Lots of Trump success news and science stuff too. We will have fun.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Encrypted Chat Apps, Uber Tesla Training, OpenAI, Marijuana Gun Ownership, Zohran Mamdani, Islam Conquers NYC, Amazon Tax Payments, Jon Stewart Economics, Bernie Sanders, Healthcare Human Right, Paul Ingrassia Nomination, Black Holidays, Gaza Ceasefire, Shutdown Blame Game, MAHA vs Soda, AFL Steven Miller, Chicago National Guard, Rare Earth Minerals, Ukraine War Winter, West Canada Land Confiscation, Deportation Progress, President Trump, 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.
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Thank you, Paul.
Paul doesn't like me to thank him too often, but I like to do it.
All right.
How would you like to see a reframe to start your day from my incredibly successful book, Reframe Your Brain?
So, this is our new system.
Every morning you get a new one.
It will change your life.
Reframe Your Day00:15:02
Now, remember, not every reframe works for every person.
So you're looking for your magical one.
Let's see.
How about this?
Oh, you already know systems are than goals, so I can skip that one.
And you already know about talent stacks.
So I'm going to skip that one for now.
I might double back to that one.
All right, here's another one.
How often do you find yourself with a problem that just sort of popped up and you're like, oh, God, another problem.
I don't need a problem.
So here's a reframe for when you get that bad mood because you got a new problem.
Instead of saying, another problem, why me?
Say, ooh, a new puzzle to solve.
Watch what happens when you redefine your problem as a puzzle to see if you can solve it.
The thing with the reframes is when you first hear them, they don't really sound that powerful, do they?
If you just hear them the first time.
But watch what happens.
So this will be my challenge to you.
The next time you have a problem, just a life problem, just say, ooh, a puzzle.
I got a puzzle to solve.
And then see if you can solve it.
It will change everything.
This one's very powerful.
I use this one a lot.
And it definitely, definitely helps.
Well, according, all right, here's some fake news.
I guess TMZ is inaccurately reporting that Trump was considering commuting Diddy's prison sentence.
I think probably a lot depends on the word considering because people used to ask me if I was considering things that I was definitely not going to ever do, you know, such as, well, I won't even say it, but I always say, well, yeah, I considered it.
I considered it, and then I ruled it out.
So would it be true that Trump may have considered it?
Maybe.
Probably.
Well, almost definitely.
He almost definitely considered it, but it doesn't look like he's likely to do it, which is a big difference.
Did you know that the X platform now has a chat function that's sort of a superpowered DM?
I still don't know all the differences between the DMing and the chatting on X because the chatting is new.
But apparently the chatting has what DM doesn't have, which is strong encryption.
And Elon Musk says that even he could not read your messages even if he wanted to.
Do you ever believe that if the person who owns the platform says, even I can't read the message, do you believe that?
Do you believe that the CIA couldn't force him to open a back door?
Could they?
You know, he's a unique character.
He's not like anyone else.
So maybe he would risk pissing off the CIA if they said, no, you really, really have to open this up.
We will make your life a living hell.
You will lose all your government contracts.
We'll come after you in ways you didn't know anybody could come after anybody.
You're going to have to give us a back door.
Would he have the stones and the character to say no to that if it could bring down the entire empire and all the good that he would be able to do?
If it canceled him from being able to ever colonize Mars, would he open up a back door to the chat?
He suggests that he wouldn't.
But we live in a world where people are humans.
They're not robots.
If you put enough pressure on a human, you can get him to do anything.
There's no real limit to what you can get a person to do if you have enough pressure, especially if they have, well, I don't want to say it, but there are lots of points of pressure, obviously, for somebody like him.
Anyway, they got chat.
So one of the pioneers, the most famous architects of the AI world we're in is this guy, Andre Karpeti.
So he was one of the original OpenAI guys, and he's worked for Tesla, and he's went back to OpenAI at one point.
And he's the one who came up with the term vibe coding, which you hear a lot in AI.
So I bring this guy up because of people who understand the current and future direction of AI, he would be right at the top.
Can we agree on that?
That given his background and his experience, that if you're going to try to guess what AI will turn into or figure out where it's going, you would want to talk to him.
And the reason I bring him up is his opinion is the same as mine, and I don't have any qualifications at all.
So how long have I been telling you this?
He said that today's agents, which is, you know, if you wanted your AI to act like a little person who does things that you want it to do, that would be like an agent.
He said the agents aren't ready to work like real workers or interns, and it might not be, and they might not work for five to ten years.
Now, which of the other AI experts are telling you that AI basically won't work for five to ten years?
Just me.
I think I'm the only other person who said, I don't know what you're looking at, but if they don't know how to make you stop hallucinating, you don't have a product, right?
Have I not been telling you that for two years?
If you can't make you stop hallucinating, and they don't know how to make you stop hallucinating.
They don't.
They don't know how to make it be a little agent that doesn't turn against you.
The most basic things that you thought AI would do, five to ten years away.
Do you know what's another way to understand five to ten years away?
They have no idea how to do it.
None.
If it were a year away, you would already see it.
They would just say, well, it's not commercialized, but look what we can do.
In a year, we'll make this commercial.
Nowhere near it.
So, you know, the exception might be the self-driving cars because they need to be trained in mostly a video way.
So it's a completely different path for the self-driving cars.
But Axios is reporting that the Uber drivers are now getting trained optionally.
They don't have to do it, to train their robot replacements.
So obviously at some point, the Ubers will be self-driving like their competition.
And Uber is having their real-life drivers train voluntarily so that the AI can watch what they're doing and respond the way they respond to people and stuff like that.
So that's coming.
Imagine being in that job where you're already not happy that your best job could be an Uber driver, which is a solid job, right?
I don't want to say anything bad about real work.
Real work is all honorable.
And I have a lot of respect for the people who do that kind of work in particular.
But they're being put in a humiliating situation where they're essentially being told that they're being replaced and they can be replaced.
That's not exactly a comfortable place to be.
If you didn't love your job in the first place, it's not going to make you rich.
And you're going to be replaced by a robot and you have to train the robot to replace you.
Not so good.
Not so good.
But the good news is for Uber drivers, the average price of gas is now at a four-year low.
So a lot of places it's below $3 a gallon.
