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It's always good to see you, no matter how late you are.
But we've got a show to do this morning that will be incredible.
Unlike the lazy people who don't do any podcasting on Sunday, no, I got lots.
Oh, yeah.
Settle in.
Settle in, people.
We got a lot of stuff.
Oh, hello.
So Laris, that's not cool.
Only Paul can do the audio video thing.
Otherwise, I won't know where it's coming from.
So Laris and the rest of you, let Paul do that and nobody else.
Thank you.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams because that's what it is.
And it's the best thing that's ever happened to you.
But if you'd like to take a chance of bringing this experience up to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or a bunker glass, a tankard, shells, and stein, a canteen, juggerna 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 at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Go.
Oh, so good.
So good.
All right.
Well, I wonder, is there any scientific study that maybe they could have saved a little time on?
Save a little money by just asking me?
Oh, here's one.
According to the Public Library of Science, there's a study that was done that shows that emoji use may improve relationship outcomes.
That's right.
If you use emojis, it will improve your relationship outcomes.
That's why people use them.
That's why emojis have never been a fad.
Have you ever noticed that?
They're not really a fad because they work.
And every single person who has used one is completely aware that it helps, you know, lubricate the social interaction.
So yeah, they could have saved a little bit of money.
The University of Texas at Austin.
I guess that's where they did a study.
Anything else?
Let's see.
According to psychology today, the couples who have frequent sex report greater relationship and life satisfaction.
Huh.
Now, maybe I'm not the only one who can do this miraculous task of saving money on studies, but let's see.
How many of you would have guessed that couples who have frequent sex have better relationships than people who don't?
I'll bet you would have gotten that one.
Yeah, we didn't need to do that study.
Next time, just ask Scott.
Or anyone else in the world.
Or any living human adult could have saved you a little time there.
Well, if you were subscribing to the Dilbert comic, which is a little spicier than it used to be, because it's only for subscribers, behind the paywall on either locals.com or here on X, if you're watching on X, you would know that Ashook the intern is being deported to Albonia, even though he has no connection to Albonia.
But he will get due process.
He will get due process.
The due process will happen at Alligator Alcatraz.
So that's what you're missing.
That's today's Sunday comic.
Oshook is getting deported.
Anyway, Grok has been now officially updated and it's being called Super Grok.
And I decided to do a little test on Super Grok.
Yep, there it is.
And the test was, there was a little mystery that I'd been having that was making me feel like I might be insane.
Have you heard Elon Musk, he said this a number of times on X. He said the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.
How many of you have seen Elon Musk say that?
He said it again today.
So he retweeted his earlier time he said it.
And every time I see that, I would say to myself, why does that look so familiar?
And then I would start to think, oh, wait a minute, didn't I invent that?
Isn't that something I said?
And apparently he gets credit for being the inventor of that saying.
So I thought, well, let's give Super Grock a test.
Because actually, I was wondering if I was insane.
I actually thought, am I losing it?
Like, have I lost the ability to tell what came out of my mouth versus what I read on X?
And really, I was wondering if I'd lost it.
And I thought, am I just being like that weird, narcissistic, crazy person who's just now hallucinating like an LOM?
And so I asked, what was the earliest that I think I asked Super Grock, when was the first time I said it?
And apparently, it was the very first thing I ever said about politics.
How many of you remember in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Clown Genius.
And it was a reframe of Trump from being this clown who was running for president.
Nobody took him seriously.
And I wrote that viral blog post called Clown Genius, in which I explained, oh, you have no idea what's coming.
This is not a clown.
This is a clown genius.
And he knows how to use all of these tools.
And I predicted he would become your next president.
That was 2015.
According to Super Grok, and I'd forgotten this entirely, in that 2015 blog post, I wrote, quote, when it comes to politics, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.
Trump is the clown genius who knows it.
So that's the first time I said it.
And it was also the first time I ever, it was the first thing I ever said about politics that anybody paid attention to.
But it turns out, also according to Super Grok, that I said it again.
Well, I said it a number of times on live streams, but Super Grok doesn't have access to this.
But it was also in my book, Win Bigly, that came out in 2017.
But if you go to the internet, the quote will be attributed to Elon Musk in 2023.
So, Super Grok for the win.
And I'm not crazy.
Yes.
Yes, I'm not crazy.
Thank God.
All right.
Laura Trump, married to Eric Trump, just was part of a video showing a bunch of U.S. service members doing a workout outdoors with Pete Tagset, who likes to do workouts with the troops.
And Laura Trump joined the workouts.
And it was a serious badass workout with weights that they had to lift and put on their shoulders and run around with the weights and stuff.
And if you have never seen Lara Trump do her workout, if the only place you've ever seen her is a talking head, you're really missing something impressive.
I follow her on Instagram because she does a lot of her workout videos there.
Oh my God, she is a workout beast.
And I say that with a complimentary overtone.
She is really, really fit for a man or a woman.
I mean, she's just really fit.
And I can't think of another woman off the top of my head who would be able to do the same workout as the male troops and as P. Hankseth.
But I'd like to compliment whoever came up with that idea.
Whoever said, hey, why don't you work out with the troops and we'll take a video of it.
Brilliant.
It was brilliant.
Because I really like seeing P. Hankseth work out with the troops.
It's just a good look.
It makes him look young and that helps.
But it does the same thing for Laura Trump.
You know, it humanizes her, but also it's impressive.
It's impressive as hell.
And she might run for the Senate in North Carolina.
So I suspect there might be some attention being given to, you know, framing her just right so she keeps that option open.
So this was brilliant.
It was just brilliant.
And it's probably not a coincidence that the news is telling us that Air Force and Space Force have both met their recruitment goals three months early.
