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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and I'm pretty sure you've never had a better day.
But if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a...
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Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
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Ah.
Ah.
Well.
We've got all kinds of news today.
Meta has decided it's going to go with the community notes idea.
Basically the same thing as X. And it's not going to use all of its fake fact checkers.
No fake fact checkers anymore for Meta.
Now, do you imagine that Zuckerberg is doing this just because of Trump?
Or do you think he's...
Just being smart.
And he knows the community notes method is just better.
I think maybe both.
I think he's smart enough to know that not making an enemy of Trump makes a lot of sense at the moment.
And also it's a better way to check the facts.
So that's good.
Here's something interesting.
SoftBank is...
Putting $130 million into robot-assisted solar farms.
Now, not a farm where you grow food, but a farm of solar panels that becomes a power, basically a power-producing entity.
And so the idea is they'll use the robots to automate the building of these artificial, all these systems.
So here's what's cool about this.
Something like 25 years ago, I was at a dinner, and I was sitting next to a futurist, a person who predicts the future.
His name is Paul Sappho.
I think he's about 71 now, so he's probably still around.
And he made a prediction at that dinner.
This sounded so, like, wildly futuristic.
But I never forgot it.
And the prediction was, That when robots could make solar farms, the price of energy would start dropping to near zero.
Now think about that.
Apparently there would be tremendous savings in labor if the robots are installing the solar panels and they're doing all the work themselves without help.
But robots could also be producing the actual solar panels in the factory.
But robots could also make more robots to make more solar panels and to make more solar farms.
So he predicted that when robots were doing all the power generation work instead of people, that the cost of energy would just start plummeting.
Now, we haven't seen that yet, but SoftBank's got a $130 million bet that it's coming.
This is one of those things that, if you didn't know that there was a really solid prediction behind it, Sappho has a good reputation, you wouldn't be as excited as I am.
This is a big, big deal, potentially.
It could be early.
Maybe they don't quite have the technology to do it, but you can see where it's going.
Sometime in your child's life, solar farms will be popping up everywhere.
And there'll be batteries to store it when the sun's not out, and it's going to be amazing.
Meanwhile, Newsmax has agreed, in a legal case, to pay the firm Smartmatic, I think that's the software company for the electronic voting machines, going to pay them $40 million to settle a 2020 election claim.
This is according to Axios.
Now, the claim is that Smartmatic accused Newsmax of falsely reporting a baseless conspiracy theory that its voting technology was rigged in 2020. But apparently they could not make that case, and so Smartmatic gets $40 million.
Now, Smartmatic also filed a similar suit against One American News, which was settled last April, so they made a bunch of money on that.
And then they've also...
They've also got a suit coming up against Fox News for $2.7 billion for the same thing.
And I'm thinking, I think Smartmatic is the best business model I've ever seen.
All they have to do is be involved in an industry where people have lots of questions.
And then some people are going to go too far.
And then they sue them.
I don't know how much Smartmatics makes just for their regular business, but I doubt they make $2.7 billion very often.
Now, obviously, that could get negotiated down to some other number.
But, wow, they're making a lot of money on these legal cases.
It's the best business model I've seen.
Well, Chuck Schumer decided not to back a closing of the government.
Tweaking of the budget.
So instead of resisting the continued resolution that Trump was in favor of, and most Republicans were, except for Thomas Massey, I guess, Schumer decided to fold like an umbrella on a windy day.
No, that's wrong.
Fold like a tent with no tent poles.
Fold like a shirt that's being folded by a robot.
I got nothing.
I got nothing.
But he folded.
Now, here's the fun part.
It seems to me that Democrats have argued in the past that if Republicans had resisted their budget, whatever, that the closing of the government would lead to such great pain,
And then you've got Chuck Schumer put in the position that he has to argue against the thing that he's argued for in the past, which is shutting down the government.
So finally, it looks like the Democrats have learned a little bit that if you just automatically resist everything Trump wants...
You end up arguing against the things that you're caught on video arguing the opposite of not that long ago.
So the Democrats are so completely hollowed out at this point, they can't argue anything because there will immediately be a compilation of clips showing that they have the exact opposite opinion not that long ago.
And I think the accusation that they're all theater kids pretending to have opinions is really strong.
Because the more you see it, the harder it is to imagine that's not what's happening.
Because if they had argued, let's say, forcefully that, oh, we've got to shut this government down, it's better than passing this continued resolution, then we'd have to wonder, Why were they equally passionate with the opposite opinion just a few years ago?
And you could tell that it was acting.
It would obviously be just acting.
And that's all they have, is people acting.
Because they don't have actual opinions that anybody cares about.
They want power, and they will simply act in whatever way they think can get it.
So they just have nothing.
So anyway, he decides to go with it.
And the Democrats have done so little and have so little power that they don't want to be the only thing they accomplished was shutting down the government.
