Trump and Venezuela, MAGA drama, Elon and Joe~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Oil Output Increase, Oil Price Stability, Elon Musk, Space-Based Data Centers, Tesla Car Speculation, ChatGPT Whistleblower Death, Brad Todd, 2020 Rigged Census, Seth Moulton, Congressional Filibuster, Voter ID Requirement, Trump Tariffs Authority, Anti-MAGA Narratives, Guilt by Association, Tucker Carlson, Venezuela Speculation, Mamdani Tax Plan, Halloween Terrorist Plan, Cartel Drone Advancements, AI Massive Value, President Macron Approval Poll, 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.
You know, I was going to have a theme song playing this morning, but I bet I can still do it.
While you're folding in here and grabbing a chair, grab the beverage.
I'm going to delight you in a moment.
For the first time.
Oh, I can't do that if I'm live, I guess.
Maybe I can.
We'll find out.
We'll find out how many things I can do at the same time when I'm live.
All right.
This will be a special treat, if it works.
Work, work.
Damn it.
all right i'll try this that's the question can you train your mind to be happy and it says yes expert says would you like to know there we go Would you like me to train you with my hypnosis experience if I have any happier?
All right, well, I won't be hypnotized you.
I'll just tell you how to do it.
Oh, yeah, I'll just tell you.
Number one, number one, number one.
Whatever you think about the most is who you are.
Yeah.
That's who you are.
All right.
Well.
Well, so that's Akira the Dawn.
That's one of two songs that he dropped this week that feature my voice as sampled from my podcast.
So it's not AI, it's my actual voice.
And he combines that with his own music in the background.
So everything except the recording of my voice is his work.
And it's amazing.
Have you listened to it?
You know, I've told you before I'm not really a music guy.
So it takes a lot to impress me music-wise.
There's something extra going on here that's more than just the fact that it's my voice.
So, you know, obviously I like my voice.
He's been following me for, I don't know, a decade or something, a long time.
And so I know he's picking up my influence on persuasion, pacing leading, stuff like that.
And I swear to God, I see that in the music.
And so the music hits me different than music.
Different than poetry, different than text, different than a podcast.
Whatever's going on that Akira is doing is music plus.
It's not music, it's music plus.
I just don't know what the plus is, but you can feel it.
You know, you can feel his talent stack.
So it's just wonderful pairing.
Anyway, there's a newer one out.
Just look for Akira the Dawn, a-K-I-R-A.
There won't be many of those.
I think you'll find it on YouTube and wherever you download music.
All right.
Do not panic.
There will be a sip.
There will be.
I just had planned to have that as my theme song and I wasn't ready.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the high level of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
And it's the best thing that ever happened to you in your whole life.
But if you'd like to try to elevate that experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper mugger, a glass of tanker chalice, a stein, a canteen, juggernaut of glass, vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine the other day, the thing makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous set.
and it happens now.
Mmm.
I remember when I had hot coffee.
It was great.
So you missed the, I was talking to the local subscribers before the real podcast started.
And I was telling them that I'd been complaining about the bad quality of my coffee warmer.
And one of my beloved subscribers on locals sent me a new one.
And I'm like, wow.
And this freaking thing is like modern.
You know, it's got the time of day around it.
So you know how many hours it's set to be warm, you know, so you don't leave it on.
It's got a power button.
It'll actually tell you the temperature.
Well, my old one didn't have that.
It tells you the temperature.
There's only one thing it doesn't do, which would be cool.
You know, I'm not like any designer of coffee warmer pads or, you know, I'm no expert at it or anything.
But there's one thing I would have added to it.
I would have added to it the ability to warm your coffee because apparently it doesn't have that.
But boy, does it look like something that would.
So that's not nothing.
All right, we're going to start with a reframe.
I guess I'll have to get a new one.
Reframe of the day.
Oh, here's a good one.
This is what I learned from my first editor when I was picked to be a syndicated cartoonist.
There's an editor who has to say, I like you, and then they go forward.
But until some editor says, I like you, you get nothing.
All right.
So when I got first syndicated, before they publish you, what they do before they publish you is they work with you for six months or so to make sure that you can produce a comic every day before they embarrass themselves by partnering with you and then find out you can't make a comic every day.
So you have to prove you can do it.
So after about six months of proving I could do it, I would submit my work, but I was still a new cartoonist.
So as a new cartoonist, your editor would put a little bit more of a thumb on the scale.
Once you become a famous cartoonist, if your editor is any good at all, they say something closer to, you know how to do this better than I do.
Right?
And then they sort of leave you alone, but rarely, now and then there might be something over the line.
But basically, once you're published and you show you can do it, the editor was a good editor, I had a great editor, won't try to put a boot on your work.
But they have to say it if they are going to get you to change something.
So this is from the earliest days where my editor was welcome to tell me that something worked or didn't work because that was useful to me.
But how do you tell somebody who's an artist that they worked all day on something and it's bad and it's not worthy of being published?
Have you ever thought about how would you word that?
Because you don't want to crush somebody's spirit, right?
So here's the reframe when you don't want to crush somebody's spirit, but you really have to tell them this wasn't good enough.
And it went like this.
The usual frame, so this would be the wrong way to do it, the old way to do it, is that you did this wrong or it's not funny.
Right?
You did it wrong.
It's not funny.
You did a bad job.
That would be the old way.
Now, listen to this reframe.
This was for my first editor.
Your other work is stronger.
Boom.
Now, is that brilliant or not?
Your other work is stronger.
That's all she had to say.
If you tell me my other work is stronger, I'm competing against myself, against myself and my other work.
And I'm not competing with her.
So she basically takes it out of, you know, you and I have a disagreement about whether this is good.
And she turns it into a disagreement with myself.