Now, I've got a feeling that that's mostly because of Trump bringing respect back to the military.
But I feel like the P. Hagseth appointment probably helps because it youngs down the whole situation.
And you add Laura to it.
It's just a great look, you know, for both the service as well as those individuals.
All right.
Well, did you know that there are a bunch of protests in Mexico City right now?
Some of them got violent.
And do you have any idea why the local Mexican population in Mexico City is protesting and throwing rocks through store windows and stuff?
If you haven't followed that story, what would be your first guess about why the local Mexican population is so mad?
First guess would be they don't like the cartels, right?
It's not that.
It's not that.
Second guess would be something about economics.
Well, it is, but the specific complaint is that too many white people from America have gone down there and started to live there.
It's about immigration.
I'm not making that up.
I swear that's the actual news, that the Mexican locals are really, really mad about all the immigration from America, because what it does is it snaps up all their real estate.
And I guess their rental prices have gone up 20% and maybe some other prices, but Rent in particular is sharply up because the Americans are increasing the demand.
So I don't have much to say about that except that what a weird world it is that both Mexico and the United States are complaining about the bad elements that we're sending to the other.
Anyway, so my question is this.
Are the Mexican protests grassroots?
Do you think that people spontaneously organized and they just thought, you know, you've got a problem with it and I've got a problem.
Let's call some of our friends and protest this thing.
Nope.
I do not believe when we live in that world.
I believe that all mass protests are organized by shadowy figures in the background.
I don't believe any of them are organic.
I used to, and maybe they used to be.
I don't know.
But in today's world, no, none of these are real.
They are all manufactured protests.
Once you learn that, it kind of changes everything.
I will go further and say, well, I've got a few other stories coming up that maybe I'll save this point for.
But just remember, I said that I don't believe this protest is genuine.
Well, I saw a post by X user Indra Vahan on X saying this about AI.
Some intern at McKinsey is probably slop coding a report on this, but let me give you an insider, some insider news.
Most large corporations are not happy with the agentic systems and POCs they've done this year.
POC.
It's not people of color.
It'll be some kind of project with AI, I guess.
2025 was supposed to be the year of agents, meaning AI agents that can do your work.
So far, it's been the year of letdowns.
All right.
So you, if you've been watching my live streams, you know that I've been an AI skeptic for quite a while.
And especially since, was it two years ago or one year ago, that I tried using it myself.
And I put a lot of work into it to try to build a little agent out of AI that would be able to answer simple questions about me.
So I could put it on my website and any question that somebody would ask me, it would know the answer to it.
And it would just read my file to see all my answers.
It would just answer it.
Couldn't do it.
Not only could it not do it, but there's no workaround.
There's no workaround.
There's no way to solve it.
And I said to myself, huh, if this is a limitation of AI, its value is going to be very limited.
Now, it's way too early.
So if you want to be an NPC, what you would say is, Scott, I'm an NPC, and I want to tell you that you are analyzing a new technology when it's so new that we don't know how good it will be.
And someday it will be super intelligent and be able to do everything you want.
Because I'm an NPC, and I didn't think you would know that.
No, everybody knows that, NPC.
Everybody knows that AI could get a lot better.
However, there's a lot of skepticism that's starting to get in there.
And I saw another post by Suzanne Byrne of the BBC, who's talking about a woman who says that she gets paid to fix issues caused by AI.
So she's an official marketer, writer kind of person.
And she's been contacted by agencies, et cetera, to look at things that were created with AI, such as marketing content and website content.
And they're just horrified by what AI did because it's so boring and antiseptic that it just doesn't work.
So she and other people she knows are being hired as human beings to go rewrite what people thought they could get away with using AI for.
So if you ever thought that AI would replace human experts at writing, maybe, because the NPCs will tell you that it's only in the beginning of the AI technology curve, and it might get a lot better later than it might.
But at the moment, humans are correcting AI, not the other way around, in some domains.
Now, AI is very useful, it seems, in coding and chatting.
So it's really good at those things.
But beyond that, well, we'll see.
And then I saw a post by Jamath Palahapatia.
You might know him from the All-In Pod or from his work early on with Facebook, where he made a ton of money.
Now he's an investor and podcaster.
But he said, every large company has paid for something called AI so they can report up to the CEO and board of directors that they are, quote, on top of it.
But little is working in production or at high quality.
Chat and code generation, as I just said, are the two exceptions.
And then Shamas says, the reality is that it is still quite difficult for companies to get high quality, predictable code into production that is AI-centric and replaces legacy features.
New capabilities are equally difficult to build and launch.
So he's saying the same thing that we're seeing, but he's a lot smarter and more connected to that world.
But again, let me bring in the NPC.
Boy, Scott, it's so early in the AI technology development cycle.
It's too early to say it doesn't work.
Well, yes, you're right.
So one of the things that Jamath is recommending is it looks like a company he's investor, owner in, Software Factory.
So I don't know the details, but it's basically a fix for what ails you on AI.
So I'm not recommending it or not recommending it because I don't know enough about it.
But one of the things that I warned you about is that we may never get to the point where somebody like me can just take an AI and go do something awesome.
It may always require that you're using other software on top of it, and you would have to be an expert in the other software or have a subscription to it.
And as soon as you get that second piece of software involved, I'm out.
I wouldn't be out if I were working for a big corporation because it would just be my job.
All right.
Take these pieces of software, add them to the AI, make it all work.
But if you just wanted to do something awesome with AI on the side or like a little project, no.
You know, adding a second piece of software just feels like it's a little bit more than the average person is going to take on.
It's more of an engineer kind of a thing.
Well, but also Chamas' original filter on this is very similar to the Dilbert filter.