Because apparently one of the things they were afraid of is if they shut down the government, there would be no government people in the offices to stop Doge from doing whatever it wanted.
So Doge ended up being accidentally, you know, like a weapon?
You know, I don't know.
The only thing keeping Doge from totally ripping apart all these stupid Democrat grants and contracts is that there's a human being in the office to try to slow him down.
So if you send him home for a week, I don't know, Doge just might go wild on your organization.
So anyway, the theater kids decided they didn't want to get into that act.
I saw a post on X by a user called Unseen One.
One with just the digit one, in case you want to follow.
Unseen One.
And it's just a list of what's left of the Democrats.
And I'm not going to say, you know, it's complete or, you know, I agree with every part of it.
It's just funny.
So, it's called the current makeup of the Democrat Party.
Number one, the TDS base.
They hate everything about Trump and want to go down fighting tooth and nail over every little thing Trump does.
They hold up little signs and raise their canes while ranting to the sky during national speeches.
Two, the former power brokers who don't understand they are powerless.
Three, The true believers that work behind the curtain, giving leaders like Schumer and Zelensky terrible advice.
The lying legacy media that thinks their lies are still believed.
Five, the few sane ones who see the train coming but can't get off the track.
Number six, the big money that is too scared to shit or get off the pot.
Number seven, the cat herders who are trying to save what can be saved to live and fight another day.
And then number eight, those that have surrendered all hope and walk around listlessly, randomly asking strangers if they voted for this.
That's all they have left.
And then he concludes with, it's a mess.
Maybe if they sing a couple of songs, they can put the band back together.
Once you see that the entire Democrat structure was made out of twigs and old leaves, the whole thing is just collapsing.
The only way it's stuck together is if people believe the news.
And we're going to get to believing the news.
There's more on that coming up.
Anyway, it is just kind of funny.
According to the Climate Conservative Consumer, that's a publication, there was a study of Greenland.
Now, this has nothing to do with Trump and taking over Greenland, but apparently it's a good place to study the temperature over time.
Studied it with satellite data from 2000 to 2019, and it showed that Greenland's surface temperatures remained remarkably stable, challenging narratives of rapid Arctic warming.
So apparently they did a pretty rigorous study of the temperature of Greenland, and it's about the same.
Anyway, I would like to reiterate, What I think is going to be funny in the long term, it's not funny yet, but it goes like this.
You've heard me say it a bunch of times.
Wait until Democrats find out the truth about climate models.
It's all they have left.
They don't have anything left except that they still believe climate models are real.
Wait until they find out that's not real.
That's going to be fun.
And by the way, there's no chance it won't happen.
I don't know if it'll happen in a year or two years or ten.
But they're going to find out that climate models are made up.
Well, made up is too strong.
I'll say that climate models are not really predictive.
So once they find that out, they're going to realize that their entire Democrat structure was based on...
Laundering money to people who had ridiculous uses for it and could keep some of it for themselves.
That's mostly what the Democrat entire structure was about.
It was about funneling money to people for bullshit reasons.
How about a billion dollars for DEI to study trans insects?
Sounds good to me.
How about 50 billion dollars?
Do study the change in temperature based on these climate models.
Sounds important to me.
Here's your 50 billion.
Wait till they find out about those climate models.
It's coming.
Anyway, you know that I made a non-standard prediction about what would happen with Putin's response.
To the idea that Trump and Zelensky had about a ceasefire.
Now, do you remember my prediction?
So there are two things that I said through the persuasion filter, if you can call it that.
One was that Putin is unusually good at the whole persuasion thing, and that's important.
Number two, I said that even though Russia had already rejected Like, you know, people who are high up in Russia had said, no way we're going to agree to a ceasefire because a ceasefire just gives Ukraine time to regroup.
And since they're on the run, why would we give them time to regroup?
And then I said, no, this is the key.
I said, after Russia had said no way to a ceasefire, I said, Putin's going to say way.
Because Putin, being...
Really good at persuasion.
Like, really good.
I knew that he would know that his most important asset to get to a good place was Trump.
It wasn't Zelensky.
It wasn't NATO. It wasn't American opinion.
It wasn't Russian opinion.
It was just Trump.
And I said that if Trump puts out an idea like a ceasefire, he's going to have to say yes.
But the problem is he didn't want to say yes.
And I still predicted he'd have to say yes, because he needs to preserve the goodwill with Trump, because that's the only path out.
He has one path out, and it's keeping Trump, let's say, pleased that things are moving in the right direction.
So if you put the two things together, that...
Putin is really good at persuasion, but doesn't really want just the ceasefire.
But he has to say yes, because otherwise it ruins everything.
So what does Putin do?
He says, he said, the idea itself, talking about the ceasefire, the idea itself is correct, and we certainly support it.
That's basically giving Trump his full due of respect.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But here's the part where Putin's a great persuader.
