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Content:
Politics, Judge Engoron, Laura Loomer, Mystery Drones, LA Goals Problem, Mayor Karen Bass, Venceremos Brigade, LA Deputy Mayor Brian Williams, LAFD Leadership, Governor Newsom, DEI System Collapse, LA Suspended Brush Removal, Los Angeles Fires, Mel Gibson, Incurable Cancer Recovery Claims, LA Evacuation Call Error, Elon Musk, T-Mobile Starlink, LA Organized Looting, LA Organized Arson, Whiteboard Climate Awareness Chart, Senator Fetterman, Jasmine Crockett, LA Rebuilding Permits, LA Rebuilding Cost, LA Squatter Rights, Scott Adams
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm fairly confident you've never had a better time, but if you'd like to take your experience up to levels that nobody can understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass of tanker chalice, a tiny canteen jar of glass, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go.
Go.
Delightful.
I feel connected to you all through the invisible umbilical cord of the coffee cup.
Well, give me an update in the comments if something happens while I'm talking, because I think Trump is supposedly, let's see, he's going to be talking to Judge Mershon today.
So there will be sentencing.
He's doing it over Zoom, right?
He's not going in person.
I don't know.
I'm not sure yet, but I think he's not going in person.
And Judge Misham has already indicated he's going to do some kind of unconditional discharge, meaning that he'll be guilty of a felony, but won't go to jail.
And no matter what the sentence is, they plan to appeal.
Trump will be officially a felon, maybe, but then it's on appeal.
So my question to you, dear legal experts, is if your case is approved for appeal, are you still a felon?
Because it's not guaranteed you're a felon if your appeal is going through, right?
So I feel like you'd say you're conditionally possibly a felon.
Just like before.
So if the legal process has not come to an end, I would say, hmm, seems to me that the legal process is still cooking along.
Why would you say he's a felon?
I don't understand what you're saying.
So the process is still going forward.
It could end with him being a felon or not a felon.
So why are you saying he's a felon?
He should be innocent until the appeals process is over.
Now, they don't say that, but I do.
Right?
It'd be one thing if you said, I'm going to appeal.
But given that we could be reasonably confident the appeal will be accepted, at least to be processed, how is that guilty?
How does I make him a felon?
In what world would I consider him a felon if he's in the legal process?
And it's likely, and here's what makes it interesting.
I think the experts say the case was so flawed.
That it's far more likely it will be overturned than upheld.
Isn't that true?
So can you be called a felon if the process is still going and all the smart people think it will end with you not being a felon?
How do you call that a felon?
It's like they don't understand the process.
We'll see.
Meanwhile, a New York court is removing the corrupt judge.
We call him corrupt.
This is Laura Loomer's reporting.
And remove the corrupt judge, Arthur Angorian, from Trump's other case, the civil fraud case.
And Laura Loomer reminds you that she exclusively broke the story about Judge Angorian's bias and how his wife was posting memes about Trump.
And apparently that worked.
So Laura Loomer gets the big win.
She's got a blue check back.
I don't know what the current situation is with her freedom of speech, but she got a big win, and she's got a blue check, and she's getting the credit today.
Good job, Laura Loomer.
We'll, of course, talk about the fire.
I need a little bit of palate cleansing.
If you live in California, even if you're not in the center of the burn area, You're thinking about it all day long, and you're probably doing something about it, too.
So we're pretty exhausted in this state, and it's just the beginning of the process.
So forgive me if I'm a little obsessed by it, but when it hits you locally, it's hard not to be.
So Trump says on day one-ish...
After he's sworn in, he's going to share information about the drones.
And he does say that the government knows.
It sounds like maybe he doesn't know.
Or maybe it's been whispered that the government knows it's their stuff.
It's one of those.
But I would expect it to be something like the government was doing a little testing or something.
Probably something like that.
Or maybe just surveilling things.
Here's what I don't expect.
I do not expect...
That on day two or whatever, Trump will say, all right, here's the secret of the drones.
We've been allowing Chinese drones to surveil our sensitive sites.
Do you think he's going to announce that?
Even if it's true.
Even if it's true.
Do you think he would tell you?
I hope not.
I think he would take care of it and keep it as a military secret if there was a way to do that.
But I think he's getting a little bit ahead of himself that he would necessarily tell us no matter what the answer is.
So we'll see.
I think he means it.
I just don't know he'll be able to deliver.
Victor Davis Hanson summed up the LA problem as a total systems breakdown.
Now, a system breakdown.
Do you think that LA was operating as a systems being more important than goals entity?
Or do you think that they seem to have goals without systems that supported them?
So they had goals for diversity.
They had goals for the environment.
Right?
They had goals for saving the smelt.
They had goals for protecting the water and the oceans.
Lots of goals.
But as, you know, I've been teaching you for a long time, systems are what you need because, you know, goals can't be supported without a system.
So it's a system that's the important part.
And as Victor Davis Hanson points out that the water storage system was bad, the forest management was bad, handling the insurance industry was bad, and he mentions the DEI hierarchy of the leadership.
And he calls it a DEI Green New Deal hydrogen bomb.
Like a perfect system collapse, because every part of the system kind of collapsed.
Now, do you think it's fair in this case?
Now, I've been railing against the people who say, as soon as there's a problem, you know, you look at the people in charge, and if you see there are a certain demographic, The people on the right say, oh, DEI, DEI. And I try to caution you, that's not proof of DEI being a problem.
All you can know for sure is that, you know, DEI was a big influence over hiring.
You can't know that that's the problem.
However, if you do a little research into the people involved, it might give you some insight.
It might.
For example, Karen Bass, did you know that when she was in the 70s, she used to travel to Cuba to work with something called the Venceremos Brigade, which was a group that organized annual trips to Cuba for young leftist Americans for many years.
