God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, Alien Bases Remote Viewing, US Political Identity, Gene Edited Pigs, Pope Trump, President Trump's Showmanship, Texas School Voucher System, Economy Strengthens, Reframing Trump's Tariffs Strategy, DOGE Accountability Systems, 2020 Election Tainted, Hakeem Jeffries Leadership, Perkins Coie Security Clearance, Trump Targeted Law Firms, George Soros, Open Society Strategy, AI Progress Rate, China Tariff Negotiations, Cartel Mexico Control, Ukraine Peace Talks, War Drone Development, Russian Gas Oil Sales, 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 think we should get ready for the best Saturday podcast you're ever going to see.
Because all the lazy people are sleeping in.
But boy, we're not lazy.
Or we're in different time zones.
That works too.
Alright, let's get our...
Our notes and our comments.
Good morning and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams and you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stye in a canteen jug or a flask.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine in it of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it's going to happen right now.
Go!
Oh, that's just what I wanted.
Just what I wanted.
Alright, get that fucking comment out of there.
There we go.
Well, after the show, there'll be a special Spaces for those of you who want a little extra.
That'll be hosted by Owen Gregorian on X. So if you're on X, just look for Owen Gregorian's X account, and you'll see the link for the Spaces that will start after I'm done here.
Well, let's see.
According to the Daily Mail, There are secret CIA files that claim to expose the secret locations of three alien bases, and two of them are on Earth, and apparently they discovered them using remote viewing.
Now, I guess the remote viewing was all they needed, so they didn't go to those places and look around, at least the ones on Earth.
And see if there were actually any alien bases.
But I'm here to tell you that remote viewing, which is where you have this psychic person go, oh, I can see miles from here.
There's a submarine base or whatever.
It's not real.
Now, you might say to yourself, but Scott, there's a peer-reviewed study that shows that it is, to which I say, Peer-reviewed studies are not worth anything.
You need a randomized controlled study.
Do you know how many remote viewers have passed a randomized controlled study?
None.
None.
Zero.
It's never happened.
Now, if the only test that's good enough for science is a randomized controlled study, and if remote viewing were real, And people can do it.
It would be the greatest asset the United States ever had.
I mean, it would allow us to win wars and find aliens and, oh my God, would that be valuable.
But nobody's ever passed a randomized controlled study for remote viewing.
It's always anecdotal.
The one I always laugh about, there's a famous case of the guy who was the best.
The best remote viewer.
And he was told to look at some location in Russia, or Soviet Union, I guess.
It was a while ago.
And he accurately drew a picture of a submarine base.
So he showed the submarine and some support structures on the port.
And I said to myself, all right, if somebody asked you to look at a remote place in Russia, And it was somebody who would be interested in a military kind of information.
Don't you think that would be enough to tip you off, that you're looking for some kind of military thing?
And if that location happened to be on the water, as in it was sort of an easy place for any kind of maritime stuff, don't you think you would say to yourself, hmm.
Sounds like some kind of naval base.
But if they ask the remote viewer, that means that they can't see what they need to see with a satellite.
So you'd say to yourself, hmm, it's near the water, it's Russia, it's probably military, but you can't see everything you need to see from a satellite.
What would that leave?
A submarine.
So every time you hear about one of these stories, Where a remote viewer got an amazing hit.
Like, how could they possibly have guessed that?
It's the usual way.
There are just some hints.
And then every once in a while, somebody's just going to get lucky.
They're just going to literally guess.
And it'll be pretty close.
So that's what remote viewing is.
Remote viewing is very much not real.
If you'd like to check that for yourself, do what I did, which is ask Grok.
Has there ever been a randomized, controlled study that showed that remote viewing is real?
And it will tell you, nope, it is definitely not real.
And if I were to put a level of confidence on this opinion, because I tend to say everything with the same level of apparent confidence, even if I don't have it, 100%.
This is one of my opinions where I'd say 100%.
Well, but would you bet every dollar you have?
Yeah.
Yeah, totally.
I would bet every dollar I've ever made.
I'm 100% sure remote viewing is not real.
Well, there's, according to Fox News, a big surge in gun purchases and also gun training.
So that's the good news.
People are pretty serious about getting safety training.
And apparently now more than 40% of US households have a gun.
I wonder at what point burglary doesn't make sense anymore.
If 40% of US households have a gun, that's pretty dicey if you're a burglar, right?
And you're trying to go in there at night and somebody might be there, but...
You think they're probably not.
I guess one of the tricks that the burglars use is they put a trail cam, a wireless trail cam in your bushes, and they aim it at your house, and somehow they can tell you that you're not home.
But they don't know for sure.
So 40% is quite a disincentive to go into somebody's house.
According to Interesting Engineering, we now have our first...
18-wheel driverless truck that can do long-haul deliveries in the U.S. It's called the Aurora driver system.
So we've actually got a truck, and Aurora is a Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle tech startup, and they're already pressing it into service for deliveries between Dallas and Houston.
So this is the first time.
That you could go out there and you could potentially see a big wheel, or what do they call it, a big rig, long distance truck with no driver.
