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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brain, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice, a dine, a canteen jug or a flask.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Oh, that's some good stuff.
Well, I have it on good authority that...
Anxiety is high today for a lot of people.
I think the news is making people anxious.
But I'm here to make that all go away.
So all of your anxiety, you can already feel it draining out of your body, can't you?
Oh, you can.
Do some movement and breathing while you're listening.
That's two long inhales through your nose, one after another, followed by exhaling out your mouth.
Three times.
Your whole body will feel different.
But speaking of health, did you know that there's a new study?
You won't believe it, but it turns out that coffee is good for you.
There's a study the Journal of Nutrition is writing about in which they found out that consuming more than two cups of coffee, as long as it's not sweetened, It was associated with reduced overall cancer incidence and mortality.
That's right.
Coffee can help you prevent cancer, according to science, which is never wrong.
And this is kind of interesting.
You know how, for your entire life, you've complained about how, yeah, they can't even predict the weather tomorrow.
You know, how are they going to do this or that when they can't even predict tomorrow's weather?
Well, apparently there's an AI-driven method, according to The Guardian, that will be able to predict the weather with very little resources.
Something like a single researcher with a desktop computer will be able to have more accurate forecasts than all the computers that they're using now to do forecasts.
With way less energy.
Thousands of times less computing power.
So you'll be able to sit at your desk and predict what your weather will be tomorrow.
How about that?
So I guess the job of a news weather person might be a risk when you can just go to your computer and it will have a better idea than all the experts.
Well, as you know, Trump signed an executive order to get rid of the Department of Education.
And probably had one of the best, I guess, presentations.
So he was surrounded by school-age kids who were all at their own little desks, and they all had their own little executive orders.
So he signs his executive order while the kids are signing their executive orders.
It was impossibly cute.
They're getting into the Department of Education.
The critics say it's bad for the children, so he surrounds himself with all these happy children.
And then Trump says that giving the power back to the states might be better for the teachers than what they were getting before.
So it's good news for the teachers.
But the executive order can't actually get rid of it.
You still need Congress to vote on it.
I guess he thinks he has the votes.
If only the Republicans agree, they can vote it out.
But the executive order can kind of gut it.
It can stop it from functioning, even though it still exists.
So that's happening.
But yeah, Trump says teachers will be, quote, better rewarded.
With the education in the hands of the states.
Now, let me give you how the news has treated this.
Don't you think the most important question about the Department of Education is what will be different if it doesn't exist?
How many of you could answer that question?
Most of you, if you're Republican, your answer to the question would be, well...
I guess it didn't do anything because scores of tests never went up.
So I guess it never did anything.
But that's a little oversimplified.
Don't you think?
A little oversimplified?
And then the Democrats are being told it will be the end of education or something.
They think it will cut funding for the disabled.
Cut funding for low-income people.
But it hasn't even been decided if the funding that was once in the Department of Education will be distributed to the states.
So we don't even know if it will cut anything.
It might just be less administrative costs because you just get rid of an entire department.
But maybe.
Maybe the disabled will get the same amount of money.
It'll just be distributed to the states instead.
Maybe. So nobody really even knows what this is.
This is one of the biggest stories in the country.
And how many of you even knew what would be cut or what would be different?
I would say almost none of us.
I had to actually do a little research.
Even to get as far as I got, and I don't think I quite understand it.
So it's kind of a funny one.
I think Trump's doing a good job of just acting like no scores went up, and so I guess we're in good shape.
Anyway, so if it can't be defended better than it has been defended, I think that's a pretty good reason to get rid of it.
Because the arguments for it...
Only makes sense if the states don't pick up that slack, and we don't know yet that they won't, because there might be funding given to the states.
We'll see.
Well, meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and AOC are doing their anti-oligarch tour together.
So they're in Las Vegas, I guess, yesterday.
It must be just so hard for them to go to Las Vegas and do an anti-oligarch.
So the funny thing is, according to journalist Batya Ungar Sargan, she was on Fox Business, and she says that there are twice as many billionaires who backed Kamala Harris compared to Trump,
twice as many.
And that 65% of the rich vote Democrat.
So rich people are...
Two-thirds voting Democrat.
And 75% of hedge fund managers also vote Democrat.
And so there you have it.
So once again, the Democrats are the living embodiment of the thing that they're accusing Republicans of.
Do you remember when they accused Republicans of being domestic terrorists?
Or at least the white supremacists, which they conflate with being Republican.
And then we're watching all kinds of domestic terrorism.
That's 100% Democrat.
So it's a very consistent pattern.
Whatever they're accusing you of, that's probably what they're doing.
It's like a confession.
I was reading the Amuse account on X that had that take.
Now, to me, the best filter on Democrats is the theater kids, because they seem to pick things that can work well in a theatrical setting.
So they send theatrical AOC and theatrical Bernie Sanders, and then they make them, you know, sort of like Lewis and Martin.
So they turn them into like an entertainment duo.
What would be better than Lewis and Martin?
That's an old reference.
Is there a newer couple?
Anyway. So it seems to me this anti-oligarch thing is just like a play they took on the road.
It's just completely unmoored from reality in any way.
So Trump's got like a few billionaires to back him.
And, you know, obviously Musk is the biggest one.