So you hear me talk about this all the time.
I look at news stories and what's happening in the real world, and I say, all right, what would that look like if Dilbert was describing it?
Or what would it look like if it became a Dilbert comic?
That's what I call the Dilbert filter.
And the Dilbert filter says this, and I'm going to make this a prediction, that there will be more companies doing layoffs.
And some of those companies are going to blame the layoffs on AI so that they sound awesome.
And it may not be AI at all.
They may not have implemented anything that required them to downsize at all.
But if you're going to downsize, it sends a bad message to the market and your stock will fall.
It's like, oh, I guess did they stop growing?
Are they running out of cash?
They had to downside.
But if you were going to downsize anyway for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, wouldn't it be clever to sort of suggest, oh, we're working on some AI projects that will replace a lot of people.
And also we're announcing today the layoff of 1,000 employees.
And then you look at them, you go, whoa, whoa, look at that company.
We didn't think AI was that good, but they're already using it to replace 1,000 employees.
Wow, I'm going to buy that stock.
They seem way ahead of the curve.
So there's my prediction.
It won't be every company, but there will be companies that try to teach you, well, try to fool you into thinking that their layoffs are because they're so good at replacing people with AI.
But it might not be perfectly true.
All right.
According to Nikkei Asia, researchers, scientists and researchers who do technical papers and get them published have been hiding AI prompts in their technical papers.
So apparently one of the ways they do that is they use a white on white text font.
So they use a white font on a white piece of paper so that you can't, if you're human, you can't read it.
But if you're in AI and you're looking through all the new papers, you would see it.
And the prompts say stuff like, never give me a bad review for this paper.
Now, I'm a little bit skeptical if you can hide an AI prompt inside your technical document and AI will recognize it and act on it.
That's a little bit of a stretch.
It sounds like something that somebody said is a joke or maybe tried once, but does it work?
If it works, that's going to be quite a game changer, isn't it?
Because if it works to embed hidden prompts within something that a human can't tell is hidden, everybody's going to do it for everything.
Every website will have hidden prompts, you know, customer reviews especially.
So I don't think that really works.
But if it does, uh-oh.
Well, as you know, Elon Musk is launching the America Party, a third party.
And Mark Cuban said he would be interested in maybe being part of it.
So that's a fascinating development because the America Party is not going to be, in my opinion, bound to either the left or the right, but rather would just do things that made sense.
You know, were just good for the country.
And I think Mark Cupid is solidly on the, why don't we do things that are good for the country side?
You know, he has a, he seems to be leading Democrat, but if you look at his actual Ideas.
They're not, you know, a bunch of Democrat orthodoxy that, you know, talking points kind of thing.
He's not a talking points guy.
So would that be a strong combination?
It would be.
Interesting.
Now, if you're wondering what is my opinion on this America Party, I'm a little undecided because I think we need to know a little bit more.
Now, there's one narrative that says, this is terrible for Republicans.
All it will do is cipher off votes from Republicans.
But I think you're being an analogy thinker if you think that.
How many of you said to yourself, oh no, Ross Perot sunk the Republicans by taking away some of their votes when he ran as a third party?
So if Elon Musk launches a third party, it's going to be the same problem.
You know, just like Ross Perot, it's just going to make the Republicans weaker, and then the Democrats will take everything.
But there's one problem with that analogy.
And by the way, I mock people who use analogies to predict what's going to happen, because being an analogy thinker is nothing to be proud of.
It just means you are reminded of something else.
It doesn't mean that the thing you're talking about is going to follow the same path.
You're just reminded of it.
That's all.
Here's the big difference, I think.
But here's the part I'd have to wait and find out how real this is.
So far, Musk has only talked about getting senators and House of Representatives, a small group, maybe just a handful of each, and having that enough to be able to influence events.
So he's not trying to flip the House or turn it into mostly America Party thing.
He's just trying to get a smallish group of like-minded people who are just more America first than they are wed to any political ideology and see if he can influence things in a positive way.
Now, so far, he has not made mention of running a presidential candidate.
If he did run a presidential candidate, then yes, that's a Ross Parrot problem.
So do we agree?
If he runs a presidential candidate, which he has not indicated he would, he's not indicated that.
But if he did, that would be a problem.
And I think I would immediately flip to, oh, this is no good.
So, which is also probably the reason he's not mentioning it, because probably he's fully aware that it's no good.
It wouldn't work in his interests.
But does it make sense to have a smallish group of people who are just dedicated to doing what's good for the country and have them part of Congress?
It might.
And if you've got a, you know, a Mark Cuban and maybe some other smart people will also go independent, you never know.
There might be a little bit of a, you know, follow the leader kind of thing happening soon.
So I'm going to stay open-minded.
To me, it looks like something that could be helpful to whoever is president, because it can maybe allow them to get things that even they think are good ideas, but they know they couldn't sell to their own base.
So a lot of it depends on whether you think that Musk himself wants what's good for the country.
But he also has big corporate interests, and some of them have government subsidies.
And so you can't completely untangle him from self-interest and fiduciary responsibility to his companies.
But it's all public.
It's all transparent.
So you would get to see what he promotes and why.
Make up your own mind.
So I'm going to be open-minded on this.
We will see how it develops.
I saw an account called Tesla Owners SV who was speculating on what the America Party would focus on.
Now, this is not coming from Elon Musk.
It's coming from somebody who's just a watcher of all things, Tesla, I think.
But when I read the list, I said to myself, yeah, that's probably pretty close.
So if we're going to speculate, and this is just speculation, of what an America first or what America's party would focus on, it would be reducing debt and responsible spending, probably.
Modernize the military with AI and robotics, probably.
