

looking to create tech cities abroad. I

assume they're doing it abroad to avoid

US um

red tape. So, the first question is, do

they really need to do it abroad or

should they be doing these tech cities

and I'll describe them in a minute.

Should they be doing it in the US? Um,

probably Trump could help them there by

saying, "All right, here here are some

zones in the US so you don't have to

take your your cool city to some island

somewhere. We we'll keep it on shore."

So, here's what the proposed and they're

not built yet, but the proposed tech

cities look like. So, you would organize

a city around a specific industry. This

is something that China already does.

And you get all kinds of benefits if you

created a city where for example they

become the experts on building robot

actu what do you call them actuaries

well it doesn't matter so whatever that

tech industry is you build your city

around it so the first thing is gigantic

benefits from having all the experts in

one geographic place but they would also

be looking to build this thing so that

has all the smartest ways to build a

community. And no, I'm not talking about

a 15 minutes city and stop being a dick.

Uh this is something that they can

endlessly tweak. So they would basically

look to

um optimize every part of a city. So

optimize transportation, optimize health

care, optimize food production and all

that. Now here's the good part. Nobody

believes that you could do this on the

first try.

So, it only makes sense if the people

who are funding it and backing it are

the kind of entrepreneurs who have

ridiculous wealth and they already know

how to tweak things until they work.

Because again, things like this don't

work on the first try. But if you could

say, "All right, that didn't work. Let's

try this. That didn't work. Let's try

this." You could get there. And it turns

out that some of the people involved

would be Lincoln co-founder Reed

Hoffman, uh, VC Capitalist Mark and

Trees, and that was my ding-ding ding

ding ding name. So, you might not love

Reed Hoffman, but he's good at what he

does. And if you hear that Mark Andre is

involved in something big and important,

take that seriously. He's one he's one

of the good guys. And if he says this is

worth doing and he puts his companies or

his own money behind it, that's

important. So this I'm sort of being a

mini version of Mike Ben for you. If you

don't know the players, you can't really

understand how much potential this is.

But if I told you that Peter Teal was

involved and I told you that Mark Andre

was involved and I told you that Reed

Hoffman was involved and forget about

his politics just just focus on his

technical and entrepreneurial ability

which is extreme. If I told you they

were involved you would know that they

could tweak and they wouldn't run out of

money and everything they did made

sense.

So, so basically you tell a story

about how in the United States and again

these are planned for overseas but uh

Trump could bring them bring at least

some of them domestic. Um I think this

is exactly the right direction. I've

been talking about this for years that

you should design a city, not move into

a city that is designed itself over time

because they would be, you know, they

would be so inefficient. So you you have

to start with a, you know, just a blank

field

and that's what they're doing.

All right. Uh the study the New York

Post is writing about that late night

comedians are going even harder against

conservatives than before. Across all

late night comedy shows, 90% of the

jokes targeted conservatives.

And one of the few exceptions were when

Greg Guffeld was on the Tonight Show, I

think. So if you thought

that the Trump administration was going

to censor all the lefties, nothing like

that happened. They they got worse

instead of better.

Here's another one. Another story from

the Daily Neuron.

Somebody is speculating that

consciousness may be a belief system,

not a scientific fact.

Does that sound right? That

consciousness

might be a belief system and not a

scientific fact. When I talk about

consciousness, people say, "But Scott,

you because I talk about AI having

consciousness." The the way I define

consciousness, and this is my own

definition, is the ability to predict

what's going to happen, you know, even

in your immediate environment, to

observe what does happen and then to

adjust accordingly. So, three parts. If

you have all three parts, I would say

you're conscious. You predict that, for

example, that if I drop this banana, I

predict it will hit the floor. When I

let go of it and it does drop, there's

very little difference between what I

expected and what happened. So, I don't

need to make an adjustment. But suppose

something unexpected happened. Then my

feeling,

my my the friction I'm going to call it,

would be greater. It's like, whoa. If

you go to the mailbox and you open your

mailbox and a spider monkey jumps out,

that would be so different from what you

expect that you would have a big

reaction.

