Trump in Asia, Ukraine versus Russia, underwater spiritual beings in submarines and lots more~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Tesla, Simulated Worlds AI Training, President Milei, Argentina's Success, SNAP Benefits, Jake Tapper, Democrat Government Shutdown, President Trump, Trump's Asia Trip, Rare Earth Minerals, TikTok Sale, Bill Maher, Biden Admin Hunted Republicans, Trump's 3rd Term Justification, Hakeem Jeffries, Gerrymandering, Gavin Newsom Period Full Stop, Thomas Sowell Quotes, DEI University Hiring, Democrat Darkness Narrative, Eric Swalwell, Trump's Ballroom, Ukraine War, GM Gemini AI, Daily Calorie Guideline, Gaza 3rd Party Security, Rebuilding Gaza, 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.
That's what happens when the cat walks on your keyboard after you think you have all your settings done.
The cat walked on my mute button.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
And you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper mug or a glass of tanker chalice, a steiner, canteen, jugger flask, vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
All right.
Our new tradition.
One reframe will be read from my book, Reframe Your Brain, the book that changes everybody's life for the better.
Sometimes just with one sentence that I have not yet read to you.
All right, how about this?
How about, here's one of the things that people argue all the time.
They argue that a plan will either work or it won't work.
That's sort of a common frame.
Hey, your plan will work or your plan will never work.
A better reframe from that is that friction and incentives always work.
We just don't know how well until they're tested.
If you put a disincentive somewhere, you can't say it won't work.
It'll work a little.
You have to wait and see.
So instead of saying something doesn't work or it does work, you just say, can I test it?
Can I test it?
Find out if it works.
Winners find out if it works.
Losers say, that'll never work.
There you go.
That's your reframe for the day.
Change your life.
Hey, I wonder if coffee is good for you.
Oh, according to Nicholas Fabiano MD, there's a study that says that coffee consumption is associated with increased brain white matter integrity and cortical thickness.
I don't know.
I'll have to test that.
I've been feeling a little bit thin in my cortical area, but it says here this coffee can thicken that up.
You test it.
Yeah, it's working.
It's working.
I can feel my cortical thickness.
Yeah, it's about twice as thick now.
You know, sometimes you read this medical news and you don't know if it's real, but that was real.
Well, there's a category five hurricane that's heading for Jamaica.
Jamaica?
No, she went willingly.
It's enough of that.
So Representative Luna, one of my favorite representatives, is suggesting that on some, was she on PBD show?
She was on a podcast.
That the so-called UFOs or UAPs, she seems to have an inside track on that.
And they're what she believes are interdimensional beings, according to other people.
At the same time, there are reports of some app called a UFO tracker, some kind of UFO tracker, that shows that there's an enormous amount of unexplained activity, some kind of vessels that are underwater all over our coast.
So my question is, do interdimensional beings use submarines that glow in the dark?
Because if I'm going to go to another dimension, I need to know what to travel in.
Do we take a spaceship?
Submarine?
What's on the other side there?
I did hear somebody say that if you were a creature from some other part of the universe, you might be more comfortable underwater than you would be in our air.
So that it would make sense that even if somebody visited Earth, that their impression of Earth was whatever's under the sea and that they're not even interested in what's above water because it's just a pain in the ass.
It's just something on the way to the ocean.
Maybe.
Remember I told you that if robots were real, meaning that we really were going to have robots walking around in 12 months, that they would already be doing the things that the market would be seeing.
Well, maybe we're there.
Because Elon says, Elon Musk says that if you were to visit Tesla's engineering headquarters in Palo Alto, the robots are in fact just walking around.
They're on their own.
And you could ask them for directions and the robot would happily take you to the place that you wanted to go.
And so this was the point I was waiting for.
Approximately one year before you can get a robot, you would expect that the people making the robots would be fully enjoying the wonders of a robot, at least in the office.
And it looks like that's either happening or it's very close to happening.
So we might be getting close to robots.
Anyway, Tesla also says, they showed a video of it.
It's pretty impressive, that in order to train their cars, and I think they're robots too, they're doing simulated worlds.
So instead of having the devices learn on the real world, because there's not enough real world to train them as fast as they want, they have the computer makeup of fake world, and then they have a train on the fake world.
So now do you believe you live in a simulation?
Because you know, the AI doesn't know it's looking at a simulation.
Just think about that.
The AI is being trained on these virtual worlds.
It doesn't know that they're virtual.
Can't tell the difference.
Why do you think you can?
You couldn't tell the difference.
If we were a simulation, the whole point is you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
It would be programmed so that even if you thought you wanted to tell the difference, you couldn't tell the difference.
It would just be programmed.
You would be programmatically prohibited from realizing your reality.
That's what I think.
Unless you're a player and not an NPC.
