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Politics, DeepSeek AI, OpenAI, Alibaba AI, MSNBC Propaganda, Joy Reid, NJ Drones, President Trump, Border Encounters Decline, EO Bans Chemical Surgical Mutilation, China Panama Canal, Jessica Tarlov, USAID Officials Removed, Mike Benz, Federal Employee Buyouts, Pulitzer Prize Lawsuit, RFK Jr. Confirmation Hearing, Nicole Shanahan, LA Fires Consultant, Matthew Berman, DeepSeek Self-Improvement, White House Hoax Tracking, General Milley, CNN Catherine Rampell, Elon Musk, Tesla FSD, AG Letitia James, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Germany Growth Rate, Denmark's Greenland Security, 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, but...
If you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or a micro glass, a tank or a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go.
So good.
Well, let's check in with the science.
Sure enough, morning coffee drinkers have 12% lower risk of all-cause mortality.
But apparently, that's a new study, but apparently, you've got to get it in the morning.
For some reason, if you wait until the afternoon to have your coffee, your all-cause mortality is not that much better.
But get it early, and you're going to live forever at this rate.
In other science, According to study finds, there's a desert plant that shows promise as a treatment for colorectal cancer.
Now, I don't know how they deliver it, and I'm just hoping it's not a cactus.
Well, let me check.
Oh, it's a shrub.
Yeah, a shrub would be no problem.
I've tried to cure my colorectal cancer.
I don't have that, but if I did, I would sit on a...
Sit on the cactus if I thought it would help.
Anyway, it's only a shrub.
It shouldn't be so hard.
In insider trading, Nancy Pelosi's husband made some more excellent calls.
Of course, we're assuming that he knows a little bit too much because Congress has insider information sometimes.
But I was looking at a couple of the examples.
And the two examples of his insider trading are that he somewhat recently sold his Apple stock and a good chunk of his Nvidia, but not all of it.
Those are the same trades I made.
I don't have any insider.
You don't need any insider knowledge to trade those two things.
Apple is at a point where AI is likely to disrupt their whole business model, and it doesn't.
It appears that they're extra good at AI. So I sold mine because I thought, you know, Apple went from sort of a monopoly kind of a company to anything could happen at this point.
And as you know, NVIDIA, even before the new news, it had such a run that it would be time to take some money off the table.
So you have to be careful with these insider trading stories.
If the insiders are making exactly the same trades as the outsiders, like me, literally, it's the only two stocks I sold, I think.
No, there was one other that was a special case.
But if I'm making the same trades at about the same time, I do believe that insider trading is a real thing and it should be addressed.
But not everything they sell.
Sometimes it's just obvious stuff.
Well, men are becoming more obsolete than ever, according to Brighter Side of the News.
Scientists have figured out how to use stem cells in mice to make their own mouse sperm so that the female mouse doesn't need a real mate or real sperm.
They can just make it out of some kind of stem cells.
So let me look ahead.
Let's see.
We're about a year away from robots doing everything that men can do that requires strength.
So we don't have the strength thing going for us.
But at least we're the only ones who can make sperm.
Okay, we're not the only ones who can make sperm now.
I guess the scientists can whip it up in the lab.
Whip it up in the lab, if you know what I mean.
No, really, it's from stem cells.
How do we know it's from stem cells, though?
I don't trust those scientists at all.
You know what I mean?
Anyway, men are obsolete.
We'll be in about a year.
So, you know, so here's another one of my unbelievably good predictions.
So good, I wonder why you listen to anybody else.
Remember when I told you that I sold my NVIDIA stock a while ago because I thought there'd be some major disruption, you know, some technology that showed you didn't have to do these big data centers and whatnot?
And sure enough, so DeepSeek comes out, the Chinese open source AI that costs 5% to make and it's almost as good.
But I also predicted, and here was my more clever prediction, that you shouldn't be that afraid of it, at least in terms of disrupting America's AI.
Because first of all, America AI would keep moving forward and probably they have some advantages because of the big training facilities that they have that DeepSeek does not.
But I also told you that the government of the United States would organize against it.
So to make it illegal or there would be lawsuits, basically it would just be tied up in all kinds of legal maneuvers like TikTok.
You know, TikTok being caught up in the government political process.
So I was pretty sure that it would be heavily attacked, and sure enough, here's what we know.
OpenAI is looking into complaints that maybe was trained on just looking at OpenAI.
Now, I'm not sure I believe this next part, but it comes from people who know way more than I do.
Apparently, there's a way to train an AI model where if there's already a model that is trained, like OpenAI, ChatGPT, You can have the one you're training, just ask the one that already exists millions of questions.
And then it just answers the questions, and then the new thing is also trained.
Does that seem real to you?
How in the world could it ask enough questions?
I get that it's fast, and there's no human involved, so it's digital.
But can you really connect to open AI? If you're just a user and ask it millions of questions a minute until you've sucked all of its knowledge, that doesn't feel like that could happen.
Wouldn't OpenAI have guardrails that say you can't have that much traffic all at the same time?
Or it would be so expensive nobody could do it?
I don't know.
There's something about it that's not connecting in terms of probably just my understanding of it.
But I don't know how it could possibly ask millions of questions and then reproduce it.
That doesn't even seem slightly possible based on what I know about anything.
But we'll see.
The smart people say that's a thing.
So OpenAI is going to go after it for stealing their IP. Because OpenAI says, hmm, we're seeing indications they may have trained on our IP, which is interesting, because a whistleblower recently died under mysterious circumstances for allegedly having evidence that OpenAI may have trained on some copyrighted work.
So you've got the one that may have trained on copyrighted work that's going to sue somebody for copying...
The work that was copied, maybe from the copyrighted...
Okay, it's getting a little confusing.
But what seems critical is that whoever has the most money to hire lawyers is going to prevail.
