Economics & Finance

e same. There's 100 percent chance that the ones who are controlling the students' behavior more aggressively are going to get better grades. There's just no way around that. But it also made me think that homeschooling has a natural cap, meaning that there's no way a parent who can't control their kid at home is going to be a successful homeschooler, is there? Because that bad behavior would make them a terrible candidate for being homeschooled. So maybe those people are like, well, I can't do anything with this kid. I'll just send it to school. At least I can go to my job. So I've always suspected that one of the reasons homeschoolers tend to have such good outcomes, I think you would agree with that, right? You'd agree that the people who are homeschooled tend to be just better citizens. Part of the reason is that you don't even get to be homeschooled unless you have parents who know they can control you in a proper parental-child way. So I'm not 100 percent sure that what makes those kids do so well later in life, the homeschooled kids, is that homeschooling is better than regular school. It could be a selection bias, that the only people who even give it a try, they know by the time the kid is six if it's a controllable kid or not. Wouldn't you say? Well, don't you think it's fair to say that you have a pretty good idea by the time the kid is six, am I going to be able to discipline this kid and will they do what a parent tells them or will they just always be that rebel? Now you add to that the number of single-parent households, and there's just no way a single-parent household is going to be able to control a kid at the same level that a two-parent household could. So homeschooling, even if you use AI to do it, should be capped by the total number of people who can be controlled by a parent or two. Well, I don't know when this is happening. I think maybe tomorrow that Trump is bringing his economic team to Mar-a-Lago to talk specifically about housing and specifically about the cost of housing. And one of his economic advisors thinks that most of us, meaning the important people in the administration, are going to be there and that they will discuss ideas that people have for improving housing costs. Now this is one of my pet favorite topics. How do you make housing less expensive and also better? And I'm so curious what kind of ideas they'll have. Some of them are probably obvious. I'm sure that reducing regulations will be part of the conversation because it's such a Republican thing to do. It's doable. But what I wonder is will they suggest a federal standard that if you build to that standard, the states have to accept it. So you could take the state completely out of the approval process, which where I live would instantly cause more housing because these state requirements are pretty burdensome. So one possibility is that you can either build your house to the state standards or you could have a more limited set of choices of how you can build it, but those choices would be pre-approved. So if you build a house with this set of standards, you've met all of the federal requirements, but the state would have to accept it. That would instantly take a whole bunch of costs off the top. What about some kind of boost to make the robots more active in building the houses? I don't know what that would look like, but if there's any restrictions, and maybe states would be the ones that would have these restrictions, could it be removing restrictions on replacing humans with robot builders is just what we need because the robots could, not yet but maybe very very soon, lower the cost of construction. Could it be that some of those pre-approved homes that I already mentioned would be allowed to use what I call Lego construction? Because the algorithm on the internet knows what kind of stuff I like. I see a lot of videos of companies that have this product. So already there exist these sort of blocks that fit together which the homeowner themselves could build most of the house because it's just snapped together. So what if the federal government said in addition to what else it does that if you build your house with these Legos it could get approved. Right now if you tried to build a house in California with some kind of new-age Lego construction, there's not a chance you get approved because they've never seen it before. So it's just automatically off the table. I learned that when I built my house. I had all these great ideas for building my house using the newest technology, but then as soon as you get into it you realize you cannot get the newest technology approved because the city has never approved that technology. So if you give them something they've never seen before, it'll never get approved. You have to show them what they've seen before, and even then it can take a year and a half to get approved. So maybe there's some way around that. Maybe some of the federal land would be used for building new houses. Maybe something about immigration enforcement, but that's already happening. Maybe, suppose I'm just throwing out some ideas, it seems to me there will be a lot of large houses that are empty-nesters. That it would be better if the person who is, let's say, a senior citizen owns a house that if they take on, I'll call it a roommate for now, a young person as a roommate who's there to help the older person maintain the house. Maybe there's some kind of tax break. So imagine you're in your 20s and you'd like to live in a house but you can't afford one. So suppose the government says, well, if we can match you with a senior citizen who has a house that's too big for them, and you have a contract to help out, you'll get some kind of a tax break. So then the old person has help. They don't have to sell their house if they don't want to. And the young person has an awesome experience because depending on the old person you might actually enjoy it. Could be a relative, doesn't have to be. Right. So that's a possibility. I don't know. What other ways do you think Republicans can lower the cost of housing? You already have squatters. Well, you know, it's actually becoming common for young people and older people to pair up that way. So it's happening organically. I don't know if it's working, but it's happening organically. One of the problems with California is that if I were to sell my house after its value has gone up, the new person buying it wouldn't be able to afford the property tax because the property tax i

