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April 26, 2025 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:20:43
Episode 2821 CWSA 04/26/25

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Time Text
Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
Maybe robots too.
But if you think you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that...
Here's a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice, just tie in 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 that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and damn it, it's going to happen right now.
Go!
Oh, that's good stuff.
So good.
Well, I wonder if there's any new news about the benefits of coffee.
Oh yeah, there is.
From the European Journal of Who Cares, habitual coffee consumption is associated with a lower odds of frailty later in life.
How many of you are frail because you didn't have enough coffee?
Well, sometimes it takes two cups before you're no longer frail.
But in other news, according to ZME Science, did you know that magic mushrooms, the use is soaring in the United States.
Apparently in every age group, people are using magic mushrooms to cure their mental problems and maybe just have a good time and get rid of their anxiety and their depression, and it's all working.
And it makes me wonder, what if they made magic mushroom coffee?
Huh?
Huh?
You hear me?
How would you like to sip your coffee, become less frail, and at the same time, cure your depression and all your mental problems while having a good time?
I can't think of a better day.
So someday, pray, please give me coffee with mushrooms in them.
Please.
Don't try to make your own at home.
All right.
Importantly, there will be a Spaces event after this podcast with Owen Gregorian hosting.
You can find that on the X platform.
Just go to Owen Gregorian's account.
You'll find the link.
Or you can go to mine because I repost it.
So Spaces after the show if you'd like to get a little extra.
And who doesn't want extra?
You all want extra.
Come on.
Well, here's another story about batteries that I like, according to Wired.
Did you know that the grid-scale batteries, the gigantic batteries that they put in the network itself to store electricity when there is electricity so it's available when there's not, apparently the cost of that has dropped like crazy.
And so...
With the cost going down, the number of batteries being added to the network is going crazy.
So that's one of those really big stories that doesn't have a...
There's no moment when it becomes a story because it's just a thing that's happening over time.
But it's one of the biggest things.
Because if we had batteries everywhere in our network, we would basically never lose electricity.
And we'd be able to have a lot more solar, if you like solar, and other stuff.
So that's good news.
According to the Daily Mail, some people believe that they've discovered a giant underwater UFO base just off the West Coast, off of Malibu.
Now, if I were going to build a gigantic underwater UFO base, that's where I'd put it.
I'd put it just off of Malibu.
But apparently it's a big structure that you can see that's got a flat top.
And it's hard to understand how underwater there would be a gigantic flat top to anything.
So, maybe.
And apparently it's associated with a lot of UFO spottings.
So they think, yes.
And I guess it's called Sycamore Knoll.
And it's a natural underwater structure.
Some say it's natural, but some say it's a garage for UFOs.
Doesn't it feel like they can just go down there and look at it?
Is it really impossible to send some divers down off the coast of Malibu?
It feels like it wouldn't be the hardest thing in the world to check out.
But I'd rather they don't check it out, because I like to think...
That there's a gigantic UFO base just off my coast.
Well, I saw a post by Mike Cernovich, who says that, I guess he's spent enough time in D.C. recently, and he says that D.C. has been cleaned up, and somewhat quickly, since the beginning of the Trump administration.
He says, D.C. is so clean now, looks like it's supposed to.
It looks like civilization.
Trump and his acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin have already transformed it almost completely overnight.
So that would be another situation where you just needed somebody to try.
There's no way to solve our southern border.
Well, how about somebody tries?
Oh, it worked.
There's no way to clean up D.C. How about if...
Trump tries.
And success.
So I guess it took a non-Democrat force to get D.C. cleaned up.
That's good news.
The Department of Justice, this is according to the Post Millennial reporting on this, the Department of Justice has decided to stop funding for research.
And I know this will disappoint you, but there won't be any more Department of Justice research on, quote, toxic masculinity or structural racism.
Now, that's kind of a problem for somebody like me, because if they're not doing any more research on toxic masculinity or structural racism, how will I know how bad I am?
I would just be guessing.
I'd be like, huh.
Well, I think my toxic masculinity is probably an 8 out of 10, so I'm kind of an asshole.
And my structural racism is, well, through the roof.
But I'd just be guessing.
I like the old way where they would do deep research, so I would know just exactly how bad I am.
But I guess guessing is all we have left now.
You might remember the story of recently James O 'Keefe and his OMG group got a secret video recording of a Pentagon branch chief who was saying that he was going to try as hard as possible to resist doing anything that Trump wanted.
So he was basically a Trump resister.
It was sort of on the Trump payroll in the sense that it's the Trump administration.
And as soon as I saw that video, I said to myself, how long is he going to be employed?
Can you actually say out loud that you're going to resist what your boss wants and stay employed?
Well, the answer is he's already out.
So I don't know if he showed himself the door or somebody else did, but He's gone.
He's gone.
So you know the issue about members of Congress who are allowed to do insider trading?
And apparently some of them are making some good money on it.
But it's specifically legal, but only for members of Congress.
So Trump has just announced that he would sign a ban if anybody...
You know, gave him that legislation.
He would sign a ban on congressional stock trading.
Now, let me see.
Does that fall into Trump's usual model?
Yes.
Do you think that 80% of the country would agree with Trump that they should not have the ability to do insider trading?
Yes.
Do you think that 20% would be batshit crazy?
And they'd be in favor of Congress doing insider trading?
Of course.
So what side do you think Democrats will take?
I swear to God, this just gets funnier and funnier, this 2080s stuff.
So I assume, I haven't heard yet, but one assumes that Hakeem Jeffries and AOC and Bernie Sanders will go all in.
Saying that Congress should be able to do insider trading.
Do you know what would end insider trading forever?
If Democrats just start doing it wildly.
Now that would be funny.
