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For the unparalleled pleasure the dope of being here the day thing that makes everything better It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now That's so good
All right, well, let me jump into the science that's exciting, and we'll talk about all the politics, as we always do.
Do you know that famous experiment where they take two little toddlers, and they put a marshmallow in front of them, and then they would leave the room after telling them, whatever you do, don't eat the marshmallow, the delicious marshmallow.
And then they would see that some kids Could do what they were told and avoid the marshmallow.
But other kids would look around and they'd say, nobody's looking, and they'd grab the marshmallow and eat it.
Now the science told us that that was an indication that one of those children was genetically defective.
Okay, those are my words.
But the idea is that some people don't have good emotional control, emotional intelligence.
In other words, they can't put off pleasure for later.
And so they said, these people will not do well in life.
Well, there's some new studies.
Guess what?
Once you control for the, uh, all the variables, it turns out you can't really see any difference.
This is one of the most famous experiments in all of social science.
It had no scientific backing at all.
Now, Here's what I would have told you if you'd asked me.
Suppose you wanted to, you know, save all that time and money and incorrect science.
And you just came to me and you said, you know, we did this experiment.
Sometimes the kid will take the marshmallow and sometimes they won't.
Which one do you think will do better in life?
What would I say?
I would have picked the kid who took the marshmallow.
Do you know why?
Because the kid who took the marshmallow correctly saw the risk-benefit.
There was no real risk.
Do you think the kid who's going to be punished for eating marshmallow?
No, the kid who takes the marshmallow gets the marshmallow and no punishment.
And for how many decades, fucking idiot scientists telling us that the guy who doesn't take the marshmallow is going to win?
Which do you think Trump was?
Do you think Trump was the toddler who took the marshmallow, or the one who left it there for no reason whatsoever?
No, Trump took the marshmallow, and he's the president of the—or, well, he was, he might be again—president of the biggest country in the world!
Or most powerful, I guess.
You know, it's funny, once this is debunked, it becomes so obvious why it wasn't true.
Of course you want the risk taker.
You want the risk taker, but also the one who took the correct risk.
There was not one toddler who was ever punished for taking a marshmallow.
The toddlers who knew that and took the marshmallow, they're the ones I want to work for.
I mean, those are your Elon Musks, and you're the people who make the world a better place.
Anyway, that one's funny.
There's The Guardian's running an article talking about Jonathan Watts.
He's a global environment editor, and he's talking about how the climate models are having not a small problem with predicting the climate.
And the problem is that they don't predict the warming.
So apparently we had a few extra warm years the last few years, but the models don't predict them.
So would it be legitimate to say that the models can't predict at all?
If they can't predict warming, you know, in other words, it warmed in those particular years more than they expected, what can it predict?
It's only up or down.
If they can't get up, are they getting down, correct?
I doubt it.
So, anyway, whenever you've got this many variables, it's not really possible to have any kind of a model that predicts.
And I'll say this a million times, I hope I'm still alive when everybody agrees.
Let me make a prediction that I will stand on If you told me, would you bet your life on it, this prediction, I'd say, oh yeah, I would totally bet my life on it.
Like literally.
There's no doubt about this.
I don't know if I'll be alive when it happens, but someday we will know the climate models were bullshit.
Why?
Because nobody can predict the future.
It's just not a thing.
It's never been a thing.
Probably never will be a thing.
I don't think AI will do it any better.
There are just too many variables.
And when you reach a certain number of variables, nothing predicts.
And that will never change.
It's built into the nature of the universe.
You get a number of variables, and if you can't know them exactly, and you never can, a few iterations later the whole model just falls apart.
It's a chaos theory.
So the fact that that's not 100% obvious to everybody who's looking at it and everybody who's doing the work is a little bit funny.
To me, it's like the marshmallow test.
The marshmallow test was somewhat obviously bullshit.
Somewhat obviously bullshit.
And now that it's been debunked, you go, oh, I guess I didn't see that coming.
Well, if you don't see the climate model Being debunked in the future?
You can't see that at all?
You know, are there some of you who just can't imagine that?
No, it's 100% certain that they will be debunked someday.
I hope it's in my lifetime, just so I can enjoy the show.
Which, by the way, doesn't mean that the climate is not warming, and it doesn't mean that we should not worry about it.
I'm just saying that the models are ridiculous.
All right.
Likewise, I did see a chart that showed that the CO2 went down quite a bit during the pandemic, but the temperatures didn't.
So, is there some kind of weird lag between CO2 and temperature that I'm not aware of?
Do the models take that into account?
Probably not.
Probably not.
Here's another scientific hypothesis that's against the mainstream.
I'm not sure I would put a high confidence in this.
What I like about it is that it's not a mainstream opinion.
All right?
So this is not me trying to convince you this opinion is true.
I'm just convincing you it's interesting.
Maybe something to consider.
And this comes from Bowtied Biohacker on Axe.
And he's claiming that ADHD is not a disorder, it's a phenotype.
It means you have OG genetics.
That people with ADHD were the elite hunters and gatherers.
And that the ADHD people are not broken, they're just being forced to live in a society where ADHD doesn't have its benefits like it would if you were a hunter or gatherer.
Now, the thinking is that if you took those people outdoors and their job was to, you know, notice danger and notice opportunities and, you know, always be looking around their environment to make sure they're safe, that the ADHD would have some benefit and that you'd need those people to go out and do the dangerous, unexpected things that other people weren't doing.
Now, I'm not sure if I completely buy that because I think there might be some Some modern things that are exacerbating it, you know, like our, all of our attention spans are going down.
I have a, I have a major problem with attention span because I, there's just so many things going on.
So the fact that there are so many things going on and that when I'm falling off to sleep, there are 10,000 things in my head, that's gotta be different than how it was in caveman days.
So I'm not a hundred percent on board with this, but I love the, here's what I like about it.
I think I like it philosophically more than I like it scientifically.
Philosophically, I like having the following bias.
Nobody is the same.
Now, that's a really powerful idea, and it doesn't feel like it until you think it through.
In our current world, we say, if you're black, you're one of the black people.
So we've got to treat you like one of the black people.
