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Content:
Politics, Ben & Jerry's DEI, Marc Andreessen, Larry Fink Blackrock, Tulsi Gabbard, John Brennan, UnAmerican NGO Funding, Tariff Funded Economy, AI Government Policy, Matt Gaetz, Bill Maher, Trump & Musk Historical Coincidences, DeepSeek AI, COVID Origin Investigation, Gaza Plan, IMF Chief Davos, AI John McAfee, Perplexity AI, Birthright Citizenship, Scott Adams
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time in your life, especially since you missed it yesterday.
Oh, you've got a whole bunch of pent-up coffee enjoyment coming up.
It's going to be better than normal.
And if you'd like to take it up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled.
Oh, wait, I said that.
Man, it was a tough few days.
Who knows what's going to happen?
sip this.
Well, let's start by explaining the mystery of where I was for the last day.
I know it's very, very unusual for me to miss a day of work.
Very unusual.
So, if I do, you can assume I'm either dead or in bad shape.
Luckily, I'm not dead.
But I know the worst thing that you could ever hear is somebody describing their health problems.
But mine were kind of funny, so I just have to tell you anyway.
So about a few weeks ago, I had this problem where I had some kind of stomach flu.
Not sure what it was.
And at the same time, by terrible luck, I had this severe injury that I didn't know where it came from that affected my left hip so that I couldn't even walk.
And it was just screaming pain whenever I walked.
So I had two problems at the same time.
Either one individually.
Would it be like the worst thing that happened to you?
But boy, you put them together.
And that's a bad time.
Now, this was a few weeks ago.
Then the other day, on Friday, I get that stomach flu back.
You know, with all the shakes and aches and pains and everything bad.
And my other leg, my other leg got the problem that had now healed from the first time.
So, how in the world do I get two...
Probably the coronavirus or virus or norovirus or whatever.
It doesn't matter.
How in the world do I get it twice in a row that's combined with the exact injury except it's the other leg?
How is that even possible?
Well, I finally figured out what it was.
The leg problem is because the way I was sleeping.
So apparently when I laid on my side, I do something with my leg that puts it in that.
Bad position.
So when I wake up, I'm in screaming pain.
And it takes just hours or sometimes days to get a normal so I can even just walk.
So yesterday, I couldn't put anything in my body, which meant that I couldn't have coffee or anything else.
So I've got a coffee headache.
I've got all the symptoms of the flu.
And I've got screaming pain in one of my legs.
Now, when I say screaming, I mean actually literally.
It would have been bad to be my neighbor because about every hour I'd wake up and scream, ow, ow, ow, with every step.
Now, you're saying to yourself, that's really bad.
That's really bad.
So I'm uncoffied, I'm sick, and I need a banana.
Because I think a banana is the only thing I could possibly get down.
Sometimes you just know what you might be able to eat.
And I think if I get the banana, I could get the coffee on top of it maybe, and it wouldn't be so bad.
And then I'd at least feel better.
And I'm like, all right, I need a banana.
So I limp to my kitchen.
Oh, oh, oh, with every step.
And for the one time, this is very rare, I have no bananas.
I almost always have a banana.
It's like my most basic thing I keep.
So I go to order one to be delivered.
Not one, you know, a bunch of bananas.
So I get on Amazon to get my banana because I'm so out of it that I couldn't tell the difference between Amazon and DoorDash.
I confused them because they both bring groceries to me.
But I forgot that Amazon is the one that brings it to you the next day.
No, I needed it right away.
I need that banana.
I really need a banana.
So I get on Amazon.
I'm like, oh, banana.
Interface.
Wait.
And I put some stuff in a basket and then it disappears.
And I'm in some other mode because I guess Amazon has more than one way to buy groceries.
And it somehow can mix up the two ways.
So every time I would add something and then I think I was done, I'd be ready to send.
There would be no send button.
There was no buy button.
And then I'd end up in some other mode.
So I think Amazon has at least three different ways to buy groceries.
So I couldn't figure it out, but I finally figured it out and put in the order.
And then it tells me it's going to be there tomorrow.
And I'm like, what?
Oh, shit.
I'm on Amazon.
I need DoorDash.
So I'd already ordered it.
So now I've got a bunch of stuff coming that I don't need.
That should be sometime today.
So I go back to DoorDash.
I go, all right.
And I try to order bananas.
And then something went wrong because my brain wasn't working again.
But I successfully put it in the order.
And I have to wait a few hours.
I'm like, oh, if only that banana would come.
Everything would start getting better if I could get the banana.
I just need one banana.
That's all I need.
Finally, DoorDash comes.
He delivers.
My bananas.
Except, apparently I had somehow ordered one banana.
That's right.
Now I know the difference between a bunch and a single banana, and I was pretty sure I hit the bunch, but apparently I hit the single banana.
So I got one banana, which would have been enough, except it was green.
So that's like no banana.
So I said, damn it, I am not going to be beaten.
So I suffered through trying to figure out how to order properly again.
Second DoorDash, right after the first one.
And finally, I'm happy to report that after all that banana business, I finally got a nice bunch of bananas.
They were all green.
So I still had no bananas.
So that was my third attempted banana delivery.
All failures.
But I had some other fruit that was along with it.
Got back in it.
So I thought to myself, if I could just wait this out, like the other time that one of my legs was in screaming pain and I had a flu-like symptoms.
You know, I knew I waited it out.
It's just really painful.
Just wait it out.
And then I went to sleep through one of my many naps, probably 10 naps that day.
And I woke up and I had re-injured my other leg.
That's right.
Now I had two legs that gave me screaming pain any time I tried to walk.
Basically totally disabled.
Couldn't stand up.
Couldn't walk.
Ow!
So it just got worse.
Anyway.
But at least I could, you know, look at my screens and entertain myself.
No.
There's something about the weird flu thing that makes it impossible to look at a screen.
Like I tried.
But every time I did, it's like, oh, headache, oh.
So it was about the worst two days you could ever have, but I'm back.
I can barely walk, but it'll be fine.
We're 80% better.
Let's talk about Ben and Jerry's.