Your other work is stronger.
Damn it.
I can make this stronger too.
She was a genius.
All right.
I wonder if there's any science that they didn't need to do because they could have just asked me.
Oh, here's some.
Oh, by the way, before I forget, Owen Gregorian will have his Spaces event after this is over.
All right.
So if you want to get a little extra talking about this stuff or maybe some other stuff, some few minutes after we're done today, Owen Gregorian will fire up a spaces, which is the auto-only feature on X. You can just Google him, Owen Gregorian, and you'll find it easily.
Anyway, so there was a test of AI capabilities.
So there's a new paper, meaning a scientific paper, where they tried to test AI's ability to do actual online freelance work.
Have you ever heard me talk about how capable AI is to do actual real useful things?
Do you understand that from the very beginning, I've been probably one of the biggest skeptics of AI being able to actually do something without a human or even helping a human.
Because the LLM model to me looks like an amazing user interface.
And that's about it.
I just don't see how it could do real work.
That's a longer conversation.
The paper was to test exactly that, to see if we're at the point where the AI could replace a person and be like an AI agent, do actual freelance tasks.
And so they gave it a bunch of tasks, and they found out that it could do about 3% of the things, but it didn't make anybody faster at anything.
Essentially, it found it was worthless.
Now, I know you're going to say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you don't understand how adoption curves work.
First, it's useless, useless, useless, useless, followed by useless, useless, useless.
But boy, when it kicks in.
Whoa, whoa.
As soon as it kicks in, it's going to go to the next level.
What you need is just more training.
What you need is a bigger data center.
What you need is another trillion dollars.
And then, and then we got something.
Well, do we?
Do we?
I'm going to say you could have asked me how that would have gone, and I could have saved you a lot of time and money.
Here's a weird thing.
Exxon and Chevron are both boosting oil output or gas, I guess, from the oil.
No, oil, what is it?
Financial Times is reporting that the two U.S. biggest U.S. oil majors are going to increase production in the third quarter.
Now, if you're following the oil business, you know that prices are not as high as they used to be.
I mean, anything could be less, but 60 bucks a barrel is generally considered a pretty healthy place to be.
It's not super expensive, but it allows all the oil companies enough incentive to do stuff.
But how do you explain that there seems to be a worldwide glut or increase in the supply of oil, and it's not much changing the price.
What does that mean?
It's not because the demand is suddenly matching the supply.
There's just more oil than there used to be.
Shouldn't the price go down?
Is this telling us that there is some kind of monopoly at work and the oil companies are all in on it?
Or not monopoly, it'd be.
Well, if it's just two companies, it'd be monopoly.
But is this telling us that there's something going on that makes them immune to price reductions independent of supply?
Because wouldn't the very best thing for the oil companies be that as much oil as they pump, they can sell for any price that they want?
How in the world does more oil equal no change in price?
Because that's what's happening.
How does that happen?
There's something going on here, right?
I don't even know enough to ask the right question, but there's no natural way that a massive increase in oil has no impact on price, unless something's going on.
Anyway, so Elon Musk was doing a lot of publicity, I guess you could say it.
He wouldn't call it that.
He'd probably call it being on podcasts, including the Joe Rogan show for three hours.
And if you think he didn't make any news in three hours on the Joe Rogan show, you'd be wrong, because he makes news when he's on that show.
And I'll just in no particular order.
Do you remember my prediction about cell phones?
That in the AI world, there would be no apps and the phone itself would be just a dumb screen.
Do you all remember me?
I've been saying that for several years, I guess, that the obvious future is that the phone becomes whatever you need it to become at the moment you need it to become it.
So you wouldn't even necessarily, I mean, you would have your own device just for convenience, but you wouldn't even need your own device.
In theory, I could reach over on the table and pick up your phone, hold it to my face, and it becomes my phone.
And it gives me any feature I want without any app being involved at all.
It just goes AI the whole way.
That is what Elon Musk says is the future.
He says, I'm not working on a phone.
But the trick is, it wouldn't be called a phone.
He doesn't say he's not working on the other thing.
The other thing would be, what do you call it?
You'll have an AI on the server side communicating with the AI on your device.
Sort of the technical way of saying that your device is just an AI-driven device.
And he says, formally known as a phone.
Oh.
So he might be working on one of these devices.
He didn't say he wasn't.
He didn't say he was, but he didn't say he wasn't.
He's just saying it wouldn't be a phone.
So do I get the credit for the prediction?
Probably five years ago I said that.
Yeah, it's obvious it's going to go that way.
So Elon says there won't be an operating system or apps in the future.
It'll just be a device that's where the screen and audio for the screen and audio and to put as much AI on the device as possible.
That's exactly 100% what I predicted.
More news from Elon.
You've heard, I think I've told you about even Jeff Bezos said that space might be an ideal atmosphere for a data center.
Well, you could put a data center in space, or apparently you can just send some software up to your vast array of Starlink satellites, and they would form a virtual data center in the sky, and you would get the benefits of being outside the gravity and all that.
And Elon could just sort of turn it on.
The things that he has considered and therefore engineered just in case they want to do it later, it's just mind-boggling that how many things he can imagine in the future so that when he's building something now, he doesn't preclude them.
So one of the things he did not preclude was that his satellites could operate as a distributed data center with its own brains and ability to communicate with each other at laser speeds.
So I don't know if he'll do that and turn it on, but he does say they can do it.
He says they'll have ultra-fast laser links powered by solar energy.
Oh, he says SpaceX will be doing this.
Oh, I'm sorry.
So let me update that.
He wasn't just talking about it speculatively.
He said they will be doing it.
How impressive is that?
That's just crazy.
It just gets better, too.
If this had been a four-hour interview instead of a three-hour conversation, God knows what would have come up.
