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We're not simplifiers.
Come on, computer.
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It's going to be that kind of a day.
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The thing that makes everything better is gold.
That's right.
It was a simultaneous step.
It happens now.
Oh, it's all coming together now.
Well, here's a little Tesla news.
Apparently, the Tesla Robo Taxi app that allows you to use your private car as a sort of a self-driving Uber is the number one download on Apple.
Now, I don't think there's any place that it's approved for that yet, but they must be really close.
So the totally self-driving car is right around the corner.
And it turns out that the Trump administration in related news is getting ready to ease a bunch of self-driving car rules.
Boy, do we need that?
Sean Duffy, Transportation Secretary.
Now, is it my imagination or Sean Duffy?
Is he also the NASA guy now?
Am I crazy?
It's just funny how some of the Trump people have more than one job.
That's just showing off, isn't it?
Like, oh, Biden needed a secretary of this and a secretary of that.
Well, I'll just have one person do all three of those jobs.
And somehow everything seems to be working out.
So amazing.
Anyway.
And yeah, Sean Duffy says it's critical to keep us moving ahead.
Well, absolutely.
So I'm loving how pro-business the Trump administration is and how dedicated they are to getting rid of useless and bothersome impediments to business.
They are really, well, the only thing I know for sure is that the publicity around it is really good.
So it seems like almost every day you hear of somebody in the administration got rid of some regulation.
So that's pretty good.
Well, speaking of Tesla, apparently, this is wild.
The Tesla board has proposed a new compensation package for Elon Musk.
It's got some targets that they want him to hit, like a million robo-talk taxis for commercial use, shipping out a million energy storage units and producing and delivering 20 million vehicles over, I don't know, a period of time.
And aim for a market cap for the company.
So this would just be the value of Tesla.
They want him to hit a market cap of $8.5 trillion.
That'd be pretty good.
And they want him to commit to up to 10 years in the CEO role.
I'm guessing he'd be okay with that.
I don't know.
And he gets 12% of the company's stock, I guess.
Somebody estimated that he could make a trillion dollars.
A trillion dollars.
You know, if there's one thing I could teach you about money, and you could take this to the bank.
You know, a lot of times people will give you financial advice, and you'll say, oh, I don't know, maybe you're being paid to say that or something.
But here is some honest and useful financial advice, and I don't think anybody will ever contradict it.
It goes like this: making the first trillion, that's the hard part.
Yeah, you're welcome.
All right.
I love this too.
President Trump says he's going to make some big announcement at 4 p.m. Eastern time today.
Now, does anybody else have the same impression I do that he's turned the government into a really good reality show?
And when he does this, the big announcement, you might not think it's a big announcement when it happens.
Like, it might not be a world-changing announcement.
It might be just a thing that he could have put out in a truth social post if he wanted to.
But don't you love the fact that he teases you that there's something big coming?
Because you don't interpret that as something big and bad, right?
So you don't assume he's going to start a war or something.
But he says it's a big announcement.
So it feels like it would be something positive.
And then he makes us wait.
Best showman ever.
So I guess last night, the White House and Trump and Melania hosted a dinner for a whole bunch of tech leaders.
So Trump was sitting next to Zuckerberg.
And if you saw some of the clips, Trump really looked like he was having fun.
That is the most sort of laughing and smiling I've seen on Trump, maybe ever.
He seemed like he just really liked that table full of people who he called the geniuses.
And they are all the geniuses.
Now, he was, I guess he had Bill Gates was on the other side of Melania.
And there's some clips of him talking.
And so there's this big drama because Trump was too nice to Bill Gates.
And so many people think Bill Gates is the devil.
And I'm going to come down strongly in the, well, it's probably a gray area.
There are probably some things that Bill Gates has done or will do that you would really, really not like.
I don't know what they would be exactly.
And there are probably some things he's going to do that are just, you know, flat out good for the world.
We could argue about which list is bigger and all that.
So I would say that Bill Gates is probably a complicated situation because he's definitely got some plans for the world that I know you think you would rather have an option and not have him filling the air with vaccinations or whatever it is he's planning to do that would affect you somehow.
So I get that you don't want to be controlled by Bill Gates.
