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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine.
At the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens right now.
Oh, that's some good stuff.
Well, we'll talk about the stock market and all the tariffs and stuff below me.
Let me ease into it with some fun news.
Now, many of you saw the TV series Game of Thrones, and you remember that there were some these big, freaky white wolves, and they were called dire wolves.
Now, I didn't know that dire wolves were a real extinct species, but apparently it's a real thing.
And a company, genetic startup company called Colossal, Has managed to clone some direwolves.
So now you can get your own direwolf.
Well, not yet.
I mean, they're not selling them.
But I would think they'd want to.
So they've been extinct for some 12,000 years.
But now you can get one.
I think a woolly mammoth is going to come soon.
But I would like a woolly mammoth wolf.
Is there any reason we can't start combining things?
I mean, it's impressive that they recreated something exactly that existed.
I guess they took a regular wolf and then they gene edited just the parts that were different to make it a dire wolf.
Now, I heard from my neighbor once that if you have a dog of any kind, burglars will stay away from your house because they don't like to mess with a dog.
But I've got a tiny little old dog and I would like to...
Do you think you can domesticate any of these dire wolves?
Because if a dire wolf comes to the door, nobody's going to rob your house if you have a wolf.
So I want a well-trained, well-behaved, but deadly wolf.
In related news, there's a dog cloning business.
This already exists if you want to clone your own dog.
New York Post is reporting that you can take the DNA from your deceased pet and you can have it cloned.
Apparently it's such a booming business they can barely keep up with it.
But like I said, I think I like the cloned Snickers.
But I like her also to be a little more dire wolf than she is.
So I'd be like, alright, you like treats and you like bugging me all day.
But could you also be a wolf to protect my house?
And I think someday, someday I'm going to get my own wolf.
Well, meanwhile, on the X platform, Elon Musk is allegedly, according to the BBC, clamping down on parody accounts.
I thought that was already done.
Wasn't it already a rule that you had to say you're a parody or you're fake?
But apparently the rule is that you must say you're a parody or a fake.
I'm not sure how new that is.
It feels like that's been the case for a while.
But that's a good idea because I get impersonated now and then on X. So I wouldn't mind having a little more clarity on that.
Thanks, Vic.
How many of you saw...
I guess Joe Rogan had an interesting guest, Ben Lamb, and he talked about, speaking of genetic stuff, he talked about gene editing of human beings in China.
So allegedly China might be ahead of us, you could argue if that's really ahead, ahead of us in the ability to gene edit humans.
So there's one story, I don't know how confirmed this is.
That they did some testing on making some babies that were gene edited to be resistant to HIV.
Does that sound real?
I don't know.
I give that a maybe.
Maybe. But then there's rumor that maybe China has also experimented with making kids who are more intelligent.
You know what I think?
I think if you tried to make Intelligent humans more intelligent, you would have just the worst problems.
Because there's a movie I used to love, it was one of the best movies ever, called Little Man Tate.
And it was about a little kid who was a genius.
And the thing I loved about it is it accurately showed that if you're too smart, you can see all the things that can go wrong.
You can see all the dangers and all the evil of the world because you're smart.
And if you're a kid and there's nothing you can do about those evils, it just makes you crazy.
So yeah, so Jodie Foster played the mom in that movie.
It was a great movie.
And I think that the smarter you are, the more mentally tortured you are.
Elon Musk says that about himself.
And I have observed that there is a certain amount of intelligence that does make people a little squirrely.
Thankfully, I'm just below that level.
I'm smart enough to get some stuff done, but not so smart that I have to go to a therapist.
So I hit the sweet spot.
Kind of lucky there.
I don't know.
What do you think?
It seems to me that with AI coming, that having smarter citizens won't make that much difference.
Because in theory, we're only a few years away from AGI.
I'm not sure I believe it, but let's just go with it.
So if we had AGI, so that's what would be the next level of AI, do we really need extra smart people?
How much do we need them?
Because they're not going to know more than the AI.
So maybe China would create a bunch of sad, smart people who could only see that the world is going to fall apart.
And then they wouldn't even be able to get a job because the AGI would be doing the job.
And they would be like, huh, could you at least have given me some genes so I'd be good at welding?
Because that's still useful.
Anyway. Here's another story that's like a million other stories.
Caltech has renamed its top diversity official while keeping the DEI office intact.
Washington Free Beacon is reporting on this.
So instead of getting rid of the DEI, which the federal government has required in order for them to get any federal funding, they promoted that of DEI to Associate Vice President for Campus Climate Engagement and Success.
Which is just the DEI person.
Now, if they were the only one doing that, you'd say to yourself, huh, maybe something should be done about this one college that's doing it.
But I feel like it might be almost all of them.
I feel like 8 out of 10 are just going to hide it and keep doing it.
And that's incredible.
At this point, it's hard to imagine sending a child to a college.
Why would a white person send somebody to a college that's going to overtly discriminate them against them for their race or their gender?
There's got to be a better way.
I want homeschooling and robots.
I want to be taught by a robot.
Well, Trump has signed an executive order to revive the U.S. coal industry.
So I guess he's going to tell the Interior and Energy Department to remove any impediments so they can have more coal plants.
