Political persuasion lessons and funny stories based on today's news~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Sean Duffy, Katie Porter, JD Vance, Privatizing Student Loan Debt, Poll Response Heart Rate, Dr. Carmen Simon, Malaria Cure, Tu Youyou, Intentionally Flawed Census Data, Census Secretive Algorithm, Obamacare, President Obama, President Trump, Bernie Sanders Shutdown Leverage, Illegal Alien Healthcare, Gell-Mann Amnesia, Anti-Trump Tim Miller, Trump's 3rd Term, Bill Kristol, Authoritarian Leadership, Jack Smith, Arctic Frost Investigation, Don Jr. Trump, BlinkRx, Cost Plus Drugs, GoodRx, Rand Paul, 6 Penny Budget Plan, Pam Bondi Congressional Testimony, Adam Schiff, Scott Jennings Technique, National Guard Deployment, Democrat Somalia-Style Leadership, Hungary's Tax-Free Mothers, Charlie Kirk Texts, Ukraine War, 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.
All right, your stocks look like they're kind of flat.
Not much happening today.
So I guess we'll do a show.
How about that?
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Let me make sure I can see your comments here because that's what matters.
there we go I suppose we might have a cat visiting.
But not yet.
You'll have to wait for that.
Do-do-do-do.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Good 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 nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains.
All you need for that is a cupper mucker, a glass of tank or chalice time, a canteen jugger flask.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the parallel pleasure.
The dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
then it happens now Alright, that was my last sip of the cup.
But boy, was it good.
Oh so good.
Well, speaking of marijuana, um, Mario Knoffle had some uh interesting posts that he surfaced on X. The AP is talking about this one.
There's a new 800 pound 800 person, not pound, uh, 800 person study found that a cannabis-based drug slash chronic lower back pain effectively with fewer side effects than opioids.
Do you believe that?
That uh THC, the uh the active component of marijuana reduced back pain more than opioids.
Well, you know who they could have asked, me because I have lower back pain, and I have taken opioids on prescription, of course.
Uh, and I have taken marijuana in large quantities.
Guess which one makes me feel better?
It's not even close, it's not even close.
People the the first of all, the marijuana you can take as much as you want, you know, as long as long as you're not responsible for work or driving or kids or anything like that.
But uh, you can you can just sort of say, hmm, that didn't make a difference.
How about this?
Until at the very least, you're not caring about it as much, which might be the secret, might not, it might not be the pain, maybe it's just the caring about the pain.
I don't know how you divide that.
But uh, next time, AP, you want a story?
Uh just ask me, I can tell you.
Meanwhile, Spain is moving to legalize medical cannabis.
Um, it's not passed yet, but I guess the council of ministers has approved it, and it's on its way to getting passed.
But over in Germany, they're going the opposite direction.
So Germany was one of the most liberal uh countries, and they allowed uh I think total legal cannabis, including you could just buy it online.
Now, what they're trying to walk back is the buying it online part, I believe.
Which uh I agree with, I would agree with that.
As long as you can go to a dispensary and show your ID, and as long as they have delivery service for people who need it for medical reasons but are not well.
I mean, I'm a perfect example.
If I needed more medical marijuana, chances are I wouldn't want to drive.
Um the driving because you know, if you have a medical problem, you might be on other drugs that are bad for driving.
So delivery is pretty important.
Delivery is very important for the medical people, very important, it's critical, Really.
Um, so I think that's a good move by Germany.
They tried it.
Uh, the online part was a problem, so they're just walking back the problem part.
Good on you, Germany, for at least being a rational player.
Um then uh I guess Sean Duffy was on uh Fox News, the was it outnumbered or something, whatever it was this morning, and Sean Duffy uh was uh he's the head of transportation, right?
And uh he said, talking about legalizing marijuana, he said, quote, I think it would be a huge mistake for the federal government to legalize it.
Now here's my take.
I think the argument, his argument was that unlike alcohol, where you can test somebody and find out if they were driving drunk, so you have something like a deterrent, a legal deterrent, which is good.
You know, you might still want alcohol to be legal, most people do, but uh, wouldn't you like a little bit of deterrent against driving?
Because that's deadly.
So that that makes sense, but you can't quite get that deterrent with marijuana because people's individual responses are all over the place, and there's no easy way to test to find out if a person is um had too much.
For example, somebody like me who's a lifelong adult user, um, you could you can just pack me with marijuana before it would have any effect on even sports.
I I can play tennis with as much marijuana as you want.
Now now, obviously, tennis is a very difficult thing.
I don't recommend driving under marijuana, by the way, just to be clear.
I don't recommend driving if you're under the influence.
Don't drive.
But it's not true that everybody's gonna have the same amount of impairment, so it makes it a problem for deciding whether you should go to jail.
Are you really high?
Or are you still better driver than most people over the age of 60, just because you're not over the age of 60?
So you know, it doesn't really work as a standard.
But I believe that's a terrible argument.
Um the good argument is that if you keep it illegal at a federal level, that sends a better message to teenagers.
Everybody agrees with that, right?
Imagine arguing with your teenager who says, uh, you know it's totally legal, right?
Not for teenagers.
It under all conditions, it won't be legal for teenagers, but it would be easier for them to argue.
Hey, I'm 17.
You know, I I can start making my own decisions.
If it would be legal for me in two months after my birthday, are you telling me that I can't make that decision now, two months before my birthday?
Or whatever.
I don't know if it's 18 or 21.
But as an argument for keeping teenagers off it, it really helps if you can say it's illegal on any level.
It just really helps.
So from a parenting perspective, believe it or not, there might be some some real argument for keeping it illegal at a federal level, while at the same time the state police say, ah, ah, we're gonna let it go.
And maybe they would just you know turn the other way in terms of the federal charges.
Anyway, so I think uh Sean Duffy could improve that argument a little bit.
Um, did you know that if Jabba the Hut had an evil twin, that twin would probably be considered a front runner to be the next governor of California?
And the only reason I say that is because the only thing we can do that's dumber than what we're doing.
And then I saw a video of somebody called Katie Porter, who's apparently a front runner to be a the next Democrat candidate for governor, and uh you're gonna have to see the video of Katie Porter talking to a reporter.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Uh Run away.
Uh I mean, it's just all bad.
And you know that thing about overweight people being jolly?
Well, guess we're gonna throw that out.
Yeah, she she looks like Pritzker in a wig.
But so that pretty much guarantees us she'll be the next governor, I think.
Because you oh my god.
Anyway, um JD Vance posted uh what they're saying is his first TikTok video as VP.
The Hill is reporting on this, and uh here's what he said.
Oh, I want to just tell you what he said, and then I'll give you my review of it.
He said, quote, now imagine him, he's he's just standing full frontal from his knees up, standing in front of some official thing with some flags, a desk, I think.
And here's what he says.
This is his whole TikTok.
He says, JD Vance here, just wanted to let you know that we are relaunching the VP's TikTok page, and then he said, uh, I got a little lazy the last few months.
I was focused on the job of being VP.
Not enough on TikToks.
That's about to change.
So follow along.
He goes, We'll update y'all on what's going on in the White House, the business of the state, we'll update you on what's going on politically, maybe some sombrero memes here and there, but follow along and we'll look forward to connecting on TikTok.
See you then.
All right.
Now here's what that doesn't sound like much, right?
Doesn't sound like there's much meat to that TikTok.
But let me call your attention to this.
What were the odds that a uh an elected member of our government, any member of Congress, just think of anybody except Trump, all right, for this one for this one purpose.
Imagine Trump is not part of the conversation.
He's the only one who's not part of the conversation.
Look at all the other politicians.
How many of them could have pulled this off?
None.
None.
There's not another politician that could have done what he did.