And right now, that's OpenAI.
Let's see what else is happening.
We're also talking about the data security problem and maybe even the persuasion propaganda problem with this DeepSeek model.
So, as I predicted, It would first of all be getting sued, and next the government would say, hey, it's too dangerous to have this, you know, Chinese spy application, you know, they might call it.
So all that's happening, exactly as I said, and the U.S. Navy is banning it.
They're going to ban DeepSeek AI over, quote, security concerns, because there's, yeah, so security concerns.
So it's basically already being banned.
Now, who predicted that?
I think I'm the only one, right?
Did anybody else say, oh, it'll just get caught up in politics and lawsuits and you're not going to have to worry about it?
That's what it looks like.
Meanwhile, Alibaba just introduced its own AI. This is brand new.
Didn't see this coming.
And it claims to be the fastest one.
Faster than OpenAI and DeepSeek and everything else.
That's what they claim.
Now, question number two.
Am I wrong that Alibaba is a fully Chinese-owned company?
And if it's true that DeepSeek may have had access to a lot, but a smaller number than the U.S. of those NVIDIA chips, Which seem necessary to at least get going.
How in the world is Alibaba creating something that's better than all the other ones?
Do they also have a whole bunch of fake, or not fake, but do they have a bunch of illegal chips too?
How many NVIDIA chips made it to China?
It feels like that would be exactly the sort of thing we'd have the most control over.
But were we sending it to some country that then sent it to China?
Because how in the world do they get it?
It's not like they're stealing it.
So I got big questions about NVIDIA chips and Alibaba.
Maybe we'll find that out today.
So as I tell you, I'm always listening to MSNBC for the comedy.
It's becoming more and more hilarious that their only coverage is comparing stuff to Hitler, and usually Republicans.
So here's what they had today.
Today they had their guest, Ghirard Haradas.
He claimed that, this is MSNBC, the guest claimed that Trump is trying to make America white again by deporting illegal aliens.
Well, I don't know if anybody knows this, but Trump has nothing to do with the color of the immigrants.
He doesn't have any control over what color they are when they come in the country.
He only has control over not letting non-citizens in the country.
But there's literally a pointy hair.
This is the guest who has this gray hair that's pointed like a paintbrush he just dipped in paint.
It's so dumb.
All he's doing is doing the law exactly the way the public wants him to do it.
It's not his fault that the people coming in are more one color than another one.
It's not Trump's fault.
And then Joy Reid says that Trump enforcing immigration law is just like Hitler orchestrating the Holocaust.
That's all she has.
Is that?
She goes, similarities to what happened in Germany and what's happening now in America are just undeniable.
Are they?
Are they undeniable?
History may not repeat verbatim, but it sure does rhyme.
Yeah, Hitler rhymes with Schittler.
So I guess we learned something there.
No, you're not supposed to figure out what's true by looking at what rhymes.
If I could give you one bit of advice about understanding the world, things that rhyme are largely coincidence.
Yeah, if it rhymes, that's not really telling you anything.
But it sounds good when you say it.
Then Tim Walsh is a guest on MSNBC, and he says, quote, of course Elon Musk did a Nazi salute.
He treats it like it's a fact.
And it's the most obviously not a fact thing that's ever happened.
Anyway, so it made me think.
I've never seen MSNBC do sports or weather.
I don't know if the TV platform has that.
So I was wondering, what would it be like if MSNBC started covering sports and weather?
Would it still be comparing everything to Hitler?
Would the weather be...
It looks like it's going to be colder than Hitler's balls today.
It's going to be snowing more than the dandruff on Hitler's shoulder.
And then they're going to switch over to the sports.
It's like, that running back, he hit the gap like Hitler invading Poland.
And I feel like they would, even for the weather, they'd replace Fahrenheit with some kind of Hitler measure.
Well...
Looks like it's 32 Hitlers today, so wear your jacket.
Anyway, speaking of that, apparently an armed man was arrested in the Capitol, who authorities say planned to kill what the armed man called Nazis.
Huh, Nazis.
Hmm, where would he get that idea?
And that included, in his view, Pete Hegseth, Mike Johnson, and Scott Besant.
If I'm pronouncing that, is it Besant or Besant?
The Treasury Secretary, new Treasury Secretary.
Now, here's my question.
What news source would he possibly be watching that would make him think that there were actual Hitler-like characters in the United States government and he would have to take action because it's so real?
Could it be MSNBC? Now, you want to get a real shock?
Why does Joy Reid still have her job?
Is it because her ratings are good?
No.
They're not even good on MSNBC. They're not as good as her peers, as far as I can tell.
But she keeps her job.
Why is that?
Why do you think that is?
As absurd and silly, just calling Trump Hitler all day long?
Nothing really else to say?
Well, here's what I worry about.
Don't we generally hear that MSNBC and NBC tend to be some of the most controlled news?
Meaning it's not really news, it's propaganda or internal intelligence people.
CIA seem to have some kind of connection with some news sources more than others.
And it is generally widely considered by people who follow this sort of thing that MSNBC is a controlled news platform, meaning that they're kind of doing what the intelligence people want them to do.
And so my question is this.
Is Joy Reid only employed because she says Trump is Hitler?
And is that what the intelligence people want MSNBC to say?
Because if they didn't want him to say it...
She would already be out.
So the disturbing thing is that the whole Hitler, Hitler, Hitler thing appears to be either approved by or actually initiated by our own government.
That's what it looks like.
Now, there's no way to know that from my perspective.
But if it's true that MSNBC is just, you know, a CIA fake news outlet, which it appears to be.
I mean, all the indications.
It really doesn't seem like they're being serious about any kind of news.
It doesn't look like they're even trying.
So I guess I have a question.
Is that what our own government is selling us?
Is there a part of our government that's selling us that the government is a Nazi government?
That doesn't seem like a good idea.