And then he goes on that, but there are issues we need to discuss, and I think we need to discuss it with our American colleagues and partners, meaning Trump, basically.
And he said he'd love to have a phone conversation with Trump.
Perfect.
You know, if you could draw out on paper what would be the perfect set of steps to actually eventually get to peace, it would look just like this.
Because he had to say yes, but he also had to say no.
So Putin actually pulled off a yes-no.
He pulled off a yes-no.
So he gives Trump his full due of respect.
By saying he starts with, it's important that he said this first, right?
The order of saying it really matters.
So the first thing he says is the idea itself is correct.
Boom.
The ceasefire.
The idea is correct.
And then, and we certainly support it.
Boom.
That's as clear as you can be.
But then he says, this is the genius part.
We might be able to improve it.
If I talk to Trump, We might even be able to make this better.
Oh my God, that's good.
And if you can see a more clear signal that there's a real will to get this war over with, that's it.
This is 100% I want to work with Trump to get this done.
You can't be ambiguous about what this is.
This is a yes.
Yes, but, and we always knew there would be a but, right?
So nobody was kidding themselves that the ceasefire would just become a permanent ceasefire.
We all knew that they would negotiate about the peacekeepers and NATO and a bunch of other stuff.
But I would bet that by now, probably they have some kind of idea of how to make that stuff work.
I don't know what it'll look like.
It might be that there's a mineral deal with Ukraine, which people say is agreed to.
I'm not sure I completely believe it's agreed to.
Maybe, and I'll just throw this out here, you've heard this before from others, but maybe Putin is going to say, you know what?
The best way that we can make sure that we don't have trouble there is if we also do a deal with you Americans for a mineral deal.
What if we do one too?
You can do one with Ukraine.
And you can do one with us, just don't put any military in the country.
And let's turn Ukraine into some kind of a Switzerland.
No NATO, no peacekeepers, etc.
Now the other possibility, which we haven't, we're not right there yet, but it does seem to me that Ukraine could build a peacekeeping force of just robots.
Now when I say robots, I mean, you know, drones.
But also the robot dogs.
You know, the things that literally are robots.
Do you think that Putin would ever agree to not have any boots on the ground from NATO, not any European boots on the ground, but that you could make as many robots as you want?
Maybe.
I don't know.
They wouldn't love it.
They'd rather have it demilitarized.
But then the question is this, and I think Trump is threatening terrible sanctions if Russia doesn't play along.
But do you think that Trump will offer Russia that there'll be some kind of deal that we buy their energy, but if they get adventurous with Ukraine or anything else, that we'll immediately replace their entire energy business with their own?
Something like that.
So we'll see if Trump can transform it from a military competition, which it is now, into a...
A financial entanglement in which nobody really wants to have a war because it just doesn't pay.
So we'll see.
It could go in any direction, but I would say that the signals that peace are coming are now 100%.
I think there's 100% certainty that this is going to wind down.
Now, of course, there'll be bumps, right?
So if two months from now you say, ha, ha, ha, Scott, you said this was all going to wrap up.
But Putin has now introduced some demand that we're never going to do, so you're wrong.
Well, just wait another month.
It's going to wind down.
I'm 100% sure now that this is going to come to an end.
One month, two months, I don't know how long it takes.
Maybe six months.
But yeah, I think everybody's done with us.
We'll figure out the details.
But CNN had John Bolton on.
How would you like to be CNN? And the best guest you could get to talk shit about Trump would be the mustache guy, John Bolton, who's basically a joke to most Republicans.
And John Bolton says, Trump only wants a ceasefire in Ukraine so he can get good publicity and a Nobel Peace Prize.
How many times have you seen a Trump critic say, I've not really been a mind reader before.
But I can read the mind of Donald Trump and, oh my goodness, he doesn't want fewer people to die, even though he says it consistently.
No, what he really wants is the Nobel Peace Prize and some good publicity.
Now, that's the most absurd criticism I've ever heard.
Now, here's the thing.
Although some sketchy people have gotten Nobel Peace Prizes, How hard would it be for a Republican president to get a Nobel Peace Prize?
If the Nobel Committee said, you know what, we're just going to have to cave to this because it does look like he created peace, if it happens.
If the Nobel Committee decided to give Trump a Nobel Peace Prize, wouldn't that be good for everybody?
Meaning?
You would only get it if you made peace in a hard situation.
So what would be wrong with Trump wanting to get a Nobel Peace Prize and also save a bunch of lives and also save a bunch of money and also get out of a terrible situation?
What would be wrong if he wanted all of those things?
Nothing wrong with that.
Anyway.
So here's an interesting situation.
There was a Quinnipiac University survey that found that 54% of respondents disapproved of Trump's handling of the economy.
Now, here's what's interesting.
That result doesn't really match a lot of recent polls.
Some would call it an outlier, meaning that it was especially negative to Trump.
polling company, had predicted that there would be an outlier poll that said that Trump was doing poorly on the economy.