And to be fair, Trump did campaign on unleashing American energy.
So, you know, he always says that Trump says that we're going to use that clean coal.
You know, that beautiful, clean coal.
So I went to Grok to find out just how dangerous is a modern coal plant.
And the answer is, super dangerous.
Now, Grok is also still worried about climate change, so it worries about CO2.
But even without the CO2, if you're just looking at the pollution to the air and water and soil, it's pretty sincere.
Sincere? No, it's pretty substantial.
So, this is not like a small change in the health of people who are living in that area.
If you lived anywhere near a coal plant, and, you know, if you did, you probably need to get out of there.
Because it just sounds terrible.
The soil, the air, the water.
And then I asked Grok if that's a regular coal plant.
What about...
Clean coal.
And apparently this clean coal is overrated, meaning that they can't really get it that clean without excessive expense.
So the big point of having a coal plant would be that it's inexpensive and you can get it up and running pretty quickly in this case.
But no, the clean coal is still plenty dangerous.
Is everybody okay with that?
Do you think that's the right trade-off to sacrifice the environment to a fairly substantial amount because energy is a requirement for survival of the country?
I don't know.
It's a tough one.
I guess I'm cautiously...
I guess I'm going to be an observer on this one because there's no way I can say I like it.
Because it's pretty bad for health.
But I can't say I don't like it because it might also be vital for the survival of the country.
So these are tough choices.
But one thing I do like is that Trump makes tough choices.
So it would be so easy for him to kick the can down the road and just say, well, if I approve this plant, everybody will be mad at me and they won't see the long-term benefits.
But Trump just says, long-term benefits.
Done. I do like that.
I do like that.
But this one's a tough one.
Also, Trump approved a...
Allegedly, he's going to approve a $1 trillion military budget.
$1 trillion.
I think that's like $150 billion more than normal.
Now, here's the other thing I worried about.
I was worried that Doge would be working hard to reduce expenses that the government, in this case it would be Trump, would say, "Oh, all those expenses you reduced, And it looks like maybe some of that's happening.
So what does Elon Musk think about the fact that the defense budget is going up at the same time?
He's literally risking his life to decrease expenses.
I would love to know what that conversation sounds like behind closed doors.
Because I can't believe that the military doesn't have $150 billion that they could have reduced from the budget to give them room for the extra stuff they do want to do.
I mean, how many tanks do we need, for example?
So the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Trump being able to use that Alien Enemies Act to get rid of the gang members.
Is that true?
Fake news.
Fake news.
So most of the news about this is fake news.
I'll tell you why.
So remember, Trump tried to use this very old act, the Alien Enemies Act.
And he said that the Trendelagua, the Venezuelan gangs, whatever they are, that they were terrorists, domestic enemies, and so he could use that act to deport them.
And then Judge Biasberg, I changed his name.
It's actually Bowsberg, but I'm going to call him Biasberg for all the obvious reasons.
So Judge Biasberg, you would be a D.C. judge.
Ruled that even though the people were held in Texas and deported from Texas, he ruled that he as a D.C. judge could block it.
But then the Supreme Court overruled Biasberg and said, this is not your domain.
This is a Texas question.
So they would need a Texas judge to even determine if they could do it or not.
So the fake news.
...is that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Trump.
What did happen is that something that wasn't bad for Trump happened, but it wasn't ruling in favor of him.
It was simply saying that the process that got us to that point was not an appropriate process.
Now, this seems like a big step forward, because it means the Supreme Court is saying the D.C. judge has to stay in his lane.
Extendable that is, or whether that will be more generalized to the rest of the country, but that problem of being able to shop for a judge and then getting one that will stop something anywhere in the country, no matter where the judge is, that's got to stop.
So maybe this is the first indication that the Supreme Court is going to be serious about that.
Now, what was the story I heard about Biasberg?
He was on vacation.
And he ended up volunteering for, or he got assigned this case.
But is this the same case, or was there a second case?
But there's a story where he wasn't the emergency judge, and I guess the emergency judges are just picked sort of automatically.
Whoever's the emergency judge at the time just gets the case.
But somehow, Judge Biasberg figured out how to get the case to himself.
Which is not the normal process.
So, he got the case in not the normal process, and then he made a judgment that the Supreme Court said wasn't even good judging.
So, that's a lot to explain, isn't it?
Judge Biasberg.
We'll see how that goes.
Well, according to the New York Post, Apple is trying to figure out how to make...
The iPhone affordable with all these tariffs.
So one of the things they plan to do is to assemble more of them in India.
But the parts are still made in China.
So the parts, even if they're assembled in India, now apparently that would allow them to say it's made in India.
And then there wouldn't be a tariff.
Or it would be whatever tariffs are appropriate to India, not the ones in China.
And that's weird, because all the parts are made in China.
But that wouldn't take care of all their problems.
It might help a little bit.
And the cost of an iPhone could balloon to more than $2,000.
Does that sound true?
The cost of an iPhone could go to $2,000.
Some say, according to a group called Wedbush, a research firm, That the phone could cost as much as $3,500 if we made them in the U.S. So, do you think that's true?
I think I've seen some smart people say, well, you know, we're not going to have people with little screwdrivers putting tiny screws into phones.
