More Schumer shut down humor. That's right, it is Schumer humor. And lots more.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, UC Berkeley, Government Shutdown, John Stewart, Chuck Schumer, Van Jones, democrat Imaginary Problems, democrat Projection, democrat Cluster B Personality Disorder, SCOTUS Tariffs, SCOTUS Ballot Deadlines, 50-Year Mortgages, Scott Bessent, Argentina Swap line Strategy, Mike Benz, Global Censorship University Strategy, Dumb People Politics, Cheryl Hines Natural Likability, Hakeem Jeffries, Jasmine Crockett, Voting Machine Ban, NewsNation Network, Bill O'Reilly, Affordability Czar, Chinese Student VISAs, SoftBank Nvidia Stock Sale, Elon Chip Fabrication Plan, USAID US Color Revolution, Hemp Ban, Rand Paul, Ukraine War Casualties, 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.
By the way, if anybody can tell me how on my Apple laptop to turn off the screen saver so it doesn't turn off in the middle of my live stream, boy would I appreciate it.
I can search for screen, I can look for display, I can look for power, I can look for auto off.
I can search all over that damn computer, but I will not find the simplest command.
How do I turn the screen saver off?
So if anybody knows how to do that, please let me know.
All right, we've got a show to do.
And let's see.
Let me jump in here and look at what you're looking at.
Well, apparently that's not an option either.
I think everything in my computer world failed today at the same time.
My printer wasn't connected.
My computer was random.
Really?
No, this isn't working either.
The simplest thing.
There we go.
The simplest thing is working now.
All right, that's enough of me complaining.
You want a show and you shall not lock screen.
So you think lock.
I'll search for lock next time.
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 of elevating this experience up to levels that nobody can understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper mugger glass of tanker Chelsea Stein, a canteen sugar flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine here of the day.
The thing makes everything better.
Sculpt a simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Go.
Fantastic.
Best sip I've ever had.
Well, we'll get back to that.
Would you like to start with a reframe from my book, Reframe Your Brain, full of over 200 frames, reframes.
Any one of them could change your life.
You never know.
All right.
Here's one.
Oh, here's the deathbed reframe.
This one's kind of useful.
Do you ever have this big old problem?
You're like, oh, this problem is plaguing me.
I can't get it out of my mind.
All you do, if you've got a problem you can't get any head, is instead of saying that my stress and anxiety are being caused by the things in my life, ask yourself how many of those things you'll be thinking about on your deathbed.
And the answer is none of them.
Once you realize that you won't care about any of them on your deathbed, it turns out it makes it easier to not worry about them today.
So this is one you just have to try.
You literally just imagine yourself at the end of your life.
And your loved ones are around and they're like, hey, Scott, what about that printer that wasn't working that day?
I think it was November 11th in 2025.
Do you remember?
Do you remember how mad you were the printer wasn't working?
How do you feel about it now?
I'm dying.
I can't even think about the printer.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It wasn't important then and it's not important now.
The deathbed reframe.
If it's not going to matter on your deathbed, it probably doesn't matter that much.
I mean, you might have to fix it, whatever the problem is.
You might still have to fix it.
You don't have to worry about it so much.
All right, let's get to the big stories of the day.
The big story of the day is that the Dilbert calendar is available.
Okay, you already know that.
You can only get it at Amazon.
And it's available to Americans or Americans who can buy from Amazon.com or anybody who can buy from Amazon.com.
It's available to you.
And it's got comics on both sides.
Ooh.
Got the spicy stuff.
Well, are you supposed to say Happy Veterans Day?
I've never known how to navigate this.
Instead of saying Happy Veterans Day, may I just take a moment to show my undying respect for all veterans and to thank you in case you don't get thanked enough today.
How many of you are vets?
How many watching this are veterans?
You're the special people today.
So if you happen to be a vet, just know that I am thinking highly respectful thoughts about you right now because we wouldn't get any of this stuff without you.
I am quite aware that the quality of my life is directly, directly springs from the fact that there are brave people who will go to war when it needs to be done.
Sometimes even when it doesn't need to be done, but that's another story.
So all respect to you, veterans.
Well, another news, you won't even believe this, but the TPUSA group was trying to do an event yesterday at UC Berkeley.