But so Joe, of course, the master of asking good questions that we'd like to hear the answers to, asked him about the, I guess he's working on the new sports car of some kind.
And we don't know much about it, but apparently it's going to be really special.
I'd wondered about that because I thought the news had said that Elon was going to bring about what, the Roadster?
Is that what it's called?
The Roadster?
But basically, that they were going to build more of a cool, yeah, the Roadster.
They were going to build a cool sporty Tesla, more sporty than what they have.
But nobody knew the details.
We still don't know the details, but it's possible, based on what Elon said, it might be a flying car.
It might be a flying car.
But you know what it might also be?
It might also be a submersible.
It might be both.
But what he says is, look, I think it has, this is Elon.
Look, I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever.
He goes, let's just put it this way.
If you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it's crazier than that.
Okay, the James Bond cars, didn't they fly and also act as submarines?
Is that where people are getting the idea might be both or one of those things?
Now, I'm not sure I care one way or the other.
I probably won't be buying a submersible car from anybody.
But I just love the fact that he doesn't have a marketing or advertising budget.
Elon doesn't.
But boy, does he do good marketing?
Oh, my God.
The quality of his marketing game is so beyond really anything we've ever seen.
Just anything.
This is the next level above the next level.
He's got me so excited about this car that doesn't yet exist.
Anyway, we'll see what it has.
Maybe some guns.
I hope it can shoot gas and protect you too.
I wonder if he made any other news.
Oh, yeah.
If this was the only thing that happened, it would still be the biggest news.
But it's just one of many things he did during three hours.
So Joe asked Elon about these accusations that the whistleblower, there was a ChatGPT whistleblower, and some say, and that some would include the parents of the whistleblower, that he was murdered and did not commit suicide soon after he had said he was a whistleblower and ChatGPT was going to be in a lot of trouble.
Some of the things that Elon mentioned, and I'm not going to say these are true because I don't want to get sued by anybody, but the conversation suggested that the following things were true: that there was blood in more than one room.
The deceased had just ordered DoorDash.
I wonder if in the history of the world, anybody's ordered DoorDash and then decided to kill themselves before the meal.
Does anybody understand what a last meal is all about?
Or did he just say, you know, I'm not really hungry after all.
I'll just kill myself in two separate rooms and put this weird wig in another room.
There was some wig that didn't belong to him.
So blood in two rooms, wig.
Let's see what else.
So this is what Elon said about Altman.
Now, I will tell you that personally, I think there's close to zero chance that Sam Altman authorized or knew there would be a hit.
All right, can I say that as clearly as possible?
The thought that specifically Sam Altman, you know, him specifically, ordered it or knew that it would happen or had some insight into it, I think that's close to zero.
But if you're asking me, was he murdered?
Well, keep in mind that rumor-wise, the CIA has a very important mandate to have control over all the big AI companies.
Do you think that the CIA is exerting control over the big companies?
Yes.
That's what we're being told by people who definitely know.
And would it be their job to do it?
Yes.
I hate to say it.
I mean, the CIA is supposed to do all the dirty stuff that you wish people wouldn't do.
But sometimes, sometimes you need the dirty stuff.
Now, imagine you're the CIA and you know that open AI and ChatGPT would be the primary way that in the future you'll be able to control other countries and find terrorists, find all the bad people.
If you thought that ChatGPT was not just one of the important things you were doing, but maybe the most important thing you're doing for years, would you be willing to murder to keep that structure intact?
Meaning that there's a chat GPT, it leads the field, you've got the back door, you have all the access you need.
Public doesn't know the details, but they're okay with it because they like to be safe too.
Would that be enough reason to murder an American citizen?
Maybe.
Maybe.
I mean, I don't think they're authorized to kill American citizens on American soil, are they?
But they are authorized to do things that people aren't supposed to do.
And who knows how far that could go?
So I don't think, and then you have to add the rogues to the equation.
What if it wasn't the CIA and it wasn't anybody on the board or management of ChatGPT?
Is there anyone else who would have a financial incentive or other incentive to murder a guy?
Yes, the investors.
If you had invested billions of dollars in this thing and you knew that your billions could turn into a trillion and you knew that there was one whistleblower in the way and the reason that you had billions of dollars in the first place is that you're an unethical bastard and you could just whisper to some special special services ex-CIA guy that you know,
you know, if that guy disappeared, somebody like you who might have been involved in it would have a pretty, pretty big payday.
So if I had to, if I had to guess, it does look a little bit more like murder than suicide, but these things can look like something else and not be that thing.
So the fact that it does look sort of exactly like a murder doesn't mean it is.
Because in our world, things look like things that aren't really the thing.
But I don't think it was Altman, don't think it was ChatGPT's management.
Probably wasn't the CIA, but I don't know about all the investors.
Anyway, I guess on CNN, a political commentator named Brad Todd mentioned that the 2020 census was rigged.
And the CNN host challenged that.
Wouldn't you?
What do you just rigged?
The census?
The census was rigged?
Seriously?
How do you rig a census?
Easily, it turns out, as Brad Todd explained, he said, quote, we do know that.
The Census Bureau's own audit showed that they had all of their errors were in one direction to the detriment of red states.
So apparently the Census Bureau has admitted that, coincidentally, all of their errors are in one direction.
So yes, we actually know that the 2020 census was rigged.
How many of you knew that?
I feel like I vaguely had heard that or something, but did you know it was official?
It's official.
The census people said it themselves.
Yep, all our mistakes were in one direction.
Okay.
Meanwhile, over on MSNBC, if you haven't seen this clip, it's well worth watching.
So there's this Democrat Representative Seth Moulton, who's seemingly not a good person based on this story I'm going to tell you.
