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And that means all the lazy podcasters take the day off.
But not me.
No, I'm here for you.
I'm here for you and especially Beth.
So Beth, this is the real show.
Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
you Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization, possibly Martian civilization, too.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take a chance on elevating this experience to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, well, all you need for that is a copper mugger, a glass of tanker, chelsea, side, a canteen, sugar, flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dope meeting at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens, that's right, right now.
Go.
Don't you feel better?
You do.
Yeah, you do.
Well, after our show today, you might want to join Owen Gregorian, who's going to be hosting a Spaces event right after we're done.
Spaces is the audio service on X. So just go there and look for Owen Gregorian, or you can find the link in my X feed, as Scott Adams says.
Well, I wonder if there's any news about the health benefits of coffee.
Oh, yeah.
According to the Times of India, there's a new study out of the UK somewhere.
And it turns out that if you have three cups of coffee every day, you can reduce your risk of liver disease by 49%.
Right.
So what I recommend is that when you drink alcohol, you drink one cup of coffee for every drink.
Because the alcohol will destroy your liver because it's poison.
But the coffee will just rejuvenate it.
You'll break even.
No, do not listen to any medical advice from cartoonist podcasters.
Bad idea.
Bad idea.
See what else is happening.
Let's do some fake news.
There's some fake news today on social media.
OAN is reporting that this is not true, by the way.
So before I even say what it is, according to Grok, there's no truth to this whatsoever.
But the rumor is that Bridget Macrone's plastic surgeon who was going to give a tell-all has been found dead, fell out of window.
But it turns out that it's probably a Russian disinformation campaign, and there's no credible source.
There's no credible source for the story.
Does Grok really know?
Marzella asks.
And the answer is, well, it's pretty good at checking sources.
So there's no other source that says it.
All right, here's my favorite story.
I was doing a pre-show before we went live here, and I couldn't stop laughing for about 10 minutes.
So Trump just published another Truth Social in which he opines that Rosie O'Donnell, who, as you know, moved to Ireland because she's so unhappy with the United States.
And Trump says that since Rosie is so bad for the United States, he's considering removing her citizenship.
Now, I went to Grok and I said, can a president remove somebody's citizenship?
And he said, no.
No, a president does not have that power.
Yeah, I think it would be in some weird situation where they had lied on some official forms to become a citizen or something.
There's a special case, but basically no.
So the thing that makes me laugh is wondering what Trump was thinking or saying or who was in the room when he wrote that message.
Because if he wrote it alone, it wouldn't be as funny.
But I just imagine him sitting there with some of his best friends or maybe just Milani or something like, all right, watch this.
I'm going to send out a true social that says I'm going to take Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship away because she complained about the United States from Ireland.
I don't believe that he believes he has the power to do that.
And you know that it's a slow news day.
So the last thing that Trump wants is people talking about Epstein.
So whenever the shelf of news is a little bare, Trump just comes up with something that he just creates out of nothing that creates a story you can't not talk about.
Do you think that the news can ignore the fact that Trump has called for maybe removing the citizenship of a U.S. citizen for complaining from Ireland?
All right.
I hope you liked it as much as I did.
To me, that's just hilarious.
He obviously knows exactly what he's doing.
All right.
Well, according to the Daily Mail, the New York Times is admitting their fake news from last year, where I guess they were accusing Trump of lying or exaggerating about the Venezuelan gangs allegedly taking over a Colorado apartment building.
And then the New York Times said, we looked into it.
That's not true.
And then a year later, they published an article that says, well, you know, turns out it's a little bit complicated.
And we can't really say it's not true.
It's true-ish, maybe, kind of true.
Maybe it was fake news.
So, you know, they might describe what they did a little differently.
But the Daily Mail is blaming them of admitting their fake news.
That was a big one.
As the fake news goes, that was kind of bold because could they really not figure out what was going on there?
Did the New York Times really, really, did they really not have the resources or the talent or the time or something to look into that and find out that, yes, there were armed gang members standing outside the apartment building?
There was no way they could have figured that out on their own for a year.
Sorry.
Trust in the media?
Pretty low.
Pretty, pretty low.
All right, here's a story that, as far as I know, has not been debunked, but it doesn't sound real to me.
So I'm going to tell you the story, but you were going to play a game where you tell me, does this sound real or does this sound a little too on the nose?
Like a little too perfect?
All right, here's the story.
I see Ian Miller is reporting this for Outkick, but I believe there were other outlets that are reporting it.
All right.
And the report is that JP Morgan Chase CEO, the famous Jamie Diamond, said the following while at a overseas event.
He said that, quote, I have a lot of friends who are Democrats and they're idiots.
Bloomberg is reporting this, while speaking at a foreign ministry event in Ireland.
Oh, well, I guess Ireland is where you go to say terrible things, like Rosie.
Then allegedly, J.B. Diamond went on and said, I always say they have big hearts and little brains.
They do not understand how the real world works.
Almost every single policy rolled out has failed.
Doesn't that sound a little bit like me or maybe Greg Gufeld?
One of the things that criticize, well, one of the things that Democrats are often criticized for is policies that don't seem to understand how human beings work, that we have incentives and stuff like that.
So that is so on the nose that that makes me a little suspicious.
And then it goes further, and he describes how the Democrats lost their way.
And allegedly, and again, I'm not totally sure this is real.
But allegedly, Jamie Diamond said, they overdid DEI.
We all were devoted to reaching out to the black community, Hispanic and LGBT community, the disabled.
We do all of that, Diamond said.
But the extent they got to stop it and they got to go back to being more practical.
They're very ideological.
And I'm thinking to myself, all right, well, it's sort of real-ish.
But he would have known he would have been quoted.
Would he really say that all of his Democrat friends are idiots?
Would he say that and then go back to New York City where his subordinates and his friends are Democrats?
Who says that?