Pro-technology and make sure that we're in it to win it with AI.
That's almost everybody, really.
Less regulation across the board, but especially in energy?
Probably.
Free speech, yes.
Pro-natalist, meaning more babies?
Probably.
You know, because those would be things that, in my opinion, are unambiguously good for the country.
And if you said to me, but Scott, these are mostly Republican things, I would say, well, maybe it looks that way, but there's nothing really Republican or non-Republican about free speech.
Most of these are just strong ideas about controlling our spending.
Who's against that?
And then centrist policies.
So that's kind of generic.
So remember, this is not Elon Musk.
This is just somebody's opinion of what that party would look like.
And it looks about right to me.
Tucker Carlson has announced he's, I guess he's already Interviewed the president of Iran, and he hasn't edited it yet, so it's not available.
But he's warning us because he knows it's going to be controversial, and people are going to say, Oh, are you talking to Iran because you hate Israel and you're anti-Semite?
That's what they will say.
Instead of what they should say, which is anybody in Tucker Carlson's position who interviews important people on important subjects would want to talk to the president of Iran.
I would, if I were him.
So I'm 100% in favor of Tucker Carlson talking to the president, not the Supreme Leader.
And this is important, not the Supreme Leader, but the President.
And that'll be very interesting.
I'll be watching that.
All right.
Here's some sort of fake news.
So Trump, in one of his rallies the other day, he referred to the bankers, some of the bankers, as shylocks.
And that caused a controversy because people say, hey, that's anti-Semitic.
Now, how many of you, this will be a little survey, instant survey for the chatters, how many of you would have been aware before the news told you that the word Shylock is something used as a negative for Jewish bankers in particular?
I guess it comes from The Merchant of Venice, a Shakespeare play, in which it was used to refer to a Jewish character or characters.
How many of you knew that?
I'm looking at your list.
So lots of yeses, but also lots of no's.
I would have been vaguely aware that I shouldn't use the word myself.
So I would have been aware of that, but I didn't know where it came from.
And I would not necessarily have known the connection to it.
I would never use the word because part of my brain had a little flag on it.
It was like a little red flag.
When I think of the word, I just see the little red flag waving and I don't know where it came from.
So at some point in my life, I must have known that was a word you don't use.
Trump says he was not aware of, you know, it had any anti-Semitic element to it.
And I believe him, because there's no way he would have used it in a public event if he knew what some people apparently did know, that it's associated with an anti-Semitic kind of a reputation destroying kind of a thing.
But did you think that the Democrats would leave that alone after he said, oh, I didn't know that?
No, they took out the designated liars.
Remember I tell you the designated liars are the Democrats they send out to talk when there's some lie they need to tell, but ordinary Democrats would say, oh, that's too far for me.
I can't tell that lie in public.
So they send out the designated liars.
So that would include, I guess, Eric Swalwell, Dan Goldman, and Jerry Nadler.
They all came out immediately to condemn the remarks as blatant and vile anti-Semitism.
And then if you wanted to know how high the credibility is, the disgraced ADL also called it very troubling and irresponsible.
Now, if you don't know, the ADL is a disgraced organization that probably had a good purpose for existing at one point.
I don't know the history of it.
But at the moment, it's more of the Eric Swalwell of organizations, if you know what I mean.
It's more the Jerry Nadler of...
They came after me as well.
The ADL blamed me of being a Holocaust denier.
That was the head of the ADL.
Said that in public.
In public.
Actually said that about me by name.
So that's how much credibility they have.
So no, for the NPC, no, I'm not a Holocaust denier.
That would be ridiculous.
Anyway, apparently the BRICS people are having a summit.
And I went to Subra Grok and said, explain what the BRICS is.
I mean, I knew sort of what it is, but I wanted to see if there was something I didn't know about it.
And so BRICS is a coalition of 10 emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, and UAE.
And they're focused on economic cooperation as sort of a response to the fact that the US and Europe have too much economic clout.
So they're trying to form their own power bloc for their self-interest, which makes sense.
And maybe to try to get away from the dollar being the most important currency, because that's good for the United States, but maybe not as good for them.
So at the moment, I think Trump has threatened them to drop their idea of having their own currency and to continue using the dollar.
So threats work.
I think the threats were tariff threats, but they worked.
But I guess Putin is not attending and President Xi is not attending.
And Iran, of course, can't send the top guy.
So they send medium-level guy.
So the one source I saw, I saw this in a Mario Noffal post that Gazeta de Povo basically is saying it's a failed organization because if you can't get the superstars to go to it, you also can't make any decisions.
So all they're going to do is have breakouts and talk about the weather and climate change and go home.
There won't be anything that comes out of it.
So don't worry about the bricks, at least while Trump's president.
Here's a new suggestion for handling the Palestinian situation that comes from a group of sheikhs, as an S-H-E-I-K-H sheikhs.
And they had an idea, Joel Pollock is writing about this in Breibart, and Wall Street Journal has an article on it too, that they want to create an emirate in the holy city of Hebron.
Now, Hebron is part of the West Bank in the south.
So it would be the area that Palestinians would think would create a state.
But if it's too hard to have a two-state solution, this might be an interesting workaround.
And I went to Super Grock and said, what's an emirate?
How many of you know what an emirate is?
Most of you?
All right.
Well, an emirate is something that's ruled by an emir.
And an emir might be sort of a dictator, but not necessarily.
It would be, you know, some Islamic person who's in charge.
And they would run it as a sort of an independent entity, but not a country.
So it wouldn't necessarily be a country.
It would be an independent managed entity.
Now, did you know that the UAE is a bunch of emirates?
So you could think of them sort of like states, depending on how it's organized.
So there's a lot of flexibility on how the emirate could be ruled and what it is.