Do you know why Cuba would host leftists to come do some awesome things in Cuba, which is just building stuff, I guess?
Why would they do that?
It's to brainwash them against the United States, but gently.
Just brainwash them that maybe the socialist way is better, and then they'll come back to the United States and destroy it or convert it.
So she was actually part of a brainwashing operation, and let me be very clear, a brainwashing operation by Cuba.
You bring young people in, and you give them this one experience that's very...
Artificial from, you know, the general Cuban experience.
And everything's great.
And look, we'll just show you the things we want.
And did you know the United States is evil?
She is unquestionably a brainwashed victim.
That's not even in debate.
If she went there multiple times and was part of a group that was, by design, a bunch of brainwashed victims.
How did she unbrainwash herself?
I don't believe there's a process for that.
If she was brainwashed, it's still in her.
You can't undo that.
So do you think that if people were well aware of that, that she would have been in charge of the city, the mayor?
No, this one does look like a DEI hire problem, doesn't it?
It looks like nobody in their right mind would have hired her for her background and qualifications.
But maybe it was a DEI-related, want to have a diversity mayor.
So I would say you can't say that DEI broke anything, but you could say that that one mayor probably only has her job because people either didn't understand or voted dumb.
Maybe it could be the public's fault.
The public just picked the wrong person.
But at least she's got a strong deputy mayor.
So you can't say it's not like one person, right?
Often the next level down are doing the real decision-making and stuff.
So next level down, you get the Los Angeles deputy mayor, so at least he's strong.
Oh, wait, he's under investigation for allegedly calling in a bomb threat to City Hall.
The FBI raided his home recently, and he's placed on leave.
Okay, he's a black man, but that is a coincidence.
And you can't say that that's DEI-related.
That's just one person who's acting badly.
Now, but at least in the fire department, you know, you don't have so much of a DEI problem, right?
Well, I mean, the head of the fire department is a lesbian, but, you know, nobody's saying that lesbians can't do...
Fire department jobs, and she's got tons of experiences relevant.
So if you're going to say, oh, she's only there because she's a lesbian, that would ignore all of her many, many years of very relevant experience.
And as luck would have it, the person just below her, I think, would be the assistant chief.
Well, another lesbian.
Two lesbians at the top.
But I think that you could call that a coincidence.
Yeah, there are plenty of lesbians.
It's not like the biggest coincidence in the world that two of them would be the number one and number two.
Let's look at the third in line.
Let's see.
I don't know if it's third in line, but the equity chief.
Well, a lesbian.
Another lesbian.
So you've got three lesbians in executive positions, but I warn you that if you're thinking there's a problem with lesbians because of these three, no, that doesn't follow.
It doesn't follow that there's some other lesbian who isn't the best person to be the chief of police or the chief of the fire department.
So this is sticky stuff.
If you're just assuming that somebody is a DEI hire and therefore they're bad, that's not fair.
It's also the situation we find ourselves in because DEI is pushed so hard that we assume it's creating problems.
It's unfair to point to any specific individual.
And I point out that Gavin Newsom is the least diverse governor you could ever imagine, and he's being criticized as much or more than any of the other people I just mentioned.
So what do we have?
We got some black leaders who seem to be terrible.
We've got some lesbian leaders who I don't really know if they're being terrible or they don't have water.
Which is somebody else's job.
So I'm not going to say the fire department's doing a terrible job.
Does anybody even say that?
I'm not even sure that the fire department has been criticized, have they?
I don't think I've seen any criticism of the fire department.
So I would say the lesbians are clear, but you have to ask yourself, what a big coincidence.
They've got a lot of lesbian representatives there.
And then you look at Newsom, who is not diverse at all, and he's a total disaster.
You can't blame DEI for that, right?
So let me say again, I don't see the fingerprint that DEI caused this.
It's just that you know that DEI will cause this.
Whether it caused this one, that's hard to say.
But will it cause another one?
Of course.
Will it cause the complete destruction of another city?
Guaranteed.
It's built into the system.
Remember, Victor Davis Hanson says it's a system collapse.
DEI guarantees system collapse because it guarantees that instead of merit and experience, you can look for demographics and identity.
So that little change, just by itself, is certainly enough to destroy an entire city if you just let it run forward.
But we should not allow ourselves to assume that any individual is a DEI hire.
You'd really have to do some deeper dive, and we don't often have that level of information from the outside.
Tom Ellsworth was on the PBD podcast, and he was saying that the reason State Farm pulled out from the state and is no longer offering fire insurance...
is that they pulled out because the county of L.A. and the city of L.A. had suspended brush removal in Palisades.
Really?
Really?
Thank you.
Really?
Is the connection to the incompetence of the city, is it that clean?
I thought this was going to be a little messier.
Where you couldn't really tell who was responsible for what.
But seriously?
They canceled the brush removal and that caused the insurance companies to pull out and they didn't immediately remove the brush and say, oh, hold on.
We will remove the brush.
Just give us a month.
Nothing like that.
The level of incompetence system-wise or individuals, I don't know.
It's astounding.
Now, of course, remember, Here's something to remember today.
We're still in the fog of war.
We're still getting all kinds of news that isn't real.
So, I think it's real, but no, no.
So far, the fire has destroyed 29,000 acres.
Would you like an estimate of how big that is?
That's two Manhattan Islands.
Manhattan is 14,000 square.
14,000 acres.
This fire has already, and still burning, already destroyed two Manhattans.
So if you're not getting the scale of this, imagine all of Manhattan gone, and then another one.
All of it gone.
And it's still going.
So if you hadn't quite understood the scale of it, that's it.
We're talking about $57 billion in economic damage, if you want to put that in perspective.
The entire tax revenue of California in the recent year was $215 billion.
Do you think you can lay that $57 billion on top of...
I mean, obviously the government's going to be constrained in what it can do to help people.
A lot of them are uninsured.