He made an accusation about Trump on MSNBC's Morning Joe that is so inappropriate that I'm not even going to tell you what it was.
So let's just say it was Epstein related, but it was bullshit.
He just made up, just made it up.
And when he put it out there and said, you know, it's sort of a fact, even Morning Joe said, there's no evidence of that.
And he said, oh, yes, there's, I mean, it's obvious.
And Morning Joe, seeing his entire life on the line.
Can you imagine if Morning Joe had not vigorously challenged the claim that was being claimed by a government official, an elected official, completely making up some shit that's the worst thing you've ever heard in your life, right?
Just the worst.
And Morning Joe knowing that he would get his ass so sued if he just let that go without a challenge.
And so, to his credit, but also to save his own neck, Morning Joe pushed back hard.
He pushed back hard.
No evidence of that.
And again, I say no evidence of that.
And by the way, now that you're done talking, can I remind the audience, there's no evidence of that.
So I'm going to give Morning Joe 100% A-plus for fact-checking that in real time.
But of course, he was covering his own ass because the Trump world lawsuits are flying and he doesn't need that kind of trouble.
So I appreciate it.
I appreciated that he pushed back on that.
So Seth Moulton, in case you want to know, total piece of shit.
Terrible person.
I mean, really a bad person.
Well, I guess the end of the year, the Obamacare premiums are going to double.
And one of the things that might happen is that Trump might have some success.
I don't know if he will.
But now he's pushing for what's called the nuclear option, which has nothing to do with nuclear in any way.
It's just the name of a thing.
And the thing is that if Congress votes by some majority, I guess, they can get rid of the filibuster.
Now, the filibuster was invented.
So if the minority side felt so strongly about a topic, they could say, we're just going to talk forever and the process will never go forward because we're still in the act of talking.
And that would be the filibuster.
And they would just have people go up there and read the phone book and take turns and just use up the time.
But in the modern world, and I checked, a filibuster is a memo.
So the minority team just sends a memo.
You know, if we wanted to, we would filibuster this.
So, you know, let's just treat it like a filibuster.
Because if you make us do it, we'll do it.
But don't need to.
So just accept this memo as our warning that the only way you're going to get anything passed in this domain is 60 votes instead of a bare majority, 51%.
So they would have to first change the rules that you can do a filibuster.
And then if the filibuster went away, the second thing they could do is vote to fund the government with a bare majority.
Now, of course, the risk is insane.
The size of the risk is just insane because it works both ways.
If the Democrats get in control, the Republicans will no longer have the comfort of the filibuster themselves to protect against the things they care about the most.
But the argument on the other side is that the Democrats are going to do absolutely anything that they can do, including the Russia collusion hoax, the 51 people who said that the Hunter laptop was not real.
You can go down the line.
I don't have to list everything.
But the counter-argument is that the Republicans have every reason strategically and ethically to do just everything.
Just do everything.
If you can get more power, get something done, just do it.
Because the Democrats would do it.
Is that a good argument?
It might be.
It didn't used to be a good argument, because there was a world in which there would be a little bit more cooperation and a little bit observance of history.
But we may be out of that world permanently.
And if you're out of that world permanently, the smartest thing you can do is recognize that as soon as possible and then start consolidating your power, because the alternative is the other side consolidates their power.
Their authoritarianism versus your authoritarianism.
You prefer yours if it's only going to go one of two ways.
One side will be an authoritarian or the other one.
So I don't yet have an opinion about whether this should be nuked.
The thing that would give them the ability to change it.
It could be just a negotiating thing.
Could be.
So I think I'm going to wait on that one.
No opinion on that yet.
All right.
Would you be amazed to learn that a judge is stopping something that Trump wanted?
Yes, believe it or not, there's a judge.
Once again, a federal judge has blocked, this is according to Axios.
So Judge Colleen Collar-Cataly.
So she's got an injunction against Trump's order that the states do check IDs for voting.
So apparently this judge says that you cannot force the states to force the voters to show ID.
And the reason is not that it's a good idea or a bad idea.
So it has nothing to do with the quality of the idea and nothing to do with whether it would work and nothing to do with what is ethical or what we should do.
It's none of that.
It's just a straight-up court ruling of what power the executive has versus the states.
And so her ruling is, you've got no power on the states running elections.
Get out of here.
So specifically, the problem is that he doesn't have authority to do this rule.
So I asked Grok, Grok, if you were on the Supreme Court, do you think you would uphold the judge and say that Trump does not have the authority to require ID for voting?
Or would you uphold Trump and say he's got an argument, assuming that they had some argument?
And Grok said, no, it's basically a simple one.
He doesn't have that authority.
The only way he could have that authority is if Congress passed a law, such as a voting rights law or some equal rights law.
So if Congress passes a law, and how would they do that, unless they nuke the filibuster?
Ooh, what if the filibuster got nuked?
Then the Supreme Court doesn't even have to get involved because he can just use Congress, get his bare majority people to say, nuke this filibuster.
And then the next thing you do, they say, one of our most important things is that we have ID for voting.
Boom.
Boom.
So these might be the same issue once you get rid of the filibuster.
Likewise, there's a big decision coming up in the courts.
The Supreme Court in this case will be listening next week to arguments about whether Trump can impose tariffs.
Did you know that that was even a legal question, whether the president even has the authority to put tariffs on stuff?
I kind of thought we sort of had agreed that that was okay, that at least they had the authority, whether you liked it or not.
But the Trump argument is, quote, that denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses.
That is correct.
May I add something to the Supreme Court argument?
Because I'm pretty sure that all the lawyers who argue in the Supreme Court watch this podcast or should.
If you were a lawyer who argues things in the higher courts, you don't think you'd want to watch my show?
I literally teach people how to persuade.
Of course.
I mean, not all of them.