So the the bigger the difference between

what you predicted and what actually

happened, the bigger the sensation.

So that's my own definition of

consciousness. By that definition,

uh there there's a new study that says

AI doesn't make uh corrections.

Um meaning that if you told AI to do a

task, it doesn't observe that it's doing

it wrong and then accurately make an

adjustment. It just keeps trying to do

the task. And that might not be fixable

with any kind of technology we currently

have. But if you get to the point where

AI could do that where it would predict

what's going to happen next, watches

what happens next and then adjust adjust

accordingly in an intelligent way. I

would call that a new life form. That

would be a new life form in my opinion

because that would be genuine

um consciousness. Now, people who

disagree with me say things like this,

but Scott, consciousness is a subjective

experience, and your AI doesn't have

subjective experiences. To which I say,

what's an what is a subjective

experience?

That's an indefinable word salad

definition.

What is it? Ju just stop for a moment

and ask yourself what exactly would be a

subjective experience.

Isn't everything you do

something you're looking at and

interpreting through your own frame? So

I would say that AI might not have

feelings, you know, like it wouldn't

feel the same as me tapping my hand, but

that's not consciousness.

You could have consciousness without

your body even having feeling. So, if

you were completely paralyzed,

but your brain could still predict

what's going to happen, notice what

happens, and then think differently

because you can't you can't move, but

you would think differently because of

what happened, would you be conscious?

You would have no feeling. So, would

that be a subjective experience?

So I would argue that when people say

consciousness is based on a subjective

experience,

that's just word salad. There there's no

meaning to that if you dig down. But my

definition of consciousness is purely

mechanical.

So if the AI could tell you later, oh, I

was very surprised that the spider

monkey jumped out of my mailbox. So I

had to make a big, you know, big

correction to my next prediction. That

would be conscious to me. I don't know

that AI could ever get there. It's not,

it's not really close to it now. And

there was a new paper uh that suggested

that people don't realize that it can't

do that.

It can't adjust.

All right, I'm going long today because

I told you it's a

it's a special podcast.

All right, apparently Starbucks is uh

being sued by the state of California

for hundred billion dollars over their

DEI policy. So apparently the attorney

general in Florida is suing Starbucks

because uh they discriminated against

non-black employees.

Well, I'm happy every time

uh discrimination is reduced. So I wish

them luck.

Um Wall Street Journal had an article

that you're going to recognize as very

compatible with things I've been saying.

So, the Wall Street Journal said, I

think it was yesterday, quote,

"Something is profoundly wrong with the

US welfare system." Duh. A problem that

runs far deeper, and the far deeper is

the the key here, and is more dangerous

than the shocking fraud in Minnesota and

has been making headlines. Real federal

welfare spending.

Real federal welfare spending has soared

by 765%

more than twice as fast as blah blah

blah other spending and now cost $1.4

trillion annually. Uh where that money

was simply doled out evenly to about 20

million families that the government

defines as poor. And each household

would have received more than $70,000 a

year.

$70,000 a year

from my tax tax money.

Now, here's the part you might recognize

as being compatible with my opinions.

Somewhere around a year ago, and I'm not

sure about the timing. It occurred to me

that there was no way our deficits or

government deficits could be as big as

they are. There was just no way unless

something like a trillion dollars a year

was being stolen. And at the time I said

to myself, well, I mean, there's no way

that a trillion dollars a year could be

stolen and I would be unaware of it. But

then Doge happened and then Mike Ben

happened and we learned about the NOS's

and how there's this entire

gigantic complicated structure that is

designed entirely for stealing our

money. Now once you realize that there's

a whole mechanism for stealing your

money and it's pervasive everywhere at

the state level at the federal level and

that it's been running for years

and that the people who are hiding it

are benefiting from it and that and that

the entire thing was invisible because

we didn't have a sense of breaking the

complexity. So back to earlier comments,

the way we pierced we I didn't do

anything but the way the country pierced

the complexity to discover that we have

a fraudbased system is Mike Benz and

Doge.