I'm pretty sure I saw a story that said Tesla is pretty far along in building their own.
So I would hate to be a startup company that was going to compete against a Tesla self-driving long haul truck.
Because I feel like Tesla could make them cheaper in the long run, and their self-driving system will be superior.
So that's going to be a tough one to compete with.
According to Eric Dolan, who's writing for a side post, a new study published in Political Psychology says that...
At least in the United States, political identity is the strongest driver of how people view other people.
So we've actually transcended race and religion and gender and sexual preference and everything else.
But if you're the same political view, you're okay.
Now, it seems to me that this is sort of a move in the right direction.
On the surface, it would seem like, oh no, we're so divided by politics, which we are.
We're seriously divided by politics.
But the accidental outcome of that is that we're less divided by race and religion and gender.
Apparently, if you meet somebody that has the same political views, you're just friends.
And the other stuff just melts away.
And that's sort of the first time that's ever been the case.
So, finally, a colorblind world, which also suggests that the Democrat idea of identity politics is truly dead.
Because the more divided we get politically, the less we care what color somebody is.
I was looking at a video yesterday.
Of a black conservative, I won't name him, who said some things that were super provocative and interesting.
And I just said to myself, conservative.
You know, I actually feel this difference that, you know, we're not blind to race, of course, we notice.
But it's just not the thing that makes you form any kind of an opinion.
It's an observation.
And then you move on.
The decision-making part has to do with their brain and their beliefs.
In other news, MIT Technology Review says there's going to be, for the first time, a magic pig who they've used the CRISPR technology to edit its genes so that it doesn't get some kind of common virus that pigs usually get before they're shipped.
To slaughter.
So now we have these special pigs with special genes made by CRISPR.
And you know what that makes me ask?
Will the bacon be CRISPR?
Will the bacon be CRISPR?
That's what I want to know.
The whole pig is CRISPR.
So yeah, should be.
Well, Trump is continuing to troll the world in his Trump-like way.
He posted on True Social an image, an AI image, of himself being the next pope.
Because he was asked the other day who he thinks should be the next pope.
And he said, I think I should be.
That'd be a great job.
And I love how provocative that is.
It's, on one hand...
You can tell he's just joking.
And on the other hand, you think, well, is that being disrespectful?
And then you think, well, it's not really disrespectful if he personally wishes he could have the job, because I would suggest it would be a good thing to have.
So the fact that he just has that instinct to keep us continually laughing or angered.
It's amazing.
Now, I've got a frame on Trump that's my own frame that I don't talk about too much.
But when you hear people say, oh, he's got chaos and you don't know what he's going to do and he's unnecessarily mean and, you know, why is he doing this and why is he doing that?
I always think of the Bill Maher experience where he found out that Trump in person...
It has nothing to do with public Trump.
The public Trump is a show.
He's the world's greatest showman.
And when you watch his rallies, it would be tempting to say, oh, wow, he's like a good stand-up comedian because he makes people laugh.
No, no.
Or you'd say he's a good public speaker.
No, that's not quite it.
He's the greatest showman.
And he understands the power of the show.
And so when he does things like, you know, posting himself as the Pope, that's the show.
If you talk to him in person, he would presumably laugh about that.
But if you don't know the difference between the show and the real person...
You get all bent out of shape because you think the show is real?
No, it's a show.
And he understands the power of the show, that he can keep your attention, he can divert you if he needs to, he can make you love him.
It's the show.
And I don't think that he's even the least bit confused about what's his real personality and what is the show.
But boy, is the show good.
So good.
All right, I guess Reuters is reporting that Texas, we saw this come and signed a $1 billion school voucher law, so now if you wanted to take your kid to a private school and get him out of the garbage schools of the public school system, you could get up to $10,000 per kid that you could use, that the state would give you, you could use for your private school.
To which I ask the following question.
Is that even close to being enough?
What is the price of a good private school?
I thought it might be a lot more than $10,000 a year.
But maybe there's a difference between the high-end ones and the normal ones or something.
Does anybody have that information?
The average cost of a private school?
Because if all this is doing is allowing rich kids to save some money, somebody says 25 a year, 20 a year.
Yeah, that's kind of what I was guessing.
I was guessing 25 plus.
60,000 a culver.
Wow.
20 in Canada, 20 to 45. Yeah.
So, all it's really going to do is allow rich kids to save some money, right?
Because the poor kids, the ones who really need to have the choice, the poor kids aren't going to be able to afford it just because they got an extra 10K.
So, we'll keep an eye on this, but I don't know if this makes a difference in the real world, except to be just a gift to some rich kids.
Well, according to the BBC, I'm not sure how much of this story I believe, there's an individual, one guy, who spent 20 years allowing himself to be bit by different snakes on purpose and also injecting himself, in some cases, with snake venom.
And he survived.
And he survived more than 200 bites.
From different snakes that he intentionally allowed to happen.
And apparently the net effect of this is he built up some natural immunity that would cover a whole range of different kinds of snakes.
So now the scientists are trying to figure out how they can harvest his immunity and make it available to other people so that snakes won't hurt us.
I'll tell you, that guy sounds a little bit crazy.