And even Nicole Shanahan posted that if President Trump is so concerned about getting into heaven, this is not the way.
And she was referring to simply listening to Bill Gates talk at dinner.
You won't get to heaven just hosting him at the party.
So there are a lot of smart people who believe that Bill Gates is some form of the devil incarnate.
I assume that that's overblown, but in what ways?
I don't know.
It just feels like something that couldn't possibly be as bad as people explain it.
So my BS detector says there's probably some real things there that you don't like.
But I'll bet there's a bunch of things that we just suspect that aren't exactly what they look like.
But certainly anything that he's doing that might end up like a mandate for you, you definitely have a right to not like that.
If somebody is running around creating mandates and chemicals in the air or whatever else you don't want to be imposed upon you, I get it.
So who was it?
I think Sam Altmond was at the meeting and thanked Trump for being, I hope I have the right guy.
I think it was Sam Altman.
Thanking Trump for being so pro-business.
Like I was saying.
He really is pro-business.
I mean, he's doing a great pro-business kind of administration so far.
Well, it looks like the White House is going to go ahead.
Oh, maybe this will be the big announcement.
I don't know.
But we already know that they're going to change the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
Now, I already told you that I wasn't crazy about that because you get more of whatever words you're focusing on.
So I thought, hmm, I wonder if this would get us more wars.
But the more I think about it, the more I think Trump is right on this, because he's got a better instinct about this than most people.
So here's me walking it back and saying, I don't know if I'm wrong, but let me give you the opposite argument.
The opposite argument is pretty strong.
And the argument for it is that if you call yourself the Department of Defense, you can call anything that's happening in the world as somehow related to your own defense or an ally's defense.
So I might have added backwards that when you call it defense, you can really easily make the argument that you should send some people over there to die.
Well, sure, it's happening in the forest and the other side of the world, but if you let that get bigger, it's coming for us.
So our national defense requires that we go attack it right now.
So you would have an infinite number of those.
And if you call it the Department of War, pretty much nobody, at least in the public, wants a war.
You know, there might be somebody in the military-industrial complex or neocons or something.
But calling it war would probably make everybody want to avoid it.
And it would certainly make our adversaries want to avoid it too.
Because we're not going to, if you cause a problem for us, we're not going to bring you our defense.
We're going to bring you a war.
So it is a little bit better.
It's a little bit more threatening.
I'll give you that.
So I'm softening on this, and I will take the L. Department of War might be just right.
Maybe.
We'll see.
And, you know, it's also likely that it doesn't change anything at all.
But I do believe, this is the hypnotist training in me, that the exact words you use to refer to things, it does change behavior.
You know, maybe in a subtle way, but when you talk about war, you know, any little subtle movement needs to be thought about carefully.
All right, let's check my BS detector.
Now, the one thing that I tell you I might be able to do well, you know, I'm sort of a grab bag of things I do well and things I don't do well like everybody else.
But one of the things I think I do well, not 100%, because this is not the sort of thing you could be flawless, but I think I'm pretty good at detecting BS.
And so, I mean, you can grade me on that or judge me yourself.
But the other day, there was this story that allegedly the head of the European Union was going into Bulgaria, and the story said that they believe that Russia jammed the GPS in her plane, and so they had to land with maps instead of GPS.
And do you remember what I said about that story?
I said, there's something wrong with that story.
That doesn't really feel like something Russia would do, you know, if there were a way to pin it on them.
I mean, they wouldn't do it if they were going to get caught doing it.
And if they allegedly did get caught, then it makes me think it's not the sort of thing they would have done.
And today we learned that the Bulgarian government reversed what it had announced.
It said there was no evidence whatsoever that Russia jammed the GPS.
Reframing Anxiety into Mission00:04:30
Boom.
I will take the W for that.
So ask yourself, did you see anybody else in the news call that story bullshit?
Probably I was the only one.
Was there anybody on CNN or MSNBC who said, you know, maybe we should wait a little bit on that story because it's not quite tracking, doesn't quite smell right.
You can grade me on that yourself, but I believe I'm the only one in the world who said, nah, that's all right.
So, prove me wrong.
If somebody else said the same thing, they might have.