Can you imagine if there's some new issue, I don't know, with war or solving war or tariffs or something, where all the members of Congress know the new news, but just to be funny, The Republicans massively invest in it.
And then they make a fortune.
And then they say, hey, you know what?
This insider trading is pretty good.
We're going to do some more.
And then the next time something comes up, the Republicans just go all in.
Like, they just go in hard.
And they make another, like, billion dollars.
And then all the Democrats look at them and go, hey, hey, you can't do that.
And they'd be like, Can't we?
I'm pretty sure that you're in favor of this.
I believe that you are protesting in favor of allowing this exact thing.
So why don't you go protest for my right to keep doing this?
All it would take is for Republicans to be making more money from it than Democrats, and it would get banned.
That's all it would take.
Well, I just found out that Las Vegas...
We'll soon be testing another autonomous vehicle, cab.
Apparently, there's a company that's backed by Jeff Bezos and some other investors called Zoox.
Z-O-O-X.
And I guess they've got a self-driving cab that they plan to be testing in Las Vegas very soon.
I don't know how many self-driving cab companies there will be, but boy, I'd be really worried if I were Uber.
Do you think Uber's going to have to buy one of them?
Maybe Uber will have to make an offer for Waymo or Zoox or something.
I don't know.
But Uber's got some problems ahead.
Speaking of automobiles and speaking of Jeff Bezos, There's a lot of publicity today for a truck, an electric truck that's also being backed by a Jeff Bezos startup.
And this little truck comes with just only the basics so that they can price it at about $20,000.
So it's just a two-seater truck.
It's not very big.
It's more like a Toyota.
And the windows are just hand-cranked and there's no entertainment system, but you could have it.
So it's being made like, I think they called it a Mr. Potato Head.
So you can get the basic and it'd be like $20,000, which would be amazing.
But then you could add a stereo if you wanted, and you could add a video screen if you want, and you could add some other stuff.
Now, here's the thing, though.
I looked at the pictures of it, and it totally activated my lizard brain.
You know, if you're male, and maybe this applies to some women as well, the company is called Slate.
When I looked at the truck, I just had this feeling in my body, and it was like, oh, oh.
I just want it.
I want it, like, really badly.
Now, if you're male, you've probably often had the experience of seeing a truck and saying, oh, I wouldn't mind owning that truck.
It's just a male thing.
We like tools.
We like trucks.
And there's a neighbor in my neighborhood that whenever I would walk past his property, you would always have a two-seater truck that had only the basics it looked like.
Parked in front of his house.
It was just gray.
It was just really basic.
And I would always say to myself, that is exactly what I want.
Because I don't want to spend $100,000 on a truck that I would barely use.
But if I had a $20,000 truck, I would be making runs to the landfill to throw things away.
And I'd let people borrow it and I'd throw my...
E-bike in the back.
I can think of all kinds of reasons if I had an extra vehicle.
But I wouldn't buy an $80,000 extra vehicle.
My brain couldn't process that.
But a $20,000?
$20,000?
If you had room to park it?
So I guess what impressed me about it...
Was that somehow they built this thing so its look, its price, and its features just hit my lizard brain perfectly.
And I'd be so curious how many other people had the same experience.
It made me just go, oh, I want that.
So we'll see where that goes.
Speaking of automobiles, a famous investor.
TV guy James Kramer recently said, I'm putting my chips on Elon Musk.
Now, here he's talking about driverless cars.
He goes, I don't think Waymo scales the way people think.
And what did Elon Musk do when he heard that one of the most famous investors in the world was going to back his product?
Well, he said he needs to...
So Elon posts that the inverse Kramer is tough karma to overcome, meaning that if Kramer says something's good, there's sort of a running joke that he's always wrong.
So Elon is worried because Kramer just said that his product is the good one.
He's like, oh my God, the inverse Kramer is tough karma to overcome.
And then Elon says in the post, I'm calling weekend reviews with Autopilot to accelerate progress.
Not only does he call him out for always being wrong, but he tells him he's going to have to double down on his efforts to try to overcome the Kramer curse.
Now, that's just funny.
That's just funny.
I do think Musk is underappreciated for how funny he is.
I saw a, and I posted this on X, but I saw a long opinion piece by Dr. Insensitive Jerk, who's a real-life economist, who is anonymous.
And he was making a point that you can see in its fullness.
It's better expressed the way he wrote it.
But I'll give you the summary.
The summary is that AI will eventually destroy other sources of information because right now AI is able to read, you might say illegally in some cases, everything that's out there.
So if you were going to look for some information, how long will it be before you say to yourself, well, I'm not going to go to Wikipedia or I'm not going to go to...
You know, this source where I think that information will be, I'll just ask AI, because AI has read everything.
So once AI can answer every question about anything that's anywhere, which we're right on the verge of that being the case, why would those other sources continue to exist?
Because who would spend their time updating them or visiting them?
So the business model of Normal sources of information should all disappear.
And then what happens?
Because the AI depends on all those other sources that it's, you know, continually scanning to stay update.
What happens then?
Is the AI going to have to just use itself as its own source of information?
So that's a pretty big question.
But it reminded me of a question that I had because I do this, you know, this podcasting and I talk about the news.
Have you noticed that podcasting and posting on X has largely replaced your habit of looking at the real news, the traditional news?
When was the last time you said to yourself, I think I've got to go look at CBS News?
Or I think I'll go to the AP or Reuters website and see what's new.
When was the last time you did that?
And I'm thinking to myself, you know, CNN's traffic and MSNBC's traffic are all going down.
At what point do the podcasters put in a business, the thing that all the podcasters need to stay in business?
So in other words, A lot of people say to me, the only place I hear news is on your podcast.
I don't know how many people are in that category.
But it used to be true for Jon Stewart when he did The Daily Show.
