t makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Go.

It's kind of amazing to me. As far as I know, locals is the only platform where the chatters can put pictures. That must not be true, but it's the only one I know of.

All right. After the show today, if you're an X subscriber of Owen Gregorian, he's going to have a little Spaces event when I'm done. But that's only for people who are subscribing to Owen. And if you're not, why not? You should be. So go over there. Owen Gregorian. You can just search for him on X. You'll find him.

Well, there's a new study from the Society for the Study of Addiction. It says that unwanted pregnancies surge with alcohol but not with cannabis. You know who else knew that? Well, here's yet another example where you could have saved some money by just asking me.

Scott, does alcohol make you do reckless things that you regret later? Oh yeah. Yep. That's what alcohol does.

Scott, does marijuana make you more cautious or more of a risk taker? Well, honestly, it probably makes you more cautious. No, you didn't need to study this one. I could have pretty much taken care of this.

Scott, what do you think? Well, sit down. I'll tell you.

But according to the Western Journal and Michael Austin who's writing, did you know this? That American marriage stability is very high actually, historically and stable. So for reasons that we hope are good reasons, there's a lot less divorce happening in the United States. But is that good news? What would cause a stark decrease in divorces?

Well, one thing that would cause that is bad economics, because the person who might want to leave says we can't really afford to have two lives. So I have a feeling, this is based on my own lack of research, I have a feeling that what we're seeing is a lot of people who have marriages but maybe they've decided it's just for financial reasons and for the kids and maybe career-wise. But they're seeing other people because they're not really a couple anymore.

How many of you know somebody who lives as a couple but long ago they made a friendly agreement that they would see other people and they're just not really a romantic couple? Do any of you know anybody like that?

So I wonder how that counts. Does that count as a divorce or does that count as still married? I guess it would be still married, right? So I'm not positive these numbers are good news, but hey.

Apparently just 15% of marriages that started between 2010 and 2012 ended in divorce within their first 10 years. Because most of you would have said, I'll bet it's more like half of those people. It was only 15%. Again, might not be good news. It might be just bad economics.

You might know that Amazon is going to upgrade their little device whose name I shall not use for fear of activating it, Alexa. But they're going to add AI to it. It's taking a while, so they haven't rolled that out yet. But they're considering, there's a report that says they're considering putting advertisements on it.

Now, I've heard of bad ideas in my time, but can you imagine a worse idea than asking your Alexa what the weather is or something like that and having to listen to an advertisement before it told you the answer? I would use that once. Just once. I would never ever use it again if it gave me an advertisement before it gave me an answer.

Now, what might be true is they want to sell subscriptions and so they want to torture you a little bit with the advertisements that would go away if you got a subscription. So my guess is that while it's true that they might be considering it, I doubt it's the only way you could consume it. So we'll see.

There's a startup that does in vitro fertilization stuff that can predict an embryo's IQ. So before you choose which of your embryos to bring to fruition, I guess, you can test them all, whichever eggs you got going there, and you can figure out which one would be the smartest one.

How many of you think that should be illegal? Well, it's illegal in a lot of countries, it turns out. But it's not illegal in the US. In the US you can test for IQ before you decide to have the embryo brought to full adulthood, I guess. But it can also test for 17 various diseases.

So is that all good or is that all bad? Well, you know, maybe it would lower healthcare costs. Maybe there'd be some kind of hidden downside to this that is not obvious. But I can tell you that you will be called a racist if you're in favor of it. And don't get me started about Sweeney.

All right. The company name is Herasite. They're like heretics. That's funny.

According to Futurism, Victor Tangermann is writing that CEOs are starting to publicly brag about reducing their workforce with AI. Do you all remember my prediction about how CEOs would act when they're doing downsizing?

In the old days, if you downsized your staff, it would be seen by the market as, "Oh, I guess things are not going so well. They had to downsize." Now the opposite case would be if you've been around for a long time and somebody buys your company and you know they're getting rid of the fat, sort of the Elon Musk buys X kind of method. So sometimes it's taken as a positive when you decrease staff.

But in the era of AI, I don't believe any CEO will ever admit that they're just decreasing staff to save money and they're not doing anything to replace them because they weren't that important anyway. I feel like they'll all say, "Yeah, we're going to cut 10% because of AI. AI. Yeah, yeah, we're going to use AI and cut by 10%." But they never give you examples.

Now, if they said, "We got rid of our call centers and now we're using AI to take calls," I would say, "Oh, that's probably exactly what happened." But the only company I know that did that ended up changing their mind because the AI was hallucinating too much. So they had to quickly undo what they did and go back to humans.

And if you tell me that they've reduced their programming staff, you coders, because coders are more efficient with AI, I kind of doubt it in the real world. I kind of doubt it. So anyway, to me it sounds like just something that the CEOs will say, not something that's happening yet. At one point it will, but I don't think it's happening yet.

President Trump is telling Schumer to go to hell. So I was trying to ignore this story in the news because it's too boring and it has to do with process. But the basic idea is that the Senate wanted to take their summer recess vacation. Probably all of them had plans, you know, and their family had plans and expects them to be there. But there was some need to approve a whole bunch of nominees that the Democrats were holding up.