So Ben and Jerry, who are no longer directly associated with Ben and Jerry, it's owned by Unilever, I believe.
But the Ben and Jerry themselves have gone full woke and maybe the company too.
So they just dropped a DEI-themed ad declaring they'll never stop fighting to dismantle white supremacy and end the climate crisis.
Now, are you all having this Trump time distortion thing that I am?
Where it seems like Trump must have been president this time for already a year because he's done so much?
Like time doesn't make sense anymore?
But here's another one.
Doesn't it sound like this didn't come from this era?
When you hear that somebody wants to dismantle white supremacy, which two months ago was sort of normal, but now it just feels like, what are you, from the past?
Am I the only one having that feeling?
That somehow, just even reading it, it's like, really?
Dismantle white supremacy?
What year is this?
It's not 2025, is it?
Anyway, my question to Ben& Jerry's is, do they still sell vanilla?
Because I feel like that's a little bit white supremacist.
Vanilla?
They should get rid of vanilla.
But here's what I think is going to happen, whether it's Ben& Jerry's or Costco or somebody else.
It seems to me that somebody's going to buy one share in their parent company, Unilever, which is a...
It's not a U.S. company, so you'd have to buy something called an ADR, but I think you can do it.
I think it works.
I'm not positive.
So maybe Ben& Jerry's isn't the first place to start.
But what's going to happen is some shareholder is going to buy one share just to press them on the DEI. And they're going to say, I'm suing you for these policies that are clearly bad for stockholders.
Because now that the government, under Trump, Has declared that DEI is literally racist.
How can a company keep doing it without being accused of literally being racist?
So it's pretty big risk for all the companies.
Sooner or later, somebody's going to sue one of them and say, you better get rid of this now that it's government-approved, or not government-approved, but government-labeled racism.
It's pretty risky to have that still going on if you've got stockholders.
As Corey DeAngelis points out in an article in Fox News, the next place for Trump to ban DEI would be the schools.
The schools need to stop the DEI. Now, I assume, even though the schools are mostly locally run, that the government has enough influence through funding or something else that they could ban it in schools.
That's really, really important.
Because if we don't kill it in school, we're dead.
Because it'll just be another generation of DEI idiots.
So yeah, Corey D'Angelis is right on this one.
School's got to be next, and college is too.
I was watching Mark Andreessen.
I think he was talking to Lex Fridman.
And I am so impressed.
With Marc Andreessen's, let's say, what would you say?
I think he's emerging from a business leader to maybe a social and political leader.
But I knew he was smart, Marc Andreessen.
But I didn't know how smart he was.
And now that I'm listening to him talk, oh, my God.
My God, he's smart.
Like, just crazy smart.
And he's smart in exactly the way the country needs, which is he can explain the most complicated things in the simplest, completely understandable ways.
And he seems to have priorities straight, etc.
Now, I didn't realize that he was advising Trump.
I don't know if he's advising him on specific topics or more generally.
I'm not sure.
But, wow.
When you hear that Trump is being advised by Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, this is crazy.
This is the best advice any human ever received.
Like, how are we so lucky?
It's amazing.
But anyway, one of the things Marc Andreessen said, he was dumping on Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, and he said...
He said that Larry Fink fell for every retarded idea in the world.
That's his words.
Of course, I'm much too nice to use that R word, but I'm quoting, because apparently it's semi-approved at the moment.
So he was saying that the DEI and the ESG and the zero-point whatever.
So, yeah.
I love to see a hugely important business figure.
Take a big old shit right on BlackRock and Larry Fink's head and just call him out as being basically an idiot who has not been helping and has probably been greatly hurting and doing it on the backs of the shareholders, both in his company and otherwise.
So that's good.
As you know, Tulsi Gabbard is up for the DNI job, head of DNI. She has to be confirmed.
And over on MSNBC, we're watching as John Brennan is saying what a bad pick she would be for the DNI. Now, as other people noted, and I often tell you, if you know the story, you don't know anything.
If you know the players, well, you might know a lot.
And this is one of those.
If all you knew is that somebody who used to head the CIA said that Tulsi Gabbard was not the right one for the job.
You'd say, oh, well, that's a very qualified person and a serious qualified person at that.
So if somebody who's serious and qualified says she's not good for the job, you're like, well, I should take that pretty seriously.
However, if you know the players, it looks pretty different, doesn't it?
And most of you who are listening know the players by now.
John Brennan.
He's the guy who pushed the Russia collusion and the Hunter laptop letter.
He is the signal of what you should do the opposite of.
And the fact that he appears on MSNBC to spew his stuff, as somebody on X who goes by the name Goofonk, Goofonk says, quote, I love MSNBC. They give us insight into what the intelligence agencies want us to believe.
Well, not the agencies in general, but certainly some elements of them, and the worst ones, I think.
So yes, that's exactly what I do when I watch MSNBC. I watch it for the humor, because it's so stupid.
Literally, I watch it for the humor.
And the other thing is that it does signal to you...
What the dark intelligence people want you to believe that isn't true.
So it's really useful.
Again, if you didn't know the players, you would just turn it on and you'd think it was news.
And then you'd say, oh, there's some news.
But if you know that they seem to be, and I don't know the details, but seems to be.
I might have to turn off the comments here, but...
We'll see how it goes.
I'll tell you what.
I'll just cover the comments with the locals people.
That way I don't have to look at them.
All right.
So I can still see the comments, but just locals.
Those of you who are being bad in the comments, don't be bad anymore.
All right.
Big question for me is, when do all the NGOs get defunded?
Is that going to happen this week?
Now, the NGOs are the non-government organizations, which I thought was sort of a limited sort of thing.
Not that big.
But, you know, they had something to do with, I don't know, some secret plan for censoring Americans.
And they seem to be deeply involved in assisting illegal immigration.
And lots of people say they're...
Some of them are involved in child trafficking, sex trafficking.
And the only thing I know for sure is why are there so many of them and why do they cost so much and why are we funding them?
It couldn't possibly be a good idea.
So I'm pretty sure that nearly all of these need to be shut down immediately because they seem to be working against the interests of America while we're funding them.
