Persuasion

evidence of insurrection, intent, or planning, and that they weaponized federal agencies to hunt down dissenters. Now, how much of that sounds like it came from me? You have to tell me if I'm imagining this. Are these concepts and the way he presents them, are they so obvious that he just sort of ended up in the same place I was because we're just both smart? I don't know. I feel like the administration beginning in the first term of Trump, I believe that a number of the insiders recognized that I was good at framing stuff and then I think they started paying attention so that they could look at how I framed it and compare how they were going to frame it themselves and see if there's anything they can borrow from my framing. It looks like they have successfully borrowed from my framing. Well, apparently Russia sent a submarine to protect that Russian-flagged empty tanker that was tryi

Episode 3065 CWSA 01/07/26

on't know for sure, but it looks like exactly the right process. You know, I always talk about a system is better than a goal. Well, the goal would be protect all the children. The system would be that we make sure we have the best science and we're looking at it continuously and all that. But what I want to add to this, this is so much in the category of something that only Trump could have gotten done. And when I say only Trump, obviously it required RFK Jr. Trump is going to go down in history, if this works out, oh my god, there's not going to be any question who was the best president of all time. Like it would just remove all doubt. And what I like about this in particular is that I've said this for years and I love it that Trump has a unique ability to build a pirate ship when you need a pirate ship. Right. So he brought on one of the most famous names in Democrat politics, RFK Jr., and put him in a high-risk situation, and he has so far, in my opinion, performed beautifully. Now, no other president could have done that because they didn't know how to build a pirate ship. When I say pirate, I don't mean in a negative way. I just mean a collection of people that would not normally be on the same team working in the same direction, but he makes it work. And so watching Kennedy not just change a goal but to change the entire system that got us to where we are is just breathtaking. It's just breathtaking. And only Trump could have done that. And I think only RFK Jr. could have gotten as far as we've gotten so far. So full standing ovation for that. But again, we'll have to see. We'll have to see if

Episode 3064 CWSA 01/06/26

rats got more seats in the House because the census said there are more people than there were. Now here's why I brought it up. The reason that we know this is because the Census Bureau did an audit of their own process. So it's not an accusation. It's what the audit people say themselves. They say that it changed the representative sample, not a sample, but it changed who's representing who and that it went in one direction on average. But what I caught here is the word audit. You know, I posted the other day that audit would be the word of 2025. And boy, is it. If you start noticing how often the word audit is going to pop up in all the stories because there's so many stories about fraud and the only way you're going to catch them is with an audit. Well, it's not the only way, but it'll be the main way you do it. So I predict that the public is going to learn the importance of audits in a way that they had not before quite appreciated. And if the public starts asking for audits and demanding them, then the politicians will have to fold to that. So probably the single most important thing we could do for our fiscal health is to make sure there's always an audit in place, like a real one, for everything that has a lot of money involved. Could it be that the attention that we're putting in that word, and by the way if it wasn't obvious, you know when I turned on my persuasion skills which I don't always do, it's because there's some big gain. I don't do it just to see if I can do it. I use my persuasion when I think there's some gigantic thing we could get out of it. And one of the things I'm going to persuade more for over the next year is the importance of audits. I know, boring, right? But if we don't get that right, everything falls apart. So did you watch any of the Joe Rogan interview recently with Brett Weinstein? And they were talking about aliens and UAPs and ancient civilizations. Well, it sounded like Joe Rogan is on the similar path that I've been on

