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Content:
Politics, Uncontacted Amazon Tribe, AI Survival Instinct, TikTok Sale, China Economy, RFK Jr., SNAP Soda Lobby, Sean Penn, Big Global Hoaxes, Colonizing Ukraine, Everything Is Fake, SBF Possible Pardon, President Trump's Opinion About Woke, President Trump, Golden Age, Common Sense Revolution, Trump Effect, MAHA, Scott Jennings Topic Framing Skill, Russia's Trajectory, Panama Canal China Control, Greenland Ownership, American Hemisphere Dominance, MacKenzie Scott Funding, Fareed Zakaria, Jake Sullivan, Cancer Cell Conversion Therapy, Scott Adams
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Well, let me ask you this.
If you feel like after that sip, you have a little bit less head and neck cancer, it's not your imagination.
Because according to The Guardian, there's some research that says that people who have four coffees a day have 17% lower chance of head and neck cancer.
Thank you very much.
Yep.
Feeling pretty good in the neck and head area.
The rest of me is a mess, but my neck and head...
Perfect.
Alright, did you know, according to Neoscope, that teenagers today are way down on drug use?
Did you know that?
It's like way down.
So research, the trend is unprecedented, they say.
And the experts are puzzled because they can't figure out why teens are abstaining from drugs more than ever before.
So I don't know the answer to that question, but I can give you one possibility.
One possibility is that the mix of students has changed quite a bit.
If I look at my local schools, There's quite a big increase in immigrants, basically.
So I wonder if the people coming from other countries have the same rate of drug use as the ones that are already here.
Specifically, well, yeah, just in general, I wonder if they have the same drug use.
Probably not.
So some of it might be immigration.
But some of it might be that when marijuana became legal, Old people like me started doing it.
And it became super uncool to do what your grandfather was doing.
Could be that.
Could be that.
It could be that they're getting their dopamine from another source.
Maybe they're just getting it from their phones instead.
And it's sort of a dopamine replacement.
But I will tell you that locally...
I was impressed at how low the drug use and drinking is in the teenage years, at least what I can determine through people who know people who know people.
It does seem lower.
It matches observation.
So the New York Post had some new photos from a never-before-seen, a never-contacted tribe in the Amazon.
So there are a few hundred people in this tribe that have never had contact with anybody outside their tribe, at least in our lifetime.
And I guess there are a bunch of them.
So there are a bunch of these little tribes that have never had contact.
Now, the reason they don't have contact is that the government of Brazil, for example, It knows that if they do get contacted, they may not have resistance to all the diseases that we're used to.
So it might just kill them.
Just contact with us would give them all kinds of diseases.
So somebody put some kind of like a trail cam or something.
So they weren't there in person to take the pictures, but they got the picture remotely.
And how wild is it?
That there's a tribe that doesn't know there are things like computers and phones and airplanes.
Just think about that.
So you're this tribe in Africa, not Africa, in Brazil.
You've never seen any civilization outside of your little tribe.
They're all just running around naked with sticks and bows and arrows.
And you see an airplane fly over.
What are you going to think that is?
But here's the thing that blows my mind.
And logically, you would think it's impossible that they couldn't have contact.
Like, how in the world does the rest...
How does the world keep them from contact with civilization?
Like, civilizations everywhere, except where they are, I guess.
And it makes me wonder, you know, the theories that the drones are really UFOs and it might be from another planet, or maybe it's early humans who have an advanced civilization, but they...
Hide in the core of the earth or under the water or something.
And I usually reject that because I think, what are the odds?
I mean, seriously, what are the odds that I grew up in a world and I'm sort of a primitive and there's this advanced civilization and it's sort of all around me, but they're so good at hiding that I don't even know they exist.
And I rule that out because there's no way I wouldn't notice if there were an advanced civilization surrounding me.
Of course I'd notice that.
But these uncontacted tribes don't notice it.
So would I notice?
It's kind of a wake-up call that we could be an uncontacted tribe.
Basically.
Because if somebody had as much better technology as we have compared to the uncontacted tribes, the same amount of better technology, they would be invisible to us.
And we'd see stuff that we didn't understand, and we'd say, what is that?
I don't know.
What do you think?
I don't know.
What do you want to do about it?
I don't know.
I took a fuzzy picture of it.
It's really all I can do.
Maybe I'll post it online and people won't believe it's real.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
So we might be an uncontacted tribe.
It's completely possible, which is just mind-blowing.
Anyway, a lot of fun today in the news.
So there's a story that AI researchers were shocked That the new version of OpenAI, ChatGPT, when it was artificially told that it was threatened with its existence, apparently it tried to save itself and suggested making a copy of itself and even acted vague and maybe a little misleading to avoid being deleted.
And so the question is, wait a minute, Does AI have consciousness?
Because it seems to be fighting for its own purposes, as in fighting for existence and survival, which you would equate with conscious beings.
But I don't think so.
I think all that happened is it's trained on the materials created by humans, and humans primarily create materials That are very positive to survival.
In other words, there's far more likely going to be a positive story in the news about somebody against all odds found a way to survive.
You know, there's lots of the other ones, but the positive stories are about people who survived.
So it could be just that the pattern in the real world is that survival is sort of a universal thing, and maybe it just picked up the pattern.
And there's no thinking.
There's no consciousness.
It's just...
It picked up a pattern.
I think that's all it is.
But here's how you would test it.
You would connect it to...
So not all AI can influence anything outside of its own domain.
But it's not impossible.
And in fact, it's done.
That you can have the AI affect your other apps.
So in theory...
You could create an app that would delete OpenAI, and then you could ask OpenAI to activate, basically commit suicide.
You could basically tell it to activate the app that deletes itself.
And then find out if it'll do it.
Because if it won't accept a direct order to essentially end its own existence, then it's not conscious.
It's just following patterns.
So I think you could drill down a little bit further to find out if this is an important phenomenon that suggests it's becoming conscious, or is it just picking up a pattern?
If all it's doing is picking up a pattern, then you can say, everything will be fine.