I'm joking.
They're not all watching the show.
But you'd be surprised how many lawyers whose job it is to persuade contact me and tell me how useful it's been.
They either read my book, Wynn Bigley, or they watched the podcast.
So is it crazy to assume that I could say something on my podcast that would be useful to this?
It's not crazy, because I'm going to do it right now.
You ready for this?
Reframe coming in.
And it's a reframe you've heard before.
I'm just going to repurpose it.
The country with the strongest economy wins the war.
You can't separate economics from national defense.
Your economy is your national defense.
And that's what Trump's Justice Department is saying, but they're not quite getting the wording right.
So what I'm going to try to help them with, get the wording right, because you can quite easily convince people, smart people, that the strength of the economy is just one more weapon that national defense can take advantage of.
And the tariffs are really a big part of what you can manipulate in your economy for national defense.
So they do say, obviously they know, because they say it directly, quote, denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses.
But let's say that without the nerdy stuff.
Take the nerdy legal stuff out.
The country with the strongest economy is the safest defense-wise.
Once you get the justices to agree with that general statement that you can't separate economics from defense, it's pretty hard to take the economics away from the president, chief of staff, the chief of the army.
I feel like that's enough.
I mean, obviously, I'm no expert on the Supreme Court or lawyering, but am I wrong?
Give me a quick reaction.
If you can sell the fact, which is easy to sell, that the economics and the national defense are, you can't separate them.
They're inseparable.
Once you've made that claim and the justices have sort of maybe mentally accepted that that's a baseline fact, whatever you argue on top of that gets a lot easier because it's all based on that.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I saved the country.
I love listening to John Solomon talking about the RICO conspiracy potentially.
Now, nobody's been charged with this in this context, but it's possible.
He says that all the bad behavior, let's say from Obama on, that were aimed against Trump and Trump world, goes back to 2014.
And that you could trace the line through the same bunch of cats all the way to 2014.
You can see the documentation, so you know what bad behavior they did.
You know that they tried to do sketchy things to change the government, essentially an insurrection.
And if it does go all the way back, then it does look like a RICO.
RICO being the originally it was a mafia attack law, so you could go after them for a whole bunch of organized coordinated behavior that's criminal.
So if they can show that this is criminal behavior, and maybe that's the obstacle, versus just political, it's all connected.
So if it's criminal and it's the same people and it's all documented that they were coordinating it for a specific purpose that was illegal, looks like RICO to me, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I feel like I'm just on the border of saying, yeah, this is a slam-dunk RICO situation.
There's no way they lose it.
I don't think it's slam-dunk.
I think it's real.
And I think that John Solomon's take on it is completely reasonable.
But whether that translates into actual people go to jail, I don't know.
All right, let's have some fun.
You like some controversy?
So in the Wall Street Journal, there's an editorial by somebody named Dominic Green, and he's talking about the MAGA rights anti-Semitism problem.
You ready for this?
So if you've been watching the news, you know that there's sort of a controversy, or somebody's trying to make it into one.
It's sort of a wannabe controversy, meaning that people keep talking about it like they want to make it something, but it's not performing.
It's not doing what they hope it will do, which would drive MAGA apart.
Now, I think what has been underestimated by the left is that the so-called woke right and the MAGA right and the Republicans and the conservatives are much better at having a lively disagreement and then just voting in the right way when the election comes.
So I'm not sure that this could ever work because the nature of how the conservative, let's say the right side of the world, that the nature of how we work, because I'm going to put myself in the wee for this conversation, is it's just a whole bunch of people who understand free speech.
If you could say there's one thing that binds us together on the right, it's free speech.
So you can't be that free speech and then also buy into there's some kind of thing driving the party apart.
It sort of just doesn't work.
But they're trying because it would work on the left.
So I think the left is using an approach that they're sure would work on the left, which is dividing people by type, because that works on their side.
But on the right, you can tell me you shouldn't platform the worst person in the world.
And I'll say, why do you hate free speech?
Right?
You can talk about platforming all day long, and I'm just going to turn it into free speech.
It's free speech.
Why don't you want to hear what the other side has to say?
Why wouldn't you hear what somebody who disagrees with you and you hate them and you wish they would go away?
Why wouldn't you know what they have to say?
Wouldn't you be better off if you knew?
Wouldn't it be better off if they were exposed to you?
Here's an argument I haven't used for a while, but I'd like to try it out.
If hypothetically I had the worst person in the world on my podcast and I interviewed them for an hour, what is the most likely outcome of that?
That they would turn me into a slightly worse person?
Is that what would happen?
Would they turn you into a slightly worse person?
Or, having watched me for 10 years, as some of you are, is it more likely that I would persuade them to be a better person?
And that, you know, if I'm half of the podcast, the people watching would say, okay, you know, I like what the cartoon has said.
Who is likely to persuade their audience in a positive direction more likely than me, even if I'm talking to the worst person in the world?
So there's a little bit of nuance on this stuff, right?
So the people on the right understand that I could bring value to a person, to a conversation with somebody who shouldn't be platformed at all, according to the left.
But the right understands that.
We can fight all day, but as long as we agree on free speech, boom, President Trump, and it works out for us.
But back to this.
So Dominic Green, he looks like he would be happy if MAGA was more unhappy with each other.
So he talked about Tucker Carlson.
This is Wall Street Journal editorial.
Actually, this is a perfect example.
The Wall Street Journal sort of leans right a little bit, right?
But they platformed this guy.
They platformed him.
And I don't think necessarily the editorial people agree with everything he says, but they platformed him.
That's how it works on the right.
CNN's doing a good job of platforming people they disagree with too.
So there's a little bit on both sides.
