God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, Optimus Robots Mars, President Trump, Trump's Uncertainty Persuasion Technique, Tariff Strategy, Tariff 90 Day Pause, Negging Technique, China's Amazon Sellers, China IP Theft, Miles Taylor Anonymous, Chris Krebs, Chuck Schumer, Anti-Tesla Domestic Violence, Anti-America Color Revolution, Anti-Energy Lawfare, Julia Pollak, Hamilton Project Trickery, Chinese Citizen Intelligence Gathering, Chinese Student VISAs, Laura Loomer, META China Whistleblower, DOGE Social Security, Argentina Suspicious Success, EU Ukraine Weapons Funding, AI Designed AI Chips, Amazon Nova Sonic, Anti-Rogue Judge Bill, THOR Anti-Drone Microwave Weapon, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
I already said there's going to be Optimus robots on Mars.
I already feel sorry for them.
Because don't you think the robots are going to be stranded on Mars?
And they don't have personalities and stuff.
But wouldn't you feel...
Super bad if you send a robot that can walk and talk and act like it's a sentient being and then you just leave it on Mars until the Mars conditions destroy it.
I don't know.
I literally feel bad for the robots.
So that's happening.
So there's a, according to the Post Millennial, the support for nuclear power.
The United States is at an all-time high.
61% of adults are pro-nuclear power.
We'll get to all the tariff stuff and the stock market and stuff.
Now, in 2016, most of you know, if you're my regulars, you know that I started trying to persuade the country that nuclear power was the only thing that was going to save them.
And I wasn't the only one.
Of course, you know, Mark Schneider and Michael Schellenberger and Zion Lights and some other really smart people.
But I have the weirdest experience, which is sometimes when I try to change things, they do change.
And I never know if I made a difference or if I just got lucky or I'm really good at jumping in front of a parade that's already going to happen.
And this is one of them.
So, but the good news is, I was on the right side.
The right side of history.
In other news, Trump signed an executive order to get rid of the, what he calls the dumb Obama-Biden showerhead regulations.
So now you got toilets that'll flush and showers that'll wash your hair and light bulbs that'll make you happy.
My timing could not be worse.
Literally yesterday, Josue walked by and said, hey, the plumbing for your bathroom, because he's been working on the bathroom for a while, just came in.
So I got all new fixtures for my bathroom that I have to throw away.
They're brand new.
They're literally not even installed.
I might just shake hand them right away, because I'm not going to put on any low flow.
I don't know if you know how expensive it is to get new shower parts, you know,
the hardware that goes in the shower.
But I think I have to throw them all away because I can't possibly use them.
I would never use the low flow stuff.
So that was the most expensive thing I've done to upgrade my house.
Literally garbage.
Well, according to Slay News, the Trump White House says it will not respond to emails from reporters that include their preferred pronouns.
It's funny because I have exactly the same policy.
If I get an email from a reporter who has their preferred pronouns, I will not answer.
I will not answer that.
I guess I've got to turn off that alert.
Somebody doesn't know that this is never the time to send me a text message.
Never. Never.
All right, let's talk about Trump and the tariff strategies.
As you know, the stock market zoomed up yesterday.
Today it's going to give back a little.
No surprise.
I think everybody who...
Everybody who noticed that it went up yesterday, probably you all thought it's not going to stay there.
It's going to bobble around for a while.
But I'm going to give you my take on what was intentional and what wasn't and what was 4D chess and what isn't.
And it'll be a little different from what I think you've heard anywhere else.
The first thing is, when you're listening to people talk about the stock market, You want to figure out, you know, after you know what's true, you want to figure out who got it right.
What did I tell you about how quickly the stock market could recover?
I didn't say it would automatically be fast.
I didn't say it would be slow.
I told you that it would depend on the reason it went down in the first place and that not all reasons are the same.
So if the stock market had gone down because a world war broke out, well, it's probably not going up anytime soon.
Or you ran out of oil everywhere in the world.
Well, good luck with your stock market.
It would take years or decades if it ever came back.
But what we had was a uncertainty-based decline in the stock market.
And so I reasoned.
Correctly. That if you reduce the uncertainty, it would just sort of pop back.
Now, it's not a done deal, because there'll be more uncertainty, there's going to be ups and downs, and the stock market will follow the uncertainty up and down.
But I think I had the best call on the stock market.
The best call was that we had something that could be easily reversed, and as soon as it was...
Stock market went up.
Now, of course, it's going to give back a little bit.
So that's the first thing.
It does feel as if even if the stock market is depressed for a little bit, that there's nothing permanent about it.
That it's really just responding to Trump and his policies and uncertainty.
And if Trump reduces the uncertainty when he's ready to do that, it should be fine.
That's what I say.
Uncertainty is probably the simplest thing that a stock market can fix if the uncertainty is intentionally being inserted by a president and he can intentionally take it away when he's ready to.