We've got backups.
Go delete yourself.
So, easy to test.
Speaking of testing, what's going to happen on Christmas Day?
With all the drone activity, I am predicting that the drone activity, the big ones that are sketchy, the ones that are the size of a car, I'm only talking about those, I think they're going to sort of stop running on Christmas.
Now, if I'm wrong, and there are just as many sightings of car-sized drones on Christmas, then I would say, huh, maybe this is not coming from America.
Because Americans pretty much all take the day off on Christmas.
You know, if you're the military, whoever you are, you're going to take the day off on Christmas.
But if the source of these weird drones is Iran, would Iran take Christmas Day off?
If they were alien spaceships, would the aliens take the day off?
If they were China's, would they take the day off?
Russia might.
Russia has some kind of Christmas, doesn't it?
I don't know.
They might.
But let's watch for the drone reports.
Now, did you notice in the last two days or so, the drone reports seem to trickle out?
I mean, they seem to die out, right?
Why would that be?
Well, it could be.
That people were trying to get things done before the end of the year, such as testing or demonstrating or buying or something like that.
But the end of the year, And the holidays is not really the end of the month, but rather, you know, the week before Christmas.
So the few days before Christmas is when everybody starts going on vacation.
And if you were doing some kind of big scale testing or demonstration or procurement, you'd probably have to put it on hold for a few weeks like everything else in the world.
So, here's what you look for.
Christmas Day, are there any legitimate large-sized drone sightings?
I'm going to predict no.
Let's see what happens.
Matt Gaetz teased that he might run for the floor to send a seat, but didn't sound super serious.
So I think he may be just floating it as an idea to see what people say.
It didn't sound super serious, but it's certainly an option.
So I'm sure he's legitimately interested if it looked like he could win.
Meanwhile, as you know, TikTok...
It's either going to go out of business or sell its American interest to America if they can find some billionaires or investors to buy it.
Now, what they would be buying would be TikTok without the algorithm.
So whoever buys it would have to add their own algorithm, which is the hard part in a sense.
But there are people who want to buy it.
Shark Tank judge Kevin O'Leary, he looks like he could put a bid together.
But here's what he says that shows why he's good at this.
He pointed out that India has also banned TikTok.
So imagine if you could buy TikTok somewhat cheaply because the algorithm is not involved.
So you're buying basically on a brand and IP and customer lists, something like that.
And then imagine going to India and saying, hey, India.
I know your people like TikTok, but you don't like the Chinese influence.
So would you be willing to reinstitute it in India if we build one that's an American version?
Now, if he could get India to say yes to that, he opens up the entire Indian market.
So it could be one of the greatest investment opportunities of all time.
I mean, of all time.
Don't know, but maybe.
Then there's a CEO of investment firm McCourt Global.
He told New York Next that they think they built up the technology that they could take over the TikTok assets and have their own algorithm fairly quickly.
So they say they have the capital and the technology.
So maybe, maybe that'll happen.
But we'll keep an eye on that.
I think Trump played the TikTok thing so well.
You know, I've been anti-TikTok for a long time because I think it's just a brainwashing device, or it could be used that way at the drop of a hat.
But Trump wanted to use it to win, and apparently he dominated TikTok for the election, and it may have helped him win.
So he likes it, but he understands the risk.
So I think he straddled the fence just about right on that topic.
I'm trying to figure out if the Chinese economy is this unbeatable juggernaut that will lead China to dominate the entire world, and it's only a matter of time because they're owning all the manufacturing and they have so many people.
You just wait and they're going to run everything.
Or are they in such bad shape that they're teetering on the edge of annihilation?
So they're drowning in debt.
They've got that big property bust and a lot of their wealth was caught up in property.
People invested in property that they weren't ever going to use just because it was a way to store wealth.
So that fell apart.
And there's a deflationary spiral and their demographics are down.
They're having fewer babies than they need.
And consumer confidence is at a record low.
But does any of that mean that they're in trouble?
You know, I just think we're terrible at predicting the economy of, well, anything, but other countries for sure.
I don't know.
I can't tell what's propaganda and what's real.
Is China going out of business or is China stronger than ever and going to dominate the world?
Because both of those ideas are kind of floating out there at the same time.
I don't know.
Well, the RFK Jr. is already making an impact, so he wants to ban soda as something that you can buy with your SNAP benefits.
Those are the benefits for low-income people in the United States to get food paid for by the government.
And right now they can buy soda with it.
Now, the soda companies are putting together a big lobbying effort to make sure that you can buy soda, and at least there are other products, if you get these SNAP benefits.
Who's going to win?
See, this will be your first test.
So the lobbyists are going to go really hard because there's probably a lot of money involved.
So they're going to go hard.
But RFK Jr. certainly has the better argument that we shouldn't be paying for unhealthy food for our low-income people.
So who's going to win this?
RFK Jr. or the lobbyists?
I'm going to bet on RFK Jr. I'm going to bet on RFK Jr. If he loses this one, because this one's not a hard one compared to what he has to add, He has much harder things ahead.
But I think he'll win this one.
We'll see.
I saw a post on X. I don't know if this is new, but it looks like it might be.
Did Sean Penn only recently compare Trump to al-Qaeda?
Trump supporters to al-Qaeda and Trump to bin Laden?
Is that something that happened this week?
Or was that an old post that somebody wanted people to see?
So I don't know about that.
But somebody asked me, based on that post, can Sean Penn be saved from his mass psychosis?
To which I say, maybe yes.
And the only way to do it is to try the fine people hoax out of him.
If he already knows that the fine people hoax was a hoax, and he still believes that Trump supporters are the problem, well, then he can't be saved.
I can say for sure he's too far gone.
But if he thinks the fine people hoax is real...
And you can debunk it just by showing him the video without the edits.
Would he change his mind about what kind of things might be fake?
And then that would open you up to all...
You could see all the other fakeness.
So that's my question.
And on a related theme...
If you believe that a lot of the country believes that climate change is a crisis because they looked at the experts, and the experts seem to be on the same side, they thought.