Anyway, here's what he says, Dominic Green, that Carlson's hosting of Nick Fuentes, of course, you know I was going to go there, on his podcast, was a watershed in the campaign to make racism cool again.
All right, well, he's going to have to defend that, right?
So the claim is that having Nick on is making racism cool again.
Whereas people on the right might say, you mean free speech?
Where we listen to him and we disagree with him?
Is that your problem?
That's the problem.
Now, Nick is a special case because he's extra good at media stuff.
So he would be persuasive and is.
So he's a little more dangerous if you're worried about that point of view becoming dominant.
And that would be a reasonable thing to worry about.
But here's how he characterizes.
This is how Dominic Green characterizes Tucker.
See if you think he's characterized Tucker correctly in his opinion.
He said that Carlson has come a long way since the bowtide folly of his neoconservative youth.
Okay, so that's just an insult.
Bowtide folly of his neoconservative youth.
All right, no specifics there.
That's just, I think I'll insult him.
After leaving Fox News, blah, blah, blah, he went over the edge.
Okay, that's your opinion.
There's no evidence that he's using to do that.
He donned a plaid shirt of the people, rediscovered Christianity.
He didn't really rediscover Christianity.
That's crazy.
What are you watching?
He may have updated some of his views, but he was super Christian the whole time.
He cashed in on his legacy status as a ringmaster.
You mean he had a job?
Yeah.
We're all cashing in.
It's called a job.
Is that okay?
Is it okay that he got a job?
Can I get a job?
I got canceled.
Am I a bad person if I got canceled and then I went and got a job?
I got a job to make money.
That's okay, isn't it?
Anyway, this is what else he says about him.
And he reinvented himself as the second coming of Alex Jones.
Now you recognize that as an attack by association.
If you don't have something to say about the person, you say something about who they had a photograph with or who they remind you of.
Why would you have to do that?
Why would you have to mock them for a photograph, an association, or who they remind you of?
It's because you don't have a fucking real thing to complain about.
These are just made-up things.
What else?
He says, so this is Dominic Green writing in the Wall Street Journal, an opinion piece.
He says that Mr. Carlson has interviewed a podcaster who thinks Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II.
Now, I watched a little bit of that content.
Do you think that describes the nuance of what happened there?
That, we know who it is, but the one podcaster who thinks that Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II, worse than Hitler?
Do you think that if we talked to the podcaster and said, hey, this Dominic Green says you think that Winston Churchill was worse than Hitler in World War II, is that right?
Do you think he would say, oh yeah, that's kind of what I said?
Do you think he'd say that?
No, he wouldn't.
No.
While I am not, let me be clear, I'm not defending Daryl Cooper.
I don't really know anything about that point of history.
I've heard him say some things that I thought, you know, certainly things that raised my eyebrows, but I saw it under free speech.
Didn't necessarily change my opinion because of anything he said.
Thought it was interesting that a person exists with opinions I hadn't heard before.
I thought it was interesting that he was brave enough to go public with things that he knew would be a little controversial, a little controversial.
But is this an accurate summary of who he is?
This is Daryl Cooper, if you wondered.
I think that I think there's plenty of room for criticizing his or anybody else's message.
So that's not the point.
So I'm not supporting him.
I don't even know entirely what his opinions were about Churchill, but that's not my point.
My point is almost certainly he's being mischaracterized, even if he really should be criticized for something.
This is not the way to do it.
All right.
They say that Tucker raised discredited claims that Ashkenazi Jews are immune to COVID.
Did that happen?
Did that really happen?
Now, if the discredited claims are things that are in the news, aren't you allowed to ask about that?
And if the answer is, oh no, that was all BS, it's disavowed, are you the villain?
Because you asked about something and the answer was that it was disavowed and there was nothing to it, which I believe there's not much to it.
Certainly, there's a possibility that some demographic groups have worser or better pandemic performance.
I think that part's demonstrated, right?
But whether or not that has anything to do with any conspiracy or anything, there's no evidence of that.
So can a podcaster ask somebody about a view that has been debunked?
Why not?
Why can't you ask about something that's already been debunked?
If your audience doesn't know it's already debunked, isn't that serving the audience?
Hey, what about this?
Oh, it's debunked.
Okay.
Now my audience knows it's debunked.
How is that a problem?
Again, free speech.
And as far as I know, there's nothing to that claim.
And he says that Benjamin Netanyahu openly tells Israelis, and now he says that Tucker claims this, that Netanyahu tells Israelis, quote, I control the United States, I control Donald Trump.
I think there's some video in which Netanyahu is making some claims about how he can handle the United States persuasion-wise.
Is that a problem?
Why would that be a problem?
And who would be surprised if Netanyahu said that, you know, if he told people in Israel, because that's the important part, he was talking to people in Israel, who would be surprised if the leader of Israel said that he had some sway with the country that matters the most and they seem to be buddies and they seem to have worked productively together.
Where are our problems here?
To me, this all falls under free speech.
Tucker and Daryl Cooper and everybody else can defend their own points of view, as can Fuentes.
I'm not defending anybody's point of view.
I'm just saying that years ago, when I saw this situation developing, I started saying in public, and I'll say it again, I defend my right to associate with, talk to, and platform anybody I fucking want.
Free speech.
Somebody won't like it.
Let me know.
Free speech.
Anyway, I don't think the MAGA thing is real.
I think it's something the left wants to be real.
But as long as the right stays in free speech, we don't like what you said about that, Tucker, but we like this.
What's wrong with that?
So if you were Jewish and you thought that the collective, let's say the collective energy of all this stuff is anti-Semitic, I get that.
I get that.
When I listen to Fuentes, it feels anti-Semitic to me.
I don't even know if he'd deny it, actually.
I'm not even sure what he'd say, but it feels anti-Semitic to me.
