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, Stephen King's X Return, Brian Roemmele X Suspension, Governor Hochul vs Mayor Adams, FBI Director Kash Patel, Russia Collusion Hoax, Adam Schiff, Epstein List, President Milei, Economic Chainsaw, Elon Musk, DOGE Taxpayer Refund Concept, Van Jones, LA Fires Trans Suffering, George Clooney, Mitch McConnell, Intentionally Biased Polls, China Money Problems, Rubio Zelensky Talks, Zelensky Popularity Poll, President Trump, Ukraine Negotiation Technique, UK Backdoor Apple Access, UK Censorship, Magical Gaza Plans, Mexico Sovereignty, Cartel Terrorists, AI Audio Books, 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.
Let's call up the comments on locals and see what we got going here.
Everybody good this morning?
It's going to be exciting.
It always is.
Yep, not that.
There we go.
There I am.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams because it is.
But if you'd like to take this special experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains.
Well, all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank of chalice, a canteen jug, 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's going to happen right now.
Oh, I can feel the simultaneity.
It was a little special today.
It was good.
Well, here's some good news.
The odds of that asteroid hitting the Earth are now down to a quarter of one percent.
A quarter of one percent.
We were up to about three percent at one point that it was going to hit us by 2032, but now we're down to a quarter of one percent.
So, celebrate.
Don't look up.
Don't look up.
Meanwhile, let's see.
The most important story of the day, really, is that Canada won the hockey game to become the leader or the winner of the...
What the hell was it?
You can tell how much I follow hockey.
Oh, the highly anticipated Four Nations Championship game.
Yeah.
So, Canada, congratulations.
Nice win.
See how easy it is to be nice?
Congratulations.
And I did turn it on just to see if there had been any fights over the National Anthem.
Yeah, I was a little complaining about it, but no big deal.
So it was probably just a good game.
I didn't watch the rest.
But I'm glad we're back to just playing sports and getting over it.
You know, when we have disagreements with Canada, it doesn't really feel like other disagreements, does it?
It just feels so much like a sibling kind of a thing, where one sibling is saying, ah, you're really a governor.
The other sibling is saying, ah, we're a country.
None of it I take too seriously.
So it seems all performative.
I'm glad we're at least not fighting about hockey.
You'll be fascinated to know that Stephen King, who left X, is back.
And he said, did you miss me?
And Elon Musk said that he did.
Which actually makes sense if your job is to get a lot of traffic on X. But here's my question.
Are we supposed to believe...
That Stephen King left Dex because it was so terrible, but then he returned after it got, I would imagine, in his point of view, even worse.
Doesn't it seem like Stephen King is doing this for a job?
Now, I know he doesn't need the money, and I wouldn't call it a job per se, but do you think he's just doing it completely independently?
And that one day he said, you know, you know what would be really fun is if I lose half of my customers by taking a firm political stand and then being totally abused online for months and months and months and months.
Did he do that because he just thought it was fun?
It couldn't have possibly been fun.
And then he left and I thought, oh, okay, well, maybe he was doing it for fun and it stopped being fun.
And now he's back.
Doesn't it feel exactly like he's being, let's say, managed by some other entity?
I don't know what it would be.
But it definitely doesn't look like anything organic.
So, I don't know.
Meanwhile, there's a mystery on X. One of the more, say, notable users of X, Brian Romelli.
He's been suspended.
Now...
Since I don't know why he was suspended, I don't have a firm opinion on it, but I don't recall him being the type of person who would be suspended because he doesn't say provocative things about anything.
So whatever the reason is, it's going to be something we didn't see coming.
Now, the only thing I could think is that he was working hard to...
Make sure that people had good private AI as they could run on their own devices.
And he was experimenting a lot with AI. And is it possible he said something about AI or did something with AI that crossed some boundary?
I don't know.
I'm just speculating.
But he's not exactly the kind of person who was making, let's say, social commentary.
I'm not sure he ever did.
So what would that be about?
Very curious.
Very, very curious.
If anybody finds it out, let me know, okay?
He's probably on some other social network by now.
Well, the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, she has decided she will not remove my brother from another mother, Eric Adams, from office, the mayor.
I guess there was some historical precedent.
That would have allowed her to do it, but it wouldn't have been easy to remove him from office.
So instead, she's going to put guardrails on him and make sure that there's some kind of standards that she seems happy with.
I don't know what that's all about.
But the guardrails seem dumb, and I guess that just means she didn't really have anything she could do.
Kash Patel has been voted in, as you know, so he's approved as the...
Head of the FBI. Now, the thing that makes this the most fun is we've never really had a full accounting of the Russia collusion hoax.
We've kind of treated it like, was it true?
Was it not true?
But really, it was an op.
I mean, it was this big organized op by people that we're pretty well aware of.
And Adam Schiff, of course, the big Opponent of Kash Patel being approved.
And at one point in a podcast, I told you this before, Kash Patel had said that Adam Schiff was the biggest criminal in Congress.
Now, I don't know what he meant exactly by criminal, because I don't know what criminal act we're talking about.
I'm not aware of a criminal act, unless there's something about putting together an op and lying about the SCIF that's criminal.
I don't think there is, because I think people in Congress can lie all day long, and it's not criminal, as far as I know.
So, I love having the guy who was fighting the Russia collusion hoax while it was happening, Kash Patel, now in charge of the FBI, and things might get interesting now.
We don't know.
Now, I wouldn't bet on it.
I don't think Adam Schiff really has anything to worry about.
But I see a lot of people saying, oh, when's the Epstein list going to be revealed?
Do you know what the answer to that is?
Of when the Epstein list will be revealed?
Well, there are two possibilities.
One is that it doesn't really exist.
Because do you really think there's a list?
Really?