We would use robots.
So we would be able to make them cheaply with our smart robots.
Well, I don't know about that.
But I do know that Apple's CEO was recently explaining that China hasn't been the low labor place for a long time.
What they are is a high skill place.
So the skill they need is to be able to create these advanced tools that make stuff like phones.
So the real thing that China has an advantage in is that they've trained just a huge, vast number of people to be able to build a factory, build a special tool that will help manufacture in that factory, and then make it all work together.
It's a very special specialty.
A special specialty.
And we don't really have much of any of that in the United States.
So I'd love to see...
Something from the Trump administration that addressed that directly.
As in, if you want to go to college to be one of these manufacturing tool-making experts, we'll pay for it.
Just imagine that.
If you want to go to college for that very special specialty, which the United States desperately needs to bring manufacturing back to this country and implement robots and all that.
That the government will just pay for the whole thing.
Because I can't think of anything that would be a more direct, smart investment.
Because if we don't have that kind of expertise to build manufacturing, we don't have anything.
We're not going to bring any manufacturing back to this country unless we hire the Chinese to build it for us.
That would be one case where I'd just say, all right, federal government's just going to pay your entire cost to college.
That would give some action, wouldn't it?
Seems like that'd be a fun job, by the way, designing tools for factories.
Well, here's something that sounds sketchy, but maybe it isn't.
According to user Publius, I saw this on X. The Department of Justice filed a sealed motion in that case about that Ryan Ruth.
He was the attempted assassin at the Trump International Golf Club.
But what's weird about it is that it's a sealed motion that's marked ex parte in camera and under seal.
So it's so secret that even Ruth's lawyer can't see all of it.
So you might say to yourself, What's up with that, that it has to be so secret that even the defendant's lawyers can't know what's happening?
And the answer, according to the smartest person I know, is that it might involve Trump's security.
So there might be some things that can't become public because it would give away the Secret Service method or something about Trump.
So it doesn't mean that the secret they're covering up is about Ruth.
The attempted assassin.
It could be just something generically government important, but we'll see.
All right, let's check in with the Democrats who have been trying desperately to come up with a coherent message and an attack against the Republicans.
So here's what Chuck Schumer did, and I think this is probably...
A good list of what the Democrats think is their tightest, most effective message.
And they might be right.
So he had a post on X. This is Chuck Schumer.
And he's just listing the bad things about the Republicans.
And he says, Trump has unleashed chaos in America.
Now, remember I told you that whenever you see the word chaos, that's a propaganda brainwashing word.
Because it's so generic, it's like dark.
Do you remember dark?
Back in Hillary's campaign when I said, no, whoever came up with that, labeling everything that Trump does as dark, is some kind of persuasion expert.
Now, I don't know if the chaos came from a persuasion expert.
I'd love to see how it tests.
But chaos is the last thing that seniors want to hear.
Seniors do not want to hear there's chaos.
Young people?
Not so concerned.
Which might explain why there's so many old people at the protests, because they don't like chaos, even though they're creating it.
Whereas young Americans are moving toward Trump, because chaos would not scare a young person, but it would definitely scare somebody nearing retirement, because the last thing they need is some chaos.
All right, so he starts with chaos, which is probably a professional word.
I don't know for sure.
I was sure when I heard Hillary use dark, I was sure that was a professional and that checked out later.
But this one could be their own invention, but they're sticking to it so slavishly.
They just say chaos every time they open their mouths now.
It makes me think it's first of all organized.
I don't think it's accidental that they're all using it.
But secondly, probably it's been tested.
And it must test well.
At least for older voters.
And then Schumer goes on, he goes, talking about Trump, his tariffs hit families with the largest tax hike in more than 50 years.
Now, of course, you can say that if you're leaving out all the nuance.
The nuance would be, we don't know how it's going to shake out.
There might be some things that are cheaper, might be some things more expensive.
It could be that if you just adjust your spending to buy more American products, Your costs go down.
If you said, well, I won't buy this foreign car, I'll buy a Ford, and then you look at Ford is offering these employee-level discounts to people, which sounds like a pretty good deal, your costs will go down.
That's why he's calling your tax hike.
We also don't know where it all ends.
So if you don't know where it ends, It's hard to say that it's a tax hike.
And he also leaves out the fact that the families, you know, the average middle class families are the intended benefactors.
They're the ones who should come out the best in the long run.
It's literally being done for them.
Because I don't think the rich people who own the factories in China are exactly very happy right now.
But the people who just rely on, you know, jobs and...
They should be the direct beneficiaries, but it might take a few years.
And that's a nuance that the Democrats can just leave out and call it a tax hike.
So unfortunately, that's a good persuasion.
It's not accurate, but it's not inaccurate in the short run.
So persuasion-wise, unfortunately, it works.
And then they say, as far as I know, this is a complete lie, that Doge is sabotaging Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Now, I think what he did, Schumer, I think what he did was he wanted to avoid the most debunkable lie, which would be that Trump wants to cut those things, because he doesn't.
He's been very clear.
100% of the time, Doge and Trump and Musk have all said the same thing.
Nobody's ever deviated once.
They do not want to cut the benefits.
They will not cut the benefits.