If you're an Uber driver, I'll bet you care a lot more about the price of gas today than you care about the robot replacing you in two years, maybe two years.
So at least you'll be happy about the price of gas.
Did you know that despite the fact that a huge portion of our GDP in the United States is because of AI already, AI was such a big thing so fast that it's just like a big chunk of our GDP.
But did you know that despite the boom in AI, that the country is slowly losing tech jobs in general?
They're not losing them in AI, but the tech jobs in general have gone down a little bit.
So I'm not sure if this is the beginning of a gigantic trend, but I don't think many jobs have been lost because of AI.
How many people said two years ago, oh, in two years, there'll be massive layoffs in tech?
Not me.
By the way, did I sell my hypothesis?
My hypothesis is that one of the most well-informed AI people says AI doesn't work and it won't work for five to 10 years.
And I believe I'm the only other person who has ever said that, at least publicly.
And I did that with no experience whatsoever.
I think I'm right.
Pretty sure I'm right, actually.
Anyway, sort of an article.
Oh, damn it, did I not write down what this was?
I want to give credit to whoever wrote this.
The source is Wall Street Journal and CNBC, but I saw it on Mario Noffel's post.
So there's some thinking that OpenAI has engineered itself to be too big to fail, too big to fail.
And I didn't know what that quite meant until I read a little bit into it.
And sure enough, so apparently OpenAI, since it sort of immediately became worth billions and billions of dollars, had all kinds of assets which they could use to buy other companies or to buy into or to get equity in other companies.
So what they wisely did is they took big positions at other AI companies so that they would own a little NVIDIA and they'd own Oracle, they'd own a little AMD, Broadcom, Microsoft.
So they would basically get really, really wet with all these other big AI companies.
And so wet and so big that these other companies would be tanked if OpenAI went down, which means that you would automatically have all the resources of these other companies, which are in the trillions.
They would be arguing to keep you in business even if you weren't making money.
So they would basically, by their big investments, buy all these teammates who, if they started to fail, because OpenAI is only going to generate, according to this theory, OpenAI will only generate $13 billion in revenue this year.
Now, that sounds like a lot, right?
$13 billion.
Except they're dealing with trillions.
To be open AI and to be ChatGPT is going to require spending trillions for the data centers.
So if you tell me you're making $13 billion a year, even if you tell me, yeah, but that's going to go way up.
I mean, that's just the beginning.
It takes a while to get to trillions.
So some people are thinking that the math doesn't work and can't work, meaning that Open AI could never really make money.
It just the cost to create it will be so immensely larger than the revenue potential could ever be, that it's the only way they can survive is by being too big to fail, connecting themselves to all these other companies that we also don't want to fail, because the whole country would go down if they did.
So they'll just make it impossible for them to go into business, which is a really smart strategy.
And I would expect no less from a company that is really literally being run by geniuses, and they're literally developing a new form of intelligence.
So if OpenAI couldn't figure out a way to stay in business with all of that going on, I'd be disappointed.
But apparently they can.
I don't know that any of this is bad, by the way.
So if you're reading between the lines, it looks like just smart business.
And I also think that the strategic imperative of getting to AI before China and everybody else is probably more important than even a few trillion dollars in GDP.
So I feel like we're in good shape.
It's just an interesting observation that they might actually have designed themselves intentionally to be too big to fail.
And it would be brilliant.
That would be the smartest thing they could have done.
But it's not innovation.
It would be financial engineering as opposed to innovation.
Speaking of Chat GPT, they're going to work shopping into it.
So if you're talking to your AI and you're asking it, what's good, whatever I should buy, you can just tell it to buy it.
Now it's not ready yet.
So that connection is not hot.
But very soon, they've decided they're going to do it.
So I guess they'll have access to the shop app or something.
So you'll be able to buy a lot of stuff from OpenAI.
AI In Your Calendar00:09:54
Now, interestingly, one of the applications I mentioned is the AI could look on your calendar and find out what it is you're in the mood to buy.
So for example, if you put on your calendar, you meet up with your friend who knows about cars to buy a car on Saturday.
If that was on your calendar, then instead of just getting random advertisements, when it was time to get that car, you would just go to your calendar and click on that entry.
And only then, when you definitely want to look at advertisements for local cars, it gives you advertisements for local cars.
The exact thing you're looking for at the exact day that you want to look for it.
Now, about 15, I think it was 15 or 20 years ago, I filed a patent on that idea.
So the idea was digital calendars were kind of newish.
And I said, wait a minute, if I put it on my digital calendar that I want to do, let's say back to school shopping on a certain date, shouldn't there be some connection to my calendar so people can feed exactly those kind of products just onto the entry on my calendar?
I'll never have to see them.
Unless I click on the entry, I'll never see them.
But if I do want to see them, it's the exact day I want to buy them.
And so I went through the patent process, partly to learn about it.
I do a lot of things just to learn about them.
And it got rejected.
And it was rejected because somebody had a prior claim that had nothing to do with calendars.
Nothing to do with calendars.
And it was just this weird generic claim that I looked at it as a non-lawyer.
I was like, ah, this doesn't even look like it's in the ballpark.
So I talked to my patent lawyer and said, all right, can we fight this?
And the answer is yes.
I mean, if you want to spend infinite money, you can fight anything.
But it didn't have an economic value at the time.
It was just something I thought would have an economic value.
So I decided to drop it.
So the funny thing is, there is someone who probably has a patent, the one that blocked my patent, that doesn't say anything about calendars.
And therefore, they're probably unaware that they can make Google Calendar pay for that patent.
Maybe.
I don't know.
But it's a valuable patent.
For someone.
Well, according to the AP, the Supreme Court's going to consider whether people who regularly smoke pot, what, can legally own guns.
Can I shortcut this a little bit?
Yes, the people who regularly regularly use marijuana can own guns.
And if you tell me that they can't, well, we're going to have a conversation because I don't see anything in the Constitution that says if I have two ales, I can't own a gun.
And if you're not going to take it away from the drinkers, you're not fucking going to take it away from the stoners.
You know what I mean?
If you're not taking guns away from drinkers, are you kidding me?
Have you ever seen the stats on drinkers and violence?
Have you seen the stats on marijuana and violence?
