God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, Cracker Barrel DEI, Target DEI, Kroger Store Closures, Bed Bath &Beyond CA, OpenAI CA, Morgan Stanley AI Expectations, Law Firms AI Impact, Elon Musk AI Prediction, Reading Decline, FL Schools Armed Drones, Arctic Sea Ice Stabile, Climate Models Scam, Scott Bessent, Venezuela Maduro, Ukraine War Solution, US Taxes Terrorist Funding, ODNI Cost Cutting, DNI Tulsi Gabbard, Democrat's Weak Theater Strategy, Trump's Communication Style, CA Newsom Redistricting, Chris Cuomo, Smithsonian's Negative History Focus, Association Thinking Trap, Brain Aging Reversal, Ukraine Sunk Cost Fallacy, India's Russian Oil, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams and you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny shy human brains, well, all you need for that is a cup or a mug or glass of tankered shells or a stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure with the dopamine at the end of the day.
The thing that makes everything better is called the Simultaneous Sip.
It happens now.
Go.
Mmm, pretty good.
Pretty good.
Not the best, but it's right up there.
Well, the restaurant chain called Cracker Barrel has decided to go broke.
But it's a good thing.
the way they'll get there is by going woke so apparently they have a newish ceo a woman who's quite gung-o for all things DEI.
And one of the things they did was they removed from their logo the old man, who I always thought was the cracker, and then he was leaning on a barrel.
So they got rid of the cracker and they got rid of the barrel.
I don't know what's left.
Well, if you had to guess, what is most likely?
Is it most likely that they're moved toward DEI and making a big deal about it and changing the logo and getting rid of the old white man on the logo?
Is that going to help their bottom line?
If you had to guess, would you guess, well, this will all work out.
Well, let's check in with Target.
Target stores who went through their own wokeness, talk friendlies,
swimsuit kind of event and I'm reading from Red State, Bob Hogue is writing at Red State that, let's see, the Target CEO is leaving his post next year and it looks like they never really recovered from their wokeness drama but here's the funny thing the way CNN
describes it is that the problem is a backlash to its retreat on DEI so if you get your news from CNN it will say the problem with target sales is not that people didn't like them being woke, but rather they didn't like when they were woke and then they became less woke.
So it was the becoming less woke because it was such an uproar that really hurt their sales.
What do you think?
Was it the being woke or was it the retreating from being woke that hurt their sales?
Well, probably both.
My guess is that anytime you change anything, you give gives somebody a reason not to not to shop there but what it definitely didn't do is give somebody a reason to shop if they didn't already have one it could give you reason not to shop either way because they got too woke or they retreated from the woke.
But which of those things would cause you to buy more?
Would you say, oh, Target's really woke now.
I'm going to buy a few extra pairs of pants?
No, it can only go one direction.
Whether you go woke or you go less woke, it can only cost you customers just because it's a change and there's no way there's an upside.
So we'll see.
Meanwhile, Kroger stores have announced that they're going to close multiple supermarkets in Washington state due to crime, according to the Gateway Bundit.
Mike Lachance is writing about that.
And what do you think of that?
So Kroger has decided that instead of staying in the high crime area, they're going to get the F out of there.
Huh?
Well, that's some advice, isn't it?
I wonder if they could get canceled for saying that they should get out of the high crime area.
I feel like they should be canceled for that.
No, no, just kidding.
Don't hurt Kroger.
But what will happen?
Will Kroger's sales go up or down?
Well, they'll have fewer sales in the high crime area, but they probably were losing money and employees too.
Meanwhile, Bed Bath and Beyond, which at one point was bankrupt, but I guess it got rescued by some big money entity.
But they're trying to rebuild, and they have announced that they will not build any stores in California.
Can you even hold this in your head that California is uninvestable if you're a big company.
They've just said there's over-regulation and taxes and basically those two things, over-regulation and taxes.
So they say it's just not even worth it.
It's too risky.
So the two risky places to do business, three, well, four if we count Ukraine, would be China, Ukraine, Gaza.
and California, but also apparently Washington State, but also Washington, D.C. So there's a whole bunch of places you just don't want to be.
And unfortunately, I live in one of those places.
So I'm thinking of moving to Ukraine for the friendly business environment.
Well, Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT, apparently, according to Zero Hedge, has hired some top Democrat operatives.
to help them grease the gears, so to speak, as Zero Hedge puts it, grease the gears with California politicians because they need to restructure the company and eventually go public and they need California to be a friendly business environment.