But since that's been one of the main attack lines, and it seems to work, Schumer's looking for something that's not exactly that, but you could kind of hear it that way.
So instead of saying that he's going to cut your benefits, Would be debunked.
He says that Doge is sabotaging them.
What does sabotaging them mean?
Now, he's probably making an argument that if you change the systems, the systems might have some hiccups during the changeover.
But anybody with an ounce of common sense would know that eventually every kind of computer system for every kind of everything has to be upgraded.
And it's been probably decades.
Overdue for some of these systems.
So this is a clever little lie that Doge is sabotaging those things.
Now, do you think that Doge is intentionally sabotaging them?
Because sabotage is something you do intentionally.
He's not saying that Doge is wrecking them, because that would suggest it would maybe happen accidentally.
He's saying that they're sabotaging them.
Now, here's the other thing that the Democrats do.
And I'm not going to say that Republicans don't do it, but for some reason I notice it more when Democrats do it.
They do this weird mind-reading thing where they'll just look at somebody who's a Republican and the Republican will just be doing normal things like, in this case, trying to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of three vital systems.
And instead of saying, well, we observe that they say and they're acting on preserving these systems and making them stronger.
So instead of that, which would be observable, they come up with their secret thoughts are that they really want to sabotage it to, for what?
Why would they want to sabotage it?
And what would be, like, how can they imagine that would work out for them?
Who believes that if you sabotage these vital systems, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, who thinks that would be a good idea?
Do you think there's even one person at Doge who thinks, you know what?
I think I'll just sabotage these things.
It's batshit crazy, but it's something that Democrats are always poised to believe, because they somehow believe that their leaders can read the minds.
Of Republicans.
And what they see when they pretend to read the minds, it's just crazy stuff.
Stuff that literally nobody would be thinking.
Ever. Like even once.
And still the Democrats will be like, uh-huh, uh-huh.
I think you have accurately read that mind.
And now I see it too.
And then Schumer says, the market is having its worst three days since COVID.
Well, maybe not.
Because, do any of you remember my prediction about where the market was heading?
Now, I'm no market expert, but from the point of view of persuasion, I think I told you on the podcast that I was guessing that around a 20% pullback is where people would say, huh, that feels like enough, and there wouldn't be any logic to it.
It would just be that 20% feels like the right number.
And sometimes there's no explaining it.
It's just when I thought about it myself, and I just was sitting in a room by myself, I thought, you know what?
I wouldn't be surprised if the market goes down 20%.
But I would be surprised if it went down 50%.
So there's just something about some numbers that are sticky.
And 20% when it comes to the stock market, because it's often, it's a number that people refer to a lot.
You know, that's 20% is a recession.
20% is something.
But we hear 20% a lot.
So I thought, human brains have a snap-to-grid quality that as soon as our mind gets close to something that it's used to, it snaps to it.
So if 20% is something that people often think about when they think about markets pulling back, that when it got close to 20%, if there wasn't something beyond the uncertainty, and I'll talk about that next, that you would just snap the grid and you'd say, 20%?
Huh, that's far enough.
So today there's some buying.
The excuse is that it looks like there's progress on negotiating tariffs.
I don't think there is.
I don't think there's any progress.
But if people want to see it that way, good.
So it looks like that's maybe tightening up.
Tomorrow everything could be different, right?
So whatever's happening today does not predict tomorrow.
And I'm not giving you any financial advice.
I'm just observing.
So... I was reading on Mario Norfol's feed, which is excellent.
You should follow Mario Norfol on X. Tesla is introducing cabin radar for some of their models, the Cybertruck and the Model Ys.
So the cabin radar will be able to tell who's in what seat, not the personality, but it'll know if a child or an adult is in what seat.
And then it will be able to detect health problems and do dynamic airbag deployment based on the size of the passenger and maybe the age.
There'd be an assumed age, I think, with the size.
And a number of benefits, such as you would know if somebody left a child in a hot car, for example.
So that's amazing.
So this would be another case where Elon Musk and his company...
are trying hard to protect the health and well-being of American citizens.
So what do you think would be the outcome of Elon Musk spending his full time trying to save humanity by making us interplanetary, trying to bring communications to everywhere on the planet through Skylink, trying to cure people with blindness and You know, serious disabilities through Neuralink.
And then making Tesla, which if you believe in climate change, would be a huge step forward.
And even if you didn't, they're excellent cars, which will be safer than other cars because the self-driving will be way safer than human driving.
I think it already is.
And then he's going even further with his cabin radar to make it...
Safer in a whole new way than other cars I've even thought of.
And that he's also working on Doge to save America because the biggest existential threat to America is the debt, and only he would be brave enough to take that on.
So how do you think he would be rewarded for this nonstop, high-energy, continuous, pro-human, pro-American, pro-survival point of view?
Well, you would not be surprised.
According to the New York Post, there's a Democrat murder culture.
So they did a survey and asked who's up for murder, if the people are Trump or Musk, and 38% of respondents said it would be at least, quote, somewhat justified to murder Trump, and 31% said the same about Musk.
Murder. And if you're looking at only the left-leaning respondents, the number thinking that murder might be justified of Trump is 55%, and Musk is 48%.