How do you think that went?
Do you think any of the UC Berkeley Democrats complained about having TPUSA there?
Of course they did.
A fight broke out.
There was bloodshed.
There were police.
I don't know how bad it got.
It might have been just a few people fighting.
But remember how I tell you that I used to be, well, honestly, there was a long period in my life where the thing I was most proud of, most proud of, of my own performance in life, per se, is that I got my MBA at Berkeley, the Haas School of Business, and that I did it while I was working full-time.
Now, if you've never tried that, let me tell you, it's a little bit challenging to get an MBA at night while you've already worked full-time during the day.
It's hard, in case you're wondering, it's hard.
And it lasts three years instead of two because the full-time MBA class would be compressed.
But wow, was it hard?
So hard.
I may have told you this story before, but on day one, not literally day one, but the very first test I took in my MBA courses, they wrote the distribution, Professor Jay.
He wrote the distribution of the grades on the board so we could all see where we stood.
And then he told us, I have to tell you, I forget the percentage, but it was something like half, maybe half or one-third.
He said, half or one-third of you, whatever the number was, it was horrifying, will not make it through the course.
And I'm sitting there thinking, really?
Half of us?
Because you don't even get into Berkeley unless you've got something going on.
You know what I mean?
Like, they don't even let you in unless you've already proven you can handle things at a pretty high level.
So I thought, it can't be true.
Can't possibly be true.
But the bottom, I don't know.
Let's say it was one-third.
That sounds about right.
It couldn't possibly be true that one-third drop out in the first semester.
And then we took a test and the test came back and we saw the distribution.
Now, the distribution did not have names on it, but I could still tell which grade was mine.
Do you know how I could tell which grade was mine without a name on it?
Before I'd seen my test, it was the lowest one in the class.
It was the lowest grade in the class.
It wasn't second.
It wasn't third lowest.
It was the lowest grade in the class right after he told me that one-third of the people aren't going to make it at all.
Do you know how mad that made me?
That I put all that work into getting in, first of all, getting into the MBA class.
It wasn't easy.
All that work.
And he's basically saying it's not going to work for you.
And here's proof.
Well, then another test came up, and I managed to be not the worst grade.
So on the second test, not the worst.
Definitely not the worst, but toward the bottom.
By the third test, somewhat respectable.
Somewhere in the, I don't know, somewhere in the middle.
By the fourth test, I had decided.
I ever tell you the difference between wanting and deciding.
Wanting means that you can allow yourself to quit if you wanted.
You could just change what you want.
Deciding is different.
I had decided that nothing was going to stop me from getting that freaking MBA.
Nothing.
And so by the end of the course, I was getting reasonable grades and managed to graduate with a degree.
It was worth as much as everybody else's.
It was the hardest thing I've ever done.
I had to give up every weekend my entire social life.
And it hurt for three years.
But when I was done, and I got that degree, for years, that was the greatest pride of my life.
And now Berkeley turned into a garbage pit.
I take no pride in it whatsoever.
I'm still happy I did the work, but I don't care about the degree.
I mean, hell with that.
Anyway, sorry, Berkeley.
So according to the University of Zurich, Natalie Huber is writing that AI is pretty unbiased, relatively speaking.
They did a test to see how unbiased it is with its answers.
But it turns out that it does become instantly biased if you tell it the source of the data.
So if you say, hey, this data came from the Washington Post or the New York Times, the AIs, and this is all the AIs, not just one, will say, oh, that looks pretty good.
It comes from one of those good sources.
But if it comes from, let's say, a right-leaning source, that might actually be very credible.
It will say, well, I'm not so sure.
We're not so sure about those.
So yes, AI does have bias.
And apparently, even the Chinese AI, DeepSeek, allegedly has an anti-China, allegedly has an anti-China bias because it got trained on so much data that had an anti-China bias that even the Chinese, even the Chinese AI has an anti-China bias.
Anyway, I'd like to give a call out to Dana Perino, Fox News, who from the beginning of the government shutdown drama would say calmly at the beginning of most of the episodes of the five, and we know how it's going to end.
The Democrats will cave.
And a day goes by, the five comes back on, and Dana says, and we know how this will end.