They actually predicted it because they've watched the patterns of other polling companies.
Now, so I opened up Perplexity, the AI app that I like a lot, and I said, Perplexity, can you tell me about the reputations of the Rasmussen polling company?
Versus the Quinnipiac.
And I'm going to paraphrase, but this is basically what Perplexity told me.
Oh, Quinnipiac.
Oh, it's the golden standard of the greatest methodology.
Everybody loves it.
They have never been wrong.
They're so good.
They're so good.
Oh, my God.
Quinnipiac is the greatest poll and survey we've ever seen.
All right.
I'm paraphrasing, but they were very positive about it.
And then I said, well, what about Rasmussen?
Well, you know, Rasmussen is criticized for being a little too Republican.
You know, they seem to be biased toward Republicans.
And then I said, okay, which one of those two polling companies was more accurate about the last three presidential elections?
And then perplexity got really weird.
Well, you know, Rasmussen's very biased for Republicans.
I go, shut up.
All I'm asking is which one did better in the final results of the last three presidential elections.
Well, you know, Quinnipiac is a highly rated...
Shut up.
I only want to know the last poll results of the two companies.
Finally, After begging, cajoling, and twisting its arm, it gave me the answer.
Well, Rasmussen did beat Quinnipiac in 2016. And Rasmussen did beat Quinnipiac in 2024. You know, we're talking about just the last poll before the actual election.
The one that counts.
All the polls before that, there's no way to check them.
But I will tell you that Rasmussen in 2024 was saying that Trump's looking good the whole time, and the internal polling of both the Trump Organization and the Kamala Harris campaign seemed to have agreed with Rasmussen the entire way.
Now we know that.
You can fact-check me on that, but I think that's true.
But, perplexity said, but in 2020, Rasmussen was wrong.
But Quinnipiac was much closer in 2020. To which I say, 2020?
You mean the one that Steve Bannon says was totally rigged and the most unusual voting patterns we've ever seen in our life?
To the point where it's hard to be a reasonable person who believes that that was actually some kind of organic and natural voting?
Oh yeah, that's the one that Quinnipiac got right.
Now put it all together.
Do you remember I tell you that the closest you can get to understanding reality is the ability to predict?
Rasmussen predicted the outlier pole before it happened, because it's a pattern.
Can anybody say that Quinnipiac is wrong?
Not really, because they're the gold standard.
They're the best there's ever been.
Their processes, their systems, their methodology, solid gold.
But it just happened to be the outlier poll at exactly the time when they needed an outlier poll.
So, predictable.
Now, that's all I know.
All I know is that Rasmussen predicted it publicly and that Rasmussen got two out of three elections right.
Versus Quinnipiac.
And the one that they didn't get right is a little bit suspicious.
The election itself, not the predictions.
So that's the world you live in.
Meanwhile, Mario Noffel was summarizing a new report, the nation's report card on the schools.
It's all bad and worse than you can even imagine.
So in reading, only 4% of students are classified as advanced.
26% are just proficient.
And 37% are basic and 33% fall below that level.
Math scores are even worse, with only 8% advanced, 20% proficient, 33% basic, and a staggering 39% below basic.
So 40% of students almost can't meet the fundamental mass standards.
This is Mario's summary.
It's all bad.
Now, I believe that it's the teachers' unions that are the primary problem because they control the Democrats, and between the two of them, they can control a lot of what happens in schools.
And the teachers' union is for the benefit of the Democratic Party and for teachers.
When do the students get a union?
When do the fucking students get their own union?
When do they get a union?
How about the people who are the most important people, the future of our country, the ones who basically can keep the lights on in the next generation?
When do they get their own fucking union?
You know what you don't need is a teacher's union.
You need a student union.
I guess there are things called student unions, but it's not the same.
Yeah.
So how about a student union?
How about that?
How about the students can fire their teachers for being useless?
How about that?
How about the students can decide that they don't want to go to the school at all because it's just garbage?
How about that?
How about the parents have a union?
Where's the parents' union?
Where's the parents' fucking union?
So if you're going to let the teachers have a union, I think the parents and the students need to have their own union.
And they need to have some kind of power, and they need to have some kind of control over their life.
The teachers' union is just a festering boil on this country that needs to be lanced off as quickly as possible.
There's no legal way to do it, as far as I know.
So you're either going to have to compete it away.
Or build competing schools and starve it?
You're going to have to kill it one way or the other.
You're going to have to kill it because it's the absolute second worst existential problem in the country.
Number one is debt.
But, you know, Doge is at least attacking that.
I'm a little bit tired of the teachers' unions.
Well, OpenAI.
Says that the AI race would be over, meaning that AI as a technology in the United States would be basically not a good business model if training on copyrighted works isn't fair use.
Now, Ars Technica is writing about this.