How in the world did we get in a situation where we're funding These unlimited number of entities that are actually trying to, seemingly, I mean, if you just look at what they're doing, it looks like they're trying to destroy America.
How in the world are we letting that go on?
I've got a feeling that Trump's getting ready to put the hammer down on that one.
Yesterday, apparently Elon Musk suggested, tongue-in-cheek, That the English Channel, the water between England and France, should be renamed to the George Washington Channel?
Now, I saw one commenter who was terribly incensed that he would suggest that the English Channel would be renamed to the George Washington Channel.
How do you not know he's joking?
How does somebody read that and not know that's obviously just a meme?
Think about what it would be like to be one of the people who doesn't know how jokes work.
Like, I don't know, that looks real to me.
Anyway, that's funny.
Well, Trump is pushing his idea of a tariff-funded economy instead of just taxes.
I don't see any way that he could get to a tariff-only economy.
If it got to a point where taxes didn't have to go up because tariffs were handling it, maybe.
But, you know, if there's tariffs, also your expenses go up.
So I don't know how to net that out.
I'm not sure if anybody does.
But it is true that we used to have a tariff-funded economy when things were simpler.
And it could be that it's easier to raise taxes than it is to raise tariffs.
Because all the obvious reasons.
It makes it harder to get stuff.
There'll be retaliation, etc.
And then you have the separate problem that if you just become the tariff country, wouldn't it cause other people to find workarounds and not sell things to you?
Or would it cause people to...
There would be some confusion if you tried to use it as a weapon, if it was also your normal way of doing business.
But I suppose you could still...
Crank it up if you wanted to turn it into a weapon.
So I guess I would say I'm not 100% sure this is a good idea.
But I know that doing what we have been doing is a bad idea.
Because what we have been doing is heading toward a cliff.
So we better do something.
And I would be more open to, let's say, non-standard and even big changes than I would have been ordinarily.
So, I don't know.
I'd love to see somebody smarter tell me if this is a good idea or a bad idea to have a tariff-funded economy.
Well, Trump is going to sign some executive order on developing AI that is free from ideological bias.
So, AP News is reporting that.
Now, I don't know what that means.
Apparently, Trump wants to remove any...
Burdensome government oversight.
And he also wants to get rid of the racism that's built into the current AIs, anti-white racism primarily.
And this would be good, presumably, to help America have AI leadership.
I'm not sure if we have that right now, but we'd be in better shape.
And, yeah, so Trump says we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.
And we also want it free from red tape.
I wonder, though, does...
I think what Biden had in mind was everything had to run past the government before it was approved to be released.
And I wonder if that helped at all or even would help in the future.
I don't know.
The argument for not having the government get involved is pretty strong, because wherever we did it, it seems to work better than whenever the government's involved.
How in the world could the government evaluate AI? That doesn't even seem like it makes sense, does it?
Like, do you think the best people are going to be looking at the AI algorithms in the government?
I don't know.
So getting the government out of that seems to make more sense than not.
At one point, it seemed so dangerous that we couldn't release AI without the government oversight.
But now that there are going to be so many AIs from so many different places, we'll talk about that, I don't think there's any way to stop AI. So if the only thing we do is cripple our own industries, but there's going to be the same amount of AI out there no matter what, Because it'll just come from other places.
This makes sense to me.
It does make sense to get rid of the regulations.
Yeah, somebody said that David Sachs might be the advisor on this one, so I would trust him.
You may have seen a clip of Bill Maher on his show.
What's he call his show?
Not Real Time, the one he does in his man cave there.
With Matt Gaetz.
And this was really frustrating to me because Bill Maher got into the January 6th thing and wanted to really nail Matt Gaetz on it.
Now, Gaetz, of course, is one of the best communicators in the game and knows a lot about the January 6th stuff, of course.
So this was so interesting to me.
I'm like, oh, finally.
Somebody's going to give a good argument to Bill Maher about the January 6th, because it's never been done.
It's never been done.
Nobody capable has ever explained January 6th to a Democrat.
I've never seen it.
And I thought, finally, you've got a superstar communicator.
This is good.
And then Gates made the mistake that is unrecoverable in terms of a debate.
He went, your side does it too.
That's the losing argument.
Let me tell you why, and this is exactly the way it went with Maher and Gates.
Basically, I'll just summarize this.
This is not their exact words, but the way it went was, Bill Maher said January 6th was bad, you know, blah, blah, blah, January 6th, insurrection, bad.
Matt Gaetz said, but you realize the Democrats have also questioned a lot of elections.
He's already lost.
The argument's lost.
At that point, you can't win.
Because then Maher says, yes, but they're not equivalent.
And then, this is what the Democrats do.
Bill Maher said, and if you say they are equivalent, you're a hack.
That's right.
He didn't say the argument is better this way.
He said if you make that argument, you're a hack.
And then Mars started getting really mad and talking over him like he couldn't possibly listen to any explanation.
But to be fair, to be fair, Gates' argument was terrible.
And I hate to say it, but getting all over a terrible argument isn't a mistake.
It was a terrible argument.
Say you do it too, because it wasn't equivalent.
I mean, you can't compare.
You know, what happened on January 6th to somebody saying, I'm not sure this was a fair election, you know, or challenging it in the courts.
These are not equivalent, right?
So let me tell you how to win this argument.
You lose from the first moment unless you establish the following thing.
Here's the way I do it.
If it were me, I would say, you know, Bill, I'm sure you're aware that there are two narratives.
There's your narrative, and then I would explain it.
So it was clear I understood it.
Your narrative is it was an insurrection.
They're trying to overthrow the country.
And importantly, importantly, they knew they lost the election.
So that's Bill's narrative.
Then I said, I'm not sure you're aware of what the other narrative is because it doesn't really come through.
And the other narrative is there is no way to know who won any election.
And if you think...
That Trump knew that he lost.
You'd have to explain why half of the country didn't know it, because they thought that the election looked rigged.
They saw too many irregularities.
Now, they could have been wrong, but they were operating under the assumption that the election had been stolen.
And if they were operating under that, they were operating as patriots, meaning that they were trying to fix something that had gone terribly wrong.