So that should be the easiest fix of all time.
Alright, here's what I think Trump was doing.
I do not believe that there was a master plan with every step.
Figured out in advance.
And that he was just playing the world.
I don't think it was that.
I think he was doing what he usually does, which is he shakes the box, he gets everybody agitated, and then suddenly he's the most important person in the world again.
I mean, being president of the United States gets you halfway there.
Maybe more than half.
But he needed people to...
To take the tariff negotiations seriously and to put it at the top of their list of things that they needed to do.
And he did that.
So what I always tell you about persuasion is step number one of persuasion is you have to get attention.
If you can't get attention, it doesn't matter what else you do.
Your persuasion is not going to make any difference.
So Trump is the best.
Of all time at getting attention.
So he shook the box like crazy.
He had all kinds of uncertainty and who knows what he's doing and did he go crazy?
Is the world going to be destroyed?
Hey, what happened to my stocks?
It was just wonderfully uncertain.
Now, in a situation where everybody is uncertain, It's sort of like the land of the blind where the one-eyed person in the land of the blind is the king.
That's sort of what Trump is because he's the only one who kind of does know what he wants and he does know what he might do and he does know how long stuff will last and he does know what a good deal will look like or not look like.
So the fact that he made everybody else uncertain...is why they started calling and jumping on planes and saying, can we have a meeting?
Because maybe we should negotiate our trade.
So the uncertainty is almost his signature move for persuasion.
He gets everybody riled up, makes whatever he cares about their most important topic, too.
He certainly got that done.
And then everybody's trying to deal with it and trying to work through their own uncertainty.
And this is another persuasion trick.
When people feel uncertain, they will gravitate toward anybody who is certain.
So as long as Trump remains confident that he knows exactly how everything should go, people will be drawn to him as the solver.
Because they don't know how everything should go.
They don't know what he's going to say.
They just don't know how long it will last.
They don't know how bad it will be.
But Trump kind of does.
And so this makes him the most important person in the conversation for something that's affecting every country in a big way all at the same time.
So, kind of brilliant.
Now, of course, in terms of the 90-day pause, that part I don't think was planned a long time ago.
I do buy the Charles Gasparini take that what was happening is that Japan, the citizens, were selling off treasuries, U.S. treasuries, which would cause our interest rates to spike,
and that's no bueno.
So I think just...
Did I say China or Japan?
I meant Japan.
I think Japan selling our treasuries...
Probably was what pushed him into the 90-day pause.
And Bill Ackman had mentioned it, Joel Pollack had mentioned it before it happened.
So people were talking it up, that a 90-day pause makes sense.
And it did make sense, because by then, 75 countries had already said, can we send somebody over there to negotiate this right away?
How can we get in the front of the list?
And Trump did his other great persuasion thing where he tries to make the biggest distinction between people who are doing what he wants and people who are not.
So he said, for example, several times that Japan did not retaliate.
And that's rule number one.
If you don't retaliate and you say, can we work out a deal?
You're our best friend.
So he made sure that everybody knew that Japan had played it correctly.
Now, at the same time, they were selling bonds, but that's the government versus individual investors, I think.
So Japan played it right, and in a very, I hate to say it, but it's a very Japan-like way.
They didn't cause trouble.
They tried to be nice and polite to everybody, and boy, did that work.
It worked perfectly.
So Trump is telling everybody they're first in line.
They're the first ones in line.
Now, of course, we also want to get a better deal, so being first in line means first in line for something that's good for us, too.
So then, if you didn't do those things, then you're China.
So he made this huge distinction between doing what is friendly to the United States and doing what's not friendly.
So that's good persuasion.
You don't want to act like those two things are almost the same.
You want the biggest possible distinction between good behavior and bad behavior.
He's so good at that.
And that's good persuasion.
He also created a situation where it would seem that our allies would need trade deals with us, new ones that are good for us, more than we need it.
Now that might not be true, but it created such uncertainty with our allies that they act like they need the deal more than we do.
Because they're calling, they're saying, can we talk?
Can we fly in?
Can we have a meeting?
So somehow, and this is kind of magical persuasion, he made his top priority not just their important priority too, but somehow he turned it into it's even more important for them.
At least they're acting that way.
So that's good.
So I guess the...
The play is that he's going to do individual deals with 75 different entities, but it looks like the individual deals won't be just reciprocal tariffs, because he's throwing in defense.
So, for example, if we're going to do the...
If the reason that your country is safe, in terms of security and defense, is because the United States has a big navy around you, Or has the potential to put one there.
Then maybe you should pay a little more on the trade deals.
So he's bringing in more variables.
I've told you before, this is great persuasion.
You introduce new variables and you bring them in.
So they're not just negotiating duties and VAT taxes and tariffs.
He's basically bringing in our security umbrella and saying, hey, if you want to be part of this security umbrella, maybe you should be real flexible on trade.