You think there's a list?
Maybe.
I mean, anything's possible.
But if it doesn't exist, it won't be released.
That makes sense.
Now, what if it does exist?
Well, if it does exist, it's definitely not going to be released.
Because whatever's on that list would be far more valuable for the government to keep secret so they could do what Epstein was doing, which is have complete control over the people on the list.
So there are only two possibilities.
It doesn't exist.
So it won't be released.
Or it does exist, so it definitely won't be released.
Only two possibilities.
So no, you're not going to see any Epstein list.
Forget about that.
Well, at CPAC, I guess Javier Mile from Argentina showed up and gave Elon Musk a sort of ceremonial, cool, chainsaw-looking thing.
I don't think it was operational.
And that was fun.
One of the things I love about having Javier Millet just insert himself into the American story and associate with Elon Musk is that, at least according to the news, what Millet did is working.
Now, I don't think we're seeing all of the news.
Do you really think that Javier Millet just took a chainsaw to a huge part of the government?
And then it was just all good.
Like only good things happened.
That's not even a possibility.
So if you're not also hearing about what the downside was, such as, you know, maybe somebody got, you know, not as good health care or not as good police protection or the garbage didn't pick up.
I don't know.
Must be something.
But did he really just...
Chainsaw the whole government spending and everybody was just fine and the only thing that happened was inflation went way down.
Does that sound real to you?
Is there any real world in which you can do something that dramatic and it's only good?
All good.
No downside.
I don't even think that about America.
I mean, I'm 100% in favor of Doge, but I think we all understand it's going to break some eggs, so to speak.
And there'll be some things you have to rapidly, you know, put back the way it was.
Like, oops, I didn't realize that was that important.
So, I don't know.
The whole Javier Millet story, I don't buy it the way it's being told.
It's a little too on the nose, a little too weirdly successful in a way the real world doesn't work.
But, again, like Doge, I'm completely in favor of it.
So I'm completely in favor of what's happening in Argentina.
I just think we're not getting the whole story.
You know, we can handle it.
There might be a downside.
I think it's worth doing overall.
It probably saved the country.
And I think Doge is worth doing overall.
It's probably going to save the country if anything can.
But really, let's not act like there's never a downside.
And then somebody challenged Elon Musk at that event.
I guess he was on stage.
And he was asked about being a puppet of Putin.
And he had a good answer.
I mean, he had a crowd-pleasing answer.
And the crowd-pleasing answer is, he said, people sometimes say I'm a bought asset of Putin.
And then Elon said, I'm like, he can't afford me.
That does seem true.
How could he possibly afford him?
How much money would you have to give him?
You'd have to give him more than...
Well, it'd have to be enough that it changes his life somehow.
What would be the amount of money that would change his life?
A trillion dollars?
Russia can't give him a trillion dollars.
So it's actually true.
What it would take to bribe him, if there is even a number.
I'm not assuming there is any number that would bribe him.
But it would be a trillion.
Russia can't afford that.
That's just a bribe.
Well, the federal judge ruled that Trump can continue the mass firing of federal workers.
Let me add that to the list of things that...
We're too boring to follow.
The court's trying to stop Doge.
The court got overturned trying to stop Doge, but now they're doing a different thing to trying to stop Doge.
Oh, it's a different court.
It's a different judge.
It's a different approach.
Well, that got overturned.
That got delayed.
I can't follow it.
But apparently Doge is still going ahead.
One of the things that...
Trump is floating, is the idea that, I don't know if it means if they get to $2 trillion in Doge budget reduction, that they would use that as a trigger to give 20% of it, which would be about $400 billion, back to taxpayers.
To which I say, now some people, I think Jesse Waters on Fox News was saying that, why wouldn't you give it back?
Why wouldn't you give at least some of it back?
Because it's our money.
It's our money.
What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with the statement that, of course you should give it back, it's our money?
It's not money at all.
It's not anybody's money.
It's not money.
What money?
Reductions in future budgets is not money.
What are you talking about?
If I tell you that next year I'm not going to buy a house, did I make some money?
Future budget non-spending isn't anybody's money.
You would have to increase debt to give away $400 billion.
Debt is nobody's.
It's nobody's money.
That would be like saying, hey, Scott, would you like me to give you $100,000?
I'd say, yeah, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to increase your debt by $100,000, because I'll take out a loan in your name, and then I'll give it to you.
And I'll say, you're damn right you're going to give it to me.
It's my money.
It's nobody's money.
It's debt.
You can't give somebody their own debt.
I don't know.
I don't think I'm explaining it right.
But it's not money.
It's just a way that we could possibly avoid going down the drain faster than we are.
So...
In my opinion, there's no good reason to give $400 billion and a $2 trillion.
I don't like anything about it.
So, I guess I'm going to go on record as saying...
If you have to already get the $2 trillion before it activates the $400 billion giveback, I'm not even a little bit for it.
I just want to save the country and let everybody benefit from that.
Anyway, Trump is threatening the state of Maine for defying his executive order about keeping men out of women's sports.
He says, we're not going to give them any federal funding.
So, according to Trump, allowing men, biological men, and women's sports doesn't get you any money in Maine.
It gives new meaning to the phrase, my Maine man.
I worked on that all morning, and that's the best I can do.
My Maine man.
It didn't work, did it?
It just sort of laid there.
You're like, Maine?
Oh, I get it.
Sort of like a dad joke on the state name of Maine.
Okay, got it.
Yeah, we'll just leave that one there.
Meanwhile, over on CNN, Van Jones had some things to say about Elon Musk and all the doging.
He said that Elon Musk is...
Now remember, do you remember my reframe from yesterday?
The reframe was that the Republicans are mostly talking about real things.
The dead is real.
Russia, Ukraine war is real.
Real stuff.
