Find my Dilbert 2025 Calendar at: https://dilbert.com/God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, Sauna Health Benefits, Food Stamp Restrictions, AI News Accuracy, Jamie Dimon, Remote Worker Productivity, META Domestic Robots, Robotics Supply Chain, President Clinton REGO, Reinventing Government, DOGE Predecessor REGO, VP Gore, DOGE Appeal, Ric Grenell, Ashley St. Clair, Liberal Women Satisfaction, Military Trans Ban, DOGE Government System Access, CISA, President Sheinbaum, James Carville, Flood The Zone DOGE Strategy, SCOTUS Approval Rating, Human Consciousness, Quantum Theory Changing Past, Evidence of The Simulation, Ukraine's Drone Front Line, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topicsto build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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 chelsea, a snack, 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 hit of the day thing makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it's happening now.
go ah ah Well.
Here's the good news.
The good news is that it feels like at least for a day or so, Trump has slowed down and my brain is starting to normalize.
Oh my God, my brain has been on fire for the last few weeks.
So many things to hear and listen to, and it's all interesting, and I care about it all.
I'm just like on my phone all day long.
Oh, look, it's another thing.
There's another judge.
There's another judge.
Look, it's another lawsuit.
There's another judge.
And it looks like it's slowed down a little bit.
So that feels good.
Anyway, after today's show, remember to join the after show.
That'll be on Spaces, hosted by Owen Gregorian.
So look on Spaces on X. That's the audio product.
Audio only.
And just look for Owen Gregorian and you can find his Spaces right after the show.
Well, here's a story in the New York Post that I swear is an old story.
Haven't we talked about this one before?
There's a Chinese zoo that admitted to painting a donkey black and white to pass it off as a zebra.
Haven't we heard that one before?
And it makes me wonder how many other animals are fake.
It's like, you know, is it possible that they've done any plastic surgery on any other animals to turn them into other animals?
I don't know.
I kind of wondered.
Well, we didn't have any chipmunks, but we did have this rat.
Let's just give them a little color job and maybe a little plastic surgery on the snout.
Suddenly, a rat turns into a chipmunk.
Well, nobody goes to the zoo to see a chipmunk, so that's ridiculous.
Why'd you bring it up?
Let's talk about the health benefits of saunas.
And I want to see if this is real science or backwards science.
You tell me, was the sauna creating the following health benefits, or do the people who decide to use saunas and have the money and have the time, Are they naturally the people who have fewer health problems?
So here are the things that, according to Oliver Onwar on X, there's research showing that if you sauna four to seven times a week, all right, how many people have the time to sauna four to seven times a week?
I would argue that these are not the people who are working so hard, and we know that working all the time is bad for you.
So right away, You start saying to yourself, hmm, these are people who have a lot of leisure and they may have some money because they can go to a sauna instead of being homeless.
So if you use a sauna four to seven times a week, your risk of dementia and Alzheimer's is reduced by an astounding 66%.
So it's good for your mental health.
It's good for your immune system.
It's good for recovering from athletic performance.
It's going to help your cardiovascular and your blood flow.
So what do you think?
Do you think that what we discovered is that saunas are really good for you?
And I assume they are.
I'm sure they are.
Or did we discover that the people who use saunas are exactly the same people who are doing everything else that's good for you?
Do you think the people who use saunas are also eating the most junk food?
Or are the people who do sauna four to seven times a week more likely to eat a healthy diet?
Are they more likely to do exercise?
Well, if one of the reasons for doing it is to recover from exercise, maybe there's a little bit of a selection bias there.
Here's what they didn't do.
I don't think that they had a control group of people who were exactly like the other people.
Some of them used the sauna and some didn't, and then they tracked them over 40 years.
I don't think that happened.
So, where do you think this information about saunas making you healthier came from?
I don't know.
But let me ask you this.
Who would have the most interest in producing a study, which would be expensive, a study about the health benefits of saunas?
Who in the world would have the financial interest?
To want to do a big expensive study on the health benefits of saunas.
Oh yeah.
Could it be the foxes are the ones counting the chickens again?
Yes.
I don't know the answer to the question.
But if I had to guess, Big Sauna did a study.
And Big Sauna decided that a controlled long-term study would be really expensive and might not give them the right answer.
So instead, they just compared people who have the Luxury of being able to sauna all the time with the people who don't have that luxury and found out that one group's healthier.
How about that?
Yeah, how about that?
Surprise.
All data that matters is fake.
It has to be, because it's always the fox counting the chickens.
All right.
So Trump signed an executive order, according to The Hill.
He's going to...
Strip funding from schools that require the COVID-19 vaccinations.
God, that feels good, doesn't it?
Don't you love the fact that the school will be punished for requiring people to get a COVID vaccination now?
Wow.
So that's just a feel-good story.
Here's some new information.
According to the New York Post, so the Trump administration, USDA chief, is looking at the idea of food stamps being not allowed for buying sugary drinks and bad food.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, you already can't use food stamps to buy alcohol.
Is that right?
If you tried to buy alcohol and food stamps, the grocery store would say, uh-uh-uh.
So could they also, I don't know if it's practical, because it would require the cashier, I think, to decide whether the food stamp is good enough for this but not good enough for that.
Where do you draw the line?
Do you draw the line at all processed foods?
Because that would be reasonable.
Do you draw the line, you couldn't do that.
You'd have to allow some processed foods, probably.
Could you draw the line at no wheat?
You can't get any wheat-based products?
No, probably can't do that.
Like, even if you believe that the wheat in the United States is not so good for you compared to other countries.
So I don't know how they can implement this on a practical level.
But I like the thinking.
And I like the fact that they might take a run at it.
Good stuff.
So, but would that create a secondary market for food stamps?
If you couldn't buy junk, how many people will sell their food stamp at a discount to somebody who needs it and then use the money from the food stamp that they sold to buy a sugary drink?
There'd be a little bit of that.
So, it'd be worth trying.
According to the BBC, an article in Mental Floss, When AI does news summaries, so if you ask your favorite AI, summarize the news on some topic.
According to the BBC, it's going to get it wrong.
They looked at OpenAI, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot.
They said that 51% of all AI responses had major errors.
