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.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
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 copper mug or a glass of tanker chalices, time, a canteen, juggernaut, 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.
And it happens now.
All right, that was my last sip of the cup.
But boy, was it good.
So good.
Well, speaking of marijuana, Mario Noffel had some interesting posts that he surfaced on X. The AP is talking about this one.
There's a new 800-pound, 800-person, not pound, 800-person study found that a cannabis-based drug slashed chronic lower back pain effectively with fewer side effects than opioids.
Do you believe that?
That THC, 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, 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.
First of all, the marijuana you can take as much as you want.
As long as you're not responsible for work or driving or kids or anything like that.
But you could 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.
It might not be the pain.
Maybe it's just the caring about the pain.
I don't know how you divide that.
But next time, AP, you want a story, just ask me.
I can tell you.
Meanwhile, Spain is moving to legalize medical cannabis.
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 countries, and they allowed, 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 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'm a perfect example.
If I needed more medical marijuana, chances are I wouldn't want to drive the driving because 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.
So I think that's a good move by Germany.
They tried it.
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.
Then I guess Sean Duffy was on Fox News, the was it outnumbered or something, whatever it was this morning.
And Sean Duffy was, he's the head of transportation, right?
And 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 illegal.
Most people do.
But wouldn't you like a little bit of deterrent against driving?
Because that's deadly.
So 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 has had too much.
For example, somebody like me who's a lifelong adult user, you could just pack me with marijuana before it would have any effect on even sports.
I can play tennis with as much marijuana as you want.
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 going to 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.
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, you know, it's totally legal, right?
Not for teenagers.
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 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 real argument for keeping it illegal at a federal level, while at the same time, the state police say, ah, we're going to let it go.
And maybe they would just turn the other way in terms of the federal charges.
Anyway, so I think Sean Duffy could improve that argument a little bit.
Did you know that if Jabba the Hutt had an evil twin, that twin would probably be considered a frontrunner 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 frontrunner to be the next Democrat candidate for governor.
And you're going to have to see the video of Katie Porter talking to a reporter.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Run away.
I mean, it's just all bad.
And you know that thing about overweight people being jolly?
Well, I guess we're going to throw that out.
Yeah, she looks like Pritzker in a wig.
But so that pretty much guarantees that she'll be the next governor, I think.
Oh my God.
Anyway, JD Vance posted what they're saying is his first TikTok video as VP.
The Hill was reporting on this.
And here's what he said.
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 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, J.D. Vance here, just wanted to let you know that we are relaunching the VP's TikTok page.
And then he said, 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 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 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 outright jokes, but just witticisms?
Who can do that?
And the answer is nobody.
Nobody.
JD Vance can do it.
If you don't realize how thin that target was, he just had 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, oh, that's pretty funny.
You know, you hit that target.
Very rare.
He can do it.
All right.
I didn't love his suit he was wearing.
I thought was a mistake.
So I'll give one negative.
If you're going to do a full body image, I'll do a little more work on the suit.
He wears good suits.
Just, you know, not that day.
I think he had, yeah, I want to say more than that.
The Trump administration is rumored, per Forbes, that they're thinking about maybe selling a portion of their gigantic student loan debt to a private market.
Why would they do that?
Now, what that means is people owe the government, I don't know, $1.6 trillion for student loan debt.
The way anybody 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 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.
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, et cetera, 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 collecting.
Maybe they could be more innovative in how they handle the debt.
So, there's something there.
I wouldn't say that this is necessarily a good idea.
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.
Eric Dolan of SciPost is writing about a study that showed that public opinion shifts your cardiovascular response during political talking.
So, in other words, if they hook you up to sensors, they can determine that some political topics make your heartbeat and your hands sweaty, and basically, your body has an 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 going to have the wrong answer because they do on every poll, and the other 75 didn't understand the question, right?
That's what an opinion poll is.
If you say, Can you give us your opinion on closing the government?
Well, people will have an opinion, but do you think they'll understand it?
They want to close the border, but do they understand all the ins and outs of the policy?
You know, 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 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 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, 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, often it'll be stuff like crime and the border and 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?
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 as soon as you hear inflation, you think, I can't pay my bills.
Oh my God, what am I going to 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 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, 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.
Don't you think that opinion polls should at least be augmented by a smaller number of people checking people's automatic responses?
So, you know, my friend Carmen Simon, who's in that line of business, and that line of business means testing people's bodily responses to different questions.