Do you know what will happen if they don't get what they want?
This is in Politico, by the way.
Well, will they leave California?
What will their AI tell them to do?
But it seems unbelievable to me that a company as big as OpenAI and ChatGPT, that they have to hire people just to figure out how to navigate the Democrat success pool that is California.
That's not good.
That's not good.
And what could you say about the governor of a state that's so poorly run that Ben Batham Beyond is not willing to do business in the state and ChatGPT had to hire expensive Democrat weasels to try to figure out how to do business with the state.
What would happen to that governor?
Well, obviously, obviously his political career would be over.
What?
Oh, he's the highest polling person to be the presidential candidate.
Oh, okay.
So we'll talk a little bit later about how Democrats are not taking the best advice.
But what about Walmart?
Don't you think Walmart's having some issues with wokeness or DEI?
Do you think they're having some issues with tariffs?
Well, Walmart is once again.
you know arguably one of the most impressive companies in the history of the United States because their sales are up.
So they've got a 4.6% sales increase in the last three months.
And that's even including the fact that they've got tariffs that are built into their prices now.
Now they have raised some of their prices because of tariffs, but only one third of their goods come from overseas and they're not passing along the entire cost of the tariffs.
They're absorbing some and passing some along, but it wasn't enough.
to decrease their sales.
And apparently, I haven't heard of them doing anything that would make anybody mad about DEI or about trans or wokeness or any of that.
So somehow they've avoided all of that.
Good job, Walmart.
Impressive.
Well, speaking of big companies doing stuff, Axios is reporting that Morgan Stanley did some data analysis and this is what Morgan Stanley came up with.
Now I'm laughing because it used to be my day job at a big corporation to do financial estimates and projections and decide which path was the best one financially.
So I have a little bit of appreciation of how accurate you can be in doing this, which is Morgan Stanley did an analysis of how much money AI could save the big companies, and they said it could save them nearly $1 trillion a year.
in reducing, I think mostly employee costs.
So they came up with $1 trillion a year.
And that's...
That's only the beginning.
They say long term, it could result in $13 to $16 trillion in market value creation for the companies in the index.
I figure that's the S ⁇ P 500 index.
I think that's what that means.
All right, do you believe, I'm giving it away by laughing at it, but do you believe that Morgan Stanley has somebody on their payroll that can estimate the trillions of dollars No, no, they don't have anybody who knows how to do that.
This is pure bullshit.
There was somebody who was no doubt assigned the project.
That's the sort of project I would have been assigned to.
Do you think I would have not produced the number?
Of course I would.
If I had been working for Morgan Stanley and they said, Scott, got an important assignment for you.
It will be up to you to decide how much money can be saved by AI.
And I'd be go off and I start making some assumptions.
Well, let's assume 46% of all the companies fire 20% of their staff within eight months.
Where'd you get that assumption?
Look over there.
It's a deer.
Change the subject.
Yeah, no, you can't really do that kind of an estimate.
It's entirely possible.
The AI will just be wonderful and companies will make more money and all the people who lose their jobs will be instantly retrained and have AI as a buddy and they'll go off and make more.
Oh, it's all possible but if you tell me that anybody can estimate what's going to happen in even three years no nobody can do that um but google's generative ai team according to futurism newer lcb is writing about this cb i don't know um that there would be no point in getting a law degree
or a medical degree if you were going to start today.
And the reason is that AI will just eat your lunch and you could.
get that expensive education.
It might take seven to 11 years to become a practicing doctor.
But by then, there's almost no chance that AI won't do it better and cheaper and faster.
You'll still need nurse-type people, you know, to put on splints and do physical stuff.
Well, I guess you can do a lot of that in hospitals.
But in terms of analyzing something and prescribing something, I feel like I would agree that your regular doctor has got some problems and lawyers too but I will point out that chat GPT just had to hire some humans to help them navigate California and I suspect that one of the big advantages of big law firms is that
they have connections they literally know the judge they you know their brother-in-law is in some political office.
So I suspect that the big law firms that charge a lot and get the most powerful people out of trouble and most powerful companies.
It probably is more about their weasily ways and who they know and what they've done and who owes them a favor.
And I don't know if AI can keep up with that.
I mean, they would use AI, but I suspect that the lawyers are going to get together and make it illegal to have an AI-only lawyer.