Dr. Andrew Uberman is yet again dunking on alcohol.
He's not against it completely, but he wants to know the health risks of it.
And he points out that drinking can raise your level of cortisol, but not just while you're doing it, but after you're done.
So it raises your baseline of cortisol.
So cortisol is the thing you don't want because that's what's making you feel stressed and everything.
So that, you know, now this is just one more story about why alcohol is bad for you.
But it made me think about one of the reframes I did as probably a 12-year-old.
So this one was so successful that I'd almost forgotten it was the biggest reframe of my life, perhaps.
Might be the biggest reframe of my life.
At about 12 years old, I was a stressed kid and anxious and stressed and worried about everything.
And so I reframed my job.
You know, when you're a kid, do you have a job?
I mean, you might have some like chores to get some money or something.
But I decided to set myself a mission.
And this is how I'd explain it to myself.
My full-time job is working on how I feel, my anxiousness or my worry.
And what that meant was that I would put it as a higher priority than just about everything.
Now, of course, you have to get your work done.
You know, you have to go to school.
You have to do your homework or whatever.
So those things actually lowered my stress because it feels good to do something and do it well.
So I didn't mind doing the work.
But so I would make sure that I exercised.
And, you know, I would, I tried meditation, et cetera.
But my point is, I decided it was my lifelong primary job.
And that if you reframe your primary job as working on your own, let's say, impression of the world, which causes you to have more cortisol or less, more dopamine or less, et cetera, it's your main job.
Because if you get that right, everything else is better.
You can work longer.
You can exercise better.
Everything.
So I've been so successful at it that recently, you know, as I'm at that age where you evaluate your life and you say to yourself, well, how'd I do?
How'd I do?
I couldn't remember, maybe one exception, a time in decades where I was especially worried about something.
You know, where just your chest is on fire or your stomach's going crazy or something.
And it's not like I haven't had some challenges.
I've had a few.
Some of you have been with me along the way.
You know exactly what challenges I'm talking about.
But even through the hardest ones, I had developed so many sort of tricks and hacks to monitor my own sense of anxiety that I just haven't worried about anything in decades.
So if you treat it as a full-time job, you can make incredible gains in just how you feel.
AI's Predictable Slowdown00:08:12
But everybody's going to have to do it their own way, which is try lots of things.
But don't yeah, and here's a bad idea.
I always feel bad for people who need a vacation to set their mind right.
I'm all for vacations, but if you don't have a way to make it right all the other time that you're not on vacation, I don't see how your life is going to be great.
So you really need to make it your mission to figure out what it is that relaxes you every day.
All right.
That's your advice for the day.
So Anthropic, the AI company, as you know, is in this lawsuit with a bunch of authors who say that it trained on their books and violated their copyright in doing so.
And I guess they're suing for $150,000 per book for 7 million pirated books.
And so if Anthropic lost, it might cost them something like a trillion dollars, somebody estimated, which would presumably put them out of business.
And then this made me think, remember I predicted right in the beginning of AI exploding, I predicted that humans would find a whole bunch of ways to stop AI from growing to what it could be.
Here's one, you know, that they'll be sued for copyright stuff.
And I'm not saying that they shouldn't be sued.
I'm just saying it's, you know, a predictable thing that will happen that the humans will slow down the AI.
But also, AIs are being sued for helping people harm themselves.
I'll just say it that way.
You know what I'm talking about, especially children.
So that's one more way that the AI companies could be put into business, lawsuits.
And then there's XAI is suing Meta because one of the engineers stole all the XAI code.
So that's one way that their entire business models could become worth nothing.
If the only thing they're selling is the specifically trained models and their specific code and somebody steals the entire thing, what's that doing the whole company?
I mean, if it became public, or if it became public enough that their competitors could all get it and copy it.
So that's a big problem.
I don't know what they do about that.
Because if it's an insider job, you can never stop it, can you?
There's always going to be some insider engineer who can get access to it.
Then you got the problem that apparently students are using AI for cheating, mostly homework, because that's when they're not being observed.
But the whole idea of homework is now ridiculous because the kids are just using AI to do their homework so they can get on with life.
Now, interestingly, that may not be bad because what might come out of that is that the schools will say, all right, forget about homework, unless they give them homework, which requires them to use AI, so they learn how to use AI or something.