Well, Javier Mule in Argentina, I guess they had a big win in their midterm elections, which people would say would be somehow good for Trump because Trump likes him.
But his party won 41% of the votes, and they're going to pick up a whole bunch of parliament seats, and Javier is really happy.
You know, I've been sort of a quiet skeptic of the Argentina miracle.
Didn't it always seem a little too good to be true?
You know, I mean, I like his vibe.
I like his general approach.
You know, I like his free market stuff.
So I don't have a specific complaint, but it just looked like it was a little too easy, too clean, too promoted.
There was something about it that didn't look 100% legitimate.
So I've been, you know, you've probably noticed, I have not been a fanboy.
I enjoy watching the show, you know, watching what Javier Mule does.
It's very interesting.
But I'm trying not to be a fanboy because I feel like there might be more news coming someday.
Does anybody else have that feeling?
There might be more news coming.
You don't want to be too far on that train when it happens because it's never all good news.
There's always something out there.
We'll see.
Well, I guess in New York City, Governor Hockle and Zoran Mundani, and I think KOC were there.
They had a big rally because their election is coming up Tuesday, Tuesday next week.
Yeah, Tuesday next week, I think.
And they got up there and they promised free child care and free universal, yeah, universal child care, free rent, or freeze rent, not free, and free buses.
I don't know what other free stuff they're giving away.
But the people in the stadium were chanting, tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich.
Meanwhile, the rich were packing up their bags to get as far from New York as they can.
Oh my God.
I'm so glad.
Well, I'm sure if they tried to do that chant in California, that people would do the chant.
But how would you like to have a little extra money and live in a state where they're chanting to tax you?
You want to leave when the chanting starts, you know, before they get the pitchforks and the torches.
Because right after chanting, pitchfork and torches.
Now, I don't know if that's coming, but it feels like it is.
Well, Wall Street Apes, an account on actually you should follow, Wall Street Apes.
They're pointing out that, did you know that the SNAP benefits, which are going to end, I guess, right away, that's the one that feeds the people who don't have enough money to feed themselves.
Did you know that there are 43 million people on that?
Americans.
Well, residents of America.
43 million people are being fed by the other people.
Did you have any idea?
It was that big.
I had no idea.
That's a lot of people.
And apparently 54% of immigrant households have at least one major welfare program.
I wonder what it is for the residents.
It's probably not that far off from the residents, actually.
So here's the question.
I think Jake Tapper put it this way to, he was talking to some Democrat.
Oh, Murphy.
See, he was talking to Murphy.
Murphy's the new designated liar.
You know how I always tell you that Swalwell and Schiff and Raskin are designated liars.
They send them out when the lie is just so gross that regular normal Democrats don't want to say it out loud.
But they'll send those guys because they'll say anything.
So Murphy's one of those.
He's joined the designated liars, Will Say Anything Club.
So Jake Tapper on CNN, who is now under, is he under the Ellison umbrella already?
So what people are looking for is to see if the conservative purchases of these big news entities, everything from TikTok, I guess, is going to go through to CNN to who knows.
But we're looking for any subtle changes in coverage that would suggest that the news is either moving toward the middle or even leaning toward the right because of new ownership.
But Jake Tapper asked this question, which suggests that he's at least finding the middle, if not leaning to the right.
He said to Murphy, funding for food stamps, that would be what I'm talking about, is expected to run out at the end of this week.
This is happening because Democrats, now watch how Jake Tapper frames this.
He says it's happening because Democrats have not agreed to vote to fund the government.
Now, do you think you would have put it that way if you were not owned by a right-leaning entity?
Because that's a really powerful framing.
And it's very powerful for the benefit of Republicans.
I don't know that I've seen Jake go this strong on a narrative that's just pure Republican.
But let me finish.
So he says, this is happening because Democrats have not agreed to vote to fund the government.
Now, Jake has said that a few times, a number of times.
He said, you know, how is this not the Democrats?
They're the ones who aren't voting for it.
You can't blame the people who are voting to open the government.
And yet they were.
He's making the common sense observation that it's the people voting not to open the government who are the ones voting to not open the government.
It's not a hard point, but before I don't think you would have seen it.
But then he goes on with the this is just a kill shot.
So then Jake says, so is this a trade-off you're willing to make letting some Americans go hungry until these Obama subsidies get extended?
Let me read that again.
This is an absolute kill shot.
There should be nothing left of the Democrat Party by now, if anybody saw this question.
So is this a trade-off you're willing to make?
See, even the putting it in the terms of willing to make strengthens it and continue to make, strengthens it again.
You've done it and you continue to do it.
He goes, letting some Americans go hungry until these Obamacare subsidies get extended.
Because I don't know about you, but if you say healthcare, I obviously care a lot because that's important.
But if you say hunger, I go to a whole different level of caring, right?
Hunger comes before kind of everything, except immediate physical safety.
