Systems vs Goals

ndry and make you breakfast and do some basically easy labor around the house. You know, the basics. Now, until somebody buys that robot, and it's probably not exactly for sale yet, until somebody buys it and tries it and tells me it works, I don't believe it. I don't know how they made the demonstration work, but they probably limited the demonstration to one kind of breakfast, one type of laundry, and just trained the hell out of those few things. And I even wonder, is it AI driven? Because when I read about it, it didn't mention AI. So did they just skip AI and say, "All right, it's going to be more like your Alexa at home. You have to give it the right command and it's programmed to do those specific things, but you couldn't teach it to do anything else." I don't know. My guess is it's a little overhyped. You knew this was coming before, but I have more to say about it. So RFK Jr., Secretary Kennedy, reminds us that Trump had asked him to look at childhood vaccines and to see why we differ from other countries and maybe they're doing it right. So after exhaustive review, says Kennedy, of the evidence, we're aligning US childhood vaccine schedules with international consensus, which a lot of people think was probably the more conservative and safer way to do it, while strengthening transparency and informed consent. Now, every part of that sounds good so far. He says the decision to change the schedule protects children, respects families, it rebuilds trust. If it works out, yes, absolutely. So I'm a little unclear on the changes themselves, but what I read online is that they would go from 84 to 88 doses for a child, which would be given basically very soon after birth, down to around 30. Now, presumably that number of the ones that got cut from the 80s down to 30 were the ones that the science suggests might be a problem. I think we're still in the territory of we can't be 100% sure how these all work together or which ones were the problems. But if you took a rational scientific whack at it and you thought, okay, we don't know how all this works together but these are the ones that have all the signals, so if we remove the signals but don't remove the parents' ability to get those when they want it, just wouldn't be required, that feels like really playing the odds right. So here's what I'm hoping. It's too soon to know if this will maybe change the autism rates or change something else because maybe the data was bad. Maybe the one that was the problem is still in the mix. We d