Imagine Imagine, if you will, just a few years in the future, where there's a accused felon who goes to trial and says, Your Honor, I'd like to exercise my right to have an AI attorney.
We fed it all the documents and it's ready to go.
And then the AI just sits there on a box and argues against maybe another AI.
Is that going to happen?
I don't know.
Because you'd have to train your AI.
to be somewhat dishonest, well, let's say dishonestly persuasive, especially if you were the defense and your client was gu can win is if your AI is a lying weasel, you know, just like the human would be defending him.
So will it ever be legal for AI to be programmed to lie to the jury to get a guilty person off?
I don't know.
I feel like the existing lawyers are going to find ways to make it illegal.
to have an AI lawyer.
Now, will the medical community do the same?
Probably it won't be long before you start seeing stories in the news about somebody who died because they took advice from AI.
Oh, you know, that's coming.
Those stories will be planted by, let's say, some doctor, the AMA or some doctor benefiting organization.
And suddenly your brain will think, wow, AI just keeps killing people with bad advice.
Oh, it told him to take ore spaste or whatever.
And then you'll say, huh, I only want a human doctor.
And it will all be fake.
But the doctors will hire the human lawyers to make sure that it's illegal to have an AI-only doctor because it's far too dangerous.
That's what they'll say.
Well, there's a physicist who believes he has a theory.
His name is Miguel El-Kaberi.
He has a theory for how to do faster than light engines.
So sort of warp speed kind of thing, faster than light.
And the way he would do it, since it's impossible to go faster than light, is instead of making the object go faster than light, he will bend space.
That's his proposition.
You could bend space so that there's, let's see, so that there's less of it in front of you than there is behind you or something like that.
And then bending the space gives you the functional equivalent of traveling faster than light, but you're technically not because within your small local domain, you're not faster than light.
It's just that you're bending space in front of you that you're not in yet and behind you.
Now, does that make sense?
I don't know.
I mean, I may not have explained it perfectly, but does it seem impossible that you could bend space in front of you behind you i don't know how you do that we don't know how to do that now right so I wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for that, but hey, you never know.
Mario D'Angelo found that story.
You should follow Mario Novel on X. He does great summaries of the news every day.
Elon Musk has made a provocative and non-obvious prediction.
He said that AI is going to obviously one-shot the human limbic system.
Now, I don't know exactly what he means by that part.
but the real prediction comes next.
He said, that said, I predict, counterintuitively, that it will increase birth rate.
Mark my words.
And then he goes, also, we're going to program it that way.
Well, the only one he can program is his, you know, Grock X-AI.
And I could certainly imagine that it would program it to optimize human reproduction.
But I don't think the other AIs are going to necessarily do that, are they?
And it also seems to me like that could be its own set of problems.
I feel like maybe AI should just stay out of it.
But hey, you know, he's obviously he's done more thinking on this specific topic than I have, so he might have something.
I'll be open-minded on that.
But why would AI increase birth rates?
He does say it's counterintuitive, but then he doesn't help us out with the reasoning.
Do you see it?
How many of you, is it because the AI will hypnotize us into reproducing?
Is it because the AI will take away all our workload and we won't have much to do and we'll be staying home.
And so it would be like, well, if we're going to be home a lot, we won't have any problems watching the kids.
We don't need.
So maybe it just makes life easier and maybe it makes it easier to afford things too.
We might get to the point where energy and housing costs are all low because the robots are building the houses and we've solved energy.
by just having smarter nuclear power and stuff.
So I don't think this is going to happen right away, but I can imagine getting to the point where if you're a family or let's just say you're married that you wouldn't have anything to do unless you had kids.
So it might be that having families is the only thing that will have meaning because you won't be able to get meaning through work.
The robots will be doing the work.
So I think he might be right.
You know, as I'm thinking it through, if you could get to the point.
where people don't have to work and everybody has enough of the basics, yeah, people will be bored and they're going to want to just have babies, probably.
Well, did you know, according to Cell Press, that reading for pleasure in the U.S. has decreased over the past 20 years?
Do you think they needed to do a study of that?
I feel like I would have known that.
Isn't that purely because of alternative uses of our time?
You know, if you've got a phone in your hand, you don't need to read that much.
Now, personally, I read way more now than I did before computers because, you know, it was only rarely that I pick up a book.
But, you know, if you're on the Internet all day, if you're on X or you're reading stuff all day.
I mean, I read probably the equivalent of about a quarter or half of a book just getting ready to do this podcast.