Now, when you look at the American Revolution, the reason that we don't get mad at the American revolutionaries for the violence, they created violence, they started it, is because they had a good reason and they were seeking freedom and independence.
And if you win, then you get to be the good guys and write history and say that that violence was totally justified.
So, the thing you have to sell...
Is the idea that nobody can tell an election is fair.
Now, what would happen if you said that?
Well, if you're a Democrat, they will start yelling at you that you're a hack.
So you're going to have to somehow settle them down enough so you can explain, you know, there's no way to know that any American election is fair.
There really isn't.
The only thing you can know is it's complicated, other people were involved, and maybe somebody told you it was fair.
But in order to think that the American election systems are fair, you would have to say that they're the only thing in America that is.
Because we've seen over the last few years, quite vividly, Department of Justice was law fair, FBI was totally corrupt at the leadership level.
We've seen that our healthcare system was completely messed up during pandemic.
We've seen that science is a mess.
There's as much fraud as there is science in the science itself.
And you could just go down the line.
Every part, we just talked about NGOs, almost every part of American institutions are clearly, obviously corrupt.
But the elections are not.
The most complicated things that you and I couldn't possibly look into.
You're telling me that nobody can hack an election?
It's the only unhackable system in the world.
These are ridiculous assumptions.
So if you want to win the J6 thing, don't talk about J6. Talk about whether elections can be known who won.
And don't leave that place.
Because if you're arguing about whether it's good or bad to be fighting against cops, don't get into that argument.
If you're trying to save a country, it's good.
Right?
If you're trying to overthrow a country, it's bad.
So you don't even have to talk about what happened.
On January 6th, because it all depends on what you think they were doing.
Now, have you noticed that it's been how many years now since January 6th?
Four years?
So four years from January 6th, and we've seen exactly zero interviews with a January 6er who thought the election was real.
None.
None.
1,500 people went to jail.
Not one of them has said, you know, once I realized the election was really real and fair, I guess I see what bad things I did.
Not one.
Do you think that Trump really believed that was a fair election?
If I had been in his place, I don't think I would have.
Now, I don't know if it was fair or not.
I just know that nobody else knows.
And it looked like it was sending the signals that it was rigged.
You know, if you go to bed and you're winning and you wake up and you lost, and something like, I don't know the number, is it 18 and 19 bellwether went the wrong direction?
If your bellwethers go the wrong direction and there's a last minute, come from behind, hard to explain when, yeah, that's every signal in the world.
Beyond that, you don't even have to see the signals.
If you know that the other side had been saying, They're trying to stop Hitler, and you see what things they did to try to stop what they thought was Hitler.
Rigging an election would be the least dramatic thing.
The lawfare is way worse than rigging the election.
Way worse.
So we know they did things way worse than rigging an election.
That's pretty established.
So rigging an election would just be normal business if they really thought they were stopping Hitler.
You probably heard this story if you're on X, but I saw a post by Stephanie Tyler, and she describes the following.
So there are a number of older books that are hard to explain their existence unless time travel is real or we live in a simulation.
So courtesy of Stephanie Tyler, I will summarize a little bit.
So it starts like this.
Nikola Tesla dies.
So back when Tesla was the man, he dies.
And the only person allowed to access his safe, the one containing all his most secret inventions, is somebody named John G. Trump, a brilliant MIT scientist and, oh, by coincidence, Donald Trump's uncle, who conveniently says, ah, there's nothing to see in there.
Now...
If this were the only coincidence, it would be really weird, wouldn't it?
What are the odds that Nikola Tesla dies and Donald Trump's uncle is the one who has access to his secrets?
That's so weird.
But it gets weirder.
In 1958, there was something called Trackdown.
I think that must have been a TV show.
Featuring a con man named Walter Trump.
And Walter Trump was trying to sell people a magic wall.
To save them from the end of the world.
Okay, now, what are the odds that there would be a book about somebody named Trump who really wants a wall?
Okay, that's a coincidence too, but we're not done.
1953, Wernher von Braun, the head of the rocket program, the father of rocket science, published a book about humans colonizing Mars led by a guy named...
Elon.
Elon.
E-L-O-N. So the guy that the father of rockets thought would be the leader on Mars was named Elon.
Okay, it gets weirder.
Even before that, in the 1890s, Ingersoll Lockwood, an author, writes a story about Barron Trump.
That's the actual name, Barron Trump.
A kid from, quote, Castle Trump, going on wild adventures with a guide named Don.
What?
And then writes a book called The Last President, where chaos breaks out in America after the election of an outsider.
What?
And then you fast forward to now.
We have Elon Musk, who runs a company named Tesla, named after Tesla, and is obsessed with getting us to Mars, and is not only working with Trump, but quite literally got him elected, and has even visited his magic wall.
That's what Stephanie Tyler says.
This is a really good thread, by the way, Stephanie.
How is any of that real?
Even Elon, when he commented about the...
A person leading Mars named Elon.
Even Elon said, how is this real?
How could it possibly be real?
Now, I'll tell you how it could be real.
Think of all the books that have ever been written.
All the books that have ever been written.
Don't you think that if you could search all the books that have ever been written, you would find a whole bunch of these?
These meaning not just stuff about Tesla or Elon, but a whole bunch of coincidences.
Hey, that book predicted this, and that book predicted that.
And the answer is, this is like the Bible code.
Remember when there was a...
I always use this example because it's so good.
There was a claim that there were secret patterns in the Bible.
That if you just did things like look at the second letter of every sentence, you know, stuff like that, that there would be a secret message predicting the future.
And there were a bunch of them, a whole bunch of them in the Bible.
And then somebody had the idea to run the same algorithm against war and peace, just a random book, and it was full of codes.
So you could take any book that's a good size, and you can find a whole bunch of coincidences that appear to predict the future.
And I think this is one of those situations where instead of looking at all the sentences in a big book, you're looking at all the books.
And if you could selectively pick just the books you wanted to show people, probably this is one of thousands of different amazing coincidences you could artificially create.
Or we're part of a simulation.
Pick one.
All right.
Well, the big news, of course, is moving the markets is this Chinese AI. called DeepSeek.