She doesn't do politics, but because 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 corporate questions and things like that.
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 glass and watch somebody being tested.
So 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 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 talked 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, ah, 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, 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 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 it 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 Trump's superpower is that he can feel how people feel somehow.
All right.
There was a Nobel Prize awarded to the first mainland Chinese scientist and also a woman.
I think that's worth noting for China.
And she discovered artemisin and malaria cure.
Oh, wow.
She saved millions of lives with a malaria cure.
Damn, that's pretty impressive.
But 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 Mabobo 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 Tu Yu Yu, Tu Yu Yu, and she won the Nobel Prize.
Now, this, of course, is a great honor.
We should be showing her maximum respect.
So her name is spelled Tu.
The first name is just T U. And then the last name is just the word you put together twice.
You, 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 that joke had 16 million views when I checked this morning.
That's a quality joke.
That's a quality joke.
That's a Nobel Prize joke right there.
I hate that the joke overshadowed her accomplishment of, quote, saving millions of lives.
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, you want to hear the least surprising news of the day?
The news is all weird and funny, and the today's show will be the best you ever saw.
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.
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 don't think about it that you don't think of it that way at first, but you soon realize that we say, hey, I don't have good data for this branch bank or whatever that I was 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, nah, 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.
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?
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, by far, oh, actually, I'm not high, Irene.
I'm not high at all.
I will be after the show.
Just it's worth mentioning that opinion.
I think the news is just genuinely funny today.
And I've been sort of laughing all day.
But on top of that, 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's nothing.
The best meal I ever had in my life was after a week of dental work where I could only eat soft 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 for 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, would 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 entity you've never heard of suddenly making a big provocative claim.
You know, 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.
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 heat islands?
In other words, too close to things like airports that would heat them up too much.
No, they used their secretive algorithm to estimate what the temperature would be if they had measured it.
So the climate change and apparently the census have always been complete bullshit.
I've always been.
So that was fun.
Now, I know there's going to 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 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, he posted on X, the real problem is that Obamacare was never actually affordable.
So apparently the Washington Post, just, 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, 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 narrow aim that I've seen.
Can you believe that the Washington Post, 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 they've been lying since then.
And that it was never affordable.
It's not a question of, 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, if we don't get something in there, we won't have anything to correct.
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 get the price down, et cetera.
So that wasn't the worst idea in the world, 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 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 raising its 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 law or somebody in Congress is making money at it or their cronies are 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 going to 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 got to shake the box.
And it's going to 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, according to Breitbart News, is reporting on that.
He was in an interview recently and he said the Democrats will 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 is shut down, who is suffering?
It's people who are at the lowest economic rung.
It's ordinary air traffic controllers and, of course, service people.
That's 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 blocked the payments.
You just freaking hate their freaking guts.
Imagine looking in your bank account and the money isn't there 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.
By the way, it's not like I disagree with him.
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 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 could you read a room worse than this?
Oh, what we need is some massive socialism and don't want to give up our leverage.
Certainly don't want to be paying those people in the military.
Fuck you.
Fuck you and your leverage.
All right.
According to Rasmussen poll, 49% of the people who are polled say 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 the Trump administration is totally dominating the messaging, and they have made people argue whether or not they're helping to pay illegal aliens.
I'm not even going to 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 is still going to treat you, but I guess you just wouldn't have the emergency room would still treat you, but you wouldn't have regular health care, which of course would be way better.
So messaging-wise, I have to give the wind so far to Trump.
All right, here's a story about Gelman 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, Gelman 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 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, 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 Gelman amnesia?
Now, one of the benefits, I think Bill Morris said exactly the same thing I'm going to say, paraphrasing, that if you're a public figure, you live gel 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, all right, probably not.
Probably there's context missing, et cetera.
So there was a story about me 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 one of the principals there is Tim Miller, who I did not realize that before he was an anti-Trumper, he was Jeb Bush's communication director for Jeb Bush.
So imagine if your prior job was Jeb Bush's communications director.
Oh, poor guy.
Let me summarize Jeb Bush's communication.
I'm going to do a fast forward of Jeb Bush's speeches and things he said.
And then that would go on for, you know, hundreds of hours.
Now, let me quote Donald Trump totally ending the career of Jeb Bush with these words.
Jeb Bush is so low energy.
And we're done.
Imagine being the communication director and having your entire campaign taken out with one sentence.
Anyway, now I'm making fun of Tim Miller only because of the unfortunate career arc he has.
