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You worked a little bit harder than you needed to yesterday, didn't get enough sleep, but still you're here.
You're winners.
But if you'd like to take this up to levels, then even winners can barely understand with their tiny, shiny human brains.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or shells, a stein, a canteen jug or 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.
It's the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
and it happens now.
Technology is working.
Thanks, Paul.
All right.
We're going to do a speed round of...
You should have just asked Scott.
You ready for this?
Speed round.
Women orgasm more readily during sex with a handsome partner.
According to the conversation, well, you didn't really need to do that study.
You could have just asked me.
Yes, women orgasm more readily with a better-looking guy.
Number two, according to Andrew Huberman, he's reinforcing the idea.
He says, remember when they used to say that drinking some wine was good for your health and actually better than not drinking alcohol?
Now everyone pretty much agrees.
That no alcohol is best.
What a ridiculous amount of back and forth that took.
Do as you wish, but know what you're doing.
Or you could have just asked Scott about 25 years ago when I first said, hey, what are the odds that alcohol is actually good for you?
I'm not buying this at all.
It's poison.
Should have asked Scott.
There's another study that found that While gender stereotypes are often viewed as misleading, they are surprisingly accurate.
So they did a study where people guessed whether men or women would be higher on certain traits.
And it turns out that a random person can guess right about 85% of the time, guessing if men or women are better at a random trait.
This is according to SciPost.
You know what you could have done instead?
You could have asked Scott.
Yes, I think I would have told you that male-female stereotypes are not random.
They're not random at all.
Here's another one.
An ugly truth.
According to study finds, attractive workers earn more money than unattractive people.
You just could have asked me.
I mean, really.
Just ask me.
You didn't need to spend a penny on this one.
Anyway, that's the speed round.
So, there's your science for you.
Every bit of it is shit.
You could have just asked Scott.
Uh-huh.
Yep, yep.
Alcohol's bad for you.
Pretty people get more money.
Yep.
Men and women are different.
I could have got all of that.
There's a Korean filmmaker named Bong Joon-ho.
He says his new film is called Mickey 17. It has Mark Ruffalo in it, who's a big critic of Trump.
But he says it's not parodying Trump, the villain played by Mark Ruffalo.
No, no, it's not supposed to remind you of Trump.
Although critics say that the comparisons to Trump are so obvious that And numerous that, of course, it's being inspired by that.
But here's the thing I wanted to point out.
The Korean filmmaker, his name is Bong Joon-ho, which coincidentally was my nickname in college.
See, because I was born in June.
So I'm sort of a Bong Joon-ho.
Okay.
That's all I had on that one.
Did you see the Bill Nye, the science guy?
Did a Nazi salute.
He was at some rally for standing up for science.
And I'm not even going to do it.
Because I would be blamed of giving a Nazi salute.
But as you know, the entire world media stopped to condemn him for giving his Nazi salute.
Wait.
That didn't happen?
I'm confused.
So...
When a Republican or a Trump supporter lifts his arm above his waist, we get four fucking weeks of nonstop, he's a Nazi, he's a Nazi, he's a Nazi, and then the theater kids go wild.
Theater kids, do it.
He's a Nazi, he's a Nazi.
Well, look at his arm.
Oh, anybody who raises their arm in the air must be a Nazi.
And then Bill Nye does it.
He's just waving hello.
What are you talking about?
He's not a Nazi.
No, he's just pretending he's a science guy.
Well, you've heard the rumors that the Obamas may be separated and possibly readying for divorce.
We don't have any confirmation of that, but I'm going to give you the hypnotist's confirmation.
I saw the messages today.
I hadn't seen these before.
Apparently on Valentine's Day, which wasn't that long ago, they gave each other these messages on social media that would suggest they were together.
But let's do a little bit closer look at these messages from a persuasion perspective and see what we can learn.
So Barack Obama said of Michelle, this was just his most recent Valentine's Day, 32 years together, and you still take my breath away.
Happy Valentine's Day.
Michelle Obama.
And then Michelle separately said, If there's one person I can always count on, it's you, Barack Obama.
You're my rock.
Always have been.
Always will be.
Happy Valentine's Day, honey.
So, do you see anything missing in those messages?
You know, the Valentine's message?
Let me give you a little bit of Valentine's advice.
If you're married, and you give a Valentine's message to your spouse, and it doesn't include I love you, you don't love that person.
Because it's the most basic thing that you would say.
It's not the thing that you leave out.
It's the main thing.
It's the main thing.
But it gets funnier.
I'm going to read Barack's message again.
32 years together and you still take my breath away.
You take my breath away?
Do you think she tried to smother him with a pillow?
Do you think she was behind drowning the chef?
And maybe she threatened him next?
You know, I took his breath away.
Allegedly.
I'm just making that up.
But, you know, if you don't shape up, I might be able to take your breath away too, so don't fall asleep.
Pillow overhead.
And then she says, if there's one person I can count on, it's you.
Well, you know what?
I would bet, since Obama doesn't seem like a cruel person or anything, I would bet that even in divorce, if that's what's happening.
He would be very supportive.
Support the kids, support her lifestyle.
So yeah, he's a rock.
But yeah, I'm going to say that based on my reading of their Valentine's message, there's not really much chance they're still together as a romantic couple.
And if they were, these Valentine messages would have ended it immediately.
Have you ever met a woman?