I mean, the amount that I read in the past two hours is pretty much.
So, yeah, reading for pleasure.
I was trying to remember the last time I read fiction for pleasure, and I couldn't even remember.
I think it was, you can help me out on this.
I've read nonfiction books, of course, but fiction for pleasure?
Probably the last one was the second Harry Potter book.
So if you told me what year that was, the second Harry Potter book when it just came out.
think this might be the last book I read for pleasure.
That was a while ago.
Anyway, according to Newsweek, some schools.
are going to test out, schools in Florida are going to test out putting armed drones in schools to defend against school shooters.
Now, when I say armed, I don't mean necessarily with bullets, but rather with a pepper spray and some kind of glass breaking device so it doesn't get trapped behind a glass door, I guess.
And what would happen is if there was a, if somebody did the secret button, presumably it would be an administrator who did it, then the drone would take off and it would be operated remotely by somebody who would know to do it.
And they would look for that shooter.
And at the very least, they'd get more information about the shooter, but it could also interfere with them.
So the drone could try peppering him and the shooter would have to turn its attention on the drone.
just so the drone didn't take it about.
So that would be fun.
That seems like a good idea.
Well, no, because you could deploy that drone in like five seconds.
Well, I'm loving watching the bad advice that Democrats are giving to other Democrats.
James Garville was on some show talking about what the Democrats should have done when J.D. Vance took his summer vacation.
Because I guess he went to England and a place called Oxfordshire took the family.
And that's sort of an upscale place.
in England.
And James Garville says that the Democrats should have hammered him because there are vacation spots in the United States that are not doing as well as they could be doing?
doing?
What's he doing taking his American money and wasting it overseas?
And he says that they should have just been all over him on that and made a big deal about it.
Is that some of the worst advice you've ever heard?
How many people care where the vice president is taking his family on vacation?
How many people care about that?
Most Americans would be perfectly happy to take an overseas vacation, you know, different countries they might prefer.
But is there any American who doesn't think that they would like to take an overseas vacation someday?
And do we really think that we're all going to be taking the same kind of vacation as the president and the vice president of the United States?
It's ridiculous.
It's just the worst advice.
Can you imagine some Democrat voters like, well, you know, I was going to vote for Trump.
But then I found out that J.D. Vance and his family went on a vacation in Oxfordshire, England.
That changes everything.
Are the Democrats at this lost?
That that seemed like good advice.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
In other news, apparently the Arctic sea ice, the Guardian was reporting this, was a new study that says that the Arctic sea ice has not reduced in 20 years.
Now, if you believed in climate change and you believe the planet's getting warmer, and it might be, it might be getting warmer..
But wouldn't you also predict that that warming would increase the ice loss?
Well, apparently it didn't happen.
However, instead of saying, uh-oh, it looks like our prediction models are wrong because you can't go 20 years without losing some Z ice if the planet's getting warmer.
No, instead, the climate people say that they have at least two climate models that would allow for such long pauses, including another 10 years.
So they say.
that there are two existing credible climate models which would allow the planet to get warmer for 30 years but the ice in the Arctic not to change for those same 30 years.
Does that sound even a little bit like they know what they're doing and they've got a handle on this thing?
It sounds like a Dilbert response, right?
Well, yeah, my prediction model is no matter how warm it gets or for how long it gets or for how long the ice won't melt all right okay got it well i don't know what to believe there but you know what i always say wait until you find out about climate models it's so funny i i think people are slowly starting to get the idea when
they see that every other thing in our environment is fake.
The news is fake, our employment data is fake, certainly all of our casualty numbers from war all fake the reasons we get in war all fake the russia hoax all fake most of our political stuff all fake but people still believe that the most ridiculous of all those things the climate models that we could somehow monitor we
could somehow model climate into the future that we still believe that one's real when all the other things from yeah from flu deaths to everything else are all fake and we know they're fake but there's one thing oh that one's true you know what i'd love to see since the best argument for the non-scientist is that there are so many scientists who say it's true.
How many other topics has science had 98% agreement?
We'll just rant.
I know it's not 98%, but let's just say 90%.
How many items in science have had 90% agreement and then later turned out not to be true?
I feel like there's a pretty long list, isn't there?
Certainly the nutrition pyramid probably had 90% agreement of dieticians and whatnot, and that was fake, right?
So if you knew how many times science had been wrong when 9 out of 10 scientists believed something was true, wouldn't that change how you saw the climate stuff?