If you're a woman, well, you're one of the women.
Gotta treat you like the women.
And then we argue about who's a woman.
And we argue about who's black.
And we get all these unnecessary fights.
Every one of these fights is completely unproductive, illogical, and off-point.
Here's what we should be doing.
Treating everybody like there's no other person like them.
If I meet an ADHD person, I don't say, this person's broken.
I say, everybody's completely different.
And the very next person I meet, Whether or not they have ADHD is going to be completely different from that guy and me and everybody else.
And that is the most, by far, the most useful filter you can put on the world.
Here's the difference.
If somebody comes to me and says, I'm black, so you have to help me.
I say, fuck you.
Everybody's got problems and yours are not special or magical and there's no reason whatsoever I should help you versus the next 10 people who come up and ask for my help.
What makes you so special?
Well, the history of the average of the people to which I say, I don't care.
Everybody's got a problem that has a history.
Their problems didn't come out of nowhere.
They all came out of some history that wasn't so good for a variety of reasons.
So, no, I don't give a fuck about your general generic average problems.
But if you come to me as an individual who is different from every other individual, maybe part of that difference is that you're black and you're this and that and that, but you're your own thing.
There's not another black person who's you.
Never.
There's not one person who's like one other person.
So if that one person says, I'm an individual, And I think maybe you have some advice for me, or maybe you could connect me with somebody that would help me get what I want.
And I would say, what is it you want?
And if it's something like, you know, a good life and a good job or something like that, I'll say, yeah, I could help.
Why wouldn't I?
Why wouldn't I?
I wouldn't help if you're making some kind of average general racial comment.
No interest at all.
But if you come to me as an individual, Sure, if it makes sense.
If I've got something you need as an individual, I'm all in.
All in.
So you go from a situation where people are resistant to helping you because you've created this artificial fight of your group against my group, but as soon as you come to me as an individual, all of that goes away.
And I just say, I have this, you need that.
What you're asking for would take a little work, but not much.
It might help you a lot.
I'm in.
So by far the most important filter we need is to get back to we're all different.
All right.
I have a positive prediction.
It goes like this.
The reason that we're not forming families and having children as much is economics are bad.
And there's not enough meaning in it as there used to be.
And we used to be economically required and, you know, you'd build your whole life around it and divorce was difficult and all those things.
But I do think that having to work all day kind of works against the whole family thing.
What happens when the robots are doing all the hard work and you don't have to have a great job or even a job at all, maybe?
In order to have a good life.
Because the robots are making the food, so it's cheap.
The robots are making the energy, so it's cheap.
You've got your fusion and your nuclear power, so it's cheap.
And then suddenly, basically everybody could have UBI and there's still plenty to go around.
What happens then?
Well, what I think happens is that people will have no meaning in life if they don't have jobs.
I can't even imagine what my life would be like if I didn't have the structure of having, well not having to always, but going to work.
Part of the reason I don't retire, when I'm clearly at retirement age, is that I like structure.
It gives me meaning.
If I can do something that any of you at the end of the day say, you know, that's a new way of thinking, I like thinking about that.
There, look at me, I did something.
Might be useful.
If I introduce a new idea, or a new filter on how to see something, or a new way to analyze something, and it affects some of you, I think, good!
There we go.
There's a little positivity I put into the world, and I have meaning.
But suppose you took all that away from me, and I didn't have a job, and I didn't need a job, and if I worked a job, nobody would care, because the robots could do it better anyway.
What would I do then?
Well, I think I would have a natural search for meaning.
And I think I'd say, you know what?
Why don't I build a little world where I can build some kids?
You know, I'll be in a relationship, I'll make some kids, and every day I'll wake up and I'll think, hey, what's good for you guys?
What's good for the family?
And then we would just do those things.
So, I've got a feeling that one of the unpredictable effects of a robot AI-driven world, which we're going to have, and fairly quickly, is that it might make having a family easier.
Now, it could easily go the other way.
So, if anybody is a pessimist here and you're saying, no, it could go the other way, totally, it might.
But I would say it's unpredictable, and our search for meaning might drive us into family structures just for meaning.
Just so that when you died, you were part of something.
Because you don't need to be part of anything if the robots are doing it all.
You don't even need to join an organization.
Basically, you don't need to do much of anything.
I'm not even sure if politics will still be a thing in 10 years.
Do you know why?
Why would politics not even be a thing in 10 years?
Because if AI starts telling us what makes sense and what doesn't make sense, what are we going to have to argue about?
Right?
So the Democrats have a plan, the Republicans have a plan.
In our current world, we just use propaganda and brainwashing and nothing useful to decide what's right or wrong.
But suppose AI Start saying things like, price gaps have failed 100% of the time.
By the way, do you know what happens if you ask ChatGPT if price gaps are good for society?
Try it!
It'll tell you something that Democrats don't like.
It'll tell you that economists say that price gaps fail, and it will give you historical examples of how they fail terribly.
And then you ask it, but what's the counterpoint?
Like, what's the argument in favor of them?
And then it will tell you.
It'll say, well, there's this economist who says this or that.
And then you ask it, all right, is that a well-regarded opinion?
And ChatGP will say, oh, no.
No, there are other opinions, but they're not regarded as serious, basically.
So this whole price gap thing has exactly one right answer.
Don't do price gaps.
And I've teased before that you won't see any economists go on MSNBC or CNN for maybe the rest of the election cycle.
You might not see another economist on television, except on Fox News, for the rest of the cycle.
And the reason is that the price gap is to have zero support among anybody who knows anything about anything.
Zero.
Yeah, the only one who tried to make an argument was like a fringe radical economist, but nobody took that person seriously.
Just think about that.
What if AI does that for every topic?
What are we going to argue about?
There would be no point in having a Democrat or a Republican.
The AI would just tell you what works and what doesn't.
I don't know.
A lot of things could be different in 10 years.
Anyway, Secret Service has a new plan to let Trump do outdoor rallies.
They're going to put him in a bulletproof glass box.
Does the glass box have a top?
Because don't you have to protect against drones as well?
So they're going to put him in a, I don't know what kind of glass shield they're going to use.