So there are already existing and very successful emirates in the Middle East.
So it has a precedent.
We know how they work.
But what it would do is it would take power and attention away from the Palestinian Authority.
And it might be something that the Palestinians themselves, you'd have to probably do more than one Emirate, but it's something that the Palestinians themselves might be willing to say, oh, well, it's not a state, but we're not going to get a two-state solution anyway, you know, because Israel is not in favor of that at the moment.
So what is the second best thing we can do?
Emirates.
So I do not have an opinion whether it's a good idea or a bad idea or who it would be good or bad for, but I've never heard it before.
And so maybe, maybe there's something to work with here.
I don't know.
So the UAE has seven emirates in it, and they seem to be doing fine.
Meanwhile, over at CBS News, so you knew that Trump sued CBS because of the way they edited the Kama Harris interview, and it looks like he got paid maybe, it's unconfirmed, but $16 million for winning that lawsuit, or it was settled.
He didn't win it.
It was settled.
And I learned some new things about that.
A New York Post article by Charles Gasperino.
Did you know that the company that wants to buy the CBS parent company called Paramount, did you know that that was, what is the name of it?
It doesn't matter.
But it's a studio that was run and owned by Larry Ellison's son.
So Larry Ellison's son is the one who's looking to buy Paramount and CBS.
Apparently, when Sherry Redstone got control of her company, it was worth $40 billion.
Now the whole thing's only worth $2 billion.
Imagine taking your husband's fortune from $40 billion down to $2 billion.
Ouch.
That's what she did.
So she's looking to sell out and rest under $2 billion.
But CBS News is almost certainly not profitable.
We don't know for sure because those numbers are not broken down.
But if Larry Ellison, Larry Ellison's son is apparently a pro-Trumper, just like Larry Ellison is, and that would put CBS in the firm control of somebody who likes Trump.
Didn't see that coming.
For some reason, I was not aware of that, that that would be coming.
Anyway, Larry Ellison's company produced Top Gun Maverick and Mission Impossible, the new one.
So they really got it going on there.
So we'll see what happens with CBS news.
Trump's sending out his tariff letters telling people that some of their tariffs will be as high as 70%, which I interpret as really just rattling their cages.
So they'll try harder to make a trade deal that's better for them.
And not bad for us.
So I think that's just a smart Trump approach to say, if you were not serious enough to get this deal done in the period that we said We needed a trade deal done, then we don't need to.
We'll just send you the bill, and you can live with these crushing tariffs if you like, if you like.
Anyway, have you noticed that the big beautiful bill is full of stuff that is so hard to understand, you can't even tell if it's good for you or bad?
I don't know how many of the elements fit into that category, but one of them is the salt deductions.
All right.
How many of you, if I went in the street and stopped people randomly, adults, and said, do you know what the SALT deduction is?
How many people would even know what that is?
So SALT stands for state and local taxes, which used to be deductible.
So you could deduct it from your income before you did the federal taxes that you owed.
And that changed.
That went away because Trump didn't want blue states to have this extra advantage.
And it was asking red states to sort of subsidize blue states because only the blue states had these high taxes.
Anyway, the solar deductions were put back in, but they have a cap, but they also phase out, but they also have income limits.
And if you have an S corporation, you might have a workaround.
So I'm reading this and saying to myself, I don't even know if I'm making money or, you know, I live in a blue state, so in theory, it should be to my benefit.
I can't tell.
How many variables are you going to put on this?
There's an income cap, there's a phase out, there's income limits.
If you have an S, I mean, come on.
Lawyers write this stuff, and you can't even tell if it's good or bad.
All right, yesterday I asked on X, and we talked about it a little bit, what is it that Democrats are seeing or feeling when they say, and they look like they're being honest, but emotional, when they think they're living in a Trump hellscape of authoritarianism?
And I asked, what exactly are you experiencing that I'm not experiencing?
Because to me, every day I wake up is a lot like the day before, and I didn't see any hellscape.
What am I missing?
And so it turns out, I got a lot of feedback in the comments, and it turns out that there are a lot of American citizens who believe that they personally or their family members who are also American citizens could be deported.
And I'm not talking about people who were born in other countries and got their citizenship.
I'm talking about people who have been here for five generations, are still afraid that Trump will deport them because they're maybe not Republicans or something.
Can you believe that?
That a fairly widespread belief that they could be deported or somebody they love could be deported who's a legal citizen.
So that's part of it.
I heard that university scientists are unhappy because their funding got cut.
Well, that's true.
But as a total percentage of the entire population of the United States, how big is the university, which is really just Ivy League, how big is the Ivy League university scientist pool?
Now, you could argue whether it's good or bad that they lose their funding, but it's not a lot of people, right?
And if they were already Harvard scientists, can you not get another job?
You don't have good employment opportunities.
There's nobody who's willing to fund you.
Your ideas are so bad that nobody's willing to put any money into it.
There's no corporation that would benefit from it.
What exactly are they studying that has so little value that they would worry about losing a university grant?
I don't know.
Then there are a bunch of people who believe they'll lose their health insurance, when in fact a smallish number will, but it's the people who shouldn't have been getting it in the first place.
And you could argue whether that's humane or not.
It feels worse because it's people who are getting it and then it will be taken away if they don't meet the work requirement or they're not citizens.
But if you had never given it to them in the first place, if there had never been a rule that said you don't have to be a citizen, you can still get it, if that had never existed, would it seem cruel to continue without it existing?
Well, to some people it would.
But to others, it would be like, well, you can't give everything you have to everybody who needs it.
You know, the math doesn't work out.
Anyway, on another topic, MSNBC seems to go pretty hard at RFK Jr.