Young people would say, it's the only place I get my news.
Other people might go to Bill Maher's show and say, yeah, I don't really pay attention to the news, but he catches me up on all the important stuff.
It's okay.
When you've got this big, robust news industry and only a few people who are well-known talking about it.
So if you've just got your Bill Maher's and your Jon Stewart's and Joe Rogan talking about the news, you're fine.
But what happens when all the podcasters are just talking about the news and then...
You say to yourself, as I've said to myself fairly recently, why would I ever go to a news site?
Because I just go to Axe, and I go to Mario Knopfel's account, and every single morning he's got a summary that he's picked from all the news sources, and the summary is usually all I care about.
It's like, oh, Trump thinks he's close to a peace deal.
Oh, there's this new invention.
And it seems to me that we're on a path where all the original reporting will disappear because there won't be anybody going to look at it directly.
They'll only be seeing it through somebody who essentially borrowed it for their own content, like I do.
So, what happens then?
I don't think we thought this through.
Because we're, and that would include me, I'm in a completely self-immolating activity.
You know, the more people watch something like this podcast to figure out what's new in the world and to try to understand it, the less they're going to watch the things that I use as my source of what to talk about.
So...
Isn't the whole thing going to fall apart?
It probably won't.
You know, there'll be adjustments, etc.
But it makes me wonder.
Well, you probably heard that Susan Rice, Obama's right-hand woman for years, was on this committee, this Defense DOD Advisory Committee.
And we couldn't understand why that would even exist.
So she didn't have authority to make decisions, but it gave her access to all the Department of Defense Pentagon people to push her opinions.
And once we realized that that existed, which surprised me, who knew that even existed, that advisory committee?
But I guess P. Agseth just got rid of that committee.
So he didn't just get rid of the people.
He just got rid of the committee.
And that sounds right.
That feels like the right decision.
Well, let's check in on all the racists, starting with Harvard.
I saw a post on X from Aaron Siberian, your perfect example.
I'm not looking at the original news.
I'm looking at the X post about the original news.
But apparently the Harvard Law Review has put in writing, so this isn't writing, this is not guessing or reading between the lines.
They say it directly.
They've made DEI the first priority of their admissions process, the process of deciding what articles to run in the Harvard Law Review.
And they say they routinely kill or advance pieces based on the author's race.
And they look for articles that have racially diverse citations.
And it's in writing, recently.
So it's not like something that, you know, was in writing a long time ago, but they changed it.
This is their current method of deciding what to publish is based on your race.
Now, this is mind-boggling.
So everything that you imagine about Harvard being a racist entity, it's apparently 100% true.
So they very much want their hiring to be race-based.
They want their admissions to be race-based.
And even who gets to publish in the Harvard Law Review, they say directly.
They want it to be race-based.
So that's super racist.
I don't know if Harvard will ever recover from this.
It's pretty bad.
According to Chuck Ross, who's writing for the Washington Free Beacon, there's a group called the National Black Justice Coalition.
And they get money from big companies like Procter& Gamble and stuff.
And I guess their mission would be to make things more equitable race-wise.
So how are they doing?
Let's see.
So I guess their leader is David Johns, who his past was he worked for Obama's White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans.
And he was talking at a recent event for this organization because they're pushing a boycott against Target because Target rolled back its DEI.
So they want people to stop shopping there.
Here are some of the things that this gentleman said.
He lashed out this week.
Again, this is Chuck Ross, the Washington Free Beacon.
He lashed out this week against what he called white mediocrity and urged a, quote, woke army of black youth to wage war with whiteness.
That doesn't sound good.
So Procter& Gamble is funding that and some other big companies.
Well, thanks a lot, Procter& Gamble.
And then he endorsed a boycott against Target.
And he said Trump was a fascist.
Trying to rob us of our wealth.
What wealth?
I'm not sure what wealth is going to rob there.
And then he urged black consumers to shop at black-owned businesses and to reclaim African way of being.
Okay, good luck with that.
But here's my favorite part.
This is something that Johns actually said in public.
Quote, We don't need nothing from white people.
We don't need nothing from white people.
They can't even make potato salad.
Oh, that's too far.
Oh, oh.
Now you've gone too far.
Really?
You're going to throw down on potato salad?
Well, I think we should have a potato salad off.
Let's see who can make better potato salad.
Black Americans or white Americans?
Hispanic or Asian Americans?
Because I think this is where we should draw the line.
Oh, you can say white mediocrity if you like.
You can say that you're forming an army of African-American young people to take back your wealth.
Okay, that's just freedom of speech.
But when you go after our potato salad, you bastards, you bastards, it's time to throw down.
So I think we need to have a potato salad off and solve this once and for all.
I'm not so confident that white people will win, but it would be funny.
It would be funny to have a potato salad off.
Anyway.
So as you know, Harvard is racist and this organization is super racist.
But at least AI.
Is not racist.
Am I right?
Thank goodness if you asked AI a question, you're not going to get some kind of racist response from AI.
Oh, wait.
According to the rabbit hole account on X, who asked the following question, is affirmative action racist?
ChatGPT said, no, affirmative action is not racist.
And Grok said, Oh yeah, it's totally racist.
So I think I just decided which AI I'm going to use.
I think I'm going to cancel my chat GPT right away because it's racist.
And this is a pretty clear example.
If there's an AI that says that affirmative action is not racist, what else is it going to tell me that's bullshit?
Now, even the people who were in favor of affirmative action, and there was a time when I was in favor of it, when, you know, 40 years ago, I thought, well, it's bad for me, it's bad for white people, but, you know, maybe we need to level up a little bit.
You know, not forever, so it's the forever part that I object to completely at this point.
It's like, come on, you had several decades, maybe that's enough.
But even if you're in favor of affirmative action, it's racist by definition.