But it seems completely artificial, as do the Tesla things, as do a lot of things that do.
So the theater kids put on a play, take it on the road.
All right, let's check in with the other theater kids.
We've got Gavin Newsom.
Who apparently claimed on his podcast that no one in his office ever used the word Latinx, Latinx.
Remember for a while we were told that the Latin or the Hispanic community liked to be called Latinx with an X on the end?
And you never heard anybody ever use it in the real world.
And it turns out the Hispanic community wasn't really crazy about it at all.
Well, here's the fun part.
So poor Gavin Newsom is trying to become more of a common sense middle ground guy so he has some chance of national office.
We assume.
Can't read his mind.
But it looks like he's trying to position himself for running for president.
But Aaron Burnett of CNN.
On her show, she runs a compilation of Newsom actually saying Latinx without joking about it.
So apparently he's the person in his own office that was using it in public a number of times.
And he wasn't using it ironically or as a criticism.
So now he's trying to sell us that no one in his office ever used the word While we have video compilation of him using the word.
Typical. So I'd like to give the Democrats another pro tip.
I'm good at the pro tips.
If you're trying to be the next Joe Rogan, the thing you can't leave out is the authentic part.
But the thing that the Democrats get wrong every time is they literally think that authentic means pretending to be authentic.
That's what Newsom's doing.
He's pretending to be authentic to try to become the next Joe Rogan without quite understanding that the public can see through inauthentic so easily.
It's what we can pick up just so easily.
And then think about Joe Rogan.
So how long has he been in the public eye?
Is there anything he's ever done that ever struck you as inauthentic?
Nothing, right?
Probably literally nothing.
Yeah, yes, he likes to hunt animals and cook them up.
Yes, he likes to do hard workouts.
Yes, he likes the MMA.
Like, what part of anything he's ever done strikes you as even a little bit, even a little bit inauthentic?
Nothing. And that's the part that they don't get, and it feels like they can't get it.
It's completely unavailable.
Because their world, I mean this literally, this is not hyperbole, the Democrat world is completely artificial.
So they don't live in a world where connecting to anything in the real part of the world has ever made sense.
It's a complete artificial, theatrical, imaginary, we can read minds, we see domestic terrorists under every chair, we can read Trump's mind, and we know he's going to steal your democracy.
It's completely artificial.
So I think they've actually lost the ability.
To even police themselves with authenticity.
They just don't have it.
I'm not even sure they know what it feels like or what it looks like or how you would act authentic.
I guess that's the problem.
They act authentic.
Anyway, the authentic part is not optional if you want to be the next Joe Rogan.
Here's another...
Pattern I think I'm detecting.
See if you detect any pattern.
So I think former Democrat Representative Cori Bush, so I guess she was defeated recently, but she's the member of Cori Bush.
She was one of the squad kind of people.
Her husband was charged with two counts of wire fraud, something about accepting payments during COVID, I think.
And allegedly lied to get those payments.
Now, does anybody see a pattern?
Has anybody noticed that prominent, I'm going to just say prominent, has anybody noticed that prominent Democrats are so often married to criminals?
Is that my imagination?
How many times have we seen prominent Democrat Husband in trouble.
And I think it could go the other way.
You know, prominent Democrat.
Wife is collecting money from USAID NGO for doing just about nothing.
All their spouses seem like criminals.
Now, I suppose the politicians themselves have some questions to answer to.
But it does seem like a pattern.
The Democrats either marry criminals or spies.
If you see a Democrat that's not married to a criminal, I would suspect that spouse of being a spy.
Because they only have two kinds of spouses, criminals and spies.
Anyway, Greta Van Susteren, who has worked for a number of different news outlets, has revealed that On a podcast with Tara Palmieri, that MSNBC is the only one who told her what she could and could not say.
Are you surprised that MSNBC didn't let her have her own opinions?
She had to agree with sort of the company opinion on stuff.
And Greta said, that's why I got fired at MSNBC.
When MSNBC tried to tell me what to do, I thought they were joking.
I thought they were joking.
Imagine working for a company that's so corrupt that when they tell you honestly what they want from you, you think, well, that can't be true.
You actually think it must be a joke because your brain can't wrap itself around the fact That they were never a real news organization, that they were a propaganda outfit by design.
And that's why I got fired, because they said I needed to play ball, and that didn't work.
Now, what else do you need to know about MSNBC?
The main takeaway from that is if you know somebody who's getting their news primarily from MSNBC, They're not really getting news, are they?
You know, obviously, most of our news sources are biased left or biased right, so bias is no big deal.
But there's a really big difference between having some bias and being told what you can and cannot say on the air.
That's a big difference.
So, MSNBC, propaganda.
All right, here's a story I've been waiting for.
So J.D. Vance, Vice President Vance, was talking to a podcast, I guess it was a Daily Caller podcast with Vince Coglienese.
I think I'm pronouncing that wrong.
So Vance was asked, How he's a different vice president than Kamala Harris was.
And Vance said, he said, I swear he said this.
This is real.
I'm not making this up.
Vance said, well, I don't have four shots of vodka before every meeting.
And then he laughed.
But here's the thing.
So the New York Post is reporting it as he joked.
That he joked.
Was he joking?
Does anybody remember 2019?