Episode 3064 CWSA 01/06/26

a lot of people. And apparently that's what happened. And the only way that could happen, says me, is if people are afraid of being called racist. So when you calculate the damage of DEI, if I were doing the analysis of what is the damage of DEI, you could come up with a long list, but you'd have to add trillions because of this. Trillions, the cost of DEI. Now, here's more good news that may not turn into good news. But if you're on social media and you're watching the bubble that I'm watching, you see people like Elon Musk talking about the fraud and DOGE and talking about it. You'll see people like David Sacks and Chamath and lots of other smart people. So the good news is that the smartest people in the country, Bill Ackman would be another, the smartest people in the country are very engaged and trying figuring out how to fix this because all of their wealth at least anything that depends on the United States is completely at risk. Now, I don't think that's the only reason that they're so engaged, but they've not been engaged before. And they are the exact same people you would want to fix any big problem. Right? If you said, "We have this big problem that nobody's been able to fix. We need the smartest people in the room to really get engaged." Well, we got that. Amazing. We finally have the smartest people in the room all on the same side for the most part and focused. But here's the problem. We might have too much diverse energy. So they're not all saying exactly the same thing and it's unclear what plan would be the best as Cernovich, add him to the list of the smartest people. So my question is this. How do we get to the point where we've focused all that smart energy? Because we're not really at a place where we can focus it. So if you said, but Scott, that's easy. All you need is a fraud czar. I don't think so. I mean that might be part of the solution but the fraud czar would get destroyed the same way they went after Musk. Now Musk is you know there's only one Musk. So he's managed to recover and even grow his business and get his compensation from Tesla and everything else. But that's rare. I don't know how many people could have survived the attacks that went after Musk. So it would really be hard to get a fraud czar who had that much risk tolerance but also had the skill and I don't know if it's enough. And we also know that justice moves too slowly. I've heard a number of people say, "Scott, all they have to do is prosecute some high level people and this will stop." You know, if Keith Ellison, the AG in Minnesota, let's say he quickly got indicted. Well, I don't know. Would that stop anything? How long would it take? So justice moves too slowly to be the biggest part of the answer but obviously has to be part of the answer. But I like the fact as I mentioned before that finding the fraud and doing something about it is a competitive sport. So I think the best case scenario is that private companies find a way to free market this situation. So you've got Palantir and other AI companies that could be helpful. So they might have a massive potentially they might have a massive financial payoff. Rico would be slower because you have to pull together like years of everything. I mean that would be slower. We need to do it probably but it would be slower. So what was I saying? So if you added the AI companies that might have some incentive to spot the fraud and then you add to that the qui tam rule that I didn't know about but apparently it's been a thing for years that allows you an individual private person to ask the government to sue somebody who has been ripping off the government and then if you as the whistleblower, let's say. If they succeed and they claw back some money, you get a portion of it and it could be big. It could be very big money. So here's the good news. When I talk about the smartest people being fully engaged, they're also the smartest people at creating new businesses that didn't exist. Right? Every one of them that I mentioned has done entrepreneurial things. They've got a track record, right? Every one of them. And that is exactly the people you want designing a new system. So it might not be that there's one path to fixing it. It might be that the free market has now surfaced what looks like a set of variables that could sort of automatically drift in the direction of getting rid of the fraud because essentially it would monetize getting rid of fraud, which hasn't really been the case. Well, it has been the case, but not everybody knew it. And now lots of people know it. So that's the good news. All right, let's talk about Pam Bondi, who is not working fast enough, people say, and has prosecuted no high-profile cases. So I'm going to wade into this at my risk. You may have heard me say this on social media. And it goes like this. If I put the what I call the Dilbert filter on this situation, how do we know, we who are not lawyers, how do we know how long something should take? How do we know how many cases she's working on? How do we know how hard it is to staff when you can't get lawyers who are like 90% Democrat, but you don't want to staff up with Democrats if the whole job is to go after Democrats? How long does it take to staff up? What kind of cases is she working on that are exactly where she should be working on but they just take a long time because they're complicated? So the higher profile the case and the more complicated the case the more you should expect it would take longer than a year even to get to indictments. So case in point, I guess Kash Patel has recommended the Department of Justice to look into the whole situation with the Russia collusion hoax. Now the Russia collusion hoax is massively complicated. It involves everybody from the ex-CIA and it involves two parts. One is making it easier for Democrats to get elected and the other is making it harder for Republicans to stay out of jail. So it involves everything from the original meetings that Obama had, the special counsels, the raid on Mar-a-Lago. There are so many moving parts. If Pam Bondi only had one thing to work on for the rest of her life, how long would that take? Then you multiply that by a thousand because remember, you've got the J6 stuff. How complicated would it be to get the other side of the J6 stuff that that was all a plot and then to wrap it all into a RICO? Because a RICO case has to show a pattern of behavior that has stretched over time and involves multiple people. So let me say this as clearly as possible. I am as frustrated as you are that nobody important goes to jail. Can we all get on the same side of that? None of us think it's fast enough, but we also don't know what would be fast enough. What would it look like if she were doing a great job and what would it look like if she were not? Could we tell? So one lawyer online said to me, Scott, what you're missing is that big law firms are already staffed up to surge like whole groups of people into different jobs for the government or for a private company. So the thinking is that it's just business as normal to be way overworked, but to instantly or quickly correct the fact that you have too much work by going to big law firms and say, "Hey, we need two dozen lawyers today. Can you just give us a whole staff?" And then those law firms, I didn't know this by the way, are routinely set up to do that. However, how does it work when the people you're going after are Democrats? Do you think there's a big law firm that can give you two dozen lawyers that are both good at what they do, not doing anything more important? You know, somebody said it's not the best lawyers that they send for that, but I don't know about that. And that they would do a non-biased job instead of dragging their feet because all you would have to do is get an anti-Trumper in the mix, one lawyer who drags their feet and they can just drag this thing forever. So I am skeptical that the existing model of surging lawyers into a high-profile, high workload situation could work in this situation. It might work in normal situations. And how long will it take before John Brennan is indicted? Anyway, so don't get mad at me. I am the Dilbert filter messenger to tell you that if there's a lot of people involved and it's complicated, it's going to take way longer than you wanted to. Does everybody agree with that? Just that we're all equally frustrated, but whenever you have this complexity and this setup, it's always going to take longer than you want. And that would be sort of normal, just normal life. Anyway, so apparently according to Wall Street Apes on X, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, this is Wall Street Apes' framing of it, admits the Somalis were imported to vote Democrat. Essentially he did. He said, quote, "Well, the Somali community is critical in my own election. I wouldn't be in office without the help of the Somali community." Okay. Now, that alone is not illegal. But we do know that the Somali community has made a difference not just in Minnesota, but also in Ohio and Virginia, maybe some other places. So at what point does it become illegal? It's not illegal to have people legally enter the country. If they entered legally and then they were legally allowed to vote, it would just be a good strategy, but it wouldn't be illegal, right? However, did you know Scott Presler was reporting this yesterday and just think about the fact that what I'm about to tell you, you probably did not know and it's been true for a while that if you work for a building, so if you're an employee of some large apartment building, it doesn't matter what kind of employee, you can vouch for