He was playful, he showed that he understood the TikTok kind of vibe that if you're completely serious, you're doing it wrong, right?
If you're completely serious, you're doing it wrong.
But how well can an elected politician deliver some social media quality, I'll say witticisms, not not outright jokes, but just witticisms.
Who can do that?
And the answer is nobody.
Nobody.
J.D. Vance can do it.
If you don't realize how thin that target was, he just hit a target that was the size of the arrow, and he did it effortlessly.
So he has just the right sensibility of when to mock something, when to mock himself gently, you know, without going too far in the self-deprecation.
I don't like the self-deprecation.
But if you're wondering who has the right stuff to be the next president, boy, would you miss this if he didn't have it.
Do you know how much you would miss having a president who could deliver, you know, I won't say a laugh line, but at least a...
Oh, that's pretty funny.
You know, you you hit that target.
Very rare.
He can do it.
All right.
I didn't love his suit.
The suit he was wearing, I thought was a mistake.
So I'll give uh I'll give one negative.
Uh, if you're gonna do a full-body um image, I'll do a little more work on the suit.
He wears good suits, just you know, not that day.
Um I think he had uh, yeah, I'm I won't say more than that.
Um the Trump administration is rumored, per Forbes, uh, that they're thinking about maybe selling a portion of their gigantic uh student loan debt to a private market.
Why would they do that?
Now, what that means is uh people owe the government, I don't know, uh 1.6 trillion dollars for student loan debt.
The way anybody who had who owns the debt, in other words, the people who are supposed to be paid, the way they can get rid of that debt is by selling the debt to somebody else who's in that right kind of business.
So, in other words, you say, if you give us, I'll just make up a number, if you give us half a trillion dollars, we'll give you the ability to collect 1.6 trillion dollars from these people who used to owe us, but now they'll owe you because we sold it to you.
So they would have to deeply discount it for it to make sense at all.
Um, but you have to keep in mind that a private entity probably can't be as successful garnishing wages.
So debt is worth more to the government than it is to private individuals, because the government can pretty much squeeze you until you pay.
Private companies, they can squeeze you a lot, they can mess with your credit, etc., but probably can't force you to pay.
It's a little bit harder for a private entity.
So that makes the value of the debt lower, because what they would be buying would be worth lower.
And maybe private entities could be more aggressive in the collecting, maybe they could be more innovative in how they handle the debt.
So there's something there.
I I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that this is necessarily a good idea.
Uh, you'd have to know the details.
It's all in the details.
But maybe.
I mean it's within the realm of, yeah, maybe.
Um, Eric Dolan of Psypost is writing about a uh study that showed that uh public opinion shifts um your cardiovascular response during political talking.
So in other words, if they hook you up to censors, they can determine that some political topics make your heart beat and your your hands sweaty, and basically your body has a uh autonomic response.
Now, let me ask you this.
What would be more useful in understanding the American public?
An opinion poll in which we already know that 25% of the people asked are gonna have the wrong answer, because they do on every poll, and the other 75 didn't understand the question, right?
That's that's what an opinion poll is.
The if you say, um, can you uh give us your opinion on closing the government?
Well, people will have an opinion, but do you think they'll understand it?
Uh that they want to close the border, but do they understand all the ins and outs of the policy?
You know, the the short term, the long term, not really.
So opinion polls are a good, you know, pretty good gauge of what people are going to say.
You know, if you talk to them, they'll say those things, and that's a good gauge of that.
But what about how they feel?
That's what this uh cardiovascular response is.
So this is not so much about this specific study, making a more general statement, that if you could study how people feel, like literally put a sensors on their body so that they can't lie to you, you're just reading their body directly, then you would suddenly know all the right policies.
Not the logical policies, but you would know what you could sell.
Now imagine, uh, and by the way, I think that Trump understands this like nobody has ever understood it.
That's what it means to be able to read the room.
Reading the room is not listening to the words, it's knowing how they feel.
That's what he does.
So if you look at the top three issues for voters, you know, often it'll be stuff like crime and uh the border and uh inflation, of course, but that's that affects everybody.
But don't you think that those are the same things that would show up on an automatic or autonomous, what is it?
Uh your cardiovascular and your other responses.
If I hook you up to something and you're having a tough time paying your bills, and then I say, How do you feel about inflation?
It doesn't matter what words come out of your mouth.
If if as soon as you hear inflation, you think I can't pay my bills, oh my god, what am I gonna do?
And your body starts going crazy, now you really know something.
I mean, you really really know something.
And likewise with the border, if you show somebody pictures of you know uh non-citizens streaming over the border and say, How do you feel about that?
I don't want to hear what words they use.
That would be a little bit interesting, but not really.
But if you tell me that if they see that picture, their heartbeat goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Oh my god, I'm under attack, which it might for some people, it might feel like an attack.
It does feel like an attack.
It does.
Um, don't you think that opinion polls should at least be augmented by um smaller number of people checking people's automatic responses?
So, you know, my friend uh Carmen Simon, who's uh in that line of business, and that line of business means uh testing people's you know bodily responses to to different questions.
She doesn't do politics, but because uh, you know, I'm very familiar with her work, by the way, you should follow her on locals, Carmen Simon, Dr. Carmen Simon.
So she's usually doing you know corporate questions and things like that.
You know, if we do this versus that, how do you feel?
One of the things I learned years, years ago when I worked in the user interface lab at Pacific Bell.
Now, I was not one of the scientists working on testing people, but we were in the same small group.
So sometimes I'd get to sit in the room behind the you know behind the glass and watch somebody being tested.
So I learned I learned a lot about that process.
And the most surprising thing I learned is if you're testing whether people can use a user interface, what what do you think is the right number of people to test?
Let's compare that to an opinion poll, where I don't know what the number is, but you probably want a thousand people.
Would you feel comfortable if you talk to a thousand people?
That would be a pretty good opinion poll, I think, nationally.
But if you're testing people for a user interface, how many do you have to test?
Do you have to test a thousand?
Nope.
Five.
Maybe one.
Because if that person says, ah, I'm looking all over this page and I don't see a button.
And then you bring in the next person, and they say, uh, I don't see, I don't even see the button.
And then you bring in the third, fourth, and fifth, and they all say, uh, I don't know where the button is.
You don't have to wonder if those five people are coincidentally messed up and they're the only ones who can't use your user interface.
You have guaranteed that it's unusable.
Four out of five, three out of five, guarantees it's unusable.
You have to redo it.
So if you're looking at how people feel, and this is maybe the the analogy is not perfect, I realize that.
But if you look at how people feel, we're way more similar in how we feel than in how we talk.
So if you get an opinion poll, people will be talking in all different ways.
But the way they feel about it might just be one of two ways.
It either bothers you or doesn't bother you.
And that would be, I mean, that would just be amazing if you do that on every topic.
I think that's uh Trump's superpower is that you can feel how people feel somehow.
All right, uh there was a Nobel Prize awarded to uh the first mainland Chinese scientist and also a woman.
I think that's worth noting for China.
And uh she discovered uh Artemis and uh malaria cure.
Oh wow, she saved millions of lives with a malaria cure.
Damn, that's pretty impressive.
But uh instead of being impressed by the science, I'm going to impress you with a joke that somebody told about this topic.
This is one of the best jokes I've ever seen.
And it's by Bobo Naduki, who may or may not be a real person.
I can't tell online.
But you have to listen to this joke.
So the article says that her name is Too Yu Yu, Tu Yu Yu.
And she won the Nobel Prize.
Now, this, of course, is a you know a great honor.
Uh, you know, we should be showing her maximum respect.
So her name is spelled two.
The first name is just T-U.
And then the last name is just the word you put together twice.
U U. Y O U Y O U. And here's the joke from Mabogo.
Also, she is the most difficult person to sing happy birthday to.
Happy birthday to you.
