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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
And it's probably the best fun you'll ever have in your entire life.
But if you want to take a chance on taking it up to a level that no human can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains.
All you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine.
At the end of the day, the thing makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go! So good.
So good.
Well, we will, of course, talk about the tariffs and who's got the upper hand.
China or the U.S., I'll help you sort that out.
But first, some other news.
Some of it's good.
Activist Robbie Starbuck gets another big victory.
He's been racking them up lately for a while now.
So he's going after big companies that have DEI programs to try to talk the man of being racist.
And you just got another big win with a company called Constellation Brands.
And they own Corona, Medela, and Pacifico beer.
And last week, Robbie Starbuck did a story exposing their woke DEI policies.
And then they said, let's negotiate.
And then they made a bunch of promises.
So they're no longer going to do DEI.
But they made a bunch of other promises that made sense.
They won't be participating in this weird CEI social credit system.
They'll no longer use the term Latinx.
They won't be lobbying for legislation that isn't core to their business.
Basically all the things you'd want them to do.
So another big victory for Robbie Starbuck.
Keep an eye on him, because he's just rolling up the winds against racism.
Finally, speaking of DEI, the Post Millennial is reporting that the top U.S. military official on the NATO military committees was fired, and people think probably because of DEI.
As you know, whenever a woman in the workplace does something that's never done before, we don't say, oh, somebody did something good.
We say, it's the first woman to ever accomplish whatever, or to ever be in this line of work, or to ever achieve this.
The first woman.
Well, the person who was fired is Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield.
And she was one of the few female Navy three-star officers.
And she was the first woman to lead the Naval War College.
And now she's the first three-star...
I'm sorry, it's not funny.
But she's the first three-star admiral to be fired for racism.
I really shouldn't be laughing at that.
Because she is a member of the military and I should show more respect.
But what I'm making fun of is not her so much.
I'm making fun of the fact that we always say the first woman to ever do anything.
And I'm so beyond that.
Or the first black American to do a particular kind of job.
And I'm thinking to myself, what are we just figuring out that people can do jobs?
Why is that still a thing?
Shouldn't we be long past?
It's the first Latinx to do something.
Yes, everybody can do jobs.
It turns out there's sufficient smart people in pretty much every group, and they can do jobs.
They can hold jobs.
Yeah, amazing.
Well, Bill Pulte, who's the U.S. Director of Federal Housing, FHFA, He's been posting on X a bunch of cost-cutting.
He's getting busy over there.
Now, I don't know how much of this is Doge-related, because I don't see Doge in the, at least in the announcements.
So it might be that he's just doing his own thing because he's smart and capable and he knows how to do things.
So here's what he just announced.
This is just wild.
This is one of his announcements.
There are a whole bunch of things that look pretty successful there.
He said there's an announcement that Fannie Mae, one of his entities, fires over 100 employees for unethical conduct, including the facilitation of fraud.
How in the world did you catch 100 employees involved in unethical conduct?
Including the facilitation of fraud.
And I kind of wonder what the other unethical conduct is.
But I'm pretty sure he's got them dead to rights.
Obviously it's something well documented or it wouldn't be in the news.
Or at least Pulte wouldn't be interested in it unless they had good evidence.
So congratulations Bill Pulte.
Another superstar in the Trump administration.
Apparently Pete Hegseth got a big win.
In Panama.
So he went down to Panama to try to de-Chinafy it.
Because we don't like China having control over the Panama Canal because they operate the ports, etc.
So according to Rahim Kassam in the National Pulse, the U.S. and Panama are rebooting their strategic partnership and they're going to get rid of China's influence.
And they're going to have a robust security upgrade.
A bunch of other things.
I guess Panama is going to reject the Belt and Road initiative that they were part of.
And it's a little complicated what the deal is, but it's all pro-America.
And Panama has decided, you know what would be good?
I've got an idea what would be good.
What if?
I'm just going to throw this out there.
What if?
We don't piss off the United States so much that they send the military in to conquer our country.
I've got an idea.
What if we just make China mad?
Because they're much further away.
So it looks like Exeth made the sale.
So, big victory for Trump and for P. Exeth.
So that's good.
Alright, let's check on the potentially fake news.
You be the judge.
According to the National News Desk, there was a study of this year's flu shot.
And it came up to the conclusion that there's a 27% higher flu risk in adults who got the shot.
So in other words, if you didn't get the shot, according to the study, you had average odds of getting the virus.
But if you got the shot, suddenly your odds of getting the virus would shoot up 27%.
Now... Does that sound true?
Do you believe that?
Or does it sound a little bit too on the nose?
You know what I mean?
Because you know there's an audience for the shots are not only not helping, they're making everything worse.
You know you're going to get a lot of attention if you publish something that says the shots make it worse.