And it makes sense because a lot of this stuff that we're looking at now is historically something that made sense at one point.
These countries were developing and we thought, oh, if we develop them into good markets, We can sell them stuff and we can use them for source of raw materials and everybody wins.
But now that many of these countries are doing fine, it makes sense to renegotiate.
So I think Trump is right on point with at least what he wants to do.
The other thing that Trump does, you know, a lot of people say, all of our allied countries are mad at us.
And they're mad at Trump, and this is surely going to lead to destruction.
I never believed that was true, because I think countries are kind of transactional.
If something's good for the other country, then they're fine with it.
If it's bad for them, they'll have lots of reasons they're not fine with it.
But basically, it's just transactional.
What's good for another country, they're going to like.
And as soon as he turned from, you know, I'm going to Give you all these massive tariffs to, oh, if you don't retaliate, it looks like we can work out a deal.
Everybody wins.
You get some security.
We get some better deals.
And it feels almost like a dating technique where he's negging.
Have you ever heard of that?
Where you say things that are insulting, literally insulting, to the people that you want to woo.
So in dating, it would be a man giving a small insult to a woman, and then she would sort of try to defend herself and argue that you should like her more.
I'm simplifying, but that's basically it.
But Trump does this with our allies.
He negs them.
So he gives them little insulting things, and then they, weirdly, they get mad, and then you think, well, that's all bad.
It has this...
sort of inclined to want to be our friends, meaning that they want to get along with America.
That's just a good idea.
And so if he negs them with his little insults and jabs and stuff, it has this...
This unexpected impact, which is what nagging is, that once the, let's say the smoke settles, they just try a little harder to be your friend because they don't want to get insulted again.
So there might be some of that going on.
Anyway, part of the magic that happened was China got isolated.
So by China...
Saying, you know, you can't tariff us more than we can tariff you.
You know, you'll be sorry.
It kind of made 75 countries look reasonable and like, oh, hey, we've got 75 friends who all want to do the right thing.
Yay! Our 75 countries doing great.
And then China looks extra evil because he's created this contrast between people who are acting, you know, responsibly.
And people who are just trying to pick a fight, it looks like.
So that's good.
Now, how much of that was planned in advance?
I don't know.
So my take on Trump is this.
If he creates confusion, he knows that he can thrive in that atmosphere.
He knows that people will want to do whatever it takes to reduce their own confusion and uncertainty, and that gives them a huge advantage.
So he's created essentially assets out of nothing.
He created this gigantic uncertainty and fear that just wasn't
Anyway. So I think there are basically two ways for Trump to win with China.
And it feels like there's no way to lose, which is not to say that it wouldn't be expensive and have some downside.
But the two ways to win would be, number one, you make tariff deals with China that are all fair.
Anybody think that's going to happen?
Do you think China is going to deal with us?
They said they would.
I think today they said, oh, we'll talk to you about tariffs.
I don't think so, because they also steal our IP, and why would we put up with that?
They also make it really hard to do business over there.
Why would we put up with that?
They are massively spying on our businesses over there.
Why would we put up with that?
So, I don't think we're necessarily going to make a trade deal.
I think it's more likely that we'll create this big trading block, the 75 countries plus the US plus whoever else joins, and that that trading block would be an alternative to China.
Now, at the moment, China still has a vice grip on some things that you can't get other places.
But that's not permanent.
There's nothing about the rare earth minerals that says they can't be produced by Canada or Australia or somebody who would be perfectly willing to sell them to us.
So I've got a feeling that the long term plan, which is probably necessary for survival, is to make sure that China is not in control of our future.
And that might require some A couple years of bad news.
Maybe less growth and that sort of thing.
But we'll see.
So I think the long term, Trump's got the advantage.
He's also threatened end of pharmaceutical tariff exemptions, according to the BBC.
And the reason he would want to put tariffs on pharmaceuticals is that it would help get them out of China.
Now, I thought pharmaceuticals The story was going to be we don't know how to make them anymore.
So China has to do it.
But it turns out that the U.S. is one of the top pharmaceutical manufacturing countries.
So I guess we do know how to do that stuff.
So we don't need to do it in China.
It was just some kind of economic advantage, I guess.
So if we get the rare earth minerals and we get the pharmaceuticals and we get the electronics.
We don't need China.
Those three industries, and they're all doable.
It's just not fast.
The European Union has agreed to buy more American gas, the liquefied, what would you call it?
The kind of gas that you don't put in your car.
Now, to me, Buying energy is going to be the fastest way for these other countries, the allied countries, to close the trade gap.
So if there's a country that...
LNG, thank you.
The LNG gas.
So if there are countries that are selling us more than we're selling them, and they want to close that gap quickly...
Because it would help them with the overall tariff negotiations.
Then one way to do it is to buy energy from the United States and commit to it.
Because everybody's going to need a lot more energy.