So this is really strong.
So I'm going to give Jake a sitting, standing ovation for that journalism move, because that was exactly the right question, exactly the right time, and exactly the right person to ask it.
What do you think he did with that question?
What do you think Murphy did?
Did he say, yeah, we're intentionally going to starve 43 million people, which, by the way, the Republicans don't want to do?
They want to open the government and give them their money, their food.
So they're going to starve Republicans so that they can get a political win on healthcare.
Now, even if you were to say, but Scott, you know, we need both of those things.
So ranking them doesn't even make sense.
Those are two essential things.
You have to have them both.
So putting them up against each other isn't fair.
It's just two things you need.
Okay.
Doesn't feel like that, though.
Doesn't feel like that.
Feels like you need to eat before you go to the doctor.
Well, so that was, to me, that was really interesting as maybe a sign of the times.
So Trump's right, I guess Trump's in Tokyo.
He's already met with the Prime Minister of Japan.
And his alleged victories so far in his Asia trip, so he's touring Asia right now.
I don't know how much to believe because the reporting seems a little light.
But there's reason to think that Trump set up a number of alternative paths for rare earth minerals through other countries that he's meeting.
And he's not done yet.
He's still going to South Korea.
It might even meet with Kim Jong-un if he wants to catch up.
I love the way he does that.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
So the question is: did Trump successfully find alternative paths for all of the rare earths?
Do we have a new, more robust alternative path that's not China?
And does it cover everything we need?
Or does China still have a hand on us?
Well, it seems that around the time that these other deals with other countries were being made, China got flexible.
And we don't know if that flexibility is because they realized they're going to lose the entire rare earth market, which they might.
They might lose the entire rare earth market for ever having tried to restrict it.
Would you ever buy rare earth from somebody who had ever tried to restrict it for political purposes?
No, not if you had a choice of buying it from somebody who never did that.
You know, it's the same rare earth materials.
So China may have realized how much they shot themselves in the foot with threatening the world with rare earth restrictions.
Maybe.
See, this is part I don't know, because there might be levels and levels of what's happening behind the scenes.
But apparently there's a soybean agreement.
Scott Besent said he was a soybean farmer himself.
I asked Grok and he said, Well, he's not a farmer, but he does own farms.
So he's a landlord.
He's a landlord who owns some farms that would have been growing soybeans, but China didn't want to buy anything until now.
Now, I guess they're going to do a big soybean purchase.
And they also have agreed, allegedly, with the sale of TikTok to some American entities that will be running all the sensitive stuff, so you don't have to worry about China stealing your stuff.
We think.
So that's the question.
We don't know how successful Trump has been on this trip.
We know that everybody's treating him like a superstar.
We know that he's, you know, he's our celebrity in chief.
They seem to love him.
Do you remember the days when it was reasonable for his critics to say that the other leaders were not respecting him?
And that was, you know, some of that disrespect was coming on us by extension.
When was the last time you heard, oh, those other foreign leaders don't respect Trump?
That's gone.
I don't know if that's ever coming back, but apparently they got used to him and they got used to him as a star, a superstar.
They didn't just get used to him.
They kind of love him.
They kind of love him.
So I guess we'll have to wait to see how much of a real-world deal making happened.
But the stock market likes it.
So the stock market's up.
Seems to be happy.
Also, because it's now several months into tariffs, and we've collected pretty enormous amounts of tariffs, and inflation barely budged.
Now, there weren't many people who thought that could happen.
I was sitting on the sidelines watching, saying, maybe it could happen.
There are a bunch of smart people who think it can happen, meaning that we collect the tariffs and we use it as a trade negotiation, and it doesn't create inflation.
Not many people saw that coming.
I didn't.
I was open to it, but I can't say I predicted it.
But here we are.
So maybe in a few more months, things will change, but at the moment, it's looking good.
So the people who are rumored to be buying TikTok would be Oracle, Larry Ellison.
So that would be a pal of Trump's.
Fox Corporation.
Can you believe that?
So that would be the owners of Fox would also own part of TikTok.
That makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
As an investment for Murdoch.
It makes perfect sense.
Andreessen Horowitz will be part of that and Silver Lake Management.
So I like anything that Mark Andreessen's associated with because he's a voice of reason.
He's not really, he's not at all.
He's not political in any sense that you normally think of it.
He is a common sense guy and real rich and real smart.
So the more you give me the common sense guys who are real rich and real smart, yeah.
I want you on the board of directors of Oracle.
I'm sorry, of TikTok.
That works for me.
Well, here's a funny little drama.
So Carney, the head of Canada, as you know, there was one minister, Ford, I guess it was, who ran that Reagan ad where Reagan allegedly was against tariffs, and it was to embarrass Trump because Trump likes Reagan, Republicans like Reagan.