The entire point of it is to change the outcomes from one race to another.
You can't get more racist than overtly saying race matters and we're going to change the outcomes of race.
That's the ultimate.
So Grok got that correct.
And ChatGPT.
Apparently, he's a racist and a liar, so that's not good.
Well, in weird but tragic news, Epstein victim Virginia Jeffrey died of suicide yesterday.
Now, because this is mostly just a tragedy story, I don't really want to play with the, oh, she did a suicide and...
Epstein did a suicide, so we're not sure if it's really suicide.
Was it really something else?
Let's just let the family alone.
So the family's got a tough time.
So I'm just going to let the family deal with this, and I don't think this is part of a bigger conversation.
It's just a tragedy from top to bottom, and it just got worse.
She had apparently been in a bad...
Some kind of auto accident and wasn't sure she would recover.
Maybe that's part of it.
Maybe it isn't.
But it's not really our business.
This is the family's business, and let's keep it that way.
Al Gore was on Bill Maher's show last night, and he was talking about his own efforts back in his administration with Clinton to reinvent the government.
That's what it was called.
Reinventing government.
And he bragged how he used a scalpel, not a chainsaw, and they carved away for seven years, and that they were successful.
They downsized the number of government employees, but he was bragging that they cut the fat and not the bone.
And so he thinks that...
Maybe Doge was a little too aggressive, too fast, cut too deep, and he's not even sure they're going to save any money, because even where they cut things, they may have to add them back.
So he was negative on Doge, but was talking about the good work that he did.
Now, I may have told you this before, but since he was on Bill Maher, I'll remind you.
During the Clinton administration, the Dilbert comic was gigantically popular.
So that was sort of the peak of its popularity.
And Gore actually had a Dilbert comic in his office because it mentioned Al Gore.
And so he liked Dilbert.
And he invited me into his office one day because I happened to be in Washington on other business.
And he invited me in and asked me if I wanted to help him use the Dilbert comic to explain how well they were doing with their reinventing government.
Now, at the time, I was smart enough to say, ooh, I can't do that, because it will look like Dilbert's taking sides.
And I was taking the Michael Jordan approach that Republicans buy shoes to.
So I didn't want to...
I didn't want to get political with the comic, so I said no.
But I also advised them against using humor because it makes it look non-serious.
I usually advise corporations not to use too much humor, unless it's like a TV commercial, that can work.
But I wouldn't do it as part of your normal communication if you're trying to communicate something serious.
It's the wrong vibe.
But I did hook them up with...
The best expert I knew on how to simplify and have good communication, which they used.
So I was a helpful member of the effort to at least communicate what they did.
That was my only part.
And I just hooked them up with somebody who was good at it.
So that was my little brush with that in those days.
And I was fully in favor of it, by the way.
I thought it was a good effort, and probably I think he should be proud of it.
I think that he got some good stuff done.
Well, Bill Maher, also talking to Gore, said, quote, the issue to me that is a central issue of our time is the peaceful transfer of power.
Now, I've heard him say that before, and I've heard a lot of other people say, yeah, you know, maybe.
Maybe Trump is doing some things that you like.
Yeah, maybe he's got that 80-20 thing.
Yeah, he closed the border, blah, blah, blah.
But, you know, the real thing, the thing which makes him completely unacceptable as a president, is that he was not in favor of the peaceful transfer of power.
Now, of course, that's the narrative.
The narrative that I understand...
Is that there was a peaceful transfer of power.
And that there was really no chance that a bunch of people wandering through the Capitol could actually change the transfer of power.
So to me, it's just fake news.
There was violence.
There was maybe an effort to delay.
But it was so small relative to what it would take to overcome a country, change the government.
Don't have a peaceful transfer of power.
It was such a small, even though there was violence, you know, the total scale of it was so small that it was a peaceful transfer of power.
But separate from that, I propose that we find out if 2020 was rigged or not.
And I've got a method to do that.
Wouldn't you like to know?
Well, you've probably all seen the graph of how many Democrats voted in all our recent presidential elections.
And you might be aware that it was always somewhere in the same level, except for one election.
There was one election where it was way on a line.
It was just way higher than normal.
And then you say to yourself, but that's because Trump was running.
You know, when Trump's running...
Those Democrats are really going to come out.
Except they didn't come out in 2024.
So how do you explain that it was Trump who is now the worst Trump ever, according to Democrats, because he had, according to them, had denied a peaceful transfer of power, even though, of course, it happened exactly on time.
So how could it be...
That 2020 was a gigantic turnout because they needed to defeat Trump, but they didn't show up when Trump was even worse in 2024?
Here's how to find out if those votes were real.
Do a poll.
So you do a poll, maybe you have a few different polling companies, but you say, just randomly ask people, which elections did you vote in?
Did you vote in 2016?
Did you vote in 2020?
Did you vote in 2024?
What do you think you'd get?
I'm just guessing, but I'll bet you would not learn that a lot more people voted in 2020.
Yet, that was our result.
Do you think it would be possible to have multiple Do you think we wouldn't be able to easily spot that 2020 was fake if it was?
If it was?
Now, if the polling showed that, yeah.
We voted in 2020, and it's the only time we voted.
And millions of people.
If the polling showed me that, what is it, 15 million people or some large number of extra voters beyond the baseline?
If the polling showed that there were, in fact, a whole bunch of extra voters who said they were extra voters, and they did vote in 2020, Then I would say, well, maybe I should shut the fuck up because that's actually pretty persuasive.
But what if you do two or three of those major polls with the most respected polling companies and you really do it big and you make sure they're well-funded so nobody's complaining about anything and then you compare three of them?
You know, they wouldn't work together.
So you'd have maybe Rasmussen, because they tend to be a little friendlier to the Republican side of things.