The glass shield obviously has to cover the entire front.
Duh.
We know from the assassination attempt that came from the side, they've got to cover the entire sides.
Duh.
Of course they've got to cover the back.
Duh.
But they also have to cover the top.
Because all it would take is a, you know, a drone attack to drop something down the, down his glass tube.
So he's going to literally be in a glass box.
Maybe on day one it won't be a box, but it kind of has to be.
How big is the glass box?
And are you going to feel like he's there alive if he's in a glass box?
And let me ask you this, if all of our outdoor rallies put the candidate in a glass box, what's to stop them from using virtual reality?
Have you seen that yet?
There's a product, an existing product, you could buy it now, Where if you want to do a video call with somebody, they can stand in this big, like closet-sized, no, let's say bigger than a phone booth kind of a booth, and they will appear on the other side as if they're standing in front of you fully 3D.
Now that already exists.
So if you could put somebody in a glass box and people are happy about it, because to me that wouldn't feel like it's live, even though he was live.
I mean, I wouldn't care if he were virtual reality at that point.
You know, if he's interacting with the audience and you can see him, but he's behind glass.
I don't know.
Maybe the virtual reality outdoor event is coming.
All right, so Harrison Walsh got some criticism from the right that doesn't matter to anybody.
That they did, instead of doing an interview, we're doing a press conference so that the press can ask them tough questions, they decided to do a sit-down interview with each other.
So they filmed the two candidates just talking to each other and having a good time.
Now, Republicans and the press said, oh, you're afraid of the press, and why don't you do regular press things?
I'm sorry if you don't like this, but it's a really smart strategy.
It's a totally smart strategy.
Try to think of anything good that comes out of talking to the press.
I don't even know why Trump does it.
When Trump talks to the press, if it's the unfriendly press, 100% of the time they take something out of context.
100% of the time.
When was the last time that you saw Trump's numbers went up because he talked to the press.
Have you ever seen that?
Have you ever seen Trump talk to the press and, wow, look at his numbers, because he said that good thing that everybody liked?
I've never seen that.
But I've certainly seen bad stories come out of it that live forever.
In fact, the fine people hoax, that came out of a press event, didn't it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I might have it wrong, but didn't his taken out of context thing come from a press event?
It did.
How about the drinking bleach hoax?
That came from a press event.
Am I wrong?
It was the press.
They were there and then he said, you said what you didn't say and then he turned it into a hoax.
So everything bad that's ever happened to Trump is because he talked to the press.
Now at some point, You know, in 2016, he had to do it because he was an unknown and we needed to know who he was.
But now that we know exactly who Trump is, I don't know if talking to the press makes any sense.
I think that the new model will be not talking to the press, because it worked for Biden.
And when Biden talked to the press, was it ever good?
Not once.
Not a single time was Biden talking to the press turned into a positive thing.
It was all negative.
So, I think candidates are just going to stop doing it.
If they're well known.
If they're not well known, they're going to have to go through a certain amount of pain to get some attention.
But if they're well known, like both these candidates, why would they ever talk to the press?
They can just put out their message and make it cleaner.
Well, here's what I think.
I think that, well, I'll get to that point.
I've got a clever point coming up, but it needs a little more introduction to get to it.
I think that both candidates should be talking to voters.
And I'll keep saying this until I sell it, because I think it's going to happen.
You tell me which of these would tell you something useful.
Any reporter who's going to be biased one way or the other talking to any candidate.
We know how that goes.
Just useless.
Now compare that to either of the candidates sitting down with somebody from the other party.
Somebody who's definitely planning to vote for the other candidate.
And maybe more than one.
And just talking to them for an hour.
To find out what they think and let the candidate make their best case, one-to-one, person-to-person.
Now, I could listen to that all day long.
Because that would be fascinating and unpredictable.
And I also think that if you picked your citizens right, and you didn't get activists, you would get people who actually want to know what's real.
Do you think that the reporters want to know what's real?
No, they don't.
They need a story.
They need hits.
They need their career to go well.
But if you just got some citizens and say, all right, have lunch with Kamala Harris.
And tell her what you think from the other team.
And same thing with Trump.
Let Trump talk to some voters.
Because the screen between the candidate and the voters is way too thick.
The voters aren't seeing the candidates.
They're seeing him through the filter of the news, and the news is completely illegitimate in this context.
So, got to talk to the voters.
And I think Trump would have a tremendous advantage in this, because he's got stronger arguments.
And that's going to be an easier sell than let's go communist.
That's going to be a hard sell.
I mean, just take the comparison.
Think of the hardest thing that a Democrat could ask Trump about.
You can always think of a reasonable answer that if you were there, you could even give it yourself.
You know, like, you know, abortion would be the tough one.
And then Trump says, well, you want, you don't want me to be making decisions about your body, do you?
Well, of course I don't.
Right.
That's why I kicked it over the states.
There are more women in the states than men and men, half of them already agree with you.
So all you have to do is convince other women And you can have abortion any way you want.
Now that would be an absolute kill shot to the accusations about Trump's going to stop abortion.
It would be a total kill shot.
But you would never be able to do that with the press.
You could do it with a human.
What would the human say if you said that?
Well, they might try, but, but, but.
You're in favor of a national ban on abortion.
And then Trump would say, no, I'm not.
No, they just made that up.
I definitely don't want that.
I kicked it to the states.
I want you to decide.
Stop saying I'm going to decide.
I've already taken it out of my domain.
It's for you to decide.
So you work on other women.
And if women agree with you, you can have any law you want.
That's how our system works.
Now, that is a strong, strong answer to the biggest complaint.
Now imagine it went the other way.
Let's say you had some well-informed Republicans having lunch with Kamala Harris.
And she'd say, I'm going to bring your inflation down by capping prices on food.
And suppose you're a Republican and you're well-informed and you say, food?
Food only has the narrowest profit margin of every industry.
Are you aware of that?
Now, if you're talking pharma, you might have big margins.
And, you know, in tech there might be big margins for some things.
But in food, it's the smallest margins of any industry.
Is there any industry with a smaller profit margin than food?
The only reason they can make any money is that people are eating food every day.