But I remember several years ago when I had young stepkids in school, there was a big push locally to stop giving crushing levels of homework to kids every night, which is what they do in the local school system.
If you have a school system that is graded as one of the top school systems, there's a really high chance that they're just killing your kid with homework, like just abusive levels of homework.
And so there was a big push to drop it to nothing because apparently the science did not back up the idea that the student would be smarter if they had homework.
It would just sort of ruin their social life and their family life.
So I could see that AI would make it so absurd to give people homework because they're not learning anything.
They're just copying down what the AI told them that maybe homework will go away.
It might.
That might be a positive.
Anyway, so also experts won't fully trust AI and it hallucinates.
And obviously, AI is being taught to, let's say, parrot the narrative that polite society and whoever is running the country at that time wants you to believe.
So it won't be totally truth-seeking, even though Elon Musk, I believe he genuinely wants to make it maximally truth-seeking, but you know it can't be, right?
It would be too destructive to civilization if it were too honest.
So, you know, there's some topics where maybe it'll be a little bit, well, some people say this and some people say that.
And there's also a thought that maybe the LLMs have plateaued.
They're not getting that much better, but we'll see.
Maybe Elon will prove me wrong by taking Grok to the level that nobody ever understood was possible.
Well, speaking of Anthropic, the AI company, it's going to stop selling its AI services to anything that's majority Chinese-owned.
So apparently, if they're just customers for the AI, they can sort of use it for banned military things in China.
So I'm kind of surprised it took this long to figure out that if they just signed up for the service and paid for it like everybody else, that they would therefore have access to the very best AI that they wouldn't have to invent.
They could just say, so you're selling subscriptions to your API?
Yeah.
All right, we'll take that and hook it up to our missiles or whatever the hell they're doing, using it on their using it, using it to run their drone swarm someday.
I don't know what they were doing with it.
But here's a question I ask.
And this is another micro lesson.
So I give micro lessons.
I've taken kind of a pause, but I need to get back to it on the subscription service locals.
But I'm going to give you all one right now.
One of the most useful things you can do besides have all the answers is to know what questions you should always ask.
If you know what questions they ask, you have sort of a superpower.
And one of the best questions, the one I recommend, is what if I'm wrong about everything?
Or the other version of that is, what if it's exactly the opposite of that?
Now, as a cartoonist, that's also part of my job.
You know, if I'll look at a normal situation, I'll go, okay, what if it worked on exactly the opposite?
Or what if the doctor character in my comic, instead of having a good bedside banner, what if he's actually a serial killer?
You know, it's whatever's the opposite.
So I'm sort of tuned to the question: what if it's exactly the opposite of that?
And that allows you to, I think it protects you from cognitive dissonance.
If you were to find out someday that it was exactly the opposite of what you believed all your life, that you would at least have the comfort of knowing that you had asked it, meaning that you would suspect it.
Maybe, maybe it's the opposite.
And I think that every time I hear about China being behind us in AI, oh, they'll never catch up to our AI.
What If It's Opposite?00:11:25
Really?
What if it's exactly the opposite?
What if China was smart enough to develop their best AI in total secret and not reveal it as like a free app?
How would we really know?
Would we really know if AI was behind us and if China was behind us in AI?
We would not know.
So if someday we find out that AI really had, or China really had a secret AI thing that was just like, you know, Iran's underground bunkers, and it was just really massive and they had better AI.
They were just hiding the good stuff.
I wouldn't be surprised.
All right.
TechCrunch has a story about Mark Zuckerberg is suing Mark Zuckerberg.
So it turns out that there are at least two Mark Zuckerbergs.
One is a lawyer, and every time he uses Facebook to advertise his legal practice, Facebook's bots spotted as a fake page because it's Mark Zuckerberg.
So they think it's a parody.
And so they delete his account or they block him.
So for years, for years, he's been getting blocked because they think he's a joker.
And now he's just going to sue him.
Oh, Gary the Cat coming in to say hi.
And now your day is complete.
That's what you want.
All right.
Get your tail out of my mouth.
Yeah.
All right.
