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April 4, 2025 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:57
Episode 2799 CWSA 04/04/25

God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, Brown University DEI, Human vs AI Art, New Wealthy-Tax Bracket, Klaus Schwab, Marine Le Pen Lawfare, USAID Foreign Judicial Control, Judicial Supremacy, Laura Loomer, NSC Firings, President Trump, 1996 Chuck Schumer Immigration Policy, 1996 Nancy Pelosi Reciprocal Tariffs Policy, 2018 Obama Reciprocal Tariffs Policy, Stephen A. Smith, Liberal Empathy, NIH Bioethics Chief Fired, Christine Grady, Anthony Fauci's Wife, RFK Jr. Cuts, Scalpel vs Chainsaw Fallacy, Pramila Jayapal Capacity Building, Mike Benz, Democrat Street Resistance Training, Media Personalities Stock Ownership, Tariff Winners & Losers, Congressional Tariffs Authority, Chuck Grassley, Economist Magazine, Chamath Palihapitiya, Tariffs Interest Rate Impact, Tariffs Unpredictable Results, Matt Taibbi Files Lawsuit, Rep. Kamlager-Dove,  Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure

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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 day.
But if you'd like to take your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or gel, a sign, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, it's called, that's right, the simultaneous sip.
And that happens now.
Ah.
So good.
Well, I guess it's going to be up to me to explain tariffs and everything else, because it's all terribly complicated.
But first, let's see if there's any science that didn't need to be done.
Oh, here we go.
According to Petapixel, which sounds like a weird name, Matt Grokut, How could that be a real name?
Grokut. Poor guy.
Matt Grokut.
Anyway, there's a study, and the study finds that if you smile in your profile picture, more people will want to do business with you and you'll make more money.
Now that's quite a surprise, isn't it?
Do you know what they could have done instead of this study?
They could have just asked me.
Scott is it good if people smile in their profile picture?
Yes Yes, it is.
Well, we were thinking of doing a big expensive study.
Don't bother People like it when you smile in your profile picture But will they be more willing to do work with you and maybe buy things from you?
Yes Yes Smiling can do all of that for you.
So next time just talk to Scott I can save you a lot of time.
Well, the Trump administration is freezing $510 million from Brown University, according to the Daily Caller, Reagan Rees is writing.
And it's because Brown University has been accused of not doing enough about anti-Semitism.
And their DEI program is a little problematic as well.
But more than that, I think they need to change the name of their university to something more inclusive.
I mean, the name of the college is Brown University.
I mean, seriously, you're going to have to change the name.
I think something like Rainbow University, or All the Colors University, or Be They Black, Be They White, Be they any other color university?
But you just can't call it Brown University if DEI is your problem.
Change that name!
Okay, it's certainly named after a person named Brown, but that doesn't matter to the joke.
Well, there's yet another day.
This was the millionth day in a row in which somebody has breathlessly posted on X That some new AI app can create people who are doing what you want them to do.
So if you dance, it makes it look like a celebrity that you selected is dancing.
And you can make them do all kinds of things.
You can make them Marilyn Monroe.
And does it matter which app it is?
No! Because nobody's ever going to do anything useful with that.
How many times have you seen an AI app Their promise is to make, oh my God, with this kind of tool, I could make my own full-length movie.
Has anybody made a full-length AI movie?
Nope. Is anybody close to making a full-length AI movie?
Nope. Because I've tried a little bit, you know, image generation stuff just to see what's going on.
I think I use Grox and maybe Chad GBTs.
And so I thought to myself, okay, I'm already a visual artist, kind of.
And so I'll tell the AI to make, and then if it's not exactly what I want, how great will this be?
Because I can just tell it to change it.
I can say, change the color of that shirt and put it in a tropical setting.
And pretty soon, with very little effort, I'm going to have like a piece of art.
It took me about 10 minutes of messing around to say to myself, I have no interest in doing this whatsoever.
And it never got close to what I wanted.
Because it turns out that the thing in my mind just couldn't be reproduced by AI.
It was just always something that wasn't close.
And I think all of these image generation things where you think, ah, we must be five minutes away from Hollywood being able to make a full-length movie with this technology.
Nope. Nope.
You're not even close.
You would not get anywhere close.
I'm going to double down on my prediction, or triple down, or quadruple down, because I keep saying it, that art, pretty much all art forms, are only attractive to us as consumers if we know that it was made by a human.
And it's not because we're anti-AI or something.
It's because it's related to our mating instinct.
So when you see an artist who does something that you can't do, you say to yourself, maybe you don't say it consciously, but your instinct is to want to mate with the artist.
Because the artist has some kind of genetic thing you don't have.
If you see somebody who can play the piano like Beethoven, and even write the music like Beethoven, you are automatically triggered to say, really?
If I made it with that, maybe I'd have a child who is super skilled.