Episode 3058 CWSA 12/31/25

I saw a post from Balaji Srinivasan, one of the smartest people in the world, who was noting that I think it's some kind of Chinese company now has an electric charger for your car. The company is BYD. So I'll take a fact check on that, but I think it's a Chinese company. They now have in production. So this is not in the laboratory. This is actually in the field. They've got chargers for electric cars that add 400 kilometers of range in 5 minutes. So Balaji calls it the flipping, the EV flipping where it would be faster to get an electric charge in your car than it would be to add gas. Now one of the things about technology that I think sometimes we're blind to is that changes that you think might be coming, they never come. It's like nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens, boom, suddenly you pass over some barrier where everything's different. So I think the point here is that if you have in production like actually in the field a way to charge the car for 400 kilometers in 5 minutes presumably other companies will have to match that. Presumably Tesla has plans we don't know about to get to the next level of that stuff. But that's really going to change everything. Yeah. And we're moving towards super capacitors, right Owen? So also there's some breakthroughs in super capacitors. And without getting too nerdy, super capacitors are another change everything. You know that they would make the battery refill — what do you call it? Refill charge. It would make the charging and use of batteries a whole different deal. Just make everything better. So that's right on the edge of happening. All right. You probably heard that Trump is introducing he wants to build a bunch of new battleship type things. He's calling it the Golden Fleet. And he thinks they can build one in two and a half years. D