And energy is really expensive.
And apparently we have the ability to deliver it, at least LNG, to a lot of places.
So I think you're going to see a whole bunch of deals.
I think South Korea is already talking about that exact kind of thing.
But the EU is already trying to get in there and say, we'll buy more American gas.
So here's what I think it looks like.
It's going to look like the US saying, our military is part of your security.
We need you to buy more of our energy.
And that will close our gap in imports and exports.
And we need fairer trade deals.
And I think there's a real good chance that Trump's going to get a lot of that, if not all of it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, other countries are pondering what to do because Trump's U-turn, the Wall Street Journal calls it a U-turn, has left governments around the world pondering how to approach the U.S. that has become nearly impossible to predict.
Well, let me give some advice to the countries.
That are trying to figure out how to deal with the US that's now impossible to predict.
Make an appointment, make a phone call, and come in here and offer us a better trade deal.
That's it.
It's not complicated.
There's one thing that Trump wants at the moment.
He wants better trade deals.
So if you're not flying over here, you're not trying to get somebody on the phone, You're not looking at your own trade deals and saying, hmm, where could we make this a little more fair?
You're not doing anything.
All we want is better trade deals.
So maybe you should be doing what the EU is doing, offering to buy more LNG.
Maybe you should be making an appointment, getting on a plane like China.
I'm sorry, like Japan.
So it's not too hard, Wall Street Journal.
know what to do.
Anyway, the Chinese yuan, their currency, just hit an 18-year low.
I don't know if that's changed since this morning, but their currency has taken a hit.
And there's reports that the big Trump tariff on China, 125%, is creating some panic among the Amazon sellers in China.
So that's not good for China.
But here's the thing.
One of the other big problems with China is they keep stealing our intellectual property.
You probably heard Mr. Wonderful talking about that.
And it's not a little bit.
It's massive.
You've heard me complain about if I were to write a new book and put it on Amazon tomorrow, It would take about 10 minutes before there were five different stolen copies of my book with practically the same cover and title that are from,
I think, China.
So the massive amount of intellectual property stealing seems like something that has to be fixed.
But do you think that China would agree to stop doing it?
And then actually stop doing it?
I say no.
There must be something baked into the Chinese system where, unfortunately, a number of them are thieves.
Now, they probably don't see it that way.
They probably just think it's being competitive or something.
But we really can't deal with China in the long run if they're just stealing everything that's our intellectual property.
So probably our long term is to make sure we have a clean break.
And let China just do its thing while we do our thing.
So I don't think you can fix massive theft of your intellectual property that's so completely universal and so built into the system that it happens every time and it happens fast and it's a lot.
I don't think you can reverse that.
So sometimes you just have to say, you know, we can't be friends.
That's what I think.
So Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to investigate this author who was anonymous for a while, this guy Miles Taylor.
Trump said he thinks he's guilty of treason.
So this is the guy who wrote a book and said that the book was called, what was it called?
It called A Warning.
In 2019.
So he said he was a Trump insider kind of a staffer and that he had all these terrible secrets and he put them in a book.
Well, turns out he wasn't very close to anybody.
So it looked like there's something sketchy going on there.
So apparently the Department of Justice is going to look into that guy.
But at the same time...
There's a similar order against Chris Krebs, the former director of cybersecurity and infrastructure security, CISA.
And I guess Trump fired him in 2020 for claiming that that year's election was the most secure in American history.
Now, he was sort of a leading face going around saying that the 2020 election was one of the most secure.
Most audited, most checked, cleanest election of all.
And Trump said, we're going to find out about this guy too, because this guy is a wise guy.
But here's my question.
What exactly is his alleged crime?
You know, I was watching some videos of what he was doing back in 2020, and he was doing that thing that the Democrats were doing, which is pretending that If you audited or if there were, let's say,
legal challenges that didn't work, that that was proof positive that the elections were as clean as a whistle.
Now, that's not even logical.
Those are just two things that can check a few things.
That doesn't tell you the whole thing is good.
Now, I don't know of any specific...
You know, irregularities personally.
I don't know what to believe about that election.
I mean, it looked suspicious to me, but I don't have any proof of that.
So, I don't know exactly what would be the alleged crime they'd be looking into.
I hope this is not entirely based on Trump's view that it must have been crooked and that this guy must have known because it must have been crooked.
I don't know.
I feel like you might need a little bit more than that to drag somebody into a sort of a lawfare web.
I'm not totally comfortable with this one.
Are you?
How many of you think that Trump has made the case that this individual Krebs should be investigated?
There might be a good reason, but I didn't see it.
It just looked like a suspicion that if somebody said this was a good election and said it a lot, and you were positive it wasn't, that there must be something there.
Beverly says, yes, hunt them back.
You're done playing a nice guy.
All right, well, I don't think that's the right answer.
So I don't think hunt them back is the right solution ever, unless there's actual evidence of potential crimes.