All right, bring it on.
So I don't think AI will ever produce any art that anybody cares about.
That's what I think.
But it might be the end of drawing.
I was doing some drawing yesterday for, you know, my job, and I realized that a child born today will never even learn to draw, because it wouldn't have any utility.
They'll just learn to use AI to make images.
Why would you learn to draw if you were a child born today?
No real reason.
Almost wondering if children born today will learn to write.
Because you could just talk to the computer and it'll write it perfectly for you.
At what point is it just useless to learn how to do it yourself?
I don't know, we're getting close.
All right, apparently according to Zero Hedge, Republicans, the Trump administration, Does that sound like something that Trump would be okay with?
It doesn't to me.
You know, I suppose it would be popular or help him sell the tax package if he does it.
But not a big fan.
Not a big fan of that.
If you had any idea what the tax burden is for people who make over a million dollars a year, and let's say they don't have any fancy ways to hide it.
They're not in real estate or they don't own a gigantic company with lots of ways to hide your taxable income.
If you're just making a lot of money because you're a surgeon or something, the tax burden is insane.
It's insane.
And then when you die, the government takes 40% of what's left.
There's really no hope.
Let me put it another way.
If you were so good at your job that you made a million dollars a year every year that you worked, and then you retired, you would not be leaving your children much of anything at all.
Because what it would cost you to live would be about the same, your taxes would take most of it, and then your estate tax would take 40% of what's left.
And then if you had three kids and you divided by three, not much left.
So really the government in its current form has made it kind of impossible to build wealth in a realistic way.
Unless you're just killing it, and then you can do it.
But you'd have to get so lucky.
But people who are making a million dollars a year, just like clearing a million dollars a year, they're not creating a dynasty.
That's just living a pretty good life while you're alive.
Pretty good life.
Well, meanwhile, Klaus Schwab is stepping down from the World Economic Forum.
We knew this was coming.
But is it my imagination, or did the people who were quite worried that the World Economic Forum was going to be like a shadow government and you're really running the whole world and all that, did we just stop thinking and talking about it?
Because I never bought into that.
You know, I was just sort of observing it from the outside.
But to me, it just looked like what Elon Musk said once, a rich people club.
And they had some Preferences, you know, they wanted some climate change and maybe they wanted you to eat bugs and not own as many things and, you know, rent them instead.
But did any of it make any difference?
I don't know.
It doesn't seem like it really did.
And now that Klaus is gone, you wonder if all the Klaut, the Klaus Klaut will be gone.
So, but I also wonder, you know, Did we think that the WEF, World Economic Forum, was the shadow government until Doge discovered that USAID was the shadow government, at least for the United States and for a lot of countries it affected?
So maybe we just like having the idea there's a shadow government, but as soon as you see that what USAID was doing, that looks like the real one?
And then the World Economic Forum, again, just looks like a rich person's club.
So Klaus is stepping down.
Trump called the situation in France where Marine Le Pen, who was the front runner for the presidency, got taken out by lawfare, or at least that's what it looks like from this part of the world.
And Trump called it a witch hunt and said it was the same playbook that Was used against Trump to take him out.
Now, do you buy that?
Do you buy that it wasn't a legitimate prosecution?
Maybe it wouldn't have happened to anybody else.
And that it was completely political and it was for the purpose of taking her out of the election?
I do.
I do.
Now, could be wrong.
Maybe. But we live in a world where, unfortunately, that would be the most obvious and routine thing that would happen.
Because we're seeing in other places.
You know, it seems to me that, remember when the first time you learned that George Soros had figured out that the best way to control the country is to control the prosecutors and maybe some judges?
Because if you get the attorney generals and the prosecutors on your side, you can kind of control the legal system.
And if you control the legal system, you are the government, because you can take out a candidate.
If you can take out a candidate like Trump, or you can take out Marine Le Pen, you're kind of the government.
And remember how clever that seemed?
We thought, man, this Soros guy is so clever.
He figured out the least expensive way to control a country.
And then he was controlling the United States, it felt like.
And then, We learned that USAID has been doing exactly that to other countries massively and for decades.
So apparently one of the first things we do when we want to control another country is we look to control their courts.
We try to get a judge and prosecutors that we can control or bribe or somehow have some influence over.
So it does seem All governments that you would call part of the democratic world, they all seem fake.
Because I believe that if your court system has been corrupted, and that certainly is the case in the United States, seems to be the case in France, probably the case in every country that USAID was working in, I'm not sure any of the democracies are real.
I think that they might all be pretend and that the real government is whoever put in the corrupt judges.
You know, remember Joe Biden and the, uh, the prosecutor, he said, well, we won't release your billion dollars to Ukraine unless you get rid of that prosecutor.
That was just this.
It looks like it was just another case where we couldn't control Ukraine unless we could control You know, they're judges and prosecutors.