A little too on the nose.
Well... I don't know what's true, but I'll tell you that Grok looked at it and said the sample that they used were clinic employees.
Clinic employees.
In other words, the people who are most often around infected people with flu.
If your sample is just the clinic that's always surrounded by flu, and you say, huh.
Looks like people getting the shots got 27% more chance of getting it.
It's probably just that the shots don't work, and this is a group of people who are around the flu all day.
So, I think Grok for the win, but again, you don't want to believe Grok just automatically.
It's great for context, but is it a better authority than the study?
I don't know.
We don't know.
So apparently one of the commenters who follows me on X, Permaculture Paladin, said, after talking to Grok, this study was done on clinic workers and people were more likely to be exposed.
Now, I love the fact that somebody who follows me immediately said, hmm, I don't know about that.
And then went to Grok and then got a useful answer.
That's good.
There's a story in Nature by Larson and Bersoff that the big problem with science is not that people stopped trusting scientists.
So didn't you think that people were trusting scientists less?
Well, according to this study, people still have a high trust in scientists, but the problem is they also trust things that are not scientific and don't come from qualified scientists.
So it doesn't matter how much you trust the actual scientists if you also have too much trust in the BS stuff that you saw online or something.
To which I say, how do you know the real scientists are the ones who are right?
One of my pet peeves is people will look at a few studies from people who are outside the mainstream science and they'll say, ha!
These non-mainstream Tests show that all the rest of science is corrupt, to which I say, maybe, but why would you trust those other scientists?
If you don't trust the mainstream scientists, why would you trust the ones who are not mainstream?
And I'm not saying that the non-mainstream ones are always wrong.
I'm just saying, is there a logic there?
That if just somebody agrees with what you suspect is true...
That that means that their work is accurate?
I don't know.
Maybe sometimes, if they have the right incentives and they did the right kind of work.
There's a story in Just the News that Biden's White House directly held special counsel Jack Smith on his January 6th investigations into Trump.
Now... The allegation is that Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, who is, I think he's 300 years old today, sent a letter to Kash Patel,
head of the FBI, and to Pam Bondi, and they said that somehow they got access to Trump and then Mike Pence's old former cell phones.
And I guess there was something...
So the White House Counsel's Office secretly obtained them and then made them available.
So there's something sketchy there.
I don't know how exactly illegal that is.
But one more connection between the things that shouldn't have been connected in a perfectly operating government.
So Jack Smith should not have had a Biden White House...
Help of any kind.
I'm a little unclear exactly what this help suggests, but there you go.
So you can read up on that on Just the News.
Senator John Kennedy, who is always full of folksy sayings about things, he was on Hannity with some other people and he was asked about the new leaders of the Democrats.
John Kennedy said, I'll try to say it all folksy, because it sounds better if I say it.
I consider AOC to be the leader of the Democratic Party.
I think she's the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle.
Our plan for dealing with her is Operation Let Her Speak.
See, it's much funnier if you do it in his voice.
Was that even close?
That might be my best impression ever.
I'll be the official John Kennedy impression guy.
I consider AOC to be the leader of the Democratic Party.
Well, Harry Enten continues to be the standout on CNN whose name is not Scott.
And Harry Enten was talking about Trump.
The thing I like about Harry Enten is he gets very excited about his own data.
You know, he's sort of the data guy.
But he just takes the data where it implies.
So he doesn't put any kind of Democrat spin on it.
So it's either good or bad.
And he just gets excited if it's a non-standard result.
But here he was saying that Trump is not a lame duck.
If anything, he's a soaring eagle.
Can you imagine a CNN employee saying that out loud on live TV?
Trump is not a lame duck.
If anything, he's a soaring eagle.
Now, I think at one point he does say, you know, it depends what you think of his policies, but he's getting a lot done.
So his number of executive orders is, you know, unprecedented, at least in modern times.
And whether you like it or not, he's just getting a ton done.
So he's no lame duck.
So Harry Enten got pretty excited about the scale of change.
That Trump is doing.
We've never really seen a second...
Have we ever seen a second-term president do anything?
I'd love to see the total list of second-term president accomplishments.
Now, his second term is weird because it was one in between.
And because he's Trump.
But I'd love to see how he stands up to any other second term.
Anyway. So let's talk about some tariffs.
I'm going to try to sort it out for you.
If you don't understand a lot about economics, but you're nervous about the future, I'm going to try to put it in the simplest terms, who's got the advantage, so that you can decide what you think is going to happen.
Now, given that the stock market has stabilized, at the same time that China has Forget about the numbers.
Let's see, China raised their tariffs on us, what, yesterday by 84%.
And then Trump responded by raising their tariff to 104%.
Yeah, we're going to get lost in all the numbers.
So just assume that both of them have decided to put tariffs on each other that are sort of through the roof and unreasonable.