Do you know what I don't want to have in my hand if I've had any marijuana whatsoever?
What's the one thing I don't want near me?
I don't want it in the room.
A gun.
I don't want a gun near me if I've had marijuana.
I don't want it anywhere near me.
Literally, I don't want it in the house.
That's how far away I'd want it.
At least it would be in a gun safe.
But I don't want to be able to touch it, right?
And the reason is, the reason is not because I think I would be especially dangerous, but it changes your risk profile.
You give me three drinks, and it's fun to play with a loaded gun.
I shouldn't say that, right?
But it's just true.
You know, I don't drink, and maybe that's a good reason for it.
But if I had three drinks and there was a loaded gun sitting on a table in front of me, I wouldn't do anything bad with it, but I'd mess with it.
I'd pick it up, right?
So if you're talking about the risk of somebody who had a couple of drinks versus the risk of a stoner who owns a gun, these are not in the same universe.
Not in the same universe.
And you know what's going to happen?
Whoever they send to argue, probably will be somebody who doesn't have experience with any of those things.
You know, probably is not a pothead.
Might not even own a gun.
But if you got somebody who was a lawyer who at least understood what it meant to be a pothead and also owned a gun and also knew what it was like to drink alcohol, maybe that would help.
But there's no way in hell you're going to make me happy if you ban it for weed smokers and not alcohol.
And you know they can't ban it for alcohol.
There's no way they get away with it.
So we'll see.
Meanwhile, a lot of the news is just repeat news.
You know that the mayoral candidate Mamdani, I guess he posed with an unindicted co-conspirator, an Islamic imam, who was unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing those many years ago.
And he's just got a big smile on his face and they're hugging and stuff.
Here's my take on that.
I never care about that.
If you want to punish people for who they took a picture with, you're going to have to punish me pretty hard.
Do you know how many people I've taken pictures with that you might not like?
Because I don't even know who they are.
As a public figure, it's the most common thing in the world where somebody will say, hey, I bought your book.
Can I get a picture with you?
Sure.
Yeah, why not?
And I don't know there.
So do you think that there's never been some criminal terrorist pedo who ever took a public picture with me?
I don't know.
But I assume there's some bad ones.
I assume.
Oh, I can think of one right now.
Yeah, off the top of my head, I can think of somebody who would get me canceled if just somebody knew that there was a picture.
Now, does that mean that I agreed with everything that person in the picture ever said or did?
No.
No, not even close.
But there is a picture.
Yeah.
Probably, probably lots of them.
There are probably quite a few pictures of me with somebody who once said something bad somewhere.
That's the kind of people who are attracted to me.
Anyway, so that's, I can say that of nothing.
I don't really care that he has a picture with that guy.
But there's a poll, the Patriot Polling Company I've never heard of, but they claim that in New York, the American-born voters would prefer Andrew Cuomo by 40% to 31 for Mamdami.
Sliwa with 25.
But among the foreign-born, but now American, the people who can vote in New York City legally, Momdani is up 62% compared to Cuomo, 24%.
Now, what that would say is that the 9-11 attack succeeded, meaning that it turned New York Islamic because the people from other countries, largely Islamic, are going to put this guy in charge.
And so am I wrong to say that?
Am I wrong to say that 9-11 worked from the Islamic perspective?
Took a while.
Took a while.
But it probably caused us to be extra open to letting people in the country because we didn't want to act like we're big racists.
So we had to overcompensate and make sure, oh, yeah, everybody can come in.
Yeah, come on.
We don't care where you're from.
And the next thing you know, they have enough of them so that if they vote in a block, which they tend to do, then the American-born New Yorkers won't have a chance that you're going to get the foreign-born just because the numbers work that way.
So that's what's happening.
I watched a podcast with Andrew Schultz and Charlemagne the God.
I don't know if they always have one together, but I see them podcasting together a lot.
They're both really interesting characters, and they're both very good at what they do, podcasting.
And in the case of Schultz, he's very good at doing his stand-up.
Amazon's Tax Evasion Strategy00:14:45
Although he said unkind things about me when I got canceled.
But I won't hold that against him because he is generally underinformed, which is my point.
And he and Charlemagne were doing that thing where you complain about Amazon not paying income taxes.
And every time I hear that, I just go, oh, if that's the quality of your argument, you should stay out of economics.
Because clearly you don't have any appreciation of how anything works in the real world if you think that that's a problem.
Do you know what would be the best news you could ever hear?
The best news you could ever hear is that Amazon, once again, paid no taxes.
Do you think they would understand what I just said?
That would be the best news for the country, not just for Amazon.
Obviously, it'd be good for Amazon.
But the reason that Amazon wouldn't pay taxes in any given situation is that the government had created an incentive structure so that people exactly like them don't pay taxes in exactly this situation.
Specifically, if the company is massively investing in new facilities, massively investing in new employees, massively investing in training those employees, which they're doing massively, then all of those things create tax revenue.
All the employees that get hired, they pay taxes.
There's an employee tax.
There's a property tax when they open a new facility.
So I asked Grok, I asked Chad GPT how much taxes are going through Amazon.
They said Amazon paid in 2024, Amazon paid $7.2 billion for local and state taxes.
$7.2 billion, just local and state, and another $30 billion in sales tax.
$30 billion.
Now you could argue maybe that would have happened if it had been brick and mortar too.
But this is the world.
You have to live in the real world.
And then Bezos himself, because he sold a bunch of his stock last year, Bezos individually paid $3.2 billion in taxes.
That's just one guy.
That's not even counting his other executives who presumably sell stock at a regular basis as people do.
So probably, I don't know, $5 billion a year in taxes just from selling stock.
So here's my point.
It doesn't help Democrats that there's a podcast of two people who are mildly Democrat, but they definitely are crossover types.
So I'm going to give them a lot of credit for that.
They both are able to see, and this is so rare, they're both able to see that Trump brings benefits.
They don't have to like everything he does, but if you're at least smart enough to know he's bringing benefits, then you're worth listening to.
So I think they're definitely worth listening to.
I would like to, in case anybody mentions this to them, that their understanding of economics is weak.
So if they lead with economics, they should, I don't like to use the word should.