You can't really quit the food.
If somebody sitting at lunch said to Kamala Harris, every time price caps have tried, they just created shortages.
Can you think of any case where it ever worked?
Now, what reporter is going to ask Kamala Harris that question?
Can you give me any example where price caps have ever worked?
And did you know that food has the smallest margin of profit of any industry ever?
You're never going to see that.
But a citizen would ask that question.
Do you know why a citizen would ask those questions?
Because those are the normal, most obvious questions.
Citizens will ask the most normal, obvious questions.
For whatever reason, reporters won't.
They'll ask the one that could get them the gotcha.
You know, what do you think about, how do you define a woman?
Come on.
Is that what you care about?
Do you care about how Kamala Harris defines a woman?
No, I get that it has real impact in the real world, but it's not in your top 10 problems.
So, no, you need voters to talk to candidates.
Nothing in between.
All right.
Politico says that Harris says she's rolling out her plan to fight inflation.
That is bullshit and propaganda and brainwashing.
She has not rolled out a plan to fight inflation.
She's rolled out a plan to cap profits.
That's not really the same.
You know, they can argue it's going to lower your prices, but if you don't do something about the money supply and other things that are driving inflation, that ain't it.
But Politico carries her water and calls it a plan to fight inflation.
So let's talk about some of the economic ideas of Kamala Harris.
And let me tell you, they sound good on paper.
So in terms of persuasion and running a campaign, this is pretty good stuff.
So don't pooh-pooh it because you think it's inaccurate.
It might be inaccurate and a bad idea, but it's pretty sellable.
So persuasion-wise, They've got a good bite on this economic thing.
Let me give you some examples.
So, Biden administration, so Kamala Harris would presumably get some, you know, credit for this as well.
They've negotiated the price down quite a bit, they say, on 10 different drugs.
So, they let the Medicare program negotiate at lower prices.
Now, Do you think this story is that clean?
Let's see, there were big pharma who was charging too much, and then the government negotiated the prices down, you know, like an average of more than 50%.
Wow.
You're really going to feel that in your pocket, right?
Are you?
Well, I have a health insurance.
Is my insurance going to go down if my health care provider pays less for those drugs?
No.
No.
That's just free money to the insurance company.
Because she hasn't told the insurance company to lower the prices.
And the insurance company is buying the drug, not me.
I'm just paying some copay that would be the same no matter what I paid.
Now, there'll be a little bit of bleed through.
And presumably, your insurance company would at least have the option of lowering the price, or not raising it as much the next year.
So you can imagine that it could work through the system a little bit, but in the short run, consumers weren't buying these expensive drugs they were going without.
And they're still going to go without if it's only 50% less cost.
So you either have insurance that's paying for it, or you're probably not getting it at all, because it's just too expensive.
Anyway, we also don't know exactly how much they reduce the prices, because when they talk about the percentage decrease, they admit in the stories that they don't know what they're decreased from.
Because apparently the list price is not necessarily what anybody's paying, but that information is proprietary.
So in other words, the Biden administration is claiming specific price decreases without telling you what level they were before they were decreased.
So it's a lie, because they're not always paying full price already.
Now, I think it is very true that the total amount that would be paid, it would be much less.
But the actual number is kind of gamed a little bit because they don't know what it's coming down from, but it's almost certainly coming down from something.
Bye.
So here's the punchline on that.
So after this long story about how the drug companies argued like crazy and They said, ah, we can't do this.
But then it happened anyway.
So they had to go along with it.
And then they were asked about what would happen to their stock prices.
And here's what the expert said when these 10 drug companies had to reduce their costs by about 50%.
They said it wouldn't really affect their stock price.
Wait, what?
How could the price be cut in half by somebody externally, the government, and yet it doesn't affect their stock price?
There's something else going on here!
That can't not affect your stock price, unless you're such a big company that that one little drug didn't make much difference.
Now the other thing that I assume the government is not including is the research and development costs.
So if some company spent a billion dollars to develop a drug that making the drug is really cheap, but they're going to sell it for like $100 a go, it's because they're getting back their billion dollars.
It's not because they're making a killer Uh, a killer amount on the per drug.
They're just trying to pay back what they put into it.
Now, do you think the government said, can you please explain to us how much you invested?
And then we'll look at your return on investment.
And if it's outrageous, then we're going to ask you to lower it.
No, they just said lower it by 50%.
As soon as you introduce that kind of madness into a system, it can't be good in the long run.
Because presumably there'll be companies that spend a billion dollars, the government said you had to cut the price by 50%, and they say, we really can't get our billion dollars back, because this will be off a patent before we get our billion back.
So do they make another drug?
Not if they think the government's going to set their prices.
You wouldn't make the next drug If you thought the government might cut the price of it in half, because you'll never know if you'll get your billion back.
I doubt the government asked them about their ROI.
And if they did, they'd lie about it anyway, so they'd never get that information.
So everything about this is a distortion of the free market.
But in the short run, it's going to sell really well.
Because consumers are just going to say, you lowered my cost?
Great.
Harris also wants to give or extend child credits.
So if you're a taxpayer with a kid, you get some more.
She wants to increase it and make it up to $6,000 if you got a new kid.
These are all real good-sounding policies.
Now, of course, this policy will not come with a warning of what it does to the deficit.
So it's a half-pinion, meaning they don't tell you what the cost of it is.
Yeah, we'd like to just give you stuff.
Okay.
Were you going to have a kid anyway?
I was.
How about if we give you $6,000?
I'll vote for that.
But it's going to sound good.
So it's basically a way to buy votes of young people who think they might have kids.
So persuasion-wise, it's a winner.
And then she wants to boost a new home building.
And she would do that by a $40 billion fund to help local governments develop innovative solutions to lack of housing supplies.
Biden, I guess, had suggested $20 billion, so she doubled it.
And expand the low-income house credits.
So basically, she'd be paying local governments to improve their housing situation.
Do you know what the problem with this plan is?
All local governments are corrupt.
If you put $40 billion into cities, they're just going to fucking steal it.
At this point, I don't have any confidence that there's a city that can take $40 billion or whatever their share is and build something.