Let's see, going back to...
Stereotypes, whether or not people can identify male or female stereotypes, yes.
If you forget to tell your spouse that you love them, it's going to be a problem.
It's going to be a problem.
All right.
Apparently, here's a hoax that I missed.
So I guess MSNBC's host, Eamon, I forget.
I don't know what his first name is.
Ayman?
Ayman?
So he was pushing, according to Media Lies, who catches all these little things, Media Lies said he was pushing the debunked lie that Pete Hegseth had ordered the removal of the Enola gay photos because of DEI. Now, I heard Bill Maher say that on his show, and he said it like he really believed it.
It wasn't just a joke.
So Bill Maher also believed.
That the Pentagon removed pictures of the aircraft that carried the first nuclear bomb over Japan, and that they took the photos away because it said gay on it, Enola Gay.
Now, who believed that?
Isn't that a little bit too on the nose?
Who in the world would be dumb enough to believe that happened in the real world?
Well, Bill Maher and...
MSNBC host, I guess.
Here's one of those small world stories.
I've told you this before, but it just blows my mind.
So when I was a kid, my parents had this couple that were sort of their main friends in town.
And the husband actually was part of the crew that loaded the nuclear weapon on the Enola Gay.
He was on the island of Tinian, where they loaded it.
And sure enough, we always knew that when we were kids.
He told us that.
And I think he didn't know exactly what it was, because they were just the crew that was supposed to load it.
They didn't have top-secret clearance about anything.
But I think they were guessing.
They saw how big it was, and they saw that they'd never seen anything like it.
So I think they knew that something big was coming.
They didn't know how big.
How weird is it that I know somebody personally who loaded that on the Enola Gay?
Isn't that the weirdest thing?
That I would have a personal connection to that?
So weird.
Anyway, that's some of the dumb things that Democrats pretend to believe, even if they don't.
So, did you know that Stacey Abrams had some kind of a non-profit that had raised as much as $100 Prior to Joe Biden gifting them with $2 billion that they were going to use in Georgia, I guess mostly, to buy appliances for people that would be better for energy.
$2 billion.
Now, let me take a guess.
Do you think all that $2 billion was just perfectly allocated?
They kept the administrative fees low, and there wasn't any money laundering, and there wasn't any grift, and there weren't any consultants that got seven-figure deals to figure out where the money went.
Don't you assume at this point that every organization that's well-funded, especially from the government, but it could also be from big donors, don't you assume that they're all corrupt?
And I really wonder, Is it the same on the Republican side?
Because I don't really hear about big Republican organizations that are completely corrupt.
Do they exist?
I mean, I'm primed to think that it would be universal.
It has nothing to do with being a Democrat or a Republican.
It's just, you know, if you can get your beak wet, you do.
But it does really seem, if you just look at the news, Democrat organization is designed to be a money laundering corrupt thing.
It looks like it's designed like that.
Speaking of that, you know, ActBlue, the big Democrat organization that allegedly is collecting small donations and wrapping them up for Democrats?
Well, they've done more than that, according to Elon Musk.
An investigation found that five ActBlue-funded groups We're responsible for Tesla protests.
Oh, are you telling me that the Tesla protests are not completely organic and rather they were just funded by the usual suspects?
Well, apparently.
Or at least allegedly.
So, and ActBlue funders, let's see, who are the people funding ActBlue besides the small donations?
George Soros?
Reid Hoffman, and then three people I've never heard of before.
But if you see George Soros and Reid Hoffman funding the same entity, they might not be up to good.
They may be up to something that you don't want them to be doing.
Anyway, apparently ActBlue is currently under investigation for allowing foreign and illegal donations.
For some kind of criminal violations.
Okay.
So again, I say, are all Democrat organizations corrupt?
It does seem like it.
From the local city governments to the unions that they usually control, to ActBlue, to Stacey Abrams, to the NGOs and the 55,000 entities that USAID gave money to.
It feels like they're all corrupt and designed to be that way, as in the entire thing is a grift to design little entities that you can steal money from.
Well, apparently Washington, D.C. finally cleared a homeless encampment that was around the State Department.
Postmillennial is reporting on this.
And it's something that they didn't do until Trump basically threatened the city.
And said, if you don't do something about this, we're going to do something about this.
And that would be pretty embarrassing for this city.
So, magically, they cleaned up the encampments.
Oh, I guess they could have done it any time.
They just had to be threatened.
So, there's your local government, Democrats.
Great.
Meanwhile, according to TechCrunch...
Google is getting rid of all their diversity language.
They're not announcing that they're getting rid of diversity, or DEI. They're simply soft-peddling it.
The words are kind of changing, and they're scrubbing some of their websites and stuff.
So no announcement or explanation.
But it does come as a lot of companies are scrapping diversity.
So I think they just wanted to be a little quieter about it.
To me, the most shocking thing about all the companies that are backing off on DEI, almost entirely because of the Trump administration pushing on it, doesn't it seem to you that the dog not barking is the people who are trying real hard to resist it?
Because these same companies were just gung-ho for DEI. I mean, they were all in for...
You know, hundreds of millions of dollars per year in.
You couldn't be more in.
And then as soon as the government says, no, it's illegal, get rid of it, there's no pushback.
Where are all the protests of the Google employees who are like, yeah, we need this DEI again.
Don't tell us what we can do.