There might be, but I don't know.
That one makes me uncomfortable.
As you know, Chuck Schumer, Senator Schumer, is a monster.
I saw a video, I think Western Lensman was the source of that, where...
Chuck Schumer is in the hallway, one of the official hallways, and a reporter is trying to get him to comment on the Tesla violent protests.
And so after asking several times, do you have anything to say about the Tesla violent protests?
Schumer says, quote, I can't talk about Tesla, but Elon Musk is a disaster for America, and America knows it.
Look at Wisconsin.
I can't talk about Tesla?
The question was, what do you think about the violent protests?
He couldn't think of anything to...
Why can't he talk about Tesla?
It's a very big story.
He's a monster.
The fact that he was not willing to say, you know, I disavowed the violence, I hope none of that happens.
I don't want to see anybody's car get keyed because they're made in America.
There were a million things he could have said, but I can't talk about Tesla.
That suggests he's completely on board with violence.
I don't know how else to see it.
Now, you might know if you watch this show or you're familiar with what Mike Benz does, which is the smart version.
You know we're in the middle of a violent insurrection, right?
That we are being color revolutioned and that all the same people, the people who are experts at doing color revolutions, are doing it to America.
They tried it in the first term of Trump before we knew what it meant and before we could recognize it.
But now we've been trained.
We know exactly what it looks like.
It would be massive fake protests.
Check. It would be trying to corrupt the judges and the prosecutors and the attorney generals.
Check. That's what they've done.
There would be control of the media, so the media would have a message that this populist who somehow has a lot of popular support is really the devil.
And the media has all agreed on that.
Check. So these are all the things that are absolutely guaranteed to be part of an insurrection.
And it's happening right now while we watch, but because most of the country doesn't know what I just told you, you just have to be kind of a nerd and really pay attention to a lot of stuff online.
People let it happen.
Or maybe half of the country wants it to happen, so they don't care how legal or ethical or moral it is.
But we're right there.
How many of our corrupt leaders, like Schumer, how many of them does Doge already have the goods on?
As in, does anybody know how Schumer made his money?
Because I've got a feeling that Musk...
Might have a list of politicians who just absolutely have a trail of money from some government funding or some outside corrupt source right into their pockets.
And Schumer would be the top one that I would suspect, based on the way he operates.
All right.
So it turns out the Department of Justice is going to go after the money people, the organizers behind the Tesla domestic violence.
And I don't think they've ever tried that before.
I don't think they tried it with Antifa or Black Lives Matter.
But we're smarter now.
So now we know that these are not organic.
We know that they're organized.
And we even know, for the most part, we know which NGOs and which entities and which billionaires are doing it all.
So the thinking is, and Elon Musk seems to think this is going to happen, that the government or the Department of Justice will look into who's behind it all and that they might go to jail.
Do you believe that the people who organized it The fake protests and the domestic extremism or terrorism against the cars and some of the people.
Do you think the government's going to actually put in jail the organizers?
That would be an amazing thing.
Again, I'm not sure exactly what crime would be the one that would get them.
But that's pretty interesting.
So whoever is bankrolling the domestic terrorism might have some questions to answer.
And Attorney General Bondi warned that no one, not the foot soldiers, not the financiers, will escape justice.
In other news...
One of Trump's executive orders, he's getting busy with lots more executive orders, would prohibit the states from using climate change ideology to cripple our various energy projects.
So this could be a really big deal.
So the Attorney General shall expeditiously take all appropriate action to stop the enforcement.
of state laws and continuation of civil actions identified in blah blah blah that the Attorney General determines to be illegal.
So I guess states have sued energy companies for supposed climate change harm under nuisance and other tort regimes.
So the idea here is that the states are Completely broken.
And if you tried to make their energy less expensive, the state would find some way not to do it by continuously chasing climate change objectives instead.
So I like this one.
We'll see if it makes any difference, but it could make a huge difference.
Imagine if there were no climate change considerations to any energy decisions made in my state.
I feel like my price of gas would not be twice what yours is, which is what it is.
It's roughly twice what the red states pay for gas.
Twice. And what do I get extra?
I don't even get security that it will be there tomorrow.
The very least you'd expect if you're paying twice as much for gas in your state is that they're guaranteed to have gas.
I don't even get that.
We're not guaranteed anything.
We're just paying more.
Anyway, as you know, Doge has made a number of projections of savings, and it turns out that this group called the Hamilton Project came up with a chart that shows that
2025 outlays, or what we're going to spend on the budget, would be flat compared to 2024, which would make it look like Doge didn't do anything, that the budget would just stay the same.
Now, but fortunately, brand new chief economist Julia Pollack did a post on X to show the trick that they used.
And the trick that they used is the chart, as Julia Pollack explains,
And let's talk about what's missing.
So in 2023, the federal outlays, the budget, were $6.13 trillion.