So there's a new story about a top aid to a Newark mayor who just pled guilty to a corruption scheme for it's a pay-to-play thing.
You get 20 years in prison.
Now, pay-to-play means that you would give contracts to preferred people and do favors in return for bribes and stuff.
So I will say again what I always say with these corruption stories: I believe that all government is just designed for maximum corruption.
Because if you've got, you know, some one or two people who can control what favors are doled out, there's really no way to control that people will find some indirect or clever way to pay them for it.
And so over time, it's going to attract the people who have figured out how to monetize the office.
So other people will say, well, I have lots of capabilities, so I'll just go into some honest job.
But the people who decide to work in government and put their whole life into government, I feel like they would only do it if they had some ill intent.
It just feels like that.
It's like maybe 80% of the people who go into government are thinking, well, once I get that cushy job in the Senate, my net worth is going to zoom.
So we need some kind of mechanism so that the elected officials, especially at the state level and below, are at least fully transparent about where all the contracts are being given and the favors and stuff.
I don't know.
We need a better system.
We have a system that guarantees by its design that eventually all the cities and the states will be criminal enterprises.
It's designed that way.
There's no other way it could go because it's just followed the money.
If people can easily and almost never get caught, I would imagine, do all these favors and stuff, there's no way it's going to go the other way.
People are going to take the free money.
Well, Breitbart News, Sean Moran is talking about an exclusive poll doing a matchup.
Let's see, who did this poll?
Exclusively obtained by Breitbart.
It's a Plymouth Union Public Research poll.
And it looked at J.D. Vance running against Gavin Newsom for president in 2028.
And it found that in the Battleground states that JD would win conclusively, but only by like 51 to 49.
Now, does that shock you and make you mad that there's even any possibility that Newsom would be just like a couple of points behind J.D. Vance running for president in 2028?
I mean, I don't think they're even anywhere on the same level.
I believe you could put absolutely anyone in that poll, and the Democrats would say, yeah, give me the Democrat.
The Republicans would say, give me the Republican.
And that's all it is.
But it's mind-blowing that every day we talk about the news and how one of them or one team or the other did something terrible or something awesome.
And none of it matters.
Absolutely nothing they do or say really makes any difference.
It's going to be about 50-50, no matter what.
Because I assume that the poll has a margin of error, which means it could be a tie.
No matter what you do, it's a tie.
I mean, that's obviously everything you need to know about everything.
That none of the facts matter at all and never will.
All right.
The new conspiracy theory is that Trump's going to run for a third term or he's not going to leave office and he'll just stay there forever.
So here's what's fun about it.
Trump is obviously trolling about that.
So he's very intentionally making news and laughing about it and quoting about it and bringing it up in weird contexts so that you think, oh, maybe he's really testing the sound to see if he can get away with it.
And then the news is going to fully embrace it because it fits with their whole, he's an authoritarian dictator.
You know, he wants to steal your democracy.
It just sort of fits with that perfectly.
But because all of that stuff was also absurd, adding like the extra absurdity to it, that he's somehow going to figure out how to do a third term, there's no way that's going to happen.
There's no way that's going to happen.
So So it's one of the best trolls because he's going to make the Democrats talk about it incessantly.
He'll probably just keep pushing that button.
And I love that.
But here's what made me laugh about it.
So imagine you're a Democrat.
So now even the Democrats know that the Biden brain, he's fine.
There's nothing wrong with Biden.
They all know that was a hoax.
Right?
Like even the Democrats know that that was a big old lie.
And they should know, if they're paying attention, that the Russia collusion thing was a total lie, but I don't think their news shows it the way the right-leaning news shows it every day.
And if they look at scopes or have put any effort into it, they would know the fine people hoax is a lie.
But they still think that the Trump third term thing is right on.
How do you look at all the hoaxes that came out of your own team and not notice the pattern?
Well, they probably don't think they're hoaxes.
Maybe that's why they can't spot the pattern, but they are.
The pattern is pretty, pretty clear.
And once again, the thing that the Democrats are running on is a thing that hasn't happened, but they tell you, man, it's going to happen.
If you let that Trump stay around much longer, it's going to happen.
He'll steal your, he's going to snatch your democracy right off your head.