And there were a number of pro-Trump people who joked, we joked, about Biden and his mental incapacity.
Do you remember that?
And everybody said, oh, you're joking.
And people like me would say, no, I mean, I might be saying it in a funny way.
But I'm not joking.
He quite obviously has some mental decline, and it quite obviously is going to get worse in the next few years if he gets elected.
Yeah, we think it's funny on some level.
It's funny that they would even run him for office.
But we weren't joking joking, you know, joking in quotes.
It was more like that's an actual observation that everybody could see.
And the funny part is that people weren't admitting they could see it.
Now, that's funny.
And to me, this feels like 2019 all over again.
Oh, yeah, Kamala Harris.
That guy joked.
That guy joked about her drinking before she goes in public.
Yeah, well, it was a joke, in quotes.
But do you think he didn't mean it?
Do you think that the people who really know what's going on, the most insider people, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, do you think they don't know that Kamala Harris has a substance problem?
Do you think they really don't know?
Is it just us jokers?
Well, the jokers keep joking about it.
It is a joke.
But it's only funny because it's obviously true.
If it were not obviously true, do you think I would have brought it up more than once?
I mean, maybe I would have floated it more than, you know, I might have floated it once to see if it was funny.
But I wouldn't be hammering on it like a million times like I am, unless I literally thought the joke is that so many people are pretending they can't see it.
Now that's funny.
Because it's just 2019 all over again.
You know, you think to yourself, well, the news will learn from their mistakes.
And if so many people could clearly see that Biden was mentally declining at a fast rate in 2019, if so many of us could see it, well, obviously we'll make an adjustment.
So the next time something like that happens, we won't be caught off guard.
And we'll say, oh yeah, we can see it early too.
But we're right back in the same situation, pretending that they can't see it.
Oh, it's just a joke, J.D. Vance.
You're just telling a joke.
And then how many outlets on the left carried that story?
I didn't see it anywhere.
I saw it in the New York Post, which, you know, leans right.
Did the entire news enterprise, Did all of them ignore that the Vice President of the United States joked that his predecessor was drunk during meetings?
Did they think that wasn't newsworthy?
No, it's obvious that they can see it.
They just can't say it.
They would rather back somebody who couldn't possibly win as long as it makes other people unhappy, I guess.
They seem to me more about destruction and making people unhappy.
It doesn't seem to have any kind of overall strategy to it.
Anyway, let's talk about tariffs.
I keep hearing that the stock market is in turmoil because all the smart people can't forecast what's going to happen with tariffs, and it creates great uncertainty, to which I say, really?
I think it only creates great uncertainty to people who are really, really bad at risk management.
Let me explain the risk of tariffs.
One thing that might happen is that we'll have a little bump in maybe products coming through, some things will be more expensive, a little bit of bump in inflation.
But I guarantee you that when the dust settles, America will have better trade agreements than we had before.
Now, does anybody doubt that?
The tariff stuff is the closest thing to a guaranteed outcome that you'll ever see.
And I think Lutnick does the best example of basically making that case.
Well, actually, Mr. Wonderful probably does the best case to make it.
Leary? There's only one way this can go.
The other countries will say, okay, we can't take this heat because our economy won't last as long as America's, so we're going to have to offer them something.
So if you knew for sure that the worst thing that could happen is there might be several months of disruption, but when the dust settles, the U.S. is going to have substantially better.
Maybe not as good as we wanted, but substantially better trade agreements.
That should make your stock market go up.
What is wrong with the risk management people who are driving the stocks down?
Do they really believe that it's chaos?
Do they really believe that because Trump seems to be unpredictable and he's changing things based on The situation on the ground.
So there's a lot of roiling going on.
Do they really think that the outcome of that has really much of any chance of being negative in the long run?
These are professional risk management people, and they think that this won't work out in the long run?
This is as close to a guarantee as you could ever get in economics, right?
There's no guarantees, but it's as close as you can get.
I don't think, you know, if there were a betting market, I could say, okay, make me a bet.
In the third year of the Trump term, will our tariff situation be better or worse than it is now?
It's close to guaranteed to be better.
Now, whether that takes a year or a month, it's just guaranteed.
I mean, I don't know how it can go any other direction, really.
So I'm not sure that we have the smartest people driving the stock market.
All right.
Then there's a story Blaze Media is covering that apparently, I didn't even know this, but America and Mexico have had some kind of long-running water deal.
And part of the deal is Mexico gives us water.
And part of the deal is we give Mexico water.
Now, I'm assuming that they give us water from places they don't need us so much, and we need it more, and we give them water from places we've got a little extra, and we didn't need it where that water is.
So otherwise, it wouldn't make sense.
We would keep our water, they would keep their water.
So there must be some situation where it just makes sense that we use their water and they use it.
But apparently...
They have not been meeting their deal under this 1944 water-sharing treaty.
And so Trump, with I think the backing of Ted Cruz, who has been pushing for this, just said, all right, so we're going to cut off your water to Tijuana.
You either have to fix it on your end, or goodbye water.
So it looks like the U.S. will deny Mexico's water too.
Now, I don't...
I don't know if that means to you, I guess, no water.
I doubt it.
But maybe not as much as they wanted.
This seems exactly right.
So I love it that my country is saying, wait a minute, you have to do your end to this, and water is not free.