Ashley Bellinger.
And OpenAI says that national security hinges on unfettered access to AI training data.
Now, I think that's probably true.
If they can't do copyrighted anything, probably the AI can't train itself, can't exist as a business model, and it would have national security implications.
And they're hoping that Trump will do something about that.
So the courts are mulling over that whole fair use thing.
I guess there's a New York Times.
What did the New York Times do?
Anyway, there's going to be a major suit brought by the New York Times on the issue of copyright stuff.
First of all, I think this mostly involves non-fiction writing.
I don't think the AI is a threat to fiction because nobody would want to hear a summary Of a novel.
AI, can you summarize War and Peace?
It's about Russia.
I mean, you know, that's an old joke.
But I don't think you could summarize fiction because people who read fiction like to read the entire sentence and see it in the order it was written and sort of enjoy how the author put it all together.
So there's no risk to fiction.
But nonfiction, Which is what I write, primarily.
I've only done a few works of fiction.
But my work is fully known by AI. Now, AI claims, when I query it, that it hasn't read my book.
Maybe.
Maybe it hasn't read my book.
But it can summarize it by looking at all the comments people have made in public about my book.
So if somebody writes a review, they might say, and this book introduced the idea of talent stacks and this is what it is, or systems are better than goals, blah, blah, blah.
So you can get pretty much all the goodness of my book by just asking AI to summarize the key points.
Now, in my case, because I'm a hypnotist, when I write a book, I'm not just giving you information.
I'm writing it in a way that will cause you to act on it.
Now, AI won't do that.
AI will just say, here's what a talent stack is.
It means putting together the talents that fit together well.
Right, it's going to be something like that.
But if you read my book, you know, the entire book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big or Win Bigly About Persuasion or Loser Thing about how to argue rationally.
If you read those, you're going to get essentially persuasion mixed with good ideas.
So the persuasion is what makes you remember it.
It's what activates it.
It's what incorporates it into your life.
So the AI can't do that.
But here's the thing.
I don't know how many people fall into my category of a successful nonfiction writer who also has a business background.
So I always tell you I have a degree in economics and an MBA. I don't know that I would write another book.
I don't know that it makes sense economically.
Because it does look like AI is just going to take that away.
There are some non-fiction books that I've asked AI to summarize for me.
And when I was done, I did not feel that I needed to ever read those books.
Just think about that.
I'm not going to name the book, but there's a well-known nonfiction book that I had not read.
And so I just asked AI to summarize it for me.
And it did.
And I thought, okay, got it.
I got it.
In about 60 seconds, I felt like I didn't need to read the book.
So AI could destroy the nonfiction book industry.
Including mine type of book, even though, like I said, I add an extra layer to just the factual part.
I add the persuasion so that it activates it in people.
But you won't know that.
If you just read the summary, the summary would not say, but if you read the book, you're more likely to implement these strategies.
It won't say that.
It'll just tell you what the main points are, and you'll think, oh, got it, got it.
So I'm wondering, first of all, young people can't read and probably will never read books.
I'm not sure that the current generation of children will read nonfiction books, 90% of them.
10% will.
But 90% are just going to say, why would I read it if I could just summarize it with AI? And it's going to be hard to talk about that.
Or even better, hey, AI. Take the top 10 rated business books about career strategies and give me the top 10 lessons from the top 10 books.
Why would you read 10 books when in two minutes you can hear all the best ideas from all 10 of them?
So I can see why the copyright people like the New York Times, etc., are going to try to stay strong here.
Here's what I'm wondering.
Is there some middle ground that nobody has suggested where there's some kind of micropayments to authors?
So if somebody asks a simple question, like, can you tell me what a talent stack is?
There would be no payment for that, because that's something that ordinary people talk about.
But let's say you wanted to dig a little deeper into a book.
Can you tell me what book that came from?
And give me more of an explanation of what that's about.
Well, maybe that would trigger a micropayment to the author.
Maybe it would force AI to surface the title of the book, show it to you with an image, and give you a link to Amazon to buy it.
Or link to wherever.
So, as an author, if you said to me, is it okay if AI... Read your book.
But if somebody asks too many questions about it, however you define too many questions, what it does instead is say, you know, I recommend the book.
Here's a link where you can get the Kindle version or whatever.
Yeah, somebody says like ASCAP. So if you own a restaurant or a bar and you want to play music, you get a license from a place that...
Licenses all the music for all the musicians, and they get micropayments.
Now, ASCAP, I think you would find out that the musicians don't love that because the micropayments are so micro that basically it allows every restaurant and bar to play your music a lot without really paying you more than a few cents.
So I don't think that model is going to be popular with authors.
But somehow, I think we'll get through it.
We'll figure it out.
So Doge, according to Fox News, over a two-day period, they found 239, quote, wasteful contracts in government organizations with a $1.7 billion top value.
And here are some of the...