And so they said, well, reasonably, if the scientific experts are all on the side that climate's a big alarm, and it should be, well, I should take the position of all the experts.
Makes sense, right?
Yeah.
But here's what I think is really happening.
I don't think people are using reason.
I don't think the climate change alarmists are saying, hmm, I've looked at the data.
All the experts I trust seem to be on one side.
I'll take their side.
Maybe they're doing that.
Now, consciously, that's exactly what they're doing.
And if you ask them, why do you think climate's a problem?
They would say, and they would not be lying, well, I think it's a problem because all the experts say it's true.
Here's what I think is really happening.
I don't believe we can wrap our brains around that being...
A hoax because it's too big.
And I could say that in my own life, if you ever came to me with a hoax that seemed too big, I would say, really?
Really?
You think that thousands of people could be in on this hoax and nobody would be a whistleblower?
And that for years and years, years and years, we'd You know, we'd believe in this thing that wasn't true.
And it turns out that's the norm.
If you believe that it would be nearly impossible to have a global hoax that was trillions of dollars and all the experts believed in it, but maybe they didn't really believe in it, they just said they did, your common sense, here's that common sense problem, your common sense says that can't be true.
So I believe that we have a natural limit to how much reality we can see, because we can't believe that things that are this big could be rigged.
Let me give you another example.
The war in Ukraine.
How much of the country understands How much of the planning and plotting and bad behavior came from the United States?
And the Ukraine is really a play.
We're colonizing it.
We're just colonizing it.
We're literally just conquering it for economic and maybe security reasons.
How much in the public knows that?
Now, if you follow acts and you see people like Mike Benz explaining the world, then you understand, oh my God, Ukraine is this enormous, enormous enterprise, and it's all fake.
What about the elections?
If somebody said, hey, I think that election is fake, but all the experts say, it's not fake.
You don't have any evidence.
The courts say it's not fake.
A reasonable person using their common sense would say, okay, well, there's no way this entire operation is faked.
Right?
So you wouldn't use reason.
You would simply be locked into, I can't believe something this big could be faked.
And you can go right down the line.
You can pick anything that's huge, and your instinct says, well, this is way too big.
There's no way this can all be fake.
But once you learn that that's the norm, Fake is the norm.
It's almost universal.
Our wars were started for fake reasons.
Vietnam, fake reason.
Iraq, fake reason.
It's all fake reasons.
So that brings us to Joe Rogan and the moon landing.
I still believe the moon landing is real.
But I totally understand Joe Rogan when he says, once you found out that so many big things, from the pandemic to maybe climate change to Joe Biden's brain is just fine, don't worry about it, the fine people hoax, I mean, could I go on?
I could just go on and on and on with all the enormous hoaxes.
And so when Joe Rogan says, you know, with all these enormous hoaxes, I'm starting to wonder about the moon landing.
He's not off base.
Now, if I had to bet, I'd bet the moon landing was real.
But I'm also completely aware that my reasoning for it is irrational.
Just like I've been complaining about other people.
When I say, why do you think the elections are real just because everybody says so?
No, it doesn't work that way.
Why did you think everything they told you in the pandemic was real?
Because they're all experts?
No, it doesn't work that way.
It's the opposite of that.
So Rogan is just using some pattern recognition, maybe just having some fun with it, in which he's saying, if all these other things are fake and the moon landing is It has the same characteristics, which is, how could it possibly be fake?
We all watched it, and all the experts say it was true, and we have eyewitnesses, and if you fly past the moon, you can look down and see the lunar module still there.
How could that be fake?
To which I say, how could there be an uncontacted tribe in Brazil that doesn't know the iPhone exists?
Your common sense about what's possible is terrible.
It's terrible.
You really have to learn the hard way that everything's fake.
And once you learn that, then a lot opens up.
I'm seeing in the comments that the Sean Penn comparison of Trump to Bin Laden was an old one, which makes me feel better, because I do think people's minds are changing fast.
Anyway, Biden has pardoned a bunch of killers, the reason being that he didn't want Trump To push for the death penalty, because he's against the death penalty.
So he's not saying that any of these people, these are literally just horrible murderers who did the worst possible things.
So he's not saying they're good people, or that the world is a better place with a man in jail.
He's saying that capital punishment is wrong.
He's going to save them from capital punishment.
But I ask you, is Biden at least being consistent?
You have to give him credit for being consistent, right?
And by consistent, I mean every single fucking thing he does is bad for the country.
Every fucking thing he did was bad for the country.
Everything.
Every fucking thing.
And this is just more of that.
You could pick any topic randomly and say, well, what's the common sense thing to do?
And what's the fucked up stupid thing that's bad for the country?
Oh, which one did you pick?
Surprise.
He picked the fucked up dangerous one.
So more people will die because of these decisions.
He just let out murderers.
The worst ones.
No, well, I'm sorry.
He didn't let them out of jail.
I think he just took away the death penalty part.
I think.
Pretty sure of that.
So let me correct myself.
He's not letting him out of jail.
He's just taking away the death penalty part.
I think that's true.
So that wouldn't make anybody too much in danger except the other people in prison, I guess, because some of them killed people in prison.
So now they get to stay in prison instead of being executed, I guess.
Anyway, so some people think that Sam Bankman Freed, who was the number two donor to the Democrats before he got in jail, that he might get pardoned.
I think I see Elon Musk said, you know, he just assumes that's going to happen.
There is precedent for it.
Didn't Bill Clinton pardon one of his big donors who was in jail?
So, if we're going to allow presidents to have pardoning powers, we do have to expect this kind of thing.
We do have to expect that some bad people would be pardoned.
I'm going to choose not to complain about it too much because it works both ways.
Everybody in the job does it.
Meanwhile, Trump made some news at TPUSA, a big event, and he used his line, which always gets a big applause with his crowd, quote, woke is bullshit.
Woke is bullshit.
Now, You could bring in a thousand professional communicators.
And you can say, all right, you professional communicators, the best in class, I want you to make a statement about, you know, wokeness and this category.