And Trump's reaction was to give them 10% more tariffs and stop talking to them on trade deals.
So here's the news from Reuters at that AZN summit that Trump's at, and I guess Carney's at too.
Reuters says, from the sidelines of the AZN summit, Canada's Prime Minister Carney sent a not-so-subtle message to Washington.
We're waiting on you.
Carney said that Ottawa is, quote, ready to sit down with the United States, but admits there's been no contact with Trump since Thursday.
So Trump is just freezing him.
It's like freezing the kicker.
He's just making him wait.
Like there was no way he could send him a text message or anything.
He's just going to wait.
So Carney's like, I don't know what's happening.
Anyway, so Canada's posture says Reuters is polite patience.
Polite patience.
So you've got the rudest leader in the world, Trump, against the politest country in the world, our good buddies in Canada.
So anyway, this is just funny.
I don't think it makes any difference in the real world, does it?
It's just they've got this little high school interpersonal drama thing going on that'll take care of itself.
Well, here's a little update on, you remember I told you the story that Bill Maher used me and Mike Cernovich as examples of crazy hallucinating conservatives, as they called us.
Because I'll just talk about my own prediction.
My own prediction was that Republicans would be hunted if Biden got in office.
And also that they would be in danger of death.
Now, the danger of death is obvious, because if you put a vegetable in charge of the nuclear football, which is what we did, we put a vegetable in charge of the nuclear football.
Can you tell me that wasn't dangerous?
Trump says there would have been no war in Ukraine with Putin.
He might be right.
Was it more dangerous to have a president who sort of encouraged and armed one side?
Don't know, but it looked dangerous to me.
Was it dangerous that we had a president who, if he had been elected for a second term, wouldn't really be able to function that well?
Yeah, that looks pretty dangerous to me.
Would it be dangerous that your foes around the world see you as incompetent?
Would that make it more likely or less likely that China would have made a play for Taiwan?
Probably more likely.
Now, they didn't.
But remember, I was talking about likelihoods.
I wasn't predicting.
I was talking about the odds.
And the point was that the odds for our survival would go down if Biden was elected.
Now, those are some pretty clean examples.
Compare that to Trump, who's stopped eight out of nine wars or something.
He's working on the ninth.
Is that dangerous?
Feels the opposite of dangerous.
How about the guy who emphasizes making our military more lethal?
Does that make us safer?
Yes.
Yes, it does.
So I believe that that point has stood.
It stood the test of time.
But the other was that Republicans would be arrested, basically, jailed if Biden came to office.
Hunted is the word I used.
And then I saw a post by Mila Joy on X in which she lists: I don't know, this is the beginning of the list.
This is the second page of the list.
These are the public figures that got arrested or indicted.
Just the public figures.
So it'd be like Trump's lawyers, Trump's whatever people worked in that domain.
That's not even counting the January 6th citizens who were hunted down as well.
Doesn't count people like me who were canceled.
We got kind of hunted.
Right?
So does my point stand that Republicans were hunted or not?
Were they?
Were they?
Was this going to happen on its own?
These people, just in a normal situation, no matter who had been elected, they were all going to get arrested?
I don't think so.
No, I think they were hunted.
So here's what I think is probably going to happen.
I don't think Bill Maher follows me or even kind of knows anything about me, because when he introduced me on his show as the topic, not as a person, but as the topic, he described me as a conservative cartoonist.
How many of you think that I'm a conservative?
So you're the ones who know me best, right?
You've been with me almost 10 years.
How many would call me a conservative?
I've told you for sure that I prefer conservatives.
I prefer their company.
You all know that.
And I, right?
Yeah, look at the comments.
There's nobody who actually knows my work who would call me a conservative.
You know, I like my marijuana too much.
I don't get involved in the abortion question at all.
I think women need to work that out.
Let us know how it goes.
Right?
I'm not a religious person, but I like religion.
I'm a big fan of Christianity, but I'm a fan.
I'm not a believer.
Right?
How conservative am I?
When I describe myself, my current best description of myself is that I'm a Trump-supporting common sense guy.
And that when he does things that look like common sense to me, I don't care if it's left or right or middle.
I just like it.
So you're more of a libertarian?
I don't call myself a libertarian because there are too many differences there.
yeah but but have have we demonstrated for sure that i don't have to agree with all of your opinions for you to embrace that i add some value to your i wish i knew what was talking Something just talks to me in a digital voice every now and then.
It's not my phone.
It's none of my devices.
There's some extra device around here.
I must have a listening.
I might be bugged.
I'm not sure what's going on.
Anyway, let's talk about Trump in the third term.
That's heating up.
I think I might be part of the reason that's heating up because I added to that noise a little bit, you know, 1%.
Bannon's the one driving it, but the idea of Trump staying for a third term is not being dismissed by Trump too hard.
So they asked him on the plane about the third term, and Trump says, I haven't really thought about it.
