news is I don't think you have to be literally the one having a baby or even married to the one who's having a baby. I think you could have step kids. I think you could be helping somebody who has kids, you know, maybe like a grandparent who does a lot of babysitting, that sort of thing. But I think if you're not directly connected to essentially the energy source for all of life, which is the reproductive thing, I think it's going to be really hard to be happy.

Now, what if you could convince the people on the left that the reason the people on the right have better mental health is because they're sort of naturally connected to the political right kind of a thing? And then you look at the political left and doesn't it seem to you that they're a little less interested in having kids? So if you could connect the two ideas, and how many of you buy my hypothesis that the thing that makes you happy is being connected to the main thing your biology is requiring of you, which is to be part of the reproductive flow of humanity?

Well, try it out because you probably have some depressed family member who doesn't know why they're depressed and they're on drugs. Can you imagine how they would feel if they were having a baby? Probably really stressed, but also that they would feel like they were attached to something with meaning.

Anyway, according to Breitbart, Disney is laying off hundreds of people and they're going to downsize their entertainment division. I was watching a reel the other day on the internet and it was somebody who works in the LA Hollywood area and they seem pretty bleak because apparently there are just no projects. Nobody's making a movie and if they are they're not doing it there. So it looks like the whole moviemaking industry is kind of dead. I don't know if it's coming back. It seems to me that everybody's looking at AI and expecting somebody to make a feature-length movie in the next probably one year. And I always thought I would like to do that, but I'll have to feel a little better to make that happen. So maybe. Possibly.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk's company Neuralink just raised $650 million which would value the company at about 9 billion. And the thing I wondered was, does Elon Musk even care that his net worth went up a few billion dollars? I don't know what percentage he owns, but can you imagine being so rich that you wake up and one of your companies raises your net worth by, I'll just take a guess, 4 billion, and he just made 4 billion and it wouldn't change his day at all. His day would be exactly the same with 4 billion if that's what it was.

Sam Altman says the world must prepare together for AI's massive impact. And then he said something that is the funniest thing a marketer ever said. He said that OpenAI releases imperfect models early so the world can see and adapt and help shape regulations. He says there are going to be scary times ahead.

Now, do you believe that OpenAI intentionally is releasing and has been releasing defective models because it helps people get ready for the real thing? Does that sound to you why they're releasing defective models? It's not because that's all they have. Now, I don't think you would argue with the fact that they don't know how to make them non-defective. I don't think they know how to make them stop hallucinating as far as I know. But it seems a little bit cheeky to say that releasing them with flaws is really helping society because then the flaws don't make them that dangerous but then we can imagine what they will be like without flaws and then we can get used to it and prepare for it altogether.

I've got some advice coming up from some people who have some ideas how to survive this age of robots and AI, but we'll get to that.

Meanwhile, Scientific American says that there's a Chinese company that found out how to bring your dead car battery back to life if you have an electric car. I'm talking about the lithium-ion batteries in your electric car. So currently if your electric car has a bad battery or it's run its course, I don't know what they do to recycle it or whatever, but it's sort of just this big problem. But this Chinese company used AI, which is a big part of the story. They use AI to look at all the chemical reactions that could revitalize a lithium-ion battery. And they actually got three suggestions and one of them worked.

So all they did was they took a dead battery. Now dead is not dead dead. Dead is like when it reaches 80% capacity. I think if it goes down from 100 to 80%, that's considered unusable. And they found they could squirt some of this chemical in there and it would revitalize it and suddenly it would be like exactly as good as a new battery.

Now there's some problems. You know, there's safety testing and you'd have to redesign the batteries so there's a way to inject something. So that would be kind of a big deal. And it might result in fewer sales of new cars because if you could keep your battery running forever, well, why would you need to upgrade? Because the software would be upgrading on its own. So anyway, I don't know if that has any place in the market, but that's pretty impressive.

I also didn't know that current batteries are supposed to last 15 years. Does that sound right? If you got a Tesla, the battery that comes with it would last 15 years. That would be impressive. Maybe it does.