You'd make sure you have maybe two pollsters that tend to lean right, at least in terms of people's opinion, even if not in reality.
You give me three major polls, and I will take that as true.
Do you think we couldn't find out with polling?
Does anybody think that wouldn't work?
It would work.
It would absolutely work.
You couldn't do it if it's just Rasmussen, because then it would turn into, well, why would we trust Rasmussen?
You'd have to do it with a few polling companies that both sides have some problems with, but have been doing it for a long time and have the weight.
To actually be able to do it?
Yes or no?
Let's throw down.
I say let's find out.
Let's find out if those votes were real.
And I'll say it again.
If it turns out that all of the polls that check it find out that, yeah, indeed, there were major more voters in 2020, if that turns out to be true, based on polling, I'll shut up about it forever.
I'll never even allege that maybe there were some problems with 2020.
I'll be completely happy.
But why don't we check?
Let's find out for sure.
Now, how many of you are thinking to yourself, wait a minute, is it really that easy?
I think it is.
Well, it wouldn't be easy, because it'd be a pretty major effort.
But it would be well within the normal things that polling companies do.
So, why not?
Who's up for a challenge?
Who's up for finding out if we've been gaslit for years?
Does anybody want to know the truth?
Pretty sure we can find out the truth.
That's my suggestion.
Well, as you know, nobody is above the law, which turned out to be we've got a little test case.
So I forget the details because it doesn't matter.
But there was a judge who had an illegal immigrant in the courthouse.
And I guess ICE was waiting to arrest the illegal immigrant when the court was done.
But the judge suggested allegedly.
Suggested that the illegal immigrant use a non-standard exit to avoid ICE.
Now, that's illegal to help an illegal get away with being illegal.
And so it looks like the Trump administration arrested the judge.
So the judge got arrested somewhat publicly in the parking lot.
For aiding and abetting the escape of an immigrant, who didn't escape, by the way.
They managed to catch it anyway.
Now, I don't have all the details to that, but that's the basic idea.
But Andrew Weissman, who you might all know as a TV Democrat lawyer, there's a video of him talking about when Trump was arrested and law fared.
He kept saying, nobody's above the law.
Nobody's above the law.
And then when the judge gets arrested for what is clearly a violation of the law, I mean, I think even the supporters of the judge would say, okay, that was illegal.
But as Wiseman said, it violates a norm.
So arresting a judge violates a norm.
So when it was Trump who was getting law fared, No one's above the law.
No one's above the law.
But when a Democrat-leaning judge gets arrested for obviously breaking the law, well, it looks like Trump is violating a norm.
So if you ever wondered if the TV lawyers are just liars, well, there you go.
Not all of them.
Not every one of them.
But obviously, just a liar.
So I would say his credibility is gone forever.
Let's look into Democrats eating other Democrats.
The Washington Free Beacon noticed this on MSNBC.
I didn't say the name of the speaker, but they had a guest on who was a black man, which matters to the story.
And the MSNBC guest was...
Was scolding AOC and Bernie for what he called a shockingly non-diverse crowd at their event in Los Angeles.
And the MSNBC guest said that the Dems are going to lose midterms unless they have young brown people.
Well, it could be that the brown people were practicing their potato salad.
Possibly.
I mean...
It could be some salad-related thing.
But I had noticed the same thing when I saw images of the crowd.
It was really super white for the party that seemed to be all about diversity.
And I don't know if it's because oligarch doesn't activate the black and brown community.
And that white people like to pretend they know what that word means.
So maybe they go.
I don't know.
I have no idea why.
But it is...
I noticed it too.
So I'm going to agree with the guest whose name I wish I could tell you because he's completely right.
If the Democrats keep doing gigantic events and there are no black or brown people in the audience...
I'm pretty sure their own base of black and brown people are going to notice that.
How could they not?
So it could be that AOC and Bernie are working against their own interests without necessarily even knowing it.
Well, according to Victoria Ballera in Fox News, there's a new Fox News poll that says Democrats' favorability hit a new low.
It hasn't been that low since, I don't know, a long time.
And for the first time in a decade, it was that low.
But at the same time that Democrat favorability hit a new low, the Democrats are also advantaged in the midterms.
So if you look at a generic Democrat versus a generic Republican, according to a Fox News poll, the Democrats have an advantage.
Now, it's normal for the party that's out of power to have an advantage in the midterm.
So that's the most normal thing.
But I feel like I've seen polls that said it was the opposite.
So I think we need a poll off, besides having a potato salad off.
We need a poll off to find out.
Because I would swear we just saw some polls that said that...
The generic Republican was beating the generic Democrat.
Did that change recently?
It might have because of tariffs.
It might have changed.
So I guess I have a question about that.
UC Berkeley, one of my degrees was at UC Berkeley.
I, of course, disavowed them for being racist.
But UC Berkeley is in trouble because apparently they...
We're involved with a Chinese-funded joint research process in which China put $240 million into it, a joint tech venture that's been running for years.
And apparently, UC Berkeley did not disclose that to the government, which is now a requirement.
So I guess they got in trouble.
So a quarter of a billion dollars came from China to UC Berkeley.
Do you think that would affect UC Berkeley's anything?
Well, it might.
Do you think it would be transferring valuable technology to China that they couldn't get any other way?
Well, they're paying for something.
What is it you think they're paying for?
If they could do this research themselves, wouldn't they do it?
They wouldn't pay a quarter of a billion dollars to an American entity.
If they can do it themselves.
So UC Berkeley, racist and possibly traitorous.
I disavow my degree, and I'm going to pretend I never went to college at all.
Anyway, so Breitbart, that was a Breitbart story, by the way, the UC Berkeley one.
According to CNET, Apple is close to shifting all of its iPhone assembly to India.