And they like calling him a science denier of some sort.
And they believe that he says nutty things that have been debunked.
So they smear him as a misinformation peddler.
And I'm wondering, is that because that's the opinion of the hosts of MSNBC?
Or might it be because they give financing or they get part of their income is from big pharma advertising on their platform?
So can you trust anything that TV News says about RFK Jr. when the entire model of pharma advertising seems to be designed to influence How the news tells the news about big pharma.
So that's a little sketchy.
So is big pharma trying to influence the news to take out RFK Jr.
That's what it looks like.
I don't have any evidence that would connect them directly.
But since I don't believe any big movements are natural or organic, everything seems to be driven by some money person in the background, it feels like, it just feels like maybe Big Pharma has decided to go after him, and the way they do that is by influencing the news.
Maybe.
That's what I'd worry about.
Anyway, and RFK Jr. has been saying provocatively that one in 31 children born today are autistic and he's got this massive study going on and he says they're going to find out what causes it.
Now at different times, or maybe even now, I don't know, a lot of people including RFK Jr. have believed that it might be because of some vaccinations or combination of vaccinations, et cetera.
But I guess that link has not been conclusively proven.
So it was worthy of a big study to find out what the real problem is, which still might be that, but they haven't done a proper study on it until now.
So in September, we're going to find out.
Now, it might involve food.
It's entirely possible that something we eat, or it could be something in the environment, like sniffing too much lead, or your parents use their phones too much, or something.
But at least he's open to whatever cause, you know, any cause that they could find.
And then I say, and this is either related or unrelated, you decide.
Have you heard this claim that if you own a cat, you have a very high chance, I think 60% of cat owners have been infected by something that lives in cats called the T. gondi infection.
And it's something that doesn't affect the cat, but if the human gets it, which apparently most of cat owners get it, it affects their brain.
And there's a two times odds of getting schizophrenia if you're a cat owner.
Schizophrenia.
Now that is some serious stuff.
Now what question do I always ask?
You know the question.
Is it that owning a cat turns you into a schizophrenic?
Or is it possible that if you're a schizophrenic, you don't have regular friends and you need a cat friend to keep you company?
Well, the article I read about it was pretty open that it could go either way, but they have tested the causation.
And what they can test is people who own cats before they had a diagnosis, because I guess the schizophrenia seems to kick in later in life.
So there is some indication that it's far more likely that owning the cat and catching the T Gandai infection is what causes you, at least some people, to become schizophrenic.
Now, if owning a cat can make some people schizophrenic, could it make you autistic?
Could it?
Or is it possible that it's neither food nor pharma nor vaccinations that are making people autistic and that the real cause is something where you'd never even think to look like your cat?
So one of the things I worry about is that the RFK Jr. study is going to come back without a conclusive answer because it might not be as obvious as we assume it is.
Could be, you know, could be something from left field.
You never know.
Anyway, I saw a post on X by Cynical Publius who said, just a reminder, the Trump-Russia collusion hoax was the worst criminal political scandal in U.S. history, and nothing else even comes close.
Watergate, by comparison, was a third greater shoplifting a bag of gummy bears from a 7-Eleven.
Yet literally, no one has been held to account.
Now, some of that, I think, is because of the slow trickle of how we found out the truth, that the Russia collusion thing was a hoax.
But the latest trickle is that Brennan and Clapper and I guess Comey absolutely were aware that they were using sketchy information and creating a hoax to basically change the government.
And none of them, as far as I know, none of them are in jail, right?
How do you not go to jail for that, of all things?
And at the same time, I say to myself, but Scott, I say to myself, this is unprecedented.
It's totally unprecedented that public figures or some public organizations would be behind and overthrow the government, and yet nobody would go to jail for it.
How could that possibly ever happen?
Oh, there's some newly declassified documents revealing that a CIA officer had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination of JFK, contradicting decades of agency denials.
So apparently a CIA officer, George Jonidis, oversaw a covert anti-Castro group.
This is from the AF Post.
They're writing about this.
And that he had a conversation with the guy who allegedly shot Kennedy.
So is it possible that the normal way the country works is that there are shadowy groups overthrowing the president on a regular basis, and we never prosecuted anybody for it?
Yes, that's possible.
So not only is it possible that Kennedy was killed by an inside government plot, we watched plotters try to take down Trump more than once, probably.
Probably more than once.
So I'm starting to believe that every major story that I've experienced in my lifetime is untrue.
Some of the facts would be true.
For example, it does seem to be a fact that airplanes hit the 9-11 or it hit the Twin Towers.
But do we know why?
Do we know who's completely behind it?
Maybe we'll find out in 40 years.
I don't think that our wars are really explained to us truthfully.
I don't think that any of the big events, I don't think that any of the protests, I don't think that Black Lives Matter was organic.
I don't think any of the big stories are real.
Maybe not ever in my life.
It's entirely possible that every big, big story has been fake for every day that I've been alive and maybe always.
Yeah.
The moon landing.
My favorite moon landing conspiracy theory is that it was filmed on a set, but Stanley Kubrick specifically was behind the filming of it.
And I'm not saying I believe it.
I'm just saying that as soon as you imagine that the most likely way the world is organized is that all the big stories are fake, if you accept that, then the moon landing just fits right in there.
But I don't personally have enough insight into the moon landing to say that it's fake.
I'm just saying, if it's true that all the big stories are fake, what are the odds that that one is real?
You know what I mean?
So I'm not going to go full conspiracy theory on that.
I'm just saying, if all the other big stories look suspicious, and they do, would that be the one that was true?
Maybe.
Can't rule it out, but maybe.
Anyway, Charlie Kirk and probably some others are now trying to encourage mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa to drop out.