So if we don't get your water, you don't get our water.
Looks right on point to me.
Here's another good news.
By the way, remember, today's theme is I'm trying to drive down your anxiety.
In my opinion, this is my actual opinion, things are going really well.
Like, really well.
It just maybe isn't really obvious from the lens of everything's on fire and the headlines and we're all fighting about everything.
But things in general, the biggest things...
Are going really well.
Here's another one.
So, of course, one of our biggest problems in the United States is access to rare earth minerals.
Well, according to Financial Times, Trump is invoking a wartime's power to increase U.S. mineral production.
So you probably knew this existed.
I think we talked about it during the pandemic.
There's a thing called the Defense Production Act.
And if the country is in trouble and you need to just sort of quickly ramp up production, typically we're thinking of a war situation, you can invoke this wartime powers thing and then you can cut a lot of corners.
So you can get around a lot of regulations.
Here are the things that will be immediately changed by this act.
So it's going to speed up the review of projects.
So if you had a mining project that you wanted to do in the U.S. to get some rare minerals here, or even somewhere else, I suppose, then you're going to get a much faster review, which could be the number one thing that makes something uneconomical,
that it might take you years to get it approved.
So if it goes from years to get it approved to, I think we can get this done in a couple weeks, That should vastly improve our odds of creating our own rare earth minerals.
Also, Trump says that there will be a mineral deal with Ukraine, despite what the news is reporting, because I thought the news was saying the mineral deal was dead, but Trump is reporting it as very much alive and might be signed soon.
So I don't know which one of those is true.
But it does suggest that Trump's looking everywhere and anywhere for rare earth minerals, which I like.
You might know that Congo, the country of Congo, is in such a, let's say, bad state in terms of war that they've offered that they will share their rare earth mineral wealth with the United States if we could help them militarily essentially survive.
And apparently that's on the table.
I don't think a deal has been made, but Congo is one of the places that the U.S. is looking at as a source.
So I don't know what that would look like.
And then part of the reason Trump liked Greenland is because of the mineral, rare earth minerals.
So we're also looking at federal lands for mining, the rare earth minerals.
We're looking at loans for federal loans for companies to...
And let me summarize that.
We have long said one of our biggest vulnerabilities to China and one of our biggest limiting factors to all kinds of technological progress is our shortage of, or let's say the risk to our supply chain of rare earth minerals.
This looks like exactly the right response, doesn't it?
So again, You know, I'm just going to give you all the good news.
If I were to design the perfect response to we don't have enough rare earth minerals in our pipeline that are secure, it would look exactly like this.
It would be the War Powers Act.
It would be federal lands.
It would be we're going to get it anywhere.
We're going to increase the rate of approvals.
We're going to give loans.
This is everything.
This is right on point.
Excellent. In other good news, Trump is backing every form of efficient energy.
So he's not big on windmills because they haven't really proven themselves.
And he's not anti-solar, but solar is going to do its thing.
But he is pro-nuclear.
He's pro-drilling like crazy.
He's pro-getting rid of regulations.
He's pro...
I think there was something about drilling in the Antarctic.
And he's even pro-coal.
Now, if I were going to tell you that you had a president who was just super pro-energy, and he was going to do everything he could to make energy just bigger in the United States, what would you think is the prospects of the United States for thriving in the future?
And the answer is, really, really good.
Because if you could only use one thing to predict how a country is going to go, it would be their access to energy.
It would be the one thing that largely predicts the future of the economy.
And Trump is, you know, seemingly all in on doing exactly the right stuff in exactly the right area of the economy, energy.
So he is right on point on that.
So that looks good.
Here's some probably fake news from the New York Times.
So the New York Times got anonymous American officials.
So it's the New York Times.
It's a story that's bad for Trump, if it were true.
And it comes from anonymous American officials involved in the military-industrial complex.
Does that sound like it's going to be true?
I haven't even told you what the story is.
But without even knowing what the story is, do you think that the New York Times, with a negative story for Trump from anonymous American officials, probably in the Pentagon or somewhere close to it,
does that sound like a real story?
Well, according to...
For Musk and Trump, it's not a real story.
And also, according to the Pentagon, it's not a real story.
But the story was, the story that I'm not going to give any, I give it no respect whatsoever.
I guess anything's possible, but this one doesn't even sound like a good try.
So the story was that Elon Musk was going to be briefed on the battle plans with China.
The battle plans with China.
Do you know what the battle plan with China is?
We're all dead.
Pretty much.
Because if we had a real war with China, China's dead, we're dead, the world's dead, everybody's dead.
We're not going to have a war with China, in my opinion.
In my opinion, the odds of a war with China...
Are really, really low.
Really low.
Because China doesn't want a war.
And we don't want a war with China.
It would be the most destructive thing that the world has ever seen.
And neither the United States nor China is crazy.
So even if it looks like you're getting close to war with China, China doesn't need a war.
China can just wait.
Their strategy of just being...
Bigger than other countries and, you know, having a big manufacturing base and just keep building things and getting technologically more capable and controlling resources and markets and building their Belt and Road thing.
That all works.
That is a really good plan for future Chinese dominance.
Now, we're not going to attack China with...
You know, the risk that that would be to the, I mean, that would be the existential risk of the highest order.