So it looks like that's what he was doing.
So once you learn that, the governments all look fake.
They all look fake.
If you look at, let's say, an election in the United States, do you think it will be determined by the candidates and the voters?
Or will it be determined by whatever corrupt judges decide is going to be legal today?
I think the judges can change the rules.
They'll decide what's in.
Do you need voter ID?
Are you going to reapportion the district so that you get, you know, more representatives?
I think the courts kind of control democracy.
And so to me, everything looks fake as long as the courts and the judges don't look credible and they don't look credible at this point.
So there's that.
So Laura Loomer made some news by, apparently she had identified some, uh, what Glenn Greenwald called three pro-war members of the National Security Council.
And she talked to Trump and Trump fired them immediately.
Now, how do you interpret that?
If you're an anti-Trumper, you say to yourself, what?
This Laura Loomer conspiracy theory lady is so powerful, she's causing policy to happen in the White House.
Is that what's happening?
Let me give you my frame on this.
I've said this a number of times about Trump.
One of his superpowers, one of his strengths, is that he's really good at listening to everybody.
You'll listen to Bill Maher, you'll listen to me when I visited, you'll listen to Kid Rock, you'll listen to Laura Loomer, but you'll also listen to Scott Besant and, you know, all the top economists, and you'll listen to other world leaders, and he's really good at scanning the room and listening.
Now the other thing I teach you is that the person with the best ideas is always in charge.
So Laura Loomer must have done some research or had some information that Trump was not aware of.
And she had credibility from other interactions.
So he was willing to, you know, give her a lesson.
She described these people and why she thinks that they were dangerous to keep on because they're kind of pro-war, you know, maybe not as pro-Trump as they could be.
And he decided, because he's the decider, That's a good point.
I didn't know about that.
They're gone.
I don't have any problem with that at all.
To me, that all looks positive.
The positive part is that Trump is always scanning his base to find out what they think and listening to suggestions.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard that somebody made a suggestion to the Trump White House and then when it got to Trump, he said, huh, Pretty good idea.
Let's do that.
It's very common and I don't think any other president has had the confidence or just the vision to see what everybody wants and to be able to decide, I like that one, I don't like this one, I like this one, I don't like that one.
So I love the fact that Loomer could come in with some information of value Because otherwise Trump wouldn't have acted if it had no value.
And he acted on it.
So I don't think that story is about Loomer.
But she's doing a hell of a job of making herself relevant in the entire political process.
So hats off to that.
But this is a Trump story.
And Trump doing the thing I like best about him.
Listening. Taking people seriously and then acting, you know, without any hesitation.
So, I saw a, there's a, going around on X, there's a video of Chuck Schumer in 1996 and he's, Chuck Schumer is basically sounding exactly like Elon Musk talking about immigration and Schumer in 1996, he's arguing in the Congress And he says, the number one reason that illegals come to the U.S. is so they can defraud programs like Social Security.
Does that sound familiar?
It's 1996, and it's Chuck Schumer.
Now today, he would say exactly the opposite.
Oh, stop accusing those illegals.
There's nothing going on.
Completely opposite.
Now that's not the only person Who's on video doing things that look sort of opposite based today?
According to the Wall Street Apes account in 1996 Pelosi was encouraging Congress to back reciprocal tariffs.
Do you think she's doing it today?
Probably not.
In 2008 Bernie Sanders wanted tariffs because he says jobs are going overseas.
Actually, Bernie might be consistent.
I think he might.
I'll have to check on that, but I think Bernie might be consistent because I think he agreed with Trump on some tariff stuff.
And in 2018, Barack Obama called for reciprocal tariffs.
Do you think he's doing it today?
So here's my take on Republicans versus Democrats.
My observation.
Having spent a lot of time with both, is that Republicans have core beliefs.
Now, I know that sounds funny, because you think everybody has core beliefs, but I don't think so.
I think Republicans have core beliefs, and they don't really change.
And Democrats have performances.
So one has core beliefs, and you could predict, if you found a video Of a Republican talking 20 years ago?
Would it look that different from a Republican talking today?
I feel like it would look essentially the same.
Whereas the Democrats, you can always go back and find them having the opposite opinion.
The indication to me is that one group is performing and one group is acting on their actual core beliefs.
And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Let me give you another example here.
According to Rasmussen polling, Stephen A. Smith, you know, would you call him an entertainer or ESPN commentator?
Let's call him Stephen A. Smith, that if you throw him in the mix for potential candidates to be president of the Democrats, He actually scores pretty well.
So let's see, 33% of likely U.S. voters view him favorably.
And in a hypothetical matchup, 31% would vote for Newsom, but 28% for Stephen A. Smith.
And he would do about the same against AOC.
So he's not the leading person, but he's also not running at all.
I mean, I think he's been pretty clear that even being considered for a presidential candidate is less about him.