So I would argue that Musk is the one American who by far, by far, is doing the most for the economic...
And future of humanity and America in particular.
And what did the left do?
Because that would take their power away, they brainwashed their people to think that murdering him is the right response.
Murder. And you could all see this coming.
I mean, it's been happening since the January 6th trials, that as soon as they started getting away with Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.
And I blame the media, by the way.
Imagine you're a host on CNN, and you let one of your hosts say that Trump or Musk were Hitler.
You created a murder culture.
If you didn't shut that shit down, you are absolutely guilty of aiding, abetting what will look like probably murder attempts.
Murder. So that's where we've gotten to.
The Democrats have so little to offer in terms of policy and ideas that they've literally turned to murder, murder, as a strategy that they're not ruling out.
Murder. Now, I blame the media 100%, and MSNBC most of all, because if you demonize people as Their intention is to steal your money so billionaires can get tax breaks, which is absurd.
And everybody is Hitler.
What the hell do you think is going to happen?
Eventually, it's going to look like murder is a good idea.
Now, there is some thinking, and the article pointed out, that the whole murder of the healthcare executive by that Luigi guy, where it turned into...
Surprisingly, a lot of young people especially thought that murdering a CEO of a healthcare company was completely justified.
And weren't you shocked by that?
I was.
But I thought somehow it was maybe a special case where there was something about healthcare in particular that people were always mad about.
They weren't getting the healthcare they needed or something.
But apparently it's an extendable thing.
When you look at like Norm Eisen trying to put Trump in jail to keep him from running, to put him in jail so that he wouldn't run for office.
There's a level of violence and implied violence from the left that I've never seen in my life.
I've never seen anything like this.
And it's not even safe to walk outside with a Trump sporting hat.
You would literally be physically attacked.
And I think it's now gone beyond just the crazies.
I think we've reached the point where the normal Democrats are like, well, you know, I'm usually opposed to murder, but if you've got a good argument like somebody's creating chaos and they intend to steal your Social Security money and use it for tax breaks for oligarchs, well, yeah, I mean, in that case, I guess a little bit of murder would make some sense.
And it's all made up.
It's completely made up.
And they've turned half of the country in favor of murder.
Unbelievable. I mean, I don't even know how to say enough about this topic.
It's the worst thing I've ever seen in terms of persuasion.
So I don't know how we get out of this, but the Democrats who are pro-murder...
I feel like maybe the Republicans need to make a point of this.
That only one side is pro-murder.
But maybe they're proud of it.
Maybe they would say, well, we're pro-murder against Hiller.
Anyway, unbelievable.
But that's the power of brainwashing.
If you're wondering how powerful brainwashing is, half of the country Well, half of one side.
Half of one side has been convinced that murder is acceptable in a political context.
That's how powerful persuasion is.
If you ever wondered, like, what's the limit of it?
What's the most you could do?
There it is.
I mean, the whole trans situation should have been a tip-off that persuasion can get people to almost any opinion.
But this one really seals it, I think.
Anyway, so I post on X by a small electronics business owner in America who is explaining why it's so hard to sell into the European Union.
And this is stuff I didn't know before.
You know how Trump has said that tariffs alone are not the problem because other countries put up all kinds of other barriers?
And you've heard about...
I guess American agricultural products such as meat.
So the problem is that we can't sell our beef, I think it is, to Europe because it's got some chemicals that they don't allow in Europe.
Now some people say, but Scott, they're just being wise and healthy and that's why European food is better than ours because they don't allow all these chemicals in.
But then you go to the next level and somebody says, Well, it's because they don't allow chemicals that haven't been tested.
But I guess in America, you can shoot your beef full of chemicals that haven't been tested as long as there's no indication it would be a problem.
I don't know how you know that.
But I wonder if there's some solution where we actually do test our beef to find out if it's a problem with that chemical in it.
It couldn't be impossible to do that test, right?
So maybe there's some way to get a valid test that says this won't hurt you, or to find out if it does hurt you.
Because if it does, I don't want to be eating that beef.
Not that I'm eating a lot of beef, but I don't want you eating that beef if it's dangerous.
So the truth is always a little complicated.
But here's what I found out.
Did you know That it's much cheaper to ship goods into the United States than it is to ship them from the United States into the European Union.
And you might say to me, that doesn't make sense.
It's the same shipping companies with the same goods.
Why would it be twice as much to ship into the European Union?
But apparently they've got landing fees, which we don't have, and green taxes.
Which we don't have.
And somehow the price of aircraft fuel is imposed on shipping carriers I think maybe even if they don't use aircraft.
So in Europe they just come up with a bunch of reasons why your shipping costs will be twice as much as the shipping costs in the other direction.
So those are the things you have to watch out for.
And those are the things that are perfectly Those are the things you want to negotiate.
So when you talk about tariffs, remember, you're talking about all these weird little things like green taxes and landing fees and duties and prohibitions against chemicals.
And it's a whole mess.
But a lot of it is just designed to keep our products out of their markets.
And Trump is smart enough to know that.
I gave you some fake news yesterday in real time.
People were telling me in the comments that there was a 90-day pause on tariffs.
That was never real.
That was just fake news.