The Democrats are going to cave.
They always do.
Or there was some rule about why you can always predict why it would happen.
And what I loved was she was so confident about the outcome.
I thought, yeah, you're putting yourself out there a little bit.
I agreed with her, by the way.
I thought that she was probably right.
But I thought, that's pretty confident to put that out there.
And 100% right.
Nailed it.
So good for you.
She wasn't the only one.
I think Greg was predicting the same.
There were other people who predicted it.
But I just liked her confidence.
And, you know, she has the experience to know what she's talking about.
All right.
Let's talk.
We still have a few more days, if not weeks, of enjoying the Democrats' bad reaction to the shutdown negotiations being over.
If you haven't seen yet Jon Stewart's Monday night show, it really is sort of a masterpiece.
He's not happy.
He's not happy with Chuck Schumer getting a nothing.
So we got this life or death situation, they told us that, you know, babies are starving and planes are falling out of the air.
And yet, they decide, after telling us for weeks, the babies will die and planes will fall out of the sky if they agree with the Republicans on anything.
They just sort of cave in.
But here's what Jon Stewart couldn't believe.
And he made this hilarious.
Now, what's funny about it is he really doesn't look like he's taking sides.
Well, maybe he does, but he's hitting his own team hard.
He's hitting his own team harder than he's hitting the Republicans by far.
He's hitting his own side.
So that gives him a little credibility because when his own side has a bad day, he goes after his own side.
You have to have that, or nobody's going to really take it too seriously.
Because Jon Stewart says, where in the art of war does it say, you know, never pressure your, never press your advantage?
And this is the funniest line.
That Chuck Schumer sold out.
He sold out on what he wanted in return for a promise to negotiate later and then later not get what he wanted.
He traded what he wanted for a promise to not get what he wanted later.
That's exactly what happened.
A promise to not get what you want later.
That's a funny line.
Oh, Jon Stewart, you're so funny.
So even Jon Stewart, when here's how I interpret this: by mocking Schumer by taking out the art of war, he took out the actual book, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu.
I think what he's trying to tell them is that they're not dealing on a strategic level.
How many times have I said that?
That the Republicans and Trump in particular, they seem to deal entirely on a strategic level.
I mean, there's a moral and ethical frame to it, but they're very strategic.
The Democrats just seem to be acting out.
It doesn't seem strategic at all, does it?
It just feels like they're mad at something.
Their whole approach to the shutdown was fight, fight, fight.
That's not even the right context for that.
Fight, fight, fight.
The right context was you just got your ear shot.
The wrong context, this is the way they were using it.
Like, like just being tougher in the way they talk is going to make it all work.
They didn't have any strategy.
They were just trying to blame Republicans and see if something would work.
Anyway, you really have to see the Jon Stewart video.
Van Jones tries to save as much as he can from this situation, but I don't think he quite nailed it, but only because he doesn't have much to work with in this particular case.
Now, I like to be transparent.
I like Van Jones.
And am I biased for people that I just personally kind of like?
Yes, a little bit.
I'm a little bit biased for people I like.
I like him.
He's a likable guy.
I've talked to him, and he was very, very generous to me.
So I like him.
But he didn't have anything to work with here.
He had nothing to work with.
So he comes out and he goes, look, this is on CNN, of course.
He says, look, right now, Democrats are going to kick each other and tear each other up and be mad at each other.
But when the smoke clears for most Americans, something has been proven here.
So this is Van.
He says, Republicans are just not that into Americans right now.
Really?
The best you have is reading the minds of Republicans and it looks all evil in there.
You think the Republicans are just turned into demons or something?
What is it that would affect all Republicans?
All Republicans just are not into Americans right now.
So you think that the America First Party that literally is America First are not that into Americans?
What?
Okay.
And then he said, and this looks like this will be the approach they're going to all take: quote, how much pain were the Republicans willing to let Americans suffer so they didn't have to?
They're just not that into you, America.
How much pain were the Republicans willing to let you suffer?
The Democrats could have voted to open it at any moment.
They just lie to their base and act like they didn't have the power to open it because we're not in power.
We're not in power.
That doesn't change the fact that they have the votes.
They can vote anything they want.