51%.
Additionally, 19% of AI answers.
Regarding BBC-specific sources had incorrect factual statements, numbers, and dates.
And 13% of the quotes were made up.
13% of the quotes were made up and attributed to people.
Now, did they have to do this study?
No, they didn't.
They just had to ask me.
I've been telling you forever.
It's Gelman amnesia.
All they did is show that Gelman amnesia is real, which we all knew.
If you know what's true, the news always looks fake.
It's not the AI. They're trying to blame the AI. No, it's not the AI. The news in the fucking BBC is fake whenever you know what the real story is.
The news on CNN is fake.
Whenever you know what the real story is.
The news everywhere, in every outlet, all the time, in every case, is fake.
The only thing that's new is knowing it.
And so the BBC, which has exactly the same error conditions as AI, is acting like they're the ones to check the AI. Really?
You're the ones to check the accuracy of the AI. How about if the AI did this experiment on the BBC? How about if we did it on just things that I know personally?
I'm pretty sure the BBC has written about me.
If I did a search on what the BBC has said about me, how accurate would it be?
It wouldn't be.
There's not a chance.
There's not even a small chance that it would be accurate.
According to me, and I would be the ultimate source of me.
So no, there's nothing in this story that tells you AI is less accurate than the regular news.
Even the one where 13% of the quotes were either altered or absent?
Well, absent.
That doesn't seem like an error if there's just no quote.
I don't know what that means if it's absent.
But if it's an error, 13%?
That's actually low, because the regular news misquotes people a lot more often.
Do you think the AI is misquoting people more often than real humans?
No.
Even the real humans aren't even trying to get real quotes.
They're trying to fabricate a quote that fits the story.
Always.
It's always fabricated.
Now, sometimes the real quote will fit their narrative, and then they'll use it.
But if they don't have a real quote, That fits the narrative.
They will make one up.
That's how it works.
Now, here's the bigger question.
Remember, I've been telling you something.
I haven't seen a single person agree with me, by the way.
So here's a prediction I keep making, and not one person that I've seen agrees with me.
So I'm all alone.
And it goes like this.
The reason that the AGI version of AI, which would be the...
You know, the general intelligence, the one that's really the smart one that's smarter than a human in the same way that humans are smart.
That's going to be a problem because how do we know it's right?
The humans are going to decide if it's right.
And if the humans don't like the answer it gives, they'll just reprogram it.
So if we created an intelligence that knew more than us, the first thing we do is program it and degrade it.
So it matched us because we start with the assumption that we know what's true.
And then we're seeing if the AI can get it right.
We're never going to be out of that model.
We're never going to say the AI is right and we were wrong about everything.
Have you met people?
People don't do that.
People say they're right and everything needs to conform to their view of what's right.
So no, there's probably no way that we can build a machine that's smarter than people, like legitimately smarter.
Now, of course, they will know more things and calculate faster.
They can play chess better.
So there's a whole bunch of things that are more almost math-based or physics-based that, of course, will be well better and more than people.
But if it came up with an opinion, supposedly tried to tell you history, can you imagine the smartest AI telling you the real history of World War II? I'm going to stop right there, because if I went any further, I'd get cancelled like three times.
Whatever you think about World War II, I'm pretty sure it's a narrative.
I mean, obviously World War II happened, but I don't really believe any of the news about World War II or any of the history.
You know, I think maybe they got the dates of the big battles right.
You know, the big stuff.
But the why anybody did anything and the what could have happened and who was doing what behind the scenes and what were people's intentions and what were the secret plots and what did the good guys do that were really bad but got erased by history because they were the winners.
It's all kind of fake.
So if we came up with an AI that somehow could tell us the real history of anything, not just picking World War II as a general reference, but of anything.
How about the history of the United States?
Do you think we would allow an AI to tell a history of the United States that was fundamentally different from what we've been brainwashing kids for generations?
Of course not.
Of course not.
The reason we brainwash kids is we don't want them to know the actual truth.
We want them to know the truth that makes them better citizens and makes the country stronger.
So what would an AI do in that case?
Say, oh, okay, I get it.
We're just brainwashing the people, so I'll make up some stuff.
Yeah.
How can you possibly get to an AI that's smarter than us when we would turn it off the moment it started saying things that's smarter than us?
Beyond, you know, math and science-y stuff, which will, of course, it'll be better.
Anyway.
Apparently, RFK Jr. has already moved to fire thousands of people in HHS. And, you know, we knew that was coming, but 5,200 workers are already being let go.
There's going to be a lot of stories like this, like there's this department in the government and Doge or whoever is firing lots of people.
So it's all going to start to sound the same, but I don't want to...
I don't want to lose how good it feels that something's happening.
The good feeling I feel when people are getting fired is not zeitgeist or not, it's the wrong word.
It's not schadenfreude.
I get my German words wrong.
It's not schadenfreude where I'm just enjoying somebody else's pain because I think they have it coming.
It's nothing like that.
I have a lot of empathy for the just regular workers who go to work.
But I feel so good there's something that's difficult to do for the government, which is self-police and reduce its own expenses, that it's actually happening.
It's like one of the most optimistic things I've seen in a long, long time.
Speaking of optimistic things, there's a recording released of Jamie Diamond, head of J.P. Morgan.
In which he's just giving it to his employees.
Some kind of, I don't know if it's a Zoom or all employees meeting or something.
And he is just cursing up a storm.
He's dropping the F-bombs and, you know, the other bombs.
And he is criticizing his employees for being on Zoom calls and secretly checking their email and not paying attention.
He says it's bad for morale, bad for creativity.
It's rude.
You know, it's going to make everything less efficient.
He can't stand it.
He thinks working from home is just not only bad for the company, but he thinks it's damaging an entire generation of young people.
And the more I thought about that, I thought, oh, my God, he's right.
When I was in the regular workforce in my cubicle days, every now and then, it was kind of rare, you know, I'd have a work-at-home day.
For one reason or another.
I mean, it was rare, but it happened.
And to me, it was just a way to do a little extra work because I wasn't being bothered.
So it didn't happen often, and I found that I was actually more productive because I wasn't being bothered.