I'll say it would be beneficial to the audience if they tell them that they don't understand economics well enough to be part of that conversation.
I do that, right?
Often you'll see me in a topic where I'll say, I don't know enough about this, so I'm not even going to give you an opinion.
They don't know enough about economics because it's, you know, it's kind of a tough field, you know, if you haven't been exposed to it.
Anyway, maybe somebody could tap them on the shoulder and say you could improve your game on the economics conversation.
Meanwhile, Jon Stewart is trying to save the Democrats, and I'm really enjoying watching his arc because he knows that the Democrats have problems because of what they're doing.
It's not something that's being imposed on them by the bad MADA people.
They are doing a bad job.
And he's making sure that they understand it and can figure out what to do.
But here's what he had Bernie on, Bernie Sanders.
Now, John Stewart and Bernie Sanders would, in theory, get along really well.
But Jon Stewart tries to live in the real world, and Bernie definitely doesn't live in the real world.
So this is Jon Stewart schooling Bernie.
And he said that whenever the Democrats do some kind of program or try to fix something, that there's always a subsidy and endless funds, and they're paying it to these middle people like insurance companies and universities without price controls and without people watching where the money's going.
Now, who does that sound like?
That sounds like exactly me, doesn't it?
Did I say this maybe twice this week?
I said that if your system depends on just shoveling a bunch of money in some direction and then not watching the money, you can't possibly succeed.
There is no path there, no path to succeed if you're not watching where the money's going.
None.
You couldn't do it by luck.
You couldn't do it by, you know, the other team did a bad job that year.
There's nothing you can do with that except fail.
And so Stewart is smart enough to know it.
And he mentions that that's been the problem with the Democrats' approach to healthcare, education, pharma, and pharma, three examples.
Because he's noticed that when the Democrats have power, they just shovel money of stuff and then the prices go up because there's too much money sloshing around in that area that they were trying to save.
And I thought to myself, damn, damn Jon Stewart.
He understands economics.
That's right.
This phenomenon, which Stewart is explaining, where you slop a bunch of money into an area will only make the prices go up.
And we can observe that it's happened every time.
Yes, yes.
That's what Democrats need to hear.
They need to hear that.
Not Jeff Bezos doesn't pay enough taxes.
And Stewart even says, will Democrats recognize the poison pill?
He calls it a poison pill that they put in policy.
So he's basically saying that the Democrat policy is all crap, but will they even know it?
Do Democrats know their policies are crap?
It's a really good question.
And a really good question.
And then Sanders tries to agree with him, but he's not really quite on the same page.
And Sanders says that the Democrats make complicated proposals.
Things like, well, if you make over $49,000, you do this.
But if you make over $46,000, you do this.
And so Sanders is right.
The Democrats do complicated proposals and they need to simplify them.
But then he goes off the rail entirely on healthcare and he says, quote, healthcare should be a human right, Bernie says.
To which other people say, wait a minute, how do you have a human right that involves taking my money?
Do I not have a human right to keep the money I make?
What gives you the human right to decide how my money gets spent?
That's not a human right.
That's not in the Constitution.
That's not in the Bible.
There's no human right that says you can take my money for your health care.
What the hell?
So I'm watching this thing and I'm watching what looks like progress because it looks like Stewart is maybe reframing Sanders in a way that could be a big deal.
And then Sanders just goes right back into absurdity.
The absurdity that your money belongs to him and it's his right to have it.
Just absurd.
Do you think that there's anything about that that Jon Stewart would agree with?
That other people deserve your money and you have a right to it?
I haven't heard him talk on that specifically, but if you look at the other smart things that Stewart says, it would be impossible for me to imagine that he would be that smart.
And then when it came to this, it would be the one thing he was dumb about?
Probably not.
So probably he disagrees and thinks that there ought to be just a better way, which is what I think, a better way to approach healthcare.
I don't know what it is, but there ought to be a better way.
All right, there's another Republican getting in trouble for something he said on chats that weren't as private as they should have been, I guess.
So there's this guy, Paul Ingracia.
Never heard of him.
But Trump picked him to lead the office of special counsel.
And apparently he has a little history.
So he had told a bunch of Republicans in a text chain that I'll summarize.
He said he doesn't like any of the black holidays.
So he thinks that the MLK Junior holiday should be, quote, tossed into the seventh circle of hell.
He spoke about himself, saying he had a Nazi streak in the context of all this stuff.
And then he said, no Malignan holidays.
Now, I'm learning today that Molynon, a word I've never heard before, is an Italian insult for black people.
Have you ever heard that?
Is that real?
M-O-U-L-I-G-N-O-N is an insult to Italian, is an Italian insult to black people?
How did I never hear that?
Anyway, but so Ingracia thought that they should get rid of or we should get rid of Kwanza, MLK Junior Day, Black History Month, and Juneteenth.
He says every single one needs to be eviscerated.
All right, so you're wondering, what is my take on this?
Generally speaking, I say you should ignore private conversations, generally speaking, because I don't want to be on the side of taking down my, you know, my own team.
Maybe if the other team wants to do it, you know, go nuts.
But if you punished everybody for saying things that you think are way over the line, and I do, I think this is over the line, of course.
But does that mean I should be part of punishing him for being over the line?
I would say it is not unusual for Republicans to say we shouldn't have a special black holidays.
Does everybody agree with me?
You've all had enough exposure to Republicans to know that if you take away the way he said it, which is separate, the way he said it, hard to defend, but just the point of it, that he doesn't think that black Americans should have their own holidays.
That's actually not an unusual Republican opinion.
And it doesn't have to do with any hatred of black people.
It doesn't have anything to do with any disrespect.
It might be the opposite.
Because the Republican thing is, why don't we treat everybody the same?
That's sort of where it comes from.
Treat everybody the same.
Why is there a special day?
Why does everybody except white people get a special day?
So I think that's where it comes from.
It's not actually unusual.
I've heard plenty of people say, you know, that plenty of people say, let's say Juneteenth, they don't think that that should be celebrated.
I'm not arguing it either way.
I'm just saying that there are plenty of Republicans who have the same opinion.
Now, the part where he says I have a Nazi streak, I can't defend that because it's not my job to do it.
And I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to get a little bit wet in his self-described Nazi streak.