But I have to admit I like him.
And I'd wondered why when he was on MSNBC and 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 rational person who has a different opinion, but he's a rational person, like, how is he part of the Democrats?
And now I learned that I think he's maybe a recent, I don't know, independent, maybe.
I don't know what he is, but he's no longer a Republican.
He's an anti-Trumper.
So he was on with Bill Kristal, 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 could 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 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 Galban 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 included.
They included me talking about how Trump was, in my opinion, he was authoritarian and a strong man.
And what I meant by that is that he pushes every envelope.
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 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 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 trying to have or supporting an authoritarian strongman, you're completely missing the philosophical 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 going to complain about something we do have and works great.
But Trump is such a unique character that you're not going to, there's no hope you're going to get a second one, right?
It's not like you say, oh, let's try to get another one who's that ballsy and that strong.
Good luck.
Good luck with that.
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's always going to be some troll who says yes.
But seriously, how many of you, 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?
It feels like it sometimes.
But far more obvious than that is that he's trolling them.
So every minute that Tim and Bill spend showing videos of me talking about Trump maybe being a dictator, they conflated it.
They conflated my saying that having 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.
So when you conflate something with its opposite, you're not doing anything useful for anybody.
You're just making some content.
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 going to 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 Scott, if you don't think you should have a third term, are you going to agree that if he tries to have a third term, you're going to fight it?
And 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 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.
Alan Walton, who's one of the commenters in the comment thread on that topic.
And he said, talking about me, he said that I said 10 seconds after the clip ended that they would have major problems if Trump ran for a third term.
Now, if I may defend 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 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 going to be Hitler and take it over the movies.
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.
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 he trusted and he went with it.
We all do that, by the way.
How many times have I shown a clip and then somebody said, that was from six years ago, Scott?
And I go, ooh.
And then I slink away to delete it.
So if you're in this business, you make that mistake a lot.
And I don't really judge it.
I'm okay as long as it's done on a platform where the comments can add the context.
It's not a perfect world, right?
It's not a perfect world.
So I'm not going to say Tim Miller should never make a mistake on a clip.
I'm not going to say that.
I make that same mistake twice a day.
But as long as it can be corrected, thank you, Elon Musk.
And then commenter Ozarki, Patrick Parrish, said also 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 the National Guard into a city by himself.
He has to obey the courts and is.
If you wanted to make the argument that he's not an authoritarian, you have a lot of argument.
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?
The law, the law.
What's another word for authority?
Head of the military defending the border.
So when I see authoritarian, I see somebody who's willing to kick every door, push every envelope.
But, but if the court says too far, he says, all right, well, we'll try something else.
That's exactly the kind of strongman, authoritarian I want.
I want 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.
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, 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, what's the word indicted?
You know how you can get the Supreme Court to indict 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, Jack Smith was trying to figure out if Trump had been talking to anybody that they should find out more information about.
And that included people like Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, and Ron Johnson, and some others that you'd be less familiar with.
But let me tell you this: if what you're doing, Democrats, is pissing off Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, and Ron Johnson, you got some trouble coming.
You got trouble coming.
Those three guys don't take shit.
You know, maybe the other ones too.
I just don't, I'm less familiar with the other one.
But those three guys, no, they don't take any shit.
So the blowback's going to be pretty fierce.
And so far, Lindsey 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.
But eventually the case was dropped, but only because Trump became president.
So I'm going to say that 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 recently put on the board, I think in February, of a company that's trying to sell pharmaceutical meds, mostly, but see, mostly focusing on generics, directly to customers.
And Don John, Don Jr. and others are going to be meeting with big pharma people sometime soon and trying to get that.
All right, so it's called Blink RX.
And they would be competing with Mark Cuban's company that does a similar, but there are some differences called cost plus drugs.
Now, I went to Grok.
I spent a lot of time on Grok today because all the stories needed more context than I could find in the news.
But I wanted to ask you, what's the difference between this 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.
In both cases, you, depending on the drug, it's not every drug, but both of them have an emphasis on generics because those are places you can save some money.
But apparently, apparently you can save money on even some drugs that have insured copays.
So in the case of Mark Cuban's company, cost plus drugs, 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, so my point is that they both seem to be in the market for cutting out the middleman so that big pharma doesn't have to go through these middleman entities that have big markups, etc.
So, want some good news?
So, here's some good news.
The good news is these are serious companies.
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 going to be, it looks like competing against each other.