Biden did say that the federal government was going to help for 180 days in the recovery, but that's only the cleanup and the salaries of the recovery people and the crews that are working it, and I think removal of the burned debris.
Those are very important, so we're very happy to have that help, but it's not going to help anybody buy a house or build a house.
Mel Gibson, tragically, was on the...
While he was doing the Joe Rogan podcast, while he was filming it, his own $14.5 million Malibu mansion burned down.
Now, I know you're not feeling sorry for him because his net worth is, I don't know, hundreds of millions or something, but it's your house.
It's your house.
No way you're going to feel good about that.
I feel terrible.
One of the things that Mel Gibson said when he was on the Joe Rogan is that he had three friends who were cured of cancer with ivermectin and fenbendazole, and then the internet is saying, whoa, you know, there are other claims and other claims and other claims, and now they're pretty convinced that ivermectin and fenbendazole are cures for at least some kinds of cancers.
Here's what you need to know.
Remember when I tell you that An anonymous source, if you have one anonymous source, how much credibility would that be?
The answer is zero in politics.
So that's a different domain.
In politics, one anonymous source is usually just a made-up lie.
What if you have multiple sources?
What if you had three?
And they basically said something that sounded the same.
Three anonymous sources.
Now, is that credible?
No.
No.
It's completely non-credible.
Anonymous sources, always non-credible.
Suppose you knew the name of the source, but you hadn't any contact with them, so you couldn't ask any questions, you couldn't do a deep dive, but you knew the name, and somebody else had told you the claim.
You didn't even hear it from the person.
Is that credible?
No.
No, that's zero credibility.
Is there a reason that we do clinical trials instead of watching what three people said as reported by another person?
No.
No, there's a reason we do the clinical trials because that has no evidentiary value.
None.
So I'm going to cause some trouble today.
So I said I don't think it's true.
I'm going to be attacked all day long by people who say, Scott, you fool.
Don't you know that Big Pharma is just trying to sell their cures, and they don't want you to know that ivermectin and fentanyl is literally curing.
The claims are that people with stage 4 cancer are cured, not just help them, completely cleared.
And so I ask this.
Let's talk to one of them.
Just one.
Show me one live human being who says something like, I had an incurable cancer, and I'm now completely clear.
Here's my test results.
I'm sitting next to my doctor.
My doctor can confirm that I'm completely clear of a cancer that was incurable.
Now, what happens if you talk to them and they say, well, it wasn't an incurable cancer, and the other complementary things we were doing have cured it before?
But this person was stage four, and they added these other drugs, and then they got cured.
So we're saying it's the other drugs they added, to which I say, but they were on all the treatments that we know are cures.
So here's what I need.
I need an incurable cancer, one that doesn't have any treatment, as far as anybody knows.
And even if they combined it with these drugs, which is the claim that maybe the drugs aren't working exactly alone, but...
There are also claims that they would work alone.
And show me the doctor, show me the patient, and show me that it was incurable except for this intervention.
Then I'm going to get serious.
I'm still going to say I need a clinical trial, but at least you went from, you know, anonymous people being talked about by other people to, well, these look like real people, and their doctor says, and I'm looking at their chart, maybe yes.
So I'd say we're...
I'll see.
New York Judge Mershon discharges Trump without imprisonment, fine, or probation.
In the Stormy Daniels case, wishes him well in his second term.
Everything's different.
All right.
That was a little side conversation there.
All right.
Apparently there was a fake alert that went out to everybody's phone in L.A. County saying that they needed to get ready to evacuate.
This turned out to be just a mistake.
The alert told people to gather loved ones' pets and supplies and get out of town.
And it happened when people were the most frightened and thought it could be coming for them.
And it was fake, meaning it was an accident.
Remember that Richard Davis Hanson analysis that it was a total system breakdown?
Well, here it is again.
They didn't even have a system to make sure that fake emergency alerts didn't go out in the middle of an emergency.
The level of incompetence it would take to get there is pretty extraordinary.
But the incompetence is probably the system.
I don't think it's necessarily that one person may push the wrong button.
It could be.
But why is that the system?
Why is one person allowed to push that button?
It seems like at least a few people should be standing around when the button gets pushed to make sure that that's the intention.
I don't know.
Get a better system.
Elon Musk donated a bunch of Starlinks in LA, and this is cool.
Apparently T-Mobile customers were having trouble.
Because probably the towers got burned or something.
But now Musk very quickly tied T-Mobile into Starlink and you can text.
So if you're on T-Mobile and you suddenly can text, you can't make a phone call, but you can text, that's because of Elon Musk.
Without Elon Musk, everybody with T-Mobile would be completely cut off during an emergency.
I mean, looks like they have been for some time.
This is gigantic.
The level that Elon Musk can contribute to a Ukraine war or an emergency, now twice, I guess, several times, I think, it's extraordinary.
So just congratulations on that.
Meanwhile, the California National Guard is moving in.
We've seen out-of-state police moving in.
So the fires have turned into an organized crime, an unorganized crime problem.
The looters...
Some of the bad guys, and they seem to be from a migrant community, and again, that's speculative, they seem to be setting fires to increase the number of places that they have to loot.
Because if they can get you to evacuate while they're there, they can get the good stuff before any houses burn down.
Now, that's just about the most evil crime you can imagine, setting somebody's house on fire so you can rob it.
The level of evil in that is hard to imagine.
There was, however, one poor individual, a criminal, who had a little blowtorch, and he was trying to allegedly set something on fire.
Presumably for that purpose.
We don't know what he was thinking, but he looked like he was doing it probably as part of that gang burning down homes.
And he got spotted by some of the locals.
The locals sent their men out.
I saw the video of it, and you might be surprised that none of the women came to help, which is good.
I didn't want them to.
But if you want to have a little glimmer, Just a little glimmer of hope.