I like the way he says this, by the way.
It's less about him and more about the complete lack of good candidates.
He's totally right about that.
But here's the thing.
Stephen A. Smith is a performer.
Now he's a commentator, but what makes him Like, extra good at his job is that he performs.
Like, he goes big when he comments, and that makes him hard to look away.
I find him totally engaging and very skilled at doing what he does, which is get your attention, hold your attention.
My experience is, if I come across a clip of Stephen A. Smith, it's hard to stop watching it because he's just So high energy and you know, he makes sense most of the time But he's a performer so That makes sense in the Democrat world find a performer because it's all a performance well,
there's a study by Well, Cy Post is writing about it and It was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that says that liberals show less empathy to political opponents than conservatives do.
So liberals would care less if conservatives had something bad happen to them, whereas conservatives might, you know, deeply disagree with the liberals, but wouldn't find pleasure in seeing something bad happen to them.
Is that surprising?
Nope! Because I'll tell you my current view on Democrats, besides the fact that they're performing as opposed to operating on core beliefs.
I think Democrats are motivated by jealousy and hate.
And that's why they perform.
Imagine if your core belief was non-existence, but your real motivation Is a revenge-y, jealousy, hatred of people who are doing better than you.
You would have to perform.
Because you couldn't say the truth.
You couldn't say, you know, honestly, I'm just full of hate.
So, I think I, you know, want Trump to lose.
Not because he's doing a bad job.
I'm just full of hate.
And Doge, even though it sounds like a good idea on paper, Musk is so rich and having so many babies, and I'm not having any babies, and I'm not rich, so I just like to see him fail.
You couldn't really do that.
You can think it, but you can't say it out loud, so you're gonna have to put on a performance instead.
You're gonna have to pretend that you have normal views and that you're a normal person.
But Republicans seem motivated by Two things.
One is the ick factor.
Now, you've heard this before, that conservatives seem to be more likely to be icked out by anything that's non-standard or just icky.
And, you know, I don't want to give you examples of what that is, because that would cause problems.
But there are just some things that make conservatives go, ugh.
Ugh, get that out of here.
I don't want to be part of that at all.
But that's not the only factor.
I think Republicans have a growth mindset, which is, you know, you can, you can do well.
The country can do well.
We can, we can create more for everybody.
So if you have a growth mindset, you don't really need to pretend when you're talking about what you want.
I want to lower taxes.
I want to get rid of regulations.
It's just a growth mindset, and the Democrats are just literally just putting on performances trying to cover up the fact that their real motivation is just some kind of horrible hatred.
That's what it looks like to me.
Well, here's something I didn't know.
According to the Amuse account on X, did you know that the person who at one point had been tasked With determining whether or not Dr. Fauci's gain-of-function research was ethical or not was...
Who do you think it was?
Of all the people in the world, who would be in charge of determining that Fauci's gain-of-function research in China was ethical?
Well, it turns out it was his wife.
That's the first time I knew this.
So his wife, who I guess just got fired by Trump, She was the head of the NIH Office of Bioethics.
So he was actually being evaluated by his wife for whether or not he was acting ethical or not.
What just happened?
Did my light just go out?
Hold on.
Well, that's weird.
That's the second independent light in my studio that just went out on its own.
Well, the other lights didn't go out.
I'm pretty sure I'm affecting my lights today.
I do that sometimes.
Well, according to ABC News, Robert F. Kennedy has cut more jobs at the Health and Human Services than he wanted to, so some people will be hired back.
And those would have been called mistakes.
Now, how would you report this if you were ABC News?
Would you report it as, that dumbass, he should have used a scalpel instead of a hammer, and now he's made this terrible mistake, and now he's gonna have to correct it.
Well, let's hope he's smarter next time.
Well, I would call that the low experience take.
Here's what an experienced person would say about that situation where big cuts were needed, big cuts were made, but then it went a little too far so they have to back up and correct a few things.
I would say that the view that he should have done it perfectly the first time is what very inexperienced people say about things.
You know, I'm no expert.
But I think you should do everything perfectly every time.
What? That's what the Democrats with not much experience say.
You know, we've never been in business, never done anything important.
That's not a thing.
You can't do something of that size and scale and do it perfectly on the first try.
Nobody could do that.
So don't even imagine that if he tried harder He used his scalpel.
Then he could have gotten it exactly right the first try and gotten it done on time.
If you had infinite time, you still couldn't do it.
Because if you have infinite time, then forces working against you will have time to organize and thwart you and get in the way.
So the best way to do this stuff is take your best cut at it, make some mistakes, and then correct them as you need to.
That's a perfect job.
Inexperienced people say, well, you had a choice of just doing it perfectly in the first place.
Why didn't you just measure twice or thrice before you cut?
I mean, there's a little thing that even says what you should do.