You know, men and women, sports, that's real.
But the Democrats have become sort of the fan fiction interpretive dance party.
They don't really deal with real things.
They imagine things that might go wrong in the future.
And that's it.
Imaginary things that could go wrong in the future.
Now, you can't say they're wrong because it's things that could go wrong in the future.
But you could say they're not doing anything because literally everything could go wrong in the future if you implement it wrong.
If tomorrow somebody said, hey, we've got this free technology that will make egg prices really low, somebody would say, oh, so it's going to be like a monopoly thing?
You know, it could go wrong.
They'll form a monopoly, put all the other egg people in a business, and then the people with the secret egg-making thing will be in charge of us all.
So basically, you're saying you're in favor of a monopoly of eggs.
Okay.
That could happen.
But why don't we deal with what did happen?
The price of eggs just went down.
So here's Van Jones on CNN. He says about Elon Musk.
He says he's, quote, abandoning his children and doing theatrics as he puts a chainsaw to the government.
The government that, quote, our parents built.
Is any of that like talking about the real world or anything you care about?
Do I care that your parents built it?
I mean, what exactly is the relevance of that?
You either like it or you don't like it.
I don't care who built it.
He said, you unleash somebody, meaning Musk, who's doing theatrics, abandoning his children, having some weird fantasy in front of everybody to be popular.
Oh, okay.
So the problem is his character.
Remember?
As long as Democrats are locked into Bad character, instead of any kind of policy stuff, they can't possibly win.
And they can't get out of the character mold.
They're completely locked in.
Some weird fantasy trying to be popular.
Do you think that's what Musk is doing?
Do you think that he's trying to be popular?
Who in the world tries to be popular by siding with Trump?
What?
That's bordering insane.
That's the last thing you do.
If you wanted to be popular, you would just make really good electric cars, really good satellites and whole boring machines and spaceships.
That would make you very popular.
But no, siding with Trump, that takes 50% of your popularity away day one and it never comes back.
So that seems like a weird...
Fantasy, fiction kind of thing that's not happening in the real world.
And then Van says that Musk is going to do whatever he wants with no oversight.
Why are we watching?
We're all giving oversight.
He's reporting exactly what he's doing.
If he does something we don't like, there's still time to reverse it.
If you take away a budget, you can give it back.
If you fire some people, maybe some of them need to get hired back.
Which is exactly the process.
It's not meant to be clean.
And then he said, that is anti-American, and it's reckless, and it's wrong.
How many of those things were real?
Let's see, the reckless, the wrong, the abandoning his family, which, you know, he has no sense of what anything Musk is doing privately.
Weird fantasies.
It's all just made-up stuff.
All made-up stuff.
Where is the alternative suggestion?
All right, let me give you the alternative suggestion.
This is what everybody who doesn't understand how the real world works says makes sense.
Oh, instead of using a chainsaw, they should use a scalpel.
The next time you hear anybody say they should use a scalpel, you should ignore everything they ever say from that day on.
If you really believe this could get done with a scalpel, you are so far from understanding anything about how anything works.
It wouldn't work.
There's a reason that big companies don't do this either.
If a big company takes over a small company, do you think they say, well, it might take us 10 years to get it done, but we're going to use a scalpel.
Do you know what happens when you try to use a scalpel?
The people you try to scalpel will tell you that won't work.
All right, managers, I just took over this entity, or I'm Doge.
I don't know all the details of what you guys do, so can you tell me where the cuts will be with the scalpel?
Because I don't have time to learn all the nuance of your specific department.
And then the department manager says, well, we're actually underfunded by 30%.
You can't really make a cut here.
And then you come back to them and you say, no, but everybody's got to make a cut.
We're just going to do it with a scalpel.
And then the person says, really?
Well, there's nothing to scalpel.
Okay, but give me a list of things we could cut out with a scalpel.
All right, you're going to have to give me a month.
A month?
Yeah, because I have to look at all the things we're doing, talk to everybody, really dig in and make sure we're using the right scalpel.
All right.
And then a month later, they come in and go, well, we looked at everything.
There was nothing to cut.
Turns out we just need 30% more money.
What do you do with that, Van Jones?
What do you do with that?
If you don't think that's what would happen, you've never worked in the real world.
Here's what works.
How much money do we give you?
100 billion a year.
All right, now you have 50. That's it.
Nothing else works.
There's nobody who's ever made anything work but that.
And then everybody screams and quits and resigns and protests, right?
And then you check back in a year and everything's working with half as much money.
It's the same thing everywhere, all the time, all over the world, all through space and time.
Only one thing works.
You have less money.
Deal with it.
Everything else is just a bunch of people with scalpels lying.
Here's my scalpel.
I'm getting ready to cut some only the fat.
I won't get any muscle.
Won't work anywhere in the real world.
And I don't believe anybody except somebody who's a lifelong pundit would ever imagine the scalpel could work.
It's so removed from any kind of...
Common sense.
Now, if you don't believe me, I would recommend that you check in with people who really know how any of this works, such as Elon Musk, literally the world expert at cutting the fat.
You know, before he did Doge, if you were going to say, all right, who would be the best person to do this?
You would have said Elon Musk.
And then as soon as he starts doing it and doing it exactly the way any smart person would who had a lot of experience, everybody is like, whoa, I've got a better idea.
I'm way smarter than Elon Musk is.
If he's using a chainsaw, then I say whatever is the opposite of that.
The opposite of a chainsaw is a scalpel.
And I saw Chris and Lisa talking to Chris Quoban on News Nation.
So Lizzo, who used to be a CNN political pundit, he was warning that the Democrats, their intense hatred of Trump is crippling their odds of reclaiming things.
Because if all they're doing is saying, Trump bad, Trump bad, they're not really creating any positive alternative.