So because Apple would have a big problem with tariffs if they leave everything to be assembled in China, they're moving all of the assembly that would be sold to America.
Not the stuff that would be sold around the world.
So China will still assemble iPhones, but only the ones that are going to be sold to non-United States markets.
And apparently, Apple was, with other companies, a lot of companies were already moving to India for a variety of reasons, because China's hard to do business with, or risky.
But Apple may be able to do its entire line of iPhones for the US, which would be about 60 million devices a year.
They might be able to do every bit of it from India by the end of 2026.
Now, when we were talking about tariffs causing companies to move their production facilities, we generally thought they couldn't do it very quickly.
But, you know, here's one of those special cases where they'd prepared for years, I guess.
They've been training Indian employees and building facilities in India.
They're just speeding it up a little bit.
So it was already going to happen, but they're going to speed it up.
So that's a big deal.
According to the New York Post, major shipping container company Hapag Lloyd, you know, Hapag Lloyd, the major shipping company, you all know it.
Said its customers have canceled 30% of their orders from China to the U.S. And, of course, that's because of tariffs.
30% of their orders for containers.
New York Post is reporting on that.
But there's been a massive increase in demand for shipments from Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam.
But that's not big enough to compensate.
So the amount that got cancelled in China from China to the United States is still way more than the big increase from these smaller countries to the United States.
So it's not going to solve any problems that the smaller countries are increasing.
Well, there was a long opinion post by Bill Ackman.
On X, which is sort of redundant, because if I say it's a Bill Ackman post, if you follow him, you know it's always too long.
He has the biggest opinion pieces in posts.
But they all make sense, and he's very smart.
And I think he's right on point on this.
He says that in terms of the tariffs, time is not on China's side.
Now, the popular opinion differs from his, but I think he's got the right take on this.
So the popular opinion is that China, because they're more of a totalitarian situation, they'll be able to weather the tariff situation better.
Now, that is true, maybe.
We don't know that for sure.
But it looks like it might be true in terms of just...
You know, the next several months.
So if there are several months of delay, they might be able to, you know, avoid a recession or depression or something.
Maybe a little bit better than this.
Maybe.
Even that's not for sure.
But here's Bill Ackman's point.
The longer the tariffs persist, the more rapidly every company that has a supply chain based in China is relocating it to India, Vietnam, Mexico.
The U.S. or some other country.
Now, that's what Apple's doing, and that's what a number of other companies are doing, too.
So he says this.
Here's the money shot.
There's no board of directors or management team who will ever again feel comfortable relying on China for a major portion of their supply chain.
The damage has been done.
So every week...
That the CEO of a major company says to themselves, wow, China is risky.
It becomes something that seemed like it might be temporary to something that looks like it's a permanent extra risk.
Because it is.
Do you remember in 2018, I promised you, and it seemed weird when I said it, That I was going to make sure that people understood that China was unsafe for business.
How many of you remember that?
And I said, you know, my motivation was my stepson had an overdose of fentanyl.
And so I thought, you know, it's time that people understood that China is not safe for business in the long run.
And I started saying it as often as possible.
And I don't know if it made any difference.
But nobody said to me in 2018, I think you have a good point.
Pretty much 100% of the smart people said, Scott, that train has already left the station.
People feel comfortable doing business in China.
China is so well-developed.
They're so good at manufacturing.
It's a well-oiled machine.
Of course people are going to keep doing their manufacturing in China, and there will just be more of it forever.
And I said, we'll see.
Because I'm going to say, China's unsafe for business.
And right now, Bill Ackman is saying, in a very clear and well-argued point, That China is unsafe for a business, and that that's not going to change.
And he's right.
And so, if you're thinking that Trump has shit the bed, screwed the pooch, and made the biggest mistake of any idiot who ever did anything with his tariffs, I would look at Bill Ackman's opinion.
Because I do think that the longer they go, the more permanent the damage is to China and the more permanent the safety is for the United States as things move into either safer allied countries or get onshored in America.
So time is on Trump's side.
Even though we might take a hit, you know, we might get a little recession hit, We might have some shortages over the summer.
That's all real.
But still, the long term, the actual survival of China as a manufacturing place that you could trust, that is completely in play.
And China probably knows it.
And so what Ackman predicts, and I think this is a good prediction, Is that both the U.S. and China are going to realize that they're better off if they say something like, let's pause this reciprocal tariff thing for 180 days and work out a real lasting agreement.
And if they do that, then we might come up with a better agreement than we've had.
But when we're done, China will still be...
Unsafe for a business.
And the United States will still be the United States, the biggest market that anybody ever had.
So probably there's going to be something like a mutually agreed pause.
And as Ackman accurately also points out, that probably the only reason it hasn't happened so far, the pause, Is that both leaders want to make sure they don't look like the weak one.
So, what does it mean to not look like the weak one?
Well, number one, if one side has made some big pronouncement about, we'll never back down, well, you can't be on the other side and back down within a week of the other side saying that.
If Trump says, we're going to win no matter what, You can't expect she to say, oh, in that case, we'll back down.
You can't expect that.
So there's something about the timing of who's insulted who and how badly and how long you have to wait before you can say, you know, maybe now's the time we should, you know, get serious and stop attacking each other.
So we might be just days away because you've seen that.
You've seen that Trump has softened his approach to China, just like you'd want.
You've seen that China seems to be saying they're not negotiating, but at the same time, it looks like they're negotiating, which suggests that they're probably not too far from saying something like, well, now that we've established mutual respect,
we can at least put a pause on this and talk it out.
So we might be surprisingly close to something that looks like at least a pause on the worst possibilities with an opening to improve our situation massively at the expense of China.
Because I don't know that China could ever recover from the risk that they've just shown the world.
So we'll see.