It would.
That would be important context, and I don't know it.
I don't think you know it either.
either but certainly they're yeah certainly eggs are bad i'm seeing some other some other examples go by yeah and then we believe that our elections are or pristine.
Really, everything's broken, but our elections are fine and climate science.
Once you realize that everything is fake, if it's complicated and there's a lot of money involved and it really matters, it's definitely fake.
All right.
Scott Besant was asked about getting a trade deal with China, which we don't have yet.
And Breitmaar News, Ian Hanchet is writing about this.
And apparently, Besant's take is that we don't need a deal because we've passed tariffs along and the tariffs include things like you know grotesque higher tariff because of fentanyl and apparently China is our biggest source of tariff money right now now I will remind you it doesn't mean that China is paying it although in some cases they might by taking lower
profit margins but the company that's importing is still paying it.
But apparently China is not complaining too much and we're getting all kinds of revenue toward the deficit and we don't really need to do anything.
I have to admit I did not see that coming.
I did not see us getting to the point where our trade deal with China is, you know what, if they want to keep having these tariffs, we'll be happy to keep them on there.
So instead of solving the problem, Trump monetized it as he does.
And Bassan says, if it's not broke, don't.
fix it so he's happy to just plod along and keep the tariff money well the us has a bunch of warships and 4 000 marines off the coast of venezuela because maduro the leader is accused of being more cartel than national leader although he's both and I guess Maduro is activating a bunch of reserves,
so he's got millions of soldiers just in case.
And I'm going to give you my conspiracy theory of the day.
Now, I wouldn't say that I believe this is true, but some of you are going to say, that's a pretty good conspiracy theory.
You ready?
Like many of you, I also believe that when a president gets in office, that there's something like what I'm going to describe that happens.
Maybe not exactly this, but it's what you imagine happens.
that someday some spooky guy, it's always a guy in a nice suit, will visit the new president and say, let me explain to you how it works.
The military-industrial complex runs the country, and you're going to give us at least one ongoing war all the time.
If you don't, we will probably take you out one way or the other.
What?
Take me out.
What do you mean?
Like kill me?
Eh, if we have to.
the important thing is the country needs at least one war all the time.
So what if So don't believe this.
This is just for fun.
What if Trump knows that, and so in order to end the war in Ukraine, he knows the only way to do it is to promise a brand new war really fast.
And so, again, this is just for fun.
I'm not alleging that this is true.
So then what he'd do is put a bunch of military forces around Venezuela because you could credibly believe that he might be planning for
And then you say to that spooky guy in the suit, hey, here's a deal if you help me get out of the ukraine situation we'll start something locally and we'll have a brand new one with venezuela deal how do you like that for a conspiracy theory that's the most cynical you could get that we that what matters is we have to have a war so when you see the new one getting queued up just in time huh
Isn't that weird?
It's just in time because the other one might be ending.
Huh?
That's a little bit of a coincidence, isn't it?
Well, it might be just a coincidence, so don't take it too seriously.
But we'll see what happens in Venezuela.
Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security has pulled funding from groups that are, quote, alleged terrorist ties.
How much money does our government have that we don't know that some of it is going to organizations that have a terrorist conspiracy?
connections.
Well, turns out there's a good reason to believe we've been giving money to some groups that had terrorist connections.
We're giving way too much money away.
So Fox News Digital got this scoop, I guess.
49 projects with alleged affiliations to terrorist activities have already been canceled.
49.
49 funded projects that our government and your taxpaying money went to support.
have some kind of terrorist connection.
It took until now to say, hey, hey, maybe we shouldn't be giving them money.
All right.
And in related news, Tulsi Gabbard, head of the D ⁇ I, has announced a sweeping overall and is going to get rid of 40% of staff.
I love the fact that even though Trump is not crowing about his cost savings in government, that it seems like all the department heads know that winning means cutting costs.
And so they're all doing it.
And it's almost like they're competing to see who can cut the most because that's how you win favor.
But it is strange that Trump's not bragging about.
He could.
just a minute all right i'm back all right so um
I guess there's a 4.5 million voters swing from Democrat to Republican in the last few years.
And a poll by a Democrat super PAC, Unite the Country, showed that what Democrats thought of their own party is that it was out of touch, woke and weak.
Out of touch, woke and weak.
And so apparently their response to being out of touch, woke and weak.
is to talk more and mock Trump more.
Does that sound like what the country wants from them?