If we did not have both of those things,

and I'll I'll just say Elon Musk as a

proxy for Doge. If we didn't have both

of those brains

figuring out what the hell went on, we

still wouldn't know that a trillion

dollars a year, that's my own estimate,

trillion a year, was being stolen.

Now, we know, and the Wall Street

Journal is sort of signaling, uh, you

think this was big, you have no idea how

big this is. So, here's my reframe. My

reframe is we all assumed that the

government had a spending problem as in

it spends too much. My current view is

that it has a lack of auditing problem.

It doesn't have a spending problem. It

has a nobody's watching the spending

problem. And that if we could solve that

using the concept I talked about earlier

with guaranteed audits. If you could

solve that,

would you reduce the deficit by a

trillion dollars a year? And I think the

answer is yes. And if you had asked me

that a year ago, I would have said not.

Well, not a trillion. You know, maybe

you'll find 50 billion. I think it's

closer to a trillion. And this is based

on and I think I've mentioned this

before. I used to work in corporate

America where I was the budget guy and

you know I would have to estimate

expenses for everything mostly in the

tech world and you develop this instinct

where you can just look at a budget and

you instantly know what's wrong with it.

And I watched my boss develop that skill

and I was amazed. like I could send I

could hand her a spreadsheet and she had

done it longer than I had and she could

just take a spreadsheet and look at it

for five seconds and immediately pick

out what numbers probably don't track

and then she'd be right and I would say

how the hell did you do that? Like how

did you just look at this sea of numbers

and you knew that one of them or more

than one were wrong? like how how could

you possibly have that intuition because

she did it over and over again. But she

couldn't really answer the question

except it was based on experience and

pattern recognition etc. But after I had

done that same job where I was the one

who had to find the problems with the

spreadsheet, I also developed that

intuition. So you could hand me a

spreadsheet and and I would go bam. And

literally within 5 seconds I could find

the wrong number. Even if it wasn't like

wildly wrong, it was just wrong.

I could do it too. And I never lost that

ability. It was some kind of some kind

of learned skill that you would not

imagine could be learned. So, a year ago

when I started thinking about how big

the the deficits were, the the alarm

went off in the back of my head. Ding,

ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. There is

no way we could get the deficits that

big. You can't explain it with a

pandemic. You can't explain it with

anything except massive fraud. And that

the fraud would have to be in the range

of a trillion dollars a year for

everything to make sense.

And that's where I'm at. I I think we're

losing a trillion dollars a year. So,

for a long time, I thought our deficit

problems were literally unsolvable, and

they might be. You know, Elon Musk talks

about everything becoming free in the

world of AI and robots. And maybe that's

what saves us. But I do feel like you

could cut our money problems in half if

you had the right kind of auditing. And

you could probably do it within two to

three years. And I think we're talking

at least a trillion dollars.

All right, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the end of my longest podcast. I

told you it'd be very special. How'd you

like it?

[snorts] Did you uh did you enjoy the

extra?

I'm going to sign off in a minute here,

but I think it's time for a closing sip.

See?

So good.

Well, I think being on the steroids

helped my show production.

All right. How many of you like the idea

because I can't I can't follow the

comments while I'm talking. So, well,

how many of you like the idea the

Republicans should build a timeline of

what they can do in the future and stop

hammering on their past accomplishments,

as impressive as they are? Did that make

sense to you?

Did you feel more hopeful

because I painted a picture where we

have a lot of solvable problems and that

the solutions are not super complicated

or out of our domain? They're they're

well within our capabilities.

Good.

All right. Looks like we did well today.

You know, I give you guys credit for any

of my successes because would I do any

of this if you weren't here? [laughter]

So, if you're wondering, you know, what

have you done that's useful today? It's

this. It's this. So, you're my energy

source

and my reason for continuing to do it.

So, without you collectively,

uh you wouldn't have me. So, if I

produce something that you thought had

value potentially to the country, you

should give yourself a pat in the back

because you're definitely part of that

uh value stream.

Yeah. You know, obviously I'm not going

anywhere because I'm paralyzed.