You know what's weird?
Here's two stories that shouldn't be happening at the same time that's related to this.
According to The Hill, consumer sentiment falls to its lowest level since post-pandemic inflation peak.
So consumer sentiment would affect how much you spend.
So if consumer sentiment is low, it would suggest that American spending and consumption Should also be lower.
But the Wall Street Journal is reporting on exactly the same day that spending is up.
So the U.S. consumer market is just so well-trained to consume that people are just buying a little extra just in case they run out later.
They're moving up some of their expenses that they probably wanted to do later.
They're like, well, if I do it now, I can beat the tariffs.
So spending's actually up.
How would you like to beat China and you're in this tariff war with the United States and then you hear, ah, consumer sentiment in the U.S. is down.
Good.
They'll be buying less stuff and this will drive them into a recession.
And then you hear that spending's up.
Spending's up.
That's like some of the best news you could ever hear.
It fits well with the Bill Ackman theory that the U.S. is probably in better shape to weather the long run than China.
Spending's up.
Now, I'm not sure that it will be up next month.
You know, maybe a month from now, everything looks different.
But the fact that it's up at all in the context of a tariff war, that's pretty amazing.
And I would say unexpected.
I wouldn't have guessed that at all.
But pretty amazing.
Here's something else that's amazing.
And this also goes to the Adams law of slow-moving disasters.
So when you heard that the U.S. was going to negotiate, what, I don't know, 160 different tariffs with different countries, and if you know anything about international trade or...
How complicated a tariff agreement would be?
You say to yourself, that's going to take a thousand years, right?
But that's assuming that we don't get smarter, and we don't become more efficient, and we don't figure out how to do trade deals with less friction.
Well, guess what?
According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. officials are creating a new template.
This sets common terms for many of the talks.
Oh my God, that's good.
I'll tell you, if nothing big happens over the weekend, this alone should make the stock market very happy.
I'm not predicting it will go up because lots could happen that's beyond this.
But if nothing happened beyond this, if you learned that the U.S. has figured out how to make a template, So that we could go to every country and we would say basically, you know, these are the things we're going to talk about.
Tariffs, quotas, non-tariff barriers, regulations on U.S. goods, digital trade, rules of origin for products and economic security.
And you could just see the list and you go, oh, okay.
So this is the template.
So basically it's a fill in the blank that you negotiate over.
That is a big frickin' deal.
Because if we start rolling up one deal after another because the template makes it easier, Trump wins.
Trump wins.
This is the sort of process improvement that's exactly what we needed.
But I'm not done.
According to the Swiss Confederation president, Karen Keller-Sutter, she said on Thursday that the U.S. is planning what she calls, quote, privileged trade negotiations with 15 countries.
In other words, they would have their own sort of faster or improved process.
So that's in addition or maybe even with a template.
I don't know.
But if the 15 most important countries that are also our allies and are playing well, so that would be Japan, South Korea, because they stepped up right away, good allies.
That would be Vietnam.
That would be presumably Europe if they wanted to get something done quickly, which they do.
So imagine this is true.
Imagine that the U.S. has figured out That they want to fast-track the best 15, because if they can get the best 15 done, like the ones that matter that are not China, it's everything but China?
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Trump might be on the cusp, and I say cusp that would last maybe a few months.
He might be on the cusp of one of the greatest...
victories we've ever seen.
And he would be pulling it from the deepest well of despair and apparent stupidity, according to all of his critics.
This could be one of the biggest wins of all time.
I mean, it would be legend if he pulls this off.
And when you see this stuff, you see that they're not just going for the goal.
The goal is to have better agreements, right?
They're fixing the system.
That's what I'm trying to tell you.
They're fixing the system for how you negotiate these deals.
If they fix the system and then they start rolling them out, oh my God.
Oh my freaking God.
That would be the most amazing thing.
Anyway, speaking of other countries, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, he's softened up quite a bit on the energy and gas and oil situation because the refineries are pulling out of California or gases twice as much as other places.
And he's turning Republican as fast as a man can turn Republican without actually saying those words.
And he's talking about the burdensome regulations in California and how that has to be softened.
And he says it's essential that refiners continue to see the value in serving the California market.
So he wants to make California a place that somebody wants to do business in, and that means softening regulations, which is a Trump system.
Trump's system is get rid of the regulations.
Everything will take care of itself.
That's very Trumpian.
Let's talk about peace deals.
According to the Daily Wire, Trump's team is in Moscow, and some say getting close to a deal, or as Trump says, quote, very close to a peace deal, and he's calling for them to finish it off.
Well, at the same time, Trump says that Ukraine...
Might be close to the mineral deal for the rare earth minerals with the U.S. I've been saying I'm not sure that will ever happen, but Trump thinks it might happen.
And he met with, I guess, the Pope's funeral is today, and Trump met with Zelensky briefly.
And, of course, it was productive, which doesn't tell us anything.
But I did see that there was one report.
That there was a new variable that got introduced into the Ukraine-Russia conversation.
And how many times have I told you, if you have a negotiation where you just can't seem to get anything accomplished, that sometimes you have to introduce a new variable.
Now, one of the new variables is the Ukraine mineral deal, but I don't really think that would be enough to give Ukraine a feeling of safety.
It might give them a feeling of, well, we could make some money, and we'll have a little more ties to the U.S. economy, and that would give us a little bit of safety, but not really much.
But I did hear, and I don't know if this is confirmed yet, that the U.S. was proposing that the United States be in charge of some pipeline from Russia that goes through Ukraine.
It might be more than one pipeline.
That goes from Russia through Ukraine to Europe.
And that part of the deal would be that would get turned on.
And that Europe could decide if they wanted to buy Russian gas at market values or not.
Now, if that's true, now we're talking.