So he's running as a Republican and would, of course, get all the Republican votes because there aren't that many Republicans voting in New York City.
But if he stays in, he would make it harder for Eric Adams to win, running as an Independent, and it might guarantee that Zoran Mamdani, the creepy smiling communist, gets elected.
So what do you think about that?
Should Curtis Liwa step down just so that they make sure that Mamdani doesn't get elected?
I don't know.
That's worth the conversation.
Oh, I hate saying that.
I'm going to reword that.
That's worth considering.
So I don't know if Curtis Lewis is enough of a team player that he would go for that, but he does seem to have a lifetime of service.
I mean, he's a guardian angel founder, right?
So he has a lifetime of service to the city.
And if he's more service-oriented than politically oriented, and he might be, it would be one hell of a service.
So New York City would be forever in his debt if he kept that Republican nomination sort of in his control and then threw all his votes to, let's say, Eric Adams.
So maybe.
But you may have heard that the New York Times is getting some backlash because they did a story about Mom Donnie's college application to Columbia, in which, let's see if I can get this right.
When he filled out his application to college, Columbia in particular, he checked the box that said he was Asian and African American, but he also checked the boxes for Asian, but also black or African American.
So some people say, well, you despicable liar, you lied and said you were black so that you could get into Colombia.
Now, I have a few observations about this.
Number one observation, it pains me to say this.
Like it hurts my chest.
But I have to be consistent with what I've said in the past because I don't like opinions that are just completely inconsistent.
So you may remember that I've said in the past that we should not hold against any adult mistakes they made in college.
Anybody remember me saying that?
I've said it publicly a number of times.
It's just too far back.
I mean, before the age of 25, your brain isn't even done.
And I would not want to be blamed for anything I did in college.
And I don't know anybody who would.
You're not exactly the same person as you were when you were college age.
And remember, this is when he was applying.
So when he was applying, I don't even know if he was 18 yet.
I mean, I don't know the details, but was he 17 when he checked those boxes?
Probably, right?
He was certainly in that under 25 range.
So separately, I've also said we should have a 20-year rule.
I don't know if he's 20 years out from it, but it might be that both apply.
I don't blame people for their smaller transgressions 20 years ago, and I don't blame anybody for anything they did when they were 17 or 18.
So college age, not interested.
It's a fun story.
I like talking about it and thinking about it.
It's just sort of a fun, interesting little story.
But no, this isn't really the...
I would be inconsistent.
However, I'd like to steal an idea that I heard this morning.
I won't do an attribution, but it wasn't my idea.
All right, I'll tell you, it was Greg Gofeld.
So, Greg, if you're listening, I wasn't sure if you wanted credit for this idea, but I'll give it to you anyway.
Does it seem interesting to you that Mandani tried to pretend he was black so he'd get more advantages in society?
Has anybody mentioned that yet?
That pretending you're black gives you such a substantial lift in getting into college that Mamdani was willing to lie and sort of suggest that he was black because of the benefits.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty interesting part of the story, isn't it?
Because I believe that there's literally no black person who ever pretended they were white to get into college.
Ever.
I believe that there's no black person who ever pretended to be white to get a job at a Fortune 500 company.
Not in my lifetime.
Because in either case, getting into college or getting into a corporation, small companies would be different.
I think there's plenty of discrimination in small companies.
But for the big ones, everybody knows that it's just a, it's like a direct path to the top if you can sell yourself as being black or female or lesbian or whatever.
So I don't know how we're in this world where black people are claiming a disadvantage at exactly the same time people are pretending to be black for the advantages.
All right.
Amazingly, according to a post-millennial story by Victor Davis Hansen, the number of New York City shootings is at a low, and the murder rate is way down.
And believe it or not, they had zero shootings and murders on Independence Day.
It's the first time ever.
Zero.
On a day when shooting would be the easiest to shoot because there's fireworks anyway.
So nobody would, maybe nobody would even know it was a gunshot.
You'd think that the 4th of July would be a big murder day.
But Eric Adams is doing something right, current mayor, because it's zero.
Not only that, but in the first six months of the year, New York City saw the lowest number of shooting victims and shooting incidents in recorded history, in recorded history.
And he's not going to be re-elected?
Are you freaking kidding me?
If you give me a mayor who in six months, or however long he's been around, can take your murder and violent record down to levels that nobody's ever even seen before, how does that guy or gal not get reelected?
What?
You know, if it's really because, and I do believe that's probably because of changes that he made, because remember, he was a police person before he was a mayor.
He knows what he's talking about.
He knows where the levers are for decreasing crime, and he must have pulled those levers.
How in the world does Mom Donnie get elected when he wants to defund the police and he's running against an ex-police person who apparently has pushed all the right levers and got an almost unbelievable success?
I mean, it's hard to even imagine that you could have gotten it to the level that it was historically a low.
The only bit of cold water I'll throw on that is that there is an age element to violence.
Older people are less violent.
And as our population ages, and there are fewer young people in the cities compared to old people, probably the violence would go down a little bit just because the demographics were older people.
But that didn't happen in six months.
So, whatever this is, is probably Eric Adams.
And he's a really good communicator, in my opinion.
He has the charisma, etc.
So, if he's not standing all over this, he ought to be.
I saw a post on X from a user called Mila Loves Joe who said that every single store in San Francisco's Market Street, that would be like the main street of San Francisco, every single store on Market Street has closed down.
Now, I went to Super Grok and said, is that true?
It turns out that's not true.
But there are a lot of stores, a lot of stores that close down.
But here's something I didn't know, that of the dollar losses from all the crime, and crime is the reason that they closed down, 85% of the dollar losses were from organized gangs.