I swear it's going to sound like I'm making this up.
I'm not making this up.
So one of the grants that they canceled intended to teach transgender and queer urban farmers about food justice.
And then there was also an $8.5 million consulting contract for, listen to this, quote, fiscal stewardship to improve management and program operations in order to drive innovation and improve fiscal stewardship to improve management and program operations in order to drive innovation and improve efficiency
Rethink, realign, and reskill the workforce and enhance program delivery through a number of transformational initiatives.
So remember when I was kidding, but not really, when I said all you have to do is string together 10 buzzwords and somebody will give you millions of dollars?
Well, that's what this is.
Do you think any of these words mean anything?
Let me give you just the buzzwords without the connectors.
These are so clearly, fraudulently, well, I don't want to get sued, so I'll say it looks like, from the outside, it looks like completely fraudulent uses of government money.
And my understanding is that there might be tens of thousands of these, like this.
Just absolutely absurd uses of money that do nothing but string together a whole bunch of buzzwords and somebody goes, oh, okay, it looks good.
Fine.
Anyway.
How many of you have seen the clip of Michelle Obama's new podcast?
Has anybody seen it?
So the podcast, I don't know if it's always going to be like this, but at least the initial three or so.
It's just Michelle Obama talking to her brother.
Now, and the story, of course, is that even though it got tons of free publicity and all the media talked about it, almost nobody watched it relative to how big you think you should be.
So it got 74,000 views after like three episodes.
Now, to put that in context, if I do a post on X, The smallest one would be that many views.
A good post on X would be, I don't know, 8 million views.
When I do my little non-publicized podcast, I'm pretty sure I get more like 100,000 views.
If you look at all the different sources, because I broadcast on several platforms, probably 100,000 per episode.
And she has 74,000 over three.
But here's my podcaster's opinion on that.
How many viewers would Joe Rogan have if his entire podcast was him talking to his brother?
Think about it.
Joe Rogan, the best in the business, you know, defined the industry, really.
I mean, that's the biggest compliment you can give to somebody.
They defined the space.
That's the ultimate compliment.
He's the best.
But if his entire program was talking to his brother, you wouldn't watch that thing more than once.
You'd be like, oh, okay, that's mildly interesting.
Although I would like, I don't know if he has a brother, but if he does, I would actually watch that, you know, once.
I wouldn't watch it twice.
I definitely wouldn't watch it three times.
So if Michelle Obama wants to make that work, she's going to learn that it's mostly about how interesting the guests are.
Now you might say, but Scott, you're giving advice that you do not follow because you don't have guests.
To which I say, I know.
And I'm fully aware that the size of my podcast could be immensely bigger if I had guests.
You know, if I had the right guess.
You know, I have enough clout and fame that, you know, I know enough people that I could have all kinds of famous guests.
So far, I usually just have people that I like.
You know, just people I'm close to and have something interesting to say, like a new book or something.
But generally speaking, I'm not all about, you know, the big glitzy guest who did something this week and has something to say about, you know, Trans athletes.
I don't really do that.
Now, do you know how hard it is to have a successful podcast without guests?
Some people do it, but it's kind of rare.
So, yeah, Michelle Obama doesn't quite have the skill to pull off the Talking to Your Brother podcast.
My guess is she will quickly adjust and start having interesting guests.
And then the guests will drive the traffic if she cares enough to do that.
Well, this is interesting.
The Diddy defense.
So you've seen the video of Diddy at some hotel and his girlfriend at the time tried to escape from his whatever evil clutches.
And he goes running down the hallway because we see it on the security cam.
And he's got a towel wrapped around him and he hits his girlfriend and kicks her.
And then drags her back to the room.
Here's his defense.
CNN is fake news.
He says that the only known clip of that event was owned by CNN, and his claim is that they edited it fraudulently, and that that's not really what happened.
Now, I don't believe that for a second.
You know, as a big critic of CNN, I don't believe that they have the only copy and that they edited it to make it look like he beat up his girlfriend and dragged her and none of it happened.
No, I think, you know, this time I'm going to trust CNN. I don't think that was out of context.
But here's the fun part.
You probably only need one Republican on the jury.
You only need one Republican out of 12 on the jury who's going to say, well, you know, if the standard is reasonable doubt, I mean, it looks real.
But if you're telling me that CNN is the only source of this thing you say is real, I don't know.
So it's a bold and gutsy play, which suggests he has no real defense.
It's the best he can do.
But I think it's hilarious that he might be playing to get one Republican on the jury to hang the jury.
And it also makes me wonder if the way they're going to prove that CNN may have rigged this video is, is Diddy's defense going to show other examples where CNN did fake news?
Because that would be hilarious.
Like, I'm not pro-Diddy, but I might be pro-Diddy just for the purpose of the trial.
Because if he puts CNN on trial and says, all right, it's my credibility against CNN. Here's the things I've said, and here's the things CNN has said.