Episode 3053 CWSA 12/25/25

n sentiment within the Republican party. Would you agree? Would you agree that there's a sort of a rolling anti-Indian American sentiment in the Republican party? Well, I think that conflates people's complaints about employment, you know, the H-1B stuff, and it conflates that with who they are as a people. I have lived in California for all my adult life and so I'm always surrounded by and especially now in my current neighborhood a very large Indian American population. I can tell you I promise you this is true. The Indian Americans are awesome people. And if you ever get to know your Indian American neighbor, you're going to be happy about it. They are actually just some of the best people in the world. They're funny. They're smart. They're hardworking. Great people. So don't conflate the ethnicity with the fact that we have an immigration issue that you would prefer to be more pro-American and not bringing in people who are from other countries as much. Now that's a separate argument. So I'm not putting up an argument that we should be flooding the country with extra Indian technology workers. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying if you're looking at the ethnicity, they're amazing people and if you get to know them, you'll be happy. All right. So apparently speaking of JD Vance, people are chattering because Charlie Kirk, who heads Turning Point USA and just had a big event, he has come out and endorsed JD Vance for 2028. Some people say it's too soon. Do you think it's too soon? It's not too soon. So let me give you, I was trying to think what weaknesses does JD Vance have that would matter. So I'm thinking, all right, JD Vance, he's an amazing speaker, so they wouldn't be able to match that. The Democrat candidate would not be as good a speaker as he is. No matter who it is, he's just gonna be better. He's very quick-minded. He's very smart. Obviously smart. He also has all the right backers. So he's got some of the most powerful and smartest backers that the Republican party can produce. But more importantly, he's probably going to have, we assume, Trump's support. Nobody's gonna run for president as a Republican unless Trump supports it. So if Trump supports him, you know, you're 90% there, right? And I was thinking, what qualities does he lack? And I'm watching him having obviously learned from Trump. You can see that he's picking up the most powerful parts of Trump, including the cursing at just the right amount. And he's learning to be provocative, but unlike Trump, he probably holds back a little bit. And that makes sense. He's vice president. He's not president. So I would say he's definitely learning technique. He's learning persuasion. He would have Trump and Trump lovers backing him. The only thing I'm worried about is that it puts a target on his back too soon. But on the other hand, it's so obvious that he's the front runner that I guess that target would have been there anyway. So I'm going to say that Charlie Kirk's early endorsement does not hurt him. It might help him and I'm fascinated to find out if the Democrats will have any way to attack him that would be reasonable. Does anybody, I'm looking at the comments right now, does anybody have any idea what negative stuff you would put on him? Because the only negativity is coming from Republicans, right? Basically Republicans who are a little bit anti-diversity, let's say. That's the best thing I can say about it. Might not like who he's married to. But are they going to vote Democrat? Are you going to vote Democrat because you think his wife should be whiter? Really. So I don't know that there's anything that was slow to slow him down. And so I don't think that my endorsement per se is useful. So I'll put it in the form of prediction. So prediction, not endorsement later. I might endorse him later, but it's too early for me. So I'll call it a prediction. He'll be the nominee. Now what about Rubio? Rubio has very cleverly and smartly taken himself out of the run under the condition that JD is running and we assume that to be true. So imagine if there is some kind of opposition research or something comes up that takes JD out of the race. I don't know what that would be, but you know, you just imagine something you don't know or something that hasn't happened hits him and takes him out. Rubio would just be sort of loyally sitting on the sidelines, just the obvious person to step in. So Rubio probably increased his odds of becoming president by taking himself out of the race. Does that make sense? By taking himself out of the race, he doesn't have a target on his back and JD does. So as time goes by, if the bad guys make a dent, and I don't know what that would be, but if they make a dent in JD, the only replacement that would seem obvious would be Rubio. And he would look like a loyal supporter. He would by then have some major accomplishments as you could say he already has major accomplishments and he would probably instantly get Trump's support under the condition that Trump agreed something took JD out. So I think if he ran st