You come on.
I think it has, I think that joke had 16 million views when I checked this morning.
That's a quality joke.
That's a quality joke.
That's a that's a Nobel Prize joke right there.
I hate that the joke overshadowed her accomplishment of quote, saving millions of lives.
But yeah, saving millions of lives, that's cool too.
That's cool too.
But are we overlooking the quality of this joke?
Come on, people, let's be fair.
Anyway.
Um, hear the least surprising news of the day.
The news is all weird and funny, and uh the today's show will be the best you ever saw.
Um, so remember I always say that all data is fake if it matters.
If it doesn't matter, you know, maybe it's maybe it's not fake.
But if it matters, there's somebody whose job it is to make sure that you don't see the real the real stuff.
There's always somebody's job to make sure you don't see accurate data.
Uh it used to be my job when I worked for a big corporation.
My job was to make sure people didn't see accurate data.
And you know, you don't think about it that you don't think of it that way at first, but you you soon realize you know that we say, hey, I don't have good data for this branch bank or whatever that I was uh monitoring, so we should just leave out the data because we don't really have data for this one bank, and the boss would say, No, just make something up and put it in there because I don't use the data anyway, I just use it if it agrees with me.
He actually told me that.
Um, so given that context that all data is fake, if it matters, what do you think of the census data?
What would matter more than census data?
Maybe just the national elections, but census data is right up there, right?
Do you remember what what else would be like way toward the top of importance of data?
How about jobs data?
How about those jobs, the jobs data?
We recently learned that was just totally made up.
One of the uh by far, oh, actually, I'm not high, Irene.
I'm not high at all.
I will be after the show.
Um just it's worth uh mentioning that opinion.
I think the news is just genuinely funny today.
Uh, and I've been sort of laughing all day.
But on top of that, uh, I won't give you the long story, but the short story is this is the first pain-free day I've had since last December.
So if you think I'm high on life, oh god, I am.
I didn't know that I could ever feel pain-free again.
Now it won't last.
That's also a longer story.
It's probably just today.
But I have rarely felt better than I feel right now.
Rarely, my whole life.
Because you know, you feel better if you're coming off of something bad.
There, there's nothing.
The the best meal I ever had in my life was after a week of dental work where I could only use food.
And the first time I had like a piece of some pasta, I thought, oh my god, oh, what is this?
It's like God in my mouth.
So that's how I'm feeling right now.
So if I do seem unusually happy, you're right, but not from marijuana.
And I don't drink, so it's not those two things.
Anyway, back to the Census Bureau.
If we know that all data is fake if it matters, and the census matters more than just about anything, wouldn't you be surprised that there's a group called Center for Renewing America, whose claim is that the census is not just flawed, but intentionally, intentionally flawed.
And I was thinking to myself, hmm, how are they going to convince me of that?
Because you know everything's political, and you can't trust, you can't really trust some you know entity you've never heard of suddenly making a you know big provocative claim.
You know, you want to you want to keep your powder dry, maybe see if anybody else is saying the same thing, listen to the argument, hear both sides.
Well, they didn't have to do that.
Uh apparently the Census Bureau, according to the Center for Renewing America, has a quote, secretive algorithm that only a handful of bureaucrats have access to, and it's called differential privacy to scramble block level data, hide citizenship status, and shift political power to non-citizens.
Okay.
You had me at secretive algorithm.
Oh, but let us tell you more about why we know this data is not accurate.
Nope, stop, stop.
Did you not just say secret algorithm?
Yes, we did.
That's just the beginning of our argument.
Stop, stop.
Take the rest of the day off.
If you tell me that any part of the fucking census has a secret algorithm, we're done here.
We're done here.
The census is bullshit.
I don't know how much bullshit, but it's definitely bullshit.
How about those temperature calculations for climate change, huh?
Huh?
Do you think that they replaced all the thermometers that went out of service or were close to uh heat islands?
In other words, too close to things like airports that would heat them up too much.
No, they use their secretive algorithm to estimate what the temperature would be if they had measured it.
So the climate change and uh apparently the census have always been complete bullshit.
Have always been.
So that was fun.
Now I know there's gonna be another side to this story, and the census people will say, no, no, that's not true.
But I'll tell you, there's nothing more persuasive to me than somebody says they got a secret algorithm.
No other questions.
I have no other questions after I hear that phrase.
How about Obamacare?
Do you think that the data about Obamacare is pretty good?
Pretty clean.
The people who put it into uh put it into law, they had a good idea what was going to happen, and they weren't surprised at all because things went just the way they estimated it would.
Obamacare.
What do you think?
Well, according to economist Stephen Moore, uh the real he posted an X. The real problem is that Obamacare was never actually affordable.
So apparently the Washington Post just uh according to Stephen, just admitted what conservatives have been saying for 15 years.
Quote, this is from the Washington Post.
The real problem is that Obamacare was never actually affordable.
Thank you, Jeff Bezos.
You know, you wonder if Jeff Bezos was at all serious about making the at least the opinion part of the newspaper, um, closer to something that would show both sides or at least close to the middle or something.
I would say this is one of the best examples of him succeeding in that in that narrow aim that I've seen.
Can you believe that the Washington Post, you know, the big the biggest one of the biggest supporters of the Democrats would say this directly?
The problem was it was never a good idea economically.
And that, by the way, is the best reframe for Obamacare.
Here's the worst reframe.
You cheap, miserable psychotic bastards want to cut that Obamacare and take away all the affordable health care for people.
What kind of monsters are you?
That would be the current frame.
Not so good.
Here's a better one.
The people who implemented it knew it would fail because it was never affordable, and now we're just paying the cost of those people who lied to you for low those many years.
That is completely true.
That the people who implemented it lied to you about what it would cost.
And uh they've been lying since then.
And that it was never affordable.
It's not a question of um, are you willing to pay more?
That's what it feels like.
Are you willing to pay more?
It's not really that.
It was unaffordable by its nature on day one and wasn't going to get better.
Now, I have complimented Obama for the way he implemented it flawed, because he said out loud, and I appreciated the transparency at the time.
At the time, he said there are lots of problems with Obamacare.
He didn't call it that.
But he said uh if we don't get something in there, we won't have anything to correct.
I'm I'm paraphrasing, that's not his exact words.
But he did say directly that he would prefer to implement a flawed plan, and then the markets try to adjust and you know get the price down, etc.
So that wasn't the worst idea in the world, uh, except that it under, I think it underappreciated how incompetent Congress is.
If we had a competent Congress that operated, let's say, like a startup or like a private industry, then you could implement something bad.
Let's call it the original iPhone.
The original iPhone was a piece of garbage.
I mean, it was just garbage.
But it was also Apple computer.
So by putting the first one out there, they they created a market, amazingly, against all odds, and then they could work on it every year, and then it could become an amazing, an amazing piece of technology.
So it's not that unusual for a private entity to do what Obama did.
Implement the flawed version, and that's the fastest way you get it fixed by you know raising his visibility.
So but it didn't work, it didn't work.
The government is not capable of doing what Apple is capable of doing, which is fast to fixing things that are broken.
Once something becomes uh, you know, law or somebody in Congress is making money at it, or you know, they're cronies or overcharging Obamacare and all the other things that happen, can't really fix it.
Can't really fix it.
So, what is Trump doing?
He's breaking it without having a solution.
Does that make sense?
Does it make sense to break it if you don't have a good replacement?
People depend on it.
He's just gonna break it.
Well, probably it does make sense, because again, the government is not Apple computer.
Keeping it flawed and fixing it would be great if we were Apple computer, but sometimes you just have to break it.
You gotta you gotta shake the box, and it's gonna cause all kinds of problems in the short run.
Do you know who has balls big enough to create all kinds of problems in the short run?
Because it's the only way to get to where we need to get affordable health care?