Now, that is a good variable to throw in there.
Because Russia would not trust...
Ukraine.
Ukraine would not trust Russia.
Europe would not trust Russia to not turn off the gas.
So if Europe has options, so they could buy more from the U.S., they've probably looked into other sources, etc.
But they also have the option of a, let's say, a reformed Russia that's no longer at war that would sell it to them at market rates.
Maybe they'd like that.
But imagine having America in charge of the pipeline itself.
Because Ukraine couldn't protect it.
And if we're protecting that pipeline, we're giving Putin a fairly large incentive to just do business.
Because then he gets a business benefit out of Ukraine.
He's dealing with the U.S. Probably feels he can negotiate better with because we're more about business.
And that might be a way to close a deal.
There might be more to it, but I've been negative on the deal because I said that neither Ukraine nor Russia seem serious enough about peace.
But this new variable where we're doing some mining in Ukraine.
But on top of that, we might be managing the flow of energy from Russia.
That might be enough.
That might be enough.
So I'm going to cautiously upgrade the odds of a peace deal from no fucking way, which is where I was a week ago, to, huh.
So that's my new opinion.
Huh.
Maybe.
Could be.
Anyway, here's another one where I'd be a little surprised, but apparently Iran is acting like they want a deal in which they would not make nuclear weapons, but the details of that we don't have an agreement on.
But Trump has kind of goosed the situation by saying that the U.S. would lead an attack against Iran.
Quote, very willingly, if talks fail.
Breitbart's reporting that.
Now, that's probably the kind of pressure that's helpful because you want Iran to think, we better hurry up and we better make a deal because we don't want to get attacked.
Because they must be very aware that the only reason that Israel hasn't attacked them yet is that Trump is holding them off.
Probably the only reason.
So if Trump says, yeah, if you don't make a deal, we're very willing not only to let it happen, but to help the attack, I think that could help the negotiations.
But here's an idea of what the Wall Street Journal describes as a possible deal.
And not there yet, but it looks like it might be doable.
And again, I said last week it didn't look doable.
But here's some new variables introduced.
So I guess the conversations are happening in Oman, where the U.S. and Iranian negotiators are trying to knock it out.
And one of the key things is that Iran wants to be able to, what is it, refine?
What's the word they use there?
They want to be able to...
I want to use the right words.
Enrich their own uranium for domestic use.
Now, if you enrich uranium up to a medium level, then you can use it for all kinds of things like health care and other domestic benefits.
If you enrich it to a further level, then you could very easily turn it into a nuclear weapon.
Now, one of the claims here is that Iran has already enriched enough uranium that if they decided to build a nuclear weapon, it might be only a few months away.
And that the only reason that hasn't happened is that the leadership of Iran has ordered that they don't do it.
Now, had you ever heard that before?
Had you ever heard that the only reason they don't have one, because they could have one in a month or two, The only reason they don't is they decided not to, because presumably it'd be too big of a risk.
So that's interesting.
To me, that's a little bit new, because I thought it was more like we wouldn't know if they were doing it or not.
So maybe we do know.
So the idea would be, so Marco Rubio has proposed, I guess, That the enriched uranium would not be enriched by Iran, but rather they could just get it from other sources.
And then they wouldn't have to worry about it being further enriched.
And there would be inspections to make sure that they weren't building a nuclear weapon.
And that would be the deal.
The right to enrich their own uranium.
Now, is that a tell?
If Iran is that close to a deal that would avoid their own country being destroyed in a bombing craze, that the only thing they're holding on to is that they want the right to enrich uranium for peaceful domestic reasons?
When we've offered that they can have all the uranium they want, they just have to get it from other sources?
Does that sound like they really don't want nuclear weapons?
Or does that sound like they sort of do want nuclear weapons and they don't want to give it up?
Well, I guess part of the deal is that Russia is being talked about as the maybe keeper of the uranium or the source of the uranium.
And I feel like if Iran had more than one source for uranium, maybe they'd feel more comfortable if they really don't want a nuclear weapon.
That part's the big question.
Because they might be just jerking us around and all they're doing is stalling.
It's possible.
It could be they're just stalling.
Anyway.
But Tehran is allegedly, according to the Wall Street Journal, is planning to detail the status of its nuclear facilities and tell the U.S. and I guess the world exactly where everything is and how much they have.
Do you believe that?
Because if they were willing to just completely go transparent about their nuclear everything...
That would sort of suggest that they don't want to build a nuclear weapon.
So I'm getting mixed messages here.
Could go either way.
And so Iran has been considering options to store nuclear material under Russian supervision.
And then I also didn't know this.
Apparently Britain, France, and Germany are threatening to reimpose sanctions.
If Tehran doesn't come up with a deal.
And I thought to myself, wait a minute.
Are you saying that Britain, France, and Germany don't already have sanctions on Iran?
I guess they don't.
So things could get a lot worse for Iran.
Because we've got sanctions on them, but these other countries that are major countries don't.
And they might.
So, I don't know.
I guess I'm going to...
I'm going to upgrade the odds of a workable Iranian nuclear deal from no way, which was last week's opinion, from no way, they're just stalling, to maybe.
I wouldn't predict it, but it's solidly in the maybe, because we're at least getting mixed messages.
All right, that's all I got for you today.
As I said, Owen Gregorian will have a Spaces event on X that will begin very soon after I'm done here.
So I'm going to say a few words privately to the local subscribers, but we'll keep it short so that if you want to run over and join the Spaces with Owen Gregorian on X, that's the audio-only thing, and they'll talk about...
Maybe some of these topics and some others.
But thank you for joining.
Hope you enjoyed it.
And Owen, you can take over from here, but let me just say a few words to the Locals people privately, the rest of you on X and YouTube and Rumble.
Thanks for joining.
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