Measure twice, cut once.
Have you never heard that?
I mean, if you've heard it, then I guess you would never make any mistakes.
It's a good thing that I'm cleverly telling you now, with all my lack of experience, how things work in the real world.
Yeah, do it without mistakes.
I'm going to add that to my other thing that only inexperienced people say, which is, you should have done it sooner.
Do you know what else you should have done sooner?
Everything. Everything that was worthwhile.
You should have done it sooner.
What about Doge?
Should have done it sooner.
What about tariffs?
Sooner. What about tax cuts?
Sooner. Everything should have been done sooner and perfectly.
It should have been done sooner and perfectly.
That's what all the dumb people will tell you.
Anyway, so I was looking at the PJ Media, Victoria Taft is writing about this, that Congresswoman Jayapal, Pramila Jayapal and some Harvard professor are behind the training of people to resist Doge and Tesla.
So they're actually doing resistance training to get more people onto the streets.
Resistance training.
Now here's the fun part.
I happen to be watching Jayapal I was getting interviewed live the other day, and she said that this resistance training that they were giving was part of capacity building.
Now, do you know where I'm going with this?
If those of you have listened to Mike Benz, he talks about the CIA, and often working with USAID in the past, Where they would do capacity building as part of the plot to overthrow other countries.
Now, capacity building would be things like making sure that you had co-opted the media, or maybe introduced a new form of media that was going to say the right things.
Or you had trained people to resist on the streets, which is exactly what Jayapal is working on.
And I said to myself, what are the odds that she would use that phrase?
Have you ever heard any just member of Congress talk about capacity building?
Have you ever heard anybody, anybody in any context use the phrase capacity building?
The only place I've ever heard it is from Mike Benz and he didn't make it up.
He's training us to understand That that's a CIA phrase.
So do you think that Jayapal accidentally admitted that she's CIA influenced?
I do.
I don't have proof, but that was a pretty big signal that she's had some kind of training that's either adjacent to or because of the CIA.
And that would explain so much that I didn't understand about her.
So much.
So, I can't say for sure, but if you see anybody who's training people to resist on the streets, and they refer to their own work as capacity building, it probably means exactly what you think it means.
And if I'd never heard Mike Benz talk about it at length, I wouldn't have caught it.
But that little, by the way, this is a, it's a hypnotist thing.
Hypnotists will tell you that people tell you exactly what their hidden thoughts are.
They just don't know they're doing it.
So I'm always looking for the hidden thoughts based on their choice of words.
This one just jumped right out.
So that was interesting.
All right, let me give you an update on tariffs.
Now, As if you're brand new to my live stream, you don't know that I'm completely disgusting because I often mention that I have a degree in economics and an MBA from a top school.
So a person like me should certainly understand tariffs.
I mean, with all of my sophisticated education background, of course I understand everything about tariffs.
And I'm going to explain it to you now in the simplest possible way, and then you'll be as smart as I am about tariffs.
Wouldn't that be great?
Don't we want to be as smart as I am?
Well, no, the real story is economics is not even real, but we'll get to that.
So when you see people complaining that the stocks went down and they lost money, That's not real.
Nobody lost any money unless it stays down and never goes back up, which has never happened to the stock market in the history of the stock market.
There's never been a time when it went down and just kept going down.
Now, if we ever do see that, that will be, you know, the end of the United States.
But in all likelihood, there's a temporary uncertainty and that, you know, things are likely to adjust.
So, I was watching somebody, it doesn't matter who, just saying, you know, and I lost all this money in the stock market.
No, you didn't.
Not only did you not lose it, but your percentage of ownership of the country stayed about the same.
Meaning that if you owned this, you know, tiny bit of stock, you owned a tiny bit of the country.
Because the country is mostly, you know, corporate wealth.
And if everything went down, you probably own just about the same percentage of the country as you owned before.
So it's not as bad as it could be.
I haven't sold any stocks.
I'm just going to ride it out.
I'm not terribly worried.
I don't know.
I don't have a estimate of when it will bounce back.
Could be sudden.
Could be any time.
I don't know, could be months, could be longer.
But what do you think about the people in the news business?
I think the people in the news business are not waiting for manufacturing jobs to come back so they can get one.
But they definitely have some money in the stock market.
If you're in the news business, you're well paid and you probably got a 401k.
So the people in the news are going to obsess about the stock market.
Because that's what affects them.
They're not going to say, well thank goodness, you know, we have a plan in place to bring back those good manufacturing jobs so I can get one of those and stop being on MSNBC.
No. They're only going to be worried about the stock because that's what affects them and it's also what they understand, what they think they do.
So, first thing you need to know is that Jim Cramer thinks these tariffs are a terrible idea.
Now, if you spend any time on the internet, you know that Jim Cramer is famous for being a contraindication of what's going to happen.