Now, some of you watching this are going to say, I do not care about this technology, but this one's really important.
This isn't like just a nerdish story.
This is civilization-altering kind of stuff.
And I think there's still some mystery about how it was developed, but the things we know is that somehow China got a hold of...
A bunch of NVIDIA chips that they weren't supposed to have access to because they would be denied to our adversarial countries.
But somehow they got them.
But they didn't get many compared to how many the United States has for its big AI projects.
But they had enough combined with some really clever engineering that they built something that's just as good as the big AIs.
The big part of the story is that they innovated way beyond what the experts were expecting and way faster.
It wasn't beyond what I expected because I literally predicted that this was going to happen, that there would be a super cheap alternative that would pop up and that it would hurt NVIDIA stock, which is why I told you a while ago that I sold my NVIDIA stock.
It was because I was expecting fairly quickly a competitor.
Now, you might say, Scott, how in the world did you guess this when seemingly nobody else was guessing it, when I have no skills whatsoever in this domain?
And the answer is just pattern recognition and economics.
So if you have a background in economics, it helps.
But when you see this many dollars involved, the AI dollars are beyond anything we've seen, really.
So there's an immense amount of money involved.
But also, if you don't get in the AI game soon enough and you're a big country, it's an existential risk.
So you're essentially engineering for your life.
If you put people in the situation of engineering for their life to try to save their country, you're going to do better than somebody who's just working for money.
In the United States, we have great engineers, obviously, or we wouldn't have the AI that we have, but they're largely working for money, and they're under the impression that they're leading in AI, and maybe they are.
That's a completely different incentive.
And I would argue that wars have taught us that when you get in a war, the innovation goes to the roof, because you're trying to live.
So when you're engineering yourself to...
Try to survive.
Suddenly, you get really clever.
And you've seen this a million times in a million different contexts.
So, given the amount of money involved, and that is an existential risk to China and other countries, I predicted that somebody would find a really clever engineering workaround, and they would do it pretty quickly.
And it happened.
It happened almost exactly when I thought it would, not long after I sold the stock.
So what we know right now is, I want to tell you a little bit, this might be a little too nerdy for you, but I'll try to make it interesting.
I saw a post by Morgan Brown, who was in the AI space, this was on X, describing what they got right.
So let me just run through this.
And by the way, again, if you think this is a nerd story about some technology, you're missing the big point.
This is everything.
If this thing is real, And it can compete with the big expensive AIs.
We're in a lot of trouble.
Yeah, America just went from dominance to uh-oh, like just overnight.
So let me give you the rundown so you're educated on this.
First of all, in America at the moment, if you are one of those regular AIs like OpenAI or Anthropic, it might cost you $100 million just on computer.
Resources to train something.
$100 million.
And they need massive data centers and thousands of GPUs that cost $40,000 apiece.
But if you were...
It's called DeepSeek.
That's the name of the new AI, the cheap one.
It only costs them $5 million.
So $5 instead of $100 million.
And it can match or in some ways, I guess, beat the current version of...
The OpenAI product.
And some others.
A little better than some others.
And they rethought everything from the ground up.
So here's some examples.
Traditional AI likes to write everything with 32 decibel places.
The cheap one said, what if we just use 8 decibel places and to be close enough?
And it uses 75% less memory.
So they gained 75% of memory just by saying, huh, we could just take a little off of this, be a little less.
Fewer decimal places.
Then there's some kind of multi-token system.
So normal AI reads like a first grader.
It reads sort of in order.
The cat sat, so it sees each word in order, one at a time.
Apparently this new one, the cheap one, reads whole phrases at once.
So if it reads a whole phrase, just like something else would read one word at a time.
If it reads the whole phrase, apparently it's two times faster and 90% is accurate.
Now, do you know what they copied?
That's speed reading.
They put speed reading into the model.
I think I've described before, because I learned speed reading when I was a kid, you don't look at words.
You look at the sentence.
And your brain picks out the important words in the sentence, and instead of going bah, bah, bah each word, you just look at it and you just know what it says.
Now, it takes practice, but obviously the AI can get it a lot faster.
So it's basically treating a sentence like a word, and then it became much more efficient.
Here's another trick.
They built an expert system instead of one massive AI trying to know everything.
So apparently it has lots of expertise built in, But it only wakes up, to use the technical term, it only wakes up the expert it needs.
So it's not always looking every expert at everything.
It just wakes up the part of the model that's relevant to the question, I guess.
And traditional models have 1.8 trillion parameters active all the time, whereas this cheap one has only...
37 billion active at once.
So that's a big difference.
All right, so here's the results.
So instead of costing 100 million to train, it's 5 million.
Instead of needing 100,000 GPUs, it might need less than 2,000.
The API costs are 95% cheaper, and it can run on a regular computer, a high-end computer, but one that you could buy for gaming, etc.
So that's a big deal.
It's all open source, which is why stocks in the other companies are falling.
And let's see.
And they don't need a billion-dollar data center, etc.
All right.
And apparently DeepSeek did it with a team of fewer than 200 people.
And I read something else separately.
This is not from Stephanie or Morgan.
But separately, I saw that they did something where they cleverly trained it with incentives and way better than regular AI. But anyway, those are the things you need to know.
Lots of clever, clever engineering.
But when you see how clever the engineering was, that's the difference between engineering for your life and just engineering.
Because it seems to me that every one of these clever moves were available to all of our AI people.
Weren't they?
But I think our AI people were saying, no, we have to hit the maximum.
So instead of saying, well, if I cuss some corners, it'll be 90% as good.
I think the American way is it's got to be the best one.
Now, what are the odds?
What are the odds that this cheap one will destroy the entire AI industry in the United States?
I think low.
And here's why I think NVIDIA won't fall to zero.
It'll take a hit, and I think it'll just make it back eventually during the year.
My guess is that NVIDIA is still a good stock.
That's my guess.
But, you know, I would just be guessing, so don't buy it because I said so.
There's definitely a bigger risk than there was last week.
So if you think NVIDIA is the same stock as it was a week ago, it's definitely not.
Definitely not the same stock it was a week ago.