I usually don't talk about the individual crimes and even if they're mass shootings and stuff, but this illegal alien Muslim terrorist guy from Egypt, to quote Jim Hoft at the Gateway Pundit. So as most of you know if you watch the news, he used Molotov cocktails and alcohol, set them on fire and threw them at a group of American Jews who were together. I don't know if you'd say protesting or rallying, and it was in support of the hostages or something. But this guy shows up. He's not even a legal citizen. And he firebombs a group of Jewish people who were just trying to support essentially people who were hostages. That's my understanding of it.

And I was trying to think, are Jews the only group in America who are attacked when they're grouping together? Because I remember the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack and I was thinking to myself, is there any other situation where a group of Americans that are in some demographic, if they group together, they're likely to be victims? In other words, I've never heard of the Pride parade being attacked, and I hope it isn't. I've never heard of a woman's group being firebombed. So you can certainly see how the question of antisemitism in the United States is at the top of the list of we better do something about this. And one of the things you could do about it would be not to let in Egyptian terrorists, if that's what he is. That would help. That would be a good start.

Have you noticed how there was a period when Trump first became president where we couldn't stop talking about the price of gas and the price of eggs? Well, it turns out the price of eggs was doing great. According to Newsmax, a dozen eggs is under $3 in most places and the average cost is down to $2.52. So according to the White House rapid response team, that means the price of eggs has dropped 61% since Trump took office.

But the best thing about that is it made Democrats just shut up about the one thing they understood. If you thought about it, the one thing the Democrats had on their side was that Trump had overpromised stuff like he would do things on day one. Well, day one doesn't really mean day one. It just means as fast as possible, we'll get right on it. And I would say if you're only halfway into the first year, it looks like you got right on it. So your egg prices went down and gas prices are down and maybe gas prices will go down some more because Trump just opened with another executive order 23 million acres of Alaskan wilderness to drilling. So Doug Burgum is driving that. And that reverses a Biden-era drilling ban.

I wonder if companies feel safe going into business drilling up there. If the possibility of a Democrat getting elected could put them out of business, is that a thing? Or would even a Democrat say, "All right, if you've already drilled, that's allowed, but no new drilling." I don't know. Would the Democrats use common sense? Hard to know.

But of course some people are worried about the habitats for grizzly bears and polar bears and caribou and migratory birds and they don't want to lose the caribou. I mean, what would you do without caribou? If there's one thing I need when I want to drive my car to a distant location, more caribou. I'll be like, "Oh man, I only made it one mile. Why?" Well, I only had access to one caribou.

So ladies and gentlemen, it's sort of a tie. On one hand, you get a bunch of oil that drives civilization. Boring. On the other hand, you lose some caribou, possibly.

Now, one of the things I wonder when I read a story like that is how much oil is up there? Because doesn't it sort of also matter how much? Because yeah, I'm in favor of opening it for drilling, but in the back of my mind I'm assuming that it has a tremendous amount of known reserves because I would kill a few caribou for an enormous reserve. But suppose there's only a little bit there. Well, that's sort of I would only kill like one caribou for that.

Meanwhile, over in Poland, there was a presidential election and what's being called by Reuters a pro-Trump nationalist has won the presidency in Poland. Somebody named Karol Nawrocki and he won narrowly, but apparently he's got that Trump vibe about him. So do you think that's actually a Trump or is that some kind of a coincidence? Are people really going to just start copying Trump because it works? Maybe. I don't know if that makes the world a safer place or not. How many Trumps can you have in the world?

And the funny thing is I think he knocked out somebody named Donald Tusk. That's pretty weird. A weird coincidence. Anyway, we'll see if that's the Trump effect if it affects any other countries.

There's a gentleman named Alex Karp who is the CEO of Palantir. So he would be a multi-billionaire by now. And he was asked at some event about secrets for success it looks like. And he said the following. He said, "I've never met someone successful who had a great social life at 20. If that's what you want, that's great, but you're not going to be successful and don't blame anyone else." And then he also says that picking the right partner in life is important.