So if he thinks it's a bad idea, it might be the best idea ever.
We'll see.
Apparently General Motors says they're going to dramatically increase car production in the U.S. And that's directly because of the tariffs, because it'll make foreign cars more expensive.
GM is thinking, oh good, we're going to sell more.
Likewise, Ford is, not likewise, but in addition, Ford is rolling out what they call employee pricing.
So they're going to allow anybody to buy a Ford for what would have been the same price that their employees could get them.
I don't know how good a deal that is or not, but it doesn't count with some of their best cars.
It doesn't count like the Raptor or the Mustang or the Bronco or the Expedition or the Navigator or the Super Duty trucks.
So it's not the best offer in the world, but it'd be great if you're looking for an ordinary Ford car.
You just want a good price.
But I think the low hanging fruit here is US companies that will benefit from the tariff and already have facilities.
So all they have to do is You know, increase production at the existing facilities.
So, when you see that kicking in, that's probably a good sign.
Here's a...
This is just so predictable.
So, Republican Chuck Grassley is working with a far-left Democrat, Maria Cantwell.
Cantwell? That sounds like the worst name for somebody who's trying to get something done.
Can you do this well?
Can't well.
Anyway, the two of them are working together in a bipartisan way to try to wrestle control from Trump about tariff decisions and make sure it's in the Congress.
So they want to make some new legislation that basically codifies the fact that Congress is the one who can raise taxes and And decide on tariffs.
So this would be game over.
Now, I don't know what the odds are that this gets passed.
I think low, probably pretty low odds that it gets passed.
But this would be terrible.
It would be basically neutering Trump's ability to negotiate, to do anything useful with tariffs.
But there we are.
Chuck Grassley trying to take control of that for the Congress, which, as you know, is worthless.
According to the Economist magazine.
All right, here we go.
Now, the Economist magazine would be written by people who really understand economics.
So whatever their take on this would be the smart take, right?
So they put out a magazine.
Oh, and did I mention that they're called the Economist and they think that magazines are still a good business model?
That's sort of disqualifying for being an economist.
What's your business model?
Well, we've got a magazine.
Okay. But what they say is that, this is right on the cover of their new magazine, that Donald Trump has committed the most profound, harmful, and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.
Almost everything he said on history, economics, and the technicalities of trade was utterly deluded.
But if you want to hear the counter to that, Olin Pod and entrepreneur Chamath Palihapitiya commented on that, and he called them a mouthpiece of globalist rhetoric that is literally always wrong.
So Jamath was kind of commenting that the more the economist hates it, the more likely it's a good idea.
I don't think he's wrong.
You may have heard that Trump's getting some pushback because Russia and North Korea and Cuba and Belarus are not on the tariff list.
You might say to yourself, wait a minute, is it because he's Putin's secret lover?
That he doesn't want to put them on there?
But anyway, the White House clarified that those countries, and Russia in particular, are so, they're already so restricted.
So they've got high tariffs already, and all kinds of sanctions, and so there's not any meaningful trade with those countries.
I think there are some things, like potash or something that we trade with, Russia, but nothing meaningful that would be worthy of derailing any peace talks.
So makes sense they left him off.
China has responded to the tariffs on them with a reciprocal tariff.
So they matched it with a 34% tariff on imports of all US products beginning April 10th.
So that matches the US.
Is that the beginning of negotiations?
Maybe. We'll see.
New York Post is saying that your iPhone could get a lot more expensive because of the tariffs if they stayed in place, especially the China stuff, because it would make your iPhone be over $2,000, they think.
Would it?
I don't know.
And if it were, maybe Apple would work hard to bring it to the United States.
I don't know if they could make it cheap enough in the United States, but maybe that'll happen.
Then the New York Post is talking about the cost of buying your Air Jordans shoes that are made in Vietnam, which is also getting a big tariff, and that your Air Jordans used to cost $180.
Might cost $18 more.
You know, there are a lot of things that are optional purchases.
I'm not terribly worried about an optional purchase expensive sneaker.
Seems like you could live without one.
The other thing Trump said, which was interesting, you remember I told you that China is unlikely to agree to a TikTok sale?
Because I think they'd want to see Trump fail and it would be worth a few billion dollars to do it.
Trump hinted that without actually committing to it, he just said it was an example, but he was clearly hinting that China might want to negotiate a better tariff situation in return for saying yes to a sale of TikTok to a US buyer or a team of buyers.
So, clearly Trump knows that China saying yes to any kind of a TikTok sale is going to be a hard sell.
And that if you didn't bring in a completely unrelated piece of business, which is the tariffs, you probably couldn't get it done.
So I think he understands that China is probably a hard no, even if they lose billions of dollars.
I think that they would let that go.
I think they'd spend billions to embarrass Trump and make sure he didn't get their crown jewel social lab.
We'll see.