But that doesn't mean it's in trouble.
And here's why.
As the experts say, the very next version of OpenAI and our other AIs will probably be better than this DeepSeek.
Will DeepSeek be able to keep up?
We don't know.
We're going to have to see.
It might.
It might be such a fast follower that nothing we can do gets out of it.
But we'll have to find it out.
The other thing I think is that, and I've been waiting for this, I think the government, I don't know if a Trump government would do it, but I think the government is going to make it hard for other AIs to compete.
Remember Mark Andreessen told us he was in a meeting in which some intelligence people said to the AI tech people, don't bother funding more AIs because we're only going to let a few big ones survive in the United States so we can basically have control over it.
Well, I feel like there will be artificial barriers put in place that might even make it illegal to use this open source one.
I mean, it may be as simple as that.
Here's what I predict.
In fairly short order, somebody's going to find some code in that DeepSeek thing, because remember it's open, that looks suspicious.
Or it has a backdoor somehow.
Or it's got some kind of thing that isn't completely predictable.
And then the rumor will start, and it might not be true, but the rumor will start that it's like a virus and you can't let it free in America.
And it might not be true, but the government, out of caution, will say, all right, we're going to ban it.
You can't use this cheap one because we're not sure it's good.
We're not sure it's safe.
So I kind of expect that to happen.
So if you add the fact that the U.S. is going to try to stay ahead and we don't know if DeepSeek can reach the next level of...
We don't even know if it can reach the next level of AI, which is AGI, more of a general intelligence.
But we also don't know if the American companies can.
They say they're going to be there by two years, but I'm not so sure.
So we'll see.
So lots of questions about this, but it doesn't mean the end of AI in America.
Now, I make similar predictions.
Now, you probably wonder, why do I keep talking about battery technology?
And the reason is it's the same as this AI. I'm expecting a huge breakthrough in battery technology because the stakes are so high, the dollar amounts would be gigantic, and it would be world transforming.
If we could just make batteries, let's say, 20 times better.
You know, pick a number.
It would change everything.
And sure enough, every day there's a new breakthrough.
I don't think any one of these are necessarily going to be the one.
But now there's, according to interesting engineering, there's a new aluminum battery that retains over 99% of its capacity after 10,000 cycles.
Now, that's...
Doesn't mean that that's going into production anytime soon.
But that's the scale of improvements that people are looking at in batteries.
And I think you could make the same prediction with batteries that I made with AI. So much money involved, so much at stake, that somebody's going to engineer some kind of battery that you just get blown away by.
Something you didn't even think was possible.
I think it's coming.
According to the Amuse account on X, the Trump administration is going to go after trying to figure out where the billions that were sent to Ukraine ended up.
So the FBI and the DOJ, they launched this big investigation into where it went.
And I think we're going to find out some terrible things about where all that money went.
It definitely didn't all go to...
You know, useful weapons and stuff.
We'll find out.
In other news, the new CIA Director Ratcliffe is going to have the CIA evaluate if China intentionally started the pandemic, according to the Daily Wire.
Now, did China intentionally start the pandemic?
Here's where they could save a lot of time and money in the CIA by simply asking me.
Scott, did China...
Intentionally release a virus in their own major city.
No.
And we're done here.
Now, a lot of people have been giving me a hard time about this on X today, after I said it on X. And people say, Scott, Scott, how do you explain X? How do you explain Y? How do you explain this other thing?
To which I say, I don't have to.
Nobody.
releases a deadly virus in their own city first if they have a clever plan to take down the rest of the world.
A clever plan to take down the rest of the world would be releasing it in Chicago.
Now, that would be a good plan.
Or London.
That would be a good plan.
Or, better yet, multiple places at once, but all of them ones who don't have a big connection to China directly.
Nobody releases a virus, a deadly virus, in their own country to take down other countries.
Nobody ever, ever, ever.
Now the response I got to that is, Scott, you don't understand that China doesn't value human life.
Okay, I don't want to go all woke on you, but that's just racist.
That's not an opinion.
That's just racist.
Because even if you said they didn't value human life, and they do, they do value human life.
I'm not going to accept Chinese are the only people who don't value human life.
That's ridiculous.
I mean, that's really ridiculous.
But even if they didn't value human life, they wouldn't release it in their own city.
There is no...
No rational argument for why they do that.
And then somebody else said, but they're not rational.
Yes, they are.
They're like one of the most rational places ever.
If they weren't rational, they would have already made a move on Taiwan.
They would have done everything different if they weren't rational.
Everything China does, you might not like it, but you can see the glaring common sense to it from their perspective.
So, no, you do not have to study this.
Nobody releases a deadly virus in their own city first when you can release it somewhere else.
Now that we know that the virus came from the lab and therefore was part of a weaponization or at least gain of function, which sounds like weaponization, This might explain some of the mysteries that I had during the pandemic.
I was trying to understand why.
And the problem is that I knew it was from the lab from the first weeks.
You know, I told you.
A friend of mine showed me the Google map long before it was in the news.
Nobody in the news had heard of it.
He said, you know, it's right across the street from the Wuhan.
A lab of, I don't know, with the perfect name for exactly this.
And as soon as I saw that, I was like, oh, obviously.
They're just saying it came from the wet market.
But clearly, that would be too big of a coincidence that the lab that does this exact work is across the street.
So I knew it was weaponized.
Weaponized or at least gain a function, which would end up looking like the same thing.
And so when people said, Scott, don't get the shots.
It's just a cold.
If you thought it was just a cold, it would be ridiculous to get a shot, wouldn't it?
If it was just a cold, why would you take a chance on a new medicine in the form of a shot?
That'd be crazy.
But if you knew that it was a gain of function and therefore unpredictable, wouldn't it be at least a toss-up that if you took some kind of technology that was designed to minimize its impact on you, the shot, Now, again, you didn't know if it would work.
You don't know what the side effects are.
There's a big risk.
We all agree that no matter what else, it was a risk to take the shot.
But it was also a pretty big risk to be completely unprotected and get a weaponized virus, especially since you didn't know what the long-term effects were, the so-called long COVID. So, if you thought it was a slam-dunk decision, Probably you thought it was also a cold.