So there was never a serious thought of a 90-day pause.
Bill Ackman had been asking for it, but the administration had never taken that seriously, I guess.
Well, here's a communication problem that I think the...
Trump team needs to solve.
I saw Bray Hume and some other people saying the following, that they're having trouble understanding what's the point of the tariffs, because there's more than one thing they could be doing.
One thing it is, it could be raising revenue.
So Trump always says, I'm going to raise revenue with all these tariffs.
But at the same time...
They're saying they want to negotiate the tariffs away.
So how do you use the tariffs to raise money at the same time you're negotiating for no tariffs?
It feels like that's a conflict.
Now, when Trump was asked about this in his meeting with, I think he was in the White House with Netanyahu and somebody asked him that question, he said it could be both, which does make sense.
But I don't know if he can get the dollar amounts from his tariff revenue.
But it could be both in the sense that if you look at every country individually, there may be some countries that are not going to change their landing fees or duties or green penalties or whatever.
And if they don't, the easiest thing for America to do would be to put a tariff on them.
So that the cost of their stuff and the cost of our stuff is the same.
So we don't have to necessarily negotiate away all the little things that keep us out of their market.
We can just say, oh, you're going to put six little things on us, we'll give you one big tariff.
So it does make sense that you would get rid of tariffs everywhere that you're doing it fairly, where there's nothing that's like a fake tariff.
Like the landing fees and the other stuff.
So as long as the country you're dealing with is an ally who wants to treat you right and be treated right, then getting rid of tariffs makes sense.
But there'll probably be a fair number of companies or countries, and maybe China will be one, in which there's just no other way to do it.
You're just going to have to keep the tariffs there because they're not going to change their internal rules to, let's say, Accept American beef or lower their transportation costs or any of that stuff.
So I do accept that it could do both, but it's a good question, is he communicating that right?
They need to communicate that better.
And then there's this third thing that Trump says it's about closing the trade deficit.
Now, I saw that Israel...
through Netanyahu, said that they plan to close the trade deficit and to do it very quickly.
Now, the only way you could do that is that they could sell fewer things to the United States or they could buy more things.
Now, I'm guessing that they couldn't have a gigantic trade deficit because we manufacture a lot.
I think they buy a lot of our weapons, etc.
So, it seems like they probably didn't have far to go.
It was just sort of smart for them to You know, to play nice with the United States because there might be some military action coming up that they need to coordinate with, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, so that's what I understand about the tariffs.
There's at least three things he's trying to do.
Tariff revenue, negotiate tariffs away, or to close the trade deficit, and that might require some tariffs.
According to Scott Besant, There are now 70 countries or so that have asked to negotiate, and that might be why the market is tightening up and responding, because it feels like there's a little bit more certainty going on.
Maybe. It might be something else.
But let's run through a couple of the other countries.
Let's see.
There's some news that Vietnam, their currency, which is called the dong, D-O-N-G, According to ZeroEdge, the Vietnamese dong is weakened.
I'll tell you, I'm a professional humorist, so I feel like I shouldn't touch this one.
I shouldn't touch the dong.
But I just have to.
I just have to.
So, no, you don't want a weak dong.
So, Vietnam, you're going to have to do something about that.
The European Union says they're ready to negotiate for a zero-tariff deal, so no tariffs either way.
Now, again, that's probably a trick because they do more than tariffs to keep our products out.
So we would have to negotiate the end of tariffs, but probably the end of other stuff as well.
And now Mike Benz, I saw him commenting on X, that if they throw in getting rid of the...
The European Union Digital Censorship Act, which threatens to close down X for not censoring the way they want him to censor, there's no deal.
And I'm all on board with that.
I just don't think we should be doing trade deals with any entity that's trying to censor free speech in America.
I've even gone stronger in saying we should reconsider being in NATO.
If they're attacking our free speech.
Because that's the foundation of all of our freedoms.
If the people that we're protecting militarily are actively attacking the most basic foundation of our freedom, we should not be protecting them militarily at all.
But there are also practical reasons why we might want to do that.
So I like this.
I like Mike Benz's Throwing this in as part of the negotiations, they're just going to have to get rid of the digital censorship on U.S. entities, or we just can't do business with you.
That's just got to be a bottom line.
We cannot do business with you if you're trying to take out the foundation of freedom in America.
Absolutely not.
Well, Taiwan has also offered zero tariffs and more investment in the U.S. Breitbart News is reporting on that.
I wonder if we're going to find out that the countries most dependent on the United States for military assistance are also the ones who are fastest to say they'll negotiate for no tariffs.
But again, no tariffs doesn't mean you have a deal.
It's more like the beginning of negotiation because there's probably a lot of other considerations here.
But I do like the fact that Taiwan China is going to invest big in the United States, so that's good.
All right, we've got to talk about China.
China has decided that, unlike these other countries, it's going to push back hard, and it looks like it's going to take it to the wall.
So these are all the things that China has said.
They said that the Chinese Commerce Ministry said that they will never accept the blackmail nature of the U.S. That's a good point.
You can kind of understand how Trump can get away with bullying some of our smaller allies that need us for survival.
You can understand how he can bully smaller economies that are just dependent on trade with the U.S. And so maybe his threatening and blackmailing and bullying is exactly right for every country except China.