But here's the thing that I was not considering, that Jamie Dimon did consider, and I think he's right on this, that if I had not spent all of my other time in the office, Then the work at home thing would be a whole different deal.
Imagine if I didn't know my coworkers in person.
Imagine if I didn't have all the casual question answering and the brainstorming that happens in the hallways and learning who's the good bear and the bad bear and who's just a waste of time and who can get things done, who wants to work with me, finding somebody else who might want to hire me, doing a little networking.
These are all the things that If you're only once in a while working at home, then the working at home is really a plus.
You probably actually just get more done.
And then you get all the benefits of the human contact and the accidental connections and all that.
But imagine if you're a young worker who's never really spent much time in any office and your entire experience is waking up and going to your own living room and sitting on the couch.
And maybe you're doing work.
But you're having no connections with other people.
Your company is sort of a meaningless concept that puts a direct deposit into your bank account.
I can't imagine that you would be killing it in terms of effectiveness or your own career or even your own mental health.
And as much as I hate commuting, commuting is just the worst thing ever, the benefits of doing this painful work-in-person thing are pretty extreme.
And I think Jamie Dimon is right on that.
He's correct.
And he also talks about they're not working long hours because when he tries to call anybody who's allegedly working at home, they never answer the phone.
Every time he tries to call somebody who's working at home, nobody's there.
They're probably there, but they can't answer the phone because there's an incriminating noise of where they are.
I would ask you this.
Oh, and then he also said that their own headcount has gone up 50,000 in five years.
And he says the only reason they needed 50,000 more people is because the people they already hired weren't getting the work done.
Now, that might be hyperbole, but there's probably something to that.
Because if they're doing exactly what they always did, but they needed 50,000 more people, that does kind of suggest that maybe they've got a problem.
So it was great hearing him frustrated and calling that out.
According to Digital Trends, Nadeem Sarwar is writing that Meta, you know, the Facebook parent there, Meta.
Meta is going to go into the robot business big time, but they're going to focus on domestic robots to help you home.
But, and this is really interesting, I love watching anything that...
Zuckerberg does strategically, because he doesn't get everything right, but as a strategic long-term thinker, he's pretty darn good.
So when he makes a strategic long-term big-money decision, definitely gets my interest.
Now, the whole meta thing of living in the virtual world doesn't seem to be...
Catching on.
So you may have gotten that one wrong.
But his current thing on robots is it's not going to be a meta robot.
So meta will make a robot, or lots of them actually, but they won't be meta branded robots.
Part of it, this is speculated, is that people are already worried about data security with Facebook.
So if you put basically a robot connected to Facebook, that's what it would feel like.
If you put that robot that's from the same company that's already been snooping on all your personal information, you're going to feel, is that robot spying on me?
Like, if I say to my robot, you know, I need you to go buy something, is that thing going to show up in my advertisements?
Because it went through the robot, and then suddenly my phone gives me an advertisement for that product?
Because that would be creepy.
And it's hard to imagine that the robot wouldn't.
Be looking for ideas to sell you stuff.
It seems like it would.
But here's the interesting part.
I haven't gotten to it yet.
What Meta's going to do is build the supply chain for robots.
So it wants to build all the component manufacturing and I guess they would use their own AI software.
It looks like maybe augmented somehow.
But they want to build a supply chain in which they can sell any part of the supply chain to anybody else.
So, for example, I'm making this up, but it's roughly the idea.
So they would have part of their supply chain would be making, let's say, a good robot hand.
But they would sell that hand to anybody who wanted to buy it.
You could put that hand on your own robot or the company that makes it good.
So that's kind of clever to come up with the idea that instead of being the robot maker, you'd be the maker of all the robots for all the people.
And then you're going to have a...
So it's a little bit like, you know, instead of being the gold miner, it's more like selling the pickaxe to all the gold miners, because most of them are going to come up broke, but they're all going to need a robot hand.
So it might be just the very best way to diversify the robot risk, because there are only going to be a few robot winners.
So if you wanted to be the robot winner, you're going to put $100 billion into robots, and you have a...
1 in 10 chance that you're the winner.
Is that worth doing?
$100 billion expense for 1 in 10 chance that you're one of the winners?
Or you build a whole supply chain and everybody who's building losing robots and winning robots say, you know, it'd be easier just to buy your robot hands.
You know, instead of inventing a whole new robot hand, they make a pretty good one.
It's just for sale.
We'll just snap it on a robot.
I don't know if this strategy will work, of course, but it's kind of brilliant.
It's kind of brilliant.
I love the way it diversifies.
Very smart.
We'll see.
Keep an eye on that.
Meanwhile, according to TechCrunch, Julie Bortz writing, that there's a job ad for one of the Y Combinator startups.
It's called Firecrawl.
And they did a job app opening.
For an AI agent.
So there's an actual opening job, and they say we'd like to hire an AI. But it has to be an AI agent that can act autonomously, and then they describe what it needs to do.
Now, they did admit that that was part PR, you know, to get some free attention, but they're also serious about it.
Now, I don't think they think that AI is quite there.
That somebody could say, hey, I just made an autonomous...
And by the way, they're going to pay it.
They would pay it a salary of $10,000 to $15,000 per year?
Oh, you know what?
It says a salary of $10,000 to $15,000, but I can't tell if that's per month or per year.
It's a little unspecified.
But in any case, even if it's per month, it would be cheaper than a lot of engineers.
So if you can get...
An AI agent that is sufficiently good and accurate that you could hire it as an employee, I'll buy one.
I will hire one.
So if anybody can make this product, there would be a generic AI agent that could just do a job autonomously.
You say, okay, make sure you do this every day or you research this every day.
I think it would be used for research.
And then, you know, summarizing the research or something.
I could use one.
So if anybody makes one, I'll hire it.
So Taiwan says it's going to pour more money into the U.S. I think that means specifically for chip manufacturing.
And it's because of the Trump tariff threats.
So the Daily Caller News Foundation is writing about this.
And is this yet another example of where tariff threats work?
Because if we really did bring some important part of the chip business to America, doesn't that, first of all, make Taiwan less safe?
If we have less reliance on them for chips, are we going to protect them in the future as hard as we have in the past?