Trump.
Somebody who doesn't need to run again.
If he were running for president again, might change how he approached it.
But he's got the balls, he's got the mandate, he's got the second term, he's got the right people.
He can break this thing.
And the faster we can figure out some way to fix it, because fixing it is the goal.
The goal is not breaking it.
The goal is not just taking away those tax burdens.
The goal is to have a better health care.
He doesn't have that yet, but boy, can he shake a box?
However, there are some good things happening in healthcare that we'll talk about in a minute.
Bernie Sanders, uh, according to Bright Bar News is reporting on that.
He was in an interview recently, and he said uh the Democrats will quote quote lose our leverage if they vote to resume the pay of air traffic controllers and service members.
So talk about tone deaf.
When the government uh is shut down, who is suffering?
It's people who are at the lowest economic rung.
It's uh ordinary, you know, air traffic controllers and of course service people.
That's the most the most grotesque part of this is if service people are affected.
I mean, that's just grotesque.
But to refer to it as losing our leverage, talk about not being able to read a room.
Do you know how much we care about democrat leverage when you can't pay your effing bills?
If you can't pay your bills, you just hate their guts from top to bottom.
And you probably don't even care who it was that that you know blocked the uh the payments.
You just freaking hate their freaking guts.
You imagine looking into your bank account and the money isn't there, and and you know who it is.
It's Bernie.
And then Bernie says we don't want to lose our leverage.
Well, fuck you and your leverage, Bernie.
Why don't you take your leverage and shove it so far up your fucking crinkled ass that it comes out your ears?
Fuck you and your leverage.
And by the way, it's not like I disagree with them.
I'm not disagreeing with the point.
I'm just saying if you do this to people and then you say out loud, it's for your fucking leverage.
You you better fix that.
That is such a messaging mistake.
Imagine this clown being your president.
This is the opposite of reading a room, right?
How can you read a room worse than this?
Oh, what we need is some massive uh socialism and uh don't want to give up our leverage, should certainly don't want to be paying those people in the military.
Fuck you.
Fuck you in your leverage.
All right.
According to Rasmussen poll, um 49% uh of the people who are polled say uh the Democrats did the closing of the government for the benefit of illegal aliens.
Nearly half of voters agree with a top Trump administration figure on the reason for the current government shutdown.
49%, so about half, say that the Democrats shut it down to give free health care to illegal aliens.
So is the free health care to illegal aliens the reason the government is shut down?
Well, it's some of the reason.
But but the Trump administration is totally dominating the messaging, and they have made people argue whether or not they're uh you know helping to pay illegal aliens.
I'm not even gonna get into that argument.
It would be easy to argue that's not exactly technically what's going on, but it would be equally easy to argue that well, although it's not technically what's going on, it's exactly what's going on.
But I can see why technically you think it's not, but it's exactly what's going on.
And a lot of it has to do with Who you call illegal.
If you're here on amnesty, is it illegal?
And then there's a question of if the hospitals are going to treat you either way, what's different?
The hospital's still going to treat you.
Uh, but I guess you just wouldn't have uh the emergency room would still treat you, but uh you wouldn't have regular health care, which of course would be way better.
So uh messaging-wise, I'd have to give the win so far to Trump.
All right, here's a story about uh Gellman amnesia.
Do all of you know that now?
I talk about it so much that most of my audience should recognize that.
Gellman amnesia.
Quickly, uh, Gellman was a physicist who realized that when he read the paper and saw a story on his expertise, physics, he always knew the story was fake news.
But but as soon as he turned the page to let's say politics, he would read it like it was probably true.
And one day he thought, uh, I feel like I might be noticing a pattern here that whenever I know the truth of the story, the news is fake.
But whenever I don't know the truth behind the story, I just uncritically assume they got that one right.
And so he concluded that probably all the news is fake.
Would you like to see a real-world example of Gale Man Amnesia?
Now, one of the benefits, I think I I think Bill Maher said exactly the same thing I'm gonna say, paraphrasing, that if you're a public figure, you live Gale Man Amnesia all day long, which is when you read stories about yourself or about something you're an expert on, you know it's fake news.
So if you're a celebrity, you've seen the fake news about yourself over and over and over and over and over again, to the point where if you saw news about at least another celebrity, you would say, uh, probably not.
Probably there's context missing, etc.
So there was a story about me uh yesterday.
So there's an entity called the Bulwark, the Bulwark.
So that's a publication.
I didn't realize that it wasn't just a Democrat publication.
Apparently they're anti-Trumpers.
And uh one of the one of the principals there is uh Tim Miller, who I did not realize that before he was an anti-Trumper, he was uh uh Jeb Bush's communication director for Jeb Bush.
So imagine imagine if your prior job was Jeb Bush's communications director.
Oh, poor guy.
Let me summarise Jeb Bush's communication address.
I'm going to do a fast-forward of Jeb Bush's speeches and things he said.
Now, let me quote uh Donald Trump totally ending the career of Jeb Bush with these words.
Jeb Bush is so low energy.
And we're done.
Imagine, imagine being imagine being the communication director and having your entire campaign taken out with one sentence.
Anyway, now I'm I'm making fun of Tim Miller only because uh the unfortunate career archies.
But I have to admit I like him.
Uh I and I'd wondered why when he was on MSNBC and the the shows I'm all primed to dislike.
I wondered why he always seemed like a reasonable guy, even though he'd be a little anti-Trump, I'd think, well, he's not crazy.
Like a lot of the people that MSNBC has on are just bad shit crazy.
But he didn't seem crazy.
And I kept wondering, how could this you know rational person who has a different opinion, but he's a rational person?
How like how is he part of the Democrats?
And now I learned that uh I think he's maybe a recent uh I don't know, independent, maybe I don't know what he is, but he's he's no longer a Republican, he's an anti-Trumper.
So he was on with Bill Christal, and they were showing a video of me.
So when they showed a video of me, let's see if you can guess.
Do you think it included the full context?
So you can really see what I had to say.
How many people think that they showed the full context of my comments?
Of course not.
Do you think that taking it out of context completely reversed or at least you know maximally changed what I was saying?
Of course, of course.
And do you think that you would have necessarily noticed if you had not also had the pleasure of listening to me say it originally and then seeing what they did to it?
Would you have noticed?
Was there any way you could tell that context had been removed?
No.
But I could tell.
I could tell.
So this is Gellman Amnesia.
I knew what they left out, but you didn't, unless you watched me.
A lot of you watched me.
So here's what they uh what they included.
They included me talking about how Trump was uh, in my opinion, he was authoritarian and a strong man.
And uh what I meant by that is that he he pushes every envelope, he he kicks every door, he does everything that he can get done, executive orders, he pushes around Israel if he can.
He's a bully.
And my argument was if you know your perfect form of government would be exactly that guy.
Now, here's the parts they left out that I would never support him for a third term, because the the system would break down.
So if you don't leave the part where it's completely impractical to have any kind of a policy of you know, trying to have or supporting an authoritarian strongman, you're completely missing the philosophical uh brilliance of my point.
The point is not that we should try to get that, or that the next one should be that, or that we should be glad we have it.
I'm just saying we do have it, and it works great.
So I'm not gonna complain about something we do have, and it works great.
But Trump is such a unique character that uh you're not gonna, there's no there's no hope you're gonna get a second one, right?
It's not like you say, oh, let's try to get another one who's who's that ballsy and that strong.
Good luck.
Good luck with that.
You know, it's sort of a one off.
So I reposted it and said, you know, I'd never support it.
But what's funny is I don't know a single person who seriously thinks Trump should or would do a third term.
Do any of you?
I'm curious.
There always be there's always gonna be some troll who says yes, but seriously, how many of you?
You're the this is probably one of the most Trump supporting audiences in the whole world.
