ts 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, 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 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 cherry-picking." And you know, I saw Jessica Tarlov make this point. This a good point that if you cherry-pick 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 say that gas prices have gone down that there's no doubt that they've gone down.

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

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 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 path that is better than whatever the Democrats have.

So let me give you a concrete example. Suppose Trump said something like this. 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 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 a year and nobody has a better idea than that.

So here are some examples. So let's say 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 farms. You're going to use Optimus to pick the food. You're going to have self-driving trucks." So basically 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 AI-driven. They got robots, they got self-driving trucks, 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 robots bringing down the cost, etc.

So the idea is for Republicans to admit that you can't make grocery prices go down overnight, but what you can do is have a rational plan to get there that Democrats would not have. Because you've 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 two year 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 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 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, 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 warmongers and their propaganda media are again trying to undermine President Trump's effort to 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 slash conquer Europe in order to gin up support for their pro-war policies.

The truth is, now here's the money shot. The truth is that US intelligence assesses that Russia does not even have the capability to conquer and occupy Ukraine 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 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 a Ukraine-like shooting war to include economic war, AI war, space platforms, weapons we've never seen before at whatever cost. So you could easily imagine that Russia is not capable 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? 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, that can give you a stomach exam in eight minutes, and all you have to do is swallow the pill, 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, we're going to work on using AI to lower your healthcare 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 healthcare costs." And they're actually doing things. Mark Cuban, you have to tell us what you can do maybe with our help to lower pharmaceutical costs. Elon Musk I don't know what he's doing in the healthcare realm, but you can say tell us how you could use AI and Grok that's AI and robots to lower healthcare 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 healthcare 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 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 over-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 healthcare costs and maybe all of our costs.

So apparently Anna Kasparian you've seen her a lot online. She said the California money that was supposed to be spent on homelessness is being funneled into NGOs and executives making half a million a year. And she said just experiencing what I've seen on the ground in California has 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 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 it's like the letters of marque 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 like to form a free market 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 people who let's say are watchdogs 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 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.

You wouldn't want the AI to be the auditor, although I wouldn't rule that out. But in stage one, you'd want the AI to simply 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 basically lose as much money as the 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 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 Post Millennial 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 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? Probably Trump could help them there by saying, "All right, here are some zones in the US so you don't have to take your cool city to some island somewhere. We'll keep it onshore."

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 actuators. 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-minute city and stop being a dick. This is something that they can endlessly tweak. So they would basically look to optimize every part of a city. So optimize transportation, optimize healthcare, 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 LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, VC capitalist Marc Andreessen, and that was my ding ding ding name. So you might not love Reid Hoffman, but he's good at what he does. And if you hear that Marc Andreessen is involved in something big and important, take that seriously. 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 Benz 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 Thiel was involved and I told you that Marc Andreessen was involved and I told you that Reid Hoffman was involved and forget about his politics 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 basically you tell a story about how in the United States and again these are planned for overseas but Trump could bring at least some of them domestic. 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 so inefficient. So you have to start with a blank field and that's what they're doing.

All right. 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 Gutfeld 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 got worse instead of better.

Here's another one. Another story from the Daily Wire. 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 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, 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 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, there's a new study that says AI doesn't make corrections. 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 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 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 is a subjective experience? That's an indefinable word salad definition. What is it? 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 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'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 correction to my next prediction. That would be conscious to me. I don't know that AI could ever get there. It's not really close to it now. And there was a new paper 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 special podcast.

All right, apparently Starbucks is being sued by the state of California for a hundred billion dollars over their DEI policy. So apparently the attorney general in Florida is suing Starbucks because they discriminated against non-black employees. Well, I'm happy every time discrimination is reduced. So I wish them luck.

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 key here, and is more dangerous than the shocking fraud in Minnesota and has been making headlines. Real federal welfare spending has soared by 765% more than twice as fast as other spending and now costs $1.4 trillion annually. 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 from my 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 Benz happened and we learned about the NGOs 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 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 the complexity to discover that we have a fraud-based system is Mike Benz and DOGE. If we did not have both of those things, and 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, 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 no. 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 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 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 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 learned skill that you would not imagine could be learned.

So a year ago when I started thinking about how big the deficits were, the alarm went off in the back of my head. 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 think we're losing a trillion dollars a year.

So