Or is all of this sort of everybody acknowledging that eventually China and Taiwan will in fact be one country and not just on paper?
I feel like it's inevitable.
I feel like location is just destiny.
How in the world could Taiwan be independent forever?
I just don't think it's a thing.
Of course, I like Taiwan, and I would like them not to be crushed by big China and have to put up with any of that.
So I'd love to figure out if there's some way they can work that out in the long run.
I still like the 100-year plan.
Just say, yeah, we agree.
We're on the same page.
Just make it 100 years, and then you don't have to think about it for a while.
So let's do that.
So we're reminded, I saw a post reminding us that Clinton and Gore, Had done something much like Doge.
How many of you remember that?
That Al Gore in particular was doing a project called Reinventing Government.
Do you all remember that?
Well, I didn't realize how successful it was.
Because in the first weeks, Clinton cut 100,000 government jobs.
Do you remember that?
I don't remember that, actually.
And then over eight years, Clinton cut 380,000 federal jobs, a 16% decrease, and he managed to run a budget surplus for the first time in decades.
Clinton ran a budget surplus.
Now, what's not included in the article is this was the dot-com frenzy.
So the dot-com era sort of made it a little bit easier to get your tax space up because the economy started Roaring in a way that was sort of unrealistic.
You know, it pulled back eventually.
But during that time, money was just growing on trees in the economy because of the dot-com revolution.
So how many of you know my connection to this?
I know I've told the people on Locals, but I'll tell the rest of you.
So during the Clinton-Gore years, the Dilbert comic was reaching its peak.
It was the big Dilber frenzy about that same time.
And it turns out, and I think I can tell you this story because so many years have gone by, that the speechwriters in Al Gore's, he was the vice president, so his speechwriters were some Dilber fans, and they'd read one of my books, The Dilber Future, and I was giving a speech in Washington.
Just unrelated, just a paid speech, happened to be in Washington.
And they noticed the publicity for it and said, well, if you're going to be in Washington, why don't you stop by the White House and we'll give you a tour.
And I thought, really?
Cool.
So I got like a personal tour of the White House during working hours, which is just about the coolest thing in the world.
I'm standing outside the Oval Office, but I couldn't go in.
They put a little...
Put one of these little velvet ropes in front of the door, so even if you wanted to take a step in, you can't do it.
But you can look in if the president's not there, and he wasn't.
And as we're looking around, I'm seeing all the cool stuff in the cool rooms, and I'm just blown away by how cool it is to see the actual White House inside.
And then somebody runs down the hallway, because I've been told that if the vice president was in the office, and they weren't sure if he would be, That, you know, maybe I could meet him.
And I knew that Al Gore was a Dilbert fan.
I knew that because his staff had requested a Dilbert comic that mentioned him once.
So he actually had a Dilbert comic on his wall in the office.
But I thought, well, I mean, just because I'm stopping by, the vice president isn't going to, you know, change his schedule to say hi to me.
And then something comes running down the hallway when my little...
Private tour was over.
And starts whispering into the ear of, you know, my guides for the day.
And then I'm told the, what do they call it?
The VPOTUS or something?
I think that's what the Vice President of the United States is VPOTUS. They said, VPOTUS, if that's right.
Doesn't sound right when I say it.
They said, he wants to see you.
And I said, what?
Yeah, he heard you were in the building.
He wants to say hi.
And I thought, seriously?
That's how that works?
He just heard him in the building and he wants to say hi?
All right.
So I get escorted down to the, there's sort of a secretarial assistant area outside the vice president's office.
And his office has this big, like, intimidating door.
Like, it's not a regular door.
You know, it's closed, but it looks like it's...
Maybe a bomb door or a security door or something.
I kind of half remember that the door was almost to the ceiling or something.
Maybe it wasn't.
But I'm standing outside the door, and this is the door to the vice president's office.
I'm thinking to myself, is that door going to open and the vice president of the United States is going to walk out and say hi to me?
Is that really going to happen?
Like in the real world, is this going to happen?
And all of a sudden, the door starts opening.
And Al Gore walks out, walks directly over to me, you know, extends his hand, and he introduced himself.
Now, that instantly made me like him.
He's the Vice President of the United States, and he goes, Hi, I'm Al Gore.
I love that.
I love the fact that, you know, one of the most famous people in the world, but he starts by introducing himself.
So he's...
So here's the first thing you need to know.
Privately, like in person, I liked him.
Liked him a lot.
And then he says, do you have a minute?
And like, what am I going to say, no?
So I go, sure.
He goes, can you come in and talk to me about something?
And I thought, really?
Sure.
So I go in his office and I was with actually somebody I was traveling with, not traveling with, but a friend of mine who lived in the city.
So we both went in and we're sitting in front of, his office was sort of a long room where there's a desk on one end, but on the other end there's like a sitting area with a little fireplace.
So we're sitting in the little sitting area by the fireplace.
And he says he's working on this project called Reinventing Government, which, of course, I knew because it was in the news.
And he said that the problem is that when he tries to explain it to the public, it's all boring because it's stuff like, well, we decreased this by 4% and we automated this thing you never heard of.
You know, it's all that stuff.
So he said, I have to do a report, I think maybe once a year or something like that.
He said, can you help me make the report?
Fun.
Can we add some Dilbert comics to it that are made just for this purpose?
Now, I had just hit my peak Dilbert popularity, and I was smart enough to say, I can't do that.
Because the moment I attached Dilbert to one political team, I would lose 50% of my market.
Do you remember what Michael Jordan said about conservatives?
They buy a lot of sneakers.
So I took the Michael Jordan approach, which is, you know, conservatives buy a lot of Dilbert books.
So thank you, but no.
And then I offered that comics were the wrong approach anyway, which they were.
So if you put a comic in there, or you try to make it jokes, it's not going to turn into a joke book that people want to read it because it's funny.
Like, you're never going to reach that standard.
So it's going to look a little unserious, and the jokes might actually detract from what was really good work.
As you can see, I just told you that the reinventing government thing worked.
It was actually an improvement in a lot of stuff.
So I said, but I can set you up with somebody who has exactly the right skills.
To write this thing so that it's really easy to understand and you can really get the point and you won't get lost in the complexity, but there won't be any humor in it.