But they also paint themselves in a corner.
So what was it?
And by the way, I like that Chris Cuomo seems to completely understand this situation.
But here's my take on it.
Once you've spent years, just years, saying that Trump is Hitler, oh, we mean it, like actual Hitler.
He's totally Hitler.
No, not just a metaphor, not just an analogy.
We mean he's actually, you know, he's actually Hitler.
Now, what happens if that guy becomes elected?
How are you supposed to agree with some of the things he gets right, which is what Selysa says, you should at least agree with the things that make sense?
You can't.
Let me give you an example.
He is Hitler, but we have to admit he has some excellent ideas too.
In what world does that work?
As soon as you say the character is Hitler, there's nothing you can say that sounds like you agree with him.
It's like, well, okay, yeah, sure he's Hitler, but I have to admit that his cost-cutting is going well.
You can't do that.
Hitler is yes-no.
And once they put themselves in the yes-no category, it's got to be no.
It's got to be no to everything all the time, because...
Hitler.
So they trapped themselves in a way that's hilariously impossible to escape under the condition that Trump became president, which I guess they didn't see coming.
So they had a great play unless he got elected, and then it would destroy the entire Democrat Party.
And it looks like that's what's happened.
ABC News continues to be ABC News.
And they recently had an article about the LA fires.
They said, among the hardest hit in the LA fires were the transgender and non-binary residents in transitional housing programs.
Now, I have great empathy for anybody who lost anything in the LA fires.
But did we really need to call out this one community?
And again, I'm completely supportive of any adults who want to do anything they want, whether they're transgender, non-binary, LGBTQ, in any way they want.
Totally in favor of it.
I like people being people.
We should all be free to express ourselves and whatever feels right to us.
And you can change your mind anytime you want, as far as I'm concerned.
Do we really need to call them out as among the hardest hit by the fire?
I've talked to some people who are hard hit by the fire.
They're not too happy.
Believe it or not, not too happy.
Even though they're not transgender in every single case.
Anyway, what I really need is if we're going to do fire reporting based on people's sexual preferences.
I'm going to need a diagram.
I need to see some Venn diagrams.
One Venn circle would be people who lost a house in the fire.
And then the other circle would be penis preference.
Because, you know, I like to see my arguments with data.
So give me the Venn diagram of how many people lost a house, and we'll cross that with the circle of how many people have certain preferences for a penis.
And there might be more to it then.
We could add some circles if that's not enough.
But at the very least, when somebody's house burns down, my first thought is, well, what are their thoughts about penis?
Do they love it?
Are they looking to add one, to get rid of one, to enjoy one, to use one?
I mean, these are the important questions about fires.
I know a lot of people are going to say, oh, the real question is, how do we rebuild?
How do we make sure it doesn't happen again?
Okay, that's fine, too.
But really, we want to know more about the victim's preferences for penis.
That's the kind of news ABC can bring us.
Well, Citibank has announced that it's going to get rid of its DEI goals and policies.
Now, Unusual Wales is reporting this on X. I don't know exactly if abandoning it is ever real.
Because it feels a lot like all they ever do is change the names.
Because they can't really say we stop caring about diversity.
That's not going to fly internally.
So doesn't it really mean they're just going to hide it better?
We don't know.
But that's what I'd assume.
George Clooney continues to be extra, extra worthless outside of acting.
I love his movies.
Within the realm of Hollywooding stuff, I enjoy his work.
I'll watch more of it.
But he conceded, I guess, in a Thursday interview with the New York Times, he conceded that the media, he says the media failed us in his coverage of Biden's fitness for office.
The media failed us.
What does this remind you of?
Reminds me a little bit of Mayor Karen Bass, who is putting together an investigation to find out why she went to Africa instead of handling the fires.
She's looking for the real killer.
It's a little like OJ looking for the real killer.
If you're actor George Clooney, and you knew for sure that Biden didn't have it together, and you noticed that the news wasn't handling it, And you knew that if you wrote about it, it would be the news?
George, you are the news.
Everything you say is the news, including this interview where you talk about the unfitness of the news.
The news printed you saying that the news failed.
He could get the news to print anything.
If he could get the news to print that the news failed...
He certainly could have gotten the news to print, I know Joe Biden and you really need to back off of this.
He's not where you need him to be.
They would have reported that.
Do you think there's any chance that if Clooney had broken ranks, they would have ignored it?
There's no chance of that at all.
He had the complete power, complete power, to make that not a problem.
He could have actually probably gotten at least a better contest if people had listened to him early, although it probably would have ended up being Kamala Harris unless they took him out really early.
Anyway, let's compare that to how Republicans have treated Mitch McConnell's obvious mental infirmities.
Now, with McConnell, we don't know exactly how much is mental.
And how much is physical?
Because it's pretty overlapping.
But in your experience, has anybody gone easy on Mitch McConnell?
Have you seen any Republicans who said, stop bothering Mitch McConnell.
He's perfectly fine.
I don't see a problem with him.
What do you see?
Well, you crazy Putin puppet.
You must be a Putin puppet if you say that.
Mitch McConnell looks fine.
Who says that?
Nobody.
So for the longest time, the minute that McConnell walked on stage and looked mentally degraded, what happened?
I'll tell you what happened.
Every single Republican said, okay, that's a problem in public.
We said it in public many times.
Okay, that's a problem.
We need to get rid of that.
That's our problem.
I feel, though, I feel like the Republicans do a level of self-policing that just doesn't happen on the other side.
It felt like somebody took a dump on our carpet.
And I think if that happened to the Democrats, they'd be looking for the real pooper.
Whereas the Republicans are like, oh, wow, look at that on my carpet.
I better clean that up right away.
We clean up our messes.
Or at least we admit they're messes.