We want to make the world a better place.
It seems to me that DEI was never popular.
Right?
Because if it were ever popular with just ordinary people, they'd be on the streets saying, you stopped our DEI? How dare you stop our DEI? But nothing like that's happening.
There are no mass protests to maintain DEI. It was never real.
It was never popular.
It was just people literally pretending.
Oh, like the theater kids.
Do you see the pattern?
Republicans are mostly things that Republicans have always wanted, and it hasn't changed much.
And then Republicans try to get those things in obvious government ways.
But the Democrats are almost an entire artificial construct.
It's literally just theater kids pretending that they like stuff, and then the minute it's not practical to like that stuff, they just change to another play.
All right, well, we're not saying that anymore.
So, yeah, we're not going to talk about the open borders anymore.
Open borders were, like, their most important thing.
And then as soon as Trump closes it, they're like, do-do-do-do-do.
So, what's going on?
No protests?
Nobody's saying you've got to open those borders up again, give us back our DEI, put those homeless people back around the State Department.
It feels like every time Trump does something, it's really quiet because they never believed these things in the first place.
DEI, I think, was, again, just a whole bunch of Democrat scams.
It was a way to grift and get paid for doing not a lot of anything that was useful.
So I think as soon as the grift was identified and popped, people didn't really want to be public about it, because it would be embarrassing at this point.
Anyway, according to Jonathan Turley, he's writing about how the UK is continuing this month with its effort to regulate and criminalize speech.
Specifically, he says there's going to be an effort in the UK to crack down on Islamophobia.
Which is really close, as Turley points out, to having a type of blasphemy standard that would only apply to probably just one religion.
If the UK designs a blasphemy standard that says you can't criticize the one religion, they're just surrendering, and that one religion will eventually dominate.
No doubt about it.
I think the UK is lost.
I'm not even sure why we have them as allies, because it's just a matter of time.
It's a matter of time.
And the time, it's not a very long time.
I think that they'll just be essentially an Islamic country pretty soon.
Apparently there are a bunch of big law firms, according to the Wall Street Journal, that have decided it would be too dangerous to...
To work on any kind of Trump opposition because the Trump administration has acted pretty decisively against some lawyers who have been anti-Trump and done bad things.
So Trump took the Perkins Coy law firm I guess their security clearances away and a whole bunch of people got fired if they worked on This or that lawfare against Trump.
So he's making a point that you could be a lawyer doing your basically fake lawfare stuff or whatever it is against Trump, but there's going to be a response to it.
And I like that.
I like the fact that there's now something more like a mutually assured destruction.
Yeah, you could be a lawyer and try to take out our government.
But they are in charge.
And if you get caught and you break a rule, you're going to pay for it.
So, good.
There should be definitely some pushback on that.
In California, according to The Guardian, some of the prisons are using virtual reality devices to give the people who are in solitary confinement something like virtual freedom.
So they can sit in their little box.
But it'll feel like they're visiting their relatives or traveling to Thailand or paragliding.
Those are the examples.
And they can do VR art therapy and stuff.
And critics are saying if the fancy technology just papers over the inhumane system, well, yeah, that's what it's supposed to be doing.
Yeah, it's an inhumane system, and they're trying to...
Make it a little more, I guess, survivable.
So that would be weird, but I can certainly see a bunch of people in their little cells just waiting to put on their hat so they can be somewhere else.
I mean, I would want to do it all day long.
Now, I don't know if they fixed the part where you get a headache from virtual reality.
I tried a system several years ago, so things have probably improved quite a bit.
But I loved it, some of the games.
There was one that, you know, you're basically on a glider around an island.
It was just awesome.
But it would make me sick, you know, just from the dizziness.
It would make me sick in about 15 minutes.
It didn't take long.
So you'd have to like it enough that you were willing to be sick for an hour afterwards.
And eventually it talked me out of using it because I thought, you know what?
It's just not worth being sick for an hour.
But it was awesome.
As Breitbart is reporting, the Department of Homeland Security did locate the people who were leaking the locations of the ICE raids, which is very dangerous for the ICE people because if they plan to do a raid and the people have been tipped off, There might be some kind of a gunfire exchange or something that didn't need to happen.
So those two people that were caught face up to 10 years in federal prison.
Now, I gotta say, on one hand, that seems pretty extreme.
On the other hand, the danger that they were putting law enforcement-type people into is way beyond the pale.
But you could sort of imagine how they thought it was doing a good thing, not a bad thing.
In other words, they thought they were doing what was the right thing, you know, to protect these people from the evil ICE people.
But thinking you're on the right side of it, it should count for something.
So I don't know if 10 years is the right answer, but I feel like at least five.
So, we'll see.
Well, according to Emerald Robinson, she says the color revolution against the Trump administration is just getting started.
Now, if you don't know what a color revolution is, it's how the United States has organized coups in other countries.
But they have some specific telltale signs if one is happening.
So, one would be a bunch of fake...
Protests that are just organized by somebody paying.
And then here's what Emerald points out.
She says, yes, they want to sabotage Elon Musk by burning a few Teslas and writing media stories to hype it.
Yeah, it looks like they're organizing protests and they're going to organize a big anti-Elon Musk thing.
Because as long as Elon Musk and Trump are getting along and producing good results for the country, then the Trump administration will get stronger.