Is he crazy, or is he just like the greatest hero we've ever known because he decided to take on this challenge and get bitten 200 times?
To me, that sounds a little mentally ill.
So I hope the mental illness is not in his blood because the only part I want is the snake immunity.
Anyway, according to the Wall Street Journal, They're acting surprised that the U.S. economy is showing significant resilience.
For example, the jobs numbers are pretty good and the stock market rally is pretty good and the unemployment rate is pretty good and a bunch of companies are trying to bring more business into the United States, which is pretty good.
Now, of course, our debt problem is terrible, but there are a whole bunch of normal things that look like they're stronger than you would expect, given that we're in some kind of a tariff war.
But we've already forgotten that the Democrats stopped talking about eggs.
Have you noticed that?
The Democrats went from eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs to about chaos.
Can we talk about chaos?
And gas prices?
Aren't gas prices at least a little bit lower since Trump took over?
So eggs and gas prices went from one of the top things that every single Democrat had to say every time they talked in public to never mind, never mind about those eggs because their prices come way down.
All right.
I'm going to give you, here's the most useful thing I'm going to do today.
I'm going to reframe Trump in a way that you haven't seen done.
You've seen parts of it, but you haven't seen it done comprehensively.
Number one, you are all aware that Trump has said many times, he said it out loud, I think he's written it in his books, that he likes to be unpredictable.
Right?
So we're all aware.
That he's intentionally unpredictable.
So what the Democrats did, which was kind of clever, is they reframed unpredictable to chaos.
And then it sounds bad.
And chaos is one of those words that just scares people who aren't paying attention, especially the elderly.
If you're elderly and you're depending on your Social Security and the Democrats tell you that Trump's full of chaos and he might cut all your benefits, Well, you might believe it.
So, you know, they're using that Nazi persuasion technique of the big lie, followed by infinite repetition.
And it kind of works.
But here's what you need to know.
The chaos is just his normal technique of being unpredictable.
Now, you might say to me, Paz Scott, clearly the tariff rollout was kind of a, just a...
Hot mess.
It looked like they didn't have it well planned.
And then as soon as it came out, they're like, oh, but we'll change this.
And oh, we didn't mean it.
We'll drop the tariff on that one.
And oh, well, we'll make this tweak.
And did I say 100%?
I meant 145%.
And then it looked to us like all kinds of poor planning.
But...
Here's a frame that you need to understand, because I know Trump does.
Have you ever heard the saying in war that a war plan only lasts until the first shots are fired?
Because once the first shots are fired, you have to figure it out like you had done no planning whatsoever.
Because it depends where the shots came from and all that.
Mike Tyson has a version of that for boxing.
And he says that your game plan for your boxing match only lasts until the first time you get punched in the face.
So my question is this.
How much was the right amount of planning and implementation for the tariffs?
And the answer is, if you believe that that should have been really, really well planned, then you don't understand what Mike Tyson was saying.
And you don't understand what every general will tell you.
Your plan is only good until the first shot is fired or the first time you get punched in the face.
And he knew, because anybody smart would know, that when he introduced tariffs on all these countries, and it was sort of all over the place, that there would be lots of shots fired and lots of punches in the face, and then you figure it out from there.
But in the meantime, You're getting the benefit of being unpredictable.
Now, you might say, but wait a minute.
Why is unpredictable good?
Unpredictable is bad, especially for the economy, right?
Unpredictable is the worst thing you could have for an economy.
Well, temporarily, we saw that our economy pulled back a little bit, right?
The stock market dropped.
The news coverage turned negative.
But that's all part of the plan.
That's the part where you're getting punched in the face.
So Trump was accurately and correctly not too worried about what a step two would be.
Step one was to get everybody all mad and to make it their top priority.
So persuasion-wise, if you can make something somebody's top priority and they're paying attention to it and they're booking flights to come over here to talk about it, that's a home run.
Now, some people say, Scott, couldn't you do it the boring, normal way where you just have your ambassador contact each country and say, we'd like to renegotiate our trade deal.
Can you meet with us?
That wouldn't have worked.
There's nobody smart who thinks that would have worked.
Would it work a little bit if you took four years for each nation you're working with?
Maybe a little bit.
But by being unpredictable and maybe a little crazy, the crazy is part of the process, by the way.
And remember, this is a show.
It's not his personality.
It's not who he is in the quiet moments.
This is all part of the show.
And what Trump can do that no one else can do is he can weaponize the show.
And that's what he did.
So when he says how much he loves tariffs and it's going to be replacing income taxes and the money's going to be rolling in, that's the show.
That's not necessarily something you're supposed to believe is specifically true.
That's the show.
And if the show gets every other country to feel uncomfortable because there's too much uncertainty, that's exactly what he needs.
If you're going to negotiate productively, you don't want to have your ambassador call their ambassador and set up a meeting because the other country, if they have an advantageous trading situation, which they do, they're just going to shine you on.
They're just going to tap you on.
As Trump likes to say, they're going to go tap, tap, tap.
And, oh, yeah, well, let's schedule that meeting next year.
Oh, too bad, our ambassador got replaced.
Why don't we wait another six months and then we'll totally have that trade meeting.