You watch the video of the maybe half a dozen men who confront this guy who's still got the torch.
One of the men is armed, but he doesn't point it at him.
He just has it ready in case he needs it.
Warns him to stand down.
The other men surround the situation and they take him out.
Now, I mean, they took him to the ground and handcuffed him and waited.
Waited for the police.
And watching those men not have any back down in them.
There was no back down.
They were going to take him out one way or another.
They were going to shoot him.
They were going to kill him if they had to.
Preferably they would capture him and head him to police so we could know more about whatever he's up to.
And that's what they did.
But I'm pretty sure if their only choice had been to do worse, they would have taken the only choice.
Because I don't think that guy was going to walk out of that neighborhood.
And things are getting really dicey.
So when there is something that looks to residents like a complete breakdown of the social order, and by the way, I'll probably get demonetized on YouTube again.
I got demonetized yesterday.
I got demonetized for I don't know what, but my best guess is suggesting that there's a danger that's approaching with this kind of behavior.
So I don't know exactly what it is.
I'm probably demonetized again, just for this conversation.
Newsom says there'll be 80,000 of these National Guards.
I saw Joel Pollack, who lives in that area, whose house seems to have survived.
We don't know if it's habitable.
But he notes that there are more pro-Second Amendment people in the Pacific Palisades than the bad guys might expect.
So if the bad guys are expecting a bunch of, you know, anti-gun people that they can easily handle, they should be warned that there's some serious personal protection in that area.
So people have the assets to protect themselves.
So I don't know where it's heading, but it does look like a complete breakdown of order.
Let's see.
So, you know that there's still a lot of talk about whether climate change is a small cause or the cause or no cause or, you know, is that just being political?
And I wanted to give you a frame for understanding the climate change issue and one that you haven't seen before.
And it can explain a little bit why the two sides can't really talk.
You know, the yes, I believe climate change is an immediate crisis versus the people, Elon Musk would be on the other side, which is climate change could be real in terms of the climate might be changing, but it's going to be slower than, you know, the alarmists believe.
So why can't they have a productive conversation and, like, figure out what's really true?
And I'll give you my take on that.
Sort of the hypnotist take.
So, if you can see my whiteboard.
Let me adjust it a little bit.
So I just made this up.
I call it the climate awareness chart.
So the highest level of awareness is at the top, but we'll get there.
We're going to start at the bottom.
And let's see.
There we go.
At the bottom level of awareness, and this is where I used to be as a young man.
I would hear that 98, 99% of scientists were on the same side.
And I'd say, well, I'm done.
There's nothing else I need to know, right?
I love science.
Science is the best way to find the truth.
It's imperfect.
It's imperfect.
But, you know, it's the best we have.
So you tell me 99% of scientists have been looking into it deeply and they're all on the same side.
I'm convinced.
And I was.
I was convinced.
Now, I would say that level of awareness is roughly equivalent to the people who say, how can they predict the climate when they can't even predict the weather?
And I don't believe in climate change because it's cold outside, right?
So one is believing it, one is not believing climate change, but these are both the lowest level of understanding.
And I've been at this level.
I've been there.
If you go up a little higher, let's say you decide, huh, I'm seeing two sides of this.
I'm just going to look into it.
So you do a deep dive.
Maybe you see Al Gore's documentary.
Maybe you read the most official statements from the biggest scientists.
And when you're done with that, you're going to say, okay, okay, I can see whether 99% of scientists are saying it because I've done my own research.
And yeah, I mean, it's like guaranteed climate change is a crisis because you did your own research.
And then there are also people who do a deep dive on the skeptic side.
So maybe they never believed the 99% of scientists or didn't want to believe it.
So they did their deep dive on the other side.
So they only looked at the skeptics' arguments.
Both of them would be completely deluded by this process.
It doesn't matter which one you're looking at.
If you're looking at either the yes, it's a crisis, or no, it's not, they both have the documentary effect, which is if you look at one argument and you see a lot on that one argument, you will be convinced beyond any doubt.
You will be 100% convinced.
And that has nothing to do with whether the thing you're looking at is true or not.
Completely unrelated to the underlying truth, It's a guarantee that if you see one argument and it's really well developed and you spend hours on it, you'll believe it every time.
And you can see that it's the same no matter whether you believe the skeptics or you believe the claims.
Still completely believable.
Still absolutely no evidentiary value.
No evidentiary value.
Because documentaries are always convincing even when they're not true.
So the only thing you would know when you're done with this process is that you're convinced.
That's nothing.
You're going to be convinced even if you saw the other side.
You'd be convinced, and that's nothing too.
These are both nothings.
Let's go up a level.
Let's say you get to the point where you did a deep dive on both sides, which I find relatively rare.
I'm not sure I've seen anybody who's done it.
I've tried to do it, so I've spent a lot of time.
I've looked at the claims, I've looked at the debunk to the claims, and then I've looked at the debunk to the debunk of the claims.
If you haven't done all three, you haven't done anything.
You've done nothing.
Because if you look at the claim, you can say, well, that looks pretty true.
And then you look at the debunk to the claim, you're like, whoa, I didn't see that.
Oh, I didn't know about how they measure that.
Whoa, yeah.
The debunk looks totally convincing.
If you're done, you're not done, because you've got to circle back and see what happens to the people who made the original claim when they were faced with the debunk, and then they come back and say, but the debunk is debunked, and here's why.
And you read that, you go, yeah, that's a pretty good argument.
So the problem is that if you do a deep dive on both sides, you're going to find they're both convincing and both not convincing.
And you won't know.
At the highest level are people who understand that all data that matters is fake and that all projection models are fake and that it has nothing to do with climate change.
These are universal truths.
If I were talking about, let's say, the data for jobs in America, you think that's real?
No.
How about the history?
Do you think our history books are based on what's real or what was allowed to be written?
It's not real.