So they've got to somehow destroy Elon Musk before he succeeds too much.
Now just think about that.
It's a real thing that there are dark forces in this country who might even like getting rid of all the You know, the fraud and stuff.
Well, unless they're involved in it.
And they still want to get rid of them.
Because they need to win.
They need to be in charge.
And then Emerald says they'll run the bird flu panics.
She says, you live through 2020, so you know how it works.
I don't want to believe it, that our government would do a bird flu panic.
And now the latest news, which is, I think, unconfirmed, that the thought is this bird flu thing was actually developed in a lab, and it may have some gain-of-function in it, to which I say, how is that even possible?
How is it possible there's still a lab working on gain-of-function for the most deadly things?
How is it possible that it's getting released?
Sure enough.
Exactly the same timeline as Trump's first term.
It's kind of hard.
It's kind of hard to imagine that these are coincidences.
So look for that.
Look for the obvious signs of a color revolution because I think it isn't...
I agree that it looks like it's in motion.
It looks like it.
I don't know if you've seen this video, but there's a compilation video of prominent Democrat senators in 2019. Now remember this date, 2019. So this is the middle of the first Trump term.
And Sidney Powell was pointing this out on X. So Ron Wyden...
So Democrat Ron Wyden, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and Kamala Harris, as a senator, were all speaking out in public about the unnecessary risks of using electronic voting machines.
Because they said they are, by their nature, unsecure.
Electronic voting machines.
2019. Democrat Senators.
Now, what a bunch of effing bastards.
That's the sort of thing that was just sort of erased from history.
Like, if I hadn't seen the video compilation, I wouldn't have known about that.
It wasn't on the news.
Do you remember at any time that any of the media, the major media, 2020 election.
Any time did they show that the Democrats have doubted even Trump's election and still do?
And now Maxine Waters is doubting the 2024 election because she thinks that Elon Musk uses technology ass to affect it.
So that whole thing about, oh, there's no way our election could ever be rigged.
It's not anything that the major Democrats ever believed.
They never believed our elections were secure.
In fact, they were speaking out publicly and forcefully to say that our elections are not secure and that we wouldn't necessarily know who won.
Isn't that amazing?
It's like beyond belief that it could happen.
Is this true of Republicans?
Because again, you know, I might be in a bubble or something, but it looks like the Democrats literally don't have actual views of anything.
They only have actors.
So at that moment, since Trump was in office, the theater kid said, oh, we better put on a play where we act like he couldn't possibly be legitimate because we don't have secure elections.
And then when Biden wins, they go, okay, theater kids, we're going to change everything.
Now we're going to put on a play where if you even doubt it, if you had even any questions about the legitimacy of a U.S. election, well, you're some kind of insurrectionist piece of crap, and you probably belong in jail with all the January Sixers.
It is so obvious that the Democrats are literally actors.
And don't believe anything that they say from DEI, that suddenly is no problem at all if it's disappearing, to voting machines and integrity, to...
And they certainly didn't believe...
There's no way they believed that the only way to secure the border was with legislation from Congress.
They didn't believe any of that.
It's pure acting.
Now, I saw...
Bill Maher the other day, on a clip, he was saying that he's sort of giving up on the fact-checking against Trump, because he says, we all get it, right?
We all get it, that if he says, let's say, I brought down the border crossings to zero, well, it might mean, you know, a thousand a day, or some number like that.
So he's admitting, That Trump plays fast and loose with the specific facts, but it doesn't seem to matter.
And I think Bill Maher has finally figured it out.
It doesn't seem to matter.
That it would be hard for you to come up with, after years of Trump not passing the fact-checking, what happened because of it?
What's the downside?
And I've used the phrase directionally correct.
Which I think I inserted into the, at least the Republican part of mind, that once you realize that every time he doesn't pass the fact check, it doesn't matter because he is persuading in the right direction.
So if he says, you know, I brought down inflation this much, but you think it's not that much?
Well, he's fighting hard to bring down inflation.
So, every time he does something that seems like a little hyperbole, a little exaggeration, or maybe just a made-up fact, they're all in the right direction.
So, for example, the doge stuff.
Is it true that he may have mentioned some things that weren't actually things, like condoms for the Palestinians in Gaza?
Well, not exactly true.
Directionally, it was completely true that money was being spent overseas on things that you and I would think would be not good uses of that money.
That's the point.
So, and that's very different from the Democrat lies.
The Democrat lies are, there's no way to close a border.
No, that's not directionally correct.
That's opposite.
When Democrats say, The election was secure and there's no way any possibility that it was a rigged election in 2020. That's not directionally correct.
It's the opposite.
So if you look at the Democrat lies, they're opposites from the truth.
If you look at what Trump gets criticized for, it's always directionally correct.
It's stuff Republicans want.
It's stuff the Republicans Think is important.
It's exactly the right direction.
There's a big difference.
But it's kind of important, I think, that Maher is very close to understanding that in context.
Now, the way he says it is that Republicans are completely aware of who Trump is and how he talks and how he acts, and we just don't care.
That's almost just right.
He's so close.
It's not that we don't care.
It's that we know he's directionally correct.
That's what we care about.
We don't care about the specifics.
We care about the direction.
We care about the energy.
We care that he cares.
We care that he cares.
And even the hyperbole shows he cares.
So, you can't compare those two things.