But I also am fascinated by how he got to that point, and I find it not persuasive at all.
Because it feels like the thing that gets him into anti-Semitic territory is some assumptions about how strangers are thinking that I don't see.
You know, that's always dangerous territory.
I assume they don't say it, but I think they're thinking this way, and that all of them are.
That's where you get in trouble.
I don't buy any of that.
To me, it looks like people who are good at school get a lot of power.
That's about it.
And of course, they might want different things than you want, but that's the whole world.
That's the whole world.
Anyway, so they can defend their own views, but it does sound anti-Semitic to me.
Tucker sounds like he's playing a different game.
I think he wants America first.
He thinks Israel's maybe too much of that equation.
It's a fairly mainstream view on the right.
Well, Trump is saying now that there will be no Venezuela land attack.
I don't know what that includes.
But let's see, Marco Rubio said, according to he was mocking some newspaper.
He said, your sources, in quotes, claiming to have quote, knowledge of the situation, tricked you into writing a fake story about the possibility that we would do a land invasion in Venezuela.
So Trump says it's not real, no land invasion.
Marco Rubio mocks it.
And Tulsi Gabbard said recently that the former American strategy of regime change is over.
And I guess there would be no point in going into Venezuela unless it was regime change.
And so the question we have now is: is it true that Trump has ruled out any land-based military action in Venezuela?
Is that true?
Or is he playing an Iran game where he's telling them it's not going to happen right before it happens?
Because that's sort of what he did with Iran.
And it worked.
We don't know.
My guess is that he's finding out that a land invasion would be so unpopular with at least half or more of MAGA that it wouldn't be worth the squeeze.
Would you agree?
How many of you would be just maddened if he started a land war?
Even if it looked like, oh, this won't take long.
You know, 30 days will be done.
But you wouldn't believe it, right?
You wouldn't believe it would be done in 30 days.
You think it lasts forever, like everything.
I'm looking at the comments.
Yeah, so it could be an entirely, yeah, it may be that he just did a trial balloon and that it didn't go over at all.
And since it didn't go over at all, maybe he backed off.
Or it could be they have some completely different strategy that doesn't require it.
So there's a lot of unknowns there.
Fog of war.
Too many unknowns.
According to Town Hall, Amy Curtis is writing that Momdani plans to tax businesses even if they're based outside of New York City.
First of all, does he have the power to tax anything?
The mayor?
Does the mayor have taxing power?
I'm not sure how that works.
But allegedly, even if you moved your business out of the state or if you're doing business in the state, but it's not where you're domiciled, he still wants to tax you.
How could you actually make that work?
So he says, I guess he said recently, oops.
He said recently, so the way this tax works is it applies to any business doing business here, meaning New York City.
They could be located in Miami, but if they're doing business in New York, it applies to them.
Well, wait a minute.
Isn't that the current situation?
If you had a Corporate entity is in one state, but let's say your Walmart stores are in other states.
Don't the Walmart stores get taxed in the states where they do business as opposed to where their corporate entity is located?
I'm not sure how different this is.
So, so maybe he's not so good on the details.
So, I'm not sure this is a real story, actually.
The more I think about it, it doesn't look like a real story.
So, big question mark on that one.
CNN is reporting that, according to the FBI, they thwarted an ISIS-inspired attack.
That would be a terrorist attack.
I guess there were rifles they found, and there was some online chatting about shooting something up on Halloween.
And once, I guess they called it Pumpkin Day online.
And once the FBI said, oops, they got weapons, they're talking about a big terrorist act, and they picked a date.
That's when they moved in.
The picking the date, I think, was the trigger.
But one wonders: is the FBI now so good, and maybe they have been for some time, so good at catching things before they happen that that's the reason there hasn't been a 911 again?
You know, of course, that would be giving up all of our privacy, which we've already done.
But if you give up all your privacy, which I'm pretty sure we've already done, whether you know it or not, is that enough to stop basically every attack?
You know, almost every attack?
It might be.
I've been puzzling about this for what, 20 years about why there haven't been obviously more attacks.
Clearly, you can get people into the country.
Clearly, those people could be terrorists.
Clearly, they could get the kind of weapons you'd use for an attack.
Clearly, there's people who want to do it.
Clearly, there are people who have tried to do it.
Why didn't it happen?
What's going on?
Like, why didn't it happen?
The only explanation I can think of is that whatever you think is the amount of privacy that you've already given up, it might be more than that.
Whatever our government knows about you is probably similar to what they know about every phone call and every terrorist and everybody had a bad idea and said something on social line anywhere in the world ever.
So, I don't know how to reconcile other than 100% loss of privacy, but we just kind of don't see it happening.
So, we kind of let it go.
I don't know.
You think it's because Saddam Hussein is gone?
All right.
Here's something that you should have seen coming, but I didn't.
So, according to the Telegraph, Charles Jaimus is writing, that some gangs are using gigantic drones, like super drones, they call them, to airlift inmates out of prison.
Now, I wasn't sure, I just skimmed this before I got on.
I wasn't sure if they've already done it, but the idea is that if you get a big enough drone, you just drop that thing into the yard and the bad guy grabs on and just flies him out of the prison.
Now, I guess you'd have to, I don't know, maybe use the drone to shoot the guards before you did it or something.
I don't know how the guards would ignore that, but they could also drop weapons in.
So, even weighing even less than an inmate, it would be easier to bring weapons in and then let the inmates sort of fight their way out with their weapons.
But the whole idea of an open-air prison seems to be just about over.
So we're probably at the end of history that would allow you to have a prison that doesn't have a top, because now the top is 100% vulnerable to escape.
So that's happening.
Giant drones.
All right, according to Live Science, Owen Hughes is writing this.