He's a democracy snatcher.
So yeah.
So the imaginary things that Democrats are worried about, Trump is trolling hard, and it's hilarious.
Well, Pam Bondi, U.S. Attorney General, has announced their, looks like they're beefing up their joint task force alpha that's fighting against the drug smuggling and trafficking at the southern and maritime borders.
So whatever you're doing, Kat, I don't appreciate it.
All right.
She wants attention.
So that's good.
And apparently the U.S. is sending some 10, not some, F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to be part of the fight against the cartels.
So that's pretty serious.
And it makes me think that Trump has pioneered a new kind of way to use the military.
I call it the zero casualty military.
Now, it's not that he wouldn't employ the military in a way that would have casualties.
It's not that he wouldn't do it, but he keeps finding ways to use the military that, fingers crossed, have meant zero casualties.
For example, the bombing of Iran, zero casualties, American casualties.
Remember, we bombed the Houdis.
I believe there were zero casualties on our side, right?
Remember Panama, we threatened with our military, but didn't need to use them, so no casualties.
And now they took out one of those drug smuggling boats from Venezuela.
No American casualties.
So it's like he's picking up the free money, the things you can do with your military that probably will be zero casualties.
And so I kind of like that.
He just looks for all the ways that you could get away with it, basically.
Well, if you saw any of the clips of RFK Jr., it looked like he was testifying the Senate there.
Democrats On Display00:09:19
And it was hilarious.
The Democrats were so crazy.
And it was like the craziest among them, like Bernie Sanders and Pocahontas, Elizabeth Warren.
So it's the ones who sort of act a little bit crazy naturally.
But here's what's funny about it.
The whole thing looked like a Saturday Night Live parody of Democrats.
It looked like a parody of Democrats.
And the reason it looked like a parody is that they were so over the top because there's a set of circumstances that guaranteed they would look ridiculous.
Number one, they've decided that they have to fight, right?
They have to fight, fight, fight.
So they have to shout down Kennedy whenever he's answering the question.
So the main thing they wanted to do is prevent him from talking and use their angry question asking as the only thing anybody remembered.
But they had to shut up Kennedy every time he tried to respond because when he responds, he sounds completely reasonable.
So what that meant is that they had to interrupt him before they had concocted something smart to say, and they were not clever enough to be both interrupters and to say a smart thing with the interruption.
So what happened was their interruptions, which was the main thing, the main thing was to interrupt to prevent him from speaking.
So it didn't matter what they said.
They just had to say something.
And it looked like several times they didn't have anything smart to say and probably knew it.
So they just said something.
So you have to watch it and then ask yourself how many times they interrupted and they just said like word salad.
And Kennedy was saying stuff like, you're just babbling now.
You're talking nonsense.
And it was true.
They were talking nonsense because if they didn't interrupt him, he would say completely reasonable things.
And they've tried to create this hoax that Kennedy is the only person in the country who doesn't like science and wouldn't use it if he had it.
The only one.
I dare you to go out in the street and say, we're just wondering if you were in charge of these big decisions at the CDC, et cetera.
Do you think that science should be used to make the decisions?
How many people in the United States would say, oh no, don't use the science?
None.
None.
Well, 100% of all living humans believe that if you have science that can be dependent on, you should use it for these decisions.
But somehow, the Democrats have convinced their idiot base that he's the only one and that Trump appointed the only person who doesn't believe in science.
Now, I will acknowledge that he may have gotten some things wrong in his pre-government work.
He may have gotten some things wrong.
Who doesn't get some things wrong?
But in his current job, he's completely committed to using science.
And he says that the science we have isn't good enough.
And he shows his work.
I mean, he can tell you, okay, did they or did they not do a randomized controlled trial?
Did they?
If they didn't, then all he's saying is we need to do that.
Did they prove that this or that is safe for children?
Did they?
I mean, you show us.
Where's the study that says you proved that was safe?
So all he's really doing is having a completely transparent and public conversation about do we have enough science for these things that we're pushing on people.
And they try to confuse the public by conflating, dropping mandates from making it unavailable.
He's not making anything unavailable yet, as far as I know.
So do you believe that there's any scenario in which Kennedy alone would say, well, I've seen some secret data, and so I'm going to ban this vaccination or this, this or that?