So I'm going to disavow that.
But at the same time, I'm going to say that's not a serious comment.
That's not a serious comment.
That is clearly chat talk.
And he's clearly sort of mocking himself.
So to me, it looks like he's just mocking himself because he's got these views.
They're not that far from mainstream Republican, which is that there should not be special holidays based on your race.
Not unusual.
That is not unusual.
No matter what you think about it, that's not an unusual point of view in the Republican world.
But where he calls himself, says he has a Nazi streak, I just interpret that as somebody who didn't think somebody was going to be watching and just wanted to sort of mock himself.
Nobody really thinks they have a Nazi streak or a Hitler streak, right?
Or a Nazi streak.
It's not likely that that's his actual self-view.
So I didn't mean to defend him because that's just his job.
You know, I can't defend everybody who does everything that I don't like.
I would say that I wish he hadn't done it.
But that would be true of everybody.
Everybody does things I wish they hadn't done.
So should I care?
Well, I wish everybody the best in this situation, but I'm having trouble caring about it, really.
Netanyahu's meeting with Egypt's spy master, trying to figure out how to make that ceasefire last.
Maga vs Maha: Winning America00:15:00
We'll see if that works.
Obviously, the ceasefire will be broken every day by both sides.
We all knew that, right?
Is there anybody who thought the ceasefire would hold?
You'd have to be, I don't know, 18 years old to think that any ceasefire over there would hold.
It would be the most ridiculous thing you ever thought.
Of course it won't hold.
Now, it might be good enough.
If I had to predict, and I do sort of, I have to predict.
I'm going to predict that it will hold well enough.
Well enough.
But it will be, you know, there's going to be knocks against the ceasefire every day.
And it will look like it's not holding.
Sometimes Israel will be blamed.
Sometimes the Gazans will be blamed.
But as long as it stays within a certain range of violence, we can probably get to the next level.
So I think that's what's going to happen.
Well, according to Harry Enton on CNN, the Republicans are winning, and Trump is winning the shutdown game, the shutting the government down.
So apparently, this is different than the prior shutdown in his first term, where his popularity and support went down when he closed it.
Now it's actually up slightly, but it didn't go down at all.
Let's see, according to Enton, there's a substantial shift in the public's perception of Trump's responsibility for the issue.
So back in 2018-19, 61% of the public thought it was his fault, basically, Trump's fault.
But in 2025, only 48%, less than half, think it's Trump's fault that the government is closed.
Now, as you know, Trump is using the closure to cut favorite Democrat policies and budgets.
So he's just sort of having fun cutting their budgets while they wait around.
So the longer they wait, the more their budgets get cut.
He totally has them by the balls.
Absolutely has them by the balls.
So he's winning in the polls.
But what the hell are they going to do?
They're either going to have to cave, which makes them look like losers, which at the moment they are.
They are losing.
Or they keep it open and he just keeps canceling all their projects.
So Trump has two ways to win.
Keep it open or keep it closed.
And they have no way to win.
Keep it open or keep it closed.
So since you know it's going to be opened, it's not like they're going to go forever and the country is going to tank.
What they need is some way to claim victory so that they can open it and say they accomplished something.
So I was brainstorming a little bit to see if I could come up with what I call the fake because.
I've talked about the fake because before.
Sometimes you know what you need to do.
They know they need to reopen the government.
The Republicans know it.
The voters know it.
The news knows it.
Everybody knows it.
Everybody knows that they have to cave fairly soon, you know, maybe in a week or so.
So since everybody knows they have to do it, and they know they need to do it, you just need that fake because, which is the reason that somebody hadn't said before.
But as soon as you hear it, you go, oh, okay, all right, that's why.
Yeah, it's because of that thing.
No, no, no.
It's new information, new information.
There's a thing that happened.
So they need a thing, whatever that is.
Could be the best thing they have is that the no-kings thing went off as at least a well-executed nonviolent protest that had a lot of people.
So they could say, all right, we did what we wanted to do.
Wait for it.
We raised awareness of the risk of authoritarian rule.
Now we can get back to work.
But they've got to be able to say, we did a thing, the no-kings thing.
It got us a good result.
It raised our profile and our argument and our point about authoritarianism.
And we made all that point.
And we did it without violence.
And now it's time to get back to work.
So that would be a fake because, because nothing really changed.
Nothing changed.
But they could spin it as it did change because I would agree that they raised the profile of the authoritarian attack on Trump.
It was probably close to 100% awareness that that's what they were doing.
But if they got a few extra percent, you know, maybe from 90% awareness to 94%, they can say, well, there we are.
It worked.
So that's why I suggest Democrats claim victory, reopen the government, because you got two ways to lose if you don't do that.
Trump is also winning what we could call the payback retribution game, as he's now we've got John Bolton officially indicted for espionage acts, which would include the same thing that Trump was being accused of with his Mar-a-Lago documents.
So how much do you love the fact that John Bolton was one of the people who was advocating that Trump needed to go to jail for his documents?
And now he's being charged for exactly the same crime with one twist.
He did not have the ability to unclassify documents.
Trump did.
That's a pretty big difference because one of them was acting completely legally, arguably.
One of them is going to have to come up with some kind of an argument that I haven't heard yet as to why it would be okay to have these classified documents in his personal possession.
Trump has an argument.
I was the president.
So if I make them available outside of the secure environment, that's a de facto declassification.
Now you could argue that's true, that's not true.
It's not why the case got dropped.
But it is a good argument.
In my opinion, that's a solid argument.
What does Bolton have?
Maybe nothing, but don't be surprised if he does have a good defense.
Sometimes there's a defense and you just don't know what it is yet.
So I'd wait for that.
We're still in fog of war on this Bolton stuff.
You would not be surprised to hear, according to Josh Voorhees writing for The Guardian, that there's a network of Republicans who are being contacted by big soda.
So as you know, RFK Jr. is trying to get to reduce our consumption of soda for health reasons, Maha.
But since it's a gigantic industry, the industry is banding together to try to get influencers and MAGA people to fight the Maha people.
So if you see that it looks like some MAGA people and some Maha people are disagreeing on social media, the question you should ask is, who are these MAGA people who would disagree with Maha?
And could you really be a MAGA person if you had taken that position?