So they're both playing hard.
Now, if that sticks, the things that will be more expensive in the U.S., there'll be lots of them.
Here's an example.
Things like iPhones and PlayStation and ThinkPad laptops and HP desktops and some kind of TVs, basically any consumer stuff that China is making.
But I look at the list and I say to myself, I don't really need any of that stuff.
You know, if I had to switch from an iPhone to a Samsung, isn't the Samsung made completely in South Korea?
And would I be so unhappy if I had a Samsung?
I don't know.
So it might be bad for Apple, and it might be bad for a number of these companies, but I don't know how much we need any of this.
You know, one of the things that might come out of this is Americans having a completely different idea of what's essential.
And it's easier to tell your kid that you don't want to buy them a PlayStation because the price is through the roof.
Well, I'd love to buy you a PlayStation, but, you know, not at $2,000.
Yes, I do think it's time to upgrade your iPhone, dear, but not at $3,000.
So it looks like you're going to keep your iPhone for maybe a year or more.
So there's a lot of stuff that we just sort of don't need.
We want, but we don't need.
Now there's other stuff I'll talk about, pharmaceuticals and rare earth minerals and stuff.
There are some things that are just essential.
But a whole bunch of stuff we just don't need.
And if a parent can say...
To a kid, eh, it's too expensive now.
We're going to wait a year?
That might actually help the parent.
It's one less thing that they have to buy that they know won't be used that much.
All right, so I'm going to start with the smartest people who understand tariffs and what they say the situation looks like.
We're going to start with Scott Besant, who's on Fox Business with Maria Bottaroma.
He talked about the China exports to the U.S. are five times greater than our exports to China.
And he goes, so they can raise their tariffs, but so what?
Now, so what is more of a negotiating position.
Obviously, there's a so what to it.
But this should be maybe the most important piece of data.
So the most important data is that they export more than we sell to them.
As long as it's five times difference, we should have the advantage because they've got five times as much exposure than we do for prices going up.
Now, you might say, but Scott, it's actually Americans who are paying that tariff because when it gets to America, that's who pays it.
To which I would say, probably it's going to depress demand.
And if they have that much exports and it depresses demand, that's a lot of pressure on an economy that we don't know how strong it is because we don't have perfect information about China.
Here's what the Wall Street Journal says.
Again, they would be smarter than the average people about stuff like this.
The Wall Street Journal says China's GDP growth Could follow 2.4 percentage points with 100% tariff.
That's what Goldman says.
And according to the Wall Street Journal, China's growth was already anemic at 5%.
So I guess 5% is anemic if you're in China.
That would be good for the United States, but anemic for them.
If you cut that in half, meaning what could happen with these tariffs, there will be serious domestic chaos.
Now, you're saying to yourself, it doesn't matter how much domestic chaos there is.
The government just has an iron fist on the people, so it doesn't matter.
I would argue that domestic unhappiness is always important, even to dictators or anybody who has full control of stuff.
So that could be a big deal.
But again, we don't know what numbers coming out of China are real.
And I don't know if anybody's really smart enough to predict the exact impact.
But you can see that China has some exposure because their economy is not super strong, and there's no doubt this would be a hit.
So it's a hit on an economy that's already being called anemic.
Then there's Kyle Bass.
Now, Kyle Bass I love because he's anti...
China, as I am, he's been for years.
But he's also very well informed about the whole financial situation with China.
Better than the average person because it's his business.
He says there's a reason the Chinese demanded that the IMF stop publishing their reserve adequacy calculation for China and for Hong Kong in 2019.
He says China doesn't have adequate USD reserves to operate their economy.
Now, that's a little bit out of my zone, but just know that somebody who knows more about the need for USD reserves to operate your economy says that they're running out.
Are they?
Well, again, I think all data is difficult to estimate, but Kyle thinks that they're not in good shape because they demanded that the IMF stop publishing their reserve adequacy.
Why would China insist that somebody stops publishing their reserve adequacy unless it wasn't adequate?
So that's a pretty good, you know, connecting the dots there.
If it's not adequate and they need it to operate their economy, that's a problem.
Then there's Chamath Palihapitiya, who has the advantage of being one of the smartest people around.
He looked deeply into it.
His opinion on X was, as many problems as the USA may have, I would say China's are worse.
China's seen the slowest growth they've had in decades.
And again, that would be based on what China tells us.
So it might be even worse than they tell us.
Their attractiveness as a recipient of foreign domestic investment has come to a halt.
How many of you remember in 2018 when I lost my stepson to fentanyl and I told you that China was unsafe for business and if it wasn't unsafe for business, I was going to make it unsafe?
And there wasn't, I don't think there was a single person who thought that was even remotely possible because, you know, we were doing well with China, it seemed like.