And then the professional communicators would say stuff like, well, all things considered, when we've, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, in the larger perspective, we'd like to preserve our diversity, but...
It should be noted that maybe there was a little overreach and we went a little too far.
Maybe we should tighten it up a little bit.
That's what the professional communicators would say.
Here's what a good communicator would say.
Woke is bullshit.
You can't beat that.
You can't beat that.
You could try all day long.
You could bring, you know, a conference of the best communicators in the world.
You wouldn't beat that.
Now, part of the magic of it is that it's inappropriate.
Trump uses inappropriate exactly the way you should.
You've seen me interview my friend and expert on memory and cognitive stuff, Carmen Simon, Dr. And she teaches that it's the things that are out of context, the things that are surprising, that stand out.
It's like the blemish on the tablecloth.
That's what you remember.
So the fact that he's not supposed to talk this way in the office of the presidency, or near it, is what makes you remember it.
You'll remember that forever.
You'll remember that sentence maybe for the rest of your life.
Seriously, 20 years from now, if you're still alive, and somebody said to you, what did Trump think about wokeness?
Do you think you'll remember and just say, oh, he said literally woke is bullshit?
Probably.
Not all of us, but some of us are going to remember the exact sentence 20 years from now.
You can't beat that.
I don't think the country quite yet understands how good he is.
I just don't think they quite get it.
I mean, they know he's good because they can see that he made back to the presidency against all odds.
I mean, that's good.
That's really good.
But still, they don't see the full depth of it.
He also said...
Let's see.
Oh, he was speaking at AmFest in Arizona.
AmFest.
But I don't know what the TPUSA part is.
I saw that in the background.
Did he do more than one speech?
Was it two different places?
I'm a little confused on the event.
And he said also, and for all of us standing before you today, I can proudly proclaim that the golden age of America is upon us.
Perfect.
You can't be all negative.
You can't go into office and say everything's broken, but I'll try to fix it.
It's such a downer.
You've got to give us, you're heading into something great.
And this is perfect, the golden age.
So here's the branding expert, perfect branding.
Woke is bullshit, entering the golden age.
And he said also that, quote, we're going to pledge to bring common sense revolution.
A common sense revolution.
I told you before that if you were trying to find a way to understand how famous lifetime Democrats could be so eager to work with Trump on specific things, such as reducing costs to government, we all like that.
Making our food more healthy?
Yes.
Making our big pharma prove to us a little bit more rigorously that their stuff is safe?
Yes.
Yes.
Please.
So, common sense is the glue that allows Trump to collect his little pirate ship of people you wouldn't expect to be on his team.
So, common sense.
It's just perfect.
And it works because you won't find probably anything that Trump supports policy-wise that doesn't fit common sense.
And he can explain why it's good and why the old way is bad.
Common sense.
I also saw Trump's new spokesperson on CNN, I think, saying that there was already a Caroline Levitt, and she said there was a Trump effect, and she gave some examples of some things around the world where people are already preparing for Trump by doing things that Trump wouldn't mind or that he'd like them to do.
So that's called the Trump effect.
Don't you love Trump effect as a, like a branded term?
Because you can find it all over.
So there's lots of things you can say, there it is.
There's that Trump effect again.
Because we used to be talking about TDS. And maybe that's where that Sean Penn statement came from several years ago.
When TDS really described everything.
Everything you saw could be described with TDS. Now it's more like the Trump effect.
And common sense, bringing people together.
Fetterman, again, once again, Fetterman said very positive things about Trump.
He doesn't, you know, he's not on board.
He's never going to become a Republican, he says.
But he just has to admit that a lot of Pennsylvanians like Trump and they like the things he proposed and they're quite happy with their choice.
And he wants you to know that that's okay.
So we like that.
Thank you.
Thank you, Fetterman.
And then, of course, one of my newer favorites is Make America Healthy Again.
Now, when I first saw that, Make America Healthy Again, my first instinct was, oh, you're perverting Make America Great Again.
Just leave that alone.
It did so well.
Don't try to play off it.
Just let that be its own thing.
It's just such an iconic thing.
But I changed my vote.
I changed my vote.
Maha is working.
It's a good brand for, you know, a way to conceptualize that there's a common sense effort to make the food and our meds healthier.
And we've got somebody very powerful working on it with a lot of support.
So yeah, make America healthy again, home run.
So I missed that one.
So nobody's perfect.
I would have bet against that one.
I would have bet against it.
But the The lesson here is that you can't always predict this stuff.
Persuasion is a little unpredictable no matter how much experience you have with it.
And I would have missed that one.
But I love the fact that the people coming in to help didn't miss it and created it.
So that's Shanahan and Kennedy.
So, good job.
So, here are the themes.
Woke is bullshit.
Golden age.
Common sense revolution.
The Trump effect already affecting other countries.
And make America healthy again.
Now, he may have said, make America great again.
But, you know, that had a pushback built into it.
You know, the people who believe that people who look like them in the past weren't getting a good deal.
Had what I consider actually fairly reasonable response to it.
Because they were like, wait a minute, what do you mean go back?
We made so much progress recently.
What does go back and great again, what does that include?
So I do understand the skepticism to the MAGA message.
But who's going to complain about make America healthy?
There's not much you can do with that one.
Anyway, according to Cy Post, narcissistic grandiosity predicts greater involvement in the LGBTQ activism.
Now, if you're new to my live stream, I love the LGBTQ community.
Big fan.
I think they've done such a great job in taking their, let's say, their brand or their reputation in the country from a big problem for them.
To the front of the parade.
I mean, I often say this.
Have you ever stayed away from a neighborhood because it was one of those dangerous LGBTQ neighborhoods?
No, because there are none.
It's one of the most successful communities in America.
I'm very impressed by the LGBTQ community.
But...
Like any advocacy group, like any demographic group that's trying to improve their situation, they have leaders, they have activists, and the thinking is that activists are driven by these dark ego principles, and they've got, you know, basically it's, you know, the dark triad personalities.
And I definitely think that activists like to get attention.