Do you think there's anything that's important and scale, like big and it matters, that's real?
No.
Because our systems don't allow that.
Whoever's in charge of the data is going to have so much power.
That somebody's going to distort them with a bribe.
When you get to the point where it really, really matters, it's 100% fake.
Or it's 100% sure that you won't tell the difference because the fakes will be so good that you think they're real.
And the reason I know the prediction models are fake is that everybody who's worked in this field, including me, Now, I didn't work in climate, but I did projection models for a living, financial ones.
They all know that the projection model is based on the assumptions you put into it.
It's not the data.
So if you're way down here at the lowest level, you think that the projection models are reasonable because 99% of the scientists said, yeah, these are real.
But you'll never learn that they can make those models anything they want just by changing the assumptions without even changing the data.
And then they can say, well, this data is bad, so we're going to put in a little adjustment to it.
What's that?
It's not science.
It's just adjusting it so it comes into the same range that people expect it to come into.
So, in our current world, 99% of the people being on one side has no evidentiary value.
How many of you would agree with that statement?
99% of scientists agree it doesn't have any evidentiary value.
Now, that's not true if you're talking about something simple like, you know, does gravity apply everywhere on Earth?
Right?
100% of scientists would say yes.
They'd be right.
So I'm not talking about, like, one variable things.
I'm talking about this.
Big, complicated, hard-to-understand things where there are people on both sides and the variables are changing and every day we have a new variable that should have been in models but wasn't.
It's like, oh, we just found out the ocean can absorb way more than we thought.
Well, was that in the model?
We just found a new technology that can allow us to produce things without the pollution.
Was that in the model?
Did you know they were going to invent something?
So the models are 100% unreliable.
And if you believe that because the scientists told you the reliable they are, you don't understand how money works.
If you understand how money works, you'll be with me up here that all the models are fake and the data is either unreliable or fake.
And that has to be true because of the design of our economic system.
Our economic system...
And you could add the fake news and the interest groups, etc.
They kind of guarantee that people will say it's true while it isn't true.
It's guaranteed that our system will be there.
Now, here's a good test for you.
If you're talking to somebody and you're having some debates down here in the documentary effect level where you've both seen some stuff but you saw different stuff and you were convinced, ask the person who thinks that there's That the climate models are real to list three reasons that the terrestrial thermometers might be imperfect.
And if they can do it, then you'd have a reasonable good idea that maybe they've at least seen both sides.
If they don't know what you're talking about and they insult you and call you a creedin and change the topic, it means they've never looked into it.
If you can make a good argument that the climate change stuff is real, here's what you should know.
You should know what the heat island effect is.
That's because the thermometer stations were once away from the cities, but the cities grew, and the heat from the city is not really what the planet heat is.
It would artificially change the thermometers.
Would you know that?
Did you know that the little enclosures for the thermometers are in buildings that are painted, usually painted white, and that when the paint fades, as it does, it can change the temperature of the thermometer, having nothing to do with the planet and everything to do with just the paint faded? having nothing to do with the planet and everything to Did you know that?
Did you know that if a thermometer breaks or is missing, sometimes they'll just plug in a number of what they think it would have been?
Did you know that?
All right.
So if you can't list At least three reasons that you should doubt the terrestrial thermometers.
Oh, here's another one.
How much of the world are they measuring?
And when you talk about the ocean, which would be a different measurement technique, how much of the ocean is being measured?
And isn't it true that the ocean can store heat in different places that are unpredictable and in amounts that we don't exactly know?
So that if the temperature somewhere went up, maybe it went down somewhere, but that down is in the ocean and nobody's looking at it.
If you can't answer the questions at least at that level, that you know that these are issues, even if you don't know what the answer to the issue is, you haven't looked into it.
And if you believe that 99% of scientists being on one side has any credibility, I can't have a conversation with you.
So here's my problem.
I keep running into people online who are operating at the lowest level of awareness, and they're pretty sure I'm the biggest frickin' idiot they've ever seen in their life.
It's like, God!
God!
99% of scientists?
Are you a troglodyte?
99, Scott.
Do you understand that 99 is almost 100?
Do you understand?
And I'm up here saying...
Do you really think the news is real?
You think the news is real?
I can't have a conversation with you if you think news is real.
I can't have a conversation with you if you think the people getting paid to say it's real are saying it's real and that means it's real.
How do I have a conversation with you?
I can't.
So I end up sort of giving up because before you could have a conversation on climate change, you'd have to start with...
How the entire system works, what the economics are, how people lie, how every other system like this is clearly and demonstrably rigged.
And once I understood that everything of this type is rigged, everything, there's nothing where you can't exactly tell and there are billions of dollars involved that isn't rigged.
They're all rigged if somebody could make a lot of money from it.
And it's big and complicated and you'll never know exactly what the truth is.
That's all rigged.
And there's probably never going to be an exception to that.
If you don't understand that, I can't have a conversation with you about climate change because you're so lost.
And again, I say, I spent most of my early life at the bottom level of awareness because I hadn't looked into it.
And I thought, 99% of scientists, they must be right.
How many physicists do you believe told us that string theory was the future of physics?
I don't know the answer to that, but I'll bet most.
I'll bet most said, yeah, string theory, you know, it's not all worked out yet, but pretty sure this is going to give us something like, you know, what civilization looks like or reality looks like.
Did it?
No, it didn't.
I would say that all the physicists Probably just parroted the same thing, string theory, string theory, and a lot of them were getting money, so they really were in favor of string theory because they could get funded that way.
So, no, you should not believe anything that most of the scientists believe is true, but it's hard to know.
If it's hard to know, ah, scam.
In other news, the Supreme Court did a ruling on Title IX. And they're not going to say that trans women are women in sports.
So the court has made the distinction between your sex versus your gender identity.
You can call yourself anything you want.
That's not an issue.