Anyway, Trump finally revealed...
Not personally, but there was an announcement that the drones over New Jersey were authorized by the FAA for research and others were just normal commercial traffic.
Just normal drone traffic, all licensed and approved and some of it for research.
So how many of you guessed it was aliens or an Iranian or Chinese attack?
If you guessed...
Chinese or Iranian attack, or some kind of surveillance, or aliens from another planet, you're not winning this round.
My prediction was it was going to be normal, approved traffic.
But I also suggested that there might be some things up there that we've not seen before, possibly because they're doing a bake-off.
To maybe show their products to somebody like the government before the government makes a decision on what vendors to buy stuff from, specifically drones.
So I don't know if that's true, but they're calling it research.
It seems to me that you wouldn't fly a drone over heavily populated areas for research, would you?
What kind of research?
Is it research to see if the drone works?
Research to find out how much data it can collect from our own people?
What exactly were they researching?
So that's a big question.
So I think we can agree that every time the government tells us something about secret stuff, you never really know if that's true.
Let me say it directly.
Trump, as Commander-in-Chief, does not have an obligation to tell us the truth.
If the truth is bad for the country.
So, if it turns out that he looked into it and found, oh, damn, I can't tell them the whole truth, but I can tell them enough of the truth to make them stop worrying.
Okay, it's not an alien, and we're not being attacked.
That's all I really wanted to know.
I didn't really have questions beyond that, because if there's something going on beyond that, that the military knows about, but we're not supposed to know about...
I'm perfectly okay with my president, no matter what party they are, just not revealing that, being a little subtle about that.
That's okay.
That's part of the job.
So I don't need to know everything, but I do appreciate knowing that they, if it's true, I don't see any possibility that it was an enemy action and Trump wouldn't tell us.
That doesn't seem real.
So I'm pretty sure we don't have to worry about it.
That's my only take on that.
Well, let's see.
What things has Trump accomplished in his one week?
Border encounters are down 93%.
In one week.
Border encounters.
That's just encounters.
Just any kind of encounter.
93%.
Now, if you're a Democrat, do you not even notice the difference?
I mean, that's pretty dramatic.
Now, it could be that there'll be another uptick, because it could be that the people planning to come or sort of waiting to see what happens, and then maybe they'll adjust and try some other way to get in.
But at the moment, it's pretty impressive.
I saw a post from Insurrection Barbie on X. Pointing out that Bill Clinton deported 12 million illegals and the media didn't say anything.
Barack Obama deported 3 million illegals.
Media didn't say anything.
Fine with that.
But when Trump deported 1 million in his first term, the media brands him a racist and a Nazi.
You see how all this works?
He does one-twelfth of what Bill Clinton does.
One-twelfth.
And he's branded a Nazi.
And Bill Clinton is branded one of the greatest presidents ever by the Democrats.
All right, so that's what we got.
Trump signed an executive order trying to ban trans-surgery and trans-chemical transitions, I guess.
Now, it's not a direct ban.
It's a, we'll take your federal funding if you're an institution that's...
Do you think it'll stick?
I think there'll be lawsuits.
But it would be pretty risky for any institution to lose their federal funding because I'm pretty sure it's not a bluff.
The one thing I'm sure of is it's not a bluff.
Chemical castration would be part of what's being banned.
So that is pretty bold.
That is very bold.
Now, is it my imagination, or has the trans mania just completely disappeared?
So, how many years have we been talking about trans issues?
It seems like non-stop every day.
And during that entire time, I met zero trans people.
None.
I didn't run into any.
Did you?
It was always so much of a bigger story than it was anything that affects the larger public.
Of course, if you're in that situation, it affects you a lot.
But for most of us, we just didn't even have any contact with that entire segment of the world.
Or maybe we didn't know, didn't notice.
But I want the best.
I want the best for all the...
Trans people as well as everybody else.
But I like having less news on this topic.
I just want to talk about something that isn't trans and isn't a comparison to Hitler.
That's all I want.
So we'll see how that plays out.
I think Trump's on the right side of history on that.
So Trump has warned that Panama is rapidly, allegedly, Taking down its signs that were written in China.
In Chinese, I mean.
They were written in Chinese in Panama.
So the idea here is that Trump is saying China has too much control on the Panama Canal.
And one way that that's obvious is if you go there, there are more signs in Chinese than there are in other languages.
So he's saying that...
They're rapidly taking down the Chinese signs, so it's not so obvious who's controlling them.
I thought there was some question about whether China has control of the Panama Canal.
I think Republicans say it's a fact, and I think Democrats say China doesn't control the Panama Canal.
Am I right that there are two movies on one screen there?
The Democrats have a completely different idea.
What's going on?
I think so.
So one of the things I find useful is watching The Five on Fox News, especially when Jessica Tarloff is on the panel.
She's the most reliable Democrat to have the alternative story.
You know, sometimes there are different people in that chair, but she's really useful.
Because, you know, the fake news isn't on one side.
You know, there's a little fake news on both sides, right?
So I'm sometimes, I've got a little blind spot to what the Democrats' version of the story is.
So she's really good at giving you the quick version of the Democrat side of things.
You know, of course, then all heck breaks out because it's a fun show with lots of energy.
I think probably maybe 10 times in the last year or two, I've heard something from her that I hadn't seen on my regular looks through the news.
So, very useful.
You don't have to agree with the other side, but you'd be crazy not to know what the argument is.
So, at least listen to the argument.
All right.
The Trump administration pushed out...
Apparently it's getting rid of 60 career officials at an entity called USAID, which is not an aid organization.
I don't want to get too deeply into that, but let me just say this.
If it doesn't mean anything to you when I say that, that 60 officials were removed from USAID, then there's a gigantic part of America.
That you're missing.
And I would refer you to Mike Benz to understand why neutering that organization might be really important.