China was just coasting along and...
I said that investment in China was going to come to a halt.
Here we are.
Chamath points out they have a very difficult demographic problem.
Too many old people, not enough young.
I don't know if that'll have anything to do with the tariffs, because that's sort of a longer-term problem.
Tariffs are a shorter term.
And then, number four, they need exports.
They do not have the capacity to absorb everything they create.
Now, America has a consumer society.
China has a savings society.
So if China said, all right, we don't need to sell all this stuff externally because we've got a gazillion people in our own country, we'll just sell it internally.
But they're not really poised to buy stuff.
They're more poised to save money.
So they don't have the option that the U.S. does where we could potentially.
You know, in a situation like this, we can sell more stuff internally.
So I went to Grok, which I used several times today, and oh my god, the combination of smart people on X plus using Grok to fill in any gaps that you don't know is the ultimate news understanding model.
I don't think I can say enough about what Elon Musk has done for the ability to understand your world.
You need both.
It's not good enough just to have the smart people weigh in, because you wonder about bias and you don't know who's right about what.
But then you fire up Grok and ask the question, who can withstand the tariffs more easily, China or the U.S.?
Now, the overall answer is, you know, it sort of depends, and there's lots of moving parts, so Grok can't be completely sure.
But here are some of the things it says.
The U.S. is less trade dependent, so we know that.
Let's see.
So exports and imports for the U.S. are about a quarter of our GDP.
But exports to China are only 7% of U.S. exports.
And we have the biggest consumer market, so like I said, we have the ability to possibly sell more things internally if we wanted to.
So that 7% we're selling to China, we could probably find another buyer.
It's not the most money in the world, and it's something we could absorb at the size of our economy.
Tariffs could reduce the deficit by curbing imports, but they also risk supply chain disruption.
So supply chain disruptions would be terrible.
So apparently China is 16% of U.S. imports.
Is that right?
Let me check my other numbers.
No, China's economy is heavily export-driven.
So their trade with everybody accounts for 37% of their GDP.
But the U.S. is their biggest market.
It's roughly 17% of China's exports.
Now, these are numbers that completely surprised me.
I would have guessed, because everybody's talking about America being this gigantic economy, I would have guessed that we were like 30% of their exports.
But we're only 17. And they're only 7% of ours.
So I'm kind of surprised because maybe both sides can absorb a lot of pain, at least in terms of price, for a while.
So the U.S. is a critical market, but it's 17% of China's exports.
And China has diversified trade partners, so they can trade with other people, but that's not something that can happen quickly.
The U.S. could face inflation and trouble cutting interest rates, yes.
So there would be domestic upheaval in the U.S. and maybe some inflation, almost certainly some inflation.
It would take years for the U.S. to build domestic manufacturing, so that's not going to happen right away.
Public tolerance for this economic interruption is a wild card, as in it's a wild card.
So if Trump doesn't sell this and it doesn't show some kind of quick benefits, it's going to be a problem.
China can deploy funds quickly.
To offset their losses so they can just pump some money into their economy, but that's not good either because it inflates property bubbles and creates more debt and they're not really so stable that they want to do that.
But their manufacturing base is unmatched.
It would be hard for us to get a lot of stuff anywhere else.
So, for example, the antibiotics and rare earth minerals and Stuff like that.
We would just be sort of analog for a long time.
There's stuff we couldn't simply go to our allies, such as Australia.
They have a lot of rare earth stuff.
They just wouldn't have enough.
So even if we tried to employ every one of our allies all around the world, and that would include, like, I guess Japan does a lot of refining of stuff that comes from Australia, the rare earth stuff.
And there are other A bunch of other markets have some rarer stuff.
But if you added it all together, it doesn't come really too close to the amount we're getting from China, or have been.
Let's see what else.
So my question also was, could the U.S. form an economic trading block that competes with China completely?
In other words, is there anything that China's doing that we couldn't...
Let's say two years.
Find other countries that do it.
So, for example, I said Australia has a booming rare earth minerals business, but it would have to boom a lot more and very quickly for it to make up the difference.
Could it?
Is that something that they could just spin up in two years?
I mean, it's already operating.
You know, it's already fully operating.
Maybe. I don't know.
But the other places you could get rare earths are let's see, besides Australia, Canada, Japan, Canada might be mad at us.
Anyway, so the rare earth mineral thing looks like a big problem.
We couldn't easily do that.
The making of electronics.
Did you know that who is the second biggest maker of electronics after China?
It turns out it's the U.S. I thought the U.S. had just lost its ability to do everything.
But the U.S. is the second biggest maker of electronics.
South Korea and Japan have a lot of game as well.
So there might be some things that South Korea and Japan can pick up in the short run.
But the U.S. looks like maybe it could make, if it had the rare earth minerals, it looks like it could make a lot of stuff.