He is a little bit too smart and too savvy to insult 75% of all of his friends, knowing that it will get back to them.
So is that real?
All right, but it goes further.
I guess he was asked about Zoran Mamdani, who, by the way, you could call him Zoran Mamdani, or you could call him Moron Zamdani.
So it's either Zoron or Moron.
Pick one.
Anyway, what J.B. Diamond allegedly said, and here I'm still a little skeptical, he really did.
But allegedly, quote, he's more of a Marxist than a socialist.
And now you see these Democrats falling all over themselves saying, well, he's pointing out some real problems, affordable housing and grocery prices.
Okay, maybe.
There's the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world.
Now, again, that's the sort of thing that I would say: that is sort of a word-solid, meaningless nothing.
Does that sound real to you?
I'm going to put a pin in this one and say, I'm not sure, because a lot of the news today is fake, or looks fake.
This one, I don't know.
I'm not buying it.
I'm willing to be talked into it being real if Jamie Diamond says, yeah, I said that, or there's a video that comes out someday.
But at the moment, I'm going to say probably not.
I'm leaning toward fake news on this one.
But I could be wrong.
I'm going to say 55% fake news, 45% real.
That would be my final answer.
Well, somebody named Eddie Zhu has developed AI glasses that will be used to train robots.
And the way it will do that is they'll put these AI glasses on Chinese factory workers, and it will watch them work.
So the glasses will be on the human, and it will be watching the human doing something with their hands that's assembling something or doing some kind of assembly line kind of thing.
And that's how they will train robots.
So they'll collect all that data and feed it into robots, and then robots will know how to put everyone in China out of work.
I think the Chinese government is going to have to throw him out of window because I don't think you can put a hundred, few hundred million Chinese factory workers out of work with robots.
But maybe, maybe it's coming.
Well, Sam Altman was talking about delay at ChatGPT.
And he says they're planning to launch their open weight model next week, but they're going to delay it for more safety testing.
And you might say, what the heck is an open weight model?
Well, I didn't know.
So I went to Grok.
I had to go to Grok today five times while I was reading the news.
Five times, the news told me something that I just said, I don't even know what that is.
Like, why don't you tell me what that means?
And then maybe I'll know what I'm looking at.
But the open weight model is an AI that is a little bit open sourced, not completely, but it allows developers to know how the model works.
So if they want to build their own product on top of it, it operates with the AI in the best way.
Now, so he's saying the tech got delayed because they want to review the high-risk areas.
Now, when he's talking about high-risk, he's not really just talking about it having a bug, right?
They're talking about, well, it might be the end of all civilization.
But we're going to take an extra week to make sure that it doesn't destroy civilization.
Well, it's possible that all humankind will be eviscerated and possibly incinerated by the end of next week, but just in case, we're going to take an extra week.
I can't tell how much of this is real because there's almost nothing I've heard about AI that I understand and also scares me.
So why is it that the people who know the most, way more than I know, why are they so scared of AI?
Is it like a mass hysteria?
Is it possible that they don't want to be the one who didn't say it was dangerous when everybody else does?
So maybe they just have to take that position because it sounds more socially responsible.
If something bad happens, they'll say, well, we told you it wasn't fully safe.
You know, I've been saying since the beginning, good things might go wrong.
And then at least you would think, oh, well, they're not morons, but something did go wrong and now we're all dead.
So I'm a little bit worried about what the smartest people know that I don't know about AI, but still, I'm not afraid of it.
Does anybody else have that feeling?
That you're watching the news, you're hearing what the smart people say, and they tell you, you know, it might be a 10 or 20% chance it will destroy all humankind.
And I still don't worry about it.
What's up with that?
How many of you actually worry about it?
I don't understand the risk enough to be actually worried.
I just, it just, you know, it's like news that just passes through.
But I'm going to add my own prediction.
I would say that we could say at this point there's 100% chance that human evolution with our organic bodies will be replaced by machine evolution and robots.
And I don't mean cyborgs.
I mean just machines.
And that the obvious evolutionary path is for the organic humans to die off from one thing or another, not necessarily from AI.
You know, it could be, I don't know, could be we last a million years and then the sun explodes and we haven't gotten to another planet.
So could be there's a new virus that comes out of a lab and kills all the humans.
But we're not there yet.
But we're very close to having these artificial general intelligence and artificial super intelligence robots that could potentially take over civilization and keep things running after all the human organic people are gone.
So if you look at the history of other species and you look at the history of like civilizations that were here 20,000 years ago, but somehow they all got wiped out, is it more likely that we humans will find a way to be permanent and just keep evolving for millions of years?
Is that more likely than all the organic people being killed, not even being murdered, but just, you know, apparently if you wait long enough, there's going to be a meteor.
Something's going to hit the earth.
You know, something's going to go wrong.
But the robots might be capable of, you know, as long as they can get electricity, of just rebuilding civilization.
So I'm going to make my prediction right now that human civilization will turn into machine evolution and it might live forever, but as machines.
Maybe.
All right.
Trump and Melania visited the Texas flood zone and he did his presidential thing.
Trump is very good at the empathy and meeting with people who have had tragedy and whatever.
But Melania was very good as well.
She was at the table with him and Trump said, Melania, might have a few words.
And I wasn't sure if Melania was happy about that.
I didn't know if she was prepared to speak.
And I still don't know if she was prepared.
But she very effortlessly went into an empathy-related, we feel your pain, I'll come back kind of a thing.
And I was watching Trump because, you know, Trump will be very careful about managing his brand and would certainly want his family members, especially his wife, to look good in public.
And I thought to myself that he was looking at her with a lot of pride because she was really good, very good.
I didn't know.
I don't know how much game she has, but yeah, she nailed it.
She had all the notes and looked very capable.
And I think he was probably quite happy with her response.
Let's see what else.
According to Just the News, Ben Whedon is writing, that the Treasury has announced that in June, the government will have a $27 billion surplus from tariff revenues.