I say no.
I say no.
MAGA includes Maha.
You are not going to carve that out.
You are not going to carve that out.
Yeah, if you're MAGA, you're Maha, and we're done here.
I will not have that conversation.
MAGA is Maha.
Trump is the one who hired RFK Jr.
Trump's the one who redeemed him, in a sense, reputationally.
MAGA is who wanted him enough that Trump was happy to put him on the team.
Oh, we are joined at the hip.
We're not going anywhere.
MAGA and Maha, same team.
And Big Soda is going to have to just pound salt because, no, you're not going to get away with this.
Not getting away with it.
Well, let's see.
Portland is getting slapped with a civil rights complaint over being a race-first DEI policy kind of a city.
This is, I believe, the America First.
I think it's America First organization that's doing that, which is doing great work, by the way.
The New York Post is writing about this.
Yeah, America First Legal.
It's a conservative advocacy group.
I think Stephen Miller is behind it or founded it.
I believe he's the brainchild behind it.
There's probably a few other brainchilds behind it.
But if you're not watching their work or following them, you're missing a good show.
Because I think America First Legal is one of the greatest developments in the last five years.
Because it always seemed to me like the Republicans didn't have a good legal response to a lot of stuff.
They weren't organized in the lawfare legal way.
But now they are.
And it looks like they have a really strong team because they just keep getting win after win after win.
So America First Legal, you should follow them on X if you get a chance.
Doing good work.
Well, Illinois is going to turn to the Supreme Court to try to block the National Guard from going into Chicago.
But Portland apparently tried to block it, but the Court of Appeals unblocked it.
So now Trump can send in the National Guard just to protect the federal assets.
So it's limited to that.
So every single day, there's a news story about some state and some court blocking Trump's attempts to reduce crime in cities.
And then there'll be another story where they tried, but they failed and Trump's going back in.
And I don't know, it's just groundhog day all over with these cities.
Now, here's my take on the city crime.
If you're a Republican, you have been brainwashed into believing that all these cities that are named, Portland, Chicago, San Francisco, you've been taught that they're all hell holes, correct?
And that they're crime hell holes as well as homeless hellholes, and that there's no way that they're going to get better unless the federal government comes in and does what Trump wants to do.
Now, the Democrats are weirdly claiming that none of this is happening.
They're claiming that the cities are fine.
The crime rate's going down.
The part of the city that has problems is so small.
It's just a couple of buildings get protested every night.
Not really much violence.
And our law enforcement's taking care of it.
So those two stories can't both be true, right?
It can't be true that there's not really any problem.
And what little problem there is, it's sort of solving itself with the locals.
At the same time, it's such a big problem that it can only be solved by the feds.
One of those two stories isn't true.
But here's the fun part.
I don't know which one it is.
If you believe that the Republican take on this is the accurate one, and all the Democrats are lying, and it really is a gigantic problem, you might be right.
I'm not going to argue with you.
You might be right.
But I wouldn't rule out, I wouldn't totally rule out the fact that the Republicans are keenly aware that this is working as an issue.
So that's where that's where I go.
That's where my eyebrow goes up.
If this were not working as an issue, I would say, well, why would they do it then unless it was just necessary?
Because it's not even working as a policy issue.
But it totally is working as a policy issue, which suggests that for political reasons, a smart political person would do more of it just because it works politically.
So have we entered a period in which it sort of looks like it's necessary, but maybe it would have gone down on its own through the efforts of the locals, just slower.
And so I'm not entirely sure if this is really making a big difference in the real world, and that two years from now, all these cities will have low crime because that thing they did for a few months that one time.
Does that seem likely?
That you could permanently reduce crime in the cities by coming in for a month and arresting a bunch of people and then leaving?
Because obviously they have to leave, right?
They're not going to stay there forever.
So I'm going to say I'm a little skeptical about both sides on this one.
However, I back Trump 100%.
Is that fair?
I do think there's a little bit of hyperbole and bullshit going on from both sides.
And I want to call that out.
I don't know what the data is.
I don't believe any of the data.
You know, all the crime data going down.
The crime data going down could be nothing but shenanigans.
And in some cases, it's definitely shenanigans.
We don't know how much.
But if it works, I'm all in.
And when I say if it works, meaning is Trump actually reducing crime in these places.
And if he is, maybe the real win is just to show it can be done.
Get Them to Feel the Cold00:15:37
Right?
A perfect win, in my view, would be the locals say, no, it's too hard.
We can't get the crime down, but we're trying as hard as we can.
It's going down a little bit.
It's going a little bit, but we're trying.
We'll get there.
And then Trump comes in with a big boot and makes a big difference in the crime stats.
And then he says, look, it worked.
Just do what we did.
Collect, you know, put a police presence where you know you need it.
Collect some guns.
I don't know.
Do whatever the do whatever the feds were doing.
And then they can say, all right, now you've created this model where we know how to reduce crime, but we can do this.
You don't need the feds here.
You have now taught us how to do it.
We accept the lesson.
We're going to increase our police department budget a little bit.
We'll take this.
Wouldn't that be the perfect answer?
None of you want the feds to be there forever, right?
I feel that's fair to say.
Not a single one of you would want the feds there as some kind of like federal police force.
We don't want that.
Not any of us.
But we do want the cities to be safer.
So if Trump can make this temporary situation a model that can turn into a permanent situation, that's all win.
That's all win.
So he does have a total victory path here.
Sean Duffy says, he's the head of transportation, that 40 million of funding will be withheld from California because they refuse to comply with the English proficiency standards for truck drivers.
And that has been a problem.
Apparently, truck drivers who can't speak English are more dangerous because they don't even read the signs, right?
In some cases, more dangerous than those who do speak English.
That's the thinking.
But also, I'm sure the Trump administration just wants English to be the standard, and California's resisting.
Meanwhile, Trump met with the Australians yesterday and signed some big deal about rare earth minerals.
These stories are always dangerous because there are, I think there are 17 rare earth minerals, and every one of them has a completely different story about why we don't have it, what country does have it, how hard it is to mine it, how hard it is to refine it, what we're trying to do.
You know, it's like all 17 of them wrote their own story.