Because it's just one of these entities that you didn't know was doing a lot of stuff that you weren't aware of and you were paying for if you're an American taxpayer.
So the Trump administration seems to be targeting All the things that really needed to be targeted, and they're doing it quickly.
It's very impressive.
I have to say I'm totally impressed.
Trump administration is also offering these buybacks, or not buybacks, buyouts for employees.
So I guess you'll get eight months' pay if you decide to go by next week.
So there's a website where you can volunteer to go, and you get...
Eight months of pay if you go now.
If you don't go now, you still might be laid off later, but without the eight months of pay.
So I'm guessing you get something, but much less.
So this is a really clever way to get things going.
Now, what's going to happen, and you're seeing it already, is that people who are not good at doing anything...
We're going to have all kinds of ideas about how it's being done wrong.
Here's specifically what people who don't know how things work are going to say.
They're going to say, hey, you froze or you cut too much too soon without looking at all the details.
That's not a mistake.
It will be true that if the administration does exactly what it should do, in other words, if it acts...
In the smartest, most capable way, it will cut way too much, way too fast, without checking.
That's the only way you can get there.
Because the only way you're going to find out what's true is to cut stuff and find out who screams.
The amount of pain that you cause is almost the only good indicator of what's working and what's true.
Every government entity...
That Trump and company want to cut.
Everyone will be lying to them.
They're all liars.
There is no way you can study and take extra time to find out who you should fund and who you should get rid of.
Can't be done because everybody's a liar.
So here's what you do instead.
All right.
I don't see any reason for this place.
We should talk to them and see if they have a good argument.
No.
You just stop the funding.
And you just see what happens.
Now, if you don't have experience, you would say, that is a little crazy, Scott.
You don't just fire first and then make a plan after you've started.
You make a plan first and then you execute the plan.
Nope.
Not in this case.
In this case, you just have to run in and start punching stuff.
Because you've got to just destroy the current assumptions, destroy the current...
Comfort.
You've just got to shake that box until everybody's dizzy.
Then you might start seeing something useful, and you're going to have to take a bunch of guesses, and it's going to be messy, messy, messy.
But here's what you can't do.
The certain way to fail is low energy.
The certain way to fail, and by the way, failing to cut the budget is the end of humanity.
I mean, it would be the end of the United States and God knows what would follow, right?
Because the world has a lot of dependence on the United States.
We'd survive, but we might be living in tribes or something.
So the level of risk involved in continuing to spend the way we are is really it's 100% doom.
So doing what we're doing in the normal way is 100% doom.
There really is no escape.
If you go wild with, let's say, putting full energy into cutting costs and you cut too deeply, what is the risk of that?
Well, there's definitely risk.
There is risk.
There's risk to individual components of the country.
And that's real.
And we should be smart about those risks and we should try to...
Adjust and we should try to make it easy on people when it makes sense.
But you gotta do it.
That's the important thing.
If you don't put full energy into cutting and disrupting and shaking the box and getting rid of people before you've fully investigated, you can't get there.
You just can't get there from here.
Any kind of a low energy traditional attack would be, well, I've created a committee and the committee will be spending 18 months Are researching what should be cut.
And the way they'll research it is they'll ask the opinions of the people they plan to cut.
Hey, you're in charge of this department.
How much should we cut?
What?
You don't want to be cut?
You have to increase 20% next year because otherwise the world will come to an end?
Oh, well, we'll put that together in a report and then we'll go back to the government in 18 months.
Oh, but we're a little late, so we had to delay.
It really took two years.
Oh, wait a minute.
We're halfway through Trump's entire term.
No point in doing it now because they'll just fight it and they'll never get done before the end of the term.
No, you cannot do a low energy major cut.
You have to go high energy, high mistake.
High energy, high mistake.
It's the only path.
And the only people who are smart enough to know that are Elon Musk, Trump.
And, you know, Vivek would know it.
You know, Sachs would know it.
Ackman would know it.
I'm sure Andreessen knows it.
I'll bet you you can't find anybody with a high IQ to disagree.
Let me lay down the gauntlet here.
I say nobody, nobody who's got a high IQ, and the Trump administration has just freaking geniuses at this point, not one of them would disagree with going high energy, High potential mistake versus, you know, our ordinary study it to death and do nothing approach.
And it's going to be hard to educate the people who don't have experience that it's the only way.
We ran out of options.
We only have one way to survive.
This is it.
This is it.
And by the way, this is not an exaggeration.
This is for survival.
And I don't think I've ever said that before.
Usually everything else is, well, we're trying to optimize, we're trying to avoid some trouble.
No.
The debt, this is survival.
And we have to put 100% into it.
All right.
This is interesting.
Apparently, Trump is suing the Pulitzer Prize Committee.
For having given Pulitzer Prizes to the New York Times and Washington Post over their Russia collusion fake news.
Now, I don't think this can succeed.
I've never seen anything like it.
So it's one thing to sue the people with the fake news.
And I don't know that that's happening.
I don't think he's suing the New York Times and the Washington Post over Russia collusion stories.
But if he's suing the Pulitzer Committee because they gave awards and didn't take them back, I think they'd be happy if they were just rescinded.
So something tells me that the real play is just to get them to admit that they gave awards to fake news and then have them just correct it and say, okay, we disavow or we rescind the award.
I don't know if you could rescind the award, but...
You could say we disavow it now, or it was a mistake.
So it could be that the lawsuit is really just to get them to do something that they should have done anyway, which is admit when they made a gigantic mistake.
Well, RFK Jr. should be sitting there right now in his confirmation hearing.
So that's happening right now.
We're expecting it to be brutal.
And we don't know if he's going to get through.
I will tell you that if somehow RFK Jr. doesn't get through, the level of disappointment I would feel for the Republicans would be off the chart.
Just off the chart.