Pharmaceuticals. China has a lot of pharmaceuticals, but did you know that the other big pharmaceutical makers are India, the United States, again, I didn't realize that the United States was actually still big in pharma,
but I think we're third.
After India and China.
But also Germany, Italy, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Japan, and the UK all have pretty robust pharmaceutical businesses.
Israel does too.
They've got one of the biggest what do you call it?
Generic. One of their biggest companies in Israel is a generic pharma company.
And Trump said we're going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.
He said when they hear that, they're going to leave China and going to reopen their plants all over the place in our country.
Now, here's a question.
If you had to design a pharmaceutical operation from scratch, that feels like it would take a long time because you'd have to really think through, you know, what devices do I need and how many people and how big is the building and all these decisions.
But if you're just trying to clone an operation that's already up and running in another country, let's say China, how long does that take?
Because don't you already have the plans?
Now you'd have to make them meet US building standards and stuff.
But I wonder if there's actually a fast way for the pharma that's operating in China but is owned by US or other countries.
I wonder if there's a fast way just to clone it.
So just build the same thing.
Just make sure it meets U.S. building standards.
We'll find out.
Then there's the risk that China could sell its U.S. treasuries.
How many times have you been told that the U.S. treasuries are substantially owned by China?
So it's like China owns the United States because they own our treasuries.
Well, apparently China's ownership is only 7.4% of foreign-held U.S. debt.
And it's way down from what it used to be.
So it was much bigger in 2012 and 2016.
So that doesn't seem like a big risk.
And if they tried selling those treasuries, it'd be bad for us because it would increase our borrowing costs.
But China would be devaluing its own holdings and weakening the yuan, which would hurt its export business.
So everything's so connected that anything we do to China is bad for us.
anything China does to us is bad for them.
Then in an unrelated topic, I forget his first name, but who's the comedian whose last name is Schultz?
And it looks like he's trying to maybe pivot from being just a stand-up comedian to being a politically relevant voice.
And he doesn't exactly have the skills for that, but he's making a game effort at it.
But here's what he said recently.
I think he was talking to Chamath on his podcast.
And he said, Schultz said, if Trump announces at the end of the year...
We're eradicating income tax for people making under $150,000.
Midterms are going red.
Now, do you think that's true?
If the only thing Trump did is said no federal income tax is under $150,000?
Because he has hinted that that might be a thing he'd do.
He's also hinted that he might raise taxes on the richest people.
People who make over a million dollars a year, I think.
Do you think that would be enough to make the midterms go red?
I don't.
I mean, probably wouldn't hurt, but I think the tariff thing and interest rates and the cost of a banana are going to overwhelm those things.
But it certainly would be popular.
I don't know how we can afford it, but it might be popular.
There's another big problem called the baseless trade.
Now, here's something I've never heard of, but apparently this affects the U.S. hedge funds.
Now, the hedge funds and other big investment places, they can bet on just about anything.
They can bet on the future.
Will the future be better or worse than you thought?
Will these securities go up or down?
But they can also bet on price differences.
So apparently hedge funds have big bets on the price difference between the U.S. Treasury bonds and another financial tool called futures.
So the actual price versus the future price of the U.S. Treasury bonds.
And apparently this bet went very wrong because of the new tariffs.
So there'd be a somewhat devastating financial loss.
So, I don't know.
How many of you have...
Investments in a hedge fund.
I mean, I'm doing all right in life, but I've never had a penny in a hedge fund.
It just seems like that's the super rich thing to do, not just the you're doing well thing to do.
I don't know how big a deal that is.
Well, another drama.
This is kind of fun.
So Elon Musk, of course, is all in on Doge, but tariffs are not part of Doge.
So Musk is apparently taking a view that's more anti-tariff.
I don't quite understand his full point of view, but what I appreciate is that he's acting like the head of a car company.
So he's acting like a manufacturer.
And he has every right to promote what's good for his stockholders and what's good for his companies.
And he's...
He would like fewer tariffs, basically, because it's going to be real expensive for him, even though it turns out that the top four cars made in America that are made mostly in America, with American parts and assembled in America,
the top four are all Teslas.
So he's absolutely killing it, compared to anybody else, in making things in America.
But you can't get everything.
So he's still got some things that would get really expensive.
And so I don't mind that he's fully pro-Doge.
At the same time, he's advising Trump that tariffs are a mistake.
I like it when smart people disagree.
And as long as you know that he's operating not as a Doge head when he makes these comments, he's operating as the head of a major manufacturing entity.
That's fine.
I mean, it's not like we're confused.
It's not like we see him as not the head of Tesla or something.
So yes, I don't know what's true in an absolute, but when I see the head of a giant manufacturing company arguing for things that would be good for the manufacturing company, that's okay.