It's just that the state doesn't have to recognize it.
So they don't have to recognize it as your sex.
They may choose to recognize that you have a gender preference.
But they don't have to say, yes, you're a woman because you say so.
So, a lot of people are happy about that.
I'm sure people are unhappy about it.
But more people, I think, are happy.
Fetterman.
Senator Fetterman is going to Mar-a-Lago.
I think he's the first.
Well, it's kind of unusual.
Now, Fetterman, I know you're getting tired of me saying Fetterman's kind of awesome, but he keeps doing smart things.
And when I talk about Fetterman, it's not because I love his Democrat preferences.
It's because I like to evaluate the persuasion techniques separate from whether I like what they're persuading.
So Fetterman just keeps...
He's hitting line drives after line drive.
I don't know if he's hitting home runs, but he's hitting line drive after line drive in the persuasion communication realm.
Very impressive.
And here's what I love about this.
So Joe Manchin is retiring.
And Joe Manchin, I always...
I always respect that because he did such a smart thing of being somebody who would be willing sometimes to vote on the other side from his team.
And when things are so close that that one vote makes all the difference, Joe Manchin was the only one smart enough to say, wait a minute, all I have to do is, are you serious?
I can run the whole country if I'm just willing to consider voting either way, like you pay me to do?
So if I just do what you pay me to do, Which is look at the topic and then decide which way I think it goes, independent of where the politics are.
You will allow me to run the whole country.
And all I have to do is do the thing that you paid me to do, as opposed to all my co-workers who are doing the opposite of what you're paying me to do.
Huh.
Am I missing something?
But seriously, I have to ask again.
All I have to do to be in charge of the whole country is simply do what you're paying me to do.
Evaluate things on their merit, independent of politics.
That's it.
And that is it.
And apparently he's the only one who's smart enough to figure it out, who's not named Joe Manchin.
So, I mean, you could say Kyrsten Sinema was sort of in that same game, but she's out of it too now, right?
So at the moment, the Senate is now swinging on, you know, one vote, but it could.
That could happen really quickly.
A couple of years from now, straight up tie, Fetterman's in charge of the country.
Virtually, right?
Because he controlled Congress.
Anyway, Trump was saying at an outing that he's getting everybody to come.
He's got the heads of the social media companies.
The big banks are all coming to visit him.
Fetterman's coming to visit him.
And he had some kind of quote like, you know, maybe we're all changing.
And he says that the people who are coming to visit him from all walks are quite productive and positive, meaning that they're there to get something done and they're not there to fight.
And it's not about Trump's personality.
They just think, can you do these things?
Because we need to do these things.
So that's all looking positive.
A little golden agey.
Meanwhile, CNN has this, I'm going to say, a racist panelist.
There's a black woman, Jasmine Crockett, who's on their panel a lot.
And she pointed out the other day, she was in a little debate with Scott Jennings, who's their conservative Republican kind of voice on the panel.
And Jasmine Crockett claimed that the most educated demographic in the country is black women.
And the conversation didn't go much further after that, so that claim just sort of stayed there.
Do you think it's true that the most educated demographic is black women?
It's almost true.
It's actually almost true.
It's not true if you look at the entire population of black women compared to the entire population of other demographic groups.
So that felt like that was the claim.
And that's definitely not true.
Is it my imagination or can you hear a leaf blower right outside my window?
You can hear that, right?
Anyway, that tells me what time it is, I think.
Here's what I believe is true, but I'll take a fact check on it.
I've told you before that black women are killing it in terms of careers and success.
So I'm going to...
Agree with Jasmine Crockett sort of directionally, but she got the fact wrong, I think.
Directionally, I believe it's true that more black women are getting college degrees than white men and more than black men, too.
Is that true?
Which would be impressive.
Now, it would also presumably be there would be a DEI element to that, meaning some people are getting recruited and some people are getting, you know, Maybe tuition paid and stuff like that.
So that's a factor.
I don't know how much of that is.
But you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
So on one hand, I think it's a completely racist and inaccurate claim that black women are the most educated group in the country.
I think that's just plain false.
But I think what she was getting at is true, which is that black women, as a class at the moment, You know, the young ones who are getting out of college and getting their first jobs and stuff, they are killing it.
They are killing it.
So I like to give, like, full congratulations to any group that works hard and gets what they want.
So congratulations.
I say the same thing about the LGBTQ group.
I think they've really killed it in terms of improving their overall situation.
I'm so impressed.
About how they've changed their situation in a few decades.
Very impressive.
And black women, same thing.
They are, in fact, killing it, but they haven't overtaken the other groups yet because there's a lot to overtake.
A lot of work to do, but it's certainly racist to imagine that her group is the most educated.
So if it's just a factual thing, I don't think a white person could have said that.
What if Scott Jennings said, you know, the white people are the most educated in the country.
Ouch.
I don't know if that's true, by the way, but he wouldn't be able to say it, but she could say it, and nobody challenged it, even though it wasn't true.
So to me, that's more racist than not, even though I support the general idea that black women are doing great lately.
All right.
Elon says it's going to take years to rebuild L.A. When they try to get permits, it's going to be a problem.
And I point out the following statements about rebuilding that you should know that I'm asking for a fact check, so I don't know which ones of these are true, but this is my starting point.
The starting point is that it can take years to get anything approved in normal times.
In normal times, it would take years to get things approved.
In California.
I know that from personal experience.
So what would it take when everybody, like 100,000 people, are trying to apply for things at the same time, or whatever the number is?
How are they going to handle that?
They don't have enough resources.
So if it used to take more than a year in normal times, how long is it going to take in abnormal times?
Where everybody's trying to do it, and all the resources are constrained, and nobody knows what they're talking about, and the environmentalists are saying, no, you can't do that, and you can't even rebuild.
The environmentalists will say, you can't even rebuild, you're too close to the ocean.