In the real world, the countries that had better trade deals than we do, and therefore were already at an advantage, they would just delay.
And then they wouldn't seriously negotiate.
What you needed was somebody who looks crazy and committed and unpredictable.
If you throw that at somebody, hey, you know your economy?
It might completely collapse.
I'm not saying it will.
But, you know, some things are in motion and people who don't deal with this, they might get some secondary tariffs.
You never know.
Maybe they're big ones.
Maybe they're 145%.
There's just no way to know how bad things could get if you don't negotiate with us right away.
So the first thing you need to know is that chaos is really just the reframe of unpredictable.
Unpredictable is good if you know how to use it.
Unpredictable comes with a show.
Trump puts on a show which he knows is a show.
So when he says things that sound to you crazy, it's not like he doesn't know it.
He knows it's making you crazy, and he knows it creates a sense of urgency in all the people who get dragged into the show, which so far is every country we do business with.
So what would you do if you were an Asian country that didn't want any uncertainty?
You would get on the first plane you could.
You'd come over here and you'd give up something to get your certainty back.
And that's what's happening.
So uncertainty causes anxiety in the person you were dealing with.
They need to get rid of the anxiety.
And so they're going to give you something to get back to certainty.
That's how negotiations work if you have a showman doing it who really understands the field.
If you were a Democrat, And you're just watching it?
You say stupid shit like, oh, why don't you use a scalpel instead of a chainsaw?
That's what somebody with no real experience or understanding of the show or negotiating or anything says.
Because they imagine that the normal, boring processes would get you a good outcome.
They won't.
They never could.
They don't have that power.
But he's created a situation where he definitely has the power.
To get people to want to get rid of their anxiety.
And you saw that the stock market, as soon as it saw something that looked like a little bit of certainty, went right up.
And there's probably more to come on that.
So, here's what you need to know.
There's probably no uncertainty whatsoever about what it is we want from each country.
So we might say, South Korea, we just need to get rid of these tariffs on these three things.
China might be, we need you to stop doing the fentanyl business, we need you to stop stealing IP, and we need a bunch of stuff with tariffs.
At the negotiating level, you know, the people who actually be in the room to negotiate the beginning of a deal, they know exactly what they're going to ask for.
They know what a bad deal looks like, and they know which country has which kind of bad deals with us, and there's no uncertainty there whatsoever.
We know what their situation is, and we know what we'd prefer, so we know what we're going to ask for.
And the other countries probably know that too.
They probably show up knowing exactly what we're going to ask for because they also understand their, their trade advantage.
So, um, Here's what I think.
As soon as Trump gets a few deals signed, everything's going to look different.
Now, the Democrats are going to have to come up with a whole new attack.
So I guess they'll say that the trade deals are worse than what he had, even if that's not true.
Because, you know, people aren't going to really be able to check.
So they'll probably just come up with a new Nazi lie and say, oh...
We just gave away the farm.
And then the average person won't even know how to check to find out if we came out ahead or behind.
And then they'll just repeat it over and over.
Oh, I gave away the farm, gave away the farm.
Looks like you gave away the farm.
And they'll have a little phrase that they'll all repeat.
And it might be that one.
You gave away the farm.
And they'll repeat it.
Which is the Hitler technique, because the Democrats are fully committed to Hitlerian persuasion at this point.
They're completely down with it.
And then they're going to say stuff like this.
I saw somebody say that the reshoring of the chip-making, well, it's not even reshoring because it wasn't here in the first place, but, you know, they're...
TSMC, I guess, said it's broken ground now in its third chip-making place in the United States.
And I saw somebody say, you don't understand.
It will take 10 years to build a new chip manufacturing plant in the United States.
To which I say, so that means we should start today, right?
If you think that because it takes 10 years, you shouldn't do it, what the hell is that?
Well, what kind of idea is that?
That if it takes 10 years to do it, this thing, which is completely necessary, that you shouldn't do it?
No, if it takes 10 years, you should start now, and you should try to get it down to five, which is probably possible.
So, he's got that going for him.
The other thing that the Democrats get wrong is they say that he's ruined our reputation in the world.
Do you think that's true?
Do you think if Trump starts rolling up the trade negotiations and he gets a win after win after win, and he'll probably start with our friendliest trade partners so that he knows he gets some easy wins, you know, it won't be China first.
Do you think that the other countries will say, oh, he's crazy?
Or will they say, all right, well, okay, it started out kind of sketchy, but he is getting some deals, and they are good for the United States.
The thing you need to know about international relations is they're not personal.
They're all transactional.
The very minute that another country needs the United States for anything, they're going to be friendly.
The minute they don't need us for anything ever, including national defense or trade, well, they're going to be jerks.
And it has nothing to do with Trump making people mad and insulting people.
That stuff is completely just transient.
It just gets them going.
It makes them pay attention to the United States.
It makes them think that whatever we need them to do is the most important thing they need to do to make their uncertainty go away.
But by far, all that matters is we end up in a good place.
So if we end up in a place where we're trading with other countries and we've got maybe some kind of defense agreement with them, they're going to be perfectly happy.