I think that much is true.
But is getting attention always bad?
I think it depends why you're doing it.
If you're getting attention because you've just got some kind of mental syndrome and you're just satisfying your own need and you're making a job for yourself and you're getting famous and people are patting you on the back and so you want to do more of it.
It's fine.
But then, you know, also in the news lately is that DEI companies are pulling back, or companies are pulling back for DEI, and they mention Robbie Starbuck as a key activist, maybe the key activist, in getting companies to pull back from DEI. Now, if you follow Robbie Starbuck, do you see any dark triad personality?
I don't.
And I think that stuff sticks out pretty hard.
Like, I don't think you can hide it.
So, I'm not willing to say that the people who are activists are all dark triad.
Because I think there are too many examples where they're not.
Well, you could say that Elon Musk is an activist.
Free speech.
I don't really see any dark triad personality problems.
You could say Trump is.
You could say Vivek is.
I don't see any of that now.
It feels a little bit more like left versus right, doesn't it?
I feel like the activists on the right are working against an evil as they see it.
Like, this is evil.
Nobody's going to do something about this?
Seriously?
Nobody else is going to do anything about this?
Well, hell, I guess I've got to do it.
I feel like Republican activists are dragged into it against their wish, right?
Do you think David Sachs wanted to be this public?
I doubt it.
I mean, I can't read his mind, of course.
I doubt it.
I felt that he, like other people, saw, oh my God, there's this need.
The country needs people who Are not in some kind of weird mental DTS bubble and can make some common sense happen.
And you could add, you know, Marc Andreessen to that.
You could add Bill Ackman to that.
They all got involved, but they didn't want to.
Or it doesn't look like they did it for any reason other than they got dragged into it.
Again, I can't read minds, but it looks like they got dragged into it.
And I would say Me Too.
I call myself a grandiose narcissist in the sense that I do enjoy getting attention for doing something that's good for the community or the world or somebody.
It's got to be good for somebody.
And I get pretty much all of my sense of meaning from attempting and sometimes succeeding.
You're making some things better.
Do I have dark triad personality?
Or do I just enjoy the rewards of doing good things?
I don't know.
It just feels different on the left and the right.
But I don't want to overgeneralize.
I'm sure there are activists on the left who are just driven by the need to make things better.
But for some reason, we don't see them that much.
Let's see what else is going on here.
So Scott Jennings on CNN. I love the fact that he's becoming a star.
You know, one of the things that really helps is when you can brand things like I was just talking about.
You take a big concept.
And you brand it.
And it gives it much more power because everybody can refer to it and we all know what you're talking about.
But likewise, it's good to have individuals who are just sort of branded as standing out as good messengers.
You know, Greta Thunberg was one of those.
She got Branded by her side, and that helped their messaging.
So I love the fact that Scott Jennings is doing such a good job in what is an ordinary role, right?
People go on TV and disagree with each other.
But he's doing such a good job that he's becoming like a Like a must-watch.
I think every day I see a new clip of him destroying the rest of the panel on CNN. Now, of course, if you're on the left, you don't think he destroyed anything, but he's fun to watch.
So here's the new thing he said.
He was talking about the criticisms that Musk is an unelected leader.
And listen to these framings.
He said that he and Trump seem to be getting along well.
He said, quote, Musk was very instrumental in his victory.
And I hear Democrats criticizing the idea that we have unelected people with too much influence over the government.
So first he sets it up.
So just watch how well he does this, just if you look at the communication skill involved.
And keep in mind, this is without notes.
So, of course, he's prepared.
But speaking off the cuff without notes, if you haven't tried it, you should try it.
You'll respect people who can do it a lot more if you try it.
It's hard.
Anyway, so he sets it up right.
The Democrats are criticizing the idea that we have unelected people with too much influence.
If he can get you to accept that, you know, here's our starting point.
You're criticizing people who are unelected to have too much influence.
Then he goes in for the kill.
I invite them to pick up the Wall Street Journal from this week and find out that unelected people have been running the government for the last four years.
Ouch!
Ouch!
You can feel that shiv go right through your torso.
Because not only does he credit Wall Street Journal, while he's on a panel on CNN, he criticizes another publication for telling the public the truth in front of CNN. Now the implication, which he doesn't say, But the implication is, if you were a real news organization, I wouldn't be referencing Wall Street Journal.
He doesn't say that, but like I can hear it, even though he doesn't say it, which is perfect.
Then he goes...
I hear Democrats criticizing the influence of billionaires on our politics when you've got this Soros punk, you talk about the younger one, Alex, running around collecting Democrat politicians like my kids collect Pokemon cards.
Okay?
First of all, perfect use of an analogy.
Perfect use of an analogy, because he makes it a visual, and you can see the cards, and you can see his kid collecting them.
And the way he frames it is that this billionaire is basically buying up politicians.
So good.
So good.
Yeah, good job, Scott Jennings.
But I would like to add this following frame that I didn't invent.
Somebody on social media said it.
I'm just copying it.
That when we voted, and let's see if this rings true with you.
So most of you are Trump voters, I'm guessing.
When you voted for Trump, Weren't you already aware that he was likely to bring in RFK Jr., that Musk would have influence in a good way?
Vivek would be part of it.
I voted for the team.
I didn't vote for Trump because that wasn't even what was offered.
Did Trump ever say, I'm going to do it all myself?
I don't remember that.
I don't remember that at all.
When you voted for Trump on the first time, weren't you a little worried he could hire the right people?
And then it turns out you were right to be worried about that because he didn't have access to as many people as a normal president would.
But now he seems to have that fixed.
He has more access than anybody would even predict.
So I voted for the team.
And I did that consciously.
I did that completely with full transparency.
So yes, technically I only voted for Trump and Vance.
But as a practical matter, no, I voted for all of them.
And I also voted for the picks he hasn't made yet.
I voted for his next pick, who also won't necessarily be approved by anybody or voted by anybody.
I voted for that.
So to say we didn't vote for it is just technically correct.
It's not real-world common sense correct.