So,

Oh, my power bricks. Yeah. I told this I

guess I didn't tell you the story on

live stream. I told the locals people,

but uh yeah, my my power brick for my

computer got fried by the electricity in

the hospital. And then my other power

bricks simply didn't work in the

outlets,

no matter which outlet we used, but they

they seem to be functional at least.

There's a longer story there, but I

won't repeat it.

So, remember I told you that one of my

persuasion techniques is to sort of

monitor if people start using my frames.

So, watch after today

if there's any change in the way

Republicans talk about

their uh midterm approach, meaning

lowering lowering expenses and painting

a better picture. If it looks like

anybody starts talking differently, it

would take it wouldn't happen today, but

maybe two weeks from now, if you start

see people falling into my frame, then

you'll know how powerful persuasion is.

For example,

my earliest frame where I was talking

about uh Trump making his critics run

around like cats following a laser

pointer. If you hear anyone quote that,

you'll know I made a dent. Because once

you hear that, you cannot unhear it. You

know, I' I've taught you that visual

persuasion is stronger than any other

kind. You can immediately see the cat

and immediately see Trump with laser

pointer and you'll never forget that.

You just have to hear it once and it's

permanently in your brain.

So that's the difference between knowing

how to persuade and just saying some

things you want people to believe.

Thank you.

Might be time for breakfast.

All right. I'm just enjoying looking at

your comments go by. If you don't mind,

we've got oh god, we got 63,000 people

live.

That's some kind of a record. So, if you

don't mind hanging out here for another

minute,

uh I'm enjoying just watching the show

go by. It makes it kind of problematic

to put them online because they get too

big, but

we'll try to try to make that work.

got what?

Let me see if I can stop that comment. I

I generally can't see the multi-sentence

comments.

So, if you're wondering what could get

my attention, think in terms of

something like a maximum of five words

in the comments because the short ones I

can often get, but if it's sort of a two

or three sentence comment, I can't get

that at all.

Now I'll miss the best part of your

comment.

The success lessons went well last week.

Good to hear.

You don't have that many. Maybe five.

Oh, well I see I see all the platforms

at the same time. It could be that the

63,000 number is a cumulative and not

what's live watching. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I

think you're right. The live the live

watchers are probably closer to 5,000.

You're right.

So, live is closer to 5,000, but uh it's

sort of signaling that when people watch

it in recorded form, it's going to be a

big number.

A comment in five words. Boom. I saw it.

Uncle Fungus, you tested my system. and

it worked.

What's the deal with Amfest?

Well, so you notice that all the

conservative influencers are obsessed,

even if they act like they're not with

the,

you know, the the Charlie Kirk drama,

the Israel drama. I don't have to be

involved in that.

Um, and that's all I have to say. if

they want to do that game, I don't

criticize them. As long as you know what

what business they're all in, I think

you can just take it for what it is. So,

if you think if you think Candace Owens

is trying to be, you know, the news,

well, you're probably confused. If you

think she's trying to be interesting and

provocative and, you know, any other

thing, well, you might be right, but

it's interesting. So, I don't have to

love her. I don't have to hate her.

And part of my problem is I like all the

people involved in the fight.

So,

you know, whether I agree with or don't

agree with Tuck or Carlson, I like him.

Whe whether I agree with or don't agree

with Candace, I like her. You know, I

met her once. Very warm, very talented.

Anything else you want to say about her?

I'll listen to it. But I don't have to

embrace it.

[snorts]

So I don't have to get worked up about

it. And part of the reason is, you know,

if push comes to shove and the war

starts,

we're all going to be on the same team,

right? When the midterms roll around, do

you think any of those people are going

to prefer a a Democrat victory?

I don't know. I think none of them would

prefer a Democrat midterm victory. So,

we're going to be in the same team.

We're a little bit bored because things

are actually working pretty well. We

don't have as much to talk about. So, I

just say it's an interesting show and I

can like all the people involved

even if I might disagree.

Uh, Rob Schneider give a great speech.

All right, I think we've hung out

enough. I'm going to take my leave. I

appreciate you greatly

and uh we'll see you tomorrow. Tomorrow

will be shorter, I think. But for now,

have an amazing Sunday. Oh, I went way

too long.