So he took that offer and I hooked him up with an expert that I'd worked with before who was just really, really good in user interface design because the book was basically user interface to tell people some information.
And so the book that they produced was...
It was at least indirectly with my help.
So, that was my little brush with history.
Anyway, so I thought I'd tell you that.
Now, fast forward to Elon Musk and Doge.
Think how boring it would be to hear about all the things Doge was doing if it were not called Doge and didn't have Elon Musk and didn't have Axe.
And didn't have Trump who are just naturally hilarious and provocative and interesting no matter what they do.
So all the things that Gore was trying to solve, which was it's just too boring to tell the public what you're doing, that's been solved by Musk and Trump by personality alone.
But the strength of their personalities is that unlike Gore, who could be kind of somber and serious, Everything they do is interesting.
It's impossible for Musk or Trump to have an uninteresting day.
They just can't do it.
So I not only have the problem that I do pay attention to all the doge stuff, but I pay attention so hard it's hurting.
Like, it gives me a headache by the end of the night because I like it so much.
It's just so attractive.
Like, really?
You did that?
Really?
You said what?
What?
Who?
What?
All day long.
So they've definitely solved the how to make it interesting.
Meanwhile, Rick Grinnell was asked in Germany if he might run for governor of California.
And his answer was that if Harris runs, he would get into it because, quote, if Kamala Harris runs for governor, I believe that she has such baggage and hundreds of millions of dollars in educating voters of how terrible she is.
Oh, that's such a good frame.
That it's a new day in California and the Republican actually has a shot.
Look how perfect this is.
That she's already spent hundreds of millions of dollars in educating voters how terrible she is.
You know, I always tell you that the difference between genius and humor is very small.
Because in both cases, your ability to summarize and just leave out everything that doesn't matter.
It's kind of one of the tricks of humor is what you remove to have that simple kernel of hilarious truth.
But it's also what you do if you're a genius.
You see Musk do it all the time.
You see Andreessen do it.
You see David Sachs do it.
So the people who are the smartest, Vivek, you see him do it.
You see J.D. Vance do it.
So all the ones who are super smart can summarize things the way Grinnell is also super smart.
So I just love this.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in educating the voters of how terrible she is.
You couldn't say that with fewer words and make it just so perfect.
So it's one of the reasons we like him.
He's got lots of skills.
So I don't know how serious he is about running for governor.
It could be you just use it as a way to put in a little shiv, which would be funny enough.
But I'm...
I think he has a chance.
I think California is at the point where if a, I'll just have to say it because it's just part of the story whether you like it or not, but a gay, conservative, brilliant, effective person with lots of the right experience, well-connected to the federal government, which needs to be a form of funding for the state going forward, maybe it's time.
There isn't much that would have made me think a Republican could win in California.
But could Rick Grinnell win?
I'll tell you one thing.
The conservatives in California would be completely down.
I mean, we would be all in on that.
So, I hope so.
I hope so.
We'll see.
Well, in other news, I think this is true.
I waited a while to talk about it because I wasn't sure if it was a prank or maybe I was understanding it wrong.
But you might know if you're an ex-Ashley St. Clair from the Babylon Bee and a well-known conservative-leaning social influencer, writer, humorist, Babylon Bee.
She announced that five months ago she had Elon...
Elon Musk's baby.
So she's joined the Elon Musk baby-making machine.
Now, I wish her the best.
So the only thing that interests me about it is, aren't you curious how many others there are who just haven't mentioned it?
Is Musk going for the...
The Genghis Khan record?
Isn't there some incredible number of people who are related to Genghis Khan because he was impregnating women for his entire life?
I feel like someday we're going to find out that there are thousands of Elon babies, and he only mentioned a few of the baby mamas, so we think there's a dozen, but maybe there are thousands.
I don't know.
Anyway, good luck, Ashley.
According to Fox News, and you've heard this a million times, there's yet another poll that shows liberal women are the most unhappy.
So, this is written by Elizabeth Heckman and Christine Parks, Fox News.
Now, again, how could they have saved some money on this study?
Oh, yeah.
Next time, just ask me.
I think we all know this, don't we?
Hasn't every study shown the same thing?
I mean, you know, granted, this is the kind of thing where maybe the science isn't perfect, but every study seems to point in the same direction on this.
So liberal women between 18 and 40 are three times as likely as conservatives women in the same group to report frequent feelings of loneliness.
Huh.
I wonder why the group...
That chooses identity politics would be more lonely.
Could it be?
Because a part of identity is if you're a woman, you're not a man.
And so everybody who isn't you is oppressing you.
Who'd want to be around that?
Of course they're less happy.
And the liberal women are the least likely to report being fully satisfied.
Now, unfortunately, there aren't that many people who are fully satisfied in general, but according to some American family survey, 37% of conservative women are fully satisfied and 28% of moderate women.
Now, it seems like that should be higher.
You'd like to think that maybe at least 60% are fully satisfied, but 37%.
But it's way bigger than the liberal women of the same age, which is...
12%.
So 12% of liberal women said the same thing.
And it said that we've seen in the research that conservative women tend to be more likely to embrace a sense of agency, meaning that they have control over their own lives and don't feel like a victim.
You know, maybe it's that simple.
If you define yourself as a victim in a world that's just doing stuff to you, how can you possibly be fully satisfied?
But if you said, yeah, it's a mean world, but I have the power to carve my way through it and make a life that works for me, and then you go and do it, that does feel like that would be more satisfying.
So maybe it's just that, the victim versus the sense of agency.
The U.S. Army has announced it will no longer allow transgender individuals to join the military, and it's going to stop performing procedures associated with gender transition for the ones.
I guess there are still members in the military.
I assume the Army is just one of the military that's going to do the same thing.
I think they all have to do it, right?
The new executive orders require each of the parts of the military to do the same thing.
I don't know if I've talked about this specifically, but let's see, Elon Musk is saying something.
Yeah, we'll talk about that in a second.
But as much as I want the adult, let's just focus on adults, as much as I want adult trans people to live their life the way that they're the happiest, The fact is that the military is the one place where discrimination is completely allowed.