So if you hear a story like this one, where there's this big, looks like consequential, quite a big deal, $8.5 billion mining and refining and recycling deal with Australia so that we can get at least some of those rare earths from Australia, our friend, instead of China, our adversary.
But it's pointed out that China still processes 90% of the global supply of rare earth.
So even if we mine it, we're going to have to figure out how somebody's ever going to refine it, which is even a bigger challenge, apparently.
So every time, here's what I'll say about Trump and the rare earths.
I don't have a good overall feeling.
I won't say feeling.
I don't have a good overall sense of whether we're getting, we're doing a good job or not trying to be free of China's control of our rare earth minerals.
But it sure looks like it, doesn't it?
So you and I are not close enough to any of that stuff to know if it's working or if they're doing the right things they need to do or they have a plan for all 17 of the rare earths or if they only have a plan for six of them.
You and I wouldn't know that.
But I'll tell you what I do know.
Trump is obviously working hard on this and this is obviously a top priority.
Would you all agree with that?
And it's sort of inspiring to see your leader completely understanding the top priorities, which is we need to get a handle on the whole China situation and the rare earth thing is the biggest lever for doing that.
He understands the strategic importance and then we can observe that he's putting the energy and the resources very strongly in exactly that area that we've identified as our top priority.
Now, don't you think Biden could have done that?
Because we're in the same situation we were in.
It's not like China only made these inroads in rare earth minerals in the last six months.
But what I watched is, Biden, you know that's like the most important thing, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But you don't seem to be working very hard to fix it.
Oh, yeah, we're doing a thing.
We're doing a deal or we had to get together.
And I look at it like, I feel like you don't understand the urgency.
This isn't one of those things you do.
If you get it done in 20 years, you're happy.
You really need to, you're going to need to pull this up to something like five years.
Now, I don't even know if Trump could do that, but people are talking about five to 10 years before we have some kind of rare earth independence.
But the fact that Trump is correctly identifying and focusing on the problem, 100% right, and then putting a level of effort, which he makes public, which is also right.
So you can see people getting excited about it.
Apparently, the stocks in some of the rare earth mineral companies just zoomed.
Stock doesn't go up until people know the governments are serious and the stocks just went up.
So Trump has convinced the markets that he's dead serious.
And now the markets can do what the markets do.
The free market can do it because now they believe him.
That's why their stock went up.
They now believe that this is game on for rare earth.
So I'm going to give him an A plus for identifying the problem and for putting the right level of attention and resources on it.
But just remember, it's at minimum, it's a five-year problem.
So if you saw anything that looked like big progress in one year, that's worthy of applause.
So there's a, I guess the planned meeting between Trump and Putin got postponed because there was a lower level meeting with Rubio and Lavrov, and I guess they were not on the same page about what to do in Ukraine.
So that's postponed.
So I have the following suggestion to get this war done.
So this is based on persuasion.
If I said to you, you should stop this war because people are dying, would that work?
No, because if that was going to work, it would have already worked.
And unfortunately, the way warfare works is that leaders don't care that much about young men dying or even older men dying.
So the fact that a whole bunch of people are dying won't stop the war.
So what would?
Now, I think that the current approach that Ukraine is doing, and you could argue that Russia is doing the same thing, is they're concentrating on the energy resources so that they can freeze the citizens on the other side.
And then the citizens on the other side will say, we give up.
We're not even on the front lines, but we give up.
Can we just surrender so we can get the heat turned on?
So I feel like it's now a civilian war.
But in order for Putin to be influenced by any negative effects on his civilian population, we're not there.
Because it doesn't look like his civilian population is suffering.
And it looks like at the moment, they'll have enough electricity to get them through the winter.
And at the moment, they might have to wait in line for some gas, but they'll get some gas.
So Putin doesn't really have the kind of pressure from his citizens that would make him want to end the war.
Here's how maybe you could do it.
You want to make them think about cold.
and you want to do it right away before you get there you want to make i i posted in on x an image made by grok of some russians at a gas station where there was snow on the cars but the russian people were in blocks of ice You need to make Putin and his public feel the cold.
You need them to feel the cold before the cold comes.
And the cold's coming fast.
They need to feel that a significant portion of their relatives and friends will literally freeze to death this winter.
And think about that.
How much does that hurt?
Have you ever been, have you been almost frozen to death?
I have.
The reason I live in California is I almost froze to death my senior year of college in a snowstorm.
I didn't have a jacket.
So I was outdoors in the middle of the winter in February.
My car broke down.
I had no jacket.
I know what it feels like to be cold.
And there was no traffic.
There were no homes and there was no traffic.
It was upstate New York.
Finally, a car came through and saved my life, but only one.
There was only one.
If that one car had not come by, I'd still be in a snowbank in Syracuse.
So if you're Russian, you felt cold.
And you probably didn't like it a lot.
So what I would do is, if I were Trump, I would remind Putin that his country is going to be a gas station frozen in ice.
And that it's one thing that he doesn't care about his soldiers dying, but wait till he sees the moms and kids dying because they can't have heat.
If I were the CIA and I wanted to make it especially, let's say, impactful in Moscow, I would first of all make sure that I was dealing with the cities, the ones that have power, not the rural.
Nobody cares about the rural anything.
And I would make sure that the CIA said that there's a run on firewood and that there won't be enough firewood this year, even if that's not true.
And then you want to say, these stores have already run out of generators because you bought them all.
So if I were the CIA, I would be getting rid of the alternative ways that you could heat yourself while making it look like it's just market forces.
See what I'm doing there?
So that if you're a citizen, you're saying, okay, well, at least I can start a fire.
What?
I won't be able to start a fire?
I can't use my fireplace?
No, there'll be no wood because everybody's expecting a massive energy shortage this winter.
So if you don't already have your wood for the whole winter, you won't have wood.
And they could make that happen just by snapping up the wood supplies in a few places and then starting the rumor.
And next thing you know, Russia would be in an energy panic because they know they won't have electricity.
They won't.
And now they could know that they won't have wood.
I don't know if they use wood to heat anything in Moscow.
But look at the general argument, not the specific argument.
The general argument is you want them to think and feel cold.
Winter's coming.
And you need to do it to both sides.
So everything I said about Russia applies to Zelensky.
Zelensky has to feel that nobody's going to have electricity in Kiev.