Or there's a fish we didn't know about before, but now we do, or there's a bird or something.
So I think it could take five to ten years to rebuild a house.
Five to ten years.
Now, what do you think it would cost to rebuild those homes?
So if you had a home that was worth $5 million, what do you think it would cost to rebuild it?
And let's say it was insured for $5 million, or it wasn't insured at all.
$5 million home, what would it cost to rebuild it?
The answer is about $10 million.
If you're building a, let's say, community, like a big developer is doing a whole community, then they can bring the cost of each unit down because they're working in bulk and they're mass-designed and there aren't that many different designs and stuff.
So they can build the house for cheaper than they sell it.
That's how they make money.
But if you're building one house and you want the rooms that you want and it's on the hill, And first you have to do a big cleanup and all that stuff.
It's going to cost closer to $10 million to build a $5 million house.
What happens to your property tax if you spend $10 million to build a $5 million house?
Well, I think that they would either...
I've heard that there's a rule that if you're building back on the same footprint, so it's the same size as the one that was destroyed, Then you get to keep the old tax bases, the old lower tax bases.
But if you wanted to make your house while you're doing it, you're like, well, you know, this would be a good time to add that spare room.
As soon as you do that, your property tax will quadruple.
You won't be able to afford to live there.
So they've created a situation where all these people get at least the good news, if they can afford it, the good news was, hey, Those changes you wanted to make your house, you can make them now, because the house is gone, so design it the way you want.
But it will have to be the same footprint, or their taxes will double or quadruple.
That's going to be a big problem, I think.
Then what happens when the fire risk returns, because everything's going to regrow, and then the insurance companies either haven't come back or...
Or they leave because nothing's going to burn while it's all rubble.
But as soon as you build and replant and all the trees are behind you, do you think you could ever get insurance?
Would you rebuild if you didn't think you could ever get insurance?
I wouldn't.
Why would you rebuild if you thought you could never get insurance?
If you had kids and you say to yourself, this is the best place in the world.
To raise kids?
The kids are going to be out of the house in 5 to 10 years, depending on the age.
If the kids are going to be out of the house in 5 to 10 years, they're going to be living in a burned-out rubble most of that time.
That's the place you go because the lifestyle is amazing.
The one thing I learned about it, I didn't know anything about the place, the one thing I learned about it is apparently the lifestyle there wasn't just good.
Did you know that?
It wasn't just good.
It was sort of like heaven.
When I hear people talk about it, it's like, oh my God.
It was just the best people, the best place, the downtown, the businesses, everything was close.
It was on the beach.
It was the temperature, so you didn't have the extreme hot because you're on the beach.
I don't know if any of those reasons are going to apply because it's going to take so long to.
Clean up.
So I don't know what that does.
What happens when you go to get a builder and 50,000 people are ahead of you for the few builders?
How in the world are you going to get a qualified builder?
Maybe they come from Manistate.
If you get a builder from Manistate, they're not going to know how to build in California.
And they would be crazy to come to California to start because the rules are too hard.
If you were a builder and somebody said, hey, come to California.
You're going to say, is that the only place I could be a builder?
No, you could stay where you are and build things more easily.
But if I come to California, it's just going to be a hot mess every single thing I do, and I won't even make a dollar because I can't even start.
And when I do start, they're going to stop me because there's going to be some fish there.
The next thing I know, I can't possibly make money.
And then I have to learn this whole state weird stuff.
The approvals are different than any other place.
I don't know where they're going to get the builders.
So that has to add some years to the rebuilding.
And then you've got unchecked crime.
Let me give you the worst-case scenario.
It could be that the people who live there have enough, you know, male energy to stop this from happening.
We'll see.
But what happens when, you know, things settle down?
Most of the properties will be abandoned, right?
Because most are burned to the ground and they're going to be working on approvals and, you know, even the cleanup's going to take a long time.
What happens then?
Let me tell you.
I think the homeless are going to move in.
They're going to put up a tent on what used to be your home.
They won't care so much about all the debris.
They'll like the view and the temperature.
And when you go to kick them out, they'll say, well, sorry, I'm a squatter.
I got a squatter rights.
And you can say, you can have squatter rights on a tent on my own property.
And then they say, this is California.
You can't move me.
What happens then?
And what happens when it's not one, but the entire hillside is full of people who heard that they'll never be kicked out and they could be living on the best property in the world as long as they don't mind living among the debris, which couldn't be any worse than what they were doing on the streets.
The thing I'd worry most about is the homeless coming in and putting on tents.
Because California doesn't remove homeless people in tents.
I mean, rarely.
And then where are people going to live?
And also people might worry that it becomes a crime, a horrible crime place that they don't want to live in the first place.
I hope not.
And where do people live while the rebuilding is happening?
How in the world are all of those 100,000 plus?
Going to be able to live close enough to L.A. that they have some kind of continuity in their life?
You know, maybe even close enough to the school?
Almost nobody.
Almost nobody will be close enough to the school they were at.
And I think some of them burned.
So you're going to end up in a different school in a different place.
And now your kids go to that other school and they get used to it.
And they got friends in the new school.
And five to ten years are going by.
And they're 17 now.
Do they want to move back?
I don't know.
I feel like the fact that you can't stay local while it's being built, and there's nothing local that you used to like, it's all burned up, you're going to move further than it would be comfortable to be the owner of something being rebuilt, because you really need to visit the site a lot.
If you've ever built a home, you kind of need to go there a lot.
I think people are going to assume they'll rebuild.
But when they get settled somewhere else that won't be that close, maybe the new life looks better than trying to go back.
So I think it's highly unpredictable.
If you want the positive news on that, it would be that it is like the best place on earth.
It's just one of the best places.
So if it's land, land, land, if that's the real estate rule, then it will be rebuilt.
And maybe we'll be surprised.
That California bends some rules, makes it easier to do.