So there was some kind of an agreement to stay and very quickly vote on a whole bunch of nominees. But then Schumer said, we're not going to play along unless you give us a billion dollars of funding for we don't even know what. It was just a billion dollars. And of course he felt like he had the upper hand because he was going to keep the Republicans from doing what they needed to do, you know, for their family and their other obligations.

So Trump said, go to hell. And he just shut down the whole process. Now, do you agree with Trump that when you get blackmailed like that, the correct response to being blackmailed is nope. And if it costs us something, well, it costs us something, but nope. We're not going to be blackmailed by some crappy Chuck Schumer guy.

All right. So that story is boring, but it's happening.

One of the things that so far has impressed me about the Trump administration is, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems they've shown a willingness to really get into a whole bunch of issues that are maybe not sexy but really, really important to get fixed. One of them is cleaning up the voter rolls in all the states because there's a lot of suspicion among mostly Republicans that the voter rolls have a bunch of dead people on them and somehow that's helping Democrats win.

I don't believe that that's a proven fact. But if half the country is worried that that's the case, you need to fix that. And I'm sure there's some problem. I don't know what the problem is, but certainly there's some problems there.

So the Department of Justice, according to Justice News, John Solomon is going to do this in all the states. So here's my question. What happens if cleaning up the voter rolls makes a difference in all the races? And then on top of that, what happens if there's some redistricting that happens, gerrymandering, and that makes a difference?

You know, I didn't love it when the Democrats found clever process ways to win. And I suppose you could say this is just a way to make it even or take away their advantage or something. But I don't love the fact that our system is so obviously not about who voted for what. It's almost entirely whose process was used. So if you don't redistrict, you get one answer. If you do, you get the other. Voting, somewhat irrelevant.

Weirdly, according to the Post Millennial, the federal government now, thanks to the Justice Department removing a barrier, can conduct merit-based hiring. Now, doesn't that sound like a joke? Let me say that again. And just imagine that I had to tell you this and it's 2025. That the federal government of the United States has now the ability to do merit-based hiring.

Now, I think what this referred to is the ability to give people a test and say, here's the test. If you pass this test, we could hire you. In the Carter administration, I guess that kind of thing was removed because it was racist. Can you believe that for years our government has been run without a merit test? We're just hiring people because of what they look like. It kind of looks like that, doesn't it?

If you had to ask yourself what went wrong, how did we get to this place? Well, maybe it has to do with decades and decades of not being able to check people's merit before hiring them, but we got the race right, I guess. Or meet the Dillons all over that.

But that's another example of Republicans fixing stuff under the hood. You know, not really sexy stuff, but stuff that really did need to get done.

And then Ron DeSantis, Governor DeSantis, is bragging that Florida, his state, is the first state to eliminate DEI from their public university system. How would you like to be working in the DEI industry when the current government of the United States and several of the governors of big states have declared that the thing you're doing should be illegal? It's so bad it needs to be against the law. And it is. It is against the law.

But just imagine you're working in some blue state and some organization that hasn't yet been targeted by Trump and it's your job to do something which has been determined to be illegal in the United States. And there are probably a million people whose business card have on it the equivalent of "I'm a money launderer" or "yeah, I'm a drug dealer." I'm a DEI professional. Kind of all the same. These are job titles for criminals and there are probably a million of them in the United States.

I may have told you that the Department of Energy recently put out a report on climate change and because it's the Trump administration and not the prior administration, do you believe that they said climate change is an existential risk and we should spend trillions of dollars to fix it? No, they did not say that.

They said that it often is being looked at wrong. Climate change may or may not be a real thing, but the way we're addressing it was batshit crazy because we couldn't really change it just in the United States. You know, China and India, for example, are bigger contributors.

But so here's what I would say about this. I saw that Judith Curry is a co-author of that paper. How many of you recognize her name? Judith Curry.

So she's one of the climate experts who I would say would be a contrarian to the general consensus that climate change is going to kill us all. And she's quite famous and very capable. But I have to be honest, the conclusion of the paper was sort of determined by who they picked to write it. Would you agree?

If you pick Judith Curry to be the co-author, you're not wondering how it's going to turn out because she's famous for being a non-alarmist about climate. So you kind of know which way it's going to go. I don't know who her co-author was, but I'm positive it was not a climate alarmist.

So here's the trick. If you were a dumb citizen who did not watch the Coffee with Scott Adams podcast, you might say to yourself, huh, these qualified scientists have a different view and they've made their case. We can compare it to the other cases and just see who's got it right. Unless science works, you know, it's always being updated. So maybe we need to update it now.

Well, okay, that would be the most generous way to look at it. Here's the other way to look at it. Whoever decided who the co-authors would be also decided the science because they knew damn well that the co-authors were going to be the non-alarmists. So of course that's what they got.

Now, I happen to think that Judith Curry is one of the more credible, useful people in the entire industry. So this isn't about her. And I'm completely on the same page with her, but I'm not an expert. I just think her argument is stronger than the argument that she's going against.

Well, so now do you see a patt