Now, if you discriminate stupidly in a way that doesn't help the military, well, we shouldn't do that.
So, for example, integrating different races in the military worked, right?
So that was one that would be a bad form of discrimination if you kept doing it, because once we stopped doing it, we made it work.
Trans, I'm told, I'm no expert on trans, introduces a whole level of extra medical complications.
Now, I'm no expert, so if somebody wants to say, that's not true, there's hardly any complication at all, I'll listen to that.
But people who have been close to it say, yeah, there's a whole lot of sick time, and you've got to adjust stuff, and you've got to fix stuff, and things go wrong.
I don't know that.
But if that's true, that would be sufficient reason to make an exception and say, okay, we don't want to have this level of being not available.
Remember, the military isn't going to hire a blind pilot.
And nobody argues about that, right?
The military is not going to say, oh, body positivity, you can be 400 pounds and join the military.
Nope.
Nope.
You can't be four feet tall and join the military.
Nope.
But again, I hope that everybody who's four feet tall has a good life.
I hope that, you know, everybody has a good life.
It's just that the military is the one place that I think we all agree a little bit of discrimination is the right play.
You know, even if it doesn't allow people like me to join, which it doesn't.
I'm a certain age where, of course, I cannot join the military.
So, yeah, a little bit of discrimination in the military is different from discrimination anywhere else, as long as they're doing it to stay on mission and they're not doing it for any other reason.
Well, on Joe Rogan, he said something that he was talking to Adam Curry, and Rogan said something that I had never thought of before, but it's very interesting.
So you know how the government now can listen to any communication?
There's basically nothing they can't snoop on if they want to.
And now the Trump administration has control of the tools to snoop on everybody for everything.
Now imagine, as Joe Rogan speculates, imagine, if you will, that the government is trying to figure out what happened to the trillions of dollars that seem to be missing and the money that clearly is misspent.
Is it possible?
That any of that created the, what would be the predicate or the legal trigger that they could be legally monitoring a lot of people to find out where the trillion went or where this or that went wrong.
Now, I don't know.
So I don't think automatically that we're just listening to everybody all the time just for fun.
I think you'd have to have a genuine suspicion about somebody.
Joe Rogan points out that it may make it impossible for Democrats to coordinate their next response or their next hoax or their excuses because they never know if they're being wiretapped now.
Because clearly they don't trust the Trump administration, the Democrats don't, any more than conservatives trusted Democrats to not be looking at their stuff.
We basically don't trust the other side with our privacy, and it's probably the right instinct.
So is it possible that whether we're listening to anything or not, that Democrats don't know how to proceed?
Because they'd have to talk to somebody, and they just don't know how to do it.
Now, Joe also pointed out, Joe Rogan, that you have to worry about whistleblowers.
So what if you have a meeting with somebody and say, all right, Here's the thing.
We're going to create this new hoax.
We're going to do this new dirty trick.
Well, if you need five people involved, can you be sure that one of them won't drop the dime on you, become a whistleblower?
So it's possible that the Democrats are a little bit crippled by their own fear of who they can talk to about what.
And I'd never really thought about that before.
But that might actually be a variable that's potentially big.
Well, here's the, I guess you'd call it the Groundhog Day news.
A federal judge just blocked something.
No, a federal judge just unblocked something.
No, a federal judge just blocked something, but then it was unblocked.
But then it was blocked for a certain time, but it wasn't really blocked, it was just delayed.
But then it wasn't delayed, it was unblocked.
But then it was blocked and banned and banned and blocked.
And then unblocked and banned.
And unblocked.
So that's all the legal news you need.
I have no fucking idea what's going on with all these judges.
But here's another one.
A federal judge decided with Musk and Doge in rejecting an effort to block them from accessing government information systems.
So Nick Sorter's reporting on that.
So that's good.
So they're not blocked.
From getting into the technology systems.
That's a big, big deal.
But I think they get blocked somewhere else.
Let's see.
There's another judge story here.
We'll get to it.
But I can't keep track of all the judges.
What we do see, there seems to be a very clear pattern that the judges that are blocking Doge are all corrupt.
They either have a family member who's benefiting from corruption or has some connection to USAID or a family member who's like a well-known fundraiser for Democrats or something like that.
Like all of them have some clearly and obviously conflict of interest.
I mean, it just looks like pure corruption to me.
Anyway.
Department of Homeland Security has already moved 12 CISA employees.
So CISA is the cybersecurity agency that policed misinformation.
So do you think CISA was policing misinformation?
Because that was their mission.
No.
They were censoring conservatives.
Let's be honest.
They were censoring conservatives.
So 12 of them got fired, according to the New York Post.
And what were they doing instead of...
So when they were policing misinformation, what was not getting done?
Was there anything that wasn't getting done?
Because they were out there policing all the misinformation?
Well, yes.
They weren't working on election security.
So the thing they could have been working on instead of censoring conservatives...
They could have been working on improving election security.
Now, I don't know if it's one for one, as in election security was totally ignored while they did these other things.
But the way the story is framed, it makes it seem like they stopped doing the only thing we desperately need, election security, and spending all their time doing the one thing we don't need, which is telling us what information is true and what's not, especially if you're not true.
So here's a story that's a little too on the nose.
I think it's true.
So according to The Guardian, the Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum, has warned that if the United States continues to label the cartels as terrorists, that she'll have to respond with reciprocal action.
Wait.
Did I just say that the government of Mexico is going to take the side of the cartels and punish America for being mad at the cartels and trying to shut them down?
They literally are taking the side of the cartel?
Now, I do understand if they said things like, oh, we're a sovereign country, you can't bring your military down here.
You know, attack.
We'll do it.
We'll do it.
You don't have to do it.
We'll do it.
No, that I would get.
That would be a sensible thing for a country to do.
We wouldn't believe that they would do anything, but it would be a sensible thing to say.
Here's what I don't understand.
Why would they just threaten the United States for going after the cartels?
It really looks exactly like they work for the cartels, which I guess they do.
I mean, I don't have any specific information, but how could you really be in charge over there unless you're working with the cartels?
I don't know.
And I guess what the Mexican president is warning, that she would do something about going after U.S. gunmakers, because the U.S. gunmakers are the reasons that there are so many guns in Mexico.