It seems like.
Now, this could be a totally biased take.
I'm completely aware of that.
But doesn't it seem like, doesn't it feel like, at least the Trump version of the Republican Party, the pro-Trump, doesn't it feel like there's real self-policing?
And it just doesn't exist on the other side?
It feels that way.
But it's more of a feeling.
And then let's see if Clooney has some good, solid takes about Trump's policies.
Or do you imagine that he might have some takes that are based on imagination and interpretive dance?
Let's see what he says.
About Trump, he said that no rules count anymore, Clooney said of Trump.
It's like letting an infant walk across the 405 freeway in the middle of the afternoon.
Okay, which policy did he just address?
I don't see one.
He also said, I think there are always these pendulum swings.
The first Trump election was, I believe, a result of eight years of a black president.
Really?
Yeah, really.
Does anybody think...
That if the last eight years had been president, let's say, Byron Donald or Tim Scott, do you think that Trump would have been elected because we had eight years of a black president?
Do Democrats really think that it was his skin color and not the things he did?
Do you really think that if a Republican black candidate became president, that that would be a reason for Republicans to vote for a white guy next time?
I mean, you know, maybe three or four people, but that's such a weird take.
By the way, I'm so pro Byron Donald.
I love just his...
Not just his vibe, but his, I guess I'd say charisma, but his communication skills, we can't ignore that.
His ability to communicate is just way above the average Republican, that if he's not in the fight for the top job fairly soon, maybe he needs to get a little more seasoned, but...
I don't know.
I think you'd be pretty happy with that kind of a voice on your side.
So, it's premature.
Anything could change, but at the moment, a very high opinion.
So, I'd like to give you George Clooney's opinions in interpretive dance.
No rules count anymore.
It's like letting an infant walk across the 405. It's like there's these pendulum swings.
We can't let the eight years of a black president.
That's my interpretive dance version.
Let's see.
CNN is telling some fake news about Pete Hegseth allegedly making deep cuts in the Pentagon.
Now, I do suspect there will be some eventual deep cuts in the Pentagon, but apparently what I think Seth is doing is moving existing funding from one bucket to another.
So he's taking it away from climate initiatives.
How could anybody be against this?
How could anybody be against the Pentagon moving money from their climate initiative?
To building an iron dome to protect the United States from incoming missiles.
Boy, those two things are not similar.
But CNN will call that as a deep cut.
There might be deep cuts coming, but that's not right away.
There are four new polls showing that the public's opinion of Trump's handling of the economy has turned, according to CNN. So there's a new CNN poll, Gallup poll, Ipsos, and QPAC. Now, what do we believe about polls?
How many of you believe polls are real?
Now, I don't want to cast any aspersions on a particular pollster or a particular poll, but I don't believe they're real.
There was a time I figured, well, if there are four of them, you know, and they're in the same direction, they're probably real.
Now, I also don't necessarily think they're wrong because America is dumb enough that they would say, it's been a month and you haven't fixed the economy yet.
That would be something that Americans would say.
I don't know.
It's been a whole month.
My price of eggs went up.
So you said you'd lower it and it's been a month.
So it's possible.
And by the way, if they did the poll, it means they were probably polling last week.
So they might have been polling his performance after three weeks on the job.
Before he even had, like, his people approved and the nominations approved.
So just in general, let me say this.
When polls can be validated, meaning they can be compared to the reality, I think they're usually as accurate as the pollsters can make them.
So, for example, for every polling company that was doing polls for the election, I believe their last poll, each of their last poll.
So the one that was closest to election day, I believe they all had an incentive because that was the day you could find out if they were way off or not.
That was the only time.
They had any incentive to be accurate.
All the other times, I believe, without proof, they had more incentive to, let's say, make some assumptions and some choices about who to poll and what method to use.
They would get them, let's say, an answer that would get them a lot of attention from the right people.
And they wouldn't have anything to compare it to.
If you've got four polls, they're sort of right-leaning, just hypothetically, or let's say left-leaning, hypothetically, and they come out at the same time, and they kind of have this similar attack that it looks like, oh, Trump suddenly is very unpopular on the economy, the most important thing.
Do you think that those are just honest, unrigged, professional polls?
They could be.
I have no proof that they're not.
No proof at all.
But I live in the real world.
There's nothing that they're compared to except each other.
And if a right-leading or, let's say, a poll that had been associated with Trump in the past came out with a different number, they'd still be safe.
Because they'd say, oh, look at that fake one from the right.
But look at all these real ones from the left, because they have more.
There are more polls that you would imagine sort of lean Democrat.
So as long as they have more of them, and there's no way to check the real number, because what would you check it against?
Just the other polls.
They can make up anything they want, and it's very powerful, because it tells the public what to think.
So no, I don't believe any poll.
That is this disconnected from some objective standard by which we could find out if the poll was real.
And the only time I know of is the last poll before an actual election.
And then the actual election, assuming it's not rigged, is going to tell you something like reality.
Well, there's something happening over in China with the money supply, but...
Any numbers coming out of China are suspect.
So that's the first thing.
And we don't know what's happening, but it looks like their M1 money supply just right away just surged.
And it looks like it surged in a way that's spectacularly different from the baseline.
But again, it's China and data.
I'm not sure we believe any data from China.
But the suggestion is that they've got a deflationary problem and that people are just hoarding their cash and they're not consuming enough to drive the economy where it needs to go.
So if you've got a deflationary problem, maybe injecting it with some stimulus money that you printed, maybe that's why they're doing it.
So we're just guessing at this point.
And it's not 100% sure that anything's happening at all because the data is so sketchy.
All right.