Maybe they need to wait for the next president, but that's not too far away.
The United States is not going to lose all of its reputation just because it did a good job getting better trade deals.
That's not going to happen.
Let's talk about Doge.
I've been a critic of Doge in the sense that I don't believe some of their anecdotal stories of successes.
And I was hoping for a trillion dollars in savings, but it looks like they're not going to get close to that.
But they are doing something that is so wonderfully big and important that it might be bigger than Even the savings.
Which is they're putting in fraud-catching systems.
And by that I mean requiring, let's say, a code and some kind of a receipt before money is dispersed so that people just can't easily get away with fraud.
That might be the most important thing they do.
Because if they upgrade the systems, and systems here is both computer as well as how people act.
And they put in fraud-catching systems.
That might be your trillion dollars.
I mean, I don't know how big it could be, but when you look at how much is clearly being stolen from taxpayers, that could be the biggest legacy, that there'll always be a doge.
I said this before, that the big benefit is that we know what a doge is, and we realize we didn't have one.
Meaning that we didn't have anybody looking to see if we were being efficient and legal or if there were fraud.
So once people realize, oh, well, if you did it right, and everybody has a different idea what that looks like, but if you did it right, it'd be a good idea to have a doge everywhere in your state, in your corporation, in your organization.
So yeah, it's a completely civilization-altering...
And it's an important one.
I guess the White House has unveiled a new website that some say looks like the old Drudge Report.
The New York Post is reporting on this.
And the idea is that the White House wants to tell people what's real and what's not fake news.
So we'll see.
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure it's biased.
I don't know how much play it'll get, but it's sort of a good idea.
I do think the White House having a hoax list, which they have, and then putting their own frame of what the truth is on their website, pretty good.
Making it look like a news report, that's probably a good decision as well.
Well, Bill Maher's panel, Apparently didn't like the idea that Oklahoma is going to require their students to learn that the 2020 election was, quote, tainted by fraud.
Now, without getting into the weeds of whether the 2020 election was, in fact, tainted with fraud, and I would say that there are two categories of fraud.
One would be money coming in from the outside and the lawyers changing the rules and changing them in a way that the courts would never have agreed, but somehow they didn't look at it.
That seems pretty sketchy, but not exactly what I'd call fraud.
It just seems like the election was gamed, I will say.
Gamed, but not necessarily illegally.
In some cases, maybe in a minor way.
But the other one would be, is there actually some obvious case of, you know, real fraud, like where fake votes were counted and stuff?
And then you also have the issue of the illegal voters, etc.
So we don't have to get into that, but I like the fact that Oklahoma is going to teach their students that it was tainted with fraud.
I do think there's enough.
I don't know about that election.
I'm not so sure that we had all the controls on everything that we needed.
I'm not so sure you could even audit it.
And why in the world was there just one year in which there are way more Democrat voters that didn't match the historical trend and didn't even match what happened at the very next election?
Now, to me, that is...
Pretty tainted.
Now, can I prove it?
Nope.
I don't have any proof that the election was stolen or rigged, but it looks exactly like it.
You know, from just an interested observer's point of view, it certainly looks like it was fraudulent, because if we don't see that level of Democrat voters in the next election, it's going to be really obvious that that was a one-off.
Yeah, and then also, as Owen's saying, the bellwether places were all wrong.
Like, all the bellwethers were sort of opposite of what they should have been.
So, my bigger question now, you know, is, if Oklahoma is teaching a different history than the other states, how could we ever trust history?
And the answer is, we couldn't.
And we shouldn't.
I don't think much of our American history is accurate.
I think I've learned at least two different versions of every big story of America.
When I was little, I learned that the pilgrims and the Iroquois Indians, they got along great.
And Squanto, the Iroquois Indian, taught us how to...
Put an ear of corn in the hole and, you know, a fish, use a fish as a fertilizer in the hole so your corn would grow or something like that.
And, you know, everybody got along great.
Then you get older and you read the real versions, you know, with these smallpox on blankets and Christopher Columbus using the locals as cattle.
They would actually ride on their backs.
They would just enslave them.
And use them as horses, basically.
They would just climb on the backs of the locals and make the locals trot along.
I don't even know if that's true, but I read it in some history book.
So, if our news is obviously fake, how could we possibly have real history?
It's not possible.
We can never have real history if our news is fake, because the history comes out of the news, right?
Well, there's now even more internal Democrat on Democrat hate.
So there's an ex-Nancy Pelosi advisor who also worked as a comms person for Kamala Harris and worked for Obama at one point.
And so it's somebody who's really, you know, really, what would you say, really connected.
In the Democrat world, Ashley Etienne.
And she was on a podcast for Politico's Playbook Deep Dive.
And she went after Hakeem Jeffries for his lack of leadership skills.
And I thought, well, why did that take them so long?
Every time I see Hakeem Jeffries talking, I think to myself, really?
That's sort of the best talker they got?
Of all the people in the world that they could have picked to be their main, sort of a main voice, they picked him?
Because he doesn't seem very good at what he does.
The things he said are just sort of obvious, just talking points.
All he does is repeat talking points.