Because China sees itself as not just a peer, but the eventual biggest power in the world.
So the last thing that China's going to do is just bend to our will.
That's just not going to happen.
So Trump has taken a stand against China that I don't see could possibly work.
Because if he's creating a situation where we win and you lose, And it's going to look like that to the public?
Like America just turned China into its bitch?
That's never going to happen.
So I believe that China would take it all the way as far as it has to go, right to the point of financial ruin, to avoid doing what Trump tells them he wants them to do.
Even if they agreed with it.
Even if they thought, well, these aren't so bad, that would be fair.
They don't think that.
But even if they did, I don't think there's any chance they would do what he's trying to force them to do because it would make them look weak.
And there's no way they're going to put up with that.
Other countries, they can just say, we're not being weak, we're just being reasonable.
And that works for them.
It's not going to work for China.
So I'll be very interested to see if what Trump is doing is sort of nagging them.
Basically going hard at first.
But then maybe there's a point where he turns it around and says, hey, instead of fighting with each other, why don't we cooperate more?
Or something like that.
Now, I don't know if that can work with China the way it worked with North Korea, because it's a whole different dynamic.
But I don't really see a way to solve this.
So here are the things that China's done.
They, of course, slapped right back with more tariffs, and then Trump's going to put more tariffs on them.
So at this point, goods coming out of China, Unless something changes, it would be prohibitive.
And it would make your iPhone cost a fortune, and a lot of other stuff would just cost a fortune.
But that's just the first thing.
China also just announced it's going to impose export controls on rare earth minerals.
So that's, of course, a threat to our entire supply chain.
They're going to ban import of U.S. films in China.
That's like a $500 million a year thing.
But I kind of laughed at that because my first thinking was, America still makes movies.
Movies are kind of a dead industry to me, unless it's another superhero movie that always plays well internationally.
But it kind of makes sense that China would do that.
Because they would assume that the celebrities are anti-Trump and it will make the Hollywood people go harder at Trump and they're fairly effective because they can get a lot of attention.
So that's a smart counter from China to try to get Hollywood on its side the hard way.
They're putting a tariff on U.S. agricultural products.
They're banning our poultry.
And they're going to suspend fentanyl-related issues.
Well, I'm not sure they ever did enough for fentanyl, but that's pretty directly F you.
Fentanyl-related issues?
That's dark.
So that's how far China's willing to go.
They're also talking about China investigating the intellectual property benefits of U.S. companies in China.
I don't know what that means, but that's not good for the U.S. companies operating in China.
So it looks like they're going to get in their pockets even more than they have.
Now, Scott Besant, Treasury Secretary, says that China's escalation was a big mistake and the country is playing with a losing hand.
All right, so here's what I haven't seen.
What I haven't seen is anybody smart Doing the side-by-side comparison of what our leverage is over China compared to what their leverage is over us, just in trade.
Why haven't we seen that?
Now, maybe somebody's done it.
If you've seen it, could you forward it to me on X?
I'd like to see it.
Because I don't really have a good sense of who has the superior negotiating position.
To me, it looks like mutually assured destruction.
As in, we sort of kind of need each other at the moment, but it's possible that China doesn't need us much at all.
Because they can switch a lot of their consumption into domestic.
They don't have to sell everything overseas.
So, I don't really have a sense of who's got the upper hand.
I will say that if nothing changes, It doesn't look good.
And when I say nothing changes, I mean, if Trump doesn't come up with a reframe to make this not a win-lose situation where we're going to win and China's going to lose, it just can't be a win-lose.
Because if you put it in that frame, you're both going to lose.
China would rather we both lose than America wins and China loses.
That's what it looks like to me.
Trump's going to have to come up with some kind of a wider deal or somehow include something that China wants that doesn't matter that much to us.
I don't know that he has a winning plan on that.
Anyway, yesterday I caused a stir by saying online that our stock market always comes back.
And I asked Grok, and it said 20 out of the last 20 times it went down by 20%, it came back.
But to be fair, it didn't come back quickly every time.
Sometimes it took 5 to 10 years, sometimes longer, and sometimes a little faster.
So here's what you need to know about stock markets and coming back.
It depends what the reason was.
If the reason was something like an oil shock, Where we thought we were running out of oil and we didn't know where to get more.
That might take a while because you're going to have to figure out how to get more energy and nobody knows how.
So that's like a real, like a physical problem.
Not enough energy.
But if your problem is like our current problem where we're dealing with uncertainty, uncertainty is the one thing that has the greatest potential.
You can't predict it for sure.
But in terms of potential, Uncertainty is the one thing that's the fastest to reverse.
You just have to add certainty.
Now, I act like that's easy, but if you're talking about negotiating tariffs and you hear those 70 countries just said, all right, let's talk, the market probably said, okay, that's definitely moving in the right direction.
So now there's at least some clarity that the other countries, and lots of them, are willing to make a deal that might even make us better off.
But China is still the wild card.
We're going to have to get that right.
Now, it's possible that Trump's long play, but he doesn't want to say it, is to get the U.S.
and China just disconnected so that we're not depending on them.