So in my opinion, if you're worried about war with China, it's the last thing you should be worried about.
Literally the last thing.
But anyway, so the rumor was, from the anonymous American officials, that the Pentagon was going to brief Elon Musk on the war plans with China.
But Musk says that's not true.
The Pentagon says that's not true.
Trump says, total lie, not true.
Make up your own mind.
But let me tell you what does make sense.
It does make sense that if Musk is in charge of figuring out how to cut the budget, and the military is an enormous part of the budget, at some point...
Musk would need to know the general direction of the Pentagon, meaning is the Pentagon going to turn into a drone-only kind of a military?
Is it going to double its number of nuclear subs?
Is it going to get rid of its tank expenses because who needs a tank?
If the United States got into a war with anybody capable, Tanks wouldn't last five minutes.
So at what point does Musk need to know, not the war plan with China, you don't need to know that detail, but you would certainly need to know the budget direction of the Pentagon so that you can say, you could ask the right questions,
like, all right, if you have all these drones, why do you need tanks?
There might be a reason.
I'm not saying there's no reason.
But those are the questions you've got to ask.
It's like, well, do you really need this?
If you've got that, can you make a robot army?
I mean, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered to handle the budget and the budget cuts.
Well, as you know, there's this big Tesla takedown effort.
And I guess they're getting really organized and something's going to happen at the end of the month.
And they keep planning all these events.
That turn into domestic terrorism because there's always somebody bad at these events.
And they're going after Tesla assets and Tesla dealerships and charging stations.
And it's all about Elon Musk.
And now actor John Cusack is involved with this.
And once again, we get back to this theater, kids.
John Cusack...
I don't believe he's appeared in any top-grade movies lately.
This is the only acting job he can get, which is pretending to be a leader of this anti-Tesla thing.
And he's complaining that the United States is fascist and becoming more fascist every day.
Is that because there's somebody who's making cars as somebody wants?
Is that the fascist thing?
Or is it possibly the people organizing the violence against them?
Which one sounds a little more fascist to you?
Tough question.
Anyway, if it's the only acting job you can get and you look crazy and you look like you might be on some kind of mental health drugs, I guess it's the best you can do.
So the Daily Wire is reporting on that.
So, poor guy.
Anyway, so here's my opinion about the Tesla protests.
Something like 30-40% of all Tesla owners are Democrats.
If you own a Tesla, do you feel uncomfortable driving it in public?
Because all you have to do is stop at some red light.
And if there's some bad, radical, you know, crazy leftists, you might get keyed.
So, if 30 to 40% of Tesla owners, who probably are quite happy with their automobiles, because Tesla has a lot of happy owners, how are they going to feel finding out that their own party made it too dangerous to just drive down the street in the car they already own?
That is an unrecoverable error.
I don't think the anti-Tesla people have thought this through.
It's not like all those people can immediately swap out their cars.
That's a pretty big expense.
So a few will, right?
A few politicians will make a big show of it or whatever.
But most people are going to keep the car they have no matter what's happening because changing out your car is sort of a big deal.
So if 30 to 40% of the Tesla car owners are finding that their own party made it too dangerous to drive to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread, how are they going to forgive their own party?
I wouldn't.
I would never forgive that.
Because it's one thing to say, blah, blah, some policy is happening that might not affect me.
You know, blah, blah, executive order that might not affect me.
You know, blah, blah, the Congress is talking about something that will never affect me.
That's really different from I can't drive my car without fear because the Democrats did that to me.
That's non-recoverable.
It really is.
And the fact that the leading Democrats are silent on telling people to, you know...
Cool it against an American company.
So forget about even the violent part.
Don't you think that Democrats should be saying don't take down American companies, especially ones that they would say are good for climate change?
But nobody.
It just completely reveals that their views are about power and about destruction.
They're not trying to build anything.
And when they do, they just take the money and nothing gets built.
You know, like the California classic example of that.
So anyway, it seems that the Democrats have decided to define themselves as domestic terrorists.
The Democrats have tried to kill Trump twice, because we assume that those killers were...
Left-leaning.
And now they're trying to take out Musk.
So they've literally become a party of anarchy.
And I told you before, I think I told you that Mitch McConnell, not Mitch McConnell, Schumer, Chuck Schumer, when he was on one of the news shows, he talked about how the goal was to make Trump less popular.
Now, how could you belong to any kind of a group?
Whose leader says our goal is to make the other side less popular so that we can get power back.
No part of that sounds like what's good for the public.
How about we plan to lower your taxes?
How about we plan to create more jobs?
That would be good.
How about we plan to find a way to get more rare earth minerals?
Oh, that would be good.
How about we found a way, we have a plan for getting better trade deals?
That would be good.
Every one of the productive ideas is coming from Republicans.
Now, some of it is because Republicans have power and Democrats don't.
But the complete inability to have a positive policy idea, combined with the, unfortunately, the authenticity of saying that what they want to do is destroy two of the most successful people in the country.
How do you not...
Understand what's going on.
They are the party of anarchy, chaos, and destruction.
They're not trying to build anything.
They're trying to just completely destroy.
And I just don't see how that could ever be a competitive political party at the national level.
Of course, they'll retain power in cities and states.
But wow, I've never seen any group self-destruct so thoroughly without understanding that they're self-destructing thoroughly.