Or in this case, they could have voted past the 60 people limit.
And then he says, Van says, Donald Trump and Republicans were willing to let planes fall out of the sky.
I can't believe he's going this far.
And children starve before they came to the table.
That's so absurd.
Like only one side was starving children, or as if any children were starving.
I'm pretty sure nobody starved.
Have you seen any anecdotal stories of, you know, even the reason you can't do this story?
If the press did a story about the family thing, oh, it's terrible that I'm laughing at this.
Stop it, Scott.
This is not funny.
If the press, let's say they found a family where little Billy was starving and they did a story from, let's say, the family's living room.
And they're like, there's little Billy, little Billy over on the couch.
He won't be eating today.
He didn't eat yesterday.
He'll probably be gone by noon.
And then it would be the fault of the reporter for not feeding little Billy, because, you know, you probably have a few extra bucks.
Maybe you could spare a little bit for Billy before he falls over on the couch during your life.
It's only funny because I just realized you can't do a story about it.
Because the moment you do a story about a starving anything in the United States, people sund food.
And they stop starving immediately.
All right.
Well, we do have a good country in the sense that nobody's going to look at somebody starving and let them starve.
We just don't live in that country.
If you see somebody starving, we're going to feed them.
Let me, if I have any neighbors within walking distance who are starving, just knock on my door.
Just knock on my door.
You have to be within walking distance.
I can't feed the world.
But if any of my walking distance neighbors are literally unable to eat, I'll give you a sandwich.
Stop by.
All right.
So what I liked about Van Jones' approach is in some ways he's sort of an indicator of, you know, testing some of the narratives because he's good at it.
So I think he, you know, they let him go first sometimes just to see how it works.
But listen to every Democrat trick he tried.
Let's see.
Was there a mind reading?
How many times have I told you that Democrats, they pretend they can read the minds of Republicans, but what they see in there is not America first and we like the Constitution and we like our God and we like families.
They don't see the things that they're actually thinking.
What they see is things that are created by the squirrels running around in their skulls and then they imagine that they can read minds.
That's here, right?
They're imagining that they're looking into Republican minds and that they don't mind if planes fall out of the sky and children starve.
How about a character attack?
Have you noticed?
Now, obviously, Trump does character attacks, but he's a special case.
But in terms of Republicans versus Democrats in general, I think Republicans are a little more likely to talk about the policy, whereas Democrats are a little more likely to talk about, oh, bad character.
Did Van do that?
Did he treat the Republicans as if they have bad character?
Yes.
He treated them like they don't care if babies die.
How about imaginary problems?
Have you heard me talk about that a million times?
That Democrats come up with imaginary problems?
Well, this was completely self-created, and it was an imaginary problem in the sense that they could solve it without doing any real work.
It was 100% solvable just by going, eh, eh?
Would you like to see that again?
Watch me solve the starving children and planes falling out of the air.
Eh, eh?
Yeah, that's me voting in favor of passing a short-term continuing resolution.
Eh, eh?
Democrats remember that.
That's how it's done.
Eh.
Save the world.
What about projection?
The thing where they're doing the bad thing, but they blame the Republicans for doing the very bad thing that they're doing?
Yes, that was the whole shutdown.
The whole shutdown was acting like the Republicans had some power over it, which they didn't.
So we got to projection.
How about the cluster B personality disorder?
Have any of you had any experience with a narcissist that's part of the cluster B, so-called cluster B personality disorders?
Well, if you've ever seen it, the way it looks is they blame you of whatever they're doing.
So, really, that's the same as the projection and the imaginary problems and the mind reading and the character assaults.
They're all sort of under that domain.
So, we got that.
Then we've got Democrats trying to focus their victories on things you can't measure.
Things you can't measure.
Is this one of those things you can't really measure?
Well, I haven't heard any numbers for children dying.
I didn't see any measurement of that.
I don't know the number of planes that fell out of the air.
I think it's zero.
I think it is.
So, the entire shutdown was about what might happen if you don't open up.
Except that didn't happen.
We did open up.
So, it was this whole set of imaginary things that could happen, but didn't, as usual.
Yeah.
So, the one that's missing is where the Democrats say a problem doesn't really exist, like they do with Antifa.