Surplus, meaning that after the government paid all of its bills, it would have an extra $27 billion left over.
And that happens to be the amount that came in from tariffs.
Does that sound real?
Doesn't that sound a little bit too impossible?
Did we just go from deficits that can never be solved to, oh, it looks like in June we spent less than we made?
So I went to Grok and said, is this true?
Is it possible that even for one month of the year that we would take in more revenue as a country?
We would take in more revenue than we spent?
And Grok said yes.
But it also said that in May that we spent $316 billion more than we made.
So is that a thing?
Can the month of May be spending over $300 billion more than you have?
And yet by June, you're making $27 billion more than you spent?
Is it possible that the way budgets work in the government is that they do most of their spending in a few months, so they don't necessarily smooth it out?
Is that what's going on?
There's something about this story that doesn't seem like it could possibly be real.
Does it?
Do you think it's real that the government took in more revenue than it has spent, even in one month, any one month?
I don't know.
I'm going to put a pin into this one and say, I don't believe it.
Don't believe it.
Well, Peter Navarro wrote an article for Fox News, an opinion piece.
He's talking about the CBO and how their estimates were failures.
Now, the CBO is the entity that tells the public, if your Congress does this or that, this will be what happens with the deficit and GDP and all that.
So if you have a plan to do something for the country, you want the CBO to say that's a good plan, because that's the, supposedly, would be the independent nonpartisan analysis.
However, what if I told you about Complicated 10-year projections of anything.
Could be, oh, something about the budget with lots of variables and lots of people and years and assumptions, or it could be something about the climate.
What do I say about all of those situations?
There's no human being who can predict any of that.
Those are not predictable things.
But Peter Navarro points out some specific things that the CBO does wrong.
And in there, there's a lesson.
And so I wanted to share that with you.
So one of the things that they don't do, well, I guess they front load spending.
So they act like the spending happens right away, which would push up maybe your inflation and your interest rates, and then bad things would happen.
And they also don't calculate the benefit of economic growth that might be the whole point of your spending bill.
So Trump's spending bill, whatever you want to call it, the latest one, is designed to give money back to taxpayers, which presumably they would spend, which would be good for the GDP, and a bunch of other stuff, which should goose the economy.
But when the CBO does their analysis, they do not assume that the GDP goes up more than it normally would historically.
So long story short, whoever is ever in charge of these big, complicated estimates of what's going to happen in the future, the result is always based on their assumptions.
It's not really based on some kind of factual thing.
We like to think it is.
It's not based on facts.
It's not based on math.
It's based on the assumptions.
So if the people who do the analysis make an assumption that's friendly to the Trump administration, it might look like we made money by cutting taxes.
But you could very easily make different assumptions and make it look like it's a huge economic disaster.
So Peter Navarro does a good job of simply pointing out that these are assumption-based estimates and not necessarily some kind of fact that you should trust.
And he is quite confident that the latest moves by the administration will be good for the economy and reduce the deficit if the CBO were good at doing estimates.
Well, the post-millennial is talking about how there's a Gallup poll that says only 17% of American adults believe climate change will impact where they live, where they live.
Now, isn't that funny?
As soon as you put the where you live part on climate change, then suddenly the number of people who believe in it just drops way down.
Because people have usually, if they're adults, have lived at wherever they lived for a number of years.
And they probably said to themselves, I've been here for a long time and the weather looks the same to me.
So I've been in California for 35, 36 years, something like that.
No, how long have I been here?
Longer than that.
40 46 years.
I've been in California in roughly the same area of California.
Do you know how much the climate has changed in my 46 years of being here?
Not really at all.
As far as I know, it feels and looks the same to me.
We go through some periods of drought, but California always did.
And then we have some rainy years and everything's okay for a while.
So is it the same where you live?
How many of you live somewhere where when you first moved there, it was a different climate than it is now?
Is there anybody?
No.
If you have your own experience, you just look around and you go, oh, it doesn't seem like it's any different where I live.
So that's going to have an impact over time.
And people are less worried about big, horrible weather disasters than they used to be.
And they should, because we get better at handling weather disasters every year of human existence.
Let's see.
According to Princeton University, Colton Poor is writing about this.
Did you know that geothermal energy has a lot of potential?
Yes, you did, because you listened to my podcast.
Now, geothermal means that if you dig a hole that's deep enough, you'll get to where the earth is super hot.
And if you were to pump some water down there, or if there was a natural water source, you could superheat that water and create energy from it.
And it would be a real clean source of energy.
No CO2 if you don't like CO2.
But it's not really economical.
Most places don't have the ideal place where you can dig a hole that was deep enough.
And the rocks would be in the right place, close to the surface and all that stuff.
So if you were to look at should we go hogwild and geothermal right away, well, somebody would do a CBO-like economic analysis and they would say, hmm, doesn't look like the economics are good.
However, according to this article, which seems right to me, the thing they don't include when they look at the economics of geothermal is that we would start by picking the ideal places.
So the place you put geothermal on day one is going to be where it is economical.
And then you're going to learn much more about how to do it economically.
And then you'll do the next one where there's yet another place where it's perfect for geothermal.
So the cost would be much lower than if you were in a place that's bad for it.
And so the thinking is that we are underestimating how much of an impact geothermal will someday have because we assume that the economics will not improve that much.
But in fact, it wouldn't be hard to improve the economics.
All you have to do is make sure you're starting in the places where it's economical.
And then the rest would be sort of the normal decrease in technology costs over time.
So they think maybe it could be the third best green source of energy until we get to better nuclear, I guess.
Meanwhile, over Harvard, Harvard's having a tough time because of all the pressure from the Trump administration.
But according to Newsmax, they're thinking about creating a conservative think tank.
So would that help?
Well, it wouldn't be nothing because Harvard has almost no conservatives there.