It's like they don't even understand it.
Meanwhile, this is interesting.
As you know, Trump was doing executive orders against a few law firms that he thought had acted inappropriately.
Meaning targeted Republicans or targeted him.
But one of them has negotiated with him.
The Paul Weiss law firm had been one of the targets of Trump's executive orders that would take away their clearances and prevent them from doing work with the government.
Apparently they negotiated and they promised not to deny representation to clients based on political views.
So that means they agreed to take on Republicans if it made sense.
They promised not to use any diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
Wow. And they said they would dedicate the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services to support the Trump administration's initiatives, according to The Hill.
That sounds pretty extreme.
How in the world?
I mean, did they offer that?
Or did the Trump administration ask for it?
Because it feels different if they offered it versus if they asked for it.
If they offered it, well, it just makes sense to say yes.
But I hope they didn't ask for it.
Because that would look a little extortion-y.
You know, if they ask for it.
But if the law firm said, all right, we're just going to have to throw everything at this deal and we'll just offer this.
And it might not be any more than they do for the other side of the political aisle.
It's a pretty big firm.
But anyway, that's an interesting situation.
It also tells me that the law firm is very good at what they do.
Because if you had told me they could negotiate a way out of this, I would have said, ha, ha, ha.
There's no way they're going to negotiate their way out of this.
And then they did.
So I guess I'm a little impressed.
And probably they weren't crazy about the diversity, equity, and inclusion thing.
They probably just did it because everybody was doing it.
So they might have given away nothing on that.
It might have been something they didn't want to deal with in the future anyway.
Well, let's talk about L.A. Reportedly has a billion-dollar deficit, just the city of LA.
Now, if you heard that, how bad would you think that was?
What if I taught you about numbers without percentages or percentages without numbers?
So there's a number without a percentage.
So if I didn't tell you what is the total budget of LA, how would you know if that's a big deal or a small deal?
So I had to do my own research to find out what the budget of LA is, to find out if a billion dollars even matters.
It's around 8%.
It's about 8% of the budget.
So if you tell me that they have to cut the budget by 8%, the rest of the budget by 8%, that seems painful but doable.
If you tell me it's just a billion dollars, then I go, I don't know, is it a...
$2 billion budget, because it wouldn't be possible to cut 50%, but 8%?
I feel like an 8% cut is something that a big budgeted anything should do once in a while.
If you're a big company, big state, big country, big organization, shouldn't you every now and then look to cut 8% to 10% of your expenses?
That's the most normal thing in the world.
So it's doable, but maybe not with the competence of the people who work in L.A. By the way, State Farm has a lot to answer for.
I'm hearing more stories of people who thought they had insurance for the Pacific Palisades, and State Farm was part of that, and are learning that the quality of their insurance was not what they hoped it would be.
So I think the local news is going to be on that story.
And I don't know what state firm does about that.
I mean, it could be that they just don't have any money, so even if they wanted to treat people better, they can't.
But we'll find out.
We'll find out.
In other cost-cutting, Pete Hegseth said on Thursday yesterday that they're going to cancel more than $580 million in grants and contracts.
What do you think about the fact that all these big government entities seem to be able to look at the budget and in five minutes they can identify millions of dollars that don't seem to be justified and they're just going to like crazy grants for crazy shit.
The fact that this is as easy as it is It was really weird.
I think it was one of the Doge leaders.
It was on the news.
I think it was on Laura Engram's show on Fox News.
Sam Korkis is his name.
He was asked, what is one of the big surprising things about the Doge and the cost cutting?
Sam said, You can cancel a $50 million contract and nothing happens.
No one even knows why it existed.
Just think about that.
Just think about the fact that you can cancel a $50 million contract, probably in multiple places in the government, this exists, and there won't be much pushback.
Because there's nobody who can defend why it existed in the first place.
That's the quality of our government money management.
We really have the right to ask for a lot more, let's say, responsibility and auditability and just fiduciary responsibility with our money.
We're owed a lot more.
Anyway, but even when I read that Hagseth said the Pentagon found 580 million to cancel, my first thought was, wow, that's a lot, 580 million.
And then I realized that the number we're looking for would be closer to 580 billion.
In order to get to a sustainable debt level, The defense is probably where a lot of the cuts will happen.
$580 million doesn't get you anywhere close.
I mean, it's better than not getting $580 million, obviously.
But $580 billion might close the debt.
I see people still dumping on CUSAC in the comments.
Well, here's some good news, bad news.
You want to hear the good news, bad news?
The good news is Germany is going to increase its military spending by a trillion dollars.
The bad news is Germany is going to increase its military spending by a trillion dollars.
Have any of you seen the Norm MacDonald, you know, the late Norm MacDonald's act?
When he talked about Germany.
I don't remember the exact wording, but if you can think of it in Norm Macdonald's voice, it's like, I don't know if any of you study history, but Germany.
And then everybody starts laughing because, yeah, Germany does have a history.
So when was the last time it was good?
For Germany to massively increase its military capabilities.
Hmm. Hmm.
I'm not worried at all.
Anyway, so that's happening.
But that might be part of what gets the United States out of Europe's business, because it didn't really make a lot of sense that we were all up in their military business in Europe in the first place.