So Marco Rubio did an interview with, I think it was Catherine Herridge, and he said that when he met with Zelensky, Zelensky was sort of a two-faced liar, and he said that when I talked to him about, let's see, about maybe the U.S. sharing in some of their mineral wealth, Zelensky seemed at first sort of positive about the concept, you know, at a concept level.
But, you know, he needed to run it through his legislative process.
So he was acting like, oh, yeah, that could be a winning idea.
And then two days later, he's saying he rejected the deal.
Not that the legislative process did, but that he rejected it.
And apparently that's just a lie.
So Rubio is just calling them out to have been lied about that.
And Rubio is saying there should be some gratitude there because we're helping them more than they're helping us.
But let's see if we can trust Ukraine.
Well, speaking of polls, you probably heard that Right after Trump had claimed that Zelensky's popularity was about 4%, which I've never heard anybody's popularity being that low ever, that Zelensky immediately referred to a poll, a more recent poll, that said he had 57% approval.
Well, that would be actually quite impressive for any leader.
57%.
Huh.
I wonder who did that poll.
Let's see.
Was it the Kiev International Institute of Sociology?
Yes, it was.
That's who did the poll.
Were they funded by USAID? Well, it turns out they were.
Guess what?
USAID, the little, some say, CIA-related funding entity that we use to control other countries, allegedly, was behind that polling.
And it came out at exactly the right time with a number that suspiciously looks like it was just made up on the spot.
Huh.
How about that?
So the Mays account on X explains it this way.
He says, a couple days ago, Trump claimed Zelensky is widely unpopular in Ukraine and that his approval rating is 4%.
The very next day...
The mainstream media collectively called Trump a liar, and the mainstream media in the United States, this is so embarrassing, the mainstream media in the United States called Trump a liar, as did, let's see, CNN did, ABC, CBS, and they all quoted that 57%.
To show that when Trump said 4%, I mean Trump's, what a liar, 4%, it's 57% people.
So May says, I looked up where the number came from.
It came from the Kiev International Institute of Sociality.
Guess when they released their poll results?
It was the day after Trump made his claim.
That doesn't sound too suspicious, does it?
There were no poll results that said that until the day after Trump said it was 4%.
How about that?
I think there was a real poll that said 4%, and then there was another real poll that said 16%.
Now, 16% would be devastatingly bad, and who knows if any of the polls are real.
So, remember what I said about polls?
If there's no way to check that they're real, they're probably not.
Probably not.
Let's talk about negotiating with Russia.
One of the big problems in the news is that people who write news and talk about news often don't know much about negotiating.
So when they watch Trump negotiating, they're seeing something they've never seen and it's not the way they would have done it.
Their assumption is he's doing it wrong.
Apple removes cloud encryption feature of the UK. We'll talk about the UK in a minute.
So here's what I tried to explain in a post on X the other day.
Might help you.
So critics of Trump's negotiating with Russia say that you don't start giving up on NATO expansion and giving up on Russia.
Returning the captured territories.
So the smart people who think they know how negotiating works say, you don't give up things before you've negotiated.
Now, I agree.
You don't give up things before you negotiate.
Everybody agrees, right?
Everybody on the same page?
You don't give away things before you've even started.
You might try to get the other side to do it, but you don't do it.
That would be just a mistake.
So all those smart critics are saying that Trump has sort of given up.
Now, I don't know how they know this because nobody knows what anybody's saying secretly.
So this is speculation on their part, I would say.
But they believe that Trump is giving up on NATO expansion, you know, toward Russia, and that that would be just like starting by giving something up.
And they think that there's not going to be any attempt to get back the territories that are...
I guess they're mostly Russian-speaking that Russia is controlling right now on the eastern part of Ukraine.
So is that an example of Trump giving up two things?
No, it isn't.
Those are two things that we're never going to change.
If you simply acknowledge the reality and then negotiate from there, you haven't given up anything.
There was no possibility that the war would end, no possibility at all, as long as we were also saying that we're going to move toward Russia with NATO. Since it was the entire reason for the war in the first place, and Russia apparently still has enough resources to press the war if they want to, why would they stop if the only reason they started...
We said, well, we're going to keep doing that thing that caused you to start the war.
That's a non-starter.
Why would we say that we're going to try to get back those occupied territories when we know that's not going to happen?
So the first thing you have to do is acknowledge what's real.
What's real is that some things aren't going to change.
But we also have things that are not going to change.
For example, if they tried to go into Kiev, we would probably crush them, and I don't think that's going to change.
So there are things that both sides know are not going to change.
If you don't at least be honest about those things, how are you going to negotiate?
If we just went in and said, all right, number one, we're going to keep expanding NATO, then what does Russia do?
They'd say, well, why are we talking?
Well, we're negotiating.
And Russia would say, that's not up for negotiating.
All right, that's the end of our negotiations.
We'll just keep fighting.
Now, does that allow Putin to take advantage of, let's say, Trump's political incentive to make it wrap up fast?
Maybe.
But how does Trump compensate?
For what looks like giving them stuff.
Looks like, but I don't think it really is.
Well, he expands the variables.
So what you would say is, here's the deal.
It's not just about those territories and it's not just about NATO. We're going to make this a lot bigger.
It's going to be a bigger deal and there are going to be things that America wants even if Ukraine doesn't.
There are things that America wants even if Europe doesn't.
So we're going to talk about all the things.
Once you've seen all the things, you might have a good idea of who gave up what and what was real and what was practical and what might work, and then you could have an opinion.
But at this point, nothing's actually been given up.
But there may have been some, you know, just common sense reality.
It's like, okay, if we're going to have this conversation, we know there are some things that are not negotiable.
Let's say, for example, that Putin had been asking for NATO to be completely disbanded, not just in Ukraine, but just disbanded.
Would we enter that negotiation?
We would not.
But suppose Putin said, all right, I'm going to accept the fact that NATO will never be disbanded.