So if they said, hey, here's our big old Harvard conservative think tank, that would maybe, you know, give them a little bit of relief from the criticism.
But reportedly also, the Crimson, that would be the Harvard newspaper, is reporting that Harvard is dismantling some, they say some, of its DEI apparatus.
So it looks like Harvard is at least doing a lot of talking and scrambling and maybe trying some stuff to get back in the good graces of the government, because the government has them in kind of a vice grip that says,
if you continue to be anti-Semitic and not open to, let's say, different points of view, such as conservative ones, we will not give you the funding that you require from the government, federal government.
So Harvard, they had been trying to hang tight and not do what they're told, but there might be a little movement there.
I missed part of this story, so it's a few days old.
But Roger Stone, I guess, said in a post a few days ago, why would Bannon, Steve Bannon, meet with Jeffrey Epstein, both at his New York home and in Paris after Epstein was convicted on sex crimes in Florida?
Why would he coach Epstein for his 60-minute appearance?
And allegedly, Bannon took 15 hours of film of Epstein for a documentary that never got produced.
So here's what Elon Musk said when he saw Roger Stone's accusation.
Now, I don't know, I don't know independently if any of this is true.
But, you know, Roger Stone is saying it.
And Elon Musk commented, Bannon is in the Epstein files.
Okay.
Now, is he just joking?
Is Elon Musk just screwing with us because he knows we won't believe that?
Or does he know something we don't know?
Or is he just guessing?
I don't know.
But that would explain why Bannon is going all in on trying to destroy Musk, destroy all of his businesses, nationalize SpaceX, and then deport him.
Deport Musk.
And I heard that the other day, and I thought, wait, is he serious?
I mean, I could understand why you don't want Elon Musk to be involved in politics.
I can understand that.
But do you really need to nationalize SpaceX, which would ruin it?
And do you really need to deport him?
What?
What?
So I wondered, like, where was any of this coming from?
So I don't know who started the fight, but it looks like it's a cage match to the death.
Because when Elon Musk says that Bannon is in the Epstein files, again, this is a claim, which I'm not aware of any evidence to support it.
It's just a social media claim.
It feels like he's going for a kill shot.
And when Bannon talks about essentially destroying Elon Musk's U.S. connection and deporting him, that feels like he's trying to take a kill shot.
Is that really what we want?
I don't.
I don't want either one of them to kill either one of them.
But I don't know what's real, and I don't know how to value any of these claims.
It's just out there.
Now, let's follow up with the summer Rumors about Bongino, Patel, and Bonte.
So, as you know, we were supposed to get a big reveal about the Epstein files, and Pam Bonte had suggested that maybe there was something more there.
And now we hear, and again, this is all rumors, I would say that the credibility of this story is about as low as you could get.
We don't really know what people are thinking, feeling, said to each other privately.
We don't really know.
But the rumor is that Dan Bongino stopped coming to work for a few days so that he could think about whether he would resign, presumably over the fact that Pam Bondi either botched the Epstein reveal or they just can't work with her for some reason.
And then further, the rumor said, and I don't think the second part is real for sure, is that Cash Patel had said that if Bongino quits because Bondi is still there, I guess he would want her to quit first or something, that he would quit.
Now, how much of that do you believe?
I do believe that they probably are a little angry at each other.
I don't know who would be angry at who or for what.
But beyond that, how much do we really know about what they think and why they're doing what they're doing?
If you tell me that Bongino took some days off from work, I'm going to say, you mean around the 4th of July, in the middle of July, when he's been working like a dog for months and months, and he took a few days off around a weekend, and I'm supposed to make something out of that?
Almost everybody in the government has taken a week off in the summer.
Does that really mean anything?
Well, here are some of the other facts around this story.
Number one, do you remember when Pam Bondi gave some influencers some special access to the first wave of Epstein files?
And she invited him to the White House and had them all hold up their own file that they had been given secret, you know, advanced knowledge of the Epstein information.
And then when they looked at it, they found out it was all public information.
There was nothing new in it whatsoever, which was, some say, almost like intentionally trying to embarrass the influencers.
Now, I think that goes too far.
I doubt anybody would have done it intentionally, but it was a bad play, and it looked like it was a little bit, you know, blown opportunity, I guess.
So there's some reason to believe that some people would have a reason to be mad at Bondi, and we don't know exactly who said, tell everybody that there's nothing to see here.
But don't you assume it was Trump?
Don't you believe that whatever Cash Patel and Bongino and Bondi said about Epstein, don't you assume that that was all run past Trump and he said, this is what you're going to say?
Don't you believe that?
Because I definitely don't believe that any of them went rogue and said, you know, I'll just say what I think and this is what I think.
Oh, there's nothing there.
I don't buy it.
So I think it's Trump's decisions, but maybe he was influenced by one of them more than the other, something like that.
But if you're going to try to bet whether Dan Bongino is really going to quit his job over any of this Epstein stuff, I would give you the following equation.
So Bongino went from the top of the pile in the best job you could ever have.
What I'm doing right now.
I laugh because even though I monetize my podcast, I wouldn't do it unless I sort of enjoyed it every day.
Well, not even sort of.
I enjoy it.
I have absolute enjoyment of doing it.
Even the prep, which takes hours.
Absolutely enjoy it.
Now, do you think that Dan Bongino went from the top of the pile, one of the top podcasters in the country, and the podcasting is sort of the hottest area you could be in, and that he left there to have some government job that probably involves commuting and people hating him and all this drama and the rumors.
How much do you think he wishes he had his old job back?
Just, you know, just use your common sense.
Do you think he goes into the FBI every day and says, man, I made a good choice?
I don't think so.
I think he made the patriotic choice.
I believe he took the job because he's a genuine patriot.
That's my belief.
Now, again, I can't read his mind and I don't know him personally.
But, you know, we all have to be judges of character because you can't avoid it.