Believe it or not, according to Elkick, Kid Rock has set up a dinner between Bill Maher and Trump and himself so that sometime soon, if this reporting is accurate and it happens, Bill Maher and Kid Rock and Trump would sit and have dinner.
Now, this is after a long period of Maher really disliking Trump on a personal level.
I think they've had...
They've had personal problems in the past, even before the presidency.
So a lot of it is personal.
But the one thing that everybody experiences with Trump is that if you spend time with him in person, even if you had a bad opinion of him, it's hard to leave with a bad opinion.
Because he's genuinely really gifted at dealing with people in person.
He's just gifted.
He's going to really care about what you say.
He's going to absolutely listen to you.
And you're going to feel that, oh, he listened to everything I said.
Like, I feel like he's not exactly what I thought he was.
People always have that opinion when they leave him.
It's very consistent.
And I'm wondering what would happen.
I'm not going to predict it will necessarily happen.
I feel there's at least a 50% chance That maybe it doesn't happen or it wasn't exactly reported 100% accurately or there was an idea that just won't come together.
So I don't know if it's going to happen.
But if it does, it's going to be a problem for Bill Maher because he's going to have to explain it to his audience that's already mad at him for trying to find some kind of a middle ground.
And I think it will change how he would talk about Trump, no matter how much he didn't want it to.
So that would be interesting.
And I just love the fact that Kid Rock, of all people, can dial up the president anytime he wants.
He could just call the president, say, hey, I got an idea.
And then the president of the United States, the most powerful politician in the history of the planet, You can say, what's your idea, Kid Rock?
Well, how about we have this dinner with Bill Maher?
That's a pretty good idea.
Why don't you set that up?
The fact that that can happen in our world is just so cool.
It's just so cool.
So I hope it does.
I wouldn't bet on it, but I hope it does.
According to the Gateway Pundit, there are reports that the U.S. has told its European allies that it doesn't plan to...
Be part of future military exercises in Europe.
You think that one's true?
Do you think we've already told Europe we're not going to be part of their military exercises?
Maybe.
Maybe it's just part of trying to convince them to spend more on themselves.
But it's very possible that that's true.
All right.
Here's where I make some people mad, and the rest of you are going to learn something.
I have to do my obligatory anti-Putin speech, because after that, I'm going to say that he did some really good persuasion.
So I'm going to talk about his persuasion skills, which I've talked about before.
He's really good at it, like unusually good, so you can really learn something by looking at Putin's skills.
But let me do the obligatory Putin speech before I do.
Putin is a terrible, murderous dictator, lying, and he has ambitions to conquer the entire world.
You can't trust anything he says.
He kills people.
He puts them in prison.
He's the worst person we've ever heard of in our entire lives.
Okay?
We're all on the same page now?
Now can I say that he does some things that are actually impressively good for persuasion?
All right.
So he gave a speech.
Recently, and Joe Hoft is summarizing this, and here's what he said to the Europeans.
He said, basically he was telling Europe that Russia has never been their enemy.
It's not their enemy, it never has been.
He said, Putin shared that Russia was not the enemy of Europe, but here's what he said specifically.
He said, quote, Russia has never been and will never be your enemy.
Now, the has never been part is the persuasive part.
Never have been.
He said, we do not want European raw materials and wealth.
We have our own raw materials and wealth.
We absolutely do not need your raw materials.
Russia is the richest country in the world in terms of raw materials.
Okay, that's a really strong point.
Why do countries ever conquer other countries?
Because they want something.
They either want to protect their border from NATO, or they want to take advantage of their resources, or they want to rob them of their wealth somehow.
But Putin's saying, you don't have anything we need.
So you've got this giant NATO military force.
And Putin's saying, why would I even want to?
Like, what would be the reason?
So not for raw materials.
He says, we do not want your land or your territory.
Look at how wide Russia is on the map.
Russia is twice the size of the whole of Europe in one place.
What would we need your land for?
What would we do with it?
Okay, that's just so, so persuasive.
What would we do with your land?
Why would we want it?
Exactly.
Exactly.
This is a version of something I've been saying for years.
I'll tell you about it afterwards.
He goes, why do you think Russia is an enemy of Europe?
What damage has Russia done to you?
Have we sold you gas and raw materials at lower prices than the prices at which your, quote, friends are currently selling you?
Yes.
And I'm thinking, okay, that's true.
And then he said, did Russia sacrifice 20 million people in World War II to get rid of the Nazis?
Yes, he says.
He's answering his own questions with yes.
Was Russia the first country to help Europe during the COVID pandemic?
I don't know anything about that, but he says yes.
He said, did we help Europe when there were fires and natural disasters?
Yes.
What has Russia done to you that you hate us so much?
He said, Russia is not your enemy.
Your real enemies are your leaders, those who lead you.
That is really persuasive.
Now, here's the version that I've said.
Again, I know Putin can't be trusted.
He's a murderous dictator, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I've been saying forever that Russia is a natural ally to the United States, but I would extend that to Europe.
The countries that border on Russia, those are a security concern.
And in some cases, they're Russian-speaking, kind of special cases.
But the idea that Russia would want to try to conquer and hold territory in, let's say, France or the UK, it seems a little weirdly crazy to me that they would even want to do that.
Why?
They couldn't hold it.
It would just be the end of Russia, and they don't need anything.
So, this is really solid persuasion.