Episode 3056 CWSA 12/28/25

n today's world, if they're building cities that could make people happier, or maybe they're helping to treat problems that the government is not treating. Maybe they're making health care affordable. Maybe they're making transportation affordable. So the billionaires need to step up and the alternative would be being taxed out of their money and then the money goes where it would not be well employed. So apparently Palmer Luckey is trying to convince some of his other billionaire friends to spend less time on their yachts and more time trying to deploy capital in what makes sense. So if you see Elon Musk and Chamath and Palmer Luckey all on the same side of a topic, it's probably something you should pay attention to. Yeah, they're the smartest people. Speaking of smart people, I saw Brett Weinstein give an opinion on childhood vaccines that I thought was very close to my own opinion, but he does such a good job of communicating. I thought I'd tell you how he explains it. So Brett

Episode 3055 CWSA 12/27/25

ng to work it out on your own? I mean, you're just going to work that out on your own is not really something anybody can do. But if your parents gave you just a little bit of exposure to managing money, such as having a custodial account, you would be less intimidated. And even those things you didn't know how to do, it wouldn't scare you to go figure out how to do them. Does that make sense? So I've always been a stock investor since my 20s, and I don't believe I would have been except that my father talked about it all the time. He was a very small investor, but we talked about it. And so I always thought, well, if my father's going to do it, it can't be that hard. It can't be that hard if my father could do it. Because honestly he was not really a high capability person. Now later in life I realized that he couldn't do it because he used a stock broker and the stock broker was absolutely ripping him off. Now I didn't know that when I was a kid. It was only later after I was an economics major and I'd learned how the world works. Only then did I learn that he should have been putting his money in index funds. And I'm not talking about the managed index funds. Well, no, they're not managed if they're index. So I'm not talking about a stock fund. I'm talking about index fund where it's just a bag of stocks. Stop eating. Unfortunately, I can't get rid of this lozenge because I'd have to stop the live stream. But I'm almost done with it. I completely understand if the chewing is completely bothersome and I would recommend that you turn off the sound for maybe one to two minutes and then I'll be done with it. But your comment is well taken. Sorry, I'm just crunching the last of it. All right. Well, apparently the UK Met Office, Britain's Met Office, has recently discovered that a whole bunch of their temperature thermometer sites were fake news. So here's what they found out about their temperature sites that are all over the UK that are the basis for climate change decisions, right? Or at least some of them. So investigators discovered that over 80% of the temperature monitoring sites are classified as junk with measurement uncertainties of 2 degrees C to 5 degrees C. In other words, some of them don't exist and they're just making up the numbers. Others are in these what they call heat islands too close to concrete stuff and their entire temperature measurement situation was completely fraudulent. Does that surprise you? How many times have I told you if you believe that humans can measure the temperature of the earth, you must be very young or very inexperienced in the world. If you've lived in a Dilbert world, sort of the Dilbert filter on everything, you should not be surprised that humans cannot measure the temperature of the Earth, no matter how hard they try. It's just something we will never be able to do. It is ridiculous. But we've been told for years, oh yeah, we can totally measure that temperature. I will even go further and say, as I've said a number of times, this hasn't caught on at all. There's something I say a lot on social media that I wondered if it would ever catch on, but not a single person has agreed with me yet. It