Now, do you buy that? Do you buy that if you had a great social life in your 20s that your odds of being successful are very low, career-wise successful? I have to admit that if people are not just totally humping it in their 20s, it would be hard to imagine that they're going to start humping it in their 30s.

But if I look at my own career arc in my 20s, I was just working regular jobs and trying to get my MBA and basically I was just building up my talent stack. But by the time I reached my 30s, that's when I launched Dilbert and I found myself working full-time doing a Dilbert comic strip, writing a book, working on licensing projects. It was insane. The amount of work I put in was just through the roof.

So while I do believe that people in their 20s, if they're not working pretty hard at something, that's a bad sign. But I think there are two things you can work at. One is working directly on that startup or whatever it is that's going to make you rich. But the other is building your talent stack. I think either one of those gets you someplace.

So if you were to look at my life in my 20s, it looks more relaxed, going to a corporate job, taking all the classes that they offered, taking a Dale Carnegie class, learning about technology, learning marketing, learning strategy. So I was learning all those things and I was very aware that I was just building up my skills so that someday I could do my own thing. I didn't think it would necessarily be cartooning, but all of those skills, including the technology stuff, directly went into Dilbert.

Then there's Marc Andreessen who's talking about the world of robots in the future. Now this is not directly self-help advice, but it's a little bit telling you the future. So Marc Andreessen, famous investor, if you don't know who he is, says general purpose robotics is going to happen at a giant scale in the next decade. Now that's what most of us think, but when it comes from somebody like Andreessen, then it just seems more credible. And he says the US should not try to get the old manufacturing jobs back, which would suggest you should not be waiting to get your manufacturing job back. He says instead we should lean hard into designing and building robots.

Now I assume we're doing that. I don't know exactly what the government is doing to make it easier to build robots, but as Andreessen points out, otherwise we will live in a world of Chinese robots. Can you imagine how dangerous it would be if you had a full-sized humanoid robot that was built in China and its intelligence could be updated and controlled just through the cloud through China? And if China wanted to overthrow the United States, all it would have to do is activate all the robots at the same time, grab a knife off the kitchen counter, stab inhabitants. So yeah, we'd better start building our own robots like really fast. Build those robots.

So if you translate this into some kind of meaningful career path advice, there must be elements of robot building that you could identify as current jobs for human beings. I don't know exactly what that would be because I don't know enough about the robot building world. But I'd be looking hard into what is it that you need to build and sell robots that the robots won't do themselves if there is anything because that's going to be a pretty big area.

Anyway, according to the Gateway Pundit, Christina Laila, so you may have heard this story but this one's a really spicy one. The FBI and Mueller's team hid Russiagate documents using a special coding system that you can use to make things invisible to people who are searching for them. Now imagine at this point I think Kash Patel and others have identified the code that was used to hide all the good stuff.

Now, why do you think this is regarding Russiagate collusion? I feel like this is going to be the thing that tells you what all the people did, all the bad people. So right now we sort of have this general idea that the FBI was presented with this idea that maybe Trump had some Russia connection, but we all know that it was organized via the Hillary Clinton campaign. But I feel like the reason nobody's going to jail for it is there's not quite the paper trail you would need to prove who did what and when and what they were thinking and what their intentions were and all that stuff. And it could be that this new discovery that there's a secret code where all the good stuff was hidden, we might find out just how bad this was.

The only concern is that there are so many things that happen in the news, especially in the Trump world, that the energy has already been taken out of the topic. And the people on the left and the mainstream media will just say, "Ah, that was a long time ago." And they'll just act like it's not a big deal. And then the political right will be screaming and saying, "Are you kidding? We just proved that you tried to overthrow the government of the United States or influence an election, which would be sort of the same thing." And we have the names and we've got the exact details and that's not going to be anything. So that's what I predict. I predict there will be some really spicy things that come out of this, but that the mainstream news will talk about it once and then it'll act like it doesn't matter. So unless there's some kind of prosecution, it will just sort of disappear.