My judge of his character is that he's the real deal, meaning that he would have only taken the job if he thought he could do something that would help the president and help the country.
Because he was giving up a lot, giving up the best job for the worst job.
Who does that?
Well, I mean, it's like somebody joining the military because the country got attacked.
It's a really big sacrifice, and he made it.
Now, suppose that he found out he couldn't do the honest job that he thought he wanted to do.
Because let's say somebody, we don't have to know who, said, Well, you know the truth, but you're not allowed to say it.
What would Dan Bongino say if somebody who had enough power to make it happen said, you're not allowed to tell the truth on this issue, let's say the Epstein issue, that your base and your fans really, really care about, but you're not allowed to tell the truth.
What would you do, or what would you assume that Dan Bongino would do?
Well, at the very least, I would make some threats.
And I would say, look, here's the deal.
I think we botched that Epstein rollout, but if we can fix it, maybe I'll stay.
But if we can't fix it, I don't want to be part of a fraud.
And I'm going to go back to my perfect job.
Now, if he quit, and even if he didn't tell you all the details, so this will be hypothetical.
If Bon Gino quits and the only public statement he makes is something like, my ethics were incompatible with the job I was asked to do.
Suppose that's it.
No details.
My ethics, my moral center was incompatible with the job I was being asked to do.
So I'm going to go back to podcasting.
Would he retain his audience?
Because it would be a little bit like admitting that he lied, but telling you that he was asked to do it.
And then you would be noticing that he quit his job in protest, which is a very clean way to tell you that he didn't mean what he said and that he's not in favor of it.
Would you then say, you know what, I really respect that guy because he resigned?
You know, we always say, if you really believe that, why didn't you resign?
We say that all the time about other people.
So if we thought that he was forced to be a little disingenuous, and then you saw him quit, and then he said, I'm not going to give you details, but let's be honest.
You probably know exactly why I quit.
And going back to my podcasting job, what would his audience do?
I think they would go back, wouldn't they?
I think they would say, you're an honest man who got caught in a bad situation.
You did the best you could.
It doesn't make sense for you to stay there any longer.
Glad you're back to podcasting.
And then his family would say, oh, finally, you're back to doing what you love.
You're not commuting to Washington.
Wouldn't this be the very best time for him to quit if he wanted to quit anyway?
Do you think he wanted to quit anyway?
Probably.
And I'm only saying that because he left the best job you could ever have, podcasting, to go to the worst job you could ever have, which is you have to do what you're told and you can't do what you think is right.
The worst.
So I don't believe he's made a decision because he probably is going to wait to the last minute to make one.
But if he decided to go back to podcasting with just a general statement about why he's leaving, I would fully respect that.
Now, I would also respect if he stayed, because I don't have any negative knowledge about him at all.
But I wouldn't believe anything about this story until it's really confirmed.
I don't believe all the who's mad at whom and why they're mad and who thinks who botched whatever and who's talking to who.
I don't know if I believe any of that.
But let's watch him.
So Bungino is kind of the canary in the coal mine because we just assume he's going to do whatever is the right thing.
And we don't know what that is because we don't know what pressure he's under or anything like that.
But I do think I'd expect him to do the right thing.
And given that his own personal interests would suggest that quitting kind of soon and making this the reason for quitting, that might kill two birds with one stone.
One bird would be he could get back to his awesome career without destroying his reputation.
And the other is it would tell you exactly what was going on there.
At that point, you would know for sure that there's something going on with the Epstein files.
So anyway, so we'll keep an eye on that.
I like all three of them.
I like Bondi, I like Bongino, and I like Cash Patel.
So I'll tell you what I'm not going to do is take sides unless some new information comes up that I've never heard.
To me, they all look like they're loyal Trump mega-compatible people.
And, you know, I wouldn't want anything bad to happen to any of them.
Anyway.
Bill O'Reilly is pretty sure that the president is behind whatever happened.
He had the Epstein file release.
He thinks that the president was behind how it was handled.
And then, let's see.
All right.
According to Glenn Beck at the Blaze, his team has filed a FOIA request, Freedom of Information request, to get all of Dan Bongino's texts and emails regarding Epstein to Pam Bondi.
Now, that's something you could do?
Are you telling me that the Freedom of Information Act would allow any citizen to just file some paperwork and then we could see the private emails of two people who are currently in the government?
Is that real?
When did that become real?
Has that always been real?
Now, I understand if people were not in government anymore, or maybe time had gone by or something, or maybe it was part of a, let's say, part of a legal action or something.
But, oh, with the redactions, with the redactions.
Okay, so that's the catch.
So as long as the government can redact anything they want, I'm just gleaning this from the comments.
As long as the government has the option of redacting whatever they want, then I guess the citizens can ask for whatever they want.
It doesn't mean they'll get it.
But interesting play.
It's an interesting play.
All right.
Here's some more fake news, maybe.
I saw a claim on social media that Epstein gave all of his money to his brother right before he died, like two days before he died.
Grock says that's not technically true, but that Epstein did.
He put all of his money in a trust.
I think it was an overseas trust, Virgin Islands.
Oh, U.S. Virgin Islands.
And we assume that the trust beneficiary was his only relative, which was his brother.
So in a way, he did sign over his money to his brother, but probably through the mechanism of the trust, we don't know the details.
And then allegedly, the brother claimed his brother's body and buried it in an unmarked grave next to his parents in Palm Beach.
Unmarked grave.
So if you were Jeffrey Epstein and you wanted to fake your own death, would you make sure that your body could not be examined?
Check.
And would you make sure that all of your money went to a trusted person so you still had access to it after your debt?
You know, allegedly dead.
Yeah.
Now, I don't have a belief that he's still alive.
I have a belief that if you rule that out, I don't know if we can rule that out.
Can we?
I'm not going to say I believe it, that he's still alive.
I'm just going to say, if you're asking me to rule it out, I don't have any basis upon which to rule it out either.