But it's interesting that Trump did set that up as a bargaining chip kind of situation.
Well, I saw one theory that Trump's real play with the tariffs is the lower interest rates.
And the way that would go is that the the tariffs would scare the stock market and Then people who took their money out of the stock market wouldn't want it to be idle.
So they would put it in bonds and if a lot of people buy bonds that would lower the interest rate on bonds because supply and demand and then if interest rates come down then the Fed might lower interest rates and then suddenly when we go to Go to get our debt refinanced We would be doing a much friendlier interest rate,
which could be tremendously Useful to the country.
I don't know that that's the plan It's just something that might happen so The reason that no economist knows what's going to go on is there way too many moving parts?
So you got your interest rates and you got well, here's other stuff the Wall Street Journal Yeah, the Wall Street Journal is talking about the impact on the value of the dollar, right?
So you got the interest rate issue that's hard to predict.
And on top of that, there's the value of the dollar that's hard to predict.
And there's not even an agreement about whether a strong dollar is good for the country or a weak dollar is good for the country.
So economists can't even decide, do we like a strong dollar or a weak dollar?
But it is likely that the dollar will weaken if the tariffs stay in place and it continues to rile the market.
So that's another thing.
Then I saw, according to Spectator Index on Axe, the price of oil went down 4%.
Also probably because of the tariffs, but I'm not sure.
So if oil goes down, that should trickle into all the other costs.
So you've got the uncertainty of whether a strong or weak dollar is good or bad.
You've got the interest rate effect that's unpredictable.
You've got the energy costs that should lower prices.
But would it be enough to compensate for the rise in prices?
You've got the question of who's going to absorb various tariffs.
Will it always be the importing company or in some cases will the exporter absorb some of it?
Then you've got the how long will it take to get manufacturing coming back to the United States?
How many adjustments can industry make quickly?
We don't really know.
So the number of unknowns involved in this are just through the roof.
But one thing's for sure, the people who know the least about economics are very certain that they know a lot about economics.
I think the more you know about economics, The less confidence you would have on which way things are going to go.
Because if it turns out that it's just a good negotiation, that's going to be great.
You would just get better deals.
If it turns out, you know, it's going to go some way that nobody could predict, well, anything could happen.
We'll see.
But here's what you need to know.
Economics is more art than science.
All right, you think economics is more, it feels like, it feels like it's some kind of a hard science.
It's not.
It's more of an art.
The second thing you need to know is that art is bullshit.
So let's see if you can follow this.
Economics is more art than science, and art is bullshit.
Economics is largely bullshit.
Nobody really knows in a situation like this what's going to happen.
We just really don't know.
But we'll act like we do.
So here's something that I saw some of the non-economists talking about.
I saw somebody saying that the reason they're mad at Musk Well, here's what you need to know.
First of all, I think it's not true.
I think Musk has actually paid more federal income taxes than any living human.
It's just that it depends on the year.
So he's had one or two years where he had enormous payments because of the financial situation.
And then some years where it was zero.
Trump, of course, as, as we all know, has found ways to avoid taxes wherever he can, because he's in the building, you know, construction, real estate business.
And the tax law is sort of designed to encourage that kind of a business.
So here's what I would say.
The reason that anybody can avoid taxes, be it Musk in some cases and Trump in some cases, is that the government wants this situation.
They would rather promote the growth and the success of a gigantic business than they need specific taxes from that business as it's young.
Now, Think about all of the federal income taxes that are created by having a gigantic company with lots of employees.
All the employees are paying federal taxes.
The businesses themselves probably have enormous property tax burden on them, which is a state tax, but still it's part of the productive taxation of the citizens.
They create things that have sales tax associated.
Again, it's not federal, but it's adding to the system.
And if you add together all the sales tax, property tax, employee taxes, and then the employment itself, and the fact that if people are employed, the government doesn't have to take care of them, the benefit that anybody with a large business that's successful is adding to the country.
is so great that the government is okay with you not paying federal income tax every single year if you're investing money into your company, and that's why you're not paying taxes.
So, the people who know the least just say, oh, they're not paying federal income tax, so that's unfair.
The billionaires are taking our money.
That's not really what's happening.
All right, so here's my big worry about the tariffs.
Do we have enough of a runway that we'll know if they're working before midterms?
Because if the economy is still roiled the way it is, the Republicans are going to get wiped out in the midterms.
And there's not really much time between now and the midterms for tariffs to Do their magic, you know, not a lot of people are going to be reshoring their manufacturing.
So I feel like Trump is, is risky at all.
Now I think he had to, because the current situation was on, you know, was untenable.
So it's the right thing for the country that he's taken this risk, I think.
You know, we don't know how it's going to turn out, but I think it's the right kind of risk at exactly the right time to do it.
But if it doesn't make the public think it's working by the midterms, Republicans are going to get destroyed.