Does anybody believe he hasn't really thought about it?
Okay.
We have some very good people, as you know, but I have the best poll numbers I've ever had.
He said something about he would love to do it.
So the reporter says, you're not ruling it out.
And he doesn't answer as directly as he could.
He goes, I think if they ever formed a group, it would be unstoppable.
Now, I don't know what the group is, but he talks about J.D. Vince and Marco Rubio being part of it.
I don't know if there's more to the group than those two.
But he thinks that they would be amazing.
But what would be the argument?
Apparently Bannon has some argument that he hasn't trotted out for why a third term in this particular case could be sold.
Now, you know my reasoning.
My reasoning is that as long as people like Carville are saying that Republicans should be put in orange jumpsuits, paraded through town and spit on after Trump is out of office, and he actually said that.
That as long as that's waiting for us, and they're saying so directly, and it's coming from somebody who has some gravitas in the party, then I think that the safest thing for Republicans is to never have a Democrat president, whatever that takes, whatever it takes.
And if it takes keeping Trump to keep them from putting me in jail and spitting on me, I'll take the third term.
And as I've been saying consistently, there's nothing else that would make me be in favor of violating the Constitution so grossly.
But I would definitely violate the Constitution to increase the chance of living.
Wouldn't you?
I mean, really, wouldn't you?
To increase your own chance of living and not being paraded through town and spit on?
Yeah.
If those are my choices, I'll take the violation to the Constitution.
And, you know, and you'll have to live with another four years of Trump.
I don't think that's going to happen, but I feel like it's the right trade-off.
So what would be the argument for keeping him?
I'm going to give you my best argument, which I don't think is good, but it'll be an argument for keeping Trump for a third term.
You ready?
Do you think I could pull this off?
Do you think I could give you a persuasive argument why he should get a third term?
Well, I don't know if this is unique or if other people have said this.
So it might not be, might not be original.
Here's my argument.
They stole his first and second term with a hoax.
The government stole it.
The government denied him a full regular term by making him fight to stay in a jail the entire first term and then using the lies that they created in the first term to prevent him from being elected in the second term.
Now, I don't know if there was also any chicanery with the votes itself.
I don't have any proof of that.
But what we do know is that they had a well-organized from the top, from the top, Obama, plan to deny him a normal presidential term.
And I would argue, if you look at what he's accomplished in his current term, where he's not having to do all this impeachment hoax stuff.
You can see the difference between what it would look like if he had been unfettered, where he is now, versus the way they treated him and essentially denied him a real presidential term.
Now you could say, well, they denied him his second term.
Or you could say they denied him his first term.
You could say they denied him his first term.
He was president, but with such an anchor on him that they put on him, it was like he couldn't really serve his term.
So is that a good enough argument to overcome the very clear wording in the Constitution that you only get two?
No.
No.
The only way that would fly is if the Supreme Court just went totally rogue.
Could they?
Could the Supreme Court go rogue and vote just by conservative majority that, yeah, that is true.
They did steal his first term.
We're going to give it back to him.
I don't think so.
I think that's too far.
I can't see Roberts going for that at all.
And not really the other ones either.
I can't see Kavanaugh.
I can't see any of them voting for it, frankly.
I think it would be 0-9.
But that's the best argument I have.
It's not terrible.
I just don't think it would pass any kind of scrutiny.
All right.
All right.
Here's more of this.
Is the media changing to be more right-leaning?
So now that Barry Weiss is going to be taking over CBS News or already has, I'm not sure where that is.
But somebody pointed out that Margaret Brennan in her interview with Hakeem Jeffries seemed a little more right-leaning than what they expected.
I've got a cat on my notes.
So she was pointing out that Hakeem Jeffries and all the Democrats have been saying forever that Trump is a monster for claiming that the 2020 election was rigged.
And that if you claim elections are rigged, you can't be a politician in this country because you're just starting stuff.
So, but Jeffries himself is saying that the gerrymandering that Trump and others want to do is rigging the election.
Somehow he's ignoring the fact that all of the 100% of the Democrat states have already gerrymandered and that California is going to do some more and maybe Massachusetts too.
So his argument is stupid.
But Brennan actually challenged him on the fact that he said rigging the election is the worst thing you could say.
Well, he says that rigging the election is what's happening.
But he's arguing that he's not talking about the election that happened, but rather he's warning that the gerrymandering would be like rigging an election.
Is that a good enough nuance?
No.
It was good to see him challenged on that.
I'm not sure we would have seen that challenge before.
So that does look to me like the news CBS is moving a little bit to the right.
We'll see.
Gavin Newsom was on some podcast in which he said that the anti-woke stuff is just anti-black, period, full stop.
What if I taught you about people who say period full stop?
It means they know it's not true.
Do you know why people put period full stop at the end of a sentence?