I could never forgive this.
Let me say that directly.
Anybody who votes against RFK Jr. Given that he might be the only one who can save us from our food supply and bad pharma, I'm taking this really personally.
This is not politics to me.
This is my life.
I mean, this is, you know, kids.
This is personal.
This is not politics whatsoever.
So I'm going to echo what Nicole Shanahan said.
She said that Bobby Kennedy might be nice, but she's not.
And she's got a list of people that have not said they'll vote for him.
Mostly Republicans, but not entirely.
Fetterman's on the list.
And she said she's going to personally fund primary challengers to anybody who votes against Kennedy.
I'm going to personally do what I can to destroy the lives of anybody who votes against him.
You know, I'm not sure I have much power, but...
To the extent that maligning them every single day on social media is useful, I'm just going to go animal because this has to happen.
Now, you can say, well, what if things go wrong?
Well, let's worry about that if it happens.
I mean, it's not like he has the ability to change something so quickly that people are going to be dropping dead.
Everything will be carefully considered.
He does like science, even if the Democrats are too dumb to realize it.
And I don't feel any flexibility on this.
No flexibility.
This one just has to get done.
There's no option on this one.
Sorry.
All the other ones, all the other ones, I didn't really care about Pete Hegseth, honestly.
I didn't really care almost any of them.
I didn't really care.
I thought there were people who could do those jobs.
The people that Trump picked are good picks.
But I didn't care.
This is the one I care about.
This is the one that will activate me.
This is the one that's going to make hell come at those people who vote against it.
And I'd like you to join me.
I think all Republicans have to just go...
We have to just go barbarian on this.
This one just has to get done.
I mean, it's the issue of the age beyond.
I mean, obviously, the debt's the imminent one.
But this is way too big.
This is way too big to let politics get in the way.
And I don't trust anybody who would vote against them because it either means they're stupid or bought.
And boy, if they act stupid or bought, they're going to have a tough, tough time ahead of them.
Because we're not going to forget this one.
Not at all.
So, thank you, Nicole Shanahan.
But, by the way, this is exactly what I was talking about with the Trump way of doing things.
Have you noticed that just individual citizens are saying stuff like, all right, well, here's this gap.
There's this thing that needs to be handled.
And you look around and you say, nobody's doing anything.
Like, nobody's making the threat real.
And then Nicole says, I can do it.
And then she does it.
And now it's news.
And now I can boost it.
So that's what I can do.
Like, I wanted to do something too, but just complaining didn't seem enough.
But if I'm boosting Nicole's message...
That's real money.
Now it's serious.
So I'm just jumping in because it's necessary.
If anybody else wants to jump in and boost Nicole's threat, I would welcome that.
Joel Pollack gives us an update on the Pacific Palisades cleanup.
I think it was originally predicted it would take 6 to 18 months to get rid of the toxins and allow people to rebuild.
But the latest, Is that it might get down to three months.
And according to Joel's reporting, there's a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rep who says, quote, that's far faster than I've ever seen on any other major fire.
And there's speculation that Trump is pushing hard on this.
And I hope that's what it is.
I don't know what Trump is doing behind the scenes, but certainly what he did in public should have been kind of a wake-up call.
Now, as I've told you, Mayor Bass has said that they hired a consultant to help them figure out what to do.
That just sounds like corruption to me.
That just sounds like corruption.
I'd like to see a picture of the consultant.
I'd like to know the relationship that that consultant has had in the past with the mayor.
Are they friends?
Have they worked together before?
Is it a Democrat?
Because I don't trust anything about the consultant, even without knowing anything about who they are.
It's just corruption as normal.
If you're looking to give the government's money to somebody, there's got to be some better way to control that money.
And then apparently there's some group putting together some, let's say, low-cost housing for the areas they used to be.
High-end neighborhoods.
So just like you imagined, the idyllic little neighborhood may be, let's say, upgraded to something that the residents don't love because it would increase their density, among other things.
Here's a little scary thing.
So DeepSeq, that open-source AI, According to Matthew Berman, he was playing with it, and he got it to upgrade its own code.
Now, being open source, that means that you could take the code of DeepSeek and upgrade it, if you had a good idea.
And so, I guess Matt Berman asked it to improve itself.
and it rose some code for itself and doubled its own speed.
Do you know what that means?
Now, first of all, I would like to see that confirmed, because the story is a little too on the nose, a little too perfect, and a little too provocative to necessarily believe.
That this is a reproducible thing and not just a fluke and that it's really twice as fast and there's no downside to it, etc.
So I would want more confirmation.
But if it's true, it would be the first hint of what's called the singularity, meaning when the AI can improve itself.
So in a small way, And I don't think it could have done it without the human approving each of the actions.
So it's not like it completely improved itself without any interaction.
But we're at the point where all you'd have to do is turn it into some kind of an agent and say, hey, here's the deal.
I want you to find out and just keep working on it.
Just keep improving yourself.
And then the AI would try different code.
Experiment with things until it made itself better.
And then we're in trouble.
Now, it's just the first indication of what's coming.
It's not the singularity.
The singularity is where humans just are going to lose control entirely because the machines will just be so far above us and improving so fast.
We'll just never be able to keep up.
They'll just take control.
That's the risk.
But, wow, might be closer than we think.
Well, here's some good news.
The White House is now tracking the hoaxes.
So the White House just did a press release, and the title of it is Debunking Latest Fake News Hoaxes.
Now, remember I've been telling you that the Trump administration takes suggestions from the public better than, not better than, I think I've never seen it before.
They just continually are looking for good ideas, and when they find one, they just implement it.
Exactly like you would hope things work.
And every time I see it, I think to myself, damn, that's like so impressive that they can implement ideas that are not their own pet ideas.
Now this one, almost certainly, comes from the fact that on the internet we were very successful with hoax lists.