I think they just give it to their contractor friends and then the contractor friends give them, you know, give them a little back in return.
I think it's just a corrupt system.
I don't think that local government should be given money.
Local government should only be in charge of making sure your roads get fixed and stuff.
Here's my fix for the whole country.
Local government should have no decision making over what vendors are chosen.
Local government should have no authority over who gets chosen to do the work that the government is contracting for.
Because that's where all the corruption happens.
You should have some kind of independent, outside, uninvolved process, if it's even possible.
I don't know what that would look like.
Where the cities are just told what vendor is going to do what, based on some better analysis of who does better work.
But the whole kickback thing, it ruins basically every city.
Because you get a bunch of crooks in charge because they know they can make a killing.
However, on paper, this will sound great.
People will say, hey, we need more housing.
You're putting a lot of money toward it.
I like every bit of that.
So persuasion-wise, these are all winners.
These are just election-year winners, because they just sound good.
Are they good?
Not in the long run.
Not in the long run.
But they sure sound good.
Food price caps, we talked about that.
Every economist thinks it's a bad idea.
So here's a summary.
It seems that the Harris economic plans are all goal-oriented.
Meaning they're trying to start with the endpoint in mind and not think through the system that gets you there.
Whereas it seems to me that the Trump-related stuff is a little more system-oriented.
I'll talk about that.
But here's an example of something that's system-oriented.
There's a new AI-powered robot for weeding fields without herbicides.
How good is it if you could eat food that had no herbicides on it?
You'd like that, right?
So, right away, I'm already interested.
There are fewer chemicals on my food?
Tell me more.
But now they've got a robot that apparently doesn't need power, except what it gets from the sun, and it will work all day.
And it's basically, it looks like a platform with a laser on it, I think, and it just rolls over the fields.
It's AI, so it understands what it has to do, and it's completely autonomous.
You basically just shove it into a field, and it gets rid of your weeds, and it figures out the best way to do it, and it learns from what works, and it just works all day.
You don't even need much maintenance.
It sleeps at night, wakes up in the morning, and starts working again.
So imagine if you could, suppose the government made it easier for these robots to be rolled out.
That would be a good system, because it would be promoting the free market that would lower your food costs in the long run.
It would be hard for employing migrants, maybe there would be fewer migrants employed, but that too would reduce the The pressure on illegal immigration.
So working on something like making sure that AI powered robots for farms get a little more attention or they something faster happens.
That's a good system.
Because it gets you to food prices, but it gets you in a systems way where you're doing all the right things at the at the lower level.
Anyway.
Agen is the new robot maker that makes that.
This is a real product.
It's not hypothetical.
It's already in fields.
All right.
CNN is making a big deal about people mispronouncing Kamala.
I guess it was a big dust up with Republican Nancy Mace, who may have pronounced it wrong, and said she didn't care.
And then one of the black pundits on CNN said, you are a white woman who is disrespecting a black woman, blah, blah, blah.
Everything's through a race filter.
It just makes everything stupid.
I was watching CNN two days ago.
And I thought it was hilarious that one of Kamala Harris' supporters, who was on the show to be her supporter, so it looked like it was maybe just somebody in the campaign, and he mispronounced her name.
This was a guy who was on the show just to be her supporter.
I believe it involves with the campaign.
I didn't get the name.
But he mispronounces her name, and they don't correct him.
So it's a pro-Kamala Harris person who calls her Kamala while he's supporting her, and they don't correct him.
Then they go to the next topic, it's still the same panel of people, and somebody who was anti-Kamala called her Kamala, and immediately she was shut down.
Oh, no, you're doing it again.
You're just using the wrong name, you're racist, and I'm thinking, Her campaign person just used the wrong name, like a minute ago.
Have you seen any other Democrats pronounce her name wrong?
You've seen it, right?
How does everybody not understand that it's just a hard name to remember and pronounce?
I've seen Trump do it both ways.
I've seen Trump say Kamala, and I've seen him say Kamala.
Do you think that he's intentionally doing it one way versus the other?
I don't think so, because I went through an extended phase where I could not remember which way it was, and I would often do it wrong, but then every once in a while I'd do it right, but it was probably just by accident.
So I think it's just a hard name.
To me, I don't think there's anything else going on.
And by the way, what racist thinks that they're improving their situation by calling somebody by the wrong name?
Like, how is that even connected to racism?
You know, I suppose you could argue it's showing disrespect, but do you think we had more respect for Hillary Clinton?
And no, it's not because she's a woman.
No, it's Democrats and Republicans have some differences, that's all.
But I don't think any of the name stuff has anything to do with race.
That just seems stupid to me.
Anyway.
So there's another story.
Every day that we hear about that attempted assassination, it sounds worse.
So now we know that the FBI released the attempted assassin's body, Thomas Crooks, and he was cremated.
Apparently it was a while ago.
So anybody who thought they could learn something by studying his corpse, I don't know what you would learn by it, but that's not available.
And people are saying, we should have at least known about this, that he was going to be cremated.
So if we had an objection because we thought we could learn something, maybe that'd be good.
I don't think we, I don't think it makes any difference.
If I were the family, I would just want, I'd want to tie things up as quickly as possible.
So if the only story here is that the family wanted this to happen, I'm okay with it.
I don't think that's the biggest problem in the world.
James Carville continues to make news.
He says that Republicans support Israel because Jews are whiter than Palestinians.
Is that just a drunk comment?
Does anybody think that's true?
Does that ring true to anybody?
Oh, I'm seeing somebody agreeing with that.
I'm seeing somebody agree.
Do you think that's true?
That it's because Republicans see Jews as whiter than Palestinians?
All right, you have interesting opinions all over the place.
Um...
Well, I'd hate to think that that's the case.
I don't think I've ever witnessed it.
You know, when I witness somebody who's a racist, they usually throw both of them in the same category.
That's been my experience.
I've never seen them say, I like this one because they're a little bit whiter.
I've never seen that.
Not in person, not in any kind of conversation I've ever been in.
But I think you're just assuming it's true.
I don't think you're basing it on any conversation or your own opinion or anything, are you?
I don't know.