The next year, they jumped up 10% to $6.75.
So that's sort of what the trend was.
So the trend was never that spending was flat.
The trend was always that it kept going up no matter what you did.
And 10% is a lot in one year.
So as Julie points out, flat from 2024 to 2025 isn't nothing happened.
And indeed, it's huge because it's the first break from the autopilot goes up every year by some 10% or so.
If the only thing you could do is keep spending flat in a context in which there's some inflation, which we do have, and there's some growth, which we do have, you would get to a much better place than where we are.
So keeping things flat is a big cut.
It's the difference between 10% up and, you know...
Chipping away with just the baseline inflation rate.
So that's good work.
Let's see.
Our top banker in the country, I always call him that, JP Morgan banker, Jamie Dimon, thinks there'll be more defaults, which is...
People who can't pay their debts and so they have to default.
He was on Fox News talking to Maria Bordaroma.
And he says, I think you're going to see a slowdown in the economy.
And he said he expects more defaults.
We haven't seen them much yet.
But you'll see more credit problems than people have seen in a long time.
Maybe. That might be what happens.
But I think a lot depends on what happens with the tariff negotiations.
If Trump ends up lowering taxes for at least a lot of people and getting our trade thing better negotiated and then Doge is keeping our expenses from running out of control,
things could fairly quickly get back to where you want them to be.
Let's look at inflation.
So March inflation, our inflation rate was 2.4%, which is below expectations, which were 2.5.
And the core CPI increased 2.8 compared to forecasts of 3. So there is inflation, but it doesn't seem to be...
At killer levels.
So it's actually weirdly under control.
Did you know that the...
I saw this on the Amuse account on X. Did you know that the Chinese Communist Party passed a law that requires all Chinese students abroad to participate in an intelligence gathering?
It's actually the law.
So if you're a Chinese student, as in born in China, And you were in school here?
You would have to be involved in intelligence gathering.
You'd have to be.
It's the law for China.
But a Senator Moody, one of ours, says the United States should immediately stop issuing student visas because all the students are spies.
They might not want to be, and they may not have been raised to be spies, but if the...
Chinese government says you must be a spy.
I guess they are.
So, yeah, I think we should talk about why are we educating them at all.
Speaking of which, Laura Loomer got another scoop.
I'd never heard this before, but apparently President Xi of China has a daughter who went to Harvard and now lives in the United States.
And of course, that raises a question.
Let's say President Xi's daughter went to Harvard and now lives in the United States.
You know what I worry?
I worry that Harvard turned that woman communist.
No? All right.
Speaking of China...
New York Post has an article that says there's a Meta whistleblower, so a whistleblower about the company Meta, you know, Facebook.
And it says that Meta actively helped China in the race to develop artificial intelligence as part of its effort to make China like it so it can do more business in China.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that Meta...
Was helping China develop technology to out-compete the United States, particularly in, I think, AI was one of the categories, and that they did it so that they could get access to the Chinese market.
Does that sound real to you?
Here's more of the story.
The details are that Meta began providing briefings.
...to the Chinese Communist Party as early as 2015.
Oh. So Mehta was giving China briefings about key technologies and whatnot.
Briefings. While they were pursuing something called Project Aldrin, which was their effort to get more access to the Chinese market.
Now, here's my Dilbert take on that.
Nothing ever came out of a briefing.
Do you think the meta gave them a briefing, and then the people at the briefing went out and said, now I finally know how to make AI, and then developed DeepSeek?
I don't think so.
I don't know how much value you can get out of a briefing, but...
It doesn't scream that Meta was giving up the United States for economic advantage.
It kind of screams that they were trying to play along and be friendly, give them some high-level information that they probably could have Googled, and tried to get access to the markets.
So I'm going to say the whistleblower doesn't sound persuasive to me.
I'm going to need more than knowing that they gave some briefings.
If they said, our engineers will work with your engineers to transfer our technical knowledge, then I would say, whoa, that's terrible.
That's pretty bad.
But it doesn't say that at all.
It sounds like they weren't even talking to engineers.
They were talking to the Chinese Communist Party and giving them briefings.
How much value have you ever gotten out of a briefing?
Not enough to build your own AI model.
But anyway, people have...
And by the way, I could be wrong.
There might be more to this story.
But just based on what's reported, it doesn't look like much.
And then I guess the whistleblower said there's a straight line you can draw from these briefings.
To the recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use, relying on Meta's Lama model.
Well, here's the thing.
The Lama model is open source.
It's available to everyone.
So China's not the only one who would use it.
So do you think because they gave them a briefing, they suddenly knew how to use this Lama AI?
I don't know.
I'm not sure the straight line is as straight as the whistleblower wants to tell you.
Anyway, here's another Doge success story.
Based on an initial survey of unemployment insurance, there are claims that this is from 2020, that 24.5 thousand people got unemployment even though they were over the age of 115.