So the guns are coming from the United States.
Now, I do see why that's a problem.
And I do see that she might want to do something about it.
But why are they connected?
Shouldn't she say, oh, not only do we want to get rid of the cartels, thanks for the help of the United States, but we'd like to help you even further by helping you figure out how to stop the gun flow from your country to ours.
Shouldn't she be on our side on both of those things?
Stopping the guns and also stopping the cartels.
Why would she use the one thing against the other thing, other than the cartel's controller?
I can't think of a reason.
So I don't have any facts to back up that speculation, but it sure looks like it in every way.
All right.
So the American Bar Association, according to the FTC chairman, so now this is a Trump administration action, The FTC is prohibiting the FTC political appointees from holding leadership positions in the ABA, participating in ABA events, or even renewing their membership.
And the FTC will stop expending any sources to facilitate any employee's membership in the ABA. So I guess the idea is that the ABA is a liberal bastion of trouble.
And so the government is saying, we don't want to have anything to do with you, you're just...
Bad entities.
So we'll see where that goes.
James Carville continues to be fun, talking about how Democrats are useless.
And he said, he was talking about how Democrats have no idea how to beat Trump.
And he says, quote, and I don't know how you accentuate.
I don't know what that means.
Do you oppose one thing?
So he's talking about how do you oppose Trump?
He goes, do you oppose one thing?
Do you oppose all five?
Because he's talking about the flood of things coming too quickly.
He goes, do you oppose one thing?
Do you oppose all five?
Is it personnel issues?
Is it policy issues?
He goes, I'm struggling here a little bit, so maybe some of our really smart viewers, he was on some podcasts, can help us untangle it a little bit.
He said, it's really tangled now because no one knows where to land.
It's all too incomprehensible.
So that's what I was talking about.
When I'm talking about Doge, Oh, the lawyer doing this and the lawyer doing that and this department doing that and that department.
It's incomprehensible.
And I even put the time in to try to comprehend it.
Imagine the casual viewer of news.
They have no idea what's going on.
But it sounds good.
Oh, you're cutting waste in the government?
All right.
Blah, blah, blah, this department, blah, blah, blah, that lawyer.
We're flooded in shit and we're searching for a way to deal with this.
These are extraordinary difficult times.
So he was referencing the fact that Bannon had said back in 2018, I think other people had been on the same page here back then, that the way to deal with the media is to flood the zone with shite.
So that's definitely what's happening.
Musk and Trump are quite intentionally flooding the zone.
Now, it has multiple advantages.
So the doing everything fast.
It isn't just about flooding the zone.
It does have that advantage.
But it's also the way you should do it.
You should move fast and break things and then fix whatever you've broken as you need to.
Otherwise, you just get bogged down.
It has to be high energy, high attack, high error.
It's the only way forward.
And it has that second advantage of making the bad guys look like they don't know how to work.
And the public just says, I don't know what you guys are doing, but if you're cutting expenses and you're working all night and you're sleeping on the floor and the smartest people in the country are working on it and they're making progress, I know I hate that.
I know I hate that at all.
So everything about the Doge-Trump strategy is just brilliant from top to bottom.
Everything about it works as a machine.
Even the Supreme Court approval is going up a little bit, according to The Hill.
So now the Supreme Court's approval rating is above 50% for the first time since 2022. Now, what would cause that?
Now, part of it is that any decisions about abortion are now further in the rearview mirror, so that probably makes a difference.
But do you think that there's just a general leaning of the public?
Toward the conservative side, or maybe toward the middle.
And that respect for the Supreme Court can return just because people are sort of getting away from the craziest part of the political scene.
So maybe it's just a general statement about how the country's feeling about the left versus the right.
In other news, you probably knew that Jay-Z was accused of some...
Horrible sex crime, and that case has been dropped, according to CBS. I won't get into what it was, but it involved a young person, and it was a terrible accusation.
And now it's dropped.
It was voluntarily dismissed with prejudice.
So here's the context that only I can add.
If you're a normie, As in, not a celebrity.
You don't really understand how often celebrities get falsely accused of sex crimes.
It's pretty much routine.
So if you said to yourself, well, I mean, somebody went through a lot of trouble to accuse Jay-Z, so therefore, probably true?
I think probably not.
Possibly true.
But just the accusation.
If the only thing you knew is that somebody was accused of a sex crime and the person involved said, I don't even know who that is, it probably didn't happen.
Probably didn't happen.
Now, I'm not excusing any sex crimes.
So if there are any dumb people, an NPC is watching, and you're saying, did he just excuse sex crimes?
No, I'm not.
I'm just saying that you don't understand how often.
These accusations are completely made up.
So I'm going to give Jay-Z the American benefit of a doubt.
The legal system has dropped it.
We don't know.
I mean, you can speculate there was some pressure on the accuser.
We don't know one way or the other.
But given the high rate of false accusations in this exact domain and the fact that it was dropped, benefit of a doubt.
Innocent until proven guilty, and it doesn't look like he's going to be proven guilty.
Here's a thing that I've been telling you is going to happen for a long time.
According to SciTech Daily, scientists discovered that your cerebral cortex doesn't just react to the world, it predicts what's coming next.
So your cerebral cortex isn't just watching.
It's continuously predicting what happens next.
Now, that's what I've been waiting for.
Because we're very close to proving that we live in a simulation.
And all the parts are sort of on their own or sort of coming together in a whole bunch of different ways.
But this is a big one.
Because it explains consciousness.
Now, I have my own definition of consciousness, which does not match anybody else's.
And I was waiting for this.
This is what I was waiting for.
I was waiting for a confirmation that there's a part of the brain that predicts.
Because here's my definition of consciousness.
It's the difference between what you predict is going to happen and what does, what you observe.
If everything that happened is exactly what you predicted, you would lose consciousness instantly.
And you can test that because in your own environment, so I'm sitting in my office with a whole bunch of things that are not changing.
So there's a cabinet over there.
My expectation is it will look exactly the same in 10 minutes.
Nothing will be different.
And everything else in the room, nothing will be different.
The only thing that's different is your comments that are streaming in.