And, again, it's worth pointing out, because there are very few people operating at this level of persuasion.
Compare this to Canada's Justin Trudeau.
When Justin Trudeau does his little speeches, they're not persuasive.
He doesn't really have that gene.
But Putin does.
Anyway, if you heard about this gigantic project in Saudi Arabia called Neom, N-E-O-M, and it was going to be like this hundreds of miles long futuristic city where the architecture would be practically magic and 9 million people would live there.
And I thought to myself, Holy cow, Saudi Arabia is just looking to lap the United States.
They're diversifying away from energy as their only thing to create a city that anybody would want to live there that just sounded amazing and all the futuristic things and everything they were going to do there.
Let's see how that's going.
Total debacle.
The costs have overrun by fantastical amounts.
And I guess the crown prince was asking his people to do something that was really just wildly visionary, but not necessarily something they could know how to do.
He had what's been called a sci-fi inspired dream about creating ski resorts, you know, indoor ski resorts in the desert, a floating business district.
A 106-mile-long pair of Empire State buildings, basically just the most impressive urban planning you've ever seen in your life.
And everything appears to be going wrong, and the blame for that is being put on the fact that nobody can tell the boss the truth.
Apparently, if you're the Saudi Crown Prince and you behead people for various reasons and you bone saw them, nobody wants to be the one to say, you know, that sounds good on paper, but I don't know if we can do that at the budget you want and the time you want.
So basically, I'm summarizing it in a Dilbert way.
So this isn't real, but this is what it feels like.
Crown Prince.
Can you build an anti-gravity luxury hotel that just sort of hovers?
Employees, no problem.
And it will only cost $1,000.
We should be done by Tuesday.
And then you multiply that by every part of it.
It was just people lying and just saying, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we could do that.
And suddenly it looks like it's going to cost trillions of dollars, way more than Saudi Arabia has or could have.
And they've got consultants working on it, which is funny.
Who are the consultants?
McKinsey& Company.
So McKinsey& Company are the consultants on this big project that's just completely falling apart.
Now, I first met McKinsey& Company, I think I've told you this story, when I worked at the phone company.
So one of my corporate jobs before I was a cartoonist.
It became one of the central experiences that created Dilbert because the whole consultant experience is just so otherworldly and weird that it was just perfect Dilbert fodder for a long time.
But let me tell you my experience.
So the McKinsey senior executives come in to sell the senior executives of the phone company on the idea that they're geniuses and they can figure out your strategy.
Better than your employees can.
So the idea is that they're so smart, so experienced, that they can just sort of turn around your company if you follow their advice.
But the person who comes in and sells the ideas and makes the sale of, okay, now our consulting company has been hired.
They're not the people who do the work.
The people who sell it actually are pretty brilliant.
Like actually impressively brilliant or you don't get in those positions.
But then they assign you somebody who's just out of business school and doesn't know anything about telecommunications.
And the way they do their work is they talk to the employees and they say, all right, so what would you do in this situation?
And then they figure out a bunch of numbers and slide decks, and they put together these impressive presentations that are basically just a bunch of math applied to what the employees told them.
And then they sell it as their consulting product.
And then the employees, like me, we'd sit in a meeting and say, well, that's just what we told you.
That actually is what we've been telling our bosses for years.
But they never listened to us.
But because the ideas from the employees got laundered through the high-end McKinsey and company consultants, our senior executives would be like, finally, we know what to do.
And then they would put those plans in place.
So Pacific Belt doesn't exist anymore.
I'm not going to say it's because of McKinsey& Company, but I will say they didn't turn around the business, let's just say.
So it got absorbed by another phone company and absorbed by another one.
So it didn't work out.
Anyway, so Saudi Arabia may be no different than the United States when it comes to that stuff.
Well, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is talking about the Houthis in Yemen because they're...
Not only threatening U.S. ships, and they've attacked U.S. ships, but they apparently, quite pointedly, are not going to go after Chinese, Iranian, or Russian ships.
So it does seem maimed at us specifically.
And of course, the Houthis are proxies for Iran.
So Iran is causing our shipping costs to be way higher because the insurance on the ships is through the roof.
And on top of that, if they want to take an alternate route around the Horn of Africa, it's way more expensive.
So part of this solution for bringing down the costs in the United States is to stop the Houthis.
But as Balaji Srinivasan said the other day on X, we have sort of a problem because we've got these $2 million missiles and they've got $2,000 drones.
And we could pound them all day long, and they would probably just pop right back up with a few more $2,000 drones.
Because unless you killed every single one of them, a few more are going to pop up, and it's not going to cost them much to be back in business, especially with Iran's help.
So there's almost no path for us to fix this.
Or is there?
Because it sounds like the Wall Street Journalists, they don't say it directly.
But they're kind of calling on Trump to just level the Hooties.
And I don't know if he can.
I don't know if our military even has the ability anymore.
I have real questions whether we have the capability to do anything big that would make a difference.
But I'll tell you the only thing that would matter is total destruction.
And it would have to be so, so bad that the Hooties just said, all right, we're never going to get near this again.
Because we just lost everything.
So, could Trump do something so big that it just wipes out the Houthi everything?
And the other question I ask is, wasn't it not that long ago that Saudi Arabia was doing terrible things to the Houthis?
And didn't we stop them from doing it?
I might need a little lesson on that.