Do you think that he would ban the COVID stuff based on the current level of science?
Probably not, because the current level of science may be inadequate for anything, to know whether it's good or bad.
So as long as everything he's doing is transparent and it's all based on data and everybody can look at it, I feel like we're pretty safe.
No, I don't believe he's the only person, the only person in the whole world who believes that you should ignore science.
I don't think so.
But at least three quarters of Democrats will be convinced that he is that one person.
Anyway.
Apparently, three lawyers for Act Blue, that's that entity that puts together donations from small donors for the Democrats specifically.
And they've been accused of really money laundering big donations that they're not supposed to be doing and then making them, you know, pretending that they came from lots of little donors.
So that's the accusation.
New York Post is writing about this.
But it just made me think, how much of the Democrat machine has already been disabled?
Remember when Zuckerberg spent the, what, $400 million?
And but now Zuckerberg is sitting next to Trump and he's not really doing that stuff in the election?
That's a brilliant big deal, $400 million.
Act Blue, if it's true that they had some bad behavior, they might not be able to do what they've done in the past.
Whether it was legal or illegal, they might be crippled.
So ACBLU might be taken out of the game, partially.
The fact that USAID and all the NGOs, we now know that game where they're really ways to fund the Democrats.
I'm assuming that Marco Rubio and the administration are finding ways to starve the Democrat candidates anyway from making money through those NGOs.
Then, of course, Trump's looking at the voter roles, and Tom Fenton was talking about this, cleaning up the voter roles in the problem states.
And if he gets away, if Trump gets away with making federal IDs necessary, I guess it would be federal IDs necessary to vote in federal elections.
I think he wants something like that.
And if he bans the mail-in votes and maybe even bans electronic voting machines, if you assume that he got away with all of that, and then also the Republicans put massive lawyers at every polling place so that they can monitor for stuff,
what would happen if we got an unusual result again where something looked like it didn't make any sense, sort of like the 2020 election did, where there was that big Zoom for Biden votes that didn't seem to have a legitimate explanation.
I don't know.
Do you think that the Republicans have such a clamp on this now that the Democrats shouldn't be able to win any federal election?
I mean, these things, of course, change in a heartbeat, so anything can reverse.
But it does seem to me like the Trump administration is putting a full court press or trying to figure out all the ways that cheating could happen and get rid of them.
But while we don't know, if was there any like major real cheating involved with most of those things?
So we don't know.
We don't know.
So Trump, again, in his ongoing move to change regulations when they get in the way, they're going to reclassify military drones so that they don't fall under the missile category because there's some restrictions on that.
So they can sell drones to other allied countries like Saudi Arabia, these Reaper drones.
So, I mean, it's a smallish story, but do you believe that the Biden administration would have done that?
Cameras Everywhere Prediction00:03:34
You know, just drop that regulation because it's outdated and do it fairly rapidly.
So there's something about the speed that the Trump administration is doing stuff, just ordinary stuff like that.
It just looks like a whole different speed for the federal government to do stuff.
According to futurism, there's a AI startup that wants to put a camera basically everywhere in public.
What I didn't understand, and I thought it'd be a really good idea if it were possible.
And by good idea, I mean, you won't like it ethically or morally or lifestyle-wise.
You won't like anything about it.
But as a business model, it would be good for somebody.
And that would be to, if you could get access to everybody's security cameras, then when there's a problem, instead of having to go to every person, all right, can you show us your security from the front of your store?
If there was some way that like all of those would be on a network for everybody's benefit, because they would be cameras facing public places.
So, there's a company that's trying to have cameras everywhere that they can, you know, see you basically watch a bad guy from beginning to end wherever they go.
And I don't know if they're using existing cameras or it has to be one of their cameras.
So, that wasn't really in the story, weirdly.
But the general idea that there will be cameras everywhere because of crime.
Um, I predicted in the mid-90s in my book, The Dilbert Future, that there would be cameras everywhere.
And I'm going to double down on one part of the prediction.
It hasn't happened, but I think it will.
I believe there will be cameras in almost every private space, let's say indoor space, except for maybe bathrooms, maybe bedrooms, but you know, like living rooms and kitchens and stuff.