And I think that's the same thing that Ashley Etienne is saying, that he's just not really adding much.
And I wonder if that's enough for them to actually make a change.
And my guess is, nope, I don't think it's enough to make a change.
So they've got the worst leadership, Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Pelosi is now 1,000 years old, and I don't think they have the ability to change them.
In some cases, because there's a DEI thing.
In other cases, because somebody who's been there so long that they have too much power and control.
They're in real trouble.
Here's the least surprising update.
A federal judge has ruled.
Can we go one day without me having to tell you a story that starts with, a federal judge has ruled, and you know that whatever comes after that, you're not going to like.
A federal judge has ruled.
That Trump's executive order going after Perkins Coie, the law firm that was doing some bad behavior, according to the Trump administration, that going after them and taking away their, I guess, their security clearance is unconstitutional and permanently blocked.
Now, wouldn't you expect...
That a law firm as capable and powerful as Perkins Coie could find at least one judge to...
What just happened?
Hold on.
My light just went off.
That was weird.
Don't you think that a high-powered legal firm that would be connected to everybody...
Could shop for a judge and find at least one judge who would say, no, that order against us is all illegal.
Well, they did.
It's the least surprising thing you'll ever see in the news.
Do you think they're done?
No.
Perkins Coie is very powerful.
So maybe on day one they took a hit when Trump surprised them by trying to take away their access and stuff.
But you knew that they were going to...
You know, gather up and come up with a plan, and it wouldn't be a bad plan.
Because they didn't get to be Perkins Coie unless they were really good at stuff, especially in the legal domain.
So, of course, they were going to come back strong.
And there it is.
Looks like they win.
And it turns out the CBS News, complete coincidence here, Listen to this coincidence.
CBS News is planning to run a segment on 60 Minutes about President Trump targeting law firms and other enemies.
Oh, do you think that they were planning to do that anyway?
Or is it possible that Perkins Coie, or somebody who has allied with him, said, you know, hey CBS, you know it would be a good story?
If you did a story about how Trump is targeting the law firms, now, I don't have any information that says Perkins Coie is behind CBS's decision, but wouldn't that be good lawyering if they were?
And they're good lawyers?
You don't think that there was even one person at Perkins Coie who could get to somebody who was a decision-maker at CBS and say, hey.
If you do this story, you know, we're going to open our kimono and we're going to have lots of people talk to you and we'll package up this story so you really got a winner.
I don't know that they did that, but they would be the kind of highly capable lawyers who should know that they should do that.
I mean, it would be a good play.
So if they didn't do it, they're sure getting lucky and I don't believe in that much luck.
So again, If you thought that Perkins Coie was just going to roll over and take the loss, no, that's not how that works.
They were going to regroup and come back stronger, and boy, did they.
But we don't know if they influenced the CBS News.
It just looks like a weird coincidence, if you know what I mean.
So I saw some long thread.
Inspired by Mike Benz, but put together by Data Republican, who you should follow next, Data Republican.
And it's a story about how all these NGOs came into being.
And the story is that George Soros wrote a document, and he laid out 30 years ago how NATO should transform from fighting the Soviet Union, which was going out of business, To some kind of an open society promoting entity.
And that it would be done mostly with things that look like non-military things.
In other words, NGOs and other charity things.
And so he laid out what we should be doing, the West, I guess, the United States and NATO.
And what NATO should be doing, according to Soros, again, this is 30 years ago, is not so much focusing on war, because the threat of war, at least with the Soviet Union, was much smaller after the Soviet Union was falling apart.
And instead, It should be to reshape other countries into this so-called open society.
Because if you got rid of the populists, and even then they knew that populists were the problem, and they said that populists, like Trump, were the problem because they needed an enemy.
Now, I'm not sure that's true in Trump's world, except for maybe immigration, but that's not really an enemy situation per se.
So that wherever there was a country that had a populist leader, they would try to use their non-military power to get rid of the populist and put in place a system that would be resistant to populists.
And here's what the open society should look like.
Now, this is in concept.
It's not the real world.
But in concept, the open society that Soros wanted all these other countries to follow would be there should be democracies with free markets, civil rights, minority protections, transparency, and a global rules-based order.
Now, I don't know if that's anything close to how things are playing out in the real world.
But they needed to avoid nationalism.
I'll say nationalism instead of populism.
So he was railing against nationalism.
Because nationalism is the one that attracts enemies, basically.
Or at least identifies as somebody else's enemy.
And he thought that the open society should be sort of dominated by outside forces and elites.
I think that's an interpretation.
But here's a Soros quote that Data Republican is giving us.
Combating closed societies involves the building of democratic states and open societies and embedding in them a structure which precludes certain kinds of behavior.
Embedding in them a structure that precludes certain kinds of behavior.
Would that be something like building some kind of anti-free speech censorship mechanism that affects a whole bunch of different countries from the outside, but also from the inside?
I think it would.
So the censorship stuff that a lot of the NGOs were involved in seemed like...
It fits into this category of a structure that precludes certain kinds of behavior.
In other words, anything that Soros doesn't want to be said out loud, there would be a mechanism, a censorship mechanism.
Now, this is my extending the argument.