Now, I would agree it might be that the poll did get those results and that that's what people said.
But don't you think that being strong and not being out of touch would involve having good policies for solving our big problems as opposed to finding a clever way to do a skit that involves mocking Trump?
No, the theater kids only have one play.
What kind of theater can we put on to get power?
The Russia, a Russia Gate hoax was theater, was it not?
It was literally imaginary characters with an imaginary plot.
It was fiction.
Most of the hoaxes, from the 51 Intel people with the laptop to the Fighting People hoax to the January 6 hoax, they're all fiction.
So, and then you've got Newsom.
who's doing this clever, but not really effective, mockery of President Trump by doing social media posts in his voice.
To me, that seems out of touch because it's not addressing any problem.
And it seems, it's not woke.
It's just ignoring woke.
And it feels weak.
Do you notice that the reason that that mockery of Trump works is that everybody knows how he talks?
And Trump has proven that the way he talks is the most persuasive and effective way anybody can ever talk.
We all kind of know that now.
We didn't know that when he first ran for the first term.
But at this point, everybody who's paying attention knows, okay, he doesn't talk like other people, but it's the most effective political talking we've ever seen.
So when you mock the most effective political communication you've ever seen by simply matching it, You haven't really mocked anything.
You haven't mocked anything because the thing that he's mocking.
is well understood to be the superior form of communication.
If he mocked something that wasn't working, well, then he'd have something, right?
But you can't mock something that worked so well in Biden president twice.
The way Trump communicates is not a flaw.
It's not the thing that the country needs to get rid of at all.
It's very effective.
So I don't think that mocking the most effective form of communication we've ever seen in that domain is buying them much.
But it's a skit.
And the important thing, if you're a Democrat, apparently, is to be part of a play.
And so Newsom's got this little character he plays that's like the president.
And so he's happy because Democrats are saying, yeah, look at that.
He's playing a part.
Look at that play.
I want to bring my friends to the play.
I got a ticket.
They seriously are about the act.
They really are about the act.
Now, of course, all politics is a little bit acting but not like this This is literally living in fiction world and having no regard whatsoever to policies or the things which you'd imagine would help them more.
Well, Texas indeed passed its new redistricting map.
So it looks like they'll get some extra seats in the House.
And Newsom won in California courts, I guess.
Republicans tried to stop him from his plans of redistricting California, but he probably will now.
First, he has to win the power to do it in a referendum.
But he might.
He might get that.
And Trump has announced that Missouri is going to redistrict.
So Trump says he wants all the Republican states that haven't to redistrict.
And if you believe the reporting on this, if all the Republicans did it, and all the Democrats did it that haven't done it yet, at least to the max, the Republicans would come out way ahead.
I'm not 100% sure that's true, but looks like a good play for Trump.
And I guess Democrats, not Democrats, but people, are beginning to receive letters in the mail saying that they have to complete 15 hours of community service per week in order to get their benefits.
They don't like taking time out of their day to get benefits.
so we'll see how that goes.
I guess Trump has threatened to cut funding to California public schools if they don't follow the federal policy on not allowing trans athletes in women's sports and sometimes if they cheat on DEI.
So we'll see if any schools lose their funding for that.
Chris Cuomo, I didn't realize this, but Chris Cuomo is not a Democrat.
I assume he was at one point, but he was talking to Benny Johnson.
And he was talking about, you know, what the Democrat Party has become.
He was pretty brutal.
Apparently he thinks that the Democrats have become the party of elitism, open borders, socialism, and defunding the police, and that those ideas are so bad they killed the modern Democratic Party.
He says the Democratic Party that his father was a part of no longer exists, and he doesn't know why.
He doesn't know why his brother is still registered as a Democrat.
So as supportive as he is of his own brother, he can't even say that the brother belongs to a party for a good reason.
He goes, my brother's a Democrat, I don't know why, but he is.
My father was a Democrat, but his party doesn't exist anymore.
Well, here's what I think.
Cuomo, in his current opinion of the Democrats and not wanting to be one of them, feels like where Bill Maher is being drawn, I don't think Bill Maher is going to make it over the line.
I think that he'll have to stop.
before he becomes a Republican.
And it's not like Chris Cuomo became a Republican.
You know, he's independent.
But do you think it's possible that Bill Maher will be, you know, pulled so far that he just, you know, denounces the Democrats and says, all right, I just can't even support you anymore?
I feel like he's really close.