It's a weird one.
Well, Thailand has a new prime minister, a 37-year-old woman.
When do we stop doing this as a story?
Is it time yet?
Can we stop doing the, it's the first time a woman had a job?
Can we just stop doing it?
Wouldn't we better be better off if nobody mentioned it?
What if just nobody mentioned it?
Hey, we got a new prime minister.
Hey, it's a young woman.
So?
Oh.
Okay.
So, I suppose, especially because it's Thailand, so you might imagine they have different thoughts about gender, but apparently the best person won, it looks like.
Yeah, this is my, my observation is always the same.
Everybody's racist until a good candidate shows up.
Have you noticed that?
So we had this big old racist country that we'd never, this America would never be able to elect a black person as president.
And then Obama shows up.
What made Obama special that allowed him to win two terms?
Obama.
He just had a lot of skill.
End of the story.
All you needed was somebody who could do the job, and America said, oh, all right.
The entire, like, the most basic assumption about America, that we're too racist to hire somebody who clearly has the goods.
Now, whether you like or don't like Obama, he clearly had the goods to be a president, right?
You can hate him, you can hate his policies, but he had the goods.
He had the brains, he had the game, he had the political instincts.
He had everything.
Likewise, Hillary Clinton came within a hair of being a president because she also had the goods.
She wasn't my choice, but nobody would argue that she didn't have the brains and the experience and all that stuff.
So when do we just get to stop talking about it?
So this 37-year-old A woman who is now the Prime Minister of Thailand.
My guess is that no matter how misogynist they were in Thailand, I don't know if they are, but no matter how they were, if she showed up and she had the goods, they just said, oh, well, you have the goods.
That's okay.
Again, let's get back to every person is an individual.
Did it really help you?
You heard in the news people reporting that R.F.K.
Jr.
was going to ask Kamala Harris or did ask her for a cabinet position.
R.F.K.
Jr.
says that is fake news.
But also Nicole Shanahan said it also.
That is fake news.
Did not happen and would not happen because they don't really have a relationship with the Democrats at this point.
And now you might ask yourself, well, are they lying?
What if RFK Jr.
and his VP choice, Nicole Shanahan, what if they're lying?
Well, I suppose anything's possible in our bigger world, but I'll just give you my personal opinion.
So I got to meet and spend some time with Nicole Shanahan because she had me on her podcast.
And I'm not going to say I'm the best judge of people in the world, but I judged her to be completely honest.
Like, she didn't have a political bone in her body in terms of lying.
She just looked like a total legitimate player who just wanted something better for the world and was, you know, putting her money and her time into it.
And I'm not sure you get that from everybody.
You might come away with a good opinion of a politician, but you still think they're full of shit.
Don't you?
I love Trump.
Like as an individual, you know, I was lucky enough to get to chat with him once.
And he is just totally engaging.
He gives you his full attention.
You feel like you're the only person in the room.
I mean, he's got the whole charisma package, but he's also full of shit.
Right?
I didn't lose sense of the fact that he's a politician, and in the modern world all politicians are kind of full of shit.
Meaning he's going to exaggerate his benefits, he's going to exaggerate how the other team is doing, etc.
Now, we don't mind too much, because it's the way the game is played, there's some bullshit on their side, there's some bullshit on your side.
You don't really, you know, you can kind of discount it.
But Nicole Shanahan was different.
She just seemed like an honest person.
And when I was done talking with her, I thought I'd met an honest person.
So when she says it didn't happen, I would bet on it.
If you said, how much would you bet that she's telling the truth, that they did not ask for some cabinet, everything?
A million dollars?
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I would, I would trust her completely that, that it didn't happen.
And then RFK Jr.
also is highly credible in my opinion.
So if the two of them say it didn't happen, I think you could bank on that.
All right, my favorite part is that Trump introduced and, well, just gave some more details, I guess, on his idea of, quote, freedom cities, he calls them.
Apparently one third of the landmass of the U.S.
is owned by the federal government and not much of that land is used.
So he wants to make That available for 10 to charter 10 new mega futuristic cities in various places on federal land.
And he says they would become historic job creation and easing of traffic and hubs of innovation and offer new families the opportunity to own homes and unprecedented opportunities for up and coming entrepreneurs, build generation wealth, low taxes, high reward environment.
Now, how much do you hate this idea if you're a Republican?
Well, let me give you the worst objections.
Right?
These are the objections that would be embarrassing if you have them.
Now, anything could go wrong with any plan, but here are the worst objections to this plan.
Number one, You're creating a 15-minute city, so you're trying to be the World Economic Forum.
No, you're not.
You're just trying to build a good city.
That's it.
That's it.
And by the way, the plans will be available to everybody to look at.
And by the way, you won't be forced to live there.
No, it has nothing to do with the World Economic Forum 15-minute cities.
It would be different people with different objectives.
No, that's the worst analogy you could ever have.
It's just a new, better city.
The next one is, when governments build cities, you end up with ghost cities like China, where you waste all your money and you've got to tear them down later.
No, there's nothing like China in this.
This would be a private industry who decides they can make money, they'll get the government to give them some free land and maybe some less regulation, and then they will build the city that they publicly told you they were going to build.
Now, would they build it if they hadn't done some research to know they could fill it with people?
Well, pretty much any new development gets filled in America.
When was the last time somebody built a development and they didn't sell all the houses?
It doesn't happen much.
The developers are pretty good at knowing where to put a place.
So now, whatever happened in China was completely different than what happens here.
In America, we've been approving and building large communities for a hundred years.
And every one of them got filled with people.
This would just be another large community, but designed a little better.
That's all.
It's just designed better.
Don't worry about it.
It's not going to be a ghost city because it was designed better.
Government-built cities are a bad idea in general because governments are bad at building things.
No, the government's not going to build anything.
The plan is not for the government to build anything.
The government is going to make it easier For private developers who already build things to build something better.
Yeah.
No, it's just making it available to private industry.
That's it.
And then I heard that rural people are going to be against it.
And if I knew more about rural people, I would know that they're not going to like it.
What?
What do the rural people have to do with anything?
It's not going to be on their land.