It looks like, coincidentally, he did the very things you would do if you were trying to fake your own death and still have resources when you were done.
So we'll keep an eye on that.
I saw a post on X by Patrick Byrne about John Brennan.
Apparently, Patrick has some inside information that says John Brennan is abroad operating from a recreated MSNBC set somewhere, and that at one point he was operating from a SCIF in Australia, continuing to coordinate against Trump.
So do you think that John Brennan left the country because he's worried about consequences?
I don't know.
Maybe.
Apparently, some more, seven more people who had worked with the Jack Smith team that was working on the cases against Trump, they have been let go.
And I guess there were already a whole bunch of them who have been fired for the same reason that they worked with Jack Smith as part of the prosecution attempt or the attempt to lawfare Trump.
And what's interesting is these are not even lawyers.
They were support staff.
Now, does that seem like going a little too far?
I can totally understand why Trump would get rid of the lawyers who were acting against him for years.
Of course.
But the support staff?
Really?
That's going a little deep.
But, you know, it would be fair to assume that the support staff was not pro-Trump.
So maybe that's all he needs.
He doesn't need a reason.
So he's cutting pretty deep there.
Hillary Clinton was on Smirkanish on CNN with a big old Hillary Clinton pumpkin smile.
And she said, quote, if social media platforms don't moderate content, then we lose total control.
Well, I guess that's saying it directly, isn't it?
You could interpret that sentence two different ways.
One is just that bad things will happen.
The other way is exactly what she said.
We will lose total control.
We?
Who's we?
And what kind of total control are they going to lose?
Did Hillary say it Exactly the way she meant it, that the Democrats and her posse would lose total control of the narrative if they let social media just do what it does.
Unbelievable.
So, yeah, and you wouldn't believe if you didn't see the video of her talking about this, she could not get the smile off her face when she talked about the need to censor people on social media.
I mean, she seemed so genuinely happy.
It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're going to lose control unless we censor the hell out of them.
Yeah, can't wait.
Oh, she says, she's the personification of evil.
The State Department, Marco Rubio, I guess I got 1,300 staffers as part of a big overhaul of the State Department.
And when I see something like that, 1,300 people have been downsized, what were those 1,300 people doing?
How could you take any organization?
I mean, I know the answer, but it's still mind-boggling.
That there were 1,300 people that, according to management, were unnecessary and they were all being paid, and they were all commuting to work.
How would you like to be one of the 1,300 when you'd been working every day for maybe years and years?
And then somebody says, oh, we just realized all that work that you did for decades probably didn't need any of it.
That was my corporate experience that gave birth to Dilbert.
One day I realized in my corporate jobs that if I had never existed in my job, nothing would be different.
Nothing about the company would be different.
Nothing about the stock price.
Every day I was going to work and getting paid, putting in these hours.
And I was completely aware that none of it made any difference to anybody.
And you could just take me away from history.
I think comedian Nate Barghatsi, he has this little joke, he says, that if he went back in time, was that if he goes back in time, that nothing would change.
I forget his exact punchline, but it was something like, oh, so how do you make a nuclear power plant?
And he'd be like, I don't really know.
That wasn't his punchline.
He had a better one.
But the idea was that he wouldn't be able to affect history because he doesn't know enough about even our current time.
That's pretty funny.
All right.
So what about this story that after lots of investigation, several of the agents who were protecting Trump at the Butler, Pennsylvania event where he got shot in the ear, that several of the agents were suspended.
Now, only for days or weeks, right?
Not a permanent suspension.
But here's my question.
How could there be so many agents who on the same day and at the same time and in the same place, all of them independently, were doing something worthy of suspension?
What?
How is that even possible?
What the hell were they doing that several of them were worthy of suspension?
Now, if they said to me, well, you know, one of these people should have kept the door locked, or one of these people should have said, make sure there's somebody on the roof, or one of these people should have said, hey, there's a guy walking around with a rangefinder and a drone.
Maybe we should stop what we're doing and check this out.
Now, you could easily understand how there'd be one or two people there who did something that was sketchy enough that you think they should be suspended for temporarily.
But how could there be several?
Like, how could you have a handful of people who all independently did something so non-standard to their job at the same time that they all get suspended?
I would love to know what their particular crimes were.
Because it does get to the question of were they doing it intentionally?
Now, I doubt it was a big, well-organized anything, because if you're going to do an assassination like that, you're not going to have a dozen people in on it.
And this would assume that, you know, something like a dozen people did all the wrong things to get him killed.
It doesn't feel like that would be the way anybody would do a plot, to have too many people involved in it.
But anyway.
So as you know, the border enforcement people, ICE, they raided two different cannabis farms in California on Thursday.
And collectively, they got 300 people detained for deportation.
300?
So these were two businesses.
They were both pot farms.
And collectively, they had 300 people who were undocumented and working there.
What kind of pot farm these 300 people?
I would say that's a 10 robot situation.
So eventually, robots.
But apparently, one person died in the process of these raids.
I didn't see the details of how they died or what they died of, but that's tragic.
And I guess one of the cannabis farms had been donating to Governor Newsom.
So, but that doesn't mean anything.
The thing that bothered me is that the price of wheat in California is going to go up now.
Hey, I thought Trump was going to reduce the price of my essentials, but no, no.
Apparently, the supply of marijuana will go down quite a bit, and prices might go higher.
I don't know if you know this, but the prices for marijuana have dropped quite a bit in recent years, since it was legal.
When it was first legalized, I think an ounce cost sometimes $400 or $500.
And at the moment, the same amount and same quality would be $250.
So the price of weed did, in fact, respond to supply and demand.
And at least there was no inflation on weed.
But maybe there will be.
There's a new poll that says Democrats look out of touch and woke in a week.
We may have talked about this one.
And there was a super PAC who did the poll, and they've decided that the Democrats focusing on fighting for democracy, it was still popular within the party, but not in the general electorate.