Well, then you can talk.
Is that an example of Putin giving us something for nothing?
Aha!
He wanted NATO completely disbanded, but he seems to have already backed off on that before we even started negotiating.
No, he didn't give up anything because it wasn't going to happen.
There was no scenario in which NATO was going to get disbanded.
So if you're giving up things that everybody knows were never really negotiable, all it does is allow you to talk.
It looks like that's what Trump's doing.
He's just being reasonable about the things that are negotiable and reasonable about the things that are not negotiable.
And if you don't have some common sense approach to what's real, you can't negotiate anything.
So it's way too early to say it's going to work or not work.
We have to see all the variables.
And it could be.
It could be.
There might be some secret variables, meaning that the public might not see the entire agreement.
For example, One of the things we might want long-term is that Russia takes our side if we have some, let's say, Islamic extremist problem.
Maybe.
Maybe we could use their help.
Suppose we want their help making sure that something good happens in the Middle East, just in general.
Maybe there's a secret agreement.
Maybe we want to make sure that We drive a wedge between Russia and China so that if things got really bad, Russia would feel a little more likely to thrive if they're on our side.
I don't know if we'd say that publicly.
So we're not going to really necessarily see all the variables that went into whatever gets agreed on if something gets agreed on.
All right.
So, in my opinion, you want to be, and here's the other thing, you want to be complimentary to Putin and treat him like a serious peer.
That's the only way he's going to make a deal.
And same the other way.
If Putin were treating Trump like he's Hiller, how would they get a deal?
Trump wouldn't even talk to him.
If Trump were treating Putin like he was Hiller, Why would Putin meet with him?
They never get a deal.
So it makes complete sense that Trump would be complimenting Putin at the same time he's giving some tough criteria.
If he complimented them and then also gave away everything, that would be bad.
If he compliments Putin so that we don't have a problem with just, let's say, the egos and the branding of things, just take that off the table.
And just work on the details?
Then it's going to look good as long as America gets what it wants.
That's going to look good.
But would you treat Putin and Zelensky the same in this context?
And the answer is no.
I wouldn't treat them the same.
I would treat Zelensky as an underling who depends on us for everything.
And I would treat Putin as a peer.
That's what I would do.
So slapping Zelensky basically in public, which is what Trump did with his 4% approval, is actually the exact right approach.
He should be treating Putin, our enemy, with respect, because that's how you might get a deal.
And Zelensky is not really playing well as a team member.
And if you're a terrible team member, you get benched.
So Zelensky gets benched.
Putin's still the opponent.
But we're treating it with respect, because that's how you get to the other side.
If you really want to be effective, that's how you get there.
All right, and I like to say that as good as Trump is at negotiating, I think Putin has the right persuasion and negotiating skills that it's a fair fight.
I still think Trump is the best, but it's definitely a fair fight.
They're a similar weight class when it comes to Overall negotiating and persuading.
So we'll see what comes of that.
Meanwhile, apparently the UK has asked Apple to open up a backdoor to their cloud service so that the UK could see everything anybody's ever done on their phone.
And I just saw something go by that says that Apple agreed to that.
Now, I always assume that our own government has full access to the back doors of all of our phones.
That's sort of an easy assumption.
But I don't know why the UK needs it.
And maybe, I guess I'm surprised they didn't already have it.
I'm a little surprised they didn't have a back door.
Here's my big question.
Russia is our enemy, we keep saying, and the UK is our ally.
But it seems like the UK was suspiciously involved in the Russia collusion hoax, or at least one of their ex-intelligence people, Steele.
And they had some other connections to it.
So I thought to myself, huh, it kind of looks like the UK tried to overthrow the government of the United States.
And then, of course, there's the whole censorship thing coming out of Europe and Great Britain in particular.
And I thought, wait a minute, these are our allies and they're trying to destroy free speech via destroying the platforms?
Free speech in the United States?
If you're going after free speech, that's worse than anything I know of that Russia did.
When did Russia go after a free speech?
There was one time they sent $200,000 worth of bad memes in 2016. That made no difference to anything.
And I think that was Pergosian's shop, and Putin actually killed that guy.
The guy who sent those memes?
Putin murdered him for other reasons.
So I'm not making the case that Russia is all good and they're our friends.
I'm making the comparison that if the UK can't act better than our known enemy, I'm going to have trouble treating one of them as an ally and one of them as an enemy.
If Great Britain is going after, or in any way, going after our privacy or our...
Free speech.
I don't really call that an ally.
I would call that an enemy by definition.
In fact, anybody who tries to curtail free speech in America is my enemy, by definition.
So, you know, obviously I'm going to, you know, give some grace to anybody who's a historical ally, but I think they have some explaining to do.
And I think the UK needs to explain why in the future we should be their ally.
It's becoming less and less clear that they're a productive ally.
They might be such an unproductive ally that they're doing worse things to us than our actual enemies.
That's entirely possible.
Anyway, let's talk about the rest of the world.
So Gaza returned some bodies.
But they did it in the worst possible way.
One of the bodies they said they would give apparently was not there.
And they made a big parade cheering spectacle about the dead bodies.
So, big cheering spectacle.
So, the U.S. envoy for this, Adam Bowler, he said that Hamas failing to turn over the body of one of the hostages It's a clear violation of the ceasefire.
And he advised Hamas to release that one body that they said they would give, but also release everybody, or they're going to face total annihilation right now.
Now, I don't know how much total annihilation will happen right now because of this, but I'll tell you, Gaza's making it really easy.
For Israel to do what it probably thinks it needs to do, which is never populate Gaza again with anybody who was there before.
So Egypt has this plan for Gaza, and it's hilariously bad.
So have you noticed that all the plans for Gaza, they always start with one magical part?