Now, I don't know enough about either company to know what the competitive matchup would be.
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 way to get your drug.
And I believe that tool would include both Mark Cuban's company, Cost Plus Drugs, as well as this Blink RX that Don Jr. is getting involved with.
So the tool is called, and there are other ones like it, I don't know what they're, but GoodRX.
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 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 Neuralink.
And we wouldn't have a cost plus drugs.
And we probably wouldn't have a whatever this other one is.
Right?
This is all billionaire stuff.
You know, 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 automatically feel this weight to do something for the world, like payback, right?
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 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 drive 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 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.
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.
Even when he doesn't get his way, 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.
It seems like it.
I mean, I can't read his mind.
Maybe everybody has his secret evil thoughts or something, but it doesn't look like it.
It looks like he's literally just on our side.
Now, would this work?
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.
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.
Otherwise, if they could do that, the budget would already be balanced.
But 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, we hate it, but we're going to have to cut these prices or cut these expenses, they'd 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, here's what I love about the way Rand Paul presented this.
Instead of saying cut 6%, which sometimes could sound like a lot, depending on the domain, 6% would be a lot.
If you lost 6% in the stock market, it would feel like a lot.
If you had to pay 6% interest rate on a mortgage, it would feel like a lot.
But what if it's 6 cents?
6 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 going to call this propaganda.
I'll call it persuasion.
It's kind of clever to call it 6 cents.
Doesn't that sound like less?
6% feels like it reminds you of other 6% things that would be too expensive.
But if somebody said, 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 $0.6, you would say, oh, you mean like nothing?
You mean like it's basically zero?
So it's a very clever way to put it.
I don't think you'll get support in Congress.
All right.
Did I tell you that today's news is all fun?
Okay.
If you haven't seen Pam Bondi 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 going to 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 pencil neck Adam Schiff, that they're not going to take any of it seriously.
And they're going to 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 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 Schiffs, your Raskins, 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 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 to get his time back.
I loved it.
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 her insults so you couldn't ignore them.
Oh my God, I loved it.
I loved it.
It's like Scott Jennings on steroids or something.
You know how much we like Scott Jennings because he always has that calm, measured, well thought out response to the craziness.
But seeing somebody who is a smart, thinking person, high-level executive, very serious, made it to the 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 more, please.
I don't know if anybody else will be able to match that.
That was just really good work.
Well, the Illinois, it looks like, oh, Texas National Guard has arrived in a training camp, I guess, in the Illinois, and they will be deployed soon.
But again, the news is all funny.
So there's a photograph, ABC ran it on Axe, of the supposed Texas National Guard troops getting off a truck in Illinois.
And if you haven't seen the picture, you really have to, because 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 I just thought to myself, Paging Pete Hegseth, P. Hegseth, could you show up and maybe lead some jumping jacks?
I can't believe that that picture got released.
They look so not ready for war.
But luckily, it's not a war.
Anyway.
All right, let me talk about the persuasion view on all this 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 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, they're sending uniformed officers and especially people with masks on and stuff, 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 going to 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.
I would say they've convinced their base, quite a bit of it, that oh, this is authoritarian.
It's the next step before Hitler comes in, right?
So, on one hand, it supports their fake messaging about authoritarian, and it also supports their fake paid protests, which apparently are going to happen today.
So, you'll see some more fake paid performers 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 less obvious part is the fun part.
So, on the pro-Trump side of this argument, persuasion-wise, the imagery 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 strong imagery of sending in the cavalry, sending in the rescue squad.
So, if he can frame this successfully, and it sounds based on Rasmussen, it sounds like he has, if he can frame this as saving 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 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?
Have 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.
Your leaders are leaving you to die.
I'm sending somebody to save your life.
Do you feel that?
Now, remember, I was mentioning earlier Dr. Carmen Simon 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 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've got a point of view that matches their team, and that's been put into words by the people.
And then, if you're asked your opinion, you'll look at the words and you'll say, What words do I have that is the answer to that opinion?
But 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 going to 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 the impact of crime.
Everybody feels it.
So it hits exactly what you're thinking and feeling in the strongest possible way.
So I think Trump's got the leverage, as we say.
Here's something else Trump said being funny.
He was talking to Carney from Canada, and separately he said, Democrats have no leader.
They remind me of Somalia.
Okay, that's just so perfect.
They remind me of Somalia.
How am I not going to quote that?
I mean, seriously.
Democrats have no leader.