It's going to be literally on land where there are no people.
The rural people can just live their life like it never happened.
No!
The rural people have nothing to worry about.
They're going to take your car and make you walk everywhere.
No, they're not.
You don't have to live there.
There's going to be ten of them.
Maybe one of them has no cars.
Do you have to live there?
No!
What if it doesn't work?
Well, then you do something better.
It's like everything else.
You try some stuff, if it doesn't work, you do what's better.
If they build 10 of them, and 3 of them are a big hit, and 7 of them are a failure, that's a giant leap forward.
Because then we build 30 more cities based on the models that worked.
Everything about this is good.
This is one of the few ideas where everything about it is good, and the arguments are just crazy.
Just crazy.
All right.
According to ex-user George, who I always tell you is a great follow on ex, the Supreme Court The Georgia Supreme Court has ruled that private contractors working for the government are also subject to public records requests.
And you say to me, well, that's a boring story.
Why do I care that government contractors are also subject to document requests from the public?
Well, some of those vendors might include companies that run elections.
So it might, some say, Open up disclosure or discovery to companies like Dominion, who would be contracted by a state, but would be private entities.
So it might give the public some kind of a backdoor into their documents.
Is that going to make a difference?
I don't know, but it'd be interesting to have more transparency.
I continue to be baffled by the story of New York Mayor Eric Adams.
In all of his legal troubles.
So he's been accused of a bunch of things.
I think they're all corruption related charges.
I don't have any idea if any of those are true, but I do have this feeling.
I believe that pretty much all local politicians are corrupt or will be eventually.
So there may be some cities where there's still a few honest people, but over time it has to turn into the corrupt ones.
Because the corrupt ones are the ones who are going to figure out how to monetize the job, and how to monetize the people who give them money to get in the job.
You know, the people who support their campaigns.
So, right now our biggest problem in the world is local governments.
And specifically local governments, as I said before, who get to decide which vendors do what work.
That has to be taken out of the control of the local government.
I don't know what the local government would do if they don't have control over who gets what jobs, but there'll probably still be a lot there.
You just have to take the money out of the government thing.
They just can't control money.
That's where all the corruption comes from.
And anyway, so here's my biggest complaint with the Freedom Cities.
The Democrats would come to run them.
That's it.
So suppose a developer builds like this amazing new city, a freedom city, and then they go to populate it.
Well, they're also going to need a mayor.
But let's say they build it so it's really optimized for, you know, people starting out and lower income people.
Well, if you optimize it for lower income people, And a lot of them are Democrats, because maybe the Republicans say, you know, I'm going to stay out of your 15-minute city.
So let's say it's mostly Democrats who move into your new Trump city.
What's going to happen?
Total destruction.
So there is no city design that can't be ruined by Democrats.
And that's not meant to be a political statement.
I know it sounds like one.
But I don't think there's a scenario where you can put a bunch of Democrats in the city and not have a corrupt leadership.
Because for whatever reason they always vote for corrupt leadership.
So, if you don't fix the how do you manage the city, there's no point in building it.
There's no point in building a new city if it's going to be managed in the same way that the old cities are managed in terms of the government.
That's got to be the first thing that changes.
I don't know if there's a way to do that.
I don't know if you can have a non-normal city management.
Can you?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Suppose the developer said, I'm going to be in charge of the city and we'll just run it like a business.
I don't know.
They'd probably become corrupt too over time.
There's got to be some way to run a city.
That's not what we're doing now.
Well, meanwhile, the Harris campaign, if you want it to be a Harris Campaign Worker.
You get to select from nine different pronoun options.
Nine different pronoun options.
My favorite that I've never heard is who, who.
H-U slash H-U.
So I think that means you individually, but also you collectively.
Like, you know, he and they.
Who and who.
I think that's the most confusing pronoun ever.
Why would you introduce a new pronoun that sounds like who when you're talking about people?
Who did it?
I know.
No, who did it?
I know.
No, who did it?
I know, who did it?
I mean, it's exactly the, it's exactly that comedy routine.
Except in this case, who refers to, you know, a number of people, not just one.
All right, well, my question is, and you may have had the same question, how can I add to this?
What is the crossover point where somebody's personal opinion about what they should be called becomes important enough that it becomes on the list of nine things that you can check?
It must be kind of a low bar, because I've never even heard of anybody who was a who-who.
Have you?
Or a G, you know, Xi?
I've never heard of a real person who had those requirements.
So it can't be many people.
So I'd like to see if I could get one added.
I haven't decided what it is yet.
But I want to see if maybe, if I get everybody to call me it, whatever it is, Then maybe we could popularize it a little bit, see if we can get it added to the list.
But I think I'd like to do it as more of a prank.
So should be pronouns that have some kind of hidden meaning, or they insult somebody, or they would be impolite to say in public.
Yeah, I'm thinking of something like like a.
of the day.
Oh, I don't know.
It would be funnier if I could come up with an example.
I'd like to be called a Dilbert.
What?
Yeah, instead of he, just call me Dilbert.
What if there are more than one?
Dilberts.
Call me Dilbert or Dilberts.
And then they would say, well, does it work for women?
And I would say, define a woman.
And they'd say, touche.
And then they start calling their women Dilbert.
I think, I think that's my pronoun.
I want to be called Dilbert and Dilbert's maybe with an S. There were a whole pack of Dilbert coming, coming your way.
All right.
So there's a, uh, as you know, Republicans are leading on the top issues, like the border, the economy, and crime.
So, if you were to rank the issues from most important to least important, the ones that universally are toward the top, Republicans have a commanding advantage.
So, then why isn't Trump way ahead?
How does that make sense?
Commanding advantage in all the important topics.
And yet, not running away with the election?
Huh.
Well, some of it might be the quality of the polling we've talked about before, but I think it's maybe something more basic, that Democrats, not all of them of course, Can't tell what's important.
You know, when I was trying to get my MBA, you take this test called the GMATs.
That's a test to see if you're smart enough to get into business school.
And one of the tests, I'm not sure they do it anymore, is you're supposed to figure out what was more important in a little story about an event.
So like, what is the important part of this story?