Episode 3052 CWSA 12/24/25

tom line than a worker by himself or the AI by itself, which is a very solid argument, I think, but we don't know if that's the way it'll turn out. The other thing is that people can't connect the potential benefits of AI to how their life will be better, but they can tell that it looks like AI might use up their water with data centers, which is a hoax. So apparently the data centers do not use up the local water supply. That's just something people believe. Also, what is this in all caps? I can't read it. Also if Trump demands that the big data centers and the AI centers, if he demands that they build their own power plants, you might end up with a lot of clean energy that you didn't have before and it wouldn't affect the locals because the data center would have its own power plant. I think that's what we've already heard some announcements about that, right? Was it Google who is building combination? Maybe it was Amazon, but they'll all have to do it. So if you're in the AI business, you will have to be in the nuclear power business, and that's the only way that any of it will work. Really? You generated content that would have taken you a week manually? Huh? Well, there you go. If hiring you once made sense, but you were 10 times more productive with AI, why wouldn't they want two of you? Because the AI didn't do the work on its own, right? I'm trying to think in the real world, you know, if I put myself back in the cubicle, even if AI could do all the things that humans can't do fast enough or good enough, you still need a human to tell it to do it. You still need a human to say whether it's been done and you still need a human to report to their boss and say I could or could not do this and you know so I feel like there's no legitimate way where an AI can just do what the boss wants. The boss will have to explain it to a human, threaten them with firing and tell them to use AI as a tool, but that ultimately the human will be responsible. So I commented about the All-In Pod first. It was a great episode. One of the best podcasts I've ever seen actually. It was just so interesting. Those guys are so good at explaining complicated things. My voice is stronger maybe. Yeah. So I wouldn't trust an AI to do almost anything. I saw a lawyer, some lawyer said that he spent a week preparing a legal argument or something and then he tried to duplicate it with AI and AI did as good or better but did it in like a minute. But you still need the lawyer because the AI isn't a lawyer, right? You know, you're not going to have a court case where the lawyer says, "I will send a robot to do the closing argument." Yeah. No cough this morning. I had a pretty bad allergic reaction. I think it was last night. Give me about six hours of coffee, but when it stopped, it just stopped. Yep. AI information

Episode 3048 CWSA 12/20/25

ening right now? Tell me. Is there something happening right now? All right. Well, let me know if you see something. All right. You can send me a text if you have my text. Give me a text and tell me if I missed something. All right. Could be just a troll. I don't know. But so on one hand, what Zelensky needs to know is that Russia won't take over the rest of the country. Has to be some obviously a property deal. Who gets what? And yeah, so those are the big things. It does seem like it's really down to real estate. And does Zelensky ever want to leave office? Idiocracy did it. Oh, add Sam's Club. Yeah. All right. Speaking of military, I guess the US military now has a thousand mile drone boat for attacking other boats or ships, I guess. And it can go 1,000 nautical miles and can carry a 1,000 pound bomb payload. And it can go up to 35 knots. Boy, I'd hate to see that coming at me. It feels like every day there's a breakthrough in military drones. Yeah, we're if we don't have a good military drone fight war, I don't know. That's a lot of work. Costco sells auto and home and it is cheaper. Yeah, but insurance, we'll see. Well, I'm not sure how much cheaper it would be. I would agree that it would have to be cheaper, but I don't know if we're talking 5% or 50%. It'd be lawyer free. I don't know if you want that. All right. I guess that's why they put the Costco far away from each other so you don't get all those samples and live on it. No, this is not the warm-up. This is the actual show. This is not very good. All right. There's a new pill according to No Ridge that lowers your blood sugar and burns your fat without appetite loss or muscle loss. So does it seem to you like we went hundreds of years not having any good way to lose weight except for exercise and diet? Then suddenly there's a pill and then there's another pill and then there's another pill and then there's another pill and then there's pills that do it different ways. So we went from, well, there's no way you're going to lose weight with a pill to, wow, there sure are a lot of ways to lose weight with a pill. All right. I'm looking at your comments. All right. And Trump was a little angry at Bondi because the attorney general is not indicting anybody. Does it seem to you that Pam Bondi is stalling? Or does it seem to you that there's no good reason for why we haven't seen some of the bad guys back from the Russia hoax era? Why have we not seen any of them get indicted? Is the problem that the person to indict is going to be Obama? Or is the problem? Could it be that what Brennan was warning us about in that interview about the CIA and about blackmail? Was Brennan warning people that they do have blackmail on anybody who would try to take down the ex-CIA people? Because when Trump talks about, hey, we need to indict these ex people, some number of them are intelligence people, right? And if it's true that the intelligence people use blackmail to stay in charge, it seems like he's warning them that they're definitely going to have some blackmail come out the minute they go after Brennan. Does it feel like that? So here's the thing I'd be watching for. I'm still going to presume that we don't see indictments for the biggest players. So I think we won't see an Obama, Susan Rice, I don't even know if she's on the list. Brennan, Clapper, I don't think any of them will be indicted. And the reason is what Brennan said that they have blackmail on everybody important. So I suspect that there's no real way that we're ever going to see what Trump wants, which is the normal Department of Justice process where they look at evidence and they indict people and then they go to trial. I don't think that's possible. I think that the only thing possible is that they might wave their hand at it and then just dismiss everything. I do not see that any of that can really happen in the real world. In a world where Epstein is killed in his jail cell and we act like we don't know anything about it. In that world, I don't see Brennan going to jail. Do you? Elon Musk also at one of his recent events said that the assassination of Charlie Kirk has made it even more impossible for people like him to go out in public. He says there are serious security issues. It's not that I don't want to. I simply can't. Now can't must mean that his security people say you cannot do this. We're not going to let you walk out in this situation. So it looks like he's taken their advice. And he says that Charlie's assass