How much are you surprised?
Remember how many times I told you that it was ridiculous that the Democrats thought that fighting to maintain your democracy was not going to resonate with the public?
That's just something that news geeks say.
But I don't know anybody who's just living their life who's worried about democracy being taken away by Trump.
And here's the poll that supports my hunch that the public didn't really care about the stealing democracy part because they didn't see it as real.
They also didn't care about the oligarchy.
I'm seeing in the comments.
Yeah, they didn't care about the oligarchy either.
If you're really into politics, that's the stuff you debate.
But if you're just a casual citizen and somebody said, maybe your biggest problems, how many just soccer moms who are dads who are not paying attention to politics, how many of them would say, well, I'm worried about the oligarchy or I'm worried about the attack on democracy?
Probably none.
But when you see that Mandani guy, when he gets all this purchase and all this attention, because he said the right thing, which is we're going to work on affordability, affordability was really a good kill shot.
You know, I'm not a Mamdani fan because he's a socialist.
But when he found a message, he just had energy and the right policy message.
He didn't even have solutions, really.
I mean, not practical ones.
But it reminded me of Trump.
When people looked at Trump in the very beginning, they just said, oh, there's no way.
I mean, we see that he's exciting.
He's bringing a lot of energy.
We get it.
And yeah, yeah, when he talks about the border and the wall, those are popular with his base, but that's not enough.
You know, you're going to have to be an experienced politician to win an election.
That's what people said.
But it turns out that Trump needed two things, the right policies and the right amount of energy.
And everything else, we were willing to forgive or just enjoy as a show, in my case.
And I think that Mom Dani is another example of that.
He definitely got the right policy, affordability, better than I've seen anybody do it, really.
So he nailed the policy, not the solutions, but at least he said, I feel your pain, you know, sort of the Bill Clinton thing.
I feel your pain.
It's affordability.
And then he brought the energy.
Now, you could talk about, you know, all different things that he did that you might like in both cases, Trump and Mom Danny.
But I feel like it just came down to that.
Do you have the right policy?
I mean, have you even identified the problem?
And then do you have the energy to make it happen?
And they both fit that.
Energy plus the right policy, according to their base.
Anyway, Jen Saki and her TV show on MSNBC that replaced Rachel Maddow's time slot is doing terrible in the ratings.
Lost 44% of her audience.
You know, I'm always surprised.
Was Rachel Maddow so popular that if you replace her with somebody who's, in my opinion, a bit of a clone?
You know, it's not like Jensaki is a completely different person than Rachel Maddow.
So why would the viewership go down so much?
It doesn't seem like that much of a change.
But one of my favorite Hobbies is looking at Fox News and what they do right and comparing it to MSNBC and what they do wrong.
MSNBC and CNN appear to be under the impression that news is something informing people, especially about the bad news.
So if you turn on CNN or you turn on MSNBC, you're mostly going to get some bad news.
And it's not all political.
You know, some of it might be natural disasters and stuff.
And those will be on every network.
But the thing that Fox News has been getting right for a long time is the understanding that people watch news as entertainment.
How many of you are in that category?
When I turn on the news, I'm sort of a little bit trying to find out what's new, but mostly I'm looking to be entertained.
And when I'm watching Fox News, I'm often entertained, depending on what show I'm watching.
And if I turn on CNN or MSNBC, because I do cycle through the three of them, they're not trying to entertain.
They're trying to get you worked up or angry.
And I can feel the difference.
But I also note that Greg Gufeld completely changes the nature of Fox News in a way that's made them dominant.
I think he's, more than anybody else, he's proven that people will watch for the entertainment, which is why he has two shows.
He's on the five, which is the top ratings thing at that time slot.
And then he's got his own show, Gutfeld, which again is tops in the ratings.
So he's now got two important time slots in which it's very clear to the viewer that entertainment is why you turned it on.
You learn some stuff because they're dealing with the same news that the other networks are.
So it's not like you're going to be uninformed, but the intent is to make it entertaining.
And then I realized the other day that Jesse Waters is a similar kind of vibe.
When you watch him on the five, he's playing it for laughs and he does a great job.
And now he has his own show.
So he's got his own hour, is it?
In which, you know, he plays it a little bit more seriously, but you can tell he's always got a smile on his face.
So they have something like three hours every night during the week in which it's unambiguously true that you're going to get entertained if you watch either those or any of those shows.
And it's amazing to me that CNN and MSMDC have not taken any kind of a learning from that.
CNN, I think they're still doing it.
Maybe not.
But they launched that show that was like a game show in which they would make fun of the news.
And Michael Ian Black was on that and some other people.
And I never found it funny because it was a little too forced.
So I don't know if that's even still on, but they tried.
Let's see what else.
There's some crypto executive orders that are expected from the White House.
And I always have trouble following this topic.
But the reason that Bitcoin is going up in value, it had a good run this week.
I didn't know why.
But apparently it's in anticipation of it becoming a better, I don't know if I want to call it an investment.
I guess I would.
Because of the upcoming executive orders.
And they would do, among other things, ban a central bank digital currency.
I guess that would be taking away a competitor to Bitcoin.
Would protect self-custody, so you don't have to keep it in the bank.
And stable coins, which are coins that are pegged to the dollar, meaning if the dollar goes up, they go up the same amount, would be backed by the treasuries.
And then there'd be some market structure, blah, blah, blah.
So some of it I don't understand, but OAN is reporting this.
So there might be something big coming with crypto.
If you're watching the Trump and Jerome Powell saga, which is always fun.
So of course, you know, Trump wants Jerome Powell to quit as soon as possible, or better yet, just lower interest rates, because that's what he really wants.
But the Gateway Pundit is reporting that Jerome Powell is getting some pressure now, and that according to Bill Pulte, who's chairman of the board of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Bill Pulte posted on X, quote, I'm encouraged by reports that Jerome Powell is considering resigning.