This is not coming from data Republicans specifically.
So all these NGOs would pop up, and all they'd have to do is say, hey, we're part of this, creating these countries being less nationalism and more open societies, and we'll put some mechanisms in place that can control them directly or indirectly.
And that the new purpose of NATO was to assimilate countries as open societies.
So that's what Soros was pushing 30 years ago.
And it was also specifically meant that NATO would try to expand its presence eastward and pick up those ex-Soviet bloc countries, which it did.
So it's exactly what we saw.
So the open society was something that the Uniparty agreed on.
It was basically a way to conquer other countries, but make it look like it was more of a natural outcome instead of a war.
You would conquer them with influence, basically.
Money and influence.
And as Data Republican points out, this isn't just theoretical.
There are some examples.
In 1994, the Partnership for Peace launched.
In 1999, NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic.
2004, NATO brought in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria.
2008 to 2022, brought in, well, tried to bring in Ukraine and Georgia, but they didn't make it.
And in 2023, Finland joins.
And then a stated Republican asked, why did everybody go along with it?
Like, how do you get so many people to get on board with a plan like this?
And the answer is that the amount of money involved was enormous.
So everybody could figure out how to get a taste.
It's like, well, if I go along with this, I could start an NGO or I could work on one and there's all this money slopping around.
I could get me some of that money.
So pretty much money was behind it all.
So I don't know if that helps you understand how we got to where we are, but it helped me.
David Sachs had an interesting post about how quickly AI would improve.
Now, some smart people disagreed with him, but he was talking about how by the end of the Trump administration, assuming he just goes four years this time, That the models themselves would be 100 times better, and that would be a normal compounding rate from what we've seen.
The chips would be 100 times better, and the data centers would have 100 times more chips for a total increase if you take all these hundreds, 100 times 100 times 100, you get to a million times more artificial intelligence.
A million times more.
So whatever you think is...
How awesome AI is?
By the end of the Trump administration, it could be a million times stronger than what we see.
A million times.
Now, some critics, and I might be one of them, will say something like, yeah, but the other possibility is that AI has already plateaued.
Now, it's still getting better, you know, in a whole bunch of different ways, but...
The large language models might have some kind of a limit.
Once you've trained it every way you can train it, maybe from that point the benefits are a little bit slower, more normal like regular software.
We don't know.
But I do know that to get to the superintelligence that we're warned about, probably they need to invent Some new techniques, not just make the current techniques faster.
So we'll see if any of that happens.
But it's going to be a crazy world.
Apparently Google says that 30% of all their computer code is now being written by AI.
But I'll bet they still need the real physical programmers.
So I don't know how long it's going to be before that goes away.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Somebody in China has been asking.
It's the Chinese Minister for Public Security, and he's been inquiring what the Trump administration expects on the fentanyl question, because China is sort of slowly preparing to negotiate trade, and fentanyl was one of the things that Trump laid down as important.
And so allegedly, according to the Wall Street Journal, There's at least one person who's in the right kind of job who's saying, can you tell us more about what you'd expect us to do?
Now, to me, that sounds like they're getting ready to negotiate and they just want to be prepared.
And according to Fox News, Beijing has now sort of laid down the following condition, I guess.
That they'd be willing to talk.
So they're, quote, evaluating an offer from the U.S. to hold talks on tariffs.
So they're not rejecting it.
They're evaluating the offer to talk.
So they want to act sort of like we're wooing them or something.
So they're not coming to the table because we're bullying them.
They're coming to the table because we're asking nicely and, you know, they'll consider it.
So that's the way they want to frame it.
So as long as Trump starts to talk nicely to them, it looks like they're willing to take baby steps toward negotiating, because of course they have to.
So I think that's going to happen.
According to Terrence Cole, who's Trump's pick to have the DEA, He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the cartels now govern most of Mexico.
And he claims that the drug lords aren't just influencing cops in the military, they're working with them.
So the government and the cartels are basically indistinguishable now?
Okay.
So if you wondered whether we had to send our military down there to take care of business, it's not going to happen with the Mexican military.
Unless they do some, you know, I think they do some fake-outs where they just go after a rival, you know, the weaker rival cartel, and then they tell the United States, look, look, we're doing things to get rid of drugs here.
We got rid of, you know, this cartel.
But really, they're just working with a stronger cartel who wanted to get rid of the competition.
I feel like that's what's happening.
So we'll see if Trump can work his way through that.
Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal, Columbia is at a new high in making cocaine.
Do you remember, it wasn't that long ago, when our CIA and the Colombian government worked together to go after the cocaine fields, and they were spraying them, and they were working hard to arrest people, and they really, they knocked down the cocaine production in Columbia by 70% or something.
It was quite successful.
But there was a lot of pushback.
And ultimately, that partnership fell apart.
And now Columbia is making so much cocaine because they're getting better at it and there's just more of it that they need special narco submarines to move it all.
So they've got these semi-submarines where the top of it is still above the water.
But it's very, very shallow and doesn't look like there's much going on on the top.
But the rest of it is underwater, so it's harder to spot.
And apparently one of these was on the way from Colombia to Australia.