You know, the visual thing that I'm seeing of myself while I do this.
So my consciousness is 100% on the things that are changing.
Because the things that are changing are the only things that have the possibility of what I predict is going to happen, not matching what happens.
Everything else in my environment, I'm unconscious to.
Because they're not going to ever change.
So what I predict about them, I know will be the same as what happens.
I mean, I don't know, but it's a pretty safe bet.
So, you are not conscious of anything you think isn't going to change, and you're correct about it.
You're only conscious of things you can predict what's going to happen, and then you watch what's happening.
And what makes humans do better than other creatures is that, the degree of consciousness, the degree of predicting.
And then seeing how it's different.
Because if you predict and then you're wrong, then you have much better insight about how to adjust it.
Oh, wow, I was wrong about that.
Rethink it, rethink it, try something else.
Until you get predictability.
So we're always going to get predictability.
We're striving for it, and that's consciousness.
It's the only purpose for it.
It's not magic.
It's just a simple little trick of the brain so that we're more able to solve problems.
We predict, and then we can solve them sometimes in advance based on our prediction.
And then if we're wrong, we say, whoa, that didn't work.
Look at the difference between the prediction and the outcome.
Basically, that's the basis of science, right?
Science is looking at the difference between your hypothesis and your outcome.
So the first thing you need to know is that consciousness is not special.
It's special because humans seem to have the most of it.
If you notice that your dog definitely seems conscious, and your dog too can predict.
You see that?
Your dog can predict.
When I walk into the kitchen, my dog thinks, hmm, that's where I get treats.
So the dog comes into the kitchen.
So the dog also has an idea of what the future looks like.
And then operates based on that.
And if I don't give the dog a treat, what happens?
I can tell that she has some tension, just like humans.
When things don't go the way we expect, we get tension.
And then we want to get rid of the tension by solving it so that our world becomes predictable again.
So consciousness is nothing but the difference between your prediction and your observation.
That's it.
Similarly, there's a new study from, not a new study, but an article in Popular Mechanics that according to some of the scientists, not all of them, but some of the scientists in the quantum realm, your thoughts can change the past.
Now, we know in the quantum world that things don't really exist until they're observed.
So, as weird as that sounds, that's generally scientifically accepted.
You know, I think everybody accepts that at this point.
That until you observe something, it's just a probability.
And then once observed, it becomes solidified forever.
But now, it's going further.
That you could change your own past.
Alright, I'll turn off your comments.
You can observe your own past.
Or you can actually change your past by what you're thinking.
Now, I think this is proof that we're a simulation.
Because one of the proofs I was looking for, and again, proof is too strong a word, but one of the pieces of evidence would be if the present can create the past.
Because if we're a computer software simulation, it would be almost impossible for any computer to hold all the complexity of all the history of everything that's ever existed.
I can't imagine any computer that could do it.
And if you could do it, you probably wouldn't do it if you're building a simulation.
You would say, well, the past exists when somebody looks into it.
But if they don't look into it, it's just not there.
So the specific example would be if you go to dig a hole in your backyard and nobody's ever dug a hole in that place, so nobody knows what's below the surface, you're seeing it for the first time as you're digging the hole.
According to my view of the world, the hole is created just as you dig.
It doesn't exist in a steady state.
It doesn't collapse its probability until you see it.
Now, that would save a tremendous amount.
But it would also explain why you and I don't agree about the past.
Because think about how hard it would be if I dug a hole in my backyard and I had an idea about the past, but it had to match everybody else's ideas that I've ever dug nearby, etc.
It would be too hard.
So instead, you would say, all right, if I'm writing this simulation and I want to save capacity, I'll just say, Your memory doesn't have to match mine.
And that's what we observe.
That one person's memory doesn't match another's.
Even when I talk about things that happened in my childhood, one of my siblings will say, that didn't happen.
That happened to somebody else.
Now, usually, since my memory is not that good, I just assume the other person's right.
Which is a good bet.
In the real world, we all disagree about what the past is.
And that's the only way you can handle all the pasts being so different, is just allow them to be different.
And people just say, well, you're wrong.
And then the other person says, no, you're wrong.
And that's the end of it.
You don't have to solve it.
You can just agree that you have a different idea of what the past was.
So that happened.
I think the odds of us being a simulation are pretty close to 100% at this point.
All right.
Over in Ukraine, there's a story in the Defense Post that Ukraine has developed this drone front line.
And what it is is basically a bunch of unmanned drones that can control a part of the front.
You know, the military front.
And basically you would just watch what's happening and kill anything that started moving and looked like an enemy.
So if this really works, which I'm not sure it does, but if it really worked, it would look like Skynet Small.
Skynet, you know, the fictional version of Skynet from Terminator movies, was a bunch of flying machines that would look for humans and kill them wherever they found them.
That's exactly this.
It's a bunch of flying machines that would autonomously, I think on their own, that part I'm not sure about, I think it's on their own, but maybe not, would kill anybody who's in that zone because they would just make sure that their own soldiers were never in that zone or they'd turn it off if they were.
So I think it's just basically putting a hat on the front lines and saying, anybody who's under this hat, we're just going to kill you.
And that would be what the future of military looks like.
Now, let's go back to the real world.
In the real world, Ukraine and Russia are getting ready to negotiate some kind of peace.
In that environment, wouldn't you expect a whole bunch of Positive stories about Ukraine's military future.
It's like, oh, sure, Russia was winning up till now, but now we've got this whole new Skynet thing locally, so you couldn't possibly gain another inch, so you might as well negotiate a good piece that we can live with.
So, I don't believe anything about this.
It could be they're working on it.
It could be that it works a little bit.
But I don't think they've found a way to completely control the front line with drones.
Someday.
Definitely someday.
But it's a little bit too on the nose that just when we get into the negotiating, oh, look, we've got some magic technology that would do what nothing's ever done before.
Maybe.
Maybe.
I just don't buy it yet.
Anyway, that's all I got for today.
Make sure you join...
Owen Gregorian's aftershow.
I'll just say a few words to the locals people when I'm done with the rest of you.
But in a few minutes, Owen Gregorian will fire up a Spaces event on X for anybody who wants to keep talking about this sort of stuff.