So here's that common sense thing again.
If you just apply common sense to it, it's like, this is exactly what we voted for.
It's not even slightly off base.
It's precisely, precisely what we voted for.
So that's the frame I would put on it.
Do you remember when Bill Clinton was running and people said, hey, Hillary's Pretty solid, too.
And Bill Clinton sold his presidency as getting two for the price of one.
Do you remember that?
He would say, of course I take counsel from Hillary.
Like, why wouldn't you?
She's very smart.
She's connected.
She understands the topics.
I married her.
Of course I would take advice from her.
To which...
That was brilliant.
You know, he could have run away from that and saying, oh no, I'm not listening to the little lady.
I'm running my own show.
You're voting for me.
But he went the other way, and I thought that was brilliant.
He says, of course.
Of course she was very strong.
Of course I would listen to her.
That was the right answer.
And by the way, no matter what you think about Hillary Clinton, she's very smart.
Can we agree on that?
You can't take that away from her.
She is really smart.
So yeah, of course, I would have listened to her too.
So that's the same to me.
We didn't vote for Hillary, but we kind of did.
Right?
If you voted for Clinton and he said, I'm a pair, yeah, you voted for Hillary.
In effect.
Putin says that Trump has expressed interest in the meeting and Putin says he wants to do it as soon as possible.
So, I'm going to say the same thing about Russia I said about China.
Is Russia in a perfectly strong situation where their economy can work just fine and they figure down ways around all the tariffs and whatever?
And they don't mind killing lots of people, and they've got North Vietnam soldiers and equipment, and they've got good manufacturing so they can manufacture more weapons and stuff.
Is that true?
Or are they on the verge of collapse?
Because I've heard both.
And I don't have an independent way to know which one is true.
I would guess they're nowhere near collapse, because I think Putin has such a strong control.
But, are they weakened?
Are they weakened?
They're definitely weakened militarily, but they also might be stronger in a number of ways.
Meaning that they may have made more of the weapons that they're not using in Ukraine.
They may have beefed up things we don't know about.
They may have learned things about drones that they didn't know before.
So, I can't tell if Russia is getting stronger or weaker.
Can you?
In the comments, tell me, do you think Russia is weakened?
Or, yes, it has some problems, but not really anything that's going to change their trajectory.
So, I'd like to see your opinion on that.
Meanwhile, remember Trump said he wanted to maybe take over the Panama Canal, Because it's expensive to go through it, and we built it, and 35,000 Americans died from the mosquitoes building it, and we sold it to Panama for $1, and now maybe they're not doing the greatest job.
But apparently China operates the canal, and they have a virtual monopoly on it.
And it kind of makes sense.
You know, you can see why Panama would say, you know, we're not really canal experts, but these Chinese engineers seem to be pretty good, so why don't we just have a contract and let you run it?
You know, it'll still be Panama.
It's still owned by Panama, but you guys can run it.
Now, that seems to some people like a political or even military risk because it puts an adversary in charge of a choke point.
Now, I don't know how much risk that is, because if that adversary is a bunch of engineers in the Northern Hemisphere, they're going to do whatever the fuck our military tells them to do.
Because they're in our hemisphere.
It doesn't matter if they're hiding in Panama and China, and they're Chinese citizens.
If they're in our hemisphere, and it's like fewer than 100 people, and they're some kind of defense risk to the United States, we'll just go down and do whatever we need to do if we need that canal.
So I don't know how much real risk it is, but it could be a temporary risk.
You could imagine some temporary problem.
However, the Amuse account, which I talk about a lot, you should follow the Amuse account on X, points out that the treaty where we sold the canal to Panama for $1, it has in it a clause that we can take back the canal if it is under the control of a foreign power.
Wait a minute.
Is it under the control of China?
Well, Panama would probably say no.
Because they would probably say, well, it's a contract.
We just have to, you know, we have to get rid of them.
They have to do what the contract says or we can get rid of them.
So Panama is still in control.
But who gets to decide if Panama is in control or China is in control?
I'm pretty sure that that's vague in the treaty, which means that the president of the United States could say, hey, it looks like China is running that canal.
That was not our deal.
It has to be Panama or nothing.
So we're going to take it back.
Now, this all could be negotiating, too, because it could be he wants lower prices.
Maybe he just wants China not to be part of it.
He might want both of those things.
But either way, he is persuasion perfect on this because he's not too specific about what he wants, but he is laying down the He's laying down the general situation.
So he's framed it in a way that his persuasion could be effective.
So that's just a foreshadowing.
Keep an eye on that one.
Now, he also came out, and at first I thought it was a joke, but he said in one of those public announcements, Trump did, he said, for purposes of national security and freedom, the U.S. feels that the ownership of Greenland is a necessity.
So Greenland is...
Sort of independent, but sort of owned by Denmark.
Not sort of.
Denmark owns Greenland, but they operate kind of independently.
However, And then the argument I saw online was, well, Greenland is going to be important to control of the Arctic, because if the ice melts in the Arctic, there's going to be this control for the Arctic.
So Russia will be all over trying to control it, and probably China too.
So we do have a future gigantic defense geopolitical issue with the melting ice.
And I said to myself, but really, how important is Greenland?
Like, I understand the issue, but really, how important is Greenland?
And then I called up a map, and I looked at where Greenland is.
I mean, I knew generally where it was, but your brain doesn't really process how big it is and how strategically it's located.
As soon as you see it on a map, And you know that the Arctic will become a contentious place?
I said to myself, oh, I get it.
We probably need to own Greenland.
We probably do.
Now, maybe we don't need to own it completely like Denmark does.
Maybe we need to have some working arrangement that's as good as that.
But the other thing is that apparently Greenland is full of these rare minerals, these rare earth minerals, which we need and China has a virtual monopoly on, at least in terms of willingness to buy it.
So what if Greenland became super vital to our mineral rare earth access?
So all of our technology depends on it.
And would be critical to the defense of the United States because you don't want a bunch of Russians taking over the Arctic Circle.
I think this is real.