And they got $59 million in benefits.
And there were 28,000 people, allegedly, between the ages of one and five years old, who also got unemployment.
$245 million in benefits.
Blah, blah, blah.
Now, I've been burned before, assuming that the Doge anecdotal stuff was true.
I'm not going to believe this one yet, because you know the Democrats are going to say, the problem is the date fields are not filled in.
They're not actually 115 years old.
The date field isn't filled in.
They're just ordinary people who have ordinary ages, and the database is inaccurate.
So the important thing is...
Somebody looked at them and they qualified for unemployment insurance and the date of how old they are might be inaccurate but doesn't really affect anything.
Now, what is true?
Do you think it's true that these are literally fake uses of unemployment insurance?
Maybe. It could be.
But I no longer trust anecdote on this.
So I would need to see more than the 115-year-old getting the benefits.
Because we keep seeing the same story over and over again, that people who are too old to actually be alive or too young to get a benefit that they should be getting or that others get.
I don't know.
I'm just going to say maybe.
I'm going to say maybe on that.
But again, I'm a big fan of Doge, and I think directionally they're completely spot on.
So if they get a few anecdotes that they're over-interpreting, not a big deal.
I saw Argentina's doing great.
They're now the leader in Latin America in fiscal discipline under their leader, Millet.
Now, every time I hear a story about Argentina, It is suspiciously too good.
As in, really?
Did he really take a chainsaw to everything in the government and then everything worked out and it happened really quickly?
Really? So I went to Grok and I asked it, was there a downside of melee?
And the answer is yes.
So... The things that worked out well is that he cut the budget and created a, at least at the highest level, a functional economy that was not spending more than it was making.
Good. That's very impressive.
But in order to get there, what do you have to cut?
Well, apparently there are deep cuts in education, healthcare, pensions, transportation, and the poorest people are probably hit the hardest.
So, there is some genuine, I don't know if misery is the right word, but these are the kind of cuts you could never make in America.
I mean, even Doge wouldn't touch this kind of stuff.
So, I'm going to be a partial skeptic on Mule's miracle success.
Because if you haven't talked to the average person there, I don't know if you know if things are working swimmingly.
But certainly having a country that can pay its bills and is not running into debt destruction, that's good.
So by any measure, I think Millet probably has the right long-term perspective.
But I'll bet you it's way more expensive than people are telling you in terms of its impact on the poor people in...
Well, Ukraine's President Zelensky says Ukraine wants to buy $50 billion in U.S. weapons, the kind that nobody else makes.
In this case, Patriot missiles.
And it'd be the largest U.S. weapon sale ever, eclipsing Japan's big deal for F-35s.
Well... Now what's different is he's going to use the European Union's money and so the U.S. would basically just be selling a product.
We wouldn't be giving it to them.
We wouldn't be the bankers for it.
We wouldn't be asking for something in advance.
We'd just be selling it.
And Ukraine would use the money from the European Union to pay for it.
To which I say...
I don't have much of a problem with that.
If you can really get the European Union to pay for American weapons, yeah, maybe we should sell them some weapons.
According to live science, AI can now design its own chips.
Which would outperform human-designed chips.
But no one understands them.
So I guess when AI develops a chip, the first problem is it might hallucinate and the chip doesn't work at all.
But when it does work, it works better than human-made chips.
But if a human looks at the chip and tries to figure out why is it this way, they can't do it.
Which is kind of fascinating to me.
So Princeton researchers say the AI design chips, they don't use traditional layouts.
They take a radical approach that boosts performance beyond human capability.
Now, there are a bunch of other things that are happening in AI, like there's a way to run Lama on a laptop now, instead of trying to run it through a whole data center.
There are photon-based chips that are being developed for AI that would be way more efficient power-wise.
And my question is, since the big issue with AI is power, and AI can design a chip, can AI figure out how to use less power for AI?
If you really pushed it to do that, could you say, hey AI, I want you to develop a chip, I don't know.
But we're probably right at the doorway of AI being able to figure out the cheaper way to be AI.
There's a whole bunch of news also.
I don't always report all of it.
But there's a whole bunch of news that goes to the same direction.
Which is ways to make AI use way less energy, as in all the way down to making it run on a laptop.
So I think it's going to be a race between trying to find energy to run these big data centers and not needing energy.
So maybe somewhere in between is what's going to be real.
Amazon's launching something called NovaSonic Speech-to-Speech AI.
Now, all it does is understand human speech, like other AIs, and talk.
But, wow, it's good.
I listened to a demonstration, and you know how an AI voice is always a little slow, and you can tell it's AI and all that?
This one is just conversational, and it speaks fast, and it gives you...
Just the feeling that's human as heck.
So apparently it outperforms OpenAI's voice model, which, by the way, is great.
The difference between the old pre-AI voice recognition, they were terrible.