Well, let's talk about some other countries.
As you know, Israel is going hard at Gaza and the Hamas militants who are still there because the hostage deals seem to fall apart.
And it looked like Hamas was just going to stretch it out.
And they were hoping for some kind of a ceasefire, maybe involving the hostages or not.
And then they thought they could reconstitute and take back control.
And indeed, during this latest ceasefire, Hamas tried to reconstitute its leadership of the area and reconstitute it like a government and a military and stuff.
And I guess Israel said, we're not going to have any of that.
So now they're just going hard at them.
And here's my question.
It seems to me that any time one of the grown-ups from another country, be it Saudi Arabia or some other...
You know, a country that's allied with the U.S. or maybe a European country, anything in the European Union.
Don't they always say, but what we really need is a two-state solution?
And here's my question.
How do they not know that's not an option?
If you just look at a map of all the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and then you look at Gaza, Where exactly would this second country be?
That option has been completely taken off the table.
And it makes me wonder, the people who say it are generally smart, which makes me think that they know it's not real, but they know that's the thing you have to say in public.
Because if you don't say, I want a two-state solution, Then you become a target for anybody who thinks that being too pro-Israel is a bad thing.
We live in a world where there's a lot of people who think that.
So, do you believe that that's just acting?
My current opinion is that's acting.
That 100% of the people who actually know how the world works and are paying attention, not casual people.
I think if you just stopped somebody on the street and said, do you prefer the two-state solution?
You'd find lots of citizens who are not deeply informed about what's going on.
I think the citizens would quite honestly say, yes, two-state solution, good idea.
But not the experts.
So don't we still have people who are allegedly experts?
They have to know.
That there's no real possibility of a two-state solution.
Don't they?
So, and that's a real question.
Do they actually not know that that option closed?
I don't know when, but it's certainly closed.
So, I would also say that the way Hamas handled the, or didn't handle, the hostage situation kind of gave Israel The free pass that they needed to do whatever they need to do.
So I think that Israel has decided that Hamas will be destroyed completely, and I think Hamas never thought that was serious.
I think their strategic problem was they thought, well, if we just do this and that, they're going to do a ceasefire, we'll reconstitute, we'll claim victory, and we'll do it again.
But that's not at all where Israel's head is at.
Not at all.
Israel has quite clearly decided that they'd like to get the hostages back, but they're not going to let it control them.
Meaning that they're going to destroy every part of Hamas, no doubt about it, no matter how long it takes.
So, for those of you who are new to me, I don't support Israel.
It's not my country.
I support the United States.
But it's hard for me to criticize a country that's doing something that looks like it's in their best interest, even if it's horrible to other people.
Because I see it through the filter of power, and Israel has power, and they're using it to what looks like their own opinion of what's the betterment of Israel.
If the power were reversed, and the Palestinians had all the power, the Israelis would not be happy.
In other words, whoever has the power is going to be doing things that the people who don't have power are really, really going to hate.
And they might even have a good point.
But it doesn't matter.
It just doesn't matter if they have a good point.
Because the ones with the power are going to get what they want, and that's just what that part of the world is about.
I don't think our part of the world is better.
I think that when the US has power, it uses it.
And when somebody else has power, they use it.
So to imagine that if I had a moral or ethical qualm, that somehow that would matter.
That wouldn't matter.
It wouldn't matter to anybody.
So I just shut up about any moral or ethical qualms because I don't live in a moral and ethical world.
I live in a world where countries, Quite understandably, pursue their own best interest as hard as they can.
So what are you going to do about that?
Now, you might say, but we don't want to be funding it.
And that's a good conversation to have, because that's just economics.
But I'm not even entirely sure if we understand the whole funding situation.
Because a lot of that money...
That looks like it's for Israel, is really just does a U-turn and comes back to the United States and funds our military-industrial complex.
But we also have some strategic reasons to be strong partners with Israel, probably economic reasons as well.
So it's a more complicated situation, and I don't think that my ethical or moral opinion about anything moves any needles.
So I just stay out of the whole conversation.
But I don't back Israel.
I don't support Israel because they don't need it.
And it's none of my business.
So I have to say that every time, I think.
Meanwhile, let's talk about Ukraine.
Zelensky has said that there's no way that the U.S. is going to take over any of their nuclear power stations.
Now, there's some, you probably heard the news, That Trump said when dealing with Putin, what if the United States takes over some or all of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine?
And that that would be, I guess, the thinking would be it would be good for Ukraine's power structure because of our expertise, but also it would be a reason not to attack Ukraine because then there would be a bigger American presence there.
But then some are saying that that only applied to one nuclear power plant that's in an area controlled by Russia at the moment.
So I'm not even sure what the details are of that.
But Zelensky is defying that, according to The Independent.
And he says, no way that America is going to have any of our power plants.
Now... Does it feel like any progress has been made?
Because it seems to me there are two situations that will never work.
One situation, according to Zelensky, is that if America tries to negotiate a peace plan without Ukraine at the table, that there's no way that will work.
Do you agree?
Do you agree there's no way that the United States can come up with an agreement?
That Ukraine will accept.
I agree with that.
Because even if we say, oh, but we can twist his arm and we can threaten him and we can just make Zelensky do what we want, he's going to do every one of these weasel tricks.