Episode 3042 CWSA 12/10/25

. We would all like maximum affordability, so there'll never be enough, but at least it's real. And I wonder if that's the weakness. Maybe that's where Trump has an opening because he could say, you know what, affordability is really hard and it's never as fast as you want, but I'm doing 12 things to get you more affordability. Jasmine is offering you nothing but some stupid ideas that would never work because that looks like what's happening. I mean, that actually looks like what's happening. Anyway, how many of you are watching the drama between Candace Owens and Tim Pool? Is anybody paying attention to that? It's kind of heating up. I wasn't really following it because I tend not to follow the individual drama stuff, but it finally got big enough that it's hard to ignore. If you don't mind, I'll just give it a quick look. So here's the basic idea. Candace has a number of what would I call them? I don't want to say conspiracy theories because that would be an insult to her ideas before actually looking at the ideas. So I don't like that phrase. I will say that she has some nonstandard provocative ideas about what may have happened or may be happening around the Charlie Kirk assassination. So they were good friends, Charlie Kirk and Candace, and there's some kind of drama with the executives of Turning Point USA, and who knows what's true. So I haven't really been paying attention to that because you can't tell what's true. There will be competing versions of what's happening and what's going to happen. But how are we going to know? But you may have heard that Tim Pool, who has one of the biggest podcasts in the country, especially for the conservative side of the world, apparently somebody took some shots at his physical facility. One of his, I don't know how much real estate he has, but one of them. Nobody was injured, but imagine how you would feel if somebody drove up to your house and put bullets in it or up to your workplace. I don't know if it was one or both of those things, but how would you feel about that? So I was watching Tim go off on Candace, not in person, but he was talking about the situation, and oh boy, he's not happy about this situation that she and maybe some other people have put him in because he's physically in danger and more to the point the people he cares about around him. I don't know what the family situation is or the friend situation, but he's got to be very aware that he may be putting his friends and family at risk. And I can't even imagine how mad I would be if that happened to me. So however mad Tim seems, he got there the honest way. You are allowed to be very mad at a situation that maybe somebody else jinned up that could put you and your friends literally in a deadly situation. So that's what he's having to deal with. He's actually talked about maybe discontinuing podcasting. Now that would be pretty extreme given how successful he is and how much impact he has on the debate in this country. So we don't want to see him do that. But I don't think he's joking when he says that that might be something he has to consider, just retiring. We don't want to see that. And that would be a really bad outcome. But I also think he deserves to be safe. And if he's not feeling safe, he's got to do whatever he has to do. And I'm not going to judge him for what he thinks makes him safe. That's completely his decision, obviously. He's marr

Episode 3041 CWSA 12/09/25