And I thought, really?
They have the technology to build a semi-submarine that can take tons of cocaine all the way to Australia?
Now it got caught, but apparently they make so much that losing a few tons of cocaine is no big deal.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the U.S. is going to withdraw some of its efforts as mediator in the Ukraine-Russia peace talks.
So according to Tammy Bruce, State Department spokesperson, She said that the methodology for the talks will change and that we will not be the mediators.
So the U.S. is kind of saying, all right, we've done what we can do.
Now you're going to have to talk with each other or nothing's going to happen.
Because obviously we knew that neither of them could make a deal with each other by talking to a third party us.
That maybe you could toss out some ideas and find out.
You know, where the guardrails are and stuff like that.
But you couldn't really make a deal by not talking to the person you're making a deal with.
So since they were not talking directly, it looked like nothing was going to happen.
So Rubio, Marco Rubio, told reporters that the U.S. could not continue to dedicate its resources to talks that would not succeed.
So we're basically pulling back.
So we got that mineral deal signed, which makes it look like we have a long-term economic interest there.
I think we could debate how real that deal is and how long it would take before anybody makes any money on it.
That would be a perfectly fair conversation.
But I think this would be a test of my predictive ability.
How many of you remember me predicting?
Kind of a while ago, that it didn't look like either Russia or Ukraine were seriously interested in peace.
And I predicted that we would have to step away because they just weren't serious.
Well, there it is.
I don't know how many other people predicted that there was no way that the two of them were going to be serious about a deal, but I got that one right.
So, if you keep in score.
However, here's some related news that might be important to it.
According to New Atlas, there's a new drone company in the United States that claims, and this claim has not been verified because it's a big claim, that they can make incredibly high-performance drones in the United States, and they can make them for a cost that's competitive with China's cost for making drones.
Now, that's quite a claim.
But that not only would it be cost-competitive, but it'll fly four times longer, ten times further, and ten times quieter, and carry five times more payload.
So it's a Silicon Valley-based company called SciFly.
And, of course, there would be other drone companies as well.
So do you think that's real?
There are some skeptics who say, We're going to have to see this thing.
We're not going to take the press release as true.
We're going to need to see this.
How in the world do you make your drones so cheaply?
It just doesn't seem like that's economically possible.
But maybe.
Maybe they fully automated it and it's 3D printers and a couple of robot arms and you're off to the races.
Could be.
Or it could be vapor.
But here's what I think.
I think the U.S. has decided that Ukraine is going to be our drone testing environment.
Now, Ukraine itself is maybe the, arguably, could be the foremost producers of war drones because they sort of had to develop that.
Now, a lot of theirs are made in garages, but they've also developed a A drone industry.
So Ukraine can make a lot of drones.
But of course, if our drones are better and more deadly, they're probably going to end up in Ukraine.
And then we're going to see how well they work against Russian drones and Russian anti-drones.
So I feel like there's some confidence that Russia can be held at bay with massive drone technology that's...
Really inevitable.
So this could be part of the reason that we can step away, is that we don't think the front line is going to change that much.
And if it did change that much, the number of drones would go up by 100, and it would change back.
So I think it's the drone testing ground from now on, and that the U.S. will probably be greatly advantaged by testing their drones in actual combat.
Because if you don't test them in actual combat, you never really know if you've got a winner drone.
You've got to put it into the actual fight.
And this is the ideal actual fight because it's Russia on one side.
So Ukraine will be a drone testing environment, I think.
Well, Trump has threatened to put tariffs...
Well, actually, Lindsey Graham.
It's a co-sponsor in a bill that would put tariffs on countries that buy oil and gas and other minerals from Russia.
And so what's missing in the story is, what countries are buying oil and gas from Russia?
So I went to Grok, and I asked that question.
And the answer is, China, most of it, or like half of all their sales are to China.
Beholden to China.
But also, a lot of their sales of oil and gas and related stuff is to India.
India is the second biggest buyer of Russian energy.
And then Turkey.
So, you know, already we have a problem here.
Turkey started NATO.
And then the European Union, 17 billion.
of LNG.
Brazil, Saudi, even Saudi Arabia buys some kind of specialty kind of energy from Russia that I guess they don't do in Saudi Arabia.
And maybe the UAE and South Korea and Japan and Taiwan.
And I'm thinking to myself, when you first read Lindsey Graham saying that they're going to put some kind of tariffs on countries that buy from Russia, If you're not thinking about which countries those are, it might sound like a good idea.
But we're not going to put additional tariffs on China.
Probably not.
And India is an ally.
And you could just go down the line.
How in the world are we going to tariff the EU for buying some Russian energy?
I don't know.
That doesn't seem real.
Well, after the show, I told you that Owen Gregorian is going to be hosting a Spaces on X. So this is the end of my prepared remarks.
I'm going to talk to the locals' people, but only briefly, so I'll release them to go to the Spaces.
Hope you enjoyed the show.
Hope you learned something about Trump's negotiating techniques and chaos equals unpredictability.
And that's it for today.
So look for Owen Gregorian's X feed.
He's going to do his spaces, and they'll continue the conversation on these topics and more.