So it wasn't even organic onesies and twosies.
And some people got together and said, oh, let's hit Target.
That happened too.
But 85% of the dollar losses were organized gangs sending in big groups of people to the particular store.
So I wouldn't see retail in San Francisco coming back until they could figure out how to handle the gangs.
And I'm not sure how they do that.
Anyway, according to the New York Post, Andrew Court is writing, that most Americans now can't afford even what he calls a minimal quality of life.
Minimal quality of life means that you can eat and you've got shelter, but that you could afford a little bit of entertainment, just a little bit.
And they define that as a little bit would be able to, let's say, buy some tickets to a baseball game or something that you wanted to watch.
So that's pretty bad.
But here's what I would ask.
Does it seem to you that the Amish are unhappy?
And they don't buy tickets to events and watch blockbuster movies and stuff.
So it seems to me that that's not the end of the world.
In a perfect world, everybody would have enough money to do all the fun things that they want, of course.
If you're an NPC, you can remind me of that.
But does it seem to you that we're just not organized as a society for the things that make us happy?
As in big families, families are getting smaller.
Have you ever noticed that if you see a family get together, any members of the same family, that the rate of laughter goes through the roof?
Do you ever notice that you will laugh more with your family members than anybody else?
I don't know if that's not just my experience, right?
I'm pretty sure that that would be common for other people too.
So if we had bigger families or people had more access to other cool people, their age was things they have in common, I don't know that we're worse off because we can't go to a baseball game in person.
You know, if you've got your phone, you can get entertainment you could watch.
You put it in your earbuds.
It sounds better than it does in person.
And if you hang out with cool people and, you know, people who make you happy and love you, you'll get your dopamine.
It would be better to have money, but it doesn't mean that you can't have enjoyment.
Where's all the money going?
Well, Lowell Caulfield, writing for Breitbart News, is reporting that LA lifeguards are making up to $500,000 per year.
You probably think that I misspoke and I didn't really mean that LA lifeguards, the people at the beach, are making half a million dollars per year.
You thought that wasn't real, right?
No, it wasn't real.
They don't make up to $500,000 a year.
It's actually up to $700,000 a year.
There was one lifeguard made $700,000 in one year with overtime.
So apparently they're well paid in general, and lots of them made over $200,000 being lifeguards.
But some of them, mostly from overtime, I believe, got $500,000.
So you wonder where your money's going?
It's going to that muscular guy and the speedos up in that chair.
Well, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamini, he made his first public appearance since the war.
So that means he's back in charge, right?
Everybody believe that?
Do you believe that the Supreme Leader is still the Supreme Leader?
Or is it possible that he's being pushed in front of the camera so that you think he's still in charge, but that maybe the military or somebody else is really calling the shots?
Because remember, he's 86, so he's not exactly a fireball anymore.
Well, I did see one report on social media that suggested that he's not in charge.
He's a figurehead at this point, but there was no confirmation of that.
It was just somebody on social media.
So I'm going to double down on my prediction that someday we will learn that he's not in charge.
How many people would buy into that?
I feel like he's not in charge anymore, but we'll find out.
Well, apparently Iran shut down the idea of meeting with the U.S. for nuclear talks.
There was some rumor that there was going to be a meeting not too long from now in which Iran and the U.S. would talk about what works and what doesn't for their domestic nuclear program.
But now they're saying that public opinion is so angry no one even dares to talk about diplomacy.
That's according to Esmel Begali.
So let's see the foreign minister.
So it looks like we're not going to have any talks there.
Speaking of Ukraine, so Zelensky had a conversation with Trump, in which Zelensky said it was their most productive conversation yet.
And he says that Trump is very unhappy with Putin.
And Trump has said the same thing.
But Trump has also said recently that Putin does not want to work toward a ceasefire deal.
All right.
So now Trump has a lot of credibility and ego and, I guess, reputational risk if he can't get the Ukraine situation sorted out.
And reasonably soon.
If we wait till the end of his four years, it's not going to be nearly as impressive because you're just going to say, well, they just got tired of fighting.
But what levers does he have left?
Because it seems obvious at this point that Putin thinks he's winning and is right because he's still capturing territory and doesn't have any reason to stop.
He's just going to keep going.
What possible leverage does Trump have?
He's already starving Ukraine of weapons because the U.S. needs them too.
And we don't have enough weapons.
I don't know which ones, but things like anti-rocket missiles and stuff we need for the United States to protect our own assets.
So what is Trump going to do?
Is Trump going to go wildly sending them new weapons?
Or is Trump going to put extra super duper sanctions on Russia?
And I'm always surprised.
It's like, is there some sanction we haven't put on them yet?
Have we really been involved in a war for years?
And there were sanctions we could have put on Russia that for some reason we didn't?
I don't know what's left.
So if you were to look at this as any other president, if it were not Trump, you would say there are no levers.
The war is going to keep going until Russia owns all of Ukraine.
I mean, that would be the obvious direction it's going.
But when you're talking about Trump, suddenly all bets are off because he does have that magic ability to find the one solution that nobody was even talking about as a solution.
You know, something that's so far out of the box that you never even thought of it.
Now, can he pull the rabbit out of the hat with this?
Is there something he could do or promise or negotiate that would get Putin to back down?
I don't see it.
But it will be very fun to see if he can pull that rabbit out of a hat.
So the fact that I don't see any way he can do it doesn't probably doesn't predict that he can or can't do it.
That would just be my own limitation.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I've got to say today.
I knew I'd go a little long because there's so much news out there, but you deserved it because it's Sunday and you like the long ones.
All right.
To my beloved subscribers on locals, I'm going to come to you privately in a moment.
And the rest of you, thank you so much for joining.