How many of you think it would be a good idea for the United States, no matter how much you love Trump, how many think it would be a good idea at his age, especially to break the entire system by running again?
All right, look at the comments.
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no.
So why does Trump keep teasing it?
Is he just testing the water?
If it feels like it sometimes, but far more obvious than that is that he's trolling them.
So every minute that uh Tim and Bill spend showing videos of me talking about Trump, maybe maybe being a dictator.
Oh, they conflated it.
They conflated my saying that having the the strong man might be actually good for you.
They conflated that with me wanting him to have a third term, which is the opposite of my opinion.
All right.
So when you conflate something with its opposite, you're not doing anything useful for anybody.
So all of the time that they spent making that video and talking about it, followed by all the time that maybe they have to deal with the fact that now they're getting some blowback, is all wasted anti-Trump time.
Because we don't care.
We don't care that these two guys honestly believe that Trump might want to serve a third term when there's no fucking way that's ever gonna happen.
And then somebody tried to challenge me online, and they said, All right, all right.
This is paraphrasing too.
I go, all right, so so Scott, uh, if you don't think you should have a third term, uh are you gonna agree that if he tries to have a third term, you're gonna fight it?
And I I guess they thought that was a gotcha, to which I said, yes, yes, that's exactly what I would do.
If he tried to have a third term, seriously, and there's nothing like that happening.
There's nothing like that happening.
But if it did happen, oh yeah, yeah, I'd be standing on top of a building screaming, do not let this happen.
Because that would be the end of the constitution, the end of the whole, you know, American experiment.
No, no way.
But do I like it that he trolls them and makes them suck up all their time, not talking about anything useful?
Okay, I kind of love that.
Kind of love it.
Uh Alan Walton, he's one of the commenters in the comment thread on that topic, and he said uh talking about me, he said that I said 10 seconds after the clip ended that it would have major problems if Trump ran for a third term.
Now, if I may defend uh Tim Miller and Bill, well, Tim Miller mostly, if I may defend him, probably somebody sent him the clip.
Probably somebody sent him the clip.
I doubt he watched the entire clip and then decided to you know leave out the most critical part.
Why?
Because he used to be a Republican, and like I said, he presents himself as a rational person, even if I disagree with his views, they seem rational.
And so I don't believe that, you know, if I'm a reasonably good judge of character, do I think that Bill Crystal would have intentionally left out the clarifier?
Yes, I do.
Yes, I do.
I think Bill Crystal would have intentionally left out the clarifier so that he could do that creepy smile, you know, that creepy Bill Crystal smile.
Yeah, yeah, I think he's gonna be Hitler and take it over the movie.
Um, but do I think that Tim Miller, who used to be Jeb Bush's guy, Jeb Bush also a perfectly reasonable person, low energy.
No, just kidding.
Um I don't think he would have personally been okay with clipping off the most important part of the clip.
I think somebody said it to him, and maybe somebody trusted, and he went with it.
We all do that, by the way.
Uh, how many times have I shown a clip and then somebody said, uh, that was from six years ago, Scott?
And I go, you know, and then I slink away to delete it.
So if you're in this business, you make that mistake a lot.
Um, and I don't I don't really judge it.
You know, I I'm okay as long as it's done on a platform where the comments can you know add the context.
It's not a perfect world, right?
It's not a perfect world.
So I'm not gonna say Tim Miller should never make a mistake on a clip.
I'm not gonna say that.
I make that same mistake twice a day.
Uh but as long as it can be corrected, thank you, Elon Musk.
And then uh commenter Ozarkey, Patrick Parrish said also in that uh in that thread, he said Trump is so authoritarian that he can't just open the government up on his authoritarian order, but he just he's just authoritarian enough to serve a third term.
Got it.
Right.
He can't pass a budget by himself.
He can't put um he can't put the National Guard into a city by himself, he has to obey the courts and is you know if you wanted to make the argument that he's not an authoritarian, you have all you have you have a lot of argument.
Um I use I use the term authoritarian a little different, maybe than most people.
I think when some people say authoritarian, they say, oh, he's doing things for his own benefit, right?
But that's not really in the definition.
The definition is that the authoritarian has a strong focus on authority.
What's another word for authority?
The Constitution.
What's another word for authority?
Uh the law.
The law.
What's another word for authority?
Uh head of the military, defending the border.
So when I see authoritarian, I see somebody who's willing to uh kick every door, push every envelope, but if the court says too far, he says, all right, well, we'll try something else.
That's exactly the kind of strong man authoritarian I want.
I want to obey the law, obey the constitution, you know, don't take away my second amendment.
Is that authoritarian?
Because he's certainly strongly backing authority.
But unless he runs for a third term, it's not about him.
It's really not about him.
All right.
Um, I finally decided to follow a little bit this story about the eight senators whose phone records were monitored, not their conversations, but the actual who they called and when and how long they talked, as part of Jack Smith's so-called Arctic Frost investigation.
So I guess when January 6th was still buzzing, uh, Jack Smith was trying to figure out if Trump had planned the insurrection and was he talking to anybody that they could further investigate to find out if there had been conversations about an actual insurrection.
There had not.
Do you think that by now that if there had been any evidence that an insurrection had been planned on January 6th, do you think we wouldn't have heard that by now?
Seriously?
None, not a single conversation by anybody who mattered that they were planning an insurrection.
None.
Not a single one.
And it is still, and how many people were charged with the crime of insurrection?
None.
None.
Nobody.
Nobody was even uh what's the word indicted?
You know how you can get the Supreme Court to indicate a ham sandwich, right?
Nobody was even indicted, nobody's admitted it.
There's been no document, there's been no whistleblower.
There's not even been a conversation with any normal person who attended January 6th to say, hey, do you have a minute?
Could you tell me what your intention was?
How many of them said our intention is to overthrow the election and put in Trump illegally?
Not a single person had that intention.
Well, you know, it's a big crowd, there might have been some crazies there.
But the general crowd believed that the election had just been stolen right in front of them, and were there to make sure there was time to check out their suspicions.
That's it.
But anyway, during the time back in the day, uh Jack Smith was trying to figure out if he if Trump had been talking to anybody that they should find out more information about, and that included people like Lindsay Graham, uh Josh Hawley, and uh Ron Johnson and some others that you'd be less familiar with.
But let me tell you this.
If you if if what you're doing, Democrats is pissing off Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, and uh Ron Johnson, you got some trouble coming.
You You got trouble coming.
Those three guys don't take shit.
You know, maybe the other ones too.
I just don't, I'm not unless familiar with the other one.
But those three guys, no, they don't take any shit.
So the blowback's gonna be pretty fierce.
And uh, and so far Lindsay Graham has let them have it in public.
And we only just found this out.
Now, legal experts are defending it because they legally got subpoenas, and they stayed within the bounds of the law.
Is that enough?
I don't know.
Um, but they you know eventually the case was dropped, but only because Trump became president.
So I'm gonna say that uh maybe that's not a technical violation of law, but boy, does it sound bad.
All right, let's talk about healthcare.
Wall Street Journal is writing a story about Don Jr. being uh recently put on the board, I think in February, of a uh company that's trying to sell um pharmaceutical meds mostly mostly, but see, mostly focusing on generics, directly to customers, and Don John Don Jr. and others are gonna be meeting with big pharma people sometime soon and trying to get that.
All right, so uh it's called Blink Rx, and uh they would be competing with uh Mark Cuban's company that does a similar but there are some differences called Cost Plus Drugs.
Now I went to Groc.
I spent a lot of time on Grok today because all the stories needed more context than I could find in the news.
But uh I wanted to ask you what's the difference between this uh cost plus drugs that Mark Cuban's already rolled out and Blink Rx that is in some state of being rolled out, I don't know how much Wall Street Journal's writing about that.