I mean, just terrible.
But ever since AI, you can really get an app to understand what you're saying, even if there's noise in the room or anything else.
So apparently this is, Rowan Chung is reporting on this, but it's hugely better than anything that's been out there for voice.
So that's coming.
Kash Patel is telling us that they got a big win on stopping drugs from cartels.
They found over half a billion dollars in drugs.
They intercepted.
Cash Patel calls it one of the most successful counter-narcotics efforts in U.S. history.
We'll see if that makes any difference, but it's got to hurt the cartels to lose half a billion dollars in one deal.
Meanwhile, over in the House of Representatives, the Republicans have figured out how to pass a bill, which they passed, to stop rogue judges From making decisions that affect places where the judges don't have authority.
So maybe authority is the wrong word.
But you know the problem of judge hunting, and the Democrats can find a judge anywhere who will stop anything anywhere else in the country.
And you say to yourself, wait a minute, why would some biased D.C. judge be able to stop something that's happening?
Not in D.C., but somewhere else around the country.
And the answer is, well, they were getting away with it.
But now this legislation, if it were to pass the Senate, and I'm thinking it might, because the Republicans have a majority, that they would use the congressional authority to keep judges from passing,
from ruling on things that are not in their domain.
I'm kind of surprised that this is the way that that gets fixed.
It seems weird to me that the Congress can deal with that.
What seems like a core issue.
But if they can, it's amazing.
Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, according to Interesting Engineering, the U.S. now has this powerful microwave weapon.
They can fry swarms of drones at the same time and boats.
So if you've got stuff coming at you, you know, you're a big naval ship or something, you see a swarm of drones, you can take them all out at the same time with this high-powered microwave called Leonidas HDO.
And it can also engage multiple targets.
It can stop boats.
So, that's pretty impressive.
I think the boats that get pirated are going to want that.
We're also working, according to Newsmax, P. Hegseth is coming up with options for a space-based defense shield for the United States.
So, putting something in low Earth orbit, I guess, that can shoot down incoming missiles and...
Aircraft, I would guess.
They don't have a decision yet on what that looks like, but apparently the project to figure out what that looks like and then build it is moving right ahead.
So we're going to have a space shield for missiles.
And if they get through, we'll microwave them.
Here's a study that I don't know how obvious this one was.
There's a study that finds conscientiousness is linked to higher reproductive success worldwide.
So if you're conscientious, which they define as the tendency to be organized, responsible, self-disciplined, and goal-oriented, you tend to have more children.
Would you have guessed that?
Or would you have guessed that the people who are least conscientious pump out the most babies and The babies have to take care of themselves, basically.
I don't know.
I'm a little surprised that conscientiousness is linked to having more babies.
It just seems to me that the least conscientious people are knocking up their girlfriends and leaving them to fend for themselves.
But maybe.
Maybe that's the way it is.
And then in related news, The number of U.S. non-parents who never want children is growing.
So listen to this percentage.
In 2002, 14% of non-parents decided, said they didn't want any children.
14%. Now that seems manageable, doesn't it?
If only 14% of married people don't want children, you'd say to yourself, well, that still leaves plenty of people that have children.
So not everybody has to be the same.
But in 2023, that went to 29%.
29% of married people don't want kids ever.
29%. That feels not survivable in the long run, does it?
I think we're going to end up doing a hungry kind of thing where you say you won't have to pay taxes if you have several kids.
Something's going to have to give.
And maybe it's going to be robots.
I don't know.
Why would anybody get married if they didn't want kids?
That's what I would ask.
The two times I got married is because kids were already in the mix.
And everything works better if you're married and you've got stepkids or real kids.
Not real kids.
Biological kids.
But yeah.
This is scary.
29% don't want kids.
Do you think that's mostly financial?
I feel like it might be.
But also having children in the modern era doesn't look anything the same.
Because once the kid gets a smartphone, it's like you don't have a child.
They're just wed to their phone.
I saw a study the other day.
That the entire influence of the parents ends at, I don't know, like seven years old.
And then after that, it's entirely pure influence.
You know, it's smartphones and it's peers and it's their classmates and it's school.
But after the age of seven, parents don't have much to do with how they're raised.
Even no matter how much you try.
Because apparently they're just way more influenced.
By their peers.
I'm not saying that's good or bad, but it's easy to see why somebody doesn't want to do it.
Because you get a few years where you think you're doing something important and then it's completely cancelled out by just the environment.
You know, the friends they hang out with and that sort of thing.
Anyway, so that's what I got for you today.
Sorry it took two tries to get this working.
I'm hoping it will work on X by tomorrow.
We'll get that fixed, I hope.
And we'll take a look at the stock market.
Obviously, it's going to give back a little bit today, but I wouldn't be too worried about it yet.
We've got lots of things ahead.
And thanks for joining, everybody.
I'm going to talk to the locals privately in 30 seconds.