Episode 3051 CWSA 12/23/25

dy and when. Don't you think that that's going to have an immense impact on your health? If you knew, oh, this medicine works, but not if I eat a potato within an hour, because there's a whole bunch of those things where there is a difference. So imagine when AI can actually wrap its little head around that. How many of you have ever heard of a thing called synesthesia? Synesthesia. I've talked about this but not in a long time. It's the phenomenon that applies to some people but not many. So maybe fewer than 10%. They have some kind of a crossover effect in their senses. So for example some people if they're listening to music they can almost feel it whereas people like me I listen to music and I like it but I don't feel it the same way like a real musician would. So that probably prevents me from being a great musician because I feel like you'd have to feel it in order to be really good at it. Probably the Beatles were all—they probably all could feel it. But what I would have to add to this is that there's a writer version of this. So not just musicians. And I definitely have the synesthesia for writers, meaning that I feel words. I just feel them. So it's probably not an accident that without any special training on how to be a writer, I managed to have a professional career as a writer. I think that might be synesthesia because I just feel things when I write them. Now, is that a humble brag or is that just telling you what works and what doesn't? All right. How many times have you been told that it's good to get enough sleep? Well, believe it or not, there's another study that says it's good to get enough sleep, but they go further and they say that if you get enough sleep, you're far more likely to be as active as you want to be for good health. But they say it doesn't work the other way. So according to this study at Flinders University that sleep first, get enough sleep, then you'll get enough activity and then you have the two things that are good for you, activity and sleep. But I don't believe that it doesn't work the other way. Let's see what you say in the comments. I believe that I can never get a good sleep if I have not been active that day. Do you have the same thing if I've not exercised that day? Now, at the moment, I'm on all kinds of drugs and stuff for my cancer. So it's different now, but in my normal healthy life, if I don't get exercise, I can't sleep. Don't you have that? It can't just be me, right? All right. So we're gonna—I'm seeing in the comments that a lot of you are agreeing with me. So I would say that exercise helps you sleep and sleeping helps you exercise and it definitely works both ways. So some schools are experimenting with drones to protect against school shootings. I'm going to give you a little quiz. How many school shootings do you think happened in one year? Let's see. Not one year since 2008 in just Florida alone. So only the state of Florida and we're talking about shootings in the school since 2008. Give me a number. How many do you think there's been? Well, while you're guessing how many there's been, the answer is, at least according to this one article from The Center Square, there have been 33 school shootings since 2008. So that just feels like a lot, doesn't it? Remember, it's since 2008, so it's not one year. Yeah, your guesses are closer to a one-year guess. Well, that's a lot, but I assume that also includes just one person getting shot. So it's not necessarily mass shootings. But what they want to do is they're testing non-lethal drones. So if there's a shooter in the school, the drone will come and distract them. So the drone will not be deadly. It won't have a gun, but it might have sirens or pepper spray or other distraction devices because if you are a school shooter and a drone comes after you, you're going to have to pay attention to the drone because that's the thing. You don't know exactly what it can do and it's going to be in your space really fast. I like this idea. Seems pretty good. You know, it could even be better if you got rid of the humans. You know, if you equipped the school with listening devices and then it heard a gunshot, don't you think it would be useful if the drone immediately went wherever the gunshot was? Now, that doesn't mean it should intervene. You probably want a human to decide whether it should intervene, but it should definitely go there. Like it should just as soon as it hears the gunshot, it should pull into that room or as close as it can get. I think this is definitely worth testing. I wouldn't go so far as to say I know it'll work. Definitely worth testing. Well, Trump is apparently going to announce a 12 billion dollar farm aid program. The Washington Examiner is reporting. And it kind of made me wonder because I'm a farm nerd. You know, I worked on a farm, my uncle's farm. He had a dairy farm. So I've spent a lot of time on farms and working on farms when I was a kid and a teenager. I guess I was still a kid. But here's what I wonder. How do you make farms unprofitable? Like, what is it about a farm that would take it from, well, we've been making money until now, but now we're losing money. Well, some of it's obvious. Some of it would be over supply. So there might be a year when everybody grows too much of one thing and then the price goes down. It might be drought or flood. So it could be bad weather in a variety of ways. It could be the rising cost of seeds and the rising cost of fuel. And I said to myself, are those all solvable problems? And let me give you my prediction slash suggestion. I guess I feel like we should have an ongoing maybe government sponsored, but it doesn't need to be. I guess it could be private. Someth

Episode 3040 CWSA 12/08/25

ot getting worse. That might be true. And crime rates have dropped in general and allegedly the number of homeless encampments in San Francisco has fallen, but I don't have a percentage on that. And then here's another one. Rents are up in San Francisco 12% over last year. All right, let's do this again. How many of you predicted that San Francisco of all places would be able to raise rents in the middle of what looked like the city falling apart? How many of you would have said, "Oh yeah, those rentals will be up 12%." Not me. I would have guessed that rents would have collapsed by now. So that's two cities in which my ability to predict with all of my economics training, zero. Zero ability to predict. If you think you can do better, knock yourself out. In other fun stories, let me say this about Candace Owens. I love Candace Owens. I like her personally. I only met her once, very briefly, but she was very warm. And I love this show that she puts on, not just the actual podcast, but the whole show. I like the way she's inserted herself into the public mind. I just sort of like everything about what she does. Now, that's different from agreeing with all of her takes. Everybody gets that, right? Do we ever get to the point where I don't have to say that? Can we ever as a civilization get to the point where I can say, "I like that public figure" without having to say, "but I don't agree with 100% of what they say." We're not there yet, right? I still have to do that. I don't agree with 100% of everything she's ever said. She's making some noise today. She says Charlie Kirk was betrayed and don't worry about the gag order in the Charlie Kirk case. Is that a gag order directed at her? I think so. She says, "I plan to violate it on the world's behalf." So she plans to violate the court's gag order on the world's behalf. She says, "The things I've discovered this past week are enough to burn the house down." And yes, Charlie was betrayed by everyone. Now, do you see what I mean? How do you not love that? She's so good. Just so good at getting attention, which is her job, right? If that's what I do, she and I are in the same job in a way, which is to get attention. But you're only going to get attention if you're creating value, right? You could get attention for one day, but you can't be Candace unless you can get attention just regularly, anytime you want. And wow, can she get attention? So good at this. So if you simply, and you know, I like to do this. I like to separate the person's character from their skill level. I like in this case I like her character and her skill level, but the skill level is just crazy. Candace's skill level, her talent stack is crazy. Anyway, so this is fun. We'll keep an eye on that. According to Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, here's more good news. It only took one year and apparently the US is already manufacturing the most advanced chip for AI and Nvidia is working with TSMC. The Taiwan company apparently moved some of its technology to the US and working with Nvidia. So now the US can make not at the same quantity. TSMC. Thank you. TSMC is the name of the chip company from Taiwan. Anyway, so they're working together and now they can make the most advanced chip in the US. I assume that volume is probably still a big issue, but I feel it's TSMC. But that's a pretty big deal to me because it means that even if Taiwan sunk into the ocean, we could get going. We would have enough on our shores that we could reconstitute slowly. That's a big deal. But it probably also makes it far more likely that Taiwan will be destroyed by China because China will know that it's not an existential risk to the United States anymore. I just realized this could be a double-edged sword. If you're China and you're not benefiting directly from the advanced chips on Taiwan, but your biggest competitor is the United States, would you worry too much if in the process of conquering Taiwan, you destroyed the semiconductor business? You might not care as much as you should because then