Uh in both cases, you uh depending on the drug, it's not every drug, but uh both of them have uh emphasis on generics, because those are places you can save some money.
But um apparently you can save money on uh even some drugs that have insured copies.
So in the case of Mark Cuban's company, cost plus drugs, um, they can sometimes even beat the copay, not just the cost of the drug, but if you have insurance and there's a copay, they can sometimes beat the entire cost of the copay.
I don't know how often that happens, but that'd be damn impressive.
Anyway, um so my point is that they both seem to be in the in the market for cutting out the middleman so that big pharma doesn't have to go through these middleman entities that have you know big big markups, etc.
Um, so you want some good news?
So here's some good news.
The good news is these are serious companies, you know.
What one has the clout to bring in all the big pharma CEOs, and the other one is Mark Cuban, who has all the clout in the world, and they're gonna be, it looks like competing against each other.
Now, um I I don't I don't know enough about either company to know what the competitive you know matchup would be, and but I would encourage you to look into it, and it turns out that there's a tool for allowing you to find the low-cost uh way to get your drug,
and I believe that tool would include both Mark Cuban's uh company, cost plus drugs, as well as this blink RX that Don Jr. is getting involved with so uh the tool is called, And there are other ones like it, I don't know what they are, but good Rx, so it's all one word, good RX.
So Google that if you're looking for a cheaper place to get your drugs, especially the generics.
So the good news is very capable people are competing on a very important topic.
See, this is why we need billionaires.
Do you ever say to yourself, I wish we could, you know, get rid of all those billionaires who are distorting the system?
If you didn't have a billionaire, we wouldn't be going to Mars, we wouldn't have an electric car, we wouldn't have a neural link, and we wouldn't have a cost plus drugs, and we probably wouldn't have a uh whatever this other one is, right?
This is all billionaire stuff.
You know, I I felt a little bit of this when I got a little bit rich.
You know, I'm nowhere near billionaire status, of course.
But even just getting a little bit rich, you you automatically feel this weight to do something for the world, like payback, right?
So you so that's why I did the Dil burrito.
I tried to make a food that was more nutritious.
That's why I do a lot of things.
But um, imagine being a billionaire.
Like imagine the pressure you would feel if you didn't feel like you were doing enough for the world.
And I believe that this is very much drives some of our best innovations.
I know you can have some complaints about Bill Gates.
There's something more complicated going on there, and I don't know what it is.
But if you're looking at, you know, who is it who's taking a stab at lowering our pharma costs?
It's some rich people, it's rich people.
Anyway, Rand Paul has introduced his own budget reduction plan for the government.
He wants to cut uh six cents from every dollar the government spends, and he says if we did that, we could balance the budget in five years.
Now, here's what I like about this.
First of all, I like Rand Paul in general.
Uh, I just love that he's part of Congress, and I love that he's a noisy part of Congress.
Don't always agree with him, but that's not really the test.
The test is not whether I always agree with him.
The test is is he additive?
He is additive as hell.
Uh, even when he doesn't get his way, he he always extends the argument, he makes you think about it a little bit more clearly.
He always adds some context, and he seems to be always on the side of the public.
Seems like it.
I mean, I can't read his mind, you know.
Maybe everybody has a secret evil thoughts or something, but doesn't look like it.
It looks like he's literally just on our side.
Now, would this work?
Um, well, he'll never get Congress to act on it because we don't have a Congress that can do smart, hard things.
They can do smart things sometimes.
Uh, they can do hard things other times, but they can't seem to put the two of them together.
That they need to do something that's smart but also hard.
You know, otherwise, if they could do that, the budget would already be balanced.
But it's by design, they're unable to do that because they will lose their jobs.
As soon as somebody said, 'Well, let's do something good for the public,' uh, you know, we hate it, but we're gonna have to cut these prices or cut these uh expenses, they get fired.
They wouldn't get re-elected.
So we have a system that by its design can't solve problems that are both smart and hard.
That's why you need a billionaire occasionally, because they can do that.
What can Elon Musk do that the government can't do?
He can solve a problem that's smart and hard.
And we're watching him do it every day.
Anyway, um, here's what I love about the way Rand Paul presented this.
Instead of saying cut six percent, which sometimes could sound like a lot, depending on the domain, six percent, it would be a lot.
If you if you lost six percent in the stock market, it'd feel like a lot.
If you had to pay six percent interest rate on a mortgage, it would feel like a lot.
But what if it's six cents?
Six cents.
Remember, I always tell you that if somebody tells you the dollar amount without the percentage, or the percentage without the dollar amount, it's always propaganda.
It's at least persuasion.
So because I like Rand Paul, I'm not gonna call this propaganda.
I'll call it persuasion.
It's kind of clever to call it six cents.
Doesn't that sound like less?
Six percent feels like it reminds you of other six percent things that would be too expensive.
But if somebody said uh uh here you can buy this item, whatever it is, it wouldn't matter if it's a piece of candy or an automobile, if they said it's six cents, you would say, oh, you mean like nothing?
I mean, like it's is basically zero.
So it's a very clever way to um to put it.
I don't think you'll get sport in Congress.
All right, did I tell you that today's news is all fun?
Okay.
If you haven't seen Pam Bondi uh testifying before Congress, I guess yesterday, and responding to Adam Schiff and then to Richard Blumenthal, do yourself a treat.
Now, I don't know that this is true.
I'm gonna add a little speculation here, but I think it's true.
It looks to me like the top administration people have decided that if they have to testify in front of uh pencil neck Adam Schiff, that they're not gonna be taking any of it seriously, and they're gonna spend the entire time that Schiff has insulting him personally and never stopping, never answering the question, just insulting him personally while it's on CNN and MSNBC until he runs out of time.
And Pam Bondi did that to both Adam Schiff and then uh a little bit less, but also some to Richard Blumenthal.
And I thought to myself, as long as she's only doing it to the designated liars, you know, your Swalwells, your shifts, your your raskins, you know, and I think I'd throw Blumenthal on there too.
As long as she's only doing it to the bad players, please do more of this.
I I want to see this all day long.
I want CNN to say, you know, we're not even going to bother covering it, because all it is going to be is Pam Bondi screaming insults over Adam Schiff begging for to get his time back.
I loved it.
I I did not think that there would be any meaningful way you could respond to being sat in front of the TV cameras and then allowing the politician to say, I demand my time back so I can insult you.
Is it true that you ran over a child?
Well, no, I didn't, it's my time, it's my time.
But I didn't really run over a child.
Shut up, it's my time, it's my time, and then just say a bunch more bullshit.
I can't put up with that for another minute.
But watching Pam Bondi literally just sitting there trying to think of new insults and then yelling your insults, so you couldn't ignore them.
Oh my god, I loved it.
I loved it.
It's like it's it's like uh Scott Jennings on uh on steroids or something.
You know how much we like uh Scott Jennings, because he always has that, you know, calm, measured, you know, well thought out response to the craziness.
But but seeing but seeing somebody who is a smart, you know, thinking person, you know, high-level executive, very serious, made it to the you know, highest levels of government.
Seeing that person realize that the situation itself is so absurd that the funniest thing she can do is just insult him to his face on TV for as long as she can get away with it.
A plus.
Pam Bondi, I've never loved you more.
That was just A plus.
More, please.
I don't know if anybody else will be able to match that.
That was just really good work.
Well, the Illinois uh it looks like uh, oh, Texas uh National Guard has arrived in uh training camp, I guess in the Illinois, and they will be deployed deployed soon.
But again, the news is all funny.
So there's a photograph, ABC ran it on on axe, of the uh supposed Texas National Guard troops getting off a truck uh in Illinois.
And if you haven't seen the picture, you really have to, because they're all they're all obese.