I think this will be the right decision for America and the economy will boom.
Now, I don't know what those rumors are.
I'm not sure that rumors can necessarily be trusted, but there's quite a push.
And I think Bill Pultey is the right person to be pushing this because he's in the domain where the interest rates are going to affect affordability of housing in a big way.
So he certainly has a dog in this fight.
Intel's CEO was talking to his own company and told them it's too late for Intel to catch up in AI chips.
What?
Can you imagine your CEO of a chip company saying, yeah, it's too late, and that the big companies like AMD and NVIDIA basically have already captured the market.
And he says, on training, I think it is too late for us.
So, Intel is a little too honest.
He must have been an engineer before he was a CEO.
That's a little bit too honest.
Yeah, it's too late for us.
We'll never catch up.
So, we're doomed.
He didn't say they're doomed, but it feels like it.
Well, in good news, the U.S. is opening its first rare earth mine in more than 70 years.
And apparently, it will provide six of the 17 rare earth materials and has tons and tons of supply.
Now, it still has to be refined.
I don't know who's going to do that or if we've solved that.
But if you're wondering, is the U.S. moving in a useful way to be free of China's control of rare earth minerals?
The answer is yes, at least for six of 17.
And I expect we'll see more movement there.
All right, let me give you a lesson in economics so that I can say that you were smarter when you left.
I had made the observation that if it's true that Trump has decided that Russia and Ukraine will never agree to a ceasefire, and it does look true.
I don't know that that's true, but from my perspective, it looks very much like Trump has given up and probably should, that at least for now, Russia and Ukraine prefer to fight.
Now, a bunch of people said to me, Scott, you stupid freaking idiot, Ukraine isn't choosing to fight, to which I say, did they stop?
If they didn't stop, they choose to fight.
Now, what you really mean is they have a good reason to fight.
I'm not talking about the reason, and I'm not arguing that they don't have a good reason.
I'm just saying that neither side has made a decision to stop, and they would prefer fighting over whatever they see as the reasonable alternatives.
So as long as they both want to fight, what would be the best thing for the greatest president in our history to do?
Let me tell you, if you know you can't fix it, you should monetize it.
And it looks like Trump might be doing that.
So what he's done is he's providing weapons to Ukraine, but he's making NATO pay for it.
Now, what's the next thing you're going to say to me?
Scott, you idiot, I thought you understood things like this.
You know that we're one of the biggest funders of NATO, so it's not like it's free.
We're putting the money into NATO and then taking it right back out to buy our weapons.
So it's not really monetizing it, right?
It's not monetizing it because a lot of it's our own money.
Here's why you're wrong about that.
It's a concept called sunk costs.
Here's how you should do that analysis.
Were we going to pay our 5% to NATO like the other countries are supposed to?
Yes.
We were going to give NATO money no matter what they did with it.
That's called a sunk cost, meaning that part's not going to change.
The money will come out of our pockets and it will go to NATO.
Nothing will change that.
That's the most public agreed upon thing, that all of the countries will try to get to their 5%, you know, in the, not right away, but there's a schedule for that.
But the United States, most certainly, is signed up for a certain amount of money that we will definitely take out of our pockets and definitely give to NATO.
If you know that that won't change and can't change in any reasonable way, then that doesn't count in the analysis.
So in other words, if we're going to give NATO money anyway, the only question is, do we want some of it back in the form of buying weapons from the U.S.?
And that's apparently what Trump's doing.
So if you understand the concept of sunk costs, the money we give to NATO is just going to be there no matter what, no matter what they do with it.
Wouldn't it make more sense for us to have as much of that as possible come right back to the United States in terms of purchasing American products, in this case, war-fighting products?
Of course it would.
Of course it would.
So we may have created a situation, or Trump may have, in which we don't have to solve the problem at all because the two sides that are fighting prefer the war.
And again, when I say they prefer the war, they would both like the other side to stop fighting and for their side to get everything they wanted out of it.
But that's not going to happen.
So instead, they don't prefer stopping, because that would give the other one the win.
So they prefer to fight.
So Trump monetized it.
I could not be more proud of my president.
If that's what's really happening, and I'm getting ahead of it a little bit, maybe that's not what's happening.
But if that's what he came up with, well, we can't stop it.
We might as well monetize it.
I would be so impressed.
I mean, I would just be so, so impressed if he monetized it.
Anyway, Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly is in favor of an Iran nuclear deal in which Iran would not be allowed to enrich uranium on their own.
But since Putin is a weasel, do we think he's just trying to be useful for world peace?
Or is it more likely that if Iran is not allowed to enrich, that they would have to depend on other countries, such as Russia, to provide them with the uranium that's already enriched for their medical use and for their domestic nuclear energy use.
And that would give Russia some leverage over Iran.
So I feel like this is more about Russia having some leverage over Iran.
But I doubt it's because he's trying to be useful.
In Great Britain, according to the Telegraph, there are some serious people who think that Britain should build more bomb shelters because they expect to be in a war with Russia.
Are you following that?
That the UK is acting like it's preparing for war with Russia?
Why would the UK want to have a war with Russia?
That seems like the worst idea in the world for both teams.
Anyway, that's all I got for today.
As I reminded you, Owen Gregorian will have a spaces event in a few minutes as soon as we're done here.
And you can continue talking about this stuff or maybe some other stuff if you want.
But go to X and look for Owen Gregorian.
And you'll find the link to the spaces, which will begin pretty soon.
All right.
And I'm going to say a few words privately to the people on locals, my beloveds, subscribers, to you.
Thanks for joining.
And I will see you tomorrow.
Same time, same place.
I hope.
Bye for now.
Oh, no.
It's not working again.
All right.
For reasons which I cannot determine, I can't go private without turning off the studio and getting back in.
So I'll just see you on locals or I'll see you on Spaces.