Episode 2994 CWSA 10/20/25

it would just put you at parity with your biggest competitor who has access to it now but wouldn't if it got knocked down. But now we can make those chips in the US. So now you're China and you think, "Aha, I can totally overthrow Taiwan now because the US won't have to fight." If they don't want to and they don't want to be in a war, a world war, they don't have to. But before we kind of would have had to because we couldn't let China take control of the chips that would be better than the ones that we could make. That'd be too big a risk. So it's entirely possible that growing our own homegrown best-of chips will sacrifice Taiwan. It's not impossible, you know, it's not impossible. Apparently Trump is using the shutdown of the government to kill some projects. I didn't know that was an option. I guess the Democrats didn't know it either, but they're finding out. Allegedly, there's some kind of $20 billion New York City tunnel project that Schumer had spent years trying to get passed and finally did. And now because the government's closed, Trump's just going to cancel the whole project. I don't even know if Trump even looked into whether it was a good idea to do the project or not. I think it's just a Schumer project and he worked 20 years to get it, so he's just going to cancel it on his ass. All right, that might be a little bit authoritarian, but I'd have to know if we really need this tunnel. I imagine that we could live without the tunnel and the $20 billion. There's a story today that somebody built a hunting stand in a tree, which is where the hunters hide from the prey, and then they can take a shot from their hiding place in the tree. They built one that had a complete view of Air Force One when it lands in Palm Beach. So he had the hunting blind had a wide open shot at the president of the United States coming down the gate from his own airplane in a place where he's known to land. Now, the good news is that it was discovered and it looks like it's been there for a while. But we don't know why it was there. We don't know if it was there for that purpose, but it would be a strange place for a hunting blind. Wouldn't you think that Palm Beach would be a strange place to have a hunting blind in a tree? I don't know how many other hunting blinds in trees there are in Palm Beach, but that certainly looks exactly like what it looks like, doesn't it? Bannon's all over that one. Apparently Boston is looking into having a city-run grocery store. Mamdani has talked about that. They haven't done it yet, but did you know that Atlanta already has one? They have a city-run grocery. And I do not have an update on whether it's working in Atlanta. I imagine they've got some challenges, but it makes me wonder, is there a way to make a government grocery store work without getting rid of the regular grocery stores so the rest of us can have more choice? And I was thinking about that. What would you do if you were the government and you wanted to, I don't want to say compete, but you were going to have an alternative grocery store in the same place where there were regular grocery stores. So the first thing you have to do is make sure that people who had money still preferred the regular grocery stores. And you could do that easily by having more junk food and more selection, right? Selection alone would get the people with money to go there. So the first thing you do is have less selection if it's a government grocery store. I think if you reduce the selection to just basics like vegetables and protein, you could probably find ways to cut costs like crazy because you just keep it simple. It's like, okay, we got five proteins just always the same. But then could you also do something that was direct from farm if you got rid of some regulations because you are the government. So if you got rid of government regulations and said, "All right, you can take your chances

Episode 2994 CWSA 10/20/25