Now, and it could be that the one and only way to do that is to create such a bad situation and just force it to happen.
And, you know, maybe we pay way too much for iPhones for five years.
And maybe we have to open up dirty, you know, rare earth mineral mines in the US and it's a health hazard.
And maybe we have to train a bunch of people to build tools and build manufacturing plants in the United States and it takes years.
But there's a decent argument.
So I don't think that Trump would say that, even if that was the actual goal.
As in, we're going to take some real expensive hits, but we have to get to the other side of this.
Anyway, so stocks seem to be in the positive today.
Because I guess people think they're getting more clarity on things.
So I was watching MSNBC today, which I do for entertainment, as most of you do.
Not because it's news or anything like that.
But man, the whole mind reading thing where the guests say they can see these weird motivations in Musk and Trump.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
They just have this view that they can actually read the minds of other people.
I would love to know if Republicans do the same thing.
I think they probably do, but I don't know why I don't notice it as much.
So, anyway.
Apparently, according to Zero Hedge and some other reports, The landscapers just got busy in my backyard seeing my ears of noise in the background.
So Trump says that the U.S. is in direct nuclear talks with Iran.
Now, that would be a surprise, because Iran, up until really recently, was saying, no, no direct talks, but we'll run through Oman or something.
But Trump is saying that we've been in very high-level direct talks.
And when asked if there would be military action if they don't come up with an Iran nuclear deal, Trump said this.
He said that he wants to avoid doing the obvious.
So he'd rather have a nuclear deal to avoid doing the obvious.
Now, here is another somewhat brilliant persuasion choice of words.
Here's what you...
If you said we might have to bomb you, then they would think maybe yes, maybe no.
They don't want to bomb us.
But if you say it matter-of-factly, like doing the obvious, doing the obvious sounds like the decision's already made.
Doing the obvious sounds like you'd be crazy not to do it.
Because it's the obvious.
Obviously, you're not going to let them have a nuclear weapon.
So, obviously, we'd bomb you.
So there's something about the phrase doing the obvious that is a little extra persuasive because it suggests a mindset where the decision's already been made to bomb.
And for negotiation purposes, that's exactly where you want to be.
And by the way, that might be true.
The thing with Trump, I don't know that he bluffs.
It might be entirely true that...
It's just obvious it's going to happen.
I don't know if that means that the U.S. would directly attack or they'd simply supply some extra weapons in case Israel wants to attack.
So we don't know what that looks like, but I'm still dubious about Iran being serious negotiating.
I feel like they're still stalling, but maybe not.
I mean, the sanctions are pretty brutal.
So maybe Iran just says we can't do this forever.
Maybe they'll just make a deal until Trump's out of office and then just go back to what they were doing.
So I don't trust Iran to make a real deal, but it's kind of interesting.
According to NBC News, Trump administration is considering drone strikes on drug cartels in Mexico.
Now, I don't know if that's real, but I don't care.
Because it's exactly the right thing to make the cartels think about.
Don't you want the cartels to think, you know, I could stay in this fentanyl business, but I'm going to get droned.
Or I could take the money I've already made and maybe open a farm.
You know, it's good persuasion to say, yeah, we're considering taking you out from the air without you ever knowing it's going to happen.
That's a really scary prospect.
If you were a cartel member and you were running a lab, some big lab to make fentanyl, and you knew that the drones knew where you were and you knew that they'd been authorized to take you out, how would you ever sleep at night?
I mean, that would be really disruptive to business.
So even if we're not planning to do it, having it out there makes sense.
Here's a little invention that might save some people from really bad situations.
University of British Columbia, they've invented a drink, a little stick for your drink that detects spiking.
So the little swizzle stick for stirring your drink.
They've made it so it somehow can detect GHB and ketamine.
So, it's not for sale yet, but I'd be worried that there's some kind of chemical properties to that stick, and if I stuck it in my drink, I'd be getting some chemicals I didn't want.
Anyway, but that's kind of cool, if it works.
In other news, Anduril, that's the American defense company that does more...
Futuristic kind of stuff.
They've unveiled an AI-powered seabed sentry for submarine detection, according to NextGenDefense.
So apparently, as you know, it's very difficult, nearly impossible, to detect a submarine.
And that has always given me great comfort, because I thought, well, if Russia and China can't detect our nuclear submarines, they're not going to mess with us.
I think.
So I've always been happy that they were undetectable.
Now, this is a U.S.
company that would be helping us detect, you know, other people's submarines.
for us to do it, it seems like it can't be that long before China and Russia have a similar technology and they can detect our subs.
That's really destabilizing, in my opinion.
So, as smart people have said, it's all going to be about drone warfare in the future.
And maybe even submarines will become less of a preferred weapon.
Because if they're detectable, that's the end of submarines, I think.
The anti-submarine drones would just take them out.
Anyway, so that's coming.
Alright, ladies and gentlemen.
That's all I had for you today.
I'm going to talk to the local subscribers privately, and we'll keep an eye on the stock market, see if Trump can pull a rabbit out of the hat and get something going with China.
I don't see it, but maybe.
I'll be optimistic and say maybe.
All right.
Can you hear all that noise behind me?
It's like a...
There's a chainsaw running like right below my window.