But it seems like we should be able to unleash Saudi Arabia's military.
They're closer.
They might have a better way.
Maybe even just let them occupy the country with a little help.
But whatever we're doing now can't stand.
The current situation is untenable.
So we're either going to have to take out Iran, seems like a bad idea, or take out the Houthis or occupy Yemen.
Or something really expensive.
And maybe the economics never work out.
Because if we're trying to reduce inflation, but we run up a trillion dollar military bill to get there, well, then we're right back to printing money.
So it's not entirely clear there's a path.
But if Trump could come up with something to bomb and somebody to bomb that would make a difference, we might see that.
Might be a whole bunch of mother-of-all bombs going off.
Meanwhile, according to The Hill, Iran's supreme leader has rejected talks with Trump for any kind of a deal.
And, you know, I always think to myself, why wouldn't they do a deal?
It just seems so logical.
Why would you want to be in this permanent military situation?
Just do a deal.
You know, we'd be reasonable.
We could work out a deal.
And then I see Iran's response, and it's actually surprisingly persuasive about why they don't want to deal.
So again, Iran is evil, you know, blah, blah, they're liars, blah, blah, blah.
I have to say all the bad Iran things before I can say that they did anything smart.
So here's what the Supreme Leader said.
About the push for a nuclear deal.
They said that the US's aim is to exert their dominance and impose what they want.
And it says, for coercive governments, negotiations are a means to impose new demands.
Iran will definitely not fulfill these new demands.
They make new demands, meaning the U.S., they make new demands regarding the country's defense capabilities and international capabilities, telling us not to do this, do this, not to meet with that person, not to go there, not to produce this, and to limit the range of our missiles to a certain extent.
And then the Supreme Leader says, how could anyone accept such things?
To which I say, oh.
you Yeah, actually.
If you put any of us in that same situation, why is some other country telling them what the hell they can do in their own country?
Now, of course, they extend their range to affect other countries that we care about.
But just think about it.
It's not really a negotiation we're asking for.
We're saying, we want you to do all these things that we want you to do, like you're not even a sovereign country.
Like, you should just do what we tell you to do.
Now, of course, we don't want them to do what they want to do, because they might build a nuke and threaten Israel, and next thing you know, we're in a war.
It's pretty terrible.
So I can see why we want them to do different things than they're doing, as in, could you please not build those nuclear weapons?
But from Iran's perspective, if you think they're going to agree to...
All right, here's the deal.
You do everything we want.
And that's it.
That's the deal.
You do everything we want and forever.
Who in the world is going to agree to that?
We're not offering them anything they can agree to.
How can you make a deal?
I mean, I'm genuinely curious.
Now, I get that if we threatened them enough that what they would get in return is not being destroyed.
But that's not really the kind of deal that other countries want to take.
We're forcing you to do what we want.
Dance for us.
Dance for us.
Do what we want.
Don't meet that person.
Don't build that missile.
It's not really something you could expect them to say yes to, ever.
And I don't know if we could put enough pressure on them, short of just, what, bombing the entire country into rubble?
That's not going to happen.
So I don't think we have anything to offer.
And Trump is the master of creating an asset out of nothing.
So if he does, that asset would be, you know, you could make more money, your people would be happier, you don't have to worry about us taking you out.
So he could create some assets.
But the way it's being presented to them is, We'd like you now to not be a sovereign country and do what you want.
We'd like you to do what we want.
Nobody's going to say yes to that.
So I guess White House Envoy Steve Wyckoff is going over there to see if they can figure out a deal.
I guess he's going to Doha, not to Iran.
But they're going to try to figure out if they can figure out a deal.
I'm not optimistic about that.
Because it has to be completely reframed.
Because the current frame is, how would you like to be a bitch and just do everything we tell you forever?
No way they're going to say yes to that.
No way.
So how do you reframe that into somehow you win, we win?
Because that's how you get a deal.
Right now it's we win, you lose.
And that's our only offer.
We win, you lose.
I don't know.
According to Mike Johnson, Speaker Johnson, Zelensky did an about-face on a mineral deal, and they think that eventually that'll get signed.
Maybe not right away.
We might sweat him a little bit, but we'll get that signed.
Here's what I would say to Speaker Johnson.
Don't call it an about-face.
An about-face makes Zelensky look like a chump.
Don't do that.
Like, even if you think it's true.
It's just the wrong phrase, an about-face.
An about-face makes it look like, I don't know, somebody's weak or indecisive or not a good leader.
How about you just say that Zelensky's done what we hoped he would do, not what we wanted, but what we hoped.
And he's shown that he's definitely on board for a peace deal, which is what we wanted.
And now the situation is all set for maybe working on a deal.
But if you're trying to make something work, don't say stuff like a bow face.
That's just causing trouble that didn't need to be caused.
Meanwhile, Mario Knopfel is reporting about this.
It was in the Financial Times.
But he's summarizing for us that apparently the Trump administration is trying to work out a deal with Congo so that we get our own supply of minerals without having to go through China that goes through the Congo.
I guess that's what it is.
And I always wonder, is there no way to get minerals out of the ground without...
These poor locals digging through it with their hands and, you know, barefoot.
It just seems like there's no robot that can do any of that.
Like, it seems like robots would be the answer, right?
It's like, okay, let's build a mine.
We'll put some robots there and some safety standards.