To try to deprogram the other side.
And indeed, the fine people hoax getting debunked probably was a key to Trump winning a second term because it allowed a lot of the smartest people, you know, the Elon Musk, the Joe Rogans, to say, wait a minute, you fooled me.
You're not going to fool me again.
So debunking the hoaxes was always the secret weakness.
That the left had that we had not fully exploited.
And now watching it work on the internet with the various hoax lists, the White House created not only separately, they also created a rapid response account on social media.
So they'll correct hoaxes in real time.
I think they had that before on the first term.
But to actually announce the fake news hoaxes by press releases?
Oh my God, that's good.
They're actually making the fake news the news.
Because if the White House does a press release, that's a big deal.
Now, in my opinion, this is the biggest mistake that Trump made in the first term, not doing this.
Not once did I see the White House debunk the fine people hoax.
Even if they did, I never heard about it.
The drinking bleach hoax and all the other hoaxes.
But on social media, people were passing them around like crazy.
So let's do a hoax update.
So according to the White House, here are the four hoaxes that happened in the first week.
One week, four hoaxes.
Let's see which ones you caught.
There's the Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute, which obviously was a hoax.
There's Trump-paused Medicaid and SNAP benefits.
No, those were specifically excluded from his executive order.
All the things that were direct payments to people were explicitly excluded.
But the news reported that they were included to get everybody all worked up.
That was fake.
Then there's Governor J.B. Pritzker.
Said that, and also Chicago school officials, said that ICE raided a school.
That never happened.
There was a Secret Service thing that had nothing to do with anything about immigration, I guess.
So that was fake.
That's three.
And the fourth one was, Physicians Advocacy Group Opposes RFK Jr. for Health and Human Services Head.
No, that wasn't a physician's advocacy group.
It was a partisan bunch of Democrats.
It wasn't any kind of advocacy group.
All right.
So you've got four hoaxes in one week.
So let's say that the rate of hoaxes stays consistent.
So four per week, 52 weeks, take a few weeks off for vacation, 200 per year.
200 per year times four, four years of the term, 800. So the Democrats are on track.
I'm not making this up.
This is just math.
They're on track for 800 hoaxes by the end of Trump's term.
Now, we'll see if the rate increases or decreases, but the current rate, four per week, 800 over four years.
Which to me is pretty funny.
Anyway.
So, and the funniest thing about this newest hoax, about the spending cuts for things they're really not doing a spending cut to, I often talk about my, quote, smartest Democrat friend who is suffering with massive terminal TDS. And after Trump won, And he won by a solid majority, and even the Democrat left had said, huh, okay.
He got real quiet.
And I thought, surely after seeing that Biden really had a dead brain, and that the Democrats were covering it, and that they picked Kamala Harris against all Democratic norms, and that she was so bad she couldn't complete a sentence,
I thought to myself, well, surely now, surely now, my Democrat friend will admit, not only are Trump's policies the most popular ones, for most things, but that he's getting it done, and even the news is complimenting him.
Even Democrats were complimenting him sometimes.
So I thought, he's finally seen the light.
But he emerged yesterday by email.
Just as plucky as he was.
And why do you think he emerged?
Because he believed the fake news that there were all these benefits being cut, and he wanted me to know that once Trump's reputation goes in the toilet and his approval drops like a rock, which it will because of all these terrible cuts he just made, which didn't happen, it's fake news, and that Trump would be completely...
Disgraced, and he hoped that Pete Buttigieg, he figures is the best candidate, will come to the rescue.
So that's what the other world looks like.
Ouch.
All right.
General Mark Milley had a bad week, because now that Pete Hegseth is Secretary of Defense, he's already announced that he's pulling the security clearance for Milley.
What else is he doing?
He's going to conduct a review board to determine if there's enough evidence to have General Milley stripped of a star while in retirement, because he's in retirement, for his efforts to, quote, undermine the chain of command during the first term of President Donald Trump.
There is going to be enough evidence to make that at least a toss-up.
I'm not...
I'm not super in favor of going after retired people, but if the allegations against Milley are true, it's not normal behavior.
So it might require a little stronger response than you'd expect.
And, of course, we're going to take down his pictures, his paintings.
Oh, my goodness.
I tell you.
I thought that I would be more uncomfortable with what looks to be, I don't want to say revenge, but let's say responses to what seemed clearly very bad behavior by a number of people.
But when you hear what the people are alleged to have been involved in, it does seem appropriate.
And we'll see.
No, don't hang him.
Let's not...
Let's not be hyperbolic.
I think he should answer for some of his decisions.
That seems fair.
And if it results in taking a star away from him or something, that's up to the military.
I would stay out of that completely.
But yeah, he's got some questions to answer there.
So remember I told you about CNN's dumbest panelist?
Her name is Catherine Rampell.
So she's going full Nazi.
She's like an MSNBC quality panelist, but she's on CNN embarrassing them.
So somebody posted what she said, which is basically defaming Musk by saying he gave a Nazi salute, which he obviously did not.
And somebody said that, Elon, you should sue her and CNN. And Elon responded, good idea.
Will he?
Is he going to sue CNN and the woman who said it's a Nazi salute?
Because I'm pretty sure if a jury saw the full video where he touches his heart and says, you know, my heart goes out to you when he's doing it, I'm pretty sure that the jury would say, uh, that doesn't look like a Nazi salute to me.
So I think he might.
I think he might win, unless the jury was confused that somebody might have actually believed it was really a Nazi salute.
Do you think people could really believe that?
It doesn't feel like she really believes it, does it?
Is she that dumb?
She does seem dumb, you know, literally, just seems dumb.
So, maybe she believed it, but it seems unlikely.
Let's see, what else is Elon doing just in the last 24 hours?
Let's see, he's doing Doge and he's already found a bunch of money to take out of there.
Lots more to come.