Now, I don't know if all National Guard people in Texas are obese, but there were like six of them in the front of the picture who were clearly obese, you know, all decked out in their military outfits.
And uh I just thought to myself, uh, paging uh Pete Heggseth, P. Heggseth, uh, could you show up and maybe uh lead some lead some jumping jacks?
I can't believe that that picture got released.
They they look so not ready for war, but luckily it's not a war.
Anyway.
Um, let me talk about uh the persuasion view on uh all the sending the National Guard into cities.
All right, so there are two ways to look at this.
So there are definitely two sides of this.
On one hand, it does look quote, authoritarian for the federal government to be sending troops to cities.
Would you agree?
I mean, you don't have to, you don't have to disagree with sending the troops.
I'm just asking you a very narrow question.
Would you not agree that if the Democrats are trying to create this authoritarian rap on Trump, then sending uh uniformed officers and especially people with masks on and stuff, it plays it plays into their um into their model, right?
Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Don't get me wrong, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but I often refer to Trump as what I call an against the president, meaning that damn, he's getting stuff done, but he's gonna leave a little breakage, because it's usually the only way he can get anything done.
So this is in the category of a little bit of breakage, because it gives them something to focus on.
Oh, the authoritarian, and it works a little bit.
I would say it works.
Uh I would say they've convinced their base, quite a bit of it, that uh, oh, this is authoritarian, it's the next step before Hitler comes in, right?
So, on one hand, uh, it supports their fake messaging about authoritarian, and uh and it also supports their fake paid protests, which apparently are going to happen today.
So you'll see some more fake paid performers uh protesting.
So that all fits into the Democrat model a little bit.
And if there was nothing else to say, it would look like Democrats are winning on this topic wing politically.
But let me give you the other side, which is more with less obvious.
So the the less obvious part is the fun part.
So on the pro-Trump side of this argument, persuasion-wise, the imagery um is telling us that Democrat leaders have left you to die, have left you to die at the hands of criminals and cartel members.
And the only person who's trying to save your freaking life is Trump with the National Guard.
So Trump has the um the strong imagery of sending in the the cavalry, sending in the rescue squad.
So if he can frame this successfully, and it sounds you know, based on Rasmussen, it sounds like he has, he if he can frame this as saving the the poor, downtrodden, especially low-income and almost always minority population.
If he can say I'm sending these people in to save you because your leaders have left you to die at the hands of criminals and cartels.
Let me say that sentence again.
I'm sending in the the National Guard because your local leaders have left you to die at the hands of the criminals and the cartels.
Now is that exactly true?
Had they left you to die?
Well, no, I mean they have police.
And it's certainly not their intention for you to die.
But feel how strong that is.
I'm sending somebody to save your life.
Do you feel that?
Now, remember, I was mentioning uh earlier Dr. Carmen Simon and her and her experiments where she can put sensors on your body and find out how you're responding to different messages.
How do you think you would respond to that message?
Your leaders are leaving you to die at the hands of criminals and cartels.
I'm sending in the military to stop them.
I feel like that's just a dead winner.
I shouldn't say dead.
But um, I believe that Trump has once again correctly read the room.
I believe that when people answer polls, they answer it with words.
In other words, they they've got a point of view that matches their team, and that's been put into words by other people.
And then if you're asked your opinion, you'll look at the words and you'll you'll say, What words do I have?
That you know, is the answer to that opinion.
But you'll be you'll be dealing on the word level, also known as the policy level, the word level.
Trump is dealing on the stay alive level, stay alive, live, don't be stabbed by a bad guy.
Are those similar?
Do you think the people who are dealing on the word level, even though those words do play through into polls, which would make it look like it's a closer, a closer debate than it really is.
On the visceral physical level, this is a blowout.
It's an absolute blowout.
But it won't be until after it works that 80% of the country will see it was a blowout.
But you can't beat I'm gonna keep you alive.
You can't beat that.
How do you beat that?
And by the way, it's close enough to true, because everybody feels that you know the impact of crime, everybody feels it.
Um, so it hits exactly what you were thinking and feeling in the strongest possible way.
Uh so I think uh Trump's got the uh the leverage, as we say.
Here's Little Leon Trump said being funny.
Uh, he was talking to uh Carney from uh Canada, and uh separately he said uh Democrats have no leader, they remind me of Somalia.
Okay, that's just so perfect.
They remind me of Somalia.
How am I not gonna quote that?
I mean, seriously.
Democrats have no leader, they remind me of Somalia.
If you take out the Somalia part, uh, would I quote it?
No, of course I wouldn't.
It would just be sort of an ordinary statement.
You know, I say it, you say it, we all say they don't have a leader, the news says it.
It wouldn't be anything, but as soon as he adds they remind me of Somalia.
Part of your brain goes, and then it like it burrows in, and it and it uh persuasion-wise, it becomes an association that you can't lose.
Will I ever forget, ever, for the rest of my life?
Will I ever forget that Trump compared the Democrats with no leaders to Somalia?
No, I won't forget that for the rest of my life.
Well, the rest of my life might not be that long, but uh the rest of you, you might remember it too.
And then he had another witticism.
You had to see this one to see uh how well he pulled it off.
But that uh so Mark Carney is sitting in that uh official chair that the leaders always sit in next to the president.
Yeah, so the two of them are facing out on these chairs.
Fox News is reporting on this.
Um, so Mark Carney is talking, and then the the part that's hard to explain unless you see the video, which is worth seeing, uh, is that Trump interrupted him?
All right.
So it's it's hard to tell a story with an interruption in it.
But he interrupted him.
Yeah.
And so Mark Carney starts out by saying, uh, this is in many respects the most important.
Trump interrupts him and he finishes his sentence with the merger of Canada and the United States.
So Carney laughs, like genuinely laughs.
And you know, he said, no, oh no, not that.
The uh the people attending all laughed.
They all laughed.
And you know how people always say that Trump never laughs.
He was totally laughing.
Like he doesn't do ha ha ha ha ha.
You know, he doesn't laugh like I do.
But he was laughing.
He had a he had a smile wrapped around his face.
He knew he pulled it off.
So you know he was happy about it, I'm sure.
But um I don't know if I told you this story, but it reminds me of uh uh of a joke I'd heard from Jared, and I wondered, I wondered if there's any influence there that that with jokes, there are there are only about a hundred jokes in the world, and everything else is just changed in the names of the people in the joke.
So it makes me wonder if uh if Trump had exposed this.
And I may have told this story before, but I'll tell it again.
So in 2018, when I was invited to meet with Trump just because it was summer and he was he was a meeting with some supporters, uh, nothing important.
And I was waiting in the outer the waiting area to be allowed into the Oval Office, and uh Jared comes walking by through the outer office on the way to work, and uh he was with another gentleman, and I guess he recognized me from I don't know, probably the podcast, and so he so he makes a point to stop and introduce himself, uh but of course he introduces the person that he's with as well.
Uh so he introduces himself and he says, This is so and so.
He's the finance minister of Mexico, and he's here to pay for the wall.
Now the finance minister belly laughs, Jared laughs, I belly laugh because it was a gray line.
Like the the humor depends not just how clever you are, but where you say it and in front of whom if you do the right joke in the right audience in the right time, it's magic.
And that that was kind of magic, it was just brilliant.
But doesn't it remind you of uh a little bit of uh Trump's joke to try to infer that uh you know your your other party from the other country is totally on board, but you're just joking about it.
Now, is Trump also serious about the possibility of merging with Canada?
I say yes, I would say yes, and it's not the worst idea in the world.
Uh I think it would be hugely difficult, and it would be you know, it would come with its own risks and everything else.
But uh I I think sorry.
Cats and keyboards are a bad combination.
Um but I think that turning that into a joke and then turning his relationship with Kearney from very contentious into two dudes joking, is brilliant.