Episode 3050 CWSA 12/22/25

raight up against JD there's no chance he would win. But if he sort of loyally stands aside and said, "You go first." And it doesn't work out. Now I don't know what the odds of it not working out are. Let's say 10%. You would go from 0% chance of winning to 10%. Without any risk whatsoever. So good play. Rubio being smart. So you've probably watched as the Minnesota fraud stuff makes more headlines, but as it does, people seem to agree that the California fraud and California mismanagement might be something like 10 times as big. How in the world could Governor Newsom ever become president under the context of by the midterms? We're going to know a lot more about all the hundred billions of dollars that were stolen in his state. But not just stolen, also mismanaged because it's kind of hard to tell what is stolen, what is mismanaged. It might end up being the same thing. But here just some examples. All right. So by the midterms some experts are saying that the cost of gas in California could reach as high as $10 to $12 per gallon and that that cost would be almost entirely because of California mismanagement and almost entirely because California is what I call a hoax-driven government. So the reason gas will cost so much is a variety of regulatory things that were designed to protect the climate from catastrophe. Now there was no chance it was ever going to protect the climate from catastrophe because one state couldn't do that anyway. But what it did do is it created this gigantic umbrella for fraud. So the only thing that happened was our gas might go to $10. It might go at least to $5 or $7, but some say as high as 10. We got a 20% decrease in capacity when January hits because two refiners just said that we're out. Too much regulation. We're out. So there won't really be any serious argument about what caused gas prices to be out of control in this one state because all the other states will now have this problem. And you can directly tie the cost to California believing incorrectly the hoax that we were in an existential crisis that could somehow be fixed by California alone doing things that other states were not doing. How in the world would somebody who was the steward of that process as governor, how in the world do you get elected president? I mean the fact that even Bill Gates has said we don't have an existential threat that completely pulls the rug out from the entire California strategy for the last 10 years. So that's going to look like a disaster. All right. So the first example of the hoax-driven government of California is that there was a climate hysteria or a climate crisis and he had to address it. That's hoax number one. But what Governor Newsom and other Democrats blamed the problem on was price gouging by the oil companies. Price gouging. When it was looked into, audited, there was no price gouging found. That was a hoax. Hoax number two, that the energy companies are the problem, not the policies of the government. Those are big hoaxes. How about when there was a border crisis in California? What did California say? California said there's no border crisis. Hoax number three. Literally a hoax saying that there was no border crisis.

Episode 3050 CWSA 12/22/25

're not talking about people who don't know how to do this business. We're talking about retired SEALs, retired top operators who might want to bring together their own private little army just for plundering the cartels. Now, I saw a comment by Elon Musk that I haven't figured out how to interpret. I don't have the exact quote, but in response to Mike Lee's post about it, 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. 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. It should change the behavior of the target group because if nobody had ever brought up the idea of letters of marque, 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 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 marque private battle group, let's say they take over a cartel shipment and they capture $300 million in cash. How many of those new battle groups would form the next day? A lot. It would only take one success where somebody essentially pirated the cartel assets and made it work and it was all legal. Only have to do it once and 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 perspective, it's one more good kick in the ass for the cartels. Well, according to SciPost, 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 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 all 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 are claims that 16 files so far among the many thousands that were taken down from the website that had the Epstein files on it. Why? Don't know. Will we ever know? No. Do you think that was because Pam Bondi wanted to do it or because 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 American 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 OpenAI so that instead of OpenAI essentially stealing their IP, they have an agreement where OpenAI can make videos. They have some Disney assets 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 OpenAI can give you today, you wouldn't be able to make a movie, but you can make little clips. And some say that we might only be a year away if you added some other technologies to it from making a feature-length 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, 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 button that just produces an endless string of video that apparently the AI that's built into X knows you would be interested in. What's magic about it is they're all short. Almost none of them are AI produced. The AI is simply finding things that exist. 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 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. 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 OpenAI 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. It's 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 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 Trump has put a blockade on them shipping their oil, but the blockade for whatever reason 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 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 the banned tankers. There were some that just were not included. But he wanted to make it look like he was being tough. Maduro 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 boarded them anyway. So they weren't even included in the blockade. But because Venezuela was trying to make this move that would make it look like they were somehow had some control of their own fate, which they don't. 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 who's got the power and who's got the risk, 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 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 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, 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 handle on that now. So on CNN there was one of the talking heads is Aisha Mills who describes herself as a black lesbian and 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 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 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 regardless of gender or sexual orientation, regardless of ethnicity. Are there not some people in the world who got lucky? You know, I'm 5'8". Do I have good genes? Well, I would say if I were 6'4", even same ethnicity, etc., I would say I have better genes. If I were like Bo Jackson, you know, one of the greatest athletes of all time, would I say I have good genes? 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 have to say we don't admit any Albanians. You just say we do admit Albanians, 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 medical genes are not so good. So if you can imagine the burden I put in the healthcare 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 health insurance. 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 stay where you are, Scott." So 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 we'll see if she gets away with it. We'll see if she's ever back in there. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked about Representative James Comer and Comer is putting together some investigation into Somali taxpayer fraud in Minnesota. So when asked about that, Hakeem Jeffries' answer was that Representative Comer 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 spring-loaded to go for personal attacks because they don't have 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 ca

Episode 3049 CWSA 12/21/25