Yeah, that's what you'd expect.
But he's getting in a shouting...
Or let's say an insult match with Peter Navarro.
This is where it gets funny.
So Musk labeled Navarro's comments as dumber than a sack of bricks and called him a moron on X. He called his claims demonstrably false, and he cited Tesla's high U.S. content.
So I guess Navarro may have made some claims about Musk and Tesla that weren't quite true.
But then, so Mr. Navarro, Peter Navarro, denied that there's any kind of rift between them, and right after he denied that there's a rift, Musk called him on X,
Peter Retardo.
Sorry, allergies are getting me.
Peter Retardo.
Anyway. What I'd love to hear is what Elon Musk's alternative plan is.
So if he's got a plan that's better than what Trump is doing, why wouldn't I want to hear it?
Why wouldn't Trump want to hear it?
But I just don't know if he's in a situation to be as completely independent in his thought as you would want somebody to be.
Because he's got a fiduciary responsibility to his stockholders, which it looks like he's taking seriously.
So that's fine.
People can disagree.
Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt said that boys will be boys, and she said Trump is staying out of it.
Trump staying out of it is exactly the right thing.
We don't need Trump getting into that.
It's funny enough as it is.
So, just leave it where it is.
According to Zero Hedge, there are many billions of dollars of factories being cancelled in the United States that were going to make batteries for electric cars.
And I guess the uncertainty of the future of electric cars Because of Trump's ruling.
We went from the future has to be lots of electric cars under Biden to you don't need an electric car.
You buy whatever the market wants.
So it made suddenly these multi-billion dollar investments in building battery making plants in the United States.
It just suddenly turned them into a bad idea.
Because you don't even know if people are going to want more electric cars in the future.
Or at least enough to build all these factories.
So that's a big negative.
Here's a little update on the...
Do you remember the story of the open AI whistleblower who was ruled to have committed suicide before he was finished with his whistleblowing?
And a lot of people, including his family, said, hmm, the scene of the crime does not look at all like...
Any kind of suicide, because it looked like there was some kind of a struggle, and there was no indication he was suicidal, and basically the facts didn't add up.
But the chief medical examiner said, oh, that's some suicide right there.
And now the latest information is that the parents say there's strong evidence that he was shot twice in the head.
Now... I suppose there could be some room for doubt because one of the shots had something to do with his tongue and the other one was not anywhere near his tongue.
So if something affected his tongue like a bullet and something affected a completely different part of his head that didn't first or second hit his tongue, it would sort of suggest that there were a second bullet.
Now, nobody commits suicide by shooting themselves in the head twice.
So... I'll tell you what this makes me think.
You know how smart it was when we saw Soros funding all these district attorneys and attorney generals and stuff?
We thought, man, he's so smart because he figured out the least expensive way to control important things, such as the Department of Justice.
Well, what would be better than bribing the chief medical examiner in some town?
I feel like you could literally get away with murder.
As long as the chief medical examiner was in your pocket and you blackmailed them somehow, or you threatened them, that would be almost as good as the Soros thing.
Maybe better.
So I'm not going to make any accusations about this particular chief medical examiner.
I guess the parents are all over it.
But I'll just note that you would only have to flip one person.
To turn a murder into a suicide.
Just one person.
And how easily can one person become corrupted in our world?
Really, really easily.
We see it every day with the judges being weird.
Here's a story that I kept ignoring, but it seems that the public is very interested in it.
And it's that...
Would-be assassin of Trump, the golf course one, Ryan Ruth, the one who's still alive.
And the news is that prior to the assassination, he had tried to get a Stinger missile from Ukraine.
Now, I guess the way people are interpreting that is that Ukraine was maybe involved in plotting the assassination of Trump.
But I don't think there's any connection.
Because it's not like he got it.
If Ukraine sold him a Stinger missile and it came from the military or something, then I'd say, whoa, what's going on here?
But the fact he tried to get one because he had some connection with Ukraine.
He was doing some, I don't know, some kind of recruiting from other countries for Ukraine.
So I'm not sure that...
I guess he said in a message at some point, the post-millennial's writing about this, send me an RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade, or a stinger, and I'll see what we can do.
And he was doing that with associates in Ukraine.
But, you know, Ukraine is just completely corrupt.
So that doesn't mean that the government of Ukraine was in on it.
It could have been any corrupt people who had access to that stuff, which is a lot of corrupt people.
Anyway, so it definitely raises a flag to look into the Ukraine connection, but I would say it's not demonstrated yet.
He definitely has a Ukraine connection.
So we know he's connected to Ukraine, and we know he asked to get this weapon, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the government of Ukraine was behind it.
According to the Washington Times, Mike Glenn is writing about this, the Pentagon is going to offer back pay and benefits to troops who are forced out over the COVID mandates.