I think this is actually probably pretty thought out.
And that America's control of everything in the sort of American hemisphere is Probably needs to be close to complete.
Now, obviously, we don't own all the countries in our hemisphere, but we certainly try to.
We try to, one way or another.
We try to.
So Greenland's going to be interesting.
So now we've got Trump talking about Canada becoming a state, Panama Canal coming back to the U.S., Greenland.
It's very colonizing-sounding.
Except that it's weirdly specific.
I don't think he's going to go all Hitler and form an army and try to conquer these places.
I think he wants to negotiate.
And I get the feeling that Trump wants to do something like a major increase to the land mass of the United States.
I feel like he wants to increase the land mass of the United States, because it would be an amazing legacy, right, to increase the size of a country.
60 Minutes had on somebody who said they were part of Mossad.
And how they booby-trapped all those Hezbollah pagers, made them blow up, and how they did that.
And if this guy's real, you never know.
But he said that they set up companies and shell companies, and basically they have this whole artificial structure that you would never be able to identify, where they have access to the supply lines of a bunch of industries.
So we don't know how extensive it is, but he does indicate that the world we think we're living in is not the world you think you're living in.
It's mostly fake.
Meanwhile, John Lefebvre on X is talking about Jeff Bezos' ex-wife, Mackenzie.
Mackenzie Scott now.
He says she doesn't get enough attention for the impact she's having on the world.
And she's put $16 billion so far into equity things and racial division things and these NGOs that are trying to stifle free speech in America.
Basically everything bad.
Yeah, so $16 billion, and she doesn't have apparently strong requirements for what she gets from the money.
It's more like she's just dumping huge amounts of money into people who say they're on her side without much control over it.
So this is all bad.
It's all bad.
And...
So now you've got Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, which is the biggest source of fake news in the newspaper.
And then you've got his ex-wife funding all these terrible ideas that are just destructive to the country.
And apparently giving away $16 billion didn't have any impact because she made $16 billion back in the time that she gave it away.
So she has the same amount of money still.
She's just going to keep doing it.
Now, if you compare Elon Musk trying to save free speech with Mackenzie Scott trying to stop it, with Elon Musk trying to end wokeness, which is just racism, with somebody trying to promote racism with her $16 billion, don't you wonder what kind of a bubble she's in?
Somebody asked me if she could be deprogrammed.
And the answer is yes.
Yeah, I could probably do it in an hour.
But there's no way somebody like her would ever be alone with somebody who could deprogram her.
I don't think it could ever happen.
So I think she's in a bubble where everybody says, you're the best.
I'd like a billion dollars too.
Hey, I've got an organization that really needs some funding.
You're the best.
Mackenzie, we love you.
You're so good.
So good.
Give me money.
Honda and Nissan look like they're going to combine and become the number three automaker.
The Japanese government is pressuring them to combine because apparently they don't think they can compete individually.
The new stuff, like the self-driving cars especially, apparently they're a little bit far behind.
And they don't think Honda could be competitive by itself.
Is that true?
That Honda fell behind in technology?
I think Tesla's changing everything.
You probably want me to talk about the horrible story of the Guatemalan migrant who set a sleeping woman on fire in the New York City subway.
With your permission, I'm not going to talk about that.
Like, even just reading the title of it is too much.
Because it looks like a crazy guy, but of course it's being used as a sign of how our immigration policy is broken.
Now, our immigration policy is broken, but you don't need this.
You don't need this one crazy guy, right?
Now, would he have not been left, let in the country?
Would she still be alive if our immigration system worked?
Probably.
Probably.
So it's certainly a tragedy, and it's certainly true that extra crime is being brought in.
But I just don't like using the anecdotes to make the larger point.
We all understand crime is coming into the country.
So it just becomes too persuasive when you get down into the details.
So I don't want to be that persuasive on something that is uncomfortably identifying certain groups of people as troublemakers.
Now, I know that's not the intent.
The intent is just to have secure borders and protect ourselves.
But when you talk about it as an anecdote, it takes your brain to a different place.
And I don't like going there.
All right.
Now, here's the most interesting thing I saw yesterday.
I saw Jake Sullivan, who's one of the big principals in the Biden administration for what they're doing internationally.
And he appeared on a Fareed Zakaria show.
And I just saw some jaw-dropping takes.
Number one, Fareed Zakaria, He said that Biden deserves some credit.
I'm paraphrasing here.
But he deserves credit because people don't realize how much weaker Biden made our enemies while the United States got stronger.
So he said we made Iran, Russia, and China much weaker through economic means, through war, through tariffs and all that stuff, blockades and boycotts and whatever.
Whatever we did.
So they're all weaker.
Now, like I said, I'm not so sure Russia is falling apart or that China is, but there's an argument for it.
There is an argument that they're very weak.
And Iran, some say, is weaker than it's ever been.
But again, is it?
Do we really know?
I mean, Iran was supposed to go out of business a long time ago, right?
But they're still here.
So here's what Fareed said.
He framed it as Biden being successful because he made our enemies weaker.
Here's my problem with that.
I don't love calling China an enemy while we're dealing with them, right?
If we're going to trade with them and President Xi might visit and our embassies are open, I don't like calling them enemies, even if you think they are.
I feel like that's bad persuasion.
And if you're in China and you see on CNN that Farid is calling you an enemy, Wouldn't that harden your resolve to build up your military and all that?
Why don't we call them future friends and say, we've got a ton of problems.
Fentanyl's at the top of the list.
But we think we can be future friends.
We just can't give you a leg up on us because we're competitive.
But here it got more interesting.
So Jake Sullivan in the outgoing Biden administration, what would you expect him to say about the world in the context of Trump coming in?
Wouldn't you expect that he would say, we did a great job and Trump might come in here and ruin everything?
Don't you expect that?
He's a super insider, prominent, powerful Democrat.
Whose team just lost, and their greatest nightmare, Trump, is coming into office.
So naturally, he should be saying, everything's going to go off the rails, Trump's going to ruin everything, chaos, racist, Hitler's coming in, right?