And if you couldn't identify what was important, You couldn't even go to business school because they don't want somebody who can't identify what's important.
It seems kind of basic, doesn't it?
But if somebody says that, for example, abortion, climate change, DEI, reparation, and pronouns, if anybody is making an argument that those should be in the top five, there's something wrong with them.
Now, it could be that what's wrong is Yeah, they don't have the same talent stack as other people, right?
So if you were an artist your whole life, and you didn't have other experience outside of art, you might think that abortion, climate change, DEI, reparations, and pronouns are right at the top of the list.
You would not be very wise if you thought that.
Here's how I think of it.
If you don't get the economy right, everything is dead.
If you don't get immigration right, we're all dead.
If you don't get avoiding wars right, we're all dead.
If you don't stop crime, we're all dead.
That's why those are at the top of my priority list.
You're dead.
Now let's take theirs.
Would the country still be a country?
If abortion laws were changed?
Yes, yes.
It could be very important to you individually, but the country would be somewhat unchanged by the abortion laws.
In fact, they did change, and the country just hummed along, right?
Now, I'm not going to discount the fact that it has enormous impact on individuals who are under one set of abortion laws, and now they're under another.
They might be in a state that doesn't support what they want to do.
Very big problem for some individuals.
But if you're looking at the country, no difference.
It just wasn't important to the country.
Important product or important topic, just not to the well-being of the whole country.
Look at climate change.
Climate change, even if you believe it's a kill the world problem, Elon Musk has the smart way to play it, which is we're going to try hard to get to that, you know, no carbon future, but it's probably not something you have to do tomorrow.
And in the short run, you're probably going to have to use tons of carbon energy because otherwise we're all dead.
So if climate change is your top thing, then you're not working on the problem of staying alive.
You're staying alive maybe in some conceptual long term that nobody can prove, but you're having trouble immediately and for a long time.
How about DEI?
I don't even have to tell you about that.
Reparations?
These are just racist programs.
Reparations is just a racist idea.
And the pronouns are just silly.
So I think that the problem is the Democrats can't tell what's important.
And again, I don't mean all Democrats, because of course there are plenty of Democrats who would say the economy is the number one thing.
But if you look at the averages, there does seem to be a difference.
Republicans can quite accurately, in my opinion, this has been my experience, they can tell you the most important things in every situation.
Am I wrong?
Republicans, quite predictably and reliably, can look at any situation in life and pick out the important parts.
Democrats, again, this is an average, it doesn't apply to every person, Democrats seem to consistently not be able to find what's important.
So it's not even an opinion about, like, what's the best thing to do about things.
It's not even knowing what's important.
And I would say that that's a talent stack problem.
People who have a certain set of experience are always going to agree on what's the most important stuff.
And people who are inexperienced, or they've been in a little silo of experience, can often have opinions that are disconnected from the real world.
And I think that's what's happening.
Anyway, the Trump campaign, there's rumors that it's going to have a shakeup and that Corey Lewandowski might come back and might be the boss of the existing people that not everybody is delighted with.
Now, is that true?
I don't know.
There's some talk that Trump just wants his old team together.
You've seen some social media pressure in that direction, Mike Cernovich specifically, and I don't know anything about Corey Lewandowski on a personal level, but he had some, you know, scandal and He disappeared for a while, but we don't really care about scandal, do we?
Does anybody really care if Corey Lewandowski had some personal scandal?
You know, some affair?
Not really.
I mean, if he can do the job, he can do the job.
So Wired, the publication Wired, did this big bubble influencer chart.
So they tried to show the influencers on the left and the influencers on the right with this very impressive bubble chart.
So I looked at the influencers on the left, and I didn't recognize any but maybe one name.
A whole bubble chart of the most important influencers, they're talking about internet influencers, and I didn't know who any of them were, except one name, Harry Sisson, because people make fun of him on X all the time.
That's it.
I don't even know much about him.
And then I looked at the one on the right, where I should have a little more insight of who the influencers are, and here's what I learned.
Wired has no idea who the influential people are on the right.
Now, I don't know, maybe they got the left wrong as well.
But they seem to be thinking that the size of your audience is, and that you talk about politics, is the determinant of your influence.
Has that been your experience?
Well, I will just mention again that Mike Cernovich was not on the list of internet influential people.
If that's the only thing you knew about it, that should give you all you need to know.
The people on the left have no idea who is moving the needle.
And good.
The less they know about that, probably the better.
All right.
There's another study from Climate Change Dispatch, or I think that's where they wrote about it.
It finds that rising CO2 enhances planetary greening and reduces drought risk.
Well, how about that?
So one of the big problems of climate warming would be the worry about drought.
But apparently, there's a new study that suggests, and again, I'm not going to say that this one's right and all the other ones are wrong.
You can't trust anything about climate or the pandemic.
The two things that all of your data is questionable, no matter which direction.
It's like, I don't know.
I'm not sure I believe anything in those domains.
But the idea is that there's a good correlation between warming and CO2.
Which causes lots of greenery, and apparently if you've got a lot of greenery, it probably follows that there's more access to water.
So, my question would be this.
Suppose there's something to it, and suppose this correlation is real.
Do you believe that the climate models included these factors?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Climate models are ridiculous.
They are ridiculous.
And you should be embarrassed and angry that anybody tried to sell them as science.
All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, that is a rapid review through the news today.
I'm going to talk to the people on Locals, my subscribers, and I'm gonna say bye to YouTube and Rumble and X. I will tell you that I've got some announcements upcoming of some products you're really gonna want.
Maybe a calendar for 2025?
It won't be on Amazon, so you're going to have to wait for me to tell you where it is.
And do you remember my book, Win Bigly?
It was quite influential in the past.
It was talking about Trump's 2016 race, and basically it was a lesson on how to persuade As told through the story of Trump and me.
So it's going to be reissued, because it's part of what got cancelled, and I've updated it with just some updates.
It's not majorly different, but I'll tell you when it's available, and I'll tell you how to get it.
That one, it will be on Amazon, but it's not there yet.
I just have to do some final checks, and then it'll take a few weeks to be available.
So in a few weeks, look for some big announcements in my domain.