I don't know if they will, but he needs to feel like they won't and that they'll freeze to death and it will be his fucking fault.
So you got to, both of them need to feel that they're now going to kill the women and children with their current strategy, which they might, by the way.
They might kill the women and children with their current strategy because both places will become unlivable in the next two months.
Moscow is probably only livable for two more months.
Did that sound like hyperbole?
It was.
It was hyperbole.
But I'm not far off.
I'll bet Moscow will only be livable for two months because after that, they're going to lose power, I think.
And then what do you do?
In the middle of the winter?
In Moscow?
Do you have to leave?
What would you do?
tear down the house to make firewood uh what's that Seeing somebody.
Oops.
Damn it.
Anyway, I'm looking at the comments to see how much disagreement I'm getting.
But I don't see any.
Vodka.
Yeah, as long as they have vodka, they'll be okay.
All right.
Well, it'll be easier to sell the cold when it gets colder.
So every day that we get closer to the middle of winter, it'll be easier to sell this idea that maybe we should try to get warm.
Trump could even say, let's just stay warm this year.
Because if you contrast warm with what's actually going to come at them, because there's no way that they blew up all these energy industries unless they're planning to shut down the other one in the winter.
And I think they're planning to shut down the other one, both sides.
Anyway, the U.S. military has allegedly killed 32 people off the coast of Venezuela so far without, this is Axios reporting on this, without telling Congress or the American people who was killed or on what evidence.
Do you care?
How many of you care that the U.S. government has killed 32 suspected drug smugglers off the coast of Venezuela?
Do you care that you don't know their names or that they didn't have due process?
I don't.
No.
When it comes to the drug cartels, I would be happy with any kind of summary execution.
I would be happy if the moment they captured them, they just shot them in the head and left them there.
Would Happy With Summary Execution00:05:07
I would be happy with that.
I don't need my military to explain every kill.
Once we've agreed it's a war or a terrorist, a terrorist situation, and we have, so that we're already past that.
It's a terrorist situation.
I don't care what you do with them.
I do not care what you do with them.
I don't know it, don't want to know their names.
I don't want to mess with any due process.
Do I think that that might cause the death of an innocent?
Maybe.
That's war.
I'm not in favor of it.
I'm not in favor of any innocent people being killed, but I didn't create this situation.
You take the situation as it's given to you.
Anyway, over in Ireland, Ireland plans to make $15 a month basic income for artists permanent, according to Business Insider.
So they tried a trial where some artists were paid $1,500 a month, no matter what they did.
It wasn't a job.
They just give them free money for being artists.
And now they want to make that permanent in the budget because it worked out so well.
I don't know if they talked to any artists, but as an official artist, myself, sort of, let me tell you how art works.
If you pay me to not make art, how much art am I going to make?
If you pay me whether I make art or not, how hard am I going to work to make it good art?
Not very hard.
The reason that I try really hard every time I draw a comic, and I do, every single time, I try really hard.
Do you know why?
Because it's a business.
That's my obligation.
My obligation is to try as hard as I can to make the best thing I can because there's money going back and forth.
But if I got paid no matter what I produced, let's just say my work would go a lot faster, a lot faster.
So, no, this is the worst idea ever.
I don't know if they include musicians in this, but that's crazy.
Somewhere over in Canada, let's see, in the Richmond, British Columbia part of Canada.
Apparently, there's some court ruling in which some homeowners are going to have to give their property back to the Native Americans.
That doesn't even seem like it could be real, does it?
That in 2025, there's going to be an actual process.
I don't know if it will succeed, but the process will look at maybe taking the homes from the modern people who own the homes and have owned it, maybe owned it all their life or thought they owned it.
And now the courts will say, You never owned that because it was stolen property.
So they're going to give your stolen property back to the people who also never owned it because they weren't even born.
That's literally happening in Canada.
Now, as somebody pointed out, if that happens, and somehow I still have hope that it will be pulled back and couldn't possibly happen.
But if that happens, it would be the end of land rights in Canada, and capitalism would be destroyed in Canada forever.
You couldn't have capitalism.
Capitalism would never exist anywhere where the capitalists had to give back what they stole.
Let me say that again.
There's no place on earth that capitalism could survive if they were forced to give back what they stole at some point in the past.
Sorry, I'm not in favor of capitalists stealing your stuff.
That's not where I'm going.
I'm not saying it was good.
I'm not saying it was moral.
I'm not saying it was ethical.
It just is.
So if you want capitalism in your life, you can't be giving back the stuff the capitalists stole 100 years ago.
You just can't do it.
Anyway, I guess the Trump administration, according to Fox News, is shattering the deportation record.
So half a million have been deported and 1.6 million self-deported because they knew that they would be next.
And you add them together, you get over 2 million people who did not have a strong enough claim to stay in the United States that they wanted to, you know, that they're still here.
So is that good?
2 million in six months?
It looks pretty good.
I'm going to have to say, once again, Trump has identified the big problem and put massive resources against it, and then we can observe it.
Trump's Bold Solutions00:01:47
How much do you love that?
That he identifies correct problems and then puts massive resources against solving them right away.
Like he doesn't even wait.
It's just like right away.
We'll never see this again.
I don't believe we'll ever see this again.
He's just the best president we've ever had by far.
I think that's, I think that competition is basically over, unless he does something terrible between now and the end of his term.
All right.
That's what I had to talk about today.
And that's all I got.
But I'm going to say a few words privately to my beloved local subscribers.
If you're a local subscriber, you know that I've been doing some drawing lessons, I guess you'd say.
Not really lessons, but when I do my drawing of the comic, I've now got a little color device that holds my phone so that the phone is just looking down on my hands while I work.
So I've done a few of those just for the locals people.
I did one for the ex-audience the other day.
But locals will get more of them because I enjoy working while people are just hanging out with me.
All right.
I'm going to go privately to locals in 30 seconds.
Damn it, it's not working.
Sorry, locals.
Sometimes the button just doesn't work.
I don't know why that is.
So I can't go private with you.
But I think you'll live.
Sometimes the button doesn't work, and I don't know why.
Thank you, Gunnar the Cat.
Appreciate it.
All right, I'm going to take off and get some breakfast.