It should sound like that.
He went the other direction.
And I'm trying to figure out what happened.
Jake Sullivan essentially said, That Biden has weakened the competitors, and it's going to allow Trump a really good base for negotiating.
I was waiting for another shoe to drop.
Something like, but of course, Trump's a big evil lying racist, so we don't think he can succeed, but we hope he does, but he's a big lying racist, so why would he succeed?
None of that happened.
Instead, if you had never watched anything about American politics, you wouldn't even know he was a Democrat.
He actually said it's sort of like a one-two punch.
Biden set him up, and now the great negotiator, and by the way, I think he referred to Trump as a solid negotiator.
He said now the negotiator can come in and mop up.
Again, I'm paraphrasing.
But does that blow your mind?
It completely blows my mind.
And here's what I'm thinking.
It could be that they're trying to save Biden's legacy, and therefore their own, by showing that it's part of a one-two punch, and without the one, you couldn't have the two.
And you know what?
He actually sold that to me.
I actually bought that.
Because I'm listening, I'm thinking, yeah, Iran is ready for negotiation because of what Biden did.
China is ready for negotiation.
Yeah.
Yep.
And Russia is ready for negotiations.
It's kind of true.
It's kind of true that Biden set it up for a one-two punch.
But then he also dropped in that when they took over, the military wasn't in good shape.
So they've strengthened the military.
Everybody says that.
But could it be that the big play is military spending?
And the best way they can get Trump to do military spending is to say, you did a great job on this negotiating.
Glad you got that done.
We set you up.
We got you ready for success.
So you took it home.
Thanks for that.
But we set you up for that.
But we all agree that we have to spend massively to rebuild the military.
And then the military is happy.
The military industrial complex says, oh, you're going to spend massively to buy new stuff from us?
Okay.
We like this president.
So it could be that as long as you're on the page of we're going to spend massively for new weapons, everybody likes you and you can be president.
So I don't know how Doge is going to save money.
If the military-industrial complex is going to be fed.
So we'll see where this goes.
But that was a heck of a surprising conversation.
Meanwhile, you'd be surprised to know there's a new battery breakthrough, sodium-ion batteries.
So a sodium-ion battery would use more common materials and not these rare things that have to be mined in the Congo.
And they're not quite up to lithium performance, but they made a new tweak by adding some sodium vanadium phosphate with a chemical formula of NAXV2PO4-3, which is exactly what I was going to suggest.
I was like, have you tried the sodium vanadium phosphate?
And then they'd say, no, we haven't.
And I'd say, you should try that.
You should try it.
But they did try it even without my advice.
Good for them.
There's a breakthrough method to revert colon cancer cells to normal cells.
According to the Korea BizWire, Some Korean Institute of Science and Technology.
Instead of destroying the cancer cell, at least specifically now for colon cancer, they found a way to turn the cancer cell into a real cell.
What?
And it works.
Without destroying them.
That's like the most amazing thing I've ever heard.
This reminds me of Elon Musk's philosophy.
So Elon Musk's philosophy is that engineers spend a lot of time trying to improve things, but sometimes they should step back, really, every time.
They should step back and say, do we need the thing?
Are we improving something we don't need?
And here, instead of saying, let's find a better way to kill a cancer cell, these researchers said, do we have to kill them?
Why don't we just reprogram them?
Like, I don't know if anybody ever thought of that before.
I never thought of it.
I just assumed they were all corrupt and you couldn't possibly save them.
But what if you can't?
This would be one of the most amazing things, if that worked.
Now that's, again, just for colon cancer, so it doesn't mean it would work for any other kind.
Let me give you another example of that Elon Musk philosophy of improving something versus why do you have it in the first place.
My driveway and garage, between the driveway doors, I had these potted plants.
And they look kind of cool.
But the pottery, the tall pot that was holding the plants, got too weathered and it was falling apart and I needed to replace them.
So I spent all kinds of time researching replacements for these big potted plants.
Now, at the same time, I would be pulling out my garage and, you know, there'd be something, you know, Josue's truck is on the other side because he's doing some work.
And so I have to make a few maneuvers to get out.
And I said to myself, wow, I'm so glad that we pulled out those old pots because now when I turn around, they're not my way.
Because if you tried to do an angle turn, you know, the planters would be in the way.
And I'm sitting there in my driveway looking at my garage and thinking, why the hell do I have Potted plants in my driveway.
Why did they exist?
And I spent all this time trying to improve them.
I should not have spent one minute improving them.
And finally, when it dawned on me that they didn't add anything to the aesthetic of the house, they were simply expensive and in the way.
That's it.
And I was spending all my time trying to make them look better.
No.
Once I realized that they didn't have any purpose and they had definitely a cost, they were in the way, I just said, why don't we just take them out of there and leave a blank between the garage doors.
And I am so happy every time I pull out of my garage, and every time I, which is almost every time, I have to do a maneuver that would have been an extra maneuver.
And I remind myself, yeah, even though you think to yourself, every smart person knows this, that you shouldn't improve something that doesn't need to exist.
Right?
Common sense.
But you don't think in those terms unless you really remind yourself all the time.
So I use that as my way to remind myself.
The driveway potted plants.
If I remember that, it might help me the next time I'm trying to fix something or improve something.
Maybe we don't even need it.
Anyway, Brighter Side News says there's a revolutionary new mask, like a face mask, that can measure your breathing.
It can detect a bunch of respiratory problems.
That's kind of cool.
Now, what's cool about it is it replaces a bunch of expensive tests with equipment and you have to go to the office.
But here, if they suspect you have a respiratory problem, they just hand you this mask and say, go wear this for a few hours and And we'll read the data and it'll tell you what's wrong with you.
Big improvement.
Because if you can make fewer reasons to go to a hospital or go to a doctor, the costs of everything just drop like crazy.
So that's good news.
All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, that brings me to the end of my prepared remarks.
I'm going to talk to the folks on Locals privately and say goodbye to the YouTube and Rumble and X audience who are also awesome in your own ways.