It's one of the things that Trump does better than anybody.
If you're doing what he likes, he's gonna go at you as hard as anybody can go.
I talk about this all the time.
It's great persuasion.
If you don't do what he likes, he goes after you hard.
You if you're at the moment doing things he likes, and I guess he was getting along with Canada at the moment, you know, he makes a joke, he slaps them on the leg, they have a laugh, now he's his best friend.
And he and he he praised Carney like more than more than I've seen him praise other people.
I mean, he really he genuinely he genuinely seems to respect Kearney's you know judgment and and skill.
So that's all good news for US and Canada.
We'll see where that goes.
Meanwhile, over in Hungary, they're passing a lifetime tax exemption to mothers of three.
So if you have three kids, you just don't pay taxes.
Now, what do you think of that idea?
Is there anything missing in that story?
What is it that's obviously missing in this story?
And I had to go to Grok to get the context.
Well, the obvious thing that's missing is what is the base tax rate in Hungary to begin with.
If the tax rate was 1%, it's nothing.
If the tax rate was like America, you know, up to 50%, oh my God.
I mean, that would be gigantic policy.
Turns out that Hungary, according to Grok, uh, their tax rate is uh 15% for just everything.
Income, investments, just 15, 1.5.
So it's a lot easier to go from one five down to zero for a special class of people, mothers, who are adding to the economy.
That's a lot easier than going from rich people paying 50% to, well, we'll let you get away with none.
How about none?
You just have an extra kid.
Do you do you know how fast I would have three children if it meant I paid no taxes?
It would take me uh nine months.
If I could pay no taxes in the United States, because remember, I pay half of my income in taxes.
If I could take that to zero, I could find three women.
Wait.
No, it wouldn't work with three women.
You'd have to have one woman with three babies.
Okay, it would take me 27 months plus a little uh recovery time.
Well, yeah.
I I would have I would have three kids I didn't plan on having to save a gigantic amount of money.
Yeah, as long as I didn't have to be too active in the raising of them.
I'm not good at that.
Um I won't last long, but you know, lots of reasons.
All right, uh I know I'm going super long.
Do you mind?
I could go a little bit longer, okay.
I'm having so much fun today.
You don't have to listen to it all.
All right, uh, there was some rumors about Charlie Kirk sending some text messages that were kind of negative on his view of how much bullying he was getting from pro-Israel sources.
Some people didn't think that was necessarily a real text and might have been fake, but apparently that's been confirmed that it's real.
So one of the TPUSA guys, I think confirmed it.
So Candace Owens had it, and here's what the message said.
Um Charlie Kirk said in the message, I think it was a group message.
Um, just lost another huge Jewish donor, two million a year because we won't cancel Tucker for the TPUSA event.
And then he says, uh I'm thinking of inviting Candace.
Now, those are connected thoughts because uh both Tucker and Candace are accused of being uh anti-Israel.
So if he got if he lost two million dollars because he won't cancel Tucker, yeah, it looks like he was gonna double down and invite Candace, uh sort of a big F U to the people bullying him.
So then one some other member uh didn't like that, I guess.
And then uh Charlie went on to explain uh Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes.
Okay, that's probably something you don't want to say in public.
Um and then it says, I cannot and will not be bullied like this.
Now, let me explain.
He's not saying all Jewish people are like the stereotypes.
He's saying that the Jewish donors, the ones he's dealing with, are acting like the worst stereotypes.
I I probably wouldn't have said that.
That that feels like a little unnecessarily provocative, but also probably completely accurate, meaning that he dealt with these donors, I didn't.
Uh, I have no reason to think he's a liar.
So if he says, my honest, my honest reaction to this is why are you acting like the worst stereotypes?
And I'm I'm out.
Seems fair.
Um and then he says, quote, leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.
Wow.
So now the accusations, um, which I do not believe.
Let me let me say up front, and then I'll say it one more when one more time when I'm done.
I don't think Israel put a hit on Charlie Kirk.
I do not think there's any chance that Israel put on a hit on Charlie Kirk.
There was a reason.
They had a good reason.
Because if Charlie Kirk turned against Israel, he did have enough clout in the United States, and the United States is vital, I believe Israel would say, to their survival, they would feel an existential threat by the fact that he said directly, I'm gonna leave the pro-Israel cause.
Did they have did Israel have a an incentive to murder him?
Yes.
Yes.
Let me say it again.
I do not believe Israel had anything to do with killing him.
Here's why.
The bigger existential threat would be caught doing it.
And we always catch everybody.
We're in a world where you kind of do catch everybody if you care enough.
Do you think that Netanyahu, as smart as he is strategically, and even if you hate him, even if you think he's a monster, he is a genius, like actual, like the literal kind of genius, strategically genius.
Um again, I don't agree with everything he does.
That's not the point.
But do you think somebody as smart as Netanyahu would take any chance of permanently ruining the U.S. as an ally?
And and I think the chance would be at the very least, 25%.
Like even if even if Mossad came to him and said, look, we got a plan to take out this critic, and it's really important to Israel that we do take him out.
But I think we can get the risk down to 25% of getting caught.
You think he'd take that?
Nope.
Nope.
Not a smart person.
No smart person in the world would take that.
How about, and especially, let's add to the fact that they knew each other.
They knew each other.
How hard is it to do a hit on somebody you know personally?
That's gotta be pretty hard.
I mean, you have to be pretty cold to do that.
I'm sure leaders do it, but it's pretty tough.
So if you look at it from the point of view that Netanyahu is not a moron, there's no chance that they there's no chance that he would have greenlit this, and there's no chance that Mossad would have done it on their own.
So I'm gonna say again, there's no chance, in my opinion, that Israel was involved in a hit on a beloved American um person who, if they got caught, even one or two percent chance of getting caught is the end of Israel.
I mean, that wouldn't just be a hard week.
I mean, that could very much well be the end of Israel.
Um, if they pissed us off that much and got caught, I mean, it's not like we don't have contentious things and they spy on us, I'm sure we spy on them.
They they try to bully us, we try to bully them back.
I mean, that all that stuff seems more like normal countries, you know, pursuing what's good for their country.
I don't hate all of that.
It's more like the the give and take you expect.
But if they had, if they had, and they didn't, in my opinion, they didn't, but if they had, biggest mistake Israel would have ever made in its entire history, Barnon.
So, no, I don't think they would do that.
Well, and finally, an update on the what I call the robot energy war.
You call it the Ukraine-Russia war.
But it's really now robots fighting energy resources.
And allegedly, now this is according to Pravda, so we can't automatically trust it.
But they say that a Ukrainian drone hit a cooling tower, a nuclear power plant cooling tower in the country of Novovovov Rosazan.
I think I nailed it.
Novovov Rosalind.
So it put a hole in the cooling tower, but we don't see any bad stuff escaping yet, but it might.
Do you think that uh do you think the Ukraine would attack a cooling tower on a nuclear?
I feel like that would be a mistake.
Because if they if they declare open war on nuclear facilities in Russia, Russia's gonna take out all the nuclear facilities in Ukraine.
Um but if they take out the energy resources, the other energy resources like oil and gas, they might be able to take out enough of that that Russia gets flexible about peace before they've destroyed 100% of the energy in Ukraine.
So maybe that's the bet.
I don't know.
So it feels like there's at least some possibility that was a mistake, or maybe fake news.
Could be fake news, but it also could just be a mistake.
It'd be a weird mistake.
I mean, hard to imagine it would be a mistake.
All right, that's all I have for today.
Um, I'm not going to say anything to the locals people today.
I got a got a good chat with them before the show.
Um, so I'm just gonna end because we ran late.
Thank you, everybody, for staying so long.
I hope you had as much fun as I did.
This is one of the most fun I've ever had doing the uh podcast.