Because they didn't have a reason.
If you had a reason, you'd sort of slot that in there.
So let me give you an example of when you don't need it.
If you don't reopen the government, people will not get food and they'll be hungry.
Did I need to say full stop, period?
No.
No, because as soon as you heard people won't get fed, the argument is made.
I'm done with my argument.
But if you say something like this, anti-woke stuff is just anti-black, period, full stop.
You're really saying, I don't want to debate any nuance of this thing because I don't even believe it myself.
I have to say, you know, being completely immersed in the conservative worldview, as I often am, I don't really see anybody talking about DEI as being anti-black.
I've literally never heard that.
I've never suspected it.
I've never thought it was like between the lines.
It's entirely stop being anti-white.
It's not the same.
If you want the world to stop discriminating against, in my case, white men, how is that anti-black?
It's just not.
So notice my argument.
My argument has a reason that the actual people I know, I've observed for 10 years, don't have any anti-black rationalizations, even in private, like private conversations.
Nobody talks like that.
Literally nobody talks like that.
All they say is, I got discriminated against and I don't want to be discriminated against.
So I'm not in favor of being discriminated against.
I don't want my kids to be discriminated against.
It has nothing to do with what black Americans do or do not get into life.
It just has to do with your own discrimination, that you don't like it.
So, Gavin, but I will give him credit that he did reframe that in a way that politically might be powerful.
But what I like about any of the conversations about Black America and who's getting what and reparations, all that, have you noticed there's always a Thomas Sowell quote that fits the story, and somebody always puts it in the comments to every one of these X reports.
So here are the Thomas Sowell quotes that somebody stuck in the story about Gavin Newsome saying anti-woke stuff is just anti-black.
Thomas Sowell, Sowell, famous black economist who is widely beloved on the right, probably more than the left, because he's more of a conservative, take care of yourself kind of a guy.
So one of his quotes that somebody stuck in there is that when people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
Boy, was that on target.
That's exactly on target.
That getting rid of DEI is not crippling black people.
It's simply taking away an obvious advantage that they had been enjoying.
So if you take away somebody's obvious advantage, they're going to think you're discriminating against them.
Thomas Sowell.
Then there was a second one on the same comment thread.
Also Thomas Sowell.
He says it is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.
Exactly.
So when somebody like Newsom says that the anti-woke is really anti-black, don't you think he's, I think he was talking to a black podcaster, if I recall.
I'm not sure.
Fact check on that.
But don't you think he was sort of leaning into his sense of moral superiority?
That's what that was, right?
He was leaning into his moral superiority.
Thomas Sowell nails it.
Speaking of that, Fox News, Preston Mizel's writing, that there was University of Washington.
They had a job posting that requires some DEI stuff, and one of their white professors did a video totally outing them about what you have to say to get hired.
So if you're whoever you are, you don't even have to be white, but you have to say a statement about DEI.
It used to be that you just had to say, do you like DEI?
Yeah, I like DEI.
Okay.
All right, you can be hired.
But now you have to go deeper.
According to the professor, this white professor, he says, you have to say that you have deep knowledge of the DEIs in order to get a high rating on all this.
He says, the funny thing is, I'm convinced I would not be hired if I applied today.
So he's currently one of the highest rated teachers.
He won the Distinguished Teaching Award at his university, and he believes there's actually no way that he would ever be hired.
So that's your world.
So if you were to allow this Distinguished teaching award guy to be hired at that university, you would say, oh, that's a that's an even playing field.
But if you insist that it has to be a DAI-11 candidate, that's kind of like a special treatment that if I had special treatment, I wouldn't want to take it away.
But Thomas Soule rings in my mind.
All right, President Biden came out and called these the dark days.
I've heard some others say that recently, the Democrats.
They keep saying that the dark days are here and the bad stuff's happening.
And I keep saying, where?
Where?
Where's the dark stuff?
Where's the bad stuff?
And then they would add things like, well, Democrats are preventing 43 million people from eating today.
And I think, okay, that is dark.
But that wasn't Republicans.
Republicans are open to feed them today.
Just vote on it.
We'll feed them today.
And then you go down the list.
What is the other dark stuff?
Was it the solving of all those wars and the fact that Gaza is under control and the fact that Ukraine and Russia, you know, we're working as hard as we possibly can to de-escalate that before super winter kicks in?
Where's the dark part?
Is it the fact that the tariffs worked, that inflation's under control, that eggs and gas prices are down?
But peace a little high, but we're working on it.
Where is all the darkness?
Is it because we stopped doing transitioning youth?
Is that the darkness?
It feels like an upgrade.
But as I've told you before, back in 2016, when the Democrats started calling everything that Trump did dark, you say that because you don't have specific credible complaints.
You do it because it can collect all of your fears.
The Democrats are not about policy.