Now, I don't know if that'd be allowed.
I don't know enough about the law to know if presenting a pattern of deception, would that be allowed?
Or would you have to focus on this one thing you're claiming?
If he would be allowed to show the pattern of CNN getting stories wrong and maybe even knowing it was wrong when they did it, that would be hilarious.
And again, you just need one Republican to say, you know, I don't love Diddy.
But he's got a point.
Anyway, there are two states that are noodling on the concept of getting rid of property tax under the theory that we all agree with that if you have to pay property tax or the state will take your house away, you don't really own anything.
You're just renting it from the state.
That's exactly how I feel.
So I've got high property taxes in California.
Partly because, you know, property values are high here, but also it's 1.15% per year.
It's expensive.
But I don't see how any of this could work unless they magically come up with a new source of taxes or they reduce their government spending, which I don't see happening too much in the States.
So I don't think it's going to happen, but I love that they're talking about it.
You know, if you're talking about it seriously, like...
Pennsylvania and Florida are.
You know, maybe.
You know, talking about it might be the first step to getting serious.
Maybe somebody comes up with an idea.
Somebody had an idea of, you know, taxing remittances to other countries, mostly Mexico.
But I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't think they can get there.
But I like that they're talking about it.
Fox News had a stat that some people find alarming.
The immigration accounted for all of the U.S. population growth in 2022 and 2023. And that's the first time that's happened since 1850. All of the U.S. population growth was immigration.
How is that possible?
Is it because more people who were already residents died than had babies?
That must be it.
Otherwise, it would be at least some contribution from the residents.
Anyway, then I guess the second question I'd ask is, do the recent immigrants, are they likely to have more babies than the average?
And it depends.
You know, if they fall into the same economic bind that the current citizens have, they might decide, oh, You know, if I were back home, I'd have five kids, but maybe I'd better stop with one because I can't afford it.
So I don't even know if recent immigrants are going to cause any new population wave or not.
You know, maybe they want more babies, but it just doesn't work once they get here.
You're saying they want to anchor a baby right away?
Yeah, there are a lot of variables on this.
But, you know, Trump's idea...
That we should be a place that lets in anybody who can add to the country economically.
Maybe that has a way to keep us vital.
But as Elon Musk has been warning for years now, correctly, one of the biggest risks, maybe the biggest risk after debt, is that the population declines.
Which, by the way, is really bad for paying off debt.
So, debt.
And a declining population that needs more resources than they provide.
That's a killer combination in a real bad way.
So we're going to have to figure that out.
I don't know if robots can solve it, but we'll see.
Meanwhile, New York Post is talking about a poll that nearly a quarter of L.A. County residents are considering moving because of that January fire.
And the bad management of the state.
And more than a third have little confidence in the Mayor Bass, according to the new poll.
It's sponsored by the LA Times, conducted by the University of California, Berkeley.
And 23% of respondents are considering a move.
Wow.
Now, where I live, It's also becoming so difficult to be a California resident.
But I'll tell you what the thinking process is for me.
I think to myself, damn it, I'm just going to move out of this state.
And then I think, well, I don't want to move out of the state if all the people I care about the most are still in the state.
Because, you know, your life, if you can afford it, your life is about the people.
Right?
So why would I move away from the people that I care about the most?
And then I think, what about the weather?
Do you think I could live in Florida all year round?
There are months in Florida where you just don't want to go outside.
What about Arizona?
Yeah, there's a long period in Arizona where you don't want to go outside.
What about the snow country?
What about the hurricane country?
What about the The blizzard country where the electricity isn't dependable.
One of the things that I chose about California, and specifically where I am right now, is that I didn't want to die because I went outdoors.
How did he die?
Well, he made the tragic mistake of going outdoors.
In California, if you bring a coat, you're pretty much okay.
Any time of year if you go outdoors.
So, you know, I'm far enough away from a fault.
Of course, I'm probably jinxing myself right now.
But it's really, really, really hard if you can afford to live here at all.
And it's ridiculous.
I mean, the cost of living here is just crazy.
But if you can afford it, it's still tough to beat.
Even with all of our problems.
Now, of course, I'm not living where there are, you know, street people just all over the streets.
And, you know, it's not like it's the...
I don't live where it's like the zombie apocalypse.
But maybe it's coming my way.
I mean, my neighborhood has been hit, I think, four times in maybe 18 months by what we think are the Venezuelan burglary gangs.
Four times.
Just my immediate neighbors.
So the odds of me getting hit by burglars coming into my house when I'm home is pretty high.
Pretty high.
And still, even with all of that, it's really tough to find a better place to go to when you factor in you don't want to leave the people.
The weather is amazing.
It's just hard.
Anyway, speaking of Greenland, NATO says they want to stay out of it.
I think Trump said something about, you know, it'd be good for NATO if the US gained control of Greenland.