Apparently there were 8,700 ex-service members who were forced out of the military over refusing the jabs, I guess.
Now the...
They're going to be offered their old jobs back and back pay.
That feels fair, doesn't it?
I like that.
Because I like when the military gets their due.
So that's good.
Here's another activist judge story.
The Daily Wire, Luke Rosiak's reporting.
So he calls it activist judges.
I've been rubber stamping billions in suspect Social Security disability claims.
So apparently what's been happening is that when the Social Security Administration looks at somebody's claim that they're disabled, and therefore they're claiming they should be paid forever by Social Security for their disability, if the Social Security says,
no, you're not disabled, you can work, they still have a legal path.
So they can go to a judge.
And the judge can decide if they're disabled.
Now, how does a judge even decide if somebody is disabled?
I don't know how that works.
But apparently, there are a number of judges who pretty much will say yes to 95% or so of all cases.
That would be 95% of people who had already been rejected by the experts at Social Security who said, Who would say, you're not disabled.
And then the judge says, yes you are.
So you get money forever.
And they say it pretty much every time.
Does that seem fair to you?
Doesn't sound fair to me.
So that sounds pretty much like a rigged system.
There's another according to Ars Technica, John Brodkin.
There's another court siding with the Trump administration and it's about access to personal data.
Now an appeals court said that Doge can access personal data held by the U.S. Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management and that overturns an order from a lower court judge.
Hey, I have a question.
When the Supreme Court...ruled that Judge Biasberg, I call him Biasberg, didn't have the standing to rule about some illegals who were in Texas because the judge was in D.C. Did that mean that that set a standard that none of the judges can do national rulings if they're only local and whatever the problem was wasn't
just a local problem?
Does that generalize?
Because it seems like that would be an enormous story, and I've seen some references to it, but I don't feel like it's being treated as an enormous story.
So can somebody give me a fact check on that?
Is it true that the Supreme Court has, in effect, without saying it directly, created a situation where these individual judges can't stop Trump?
If they've been, let's say, shopped to find somebody who will say, no, you can't do this nationwide thing.
So is that the end of rogue judges saying you can't do a nationwide thing?
Or is that too optimistic?
All right.
Well, I'll keep looking at your comments.
It was not a ruling on nationwide injunctions.
You're a retired lawyer.
So even though it's not ruling on nationwide injunctions, did it not set the standard for what a judge could do?
Meaning that you would know in advance that the Supreme Court would overturn it if it was another one of these situations where the judge was in D.C. and the problem was in Texas or Florida or something.
So, even if it's not a precedent, doesn't it tell you which way it's going to go?
I guess that's a precedent.
Alright, so it's a precedent, but not a ruling.
It's influential, but not a precedent.
Alright, I'll look for a little more guidance on that.
But if it had been a, if it had shut down the ability of these judges to rule anywhere in the country, even if they were not, you know, the judge that should rule anywhere in the country, if that were true, it seems like it would be the news all over the place.
So I'm feeling like it's not exactly the news.
Well, let's talk about water fluoridation.
So fluoride in the water.
According to the Children's Health Defense, Brenda Belletti's writing, that water fluoride is linked to autism and other developmental delays.
So there's a study that says it did lower the risk for tooth decay.
So that's the good news.
The fluoride did that.
But a higher risk for neurodevelopmental disorders.
According to a peer-reviewed study.
And apparently there's more likelihood of autism or attention deficit, hyperactivity, intellectual disabilities, and specific delays.
That's kind of scary.
How many of you had fluoride in your water when you were a kid?
I did not.
Now, I've had plenty of fluoride in my water as an adult.
But we had a...
A private well.
So we had lots of cavities.
Lots of cavities.
Oh, lots of cavities.
But I didn't get ADHD or one of these other problems.
So maybe.
That's one data point so I wouldn't make too much of a judgment over it.
Well, according to the LBC London has fallen out of the top five wealthiest cities in the world because the millionaires are getting out of there.
Are you surprised that the millionaires are leaving London?
No, you're not.
I think London's going to fall.
All right, let's do an update on the stock market.
Dow is down a little.
NASDAQ is up a little.
S&P is down a little.
Bitcoin is down a little.
bouncing around.
Yeah, it looks like you're surprised that I'm not on the spectrum.
As far as I know, I'm not on the spectrum.
I mean, that's not my understanding of myself, but I suppose anything's possible.
Mike Benz has a prediction.
You know, in Germany, there's a party called the AFD, and they're the...
Some would call them the right-wing party, but basically the most Republican-y looking entity there.
They have now become the most popular party.
And Benz is saying, historic white pill.
He says this in X. The White House and the U.S. State Department must be ready to respond when the German government inevitably arrests AFD party leaders and...
Threatens to cancel elections.