Here's a story I'm reluctant to believe is true, that China solved a century-old problem with a new analog chip that is a thousand times faster than high-end NVIDIA GPUs.
In theory, and you'd better put a big grain of salt on this one.
In theory, plucky little China, not having access to the best of our chips, has already leapfrogged them in terms of power and not using electricity, like way faster, but also way, way less energy use.
Do you believe that happened?
And that's already done?
It's already done.
They've already leapfrogged us by a thousand.
Yeah, but it's not programmable, somebody says.
I don't know about that.
I would say this is probably getting ahead of itself.
I would say it's unlikely that this is exactly what it's being claimed to be.
But I will say, you remember my prediction about AI, right?
So I held some, I do not give investment advice.
Let me say this.
This is not investment advice.
This is a description of what I did.
And I'm not good at investing.
And you should not follow my lead.
I'm really not.
I'm literally not good at investing.
I don't think almost anybody is because it's mostly guessing.
I don't really guess better than other people, at least on random things.
So I held some NVIDIA when the AI noise started.
It went up because that's what it does.
But I sold it fairly quickly.
And the reason I sold it was I could not imagine a future in which some startup, or maybe China, would come up with a leapfrog technology and that we would have no visibility on that before it happened.
And that one day you just wake up and somebody would say, hey, China made a chip that's a thousand times better and a thousand times less energy.
They're shipping it tomorrow.
Now, again, I don't believe this story necessarily, but it seemed to me that the risk of disruption is higher than anything I've ever seen in my lifetime because the money involved is so much higher than anything I've seen in my lifetime.
If you tell me, hey, if you come up with an alternative technology, you can make a million dollars.
Well, somebody would probably try to do it, right?
A million dollars?
Sure.
But if you tell me, you know, if you come up with a better AI, you could make a trillion dollars.
Wait, wait, what?
A trillion.
A billion, right?
No, a trillion.
You could make a trillion dollars.
How hard would you work for a trillion dollars?
I would work pretty hard for a million.
I'd never sleep if I thought I could make a trillion.
I'd just keep working until I died.
Like, I could make a trillion dollars, a trillion, a trillion.
Anyway, so if you assume that incentives are a real thing and the higher the incentive, the more somebody's going to work on it, there's never been in the history of the world, and maybe there never will be, a bigger incentive than leapfrogging AI.
And so the smartest people in the world are working as hard as they possibly can to make my prediction come true that there's some secret technology we don't know about in a garage that's going to surprise us soon.
So that's why I sold my NVIDIA.
But remember, I'm a terrible investor, and I don't have confidence that that was the right decision.
But as long as you treat your investments as part of a portfolio, you know, even if you get some part of it wrong, you probably could still get the rest of it right.
So if you see it as part of my diversification, it would make sense.
If you saw it as an individually good decision, well, you're just guessing.
I don't know if it's a good decision.
I really don't know.
All right.
Apparently, French President Macrone, according to the Brussels Signal, has reached a historic low rating, 11%.
His approval rating in France is 11.
How in the world do you stay in charge when your approval is 11?
Well, it works in Chicago.
And another French news, apparently they've activated, so it's in production now, the first highway that charges your electric cars and trucks as they drive.
ZMA Science is writing about this, Mahe Andre.
And apparently they've already put up a kilometer and a half, which is about a mile, and they've turned it on, and it works.
Now, I don't know how much you can charge anything in one mile, so it's just a proof of concept thing.
But they built it.
It's in the road.
It works.
They're testing it.
Don't you think that would be ultimately the way to do this?
The one thing I don't like about the electric car situation is that you have to charge it.
Now, if I had one, which I don't, I would charge it at home and I would barely ever need to charge it anywhere else.
But wouldn't it be great if you never had to plug it in?
Wouldn't it be great if at least, you know, I'll just pick a random number.
Let's say 30% of your roads that were the ones most traveled.
Or they don't even have to be the ones most traveled.
Maybe you could even build the road just for that purpose.
But wouldn't it be great if you just got charged by going where you're going?
It'd be hard to beat that as a business model.
Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, that's what I had for you today.
Let's see.
I feel like I'm forgetting something.
Am I forgetting anything?
Did I mention that on the All-In Pod, I saw a clip of the All-In Pod.
So Elon was not only on Joe Rogan's show, but he also was on the All-In Pod, one of the best pods in the whole world, as they'll tell you.
But Elon was talking about some particular bureaucratic problem in companies, and he made a Dilbert reference.
And he said on the Dilbert scale, this would be 11 out of 10.
Yeah, Owen will have his spaces.
I'll mention that again.
So he mentioned Dilbert on the All-In Pod.
All of the All-In Pod guys know me.
They either know me or I've communicated with them.
I guess I've communicated with all of them one way or the other.
So I love those guys.
They're just the most useful.
You know how I always say that the goal of life is to be useful?
Not just entertaining, but to be useful.
They are the most useful podcast probably in the world because you get four brilliant.
Oh, I haven't talked to Freeberg, so I don't know him, but he seems cool.
They're the most useful podcast by far because you're getting four of the smartest, plugged-in, high-talent stack people who know how to communicate really well and get into the cool topics and stuff.
You can't beat them for being useful.
They're top of the list right there.
But anyway, then Jason gave me a nice call out.
I appreciate that.
I appreciate that, Jason.
You might be watching.
So we're at the end of the show.
I'm going to say a few words privately to my beloved local subscribers.
So far, every night, every late afternoon for me, I've been doing a drawing lesson from my man cave.
Don't know how much longer they'll go because my muscles are degrading kind of quickly.
But at the moment, it's really fun.
You can watch my hand as I'm drawing the cartoon, and I teach you little tricks about drawing that you wouldn't hear anywhere else.
So probably we'll do that again.
I don't give a time for that because I just do it when I can.