This is a magical part.
All right, here's Egypt's plan.
You tell me what the magical part is.
So the Egyptian-led plan, it would set up temporary safe zones within Gaza, safe zones, but Hamas would not be invited into the safe zones.
That's the first magical part.
How do you keep Hamas out of the zone full of Hamas supporters?
That's not a thing.
If you had some way to keep Hamas out, you'd be reading minds or...
You'd be talking about a completely different public.
The people who were cheering the dead bodies were not necessarily Hamas.
They might have been regular people as well.
So if you've got 5 million people, the Gazans, who had been brainwashed for years that they needed to be brutal on Israel, Can you keep just the Hamas people out of the safe zone?
That's just pure magical thinking.
The magical thinking is, all right, imagine that instead of the residents of Gaza being exactly who they are, a brainwashed, weaponized public, let's imagine that they're not those people.
And then I've got a solution for you.
And then I say, oh, but wait, they're not really the...
The people who are going to just never go back to the Hamas way of life.
It was very much a preference, and they probably have twice as many reasons to do it now because Gaza got flattened.
And then they say the Arab states would kick in $20 billion.
That might be possible.
And then they want a Palestinian administration that's not aligned with Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
Really?
Do you think there's a Palestinian administration that they could find that would be acceptable to the residents of Gaza, because I think that's important, that would have no connection with Hamas or the Palestinian Authority?
These are pure magical thoughts.
It's like they're not really even trying, are they?
It's just magical thinking.
So they start with, all right, imagine if...
The Gazans had not been brainwashed since birth.
Now I've got a solution.
But they have been brainwashed since birth.
Well, let's imagine they're not, and then we can solve it.
But hold on.
You can't just imagine a different reality.
Well, maybe I can.
The ridiculousness of the alternative plans, Are just so striking.
Anyway.
Yeah, good luck keeping Hamas out of the safe zone.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, President Scheinbaum of Mexico said about the possibility of the U.S. going in militarily after the cartels, what we want to make clear with this designation, the designation that the Cartels are terrorists.
What we want to make clear with this designation is that we do not negotiate sovereignty.
This can't be an opportunity by the United States to invade our sovereignty.
They can call cartels whatever they decide, but with Mexico, it is collaboration and coordination, never subordination, no interference, and even less invasion.
All right, let me explain some things to Mexico.
And I hate to break it to you, Mexico, but your sovereignty doesn't mean a thing to us.
Just want to be clear.
Your sovereignty is just some shit you care about.
We don't care about that.
You know what I care about?
The death coming across the border from your country.
I don't care about your sovereignty.
And if I have enough of a military to ignore your sovereignty, it just isn't part of the conversation.
If we need to, Your sovereignty means nothing to us.
Nothing.
We don't respect it, don't recognize it, don't care.
If you had sovereignty, you would have prevented the cartels from essentially running the country.
You don't have any sovereignty.
Maybe the cartels have some sovereignty, but you've got none.
And if you think you do, it's just in your mind, and certainly has nothing to do with what U.S. policy will be, Period.
That's not negotiable.
So let me just break it down into the simplest way.
Just some questions.
Is there a problem for the U.S. that's arriving from Mexico?
In other words, is Mexico causing the U.S. to have a big, deadly problem?
Yes.
Yes.
The answer is yes.
Is Mexico addressing that problem on their own in an effective way?
No.
Nobody thinks that they're doing it.
Is there any chance, any chance at all, that Mexico will address it effectively on their own?
No.
Nobody thinks that.
So, say goodbye to your sovereignty.
You just sacrificed it.
Your sovereignty means you take care of your shit.
If you can't take care of your own shit, you don't have sovereignty.
And there's trouble coming your way.
That's just the way the real world works.
Sorry.
Well, Spotify says it's going to now allow AI-narrated audiobooks according to Digital Trends, Andrew Tarantola's writing.
And apparently this would increase the number of books on Spotify.
And the way that they are allowing it is they'll allow this one AI company, Eleven Labs, To be the ones who create your audiobook.
Now, it's pretty expensive because if you're an author and you use Levin Labs, it can be one of their subscriptions.
The professional one is pretty expensive.
It's over $1,000 a month.
Now, here's what I wonder.
Wouldn't an audiobook be instantly stolen and pirated and put in the public domain the minute you put it on Spotify?
Now, I don't know if that's as easy if you had it on an Amazon platform, because the Amazon audiobooks, I think there's some kind of encryption or something.
But I don't know about Spotify, if you just put it on Spotify.
The one thing I do like is that you could pretty much instantly have it in as many languages as you want.
But it does feel like just giving your book away.
Because if there's an audio file that anybody can copy, could they just download it as they're playing it?
How does that work?
I don't know.
But if I make an audio book using AI and just upload it to Spotify, it feels like it would take about one second for somebody to download it and just start making it available on other platforms.
So it seems like a mess from the author's perspective.
But I might do it.
You know, it's also, I think the days of audiobooks and books may be over in general, because AI is going to take so much of that that I don't even know if publishers can survive in the future.
It doesn't seem like it.
The Russia-Ukraine war is entirely the fault of NATO, Chuck says.
Well, people who don't know how anything starts, Are always difficult.
Difficult to talk to them.
But I used the poke the bear analogy yesterday.
You know, you can blame the bear for killing you, but if you were poking the bear with a stick, you're not entirely innocent.
You know, if you knew the bear would do it and you poked him with a stick, is it really the bear's fault?
All right.
It is the bear's fault, but...
All right, I'm just looking at some of your comments.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's all I have for you today.
Happy Friday.
Tomorrow will be the weekend.
Maybe tonight will be the weekend.
Thanks for joining, and I'm going to talk to the locals people privately.
Let's see if our technology is allowing me to do that today.