Steve Bannon on his War Room show had author of Putin's Playbook, Rebecca Coffler, and she says that we're already in a kinetic war with Russia because Russia would know that that very clever drone attack that Ukraine apparently pulled off to destroy a bunch of Russian bombers, that there's no way that they could have done that without direct US support at the very least our satellite images, but probably more than that. And I thought to myself, oh, I'm an idiot. Not once did I think, oh, the United States was obviously involved in that attack. I didn't think that once. And it's kind of obvious once somebody who's an expert points it out, you go, "Huh, yeah, actually there's a pretty good chance that America was involved in that."

But then related to that, apparently Russia is deploying Chinese lasers that would be defensive tools for knocking down any drones and maybe missiles too. So there's a video that's been posted on Telegram that shows a team of Russian military people operating this Chinese drone laser. Now you see what's happening, right? Russia and Ukraine have become a weapons testing area for first the United States and now for China and Russia and Ukraine are just sort of caught in the middle.

And I also thought to myself, do you know who's preventing Russia from attacking the United States besides perhaps Russia themselves? Probably China. Do you think China that buys 80% of the energy that Russia sells, do you think they have the power to say no, you're not going to war? We might test some weapons and we might keep crawling along the way things are going, but you can't start World War III. I feel like China would have that power now. So that we're not even really dealing with Russia exactly. I think that China has probably pulled off a total control move because they're the biggest customer of Russia and they can bankrupt them anytime they want. So I think we're safer than you think because China would not allow Russia to escalate beyond the point where they're just testing some Chinese weapons. So I think that so-called war in Ukraine is just going to keep going as a stalemate.

Another guest on the War Room named Boone Cutler, he asked the following question, which is a good idea. What would happen if all those Chinese-owned properties, I think most of them are farms that are near military bases in the United States, what if they also have swarms of drones? They're right next to military bases. So they could attack the military base in a minute. So maybe we should look at that. Now, I haven't seen any evidence that the land that's being bought that's near military bases is being stocked up with weapons. But I would definitely worry about it. I would look into it a little bit. So yeah, let's find out a little bit more about that.

Meanwhile, according to Interesting Engineering, in Russia the kids are going to be taught, I guess it's a mandatory class, they're going to be taught how to operate drones. So they'll all be little drone experts. To which I say, isn't that worthless? In one year, won't all the drones be self-driving? Why would you put a human in the drone operating position? You know, even if the AI is operating the drone, at the very least, the human will be relegated to final decisions. So I think the drone will take off. It will decide because AI is operating the entire war. The drone will know where to go for maximum impact and the weakest defense and it'll pick its targets and maybe but not even necessarily it might show it to the human and then the human says yes or no. Yes, attack that tank. But it doesn't seem to me that you're going to need a lot of human operators for drones in one year. Is that too soon? I think in one year if we have full self-driving Teslas that are giving civilians rides in cities throughout the United States, you think the drones are going to be operated by humans? I mean maybe in some specialty way but it doesn't seem like a useful skill in the future.

Jeffrey Sachs who was on the All-In Summit way back in September of 2024, he had some interesting things to say about Taiwan. And I'm not going to say I agree with it or disagree with it, but he makes a good case. He says China first of all is not a threat to the United States security, big oceans, big nuclear deterrent and so forth. Second, we don't have to be in China's face. What do I mean by that? He says we don't have to provoke World War III over Taiwan. That's a long complicated issue, but this would be the stupidest thing for my grandchildren to die for. We have three agreements with China that say we're going to stay out of that and we should. And I have to say, the idea of dying because of something about Taiwan, that does seem like a really bad reason for an American to die.

Now on the other hand, Taiwan is an ally and we must have made some assurances that we would be helpful. But I wonder to what extent just giving them weapons would be enough. It seems to me that if in the long run there's no possible way that Taiwan will remain independent