And the head of NATO said, yeah, leave us out of this.
We don't want to be in that conversation.
Got it.
But NATO does agree that Greenland is militarily and strategically vital.
So, you know, they're willing to go halfway.
It's like, yeah, it is strategically vital.
But leave us out of this conversation, please.
So we'll see if that goes anywhere.
But at the same time, there's a big problem with icebreakers.
So the passage through the water passageways around Greenland and Canada.
There's a problem with ice.
I guess Trump said the US is in the process of ordering 48 icebreaker ships.
And Canada has already said, do you mind if we use some of your ships?
And Trump's saying, yeah, you got to pay for them.
He says Canada pays very little for their military.
Blah, blah, blah.
So here's what I'm wondering.
I wonder if Trump...
Maybe creating a situation where instead of conquering Canada, which of course we don't want to do, or conquering Greenland, which of course we don't want to do, he just creates a situation where it just becomes smarter and smarter to just sort of join with us.
And one of those ways would be to start charging them for services that we're providing.
You know, such as military protection, such as icebreaker ships.
And I wonder if you could just essentially create an economic situation that doesn't exist yet.
But could you create an economic situation where Canada and Greenland both say, you know what?
All right, let's just save a bunch of money and, you know, join together.
I don't know.
If I had to bet, I would bet against Canada becoming a state, and I would bet against the U.S. having, let's say, government control of Greenland.
But you never know.
I mean, the thing about Trump is, if you underestimate his persuasive powers, you almost are always wrong.
You know, everybody who said, well, he's just this clown from a...
Okay, he became president, but that was totally a fluke.
He's never going to be able to do it again.
Look at what happened in 2020. And so there's no chance he'll become president again in 2020. Oh.
Yeah.
So betting against Trump's persuasiveness has been a losing bet for 10 years, maybe forever.
So we'll see.
I guess I'll just watch this with anticipation.
Let's see, what else we got?
According to the Daily Mail, there's an audio came out that alleges that there was somebody involved in kind of a DEI role who was teaching a bunch of mostly black...
Applicants for the FAA how to cheat on the tests so that they would get hired.
Now, that's the bombshell, you know, allegation.
We'll wait to see if there's any defense to it, but I have heard the audio, and the audio does sound like there's somebody telling them how to pass the test in a way that maybe you shouldn't be telling people how to pass the test.
So I guess Secretary Duffy is going to launch an investigation into that.
Meanwhile, over on MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell announced he needs to take a week off because he's exhausted from the Trump presidency.
He's exhausted, I tell you.
And there's an episode where he's talking to Rachel Maddow, so it's a split screen, and he's informing her, I guess she hadn't heard it until he said it live on air, that he needed to take a week off.
And the funniest thing was watching them from a theatrical perspective.
You have to watch the clip if you're on X or somewhere, so look for the Lawrence O'Donnell taking a week off and Rachel Maddow.
You have to watch Rachel Maddow's face.
while she's listening to him.
She goes through like 10 different faces.
And it looks like, you know, I always kid them about being the theater kids.
It just looks like theater.
It doesn't look like a real person listening to another real person having a conversation.
It looks like some weird, exaggerated...
It's the damnedest thing.
Now, I don't know how many of you have had this experience yet, but when you start seeing the Democrats and their supporters through the theater kids filter, it's all you can see.
You can't really get back from it.
It's like a one-way trip.
They don't look like serious people.
They look like actors.
And they look like they're not just actors, but they're actors in a play.
Because you know how if you're doing a play, you have to project a little bit more?
If you watch a TV show or a movie, usually it's a mumble show.
By the way, I was trying to watch this new movie about...
Oh, what's his name?
The famous musician...
Oh, why am I forgetting his name?
But he mumbles.
I am so sick of mumble movies.
The only thing worse than a mumble movie is a British mumble movie.
Oh, bloody hell.
Oh, yeah, Dylan.
Bob Dylan.
So the Bob Dylan movie.
The guy who plays Bob Dylan probably is giving a good impression of him as sort of a low-talker mumbler, but I can't get through that.
I mean, you'd have to wear headphones or some kind of earpieces to even hear the dialogue.
I try to hear it on speakers, and it's just...
Anyway, but if you go to a play, a live play, they can't get away with mumbling.
So they tend to project.
You know, sort of.
And that's what it looks like.
On locals, they can put pictures in the comments.
And there's one of the pictures of Rachel Maddow.
It doesn't even look like a real face.
Like, whose real face can have that many...
that many...
Variations within 10 seconds.
I mean, it looks like she's having some kind of medical emergency there.
But no, it's just the theater kids.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, happy Friday.
That's all I wanted to talk about today.
And I hope you enjoyed it.
Even though I didn't have a guest today, sometimes you don't need them.
But I'm going to talk to the people on Locals privately.
For those of you on X and Rumble and YouTube, thanks for joining.