Trump asked him to rescue the stranded astronauts at the International Space Station and he took the assignment.
So he's going to rescue them.
So he's saving the country from debt.
He's rescuing two astronauts stranded in space.
And he's also been asked to work with Boeing.
To get Air Force One completed on time.
I guess they've been working on it for years and it's over budget and Trump would like to have access to it during his term.
So who else are you going to ask?
Well, Elon's not doing enough.
How about he fixes that?
Is there anything he can't do?
Do we have any problems that Elon isn't directly or indirectly solving?
This is incredible.
Remember I always tell you that the person with the best idea is in charge?
Elon Musk is not in charge of anything except that he has good ideas.
And if he brings you the best idea and you look at it, you go, oh, well, that is the best idea.
It kind of makes him de facto in charge without being in charge.
So why would you ask him to help with Boeing?
Because you're almost positive that whatever he does with them, he's going to introduce the best idea.
Okay, how is he going to do any of these things?
Doge, etc.?
Well, the best ideas.
That's it.
So, if Elon has way more power than other people are comfortable with, I think they're missing that the source of his power is performance.
It's not...
It's not some lust for dictatorship.
I don't see that at all, actually.
I don't see any signs of that.
But he certainly likes having solutions.
So I think we need to stop bitching about the person with the best ideas having the freedom to implement them.
Because it's a good thing.
Well, speaking also of Elon Musk, he says that Tesla's full self-driving mode is here.
Now, what does that mean?
Full self-driving.
So I assume that means you just don't have to have a human being touching the steering wheel.
I don't know how legal it is everywhere.
So there might be a legal question that I'm not clear about.
But it looks like technologically, letting the car do the driving is going to be way, way safer than a human.
Probably won't even be close, even if the car makes some mistakes.
Even if the car causes some damage and death, because everything does, it's going to be way safer.
And how would you buy another vehicle if there was one that could do this?
Now, I've not tried the self-driving on a Tesla, and I'm kind of worried that my psychology can't handle it.
Because, you know, you have a sense of what you can handle.
I don't know.
I don't know what it would feel like to be in the car while it's driving itself.
But I would try it.
I would definitely try it.
And probably I'd get comfortable with it.
People seem to be able to adjust to it.
So I guess I would too.
And if I could have a car that would literally drive itself, oh my God.
And I also wonder if there'll be some kind of weird changes at bars or restaurants that serve drinks.
Can you imagine the restaurant having its own Tesla and it's parked outside and you just, you know, people need a ride home.
They don't have a ride.
You just say, ah, just take the Tesla.
And they just sit in the Tesla and just drives them home and then drives back to the bar and parks where it was.
And I can just take people home all day long.
So we might be on the verge of taking drunk driving down by 90%, not on day one.
But if enough people have a drinking problem and they want to keep having fun with their drinks, if they say, you know what, if I drink when I go out and I like it, it wouldn't make sense to have another vehicle.
Unless you always have a...
Unless you always have a designated driver, but most people don't.
So what this could do to even the recreation industry, it could be one of the greatest things that ever happened in society.
We'll see.
Anyway, I saw an opinion that it seems like almost a sure thing that Tesla will stay ahead with the self-driving AI part of its business.
And if you add the self-driving cars, that it doesn't look like anybody's going to be able to catch up to soon.
And then you add on top of it the tricks that DeepSeek brought to the industry.
Because in theory, all the other AIs are going to take the tricks that DeepSeek had, add it to their own code, and be twice as fast.
So if you add that...
To what Tesla already has, their self-driving cars are going to be insane.
And their robots, the Tesla robots, are going to be even better than we imagined.
So if you add robots plus cybercabs and self-driving cars, it's hard for me to imagine that Tesla is going to do poorly in the future.
Hard to imagine.
But there is a political risk.
Elon's out there.
So if people decide they don't want a self-driving car because they don't like his politics, that could be a problem.
Well, D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin is conducting this internal inquiry as to why prosecutors brought the post-Enron statute for the first time against the January Sixers.
So some 300 of the January Six protesters Got felony counts for some obscure law that had been designed only for Enron, I guess.
And to have it apply in this context was kind of a stretch.
And some people would say that it was too much of a stretch.
So Ed Martin's going to look into this and figure out if those prosecutors had gone too far.
Yeah, Tesla's earnings statement is out today, coincidentally.
Meanwhile, New York's Attorney General Letitia James, she's going to sue the Trump administration for trying to freeze those federal funds on what she thought were.
I think she fell for the hoax.
I think she thought it was going to stop direct payments to people who get direct payments, but it's not.
It's going to stop stuff like DEI and, you know, and funding.
Funding illegal immigration.
Things that are far less controversial.
But here's the thing.
So her claim is that the president can't pause funding because it's a congressional thing.
Maybe.
But I've never seen anybody who was more like a movie villain.
Letitia James.
There's something about the way she looks and the way she talks that's just extra chilling.
And we're going to get Trump.
I can't even do an impression, but damn, she's got the evil genius.
It's like she has Dr. Evil's twin or something.
She's got that down.
So Caroline Leavitt, the new spokesperson for Trump, had her first press conference, and I would give it an A+. It was really, it could have been the best one I've ever seen.
You know, I haven't seen every press conference, but, you know, so McElhaney, am I saying that right?
McElhaney, no, McElhaney, was the standard, and she was great, and pretty much flawless, and often created headlines just from her good answers and stuff.
But Caroline Leavitt was perfect.
She didn't need a binder.
She spoke to everything confidently, quickly, very clearly.
She knew the reporters by name.
Her answers were real answers and not a bunch of evasions and word salad.
And it's kind of terrible for the last spokesperson, Corrine John.
Because we're going from unambiguously the worst press secretary of all time to one of the top two of all time, although Dana Perino was probably in that top category as well.