They're about fear and about personal attack.
If they can make you afraid, then they can get elected.
So when they say stuff like dark, but they don't give any details of what exactly is the dark part, what are we missing?
The reason they can't give you details is if they did, you'd say, oh, well, that looks like temporary.
Or, well, yeah, that's true, but Trump's working on that.
Or nobody solved it before, right?
So they can't give you reasons.
Because if they gave you reasons, it would look weak and pathetic and not common sense.
But they can say it's dark.
The dark days have come.
Eric Swalwell, I didn't think this was real, but I think it's real.
When I first saw it, I thought that can't be real.
So Swalwell has said now on social media that the only Democrat candidate who would be, let's say, the only valid presidential candidate for the Democrats would be somebody willing to say in advance that they would bulldoze the ballroom if they won.
That's a real thing that happened.
Swalwell actually, and by the way, if I'm wrong about this, please correct me immediately so I don't go too far.
It doesn't look like something that's real, does it?
It doesn't look like it's real because it's too on the nose.
It's too on the nose for what like the dumbest Democrat would say.
But is it real?
I believe it's being treated as real, right?
And can you even imagine bulldozing a $350 million building that even the Democrats have been saying they've needed for decades?
Is that the dumbest thing you've ever seen?
And to imagine that maybe the Democrats have enough of a base that would agree with this, that he would think that saying it would somehow boost his political situation.
It's incredible.
Well, Russia, Ukraine has turned into two movies on one screen.
Depending on which propaganda site you look at, it's a completely different war.
So there's somebody named Yasmina on X. Don't know anything about Yasmina.
I do not believe that anybody on X is credible when it comes to the war.
But I'll just give you a sense of the two sides, what they're saying.
Yasmin is on the side that Russia's economy is close to collapse.
And that's one movie.
And the other movie is that Ukraine is going to lose all of its energy resources before winter and freeze to death.
And that Russia has never been serious as they are now about turning off the power in Ukraine.
And now that Ukraine is attacking them deep within Russia and taking out some of their energy resources, that Russia will have no gating factor to keep them from taking out all of Ukraine's energy.
It looks like what they want to do is make half of Ukraine go dark to force the people who lived in the dark part to move to the part that still has energy, which would essentially clear out a big swath that they can just re-enter.
It would make it easier to conquer if they moved down to all the people who didn't have electricity.
So that looks like the movie.
Both of them trying to crush the other's economy.
And they have much better weapons this winter than they had last winter.
So the odds of them being able to do it in both cases are now closer to, I don't know, closer to 100%.
Maybe not 100%.
But I don't think they could have done it before.
I think they could do it now.
And I guess Ukraine sent 193 drones at Russia just last night.
So most of them get shot down these days.
But 193 drones a night going after your energy resources?
How many nights do you need before you get them all?
So, and I guess one of their biggest refineries got shut down in Russia.
But again, you don't even know if that's real.
So all the FOGO war stuff is completely impossible to sort through.
But the U.S. is working on reducing Russia's access to oil.
And again, it's two movies on one screen.
One movie says that the U.S. is making a big difference and that the sanctions that we put on third-party countries like India and China are actually making them change their behavior.
So in the short run, India and China aren't really changing their importing of Russian oil.
In the long run, it looks like they might want to avoid the problems that the sanctions will cause them.
So it looks like they might be looking for alternatives and that the only thing that would keep them from getting off of Russian oil, which would bring them problems in their own country from the United States, might be just having another source.
And that might not be impossible.
So if things ramp up in other places.
But we'll see.
And then apparently there's not a glut of oil, but there's extra oil being pumped in the Middle East.
That's probably at least partly from Trump's influence.
Because if the price of oil stays around $60 a barrel, then our domestic industry survives, but Russia would have way less money to oppress the war.
They would also probably survive, but they wouldn't have the extra for the war that they would want.
So anyway, fog of war.
I saw an older post from February by AI pioneer, founder, kind of guy, Andrei Karpathy.
And he had something interesting to say about intelligence versus what we call agency.
Agency in this case is defined as a personality trait that refers to your capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over your actions and your environment.
That would be your agency.
And what Karpathy points out is that we already have a lot of intelligence.
So our AIs are doing good on intelligence.
They can often, or usually, beat a human being on what they know.
So that's a kind of intelligence.
But what they don't have is agency.
And that until you start building agency into the robots and the AI, you don't have what you need.
So I don't know how you could give them agency without them being too dangerous.
So we'll see where that goes.
General Motors says they're getting closer to what they call an eyes off vehicle.
They want to make a vehicle where you don't have to watch, sort of like the Tesla model, self-driving.
But it doesn't look like they're that close.
I think they've got one really expensive car that they think they'll be able to do it with, the Cadillac.
And then they want to build Gemini AI into their cars so you can just talk to the car and have it do what you want.