So he might, I don't think he'll ever become a Republican, but he doesn't need to.
He just needs to denounce the badness.
the issue issue that Trump has created with the Smithsonian and the other museums.
He wants the museums to focus more on the positive accomplishments of America.
and less focused around an emphasis on slavery.
And to this point, Molly Hemingway, who was reporting on X, she said, I overheard an older white woman sitting behind me on a plane ride today talking to her husband.
She was aghast at the idea that the Smithsonian might not make the history of slavery the centerpiece of the institution.
Now, we all agree that slavery was a big part of the story of the early United States.
So everybody agrees with that.
But does it make sense that your museum focuses Well, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
If what you're trying to accomplish with your museum is a history lesson, well, then you just make sure that it covers all the history and slavery was a big part of it.
But if you're trying to make Americans feel good about being Americans, which I feel like is the more important use for the national museums.
could be private museums that do whatever they want but for a national museum i But I will go further than that.
I believe that the more attention is giving to slavery as the original sin and biggest part of our history, it's all bad for Black Americans today.
Does anybody know why?
is something I've taught you many times.
And it's just glaringly obvious in this case.
And here it is.
People don't think logically.
They think by association.
So if you can say somebody was good friends with Epstein, you could ruin them even if they didn't do anything wrong because it's just the association.
What does it do to modern black Americans if when you're thinking of black americans you're thinking of slavery because it's just in your mind and it's really part of the narrative what does that do to how you feel about black Americans and how they feel about themselves and how they fit in.
Well, since being a slave would be a horrible association.
You're taking modern Black Americans and you're making people think about their existence as slaves.
That is the worst association you could ever put on anybody if you want them to be successful in the modern world.
So from a history perspective, Yeah, if you're just trying to describe what happened, of course you want to include as much of the history of slavery as makes sense, of course.
But if you're trying for people to be happy and successful, then persuasion and how people feel about things and associations and the psychological impact of things has to be a big part of the decision.
And I can tell you for sure that black Americans would be way better off if there were some device that you could hold up to everybody's head to make them forget that slavery ever happened.
If you could make everybody forget that slavery had ever happened, then black people would wake up in the morning and say, huh, I guess anything's possible.
and they would just work toward their best life and they would have the best outcomes that are possible in the real world.
But will that ever happen?
No, that will never happen because there are people who make money by emphasizing the negative parts.
So as long as there's a business to be made in emphasizing the negative, people will do it.
Yeah.
So...
that's what I think.
Elon Musk has denied on X, the Wall Street Journal's report that he's decided to scrap his third party idea.
He has not decided definitively to scrap that in favor of supporting J.D. Vance.
So Musk told us to not believe everything you read in the Wall Street Journal.
So we won't believe that until we have some confirmation if it ever comes.
Well, the University of California in San Francisco reports that at UCSF, they discovered a protein that reverses brain aging in mice how many times have you seen a story in the news that somebody reversed aging in a mouse i feel like this story has been coming out for 40 or
50 years every few weeks hey we discovered something that will reverse aging in a mouse now How many things have reversed aging in human beings?
Zero?
Is there any pill that I could buy that I'm not that would reverse my aging.
And yet, and yet, every freaking week for 50 years, we figured out how to reverse aging in a mouse.
You should not believe anything that is reported about success with a mouse.
The percentage of those that translate into a real, you know, functional human.
medical process is really low.
It's very unusual.
But the way the news reports it, it makes you think, wait, it worked on the mouse and they wouldn't bother testing it on the mouse unless that would tell you something about whether it would work on a human being.
So, wow, this is promising.
No, it's not.
It's not promising.
The odds of any of this ever seeing the light of day and turning into a pill that will reverse your brain's age is really, really low.
Like really, really low.
So low, don't even think about it.
Anyway, so I've noticed that Ukraine and the Ukrainians have what I call a sunk cost problem.
So in economics, a sunk cost is money you've already spent.
So what you should never do is say, damn it, I've already spent so much in this project that I have to keep spending more to finish it.
No, you don't.
The amount that you've already spent is just gone.
You should make your decision as if it didn't make any difference at all.
And gamblers would do the same.
If you're gambling and you've lost a million dollars so far, if you say to yourself, I can't stop now because I've already, I'm down a million i got to win it back that's sunk cost you should look at every bet as if it's a new decision independent of anything you've already done and likewise the ukrainians often are saying stuff like we can't give up any land to putin because
so many ukrainians have died trying to keep that land to which i say that's a sunk cost those people are not going to pop back to life no matter what you do they are just gone and while you can respect their sacrifice, you should not be making your new decisions based on the fact that they died.