Now, this is an interesting prediction because Benz is looking at the pattern of, you know, populist or right-leaning governments and how if they get close to power, like Trump, the lawfare comes out and they just try to arrest them.
And it might be because other countries are involved.
It might be just because they know it works.
So... As I often say, the closest you can get to understanding reality is a narrative that predicts.
So Mike Benz has a narrative, which is whenever a party like this gets close to power, that there will be some fake legal activism against them to try to jail them so that they can't take power.
prediction. So if you're wondering, is that narrative that whenever this kind of person gets close to power or this kind of people, that there's always lawfare that takes him out, or at least attempted
lawfare in Trump's case, that's a very specific prediction.
And I've got a feeling he's gonna be right about this.
So, it's kind of gutsy to make the call, but...
It does look like it's heading in that direction.
So I think Mike Benz might be on to something.
He might be on to something.
All right, ladies and gentlemen.
The big story is still the tariffs.
I don't think that anything that anybody's saying about tariffs is completely believable.
Unless it's really generic.
I don't think we really know how long China can last.
I don't think we know how long we can last.
But I do agree, this is the time for the fight.
It's not going to get better.
So if we're going to fight, might as well do it now.
Now we should, I think we have to acknowledge that it would affect different people very differently.
Personally, I'm getting slammed.
So it's very expensive for me.
But I can, you know, I can take the hit.
So... I definitely am going to feel bad for anybody who's going to lose their business because it looks like there's going to be quite a bit of that.
And anybody who is looking to retire and they were depending on their stocks to do it, I'm not going to be the guy who says, why was your money in stocks if you're ready to retire?
It's a fair question, but it's such a dickish thing to say that I think I'll stay off that.
So there are a lot of people who are definitely going to suffer.
Potentially or actually because of the terror fight.
On the other hand, what exactly was the alternative?
The alternative is that we just keep getting beaten up by other countries for reasons that don't make sense.
So it was time.
And I think if Trump pulls this off, even though there's going to be a lot of salesmanship and hyperbole and...
A lot of BS that goes into the claims and the counterclaims.
If we get to anything good, it will look like one of the greatest things that any president ever did.
If it doesn't work, we probably have a few years where we have to do major adjustments to our economy to bring manufacturing here and find other sources of things.
But it seems like we have two possibilities.
One is we get China to treat us in a way that we consider fair.
That'd be great.
The other thing is that we create a, let's say, a trading block with our other allies in which we can get everything we need.
As long as we're getting some of them.
In other words, if we're getting rare earth minerals from Australia and Japan is refining them for us and South Korea is maybe building some factories in the U.S. to make some more electronics on our soil and maybe Canada starts,
maybe we become friends with Canada again.
Maybe Greenland, maybe Ukraine come up with some rare earth minerals.
I don't know if China wants to win this or lose this.
Just consider this.
If China surrenders on tariffs and just says, all right, all right, we'll start treating you more fairly, is that going to be good or bad for China?
I think the worst thing for China would be to not give in to anything.
And then force us to kind of suck wind for two years until we find an entire trading block that can do everything they can do.
And then they will be unnecessary.
And then it's a whole different world.
So it seems to me that China has two choices.
One, maintain a lot of good business by treating us fairly.
Or two, lose everything that...
I feel like they would rather have some leverage over us.
So for their own strategic reasons, I think they need to surrender.
But they have to make it look like it was a win-win and not a surrender.
So don't be surprised if at some point something like Well, maybe our diplomats should meet your diplomats and talk about this.
Or maybe we should come up with a grand deal.
I wouldn't be surprised.
And I'm not even sure if I'm rooting for them to cave or I'm rooting for them to not cave.
Because by far our better situation would be we create a trading block where the rest of the world is...
Providing us everything we were getting from China, plus a lot of it being made locally, plus we learn how to make factories again.
So we can either win or lose, but I think we win both ways.
It feels like it.
It feels like we have two ways to win and no way to lose.
Now, one of the ways to win will be really painful.
If we have to wait two years, I'll just pick that number.
If we have to wait two years for...
You know, alternative sources of pharmaceuticals and rare earth minerals to be available.
That could be a real painful two years.
But boy, would we be happy when that was over, right?
So, remember my other prediction?
My other prediction that the stock market would come down around 20%, but then the psychology of investors would kick in and people would feel like, huh.
20%?
That's a buying opportunity.
So I think we're seeing it bounce around like teasing that 20%.
And it might keep doing that.
So you might have your up days and your down days.
But I feel like when it gets near 20%, you're going to have about as many buyers as you have sellers.
So it might stabilize there for a while until we get better clarity.
All right.
I'm going to say a few words to the locals people privately.
The rest of you, thanks for joining.
Nice to see you.
And I'll see you same time tomorrow for even more fun.