Remember, I always talk to you about products that have never been tested.
Have you ever been in a car with even one other person and tried to use a voice command for anything?
Have you ever been in a room where you wanted to use a voice command on your phone, but there are other people in the room?
Does it work?
Never.
If you are obviously doing a voice command to your car or your phone, all of your guests and everyone around you will pretend they can't see that you're doing that and they will talk normally.
And then they'll turn on the music.
And you'll be like, seriously, you don't see that I'm giving a voice command to my phone right now.
You can't tell that I'm doing that.
And you're just talking right over it.
It never works.
You'd have to have a long trip by yourself with the radio off.
And who does that?
You'd have to turn off the radio every time you talk to your car.
Anyway, I think JM's way behind.
Here's an article from IFL Science, Dr. Katie Spalding.
Do you guys know how the 2,000 calories a day recommendation for humans came about?
Do you ever wonder about that?
Like, who came up with 2,000 calories as sort of the baseline?
And there's a long story to it, but basically it's just made up.
It's just a number that a bunch of people sat in the committee and said, how about 2,000?
Well, you know, big people who are getting ready for a competition, they might need more.
Yeah, but 2,000 is a round number.
So basically, the reason it's 2,000 instead of 2,350, which they think might have been a more accurate number, is that it's easier to remember 2,000.
So they can manipulate people easier if they said 2,000 instead of 2,350.
And of course, everybody should be getting their own amount based on a big there.
Roman.
What's the matter, Roman?
That was quite a whale.
Row.
All right.
He'll take care of himself.
All right.
So, yeah, everything about nutrition is made up and fake, and all the science around it is sketchy and ridiculous.
So there's that.
Israel says that they're not in favor of Turkey taking a security role in Gaza.
Why is that big news?
Well, it's big news if Turkey had been willing to do it.
That would have been pretty big news.
I don't know if they're willing.
But Israel says they're the ones who get to decide which other Arab countries do security, and nobody else gets to decide.
And I agree.
Obviously, Israel would have to be okay with whoever goes in there.
But that does eliminate what I thought was the most likely contender for the security.
What would be next?
Would they say yes to Saudi Arabia?
Would they say yes to Jordan?
Who would they say yes to who had a dependable military?
Because the dependable military is a big part, right?
It can't be everybody.
Well, here's my prediction.
I believe that, as I said before, that Netanyahu loses if what happens after the end of the war is Gaza gets rebuilt, Hamas has a role in it, and in the end, there's no one state solution.
Because all of that was possible if Netanyahu had been allowed to just take it to the ultimate conclusion, which would have taken a few years.
But 100 years from now, as I say, if Netanyahu had turned the entire West Bank and Gaza into Israel, and it just was one big country, if he had pulled that off, in the short run, of course, he would just be called a war criminal and whatever is the worst criticisms you could come up with, genocidal maniac, in the short run.
But if you waited 100 years, it would be a big statue to him, and he would be the greatest Israeli who ever lived because he created the greater Israel.
So he was, of course, I can't read his mind, but it's obvious that he didn't want a two-state solution.
And it's obvious that if he'd had his way for a few more years, probably could have gotten just about anything he wanted.
But Trump stood in.
Trump took the credit for ending the war.
He took the credit, but he also ended the killing most of it.
You know, still a little bit going on.
But he ended most of it.
So I don't disagree with Trump putting a big old Trump boot on that whole situation because that's America first.
It's not America first to have a one-state solution.
It's probably America first to have something that's neither one nor two, which is where we are now.
So here's my prediction.
Netanyahu will stall as long as he can.
And when Trump leaves office, if he leaves office after this term, assuming he does, that Gaza will look pretty much the way it looks now.
And that there will be no hurry to clean it up or to make it more habitable because Netanyahu might want to just wait for Trump to be out of office and then see if he's got a little more flexibility if that happens.
That's what I'd do.
If I were Netanyahu, I would pretend I was on board and I would be tapping Trump along and not doing any cleanup.
And that's why I would say that it's not done.
It's like, well, that cleanup.
If only you would give us a billion dollars for the cleanup, we'd start right away.
And we'd be like, why are we paying?
And then there would be an argument over the funding.
And then Netanyahu can say, no, we want to clean it up as fast as possible.
We just don't have the funds.
So if one of you wants to give us a billion dollars, we'll be all over that.
We'll get that cleaned up right away.
So there's probably a hundred ways that you can stall and make it look legitimate.
Well, we still got a pocket of resistance there.
Well, we still got to do some toxic cleanup.
Well, we still got to get a security situation that we could be happy with.
Yeah.
Do not expect Gaza to turn into a gleaming city full of Gazans returning.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's what I got for you today.
Boy, is my timing good.
Excellent timing.
I'm going to say a few words privately to the locals people who are my beloved, my beloved local subscribers.