He's going to have the European Union on his side.
He's going to have each of the countries over there on his side.
He's going to have a lot of Americans on his side.
So as long as Zelensky is a weasel, And whoever might replace him would just be weasel number two.
I don't think that we can come up with an agreement that he would keep and would end the war.
So situation number one that won't work, and I agree with Zelensky on this, is trying to negotiate a peace deal without Ukraine at the table.
But there's one other thing that won't work.
Trying to negotiate a peace agreement With Ukraine at the table.
Because if you put them at the table, they're going to ask for things that nobody's going to give them.
If you don't put them at the table, we're going to give away things that they're going to work behind the scenes and in every way to thwart us.
So you can't make a deal with them at the table.
And you definitely can't make a deal with them not at the table.
And those are the only two options.
They're either at the table and it doesn't work or they're not at the table and it doesn't work.
In my opinion, I don't see anything that looks like even a little bit of progress.
What do you think?
Do you see it differently?
And to me, it looks like Russia is just going to keep chewing up whatever they can because they have such a dominant position at this point, theoretically.
I mean, I'm not there.
So, you know, maybe the drones and robot dogs that the Ukrainians have can turn the tide of the war.
I mean, maybe, but I don't see it happening.
So, I don't see any progress there at all.
Nor do I see a path.
So, unless something big happens, I'm not expecting anything to happen except the United States getting out of the game.
So, let me make a prediction.
Given that Zelensky doesn't seem to be serious about peace, because being serious about it would be giving up more than he's willing to give up.
But we don't have to pay for it.
So I think Trump's next move would be to remove just every bit of support for Ukraine and say, Germany, I'm glad you've increased by a trillion dollars.
You're spending.
Hey, Great Britain and France, good luck with that.
We'll sell you some weapons if you like.
Would you like us to sell you some weapons?
Because we'll be happy to sell you stuff.
So that's my prediction.
My prediction is no peace in Ukraine and the United States pulls out entirely and just says, fuck every one of you.
And I think we're really close to fuck every one of you.
Because we're being dragged in.
I mean, I guess we dragged ourselves in.
You could argue that we're responsible for it.
But at this point, we certainly have a fiduciary responsibility to deal with our own budget problems and let them have whatever faith they decided they wanted.
Because if Zelensky wants to fight, why should we stop him?
Anyway, according to Live Science, an octopus has been spotted riding on top of the world's fastest shark.
This is my favorite story.
There's even video of it.
So somehow an octopus grabbed on the top of a shark, and it happened to be, coincidentally, one of the fastest type of sharks, a shortfin Macau shark.
And that shark can go up to 50 miles per hour underwater.
Can you imagine how much fun that octopus is having right now?
Unless the moment it lets go, the shark is going to eat it.
So I don't know if sharks eat octopuses.
I think they do, right?
Are sharks picky about what they eat?
So it could be that the octopus is thinking, Okay, if I ever let go, I'm going to be lunch.
Or is the octopus saying, I think I just figured out the greatest thing ever.
I've got a pet.
I've got a pet that's going to take me places.
Man, am I traveling.
I'm seeing the world.
So anyway, they're calling it the sharktopus.
It's a combination of a shark and an octopus.
The sharktopus.
They were spotted in the Horaki Gulf off of New Zealand.
So be careful if you go to New Zealand because it might not be the only shark to puss.
There might be lots of them.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I needed to tell you.
So here's what I think.
I think the Ukraine war will not turn nuclear, but I think the U.S. will just get out.
I think that the Democrats don't realize that their Tesla attack will destroy the entire Democratic Party.
Because I just don't know too many normal Democrats with Teslas who are going to put up with this.
I just don't think they will.
I think they're going to lose the entire...
Asian American vote, if they haven't already.
And because of that.
I mean, that just looks like complete lawlessness.
And the Asian American community likes their law.
They like law and order.
And they like their Teslas.
So I think that's really going to sting in a big part of their party.
I think the tariffs are going to be nothing but positive.
But it will be, you know, a rocky road until it is.
I think inflation will get under control.
I think interest rates will come down.
I think our energy is almost guaranteed to be much higher in a year or two than it is now, which will again bring down prices.
I think that almost everything is going in the right direction with Doge.
I do worry that they can't find enough, but boy does it look like there's plenty of fraud and abuse.
It looks like there's plenty to cut.
So I'm going to tell you that the stock market is acting political right now.
It's not acting economical.
If the stock market has started acting as if economics were driving it, I think it would be discounting a lot of the roiling and would be saying, you know, things are definitely starting to shape up.
So we fixed the border problem.
I don't think education is fixed.
If I had to pick one weak spot, I don't think getting rid of the Department of Education makes much difference.
But I don't trust states to do education because they haven't succeeded yet.
The idea that the states would compete with each other to do education better, it hasn't worked yet.
What would make that suddenly work?
So I think the...
The only thing the Republicans have there is if they can push school choice.
So school choice might give you something, you know, as long as everybody has the choice.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have to say today.
Hope it reduced your anxiety a little bit.
And if that doesn't work, coffee can cure everything else.
So I'm going to say a few private words to the people on Locals, my subscribers.
And the rest of you, thanks for joining.
I will see you same time tomorrow on X and Rumble and YouTube.