So the Republicans have had two or three that are the best we've seen.
And at what point do Democrats notice?
It seems like they'd notice that their own spokesperson was completely incapable of doing the job and that the Trump ones are great.
Well, how are the other countries doing?
Let's check in internationally.
Let's see.
The Green Party leader, their economic minister, says they only expect Germany to have a growth rate of 0.3%.
0.3%?
That would be like the end of Germany if they don't get that up.
That would be less than inflation.
Basically, that would be a death spiral, 0.3%.
Because it would be one thing if they were in the middle of a pandemic or just recovering.
But other countries don't have a 0.3% growth rate.
So whatever they're doing in Germany, it's all wrong.
And here's my question.
Does Germany still have the ability to manufacture?
Because that was one of their strengths, right?
They could build factories and manufacture stuff like cars and whatnot.
And I wonder if they still have that ability.
Did they lose it?
Like America did?
But if they still have people who have those skills, I wonder if we can poach them since Germany is falling apart.
Is there any way we could say, hey, we need a bunch of people who know how to...
Engineer a factory and do it quickly so we can bring manufacturing back to America.
And I don't know.
Seems like we should be looking for some superstars who have specific skills from other countries.
Meanwhile, over in the UK, it looks like there's a law to imprison people who view far-right propaganda online.
And you could get 15 years for looking at...
If you're looking at what they labeled far right, 15 years in prison for reading.
15 years in prison for reading because you read the wrong stuff.
Now, that doesn't even sound real, does it?
I don't know if this is a law that already passed or is being considered.
I forget.
But the fact that it's even on the discussion.
15 years for looking at far-right material?
Doesn't that create a little bit of a risk that they can redefine what far-right means?
Well, it used to mean what we really meant was you're agreeing with Hitler.
But now it means that you're agreeing with Trump.
Because, you know, Trump is Hitler.
Obviously, you have A plus B. So, UK is just completely broken.
That's just completely broken.
But, according to the Jerusalem Post, the Saudis and Israel are getting closer to some kind of breakthrough understanding where they recognize...
I guess the big thing is getting Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel in a full way, because that would be shocking, historically.
But they're getting close, apparently.
That's the report, anyway.
There are lots of things that can derail a thing like that, such as October 7th.
The last time the Saudis and Israel looked like they were getting close to agreeing on something big, that's when Iran acted.
So there could be another big thing coming to stop it from happening.
We'll see.
Iran doesn't have much in the way of assets left after Israel took out Hezbollah's big weapons and Hamas's big weapons and the Syrian...
Iranian proxies.
So it could be that this is exactly the right time to get that Saudi or Israel thing done.
Here's a funny story.
So Denmark, which controls Greenland and doesn't want to give it to or sell it or anything to Trump, they decided to beef up their security.
So they're going to spend $2 billion.
To improve their own national security over there.
But if you wanted to know what it was before, so this is the entire Greenland national security.
Are you ready?
Currently, there are four aging inspection vehicles.
Now, does an inspection vehicle even have a gun?
Do they?
I mean, if it's an inspection vehicle, in theory it would have some force.
So maybe there's a gun on it.
I don't know.
But they've got four of those.
They've got a Challenger surveillance plane and 12 dog sledge patrols to monitor an area four times the size of France.
Four dog sledge patrols.
But not to worry, they're going to upgrade their military.
To include three new Arctic Navy vessels, okay, and doubling the number of planned long-range surveillance drones to four, from two to four, as well as satellite surveillance.
So that should protect them in case America wants to conquer them.
But then I found out this.
According to a Denmark or Danish politician, They've done the math.
Did you know that the U.S. military has 300 to 400 soldiers in Greenland already?
That's normal.
It's not new.
We've got 300 to 400 military already in Greenland.
America does.
And what are they doing there?
They're part of an early warning radar defense.
So they're operating a radar defense.
Because if you're monitoring some radar, What you need is three to four hundred people.
Right?
Because monitoring the radar is kind of sitting there looking at a screen and you're going to need hundreds of people.
What?
Why are there three to four hundred people?
I have no idea why we have three or four hundred people if we're just a radar site.
Anyway, so the Danish politician said that if Trump just said, all right, we own it now, We already have enough military to conquer it.
We wouldn't even have to move troops.
We could just say, you know, we've got 300 soldiers there.
And that would be enough to conquer all of Greenland.
So, I guess Trump can take it if he wants it.
Even Denmark says all he'd have to do is say he's taking it, and we couldn't do anything.
And I agree.
They probably couldn't do anything about that.
Well, let me tell you that if you're subscribing to the Dilbert comic, which you can only subscribe to and see if you're on X, just go to my account on X and you'll see the button.
Or if you're a Locals member, but that's more political and a little bit naughtier, so make sure you can handle the political stuff if you want to be on Locals.
But we have a lot of fun on Locals because it's more of a community.
And Dilbert...
The Dilbert cartoons this week feature Dilbert who's been disgraced on the internet.
And he has to deal with being disgraced on the internet.
Except that he finds that it just makes his life better.
So you'll have to follow it to see.
And also the Dilbert calendar for this year.
Now that a month has passed, you can use the discount code to get it for 10% less because you missed a month.
Basically, the calendar is like buying a Dilbert book.
It's just in calendar form.
So it's got a year of comics on the front, a year of comics on the back of each page.
So some of them are Dilbert Reborn, the spicier ones, and some of them are the classics.
And there's no real reason that you have to wait until the beginning of the year to buy the calendar.
It's really just a way to read comics every day.
So you don't have to be...
Reading them in the exact order that they're on the calendar.
But if you want that discount code, you can see it's the pinned post on my X account.
You'll see it there.
And you'll see the link to buy it.
The only link where you can buy it.
All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining.
I'm going to go private with the locals people.
But if you're on YouTube or Rumble or X, thanks for joining.