They remind me of Somalia.
If you take out the Somalia part, 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 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 the rest of you, you might remember it too.
And then he had another witticism.
You had to see this one to see how well he pulled it off.
But that so Mark Carney is sitting in that official chair that the leaders always sit in next to the president.
So the two of them are facing out on these chairs.
Fox News is reporting on this.
So Mark Carney is talking.
And then the part that's hard to explain unless you see the video, which is worth seeing, is that Trump interrupted him.
All right.
So it's hard to tell a story with an interruption in it.
But he interrupted him.
And so Mark Carney starts out by saying, 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, no, not that.
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.
You know, he doesn't laugh like I do, but he was laughing.
He had a smile wrapped around his face.
He knew he pulled it off.
So he was happy about it, I'm sure.
But I don't know if I told you this story, but it reminds me of a joke I'd heard from Jared.
And I wondered if there's any influence there.
That with jokes, there are only about 100 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 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 meeting with some supporters, nothing important.
And I was waiting in the outer, the waiting area to be allowed into the Oval Office.
And Jared comes walking by through the outer office on the way to work.
And he was with another gentleman.
And I guess he recognized me from, I don't know, probably the podcast.
And so he makes a point to stop and introduce himself.
But of course, he introduces the person that he's with as well.
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 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 was kind of magic.
It was just brilliant.
But doesn't that remind you of a little bit of Trump's joke to try to infer that 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.
I think it would be hugely difficult.
And it would be, you know, it would come with its own risks and everything else.
But I think casting keyboards are a bad combination.
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 going to go at you as hard as anybody could 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.
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 praised Carney more than I've seen him praise other people.
I mean, he genuinely seems to respect Carney's judgment and skill.
So that's all good news for U.S. 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 a gigantic policy.
Turns out that Hungary, according to Grok, their tax rate is 15% for just everything: income, investments, just 15, 1.5%.
So it's a lot easier to go from 1-5 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 know how fast I would have three children if it meant I paid no taxes?
It would take me 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 recovery time.
Well, yeah, I would have three kids I didn't plan on having to save a gigantic amount of money.
As long as I didn't have to be too active in the raising of them.
I'm not good at that.
And I won't last long, but lots of reasons.
All right.
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.
There were 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.
So, Charlie Kirk said in a message, I think it was a group message, just lost another huge Jewish donor, $2 million here, because we won't cancel Tucker for the TPUSA event.
And then he says, I'm thinking of inviting Candace.
Now, those are connected thoughts because both Tucker and Candace are accused of being anti-Israel.
So, if he got, if he lost $2 million because he won't cancel Tucker, it looks like he was going to double down and invite Candace.
Sort of a big F you to the people bullying him.
So, then some other member didn't like that, I guess.
And then Charlie went on to explain: Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes.
Okay, that's probably something you don't want to say in public.
And then he 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 probably wouldn't have said that.
That feels like a little unnecessarily provocative, but also probably completely accurate, meaning that he dealt with these donors.
I didn't.
I have no reason to think he's a liar.
So, if he says, my honest reaction to this is, why are you acting like the worst stereotypes?
And I'm out.
Seems fair.
And then he says, quote, leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.
Wow.
So now the accusations, which I do not believe, let me say it up front, and I'll say it 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 going to leave the pro-Israel cause.
Did Israel have 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?
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 I think the chance would be, at the very least, 25%.
Like, 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 got to 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 he would have greenlit this, and there's no chance that Mossad would have done it on their own.
So I'm going to say again, there's no chance, in my opinion, that Israel was involved in a hit on a beloved American person who, if they got caught, even 1 or 2% chance of getting caught is the end of Israel.
I mean, that wouldn't just be a hard week.
I mean, that could very well be the end of Israel.
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 try to bully us.
We try to bully them back.
I mean, that stuff seems more like normal countries pursuing what's good for their country.
I don't hate all of that.
It's more like the give and take you expect.
But 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, bar none.
So no, I don't think they would do that.
Well, and finally, an update on 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 city of Nova Vovovovovozen.
I think I nailed it.
Novo Vovovovovrozn.
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 Ukraine would attack a cooling tower on a nuclear?
I feel like that would be a mistake.
Because if they declare open war on nuclear facilities in Russia, Russia is going to take out all the nuclear facilities in Ukraine.
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.
I'm not going to say anything to the locals people today.
I had a good chat with them before the show.
So I'm just going to 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 podcast.