And it looks like they are doing that.
And that's a sunk cost fallacy.
Now, I don't know if the leaders are doing that, but you're hearing that from Ukrainians.
We can't give this land up because so many people sacrificed to China.
You should count that as zero.
If millions of Ukrainians died trying to protect that land, zero.
You should not include that in your decision.
However, since we're not a logical species, we're a persuadable psychologically emotional species, it does matter if people feel like they can't make a certain decision.
But you need to separate what is them feeling a certain way.
Oh, we can't give up this land because we've sacrificed so much.
with what makes sense.
What makes sense is it doesn't matter at all how many people died protecting, trying to protect that land.
It doesn't matter.
It's already over.
They're dead.
You have to make your decision like you woke up into the game today.
And the only thing you know is what's true going forward.
So here's my prediction.
I think Putin is going to keep yanking the football.
We're already seeing some indications that Putin isn't so keen on getting a deal.
which would be no surprise.
And eventually, if it hasn't happened already, whatever goodwill Putin has developed with Trump will evaporate and reverse really quickly.
And when Trump decides that he's pissed off at Putin and there's no redeeming, it's going to get ugly.
And I'm almost guaranteeing that's where it's going to go.
I don't think Putin is going to deal with Trump and with Europe and Ukraine in a productive way.
I don't think he wants to.
I don't think he plans to.
because time is on his side.
And he probably thinks that Trump and the Europeans have used all of their chips, that there's not much else they can do to him and he can just last forever but as i mentioned before um india went from one percent of its oil that it purchased being from russia to 40 and it turns out that the reason it went so high is that it's not that they're buying it to use
it in india but some entities in india are buying it and reselling it because it's cheap oil So they're just keeping the difference.
So basically, some Indian entities, and there can't be that many of them, because you would have to be in that specific line of business how many people are in that line of business that they can move gigantic amounts of oil from one country to another can't be that many people i think that trump says to india here's the deal you've got half a dozen companies that are allowing uh russia to move its oil i know you india as a government want
to keep good relationship with uh with putin however There's nothing that's going to stop us from taking out your six companies.
Their CEOs are going to start dropping dead.
We will sanction them individually.
We'll just take out those companies.
And what will India do?
Will India say, you can't do that.
I want to protect my companies that are thwarting the sanctions on Russia so that the Ukrainian war will last longer.
What are they going to do?
Well, I don't know the full situation.
So, you know, I'm in way over my head.
talking about Indian buying and reselling oil.
But if it's true that there are a handful of companies in India that are keeping Russia alive, I believe that we can target them.
I believe that we can just tell India, look, you know, those companies are going to start having some real bad luck.
And you might not know where it came from, but trust us, those companies are going to have some real bad luck and it's going to happen really fast.
So here's what I think.
I think Putin is going to believe that he can get away with stalling and that will cause the Europeans to be mad at Trump and that'll all be good for Russia.
But I think Trump is going to say, you've now crossed the line And now I'm going to take your economy.
And maybe it will be the India play.
Maybe not.
But I do think that there is, let's say, a more aggressive way that Trump could just take the knees out.
And I think he would do it.
So I think that's where it's headed.
And maybe something with giving Ukraine better weapons too, that might happen.
Trump's $464 million civil fraud penalty was vacated on appeal.
Really?
So Zero Hedge is reporting that the, was that not the Letitia James case with the banks?
And that just got thrown out on appeal, if that's true.
So we'll see.
Anyway, you know what is the dumbest comment?
I just saw the dumbest comment here on locals.
Bad take.
I don't think once someone has ever told me I had a bad take and then could follow it up with what was wrong with it.
As soon as I hear bad take, I just think, oh, you're a fucking idiot.
Because if you had a real reason, it would have taken about as many words as bad take.
You know, you could have said something like, that's not how that works, or, well, that's too generic too.
uh cnbc reported it as well wow Wow.
Now does that mean that he's not guilty of any of those charges or that he just doesn't have to pay?
I wonder what that means.
I don't know how that works.
All right, we'll look into that.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to talk to the beautiful people, my beloved people on Locals, subscribers.
And the rest of you, thanks for joining.
I hope you enjoyed it.
See if we can end some wars.
All right, locals.
Locals, I'll be coming at you privately in 30 seconds.
