e was leaning on a barrel. So they got rid of the cracker and they got rid of the barrel. I don't know what's left.

Well, if you had to guess, what is most likely? Is it most likely that their move toward DEI and making a big deal about it and changing their logo and getting rid of the old white man on the logo? Is that going to help their bottom line? If you had to guess, would you guess, well, this will all work out?

Well, let's check in with Target stores who went through their own wokeness tuck-friendly swimsuit kind of event and I'm reading from Red State. Bob Hogue is writing in Red State that let's see their Target CEO is leaving his post next year and it looks like they never really recovered from their wokeness drama.

But here's the funny thing. The way CNN describes it is that the problem is a backlash to its retreat on DEI. So if you get your news from CNN, it will say the problem with Target sales is not that people didn't like them being woke, but rather they didn't like when they were woke and then they became less woke. So it was the becoming less woke because there was such an uproar that that really hurt their sales.

What do you think? Was it the being woke or was it the retreating from being woke that hurt their sales? Well, probably both. My guess is that anytime you change anything, it gives somebody a reason not to shop there. But what it definitely didn't do is give somebody a reason to shop if they didn't already have one. It could give you a reason not to shop either way because they got too woke or they retreated from the woke. But which of those things would cause you to buy more? Would you say, "Oh, Target's really woke now. I'm going to buy a few extra pairs of pants." No. It can only go one direction. Whether you go woke or you go less woke, it can only cost you customers just because it's a change and there's no way there's an upside. So we'll see.

Meanwhile, Kroger stores have announced that they're going to close multiple supermarkets in Washington state due to crime, according to the Gateway Pundit. Mike LaChance is writing about that. And what do you think of that? So Kroger has decided that instead of staying in the high crime area, they're going to get the f out of there. Huh. Well, that's some advice, isn't it? I wonder if they could get cancelled for saying that they should get out of a high crime area. I feel like they should be cancelled for that. No, no, just kidding. Don't hurt Kroger.

But what will happen? Will Kroger's sales go up or down? Well, they'll have fewer sales in the high crime area, but they probably were losing money and employees too.

Meanwhile, Bed Bath and Beyond, which at one point was bankrupt but I guess got rescued by some big money entity, but they're trying to rebuild and they have announced that they will not build any stores in California. Can you even hold this in your head that California is uninvestable if you're a big company? They've just said there's overregulation and taxes and basically those two things, overregulation and taxes. So they say it's just not even worth it. It's too risky.

So the two risky places to do business, three, well four if you count Ukraine, would be China, Ukraine, Gaza, and California. But also fairly Washington state but also Washington DC. So there's a whole bunch of places you just don't want to be. And unfortunately I live in one of those places. So I'm thinking of moving to Ukraine for the friendly business environment.

Well, Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT, apparently according to Zero Hedge has hired some top Democrat operatives to help them grease the gears, so to speak, as Zero Hedge puts it, grease the gears with California politicians because they need to restructure the company and eventually go public and they need California to be a friendly business environment.

Do you know what will happen if they don't get what they want? This is in Politico, by the way. Well, will they leave California? What will their AI tell them to do? But it seems unbelievable to me that a company as big as OpenAI and ChatGPT that they have to hire people just to figure out how to navigate the Democrat cesspool that is California. That's not good. That's not good.

And what could you say about the governor of a state that's so poorly run that Bed Bath and Beyond is not willing to do business in the state and ChatGPT had to hire expensive Democrat weasels to try to figure out how to do business with the state? What would happen to that governor? Well, obviously his political career would be over. What? Oh, he is the highest polling person to be the presidential candidate. Oh, okay.

So we'll talk a little bit later about how Democrats are not taking the best advice, but what about Walmart? Don't you think Walmart's having some issues with wokeness or DEI or do you think they're having some issues with tariffs? Well, Walmart is once again, you know, arguably one of the most impressive companies in the history of the United States because their sales are up. So they've got a 4.6% sales increase in the last three months. And that's even including the fact that they've got tariffs that are built into their prices. Yeah.

Now, they have raised some of their prices because of tariffs, but only one-third of their goods come from overseas, and they're not passing along the entire cost of the tariffs. They're absorbing some and passing some along, but it wasn't enough to decrease their sales. And apparently I haven't heard of them doing anything that would make anybody mad about DEI or about trans or wokeness or any of that. So somehow they've avoided all of that. Good job Walmart. Impressive.

Well, speaking of big companies doing stuff, Axios is reporting that Morgan Stanley did some data analysis and this is what Morgan Stanley came up with. Now, I'm laughing because it used to be my day job at a big corporation to do financial estimates and projections and decide which path was the best one financially. So I have a little bit of appreciation of how accurate you can be in doing this, which is Morgan Stanley did an analysis of how much money AI could save the big companies and they said it could save them nearly $1 trillion a year in reducing I think mostly employee costs. So they came up with $1 trillion a year and that's only the beginning. They say long-term it could result in 13 to $16 trillion in market value creation for the companies in the index. I figure that's the S&P 500 index. I think that's what that means.

All right. Do you believe, I'm giving it away by laughing at it, but do you believe that Morgan Stanley has somebody on their payroll that can estimate the trillions of dollars of impact of AI? No. No. They don't have anybody who knows how to do that. This is pure, there was somebody who was no doubt assigned the project. That's the sort of project I would have been assigned to. Do you think I would have not produced the number? Of course I would. If I had been working for Morgan Stanley and they said, "Scott, got an important assignment for you. It will be up to you to decide how much money can be saved by AI." And I'd be like, "All right." And then I'd go off and I'd start making some assumptions. Well, let's assume 46% of all the companies fire 20% of their staff within 8 months. Where did you get that assumption? Look over there, it's a deer. Change the subject.

Yeah. No, you can't really do that kind of an estimate. It's entirely possible that AI will just be wonderful and companies will make more money and all the people who lose their jobs will be instantly retrained and have AI as a buddy and they'll go off and make more. It's all possible. But if you tell me that anybody can estimate what's going to happen in even three years, no. No, nobody can do that.

But Google's generative AI team according to Futurism, Lucas is writing about this, CB Insights I don't know, that there would be no point in getting a law degree or a medical degree if you were going to start today and the reason is that AI will just eat your lunch and you could get that expensive education it might take 7 to 11 years to become a practicing doctor, but by then there's almost no chance the AI won't do it better and cheaper and faster. You'll still need nurse type people, you know, to put on splints and do physical stuff. Well, I guess you could do a lot of that in hospitals. But in terms of analyzing something and prescribing something, I feel like I would agree that your regular doctors have some problems and lawyers too.

But I will point out that ChatGPT just had to hire so