And then Congo gets the money.
We get some minerals.
Everybody wins.
So I hope there's a way for everybody to win.
I wouldn't be super happy if all we did was cut China out, but the locals are still scrambling around with their bare feet and their hands trying to get these minerals.
That's just really sketchy.
But apparently what we would offer Congo would be some kind of military support that I'm sure they would like.
So Trump announced on Truth Social, I guess on March 7th, that he's going to ban all foreign aid flowing to South Africa.
All foreign aid.
Now, I don't know how much that is or how much difference it makes to South Africa, but PGA Media is reporting this.
And listen to the way Trump simplifies this.
Now, this is the thing that drives his critics crazy, that he talks like regular people.
And this is the best example of talking like a regular person that you'll ever see in your life.
The fact that this is coming from a president is just so impressive that he can, from the president's office, he can simplify all the way down to, oh, I get that.
Yeah, that's just ordinary people talking.
So here's what he said on truth.
South Africa is being terrible.
Okay.
That's just the first part of the first sentence.
South Africa is being terrible.
Got it?
Plus, to long-time farmers in the country, they're confiscating their land and farms, and much worse than that.
A bad place to be right now.
And we are stopping all federal funding.
To go a step further, any farmer with family from South Africa seeking to flee that country for reasons of...
We'll be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to citizenship.
This process will begin immediately.
That is so clear.
Don't you love the clarity of that?
We're ending all funds because they're terrible, and they're so terrible that we'll take the families of the people who are in deep trouble.
Now, the people, the farmers, I'm going to guess we would consider highly skilled people because farming is not easy, right?
But I think that the South African farmers probably could make the transition to farming in America with less trouble than somebody who'd never been a farmer.
So they could bring to America a farming, let's say, revolution, if there are enough of them.
That would make a big difference to our food prices.
Not right away, but say five years.
So I like everything about that.
Did you know that the current law in South Africa allows the government to expropriate, which is just take, land from private parties if it's in the public interest?
Now, that would sound like eminent domain.
Countries do that to build roads and to build dams and stuff, but that's not what they're talking about.
They're just talking about taking it.
And apparently, if they make an offer and the farmer, let's say a farmer, says, no, that's not enough, then the law allows them to simply take it without compensation.
Do you think they're ever going to offer enough?
Why would they?
All they have to do is under-offer.
The farmer says no, and then they take it for free.
Why would they spend money that they don't have to spend?
So it looks to me like it's a bad place to be if you're a white farmer in South Africa.
Well, in some technology news, it's kind of cool.
There's an AI breakthrough, according to VentureBeat, that...
It uses a technique called a chain of draft.
I guess the researchers for Zoom Communications came up with this.
Now, you don't need to know what that is.
So a chain of draft versus a way the AI is being done normally.
They can get as good or better results for as little as 7.6% of the text required with regular methods.
So this is one of those potentially enormous And we keep seeing stories like this, where somebody says, well, I've got this little trick, this technique, that will make an enormous difference in energy consumption.
In this case, an enormous difference in how much training or what kind of training you give it.
So I guess they found out that if you fill it with every word, which is what the large language models do, It's no better than if you somehow can pick the words that make a difference.
I don't know how they do it, but I guess they've done it.
In other AI news, did you know that there's a lawsuit from various authors against Meta for Meta's AI? It says that Meta was allowed to read all their books and train on the contents of the books.
And so some authors are suing.
Sarah Silverman is one of those.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of those.
So they're suing him.
Now, here's my experience, because I've asked several AIs.
I haven't asked Meta, so I haven't tested Metas to see if it's different.
But the AIs I've talked to, maybe three of them, they're aware of my work, meaning that they can explain some of the key points of my books.
Not the Dilbert books, but the...
The ones that are about persuasion or career self-help stuff.
And they do know it.
They know what a talent stack is.
They know what systems over goals are and how to explain it.
They understand the keys of persuasion, etc.
But when I asked the AI, did you read the book?
Were you trained on the book itself?
They say no.
They say no.
They were only trained on...
People's public comments about the book.
So they could look at the reviews of the book, including extended reviews that would get into the meat of what I said, but they haven't looked at the book.
Now here's my question to you.
Do you believe that?
Do you think that's true?
That they didn't train on the book?
That they only trained on the people talking about the book?
Now I will say...
That what it knows about the book does sound a lot more like they only trained on people who talked about it.
So it can't answer deep questions about the internals of the book because it says, I've never seen the book.
And it makes me wonder, are the AIs lying?
Is it possible that they had to train the AI to say, oh, I've never seen the book.
I just know about people talking about the book.
Now, in my case, since I'm a more notorious author, there are always people talking about the book.
So people are going to review it.
Even on Amazon, there'll be hundreds of reviews.
So they could definitely get the basic idea from my books.
But if you were a less-reviewed author, what would it know about your book?
Nothing?
Because nobody talked about it?
Nobody bought it?
No.
So I do wonder if any of them are trained to lie.
I'm not going to make specific accusations, but all the ones I tested said they didn't read the book.
So maybe it's true.
But I haven't tested meta, so I don't know about that.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's what I've got for you today.
It's a wonderful Sunday, even if you're a little bit tired.
I think you should go forth and have an amazing day.
I'm going to talk to the people on Locals privately in a moment, and the rest of you I will see tomorrow, same time, same place, for more fun.