And that means you probably didn't know that it came from a weaponized lab.
But what I'm seeing is people who knew it came from a gain-of-function lab, meaning either accidentally or intentionally weaponized, and you still said it was a cold.
You must have really not trusted that lab to make some good stuff if you thought it was just a cold.
Well, they've been working hard.
They made the common cold or something.
No worse than the common cold.
Anyway, the Houthis in Yemen that were disrupting all the ship traffic in the Red Sea by shooting them with missiles, they said that they're going to stop doing that as long as the ceasefire in Gaza holds.
Okay.
Apparently the ships that would use the Red Sea have decided that's not good enough.
They don't trust the Houthis to not attack them, and they shouldn't.
Because I don't think that by the time you send your ship into the Red Sea, it could be five minutes from the ceasefire falling apart.
So yeah, it would be pretty dangerous to assume that they're not going to shoot you because of a ceasefire that may not hold.
But it really made me wonder, is that really what the Houthis care about?
The only thing that they care about is Gaza?
Did we know that before?
Or are they just pretending that's the thing they care about so that they have a reason to stop doing it?
I was pretty sure, you know, obviously they're backed by Iran.
So whatever Iran wants is what the Houthis are doing.
But did Iran just say to the Houthis, stand down as long as the ceasefire holds?
Because that would almost suggest that they really mostly cared about Gaza.
That doesn't seem completely right, does it?
So there's something about this that doesn't add up.
But the first thing that makes me wonder is apparently Trump has suggested that...
Let me find his exact words here.
Trump has suggested for Gaza that they clear out the whole thing.
Basically take all the people in Gaza, relocate them.
Temporarily or permanently.
And then fix whatever is Gaza and then decide later if anybody can come back.
Now, that's pretty dramatic.
But I think he's talking to Jordan and Egypt about taking the Gaza residents.
Not that the Gaza residents want to go to either of those places, but where they are now is probably not so cool.
But here's what's wrong with that.
Egypt and Jordan are not our enemies.
Am I right?
I mean, Egypt and Jordan are sort of, you know, Jordan especially is somebody we work with all the time.
Why would we send Hamas, because the Hamas people are a big part of, you know, they're going to be part of the Gazans who are moved anywhere.
Why would we move a whole bunch of Hamas fighters into an ally or somebody that we at least would like to work with, like Egypt?
That doesn't make sense, does it?
Wouldn't it make more sense to tell Iran they have to take them?
Because Iran's the one that broke it.
If you broke it, you bought it.
Let me just float this idea.
So this is in the context of the bad idea concept, if you haven't heard this before.
The bad idea is when you suggest a bad idea just to brainstorm.
And then people say, that's a stupid idea, Scott.
But you remind me of something that would work.
So I'm going to give you the bad idea, the stupid, embarrassing one, because I have that superpower.
I have no shame.
So I can do embarrassing ideas that maybe just you think of a better one.
And then that's the goal.
All right?
Suppose Trump and, I guess, Netanyahu say, here's what we want to do.
Iran is the one who's backing Hamas.
Iran is the one who's the main sponsor.
Iran's the one that broke it.
They're all going to Iran.
And then Iran says, whoa, hold on, hold on.
We're Shia and they're Sunni and it doesn't work.
And we say, we don't care.
You've been backing them.
They're yours.
So if you want them to have a good life, open up some space in Iran.
Take care of them.
You're the one who got us in this situation.
It's not ours to fix.
So why don't you do something really good for the Gazans and build a really nice, safe place for them in Iran.
We promise that if we get in a fight with Iran, we won't even bomb them.
They'll be nice and safe.
So Iran, why don't you take them back?
And here's the thing.
Of course Iran is going to say no.
At least in minute one they're going to say no.
Of course they're going to say no.
But the framing is kind of smart.
The framing would be, you broke it, you bought it, and that's the end of the story.
Now, would this be a terrible tragedy to the Gazans?
Yes.
It would be a terrible tragedy if they didn't think they could go back.
But I wouldn't rule out that somebody carefully vetted could come back once Gaza is rebuilt into something.
I wouldn't take any of the Hamas fighters back, but it does seem like you could probably do enough vetting that some people could come back, just not the Hamas fighters.
And maybe you'd have to...
It could be that it would just recreate the problem.
So if we decided never to do that, not we, but if they decided never to do that, it wouldn't be unconscionable.
It would just be a practical decision.
All right.
So that's the question.
We should tell Iran they have to take them because it's their problem, not anybody else's.
The chief of the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, over at Davos, I think, was saying, according to Breitbart, that Europe should be more like the U.S. And I think this is all from Trump.
I don't think they would have even said this before.
So the European economy, as you know, has lagged behind the U.S. by quite a bit.
They've invented practically nothing.
And so the head of the IMF said, the time has come for Europe to collectively look across the Atlantic and follow the U.S. lead as it grows in confidence daily under the leadership of President Donald Trump.
No, I think that's maybe Breitbart's take on it.
But the actual quote is, The United States has a culture of confidence.
Europe has a culture of modesty.
Georgieva said, I guess she's the head of the IMF, quote, my advice to my fellow Europeans is more confidence.
Believe in yourself and most importantly, tell others that you do.
Okay.
Do you think that the problem, do you think that the big problem between Europe And the United States is confidence.
Do you think maybe they got that backwards?
Do you know what would make Europe confident?
Winning.
Winning.
Winning makes you confident.
You know what makes you not confident?
Losing.
Losing to somebody else.
So, could it be that their real problem is structural?
Meaning that they have red tape like crazy.
They have government in everybody's pockets.
Basically, everything's wrong.
I don't think they have the venture capital structure that we have in this country.
If you fixed all the structural, wouldn't Europe have success?
And wouldn't success make them confident?
Probably.
I don't think that America somehow raised a bunch of confident people independent of success.
There are people like me who are confident before they're successful.
But I think I was just born that way.
I don't think it has anything to do with America.
Don't you think there are some confident people being born in Europe?
Like none?
What, they have some kind of weird genetic defect that affects all the nationalities in all of Europe?