And then it's all gone.
You're going to lose everything.
Politically, you're going to lose everything.
And then it could get worse, because if this was the only thing that was was going to allow us to balance the budget and have some kind of a strong economy going forward, and the Democrats take it away, which they will, because they're not going to just let it ride.
This is a really big, this is a really big risk.
But again, I would rather that he takes the real risk to really help the country, than to do something that would be purely political, which is, you know, paper over it and pretend it's not a problem, that things aren't going right.
Anyway. So, worry about the midterms.
Matt Taibbi, journalist Matt Taibbi, is suing a Democratic lawmaker for $10 million.
Because she made the mistake of saying something on social media that she had said in the context of her job.
If she said something in the context of her job, apparently you can't sue her.
But she made the mistake of putting it on social media, and I guess that opened the door for him to sue.
And she made allegations that apparently are thoroughly debunked.
I'm not even going to mention them because I don't want to put it in your head.
But go Taibbi.
Yeah, I mean, he was unfairly accused of something that didn't pan out whatsoever in the past.
And this Democratic California representative, Sidney Kim Leger Dove, just decided to, you know, empty the barrel.
Is that a thing?
And just totally trash him in a public way, including on social media.
So yes, she needs to be completely put out of business.
I hope he succeeds.
I saw in a Mario Knopfel recap of the news that the Hooties have shot down a number of drones now.
And our drones cost $30 million a piece, the good ones, the Reaper drones.
And they've shot down three of them, two recently just this week.
So we've lost 17 of them over time.
And each one costs $30 million.
So they've managed to cost us $500 million worth of just drones they shot down in the last six months.
Now, here's my question.
What kind of technology do the Hooties have that they can so successfully shoot down our drones?
I mean, you know, maybe they miss nine at a time times, I don't know, but they must have some pretty serious equipment over there.
That they can spot it and then get to it.
So, I don't know how long it's going to take for us to suppress the hoodies, but it looks like it could be a while.
All right, I'm going to claim the best predictor of what's happening in Gaza.
Now, those of you who have been watching me for a while, you have to either back me or disagree with me on this.
I'll tell you the current news.
And then you tell me, was I the best predictor of what would happen with Israel and Gaza?
Now, if you're new to me, I need to clarify that I do not support Israel.
I observe it, and I observe that they seem to have the power and they're using it.
If the other side had the power, they would be using it.
So, I'm not putting an ethical or moral Label on any of this and I'm not saying what they should do or what they shouldn't do.
I'm just telling you what they're doing and one of the things I predicted was they were never gonna let the Gazans move back into Gaza and that they would have to depopulate it and just Move people somewhere else or keep them in camps or something and it looks like that's exactly what's happening So the biggest mass displacement of the war so far Israel's calling it creating security zones,
but one assumes the security zones will, you know, grow to the entire thing.
And they plan to be more aggressive for a year, but Hamas apparently has offered to release all the remaining hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire, which suggests that Hamas knows that Israel's real aim is to depopulate the area, kill every member of Hamas, Even if it costs them their hostages.
Now, I don't think that Israel is going to stop just because they have a chance to get the hostages back.
They might keep negotiating, but they're done with Hamas.
Hamas will be trapped and destroyed in their tunnels, and I don't think there's any way around it.
And eventually Gaza will be just, you know, owned and operated by Israel, and I believe I'm the only person who told you that from the jump.
Can you confirm or deny that that's true?
I saw no other commentator say, from the very first, the Palestinians are not going to be living in Gaza when this is done.
Now, part of it is that Israel used the term total victory.
And, you know, they said things like, it will never be the same.
Now in here, total victory, and here it will never be the same there.
What did you think was gonna happen?
Because if all they did was fight for a while and then say, all right, let's try living together again, would that be total victory?
No, no, that wouldn't even be anything.
If they had negotiated for the hostages and then said, all right, We promised we'd get our hostages back, so now you can keep on living in Hamas.
You can keep on running Gaza.
That's not really total victory, is it?
It's not even close.
It's more like losing.
So, yes, there's really no chance that the Palestinians will be going back to Gaza and living there.
Now, again, if you're new, I'm not saying that's good or bad or moral or ethical or not.
That's up to you.
Make up your own decisions.
I'm just predicting.
And I'm saying that if you were in that situation, what would you do?
If the situation were reversed, what would Hamas do?
This. They would do this.
Everybody in this situation would end up defaulting to this, because everything else doesn't make sense at all.
And, you know, the United States is kind of distracted at the moment.
So if we had an impulse to try to stop Israel from doing what it's doing, I don't think this would be the time we'd use it.
So that looks like what's gonna happen.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, are my comments for today.
I'm gonna make a few comments privately to the local subscribers, but for the rest of you, thanks for joining on YouTube and X and Rumble.
And I'll see you again tomorrow, same time, same place.
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