Here's one thing they could do.
They could say you could put an ADU on your property right away if it meets these minimum requirements.
So these are the ADU stands for Additional Dwelling Unit.
Is it Additional Dwelling Unit?
So that'd be like a little, it'd be the size of a mobile home, but they're more like a regular home.
And you could plop it on the property if you have a backyard.
And if you wanted to, you could live there.
But even that's going to take a long time.
So there might be some fast approval of ADUs just so people who want to be close can have some continuity and live near their friends.
But I don't know how many people would take that option.
Meanwhile, the Pope is now the latest victim of what I call the Trump effect.
Well, other people call it that too.
The Pope is railing on a January 9th speech.
He's railing against fake news.
The continuous creation and spread of fake news, he said, distorts facts, but also perceptions.
So the Pope is going full MAGA, full MAGA, and he's against fake news.
Well, all I got to say is thank God.
All the religions agree with each other because I'd hate for one of them to be spreading any fake news.
But the Pope assures us he's got it under control.
Meanwhile, in interesting engineering, there's an article by Iman Tripathi.
Apparently, there's a U.S. firm in the nuclear business that wants to build a one-mile underground tunnel or hole.
I'm not sure if it's a tunnel or a hole.
To powered data centers.
So the reason they want to put the nuke in the hole one mile down is if there's a problem, it's easier to contain.
But if there's a problem, it contains itself.
Because it can't explode, because it would be held up by the entire Earth, would be the surround for it.
So I don't know if that really works, but these aren't the biggest reactors.
They would be, I think...
Micro-reactors?
Smaller reactors.
And they would stick them in the ground, and then that would make a big difference.
Some of the benefits are, let's see, robust containment, just because of the earth around it, and continuous pressure.
So that way you don't have massive concrete structures.
Oh, so it's much cheaper.
So you don't have to build the whole structure if you can make a good mile-deep hole.
And it minimizes the environmental impact.
And, you know, I've told you a number of times that holes are the future of energy and maybe of other things.
And I've said, if we can improve our technology for cheaply building holes and tunnels, we're going to be able to have everything from geothermal to, you know, better mining to now nuclear.
Of course, you could use it.
What's the other thing?
Geothermal is where you're looking for the hot water under the earth to create power.
But what's the one where you're just using the temperature difference underground to either moderate the hotness or the coldness of your house above ground?
What's that called?
But that's another reason to have good hole-building technology.
Holes are the future.
There's a hobbyist who built an AI-assisted rifle robot.
Using chat GPT. And there's a video that went viral on TikTok, I guess.
And it shows the inventor with the robot.
Now it's a tabletop robot.
Wouldn't be too hard to attach it to a robot dog or something, I guess.
But it's just a rifle that can, you know, point anywhere in a moment.
And he just talks to it.
He says, there's a threat, you know, on the left.
And it just goes...
So...
The one he's using doesn't use real rounds.
It's shooting something fake.
But how far away are we from telling your robot rifle dog to go attack the German front line?
All right, rifle dog.
There's a bunch of Russian soldiers two miles away in a trench.
I want you to go there.
If you see anybody who looks like an officer, Shoot them first, or something like that, and then send it to attack.
But AI robot rifle dogs, they're coming.
The CES show is highlighting all the big technical breakthroughs, and so we're seeing news.
At least two companies have built human robots that look like real women.
But one of them will build a real woman with the face of your choice.
So I guess you just give them a photograph of who you want it to look like, and they'll put an artificial skin face on it that looks like the person you want.
Now, at the moment, these robots are not impressive because they just look like mannequins who happen to be able to talk.
So it's not like you're going to want to take that robot home, if you know what I mean.
It's more of a suggestion of what's to come.
It's not there yet.
I have a prediction about what one year from now looks like, because the robots will develop quickly.
Here's a conversation between a married couple one year from now.
Human wife says to her husband, I want a divorce.
Human husband says, okay, can you pose for a photo first?
Mic drop.
All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's all I have to say.
It's 807, well, where I am.
And did I miss anything?
Any big stories that are happening?
Let me get a good picture of you before you go.
I'm going to upgrade.
All right.
All right, ladies and gentlemen.
I've...
I have some stories I think I'm going to save for later, but I got some good ones.
The Carter funeral.
Yeah, I didn't talk about the Jimmy Carter funeral.
So here's the fascinating thing about the Jimmy Carter funeral.
So, of course, the ex-presidents are all invited.
So you had the Clintons.
You had only Barack Obama.
Michelle did not come.
We're not sure why.
And then...
You had the Harris's, so Kamala and her husband, and then I'm forgetting who else was there.
But I was looking at all the people sitting up front, and it turned to be it was Trump and all the people he's destroyed.
It was Trump and all the people he's destroyed sitting today, they're chatting.
Oh, Biden.
Biden was the other one.
So Biden, he destroyed.
The Clintons he destroyed via destroying Hillary.
Barack Obama destroyed.
Michelle Obama couldn't even come.
And then the funny part is he ends up sitting right next to Barack Obama, who just warned the world that Trump was Heller and that he called neo-Nazis fine people.
And you see Obama and Trump.
Chatting and joking with each other.
Nothing's real.
Nothing's real.
Oh, Pence, right.
Mike Pence was there, and Mike Pence was destroyed by Trump as well.
Was there a Bush there?
I don't know.
I mean, the Bush dynasty got destroyed, not George Bush.
So, yeah, it was quite amazing.
It was Trump and all the people he'd destroyed.
It was kind of amazing.
All right.
You know, I think Trump has a superpower in forgetting what people said about him.
Not forgetting.
He never forgets.
But willingness to just work with you if it makes sense.
I just love that Trump owned the room Thank you.
Alright.
I'm going to talk for a moment privately with the local subscribers.
The rest of you, I will see you tomorrow for more fun and games.