They all have the low confidence genetic defect?
Or do the schools teach them not to be confident?
It seems more likely that there's a structural problem, and if they fix that, the confidence would follow, but that's just speculation.
Anyway, what else is happening?
According to Michael Schellenberger, the CIA under Biden broke the law in not releasing its analysis of the Wuhan lab.
So I guess the CIA... Already had that opinion that it was probably the Wuhan lab that was a source of the leak, but by not releasing it, which would be their job, if it weren't for Trump, the truth may not have come out.
All right, that's interesting.
So we do need to look into that.
Meanwhile, Britain has a firefighting robot that can spray 2,000 liters of water in a minute, according to interesting engineering.
Huh, a robot that can fire...
Spray 2,000 liters of water.
Well, luckily there was a video so I could see that the robot was not a humanoid robot.
Because if it had been a humanoid robot that could shoot 2,000 liters of water, the question I would ask is, where is the water coming out of?
Because I just imagined this robot.
Now, never mind.
You can do the joke in your own head.
I don't have to explain it.
Did you know that John McAfee, who died a few years ago, Allegedly by his own hand.
He's back in the form of AI. So I guess his X account, which I think is managed by his widow, says, yeah, this is real.
It's really an AI of John McAfee.
I guess it talks like him.
It has his attitude and everything.
And he's launching a crypto coin.
Of course he is.
So that's interesting.
I wonder what software they're using for that.
Because I kept wanting to make an AI me, but I don't think the software is there yet.
In other news, Perplexity, the app, it's an AI app, that I keep telling you is great, and it is great.
It's one of the best things, honestly.
I tried a whole bunch of AI apps, and every time I got disappointed, it's like, oh, I thought it would do something more than that.
But when I tried the Perplexity app for searching and asking questions, oh my God, did they nail that.
They nailed that like just about nothing I've ever seen.
So in terms of execution, a big shout out to the Perplexity AI team.
You guys are geniuses.
Oh my God.
Just the quality of the app, because I use it all the time.
Every day I use it several times.
And every time I'm impressed.
It just doesn't fail.
It's just so good.
Anyway, their valuation went from not much to $9 billion, and I guess that gives them the confidence to put together a bid for TikTok.
And their bid would do something to keep the existing stockholders in it somehow, but would give the United States, the government of America, it would give them a 50% Of the benefit if it goes public, I guess.
So there could be several hundred billion dollars at stake here if it goes public.
And if it goes public under the new form.
So it's more of a merger situation than a purchase.
I guess they wouldn't purchase the algorithm.
So they'd have to invent their own algorithm.
But, again...
If it was anybody but perplexity that said they were going to reinvent the algorithm that was so good, you'd say, hmm, can they do that?
But once I've seen what they did with perplexity, they certainly have the skill.
Whatever they're doing is really, really right.
So yeah, maybe they can.
So I don't know if this is going to work out, but it's a complicated kind of proposal.
They may have answered all the questions.
You know, it's a long ways from it getting done.
You know, if I had to bet, I'm not sure I'd bet for it, but that's a real interesting offer.
Real interesting offer.
Did you know how many children are born to illegal immigrants in the United States?
According to Just the News, Nicholas Balazy.
Writes that in 2023, there were a quarter million children born to illegal immigrants, to use their phrase.
That's a lot.
Now, of course, the birthright citizenship thing is working through the courts, so we'll probably end up in the Supreme Court.
And here's what I have discovered in this two movies on one screen situation.
If you're a Democrat, the only thing that you've been told by your news is that it clearly says in the Constitution, That birthright citizenship exists.
And if you're born here, that's the end of the story.
Would you agree?
That if you're a Democrat, that's all you've heard.
All you heard is it's in the Constitution.
Done.
What else is there to say?
But if you're a Republican, you didn't hear that.
If you're a Republican, you heard a completely different story in which the person who originally tweaked the language in the...
The birthright citizenship part of the Constitution, he said directly, and in his own words, it was not intended for aliens or non-citizens.
It wasn't intended for them.
Now, here's where it gets interesting.
The Supreme Court has a lot of originalists on it, conservatives who want to interpret things the way they were originally meant to be interpreted.
Lindsey Graham said that he thinks there's a good chance the Supreme Court will uphold the banning of illegal foreign people using it for, let's say, gaming the system.
So I don't know if Lindsey Graham has a good handle on what the Supreme Court will do, but he's a serious guy, and there's a serious argument for it.
The argument against it, well, let me say this.
If the only thing the court looked at was what was the original intent, it's actually a slam dunk.
It's a slam dunk that they did not intend foreigners to come in and have a baby and make it an American.
That seems to be clear if you go with the original argument.
And it all has to do with what the word jurisdiction meant, and I'm still not clear about how that's important in the story.
But apparently, if we know that the person who wrote it...
I mean it to be this and not that.
That's pretty clear.
So, we'll see.
But the precedent of doing it to include anybody who's here for any reason is so long that I don't know if the Supreme Court is going to say, you know, it's been too long.
You know, there's too much precedent.
Maybe.
Maybe.
But what's different is the risk is completely different now.
And I don't know to what extent the Supreme Court takes that into consideration.
So let's say they had a situation where if they rule one way, they think they're right in terms of the Constitution, but it would clearly be really dangerous for the country itself.
Would they do it?
Or would they say, we don't want to destroy the country, so we're going to rule in a way that doesn't rock the boat too much?
I don't know.
You know, I don't think that they would be oblivious to the impact on the country and just look at the law, but they're kind of supposed to, right?
It's sort of their job just to look at the law and not worry too much about the externals, but I think they have to as human beings.
All right.
Yeah, they certainly rocked the boat with abortion, but really they just kicked it to the states.
Which isn't that much.
I mean, that isn't that much.
What's this?
Born in the USA, rethinking birthright citizenship in the wake of 9-11.
John Eastman.
So John Eastman wrote about this.
All right.
All right.
Just looking at your comments.
That's all I've got for today's show.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I'm feeling a lot better.
And I still can't walk too well on that one leg, but that'll be fine by the end of the day.
And I'm going to say hi to the locals people privately.