I believe that every house will end up having a camera.
Maybe it'll be built into light bulbs or something.
But it will be deeply encrypted so that even the government can't get in.
And the one and only way anybody could penetrate it is if there's a court order and then some kind of password is revealed or whatever.
So, that way, the homeowner would never give up their privacy unless, let's say, there was a house invasion and they wanted to give up their privacy to show the criminals.
And then they get a court order and then it get opened up.
So, my prediction is that somebody's going to find a way.
And I'm not saying this is good.
I'm not saying you should like it.
You're all going to dislike the risk to your privacy.
I get it.
You don't have to explain it.
I'm just predicting it.
I'm not telling you it's a good idea or that you should like it.
I'm just saying, I feel like it's going to be 100% recording cameras in all interior spaces.
And we'll just figure out some way to keep it private until it needs to be not private.
And you're not going to like it.
Well, there's yet another story.
Organic Computers: A Risky Future?00:03:37
How many of these have you heard?
Of scientists trying to turn some living organic thing into a processor.
And the story is always the same: that organic things could possibly, you know, process things faster than digital things.
And, you know, this might be the future.
Blah, blah, blah.
So here's another one that they're trying to turn bacteria into digital processors.
And every time I see this kind of story, I say to myself, I feel like this will never work.
As soon as you put in organic parts, they become unpredictable and they die.
They don't live forever.
I mean, is it my imagination or is it sort of obvious you can never have a sturdy commercial application of an organic computer?
Doesn't it seem like a total waste of time?
And even if you made one and it worked, you know, it'd be like a year before the silicon version with lasers or whatever was faster.
So these are these stories just seem dumb to me.
Well, here's another what's going on with China's story.
You know that they were making electric cars like crazy and they were subsidizing their electric car business and they had they were even selling more electric cars, I think in China anyway, with a Chinese company, even more than Tesla in China.
But now we're hearing that it's turned into this big price war because there's so many electric car companies in China that they're competing with each other a little bit, or sort of oversupported.
And I don't know how my cat is finding ways to throw additional things on the floor.
She must have found, or he must have found some like some continuous thing to destroy.
I just hear the sound.
I don't know what's happening over there.
It doesn't sound good.
Anyway, so my question on China is: again, I'll ask the same question.
Is China about ready to have an economic collapse or is China getting ready to dominate the economy of the whole globe?
Because I feel like I'm getting both stories.
You know, this electronic car one sounds like they're in trouble.
Then you have the ghost cities that they built that nobody moved into.
And you've got the bad consumers spending because they're all saving money.
You've got the demographic problem where they don't have enough females and they don't have enough babies and they're running out of people and blah, blah, blah.
But on the other hand, they're building the Silk Road.
Although the Silk Road is running into some trouble, I hear they're building the biggest navy in the world.
They're building power plants faster than anybody.
So is China collapsing economically?
Because there's lots of evidence that it is.
Or is it going to be dominating everything economically?
I feel like both of those movies are running at the same time.
And I'm not really sure which way it's going to go.
I do know that China is not going to get a lot more foreign investment because people have figured out it's too risky to do business in China.
But maybe they find a way to get around that.
I don't know.
Just do business with other countries.
Persuasive Strategies00:01:34
Anyway, that's all I had for you today.
It's sort of a weird news day.
I'm going to speak privately to the wonderful and beloved members of locals subscription based.
I will remind you that my book, Loser Think, second edition, which is basically the same as the first edition, but it wasn't available in stores because I got canceled, and now it is.
So it's only available on Amazon, though.
Amazon's the only place you can get it.
What I didn't ever explain to you, which I should have, is that LoserThink is sort of a companion to Winn Bigley.
So Winn Bigley teaches you how to learn how to persuade through the story of how Trump does it.
But LoserThink is about how to not persuade what you think you are.
So it's basically the wrong way to think about things that would be unpersuasive.
So you need two things.
You need to know how to be persuasive, but you should also learn how to avoid arguments that are unpersuasive and to figure out what the persuasive version of those is.
So that's what Loser Think will teach you.
People seem to like it.
That's the only reason I made it available because people said they really liked it.