That didn't apply to this one because everybody agrees that if you're not funding SNAP, people are going to have more trouble getting food.
So, at least they agreed on the problem.
But can you see how stunningly consistent it is that Van, who's a totally reasonable, smart guy, he's following the Democrat plan that looks like mental problems more than it looks like the art of war, if you know what I mean?
There was a, I think it was a fake truth social that was hilarious.
I wish it hadn't been true, but it purported to show that Trump was saying that fat people would not be allowed in the United States, and then it ended with saying that Rosie O'Donnell will never come back, which would be a comment on her weight.
That did not happen as far as Grok can tell.
So, Grok said that was not real.
I made the mistake of reposting that this morning before I said to myself, I better check this one.
This one's a little bit too on the nose.
And sure enough, Grok said, nope.
But here's the fun part: it's actually based on something real.
It is real that the State Department is going to ban overweight people from entering the U.S. on a visa, but it would be based on general health requirements.
So, we're not talking about somebody who's got a few extra pounds because that would be everybody.
We're talking about people who are clearly not as healthy as they could be and clearly will be a burden on the healthcare situation in the U.S. Under those conditions, I guess the State Department says no visa for you, which isn't not a terrible decision.
I can see that.
Well, the Supreme Court's still thinking about tariffs, and Trump points out that they don't understand tariffs, which is no big surprise.
He says that they've been given the wrong numbers on unwinding the tariffs, because one of the questions that the Supremes asked was, what would it cost if we ruled to unwind the tariffs that have already happened?
And Trump points out that the tariffs are not unconnected to the deals about bringing capital into the U.S.
He says that there are $3 trillion that also has to be unwound because part of the tariff agreements were that people would be investing in the U.S.
So is it possible that the Supreme Court is going to be off in their calculation by $3 trillion?
And then they're going to make a decision that we're all bound by while being off on the assumptions by $3 trillion.
And it might be.
they might be off by three trillion dollars and then make a decision based on that bad assumption now because trump has said you know that it's and who knows about the three trillion I don't know if the $3 trillion tracks exactly, but it is correct that you can't separate all this stuff.
Logically, you can't separate.
Trump says that we'll have over $20 trillion coming into our economy.
I think that was on Laura Ingram.
She did a very illuminating interview with Trump.
But here's my take.
All data is fake.
All data is fake.
If you simply went by what the Republicans are claiming, you'd find out later it wasn't exactly right.
If you go by what the Supreme Court is believing, that's not right.
If you tried to do the math yourself and add it up on your own, you wouldn't get the right answer.
All of our important decisions.
We pretend that somehow we have all this knowledge.
We don't.
We're mostly guessing.
Bias in guessing.
That's mostly life.
But also, apparently the Supreme Court is considering looking into the case of the ballot deadlines.
So I guess there are 30 states that are up for a decision.
Let's say, not really, because the Supremes haven't decided to take the case yet, but it looks like they might.
And the idea would be if the Supreme Court could allow the, I think the administration, the feds, to tell states that they can't count later ID if in ballots.
So there is a possibility that the Supreme Court will say you can't count ballots that come in 30 days late or whatever deadline they put on it.
I think that they might.
Don't know how this one will go.
I don't have a good, I'm not really good on the Supreme Court predictions, but that would be a really big thing.
And it would give me some confidence in our system because none of us understand why it should take so long only in one country.
Am I right?
Every one of you has the same issue, which is, okay, if you really have to wait 30 days, why is it only the top industrialized country in the world that has to wait 30 days?
Really?
We can't figure that out, but Estonia can do it in a day.
I'm just making that up, but I think they can actually.
Estonia, you vote on the app on your phone.
All right.
So that might be a big deal.
We'll see.
Laura Graham asked Trump about the concept of the 50-year mortgage proposal.
And I think Trump gave a really good answer to that.
So rather than trying to wade in and really get into numbers and stuff, he said, quote, all it means is you pay less per month.
You pay it over a longer period of time.
Now, that's not really all it means, because it also means you pay more, means you don't get to own your house outright as soon.
It might be you live your entire life and you never owned your house completely.
So it's not like there's no cost, but I think his summary is completely fair.
The part you'd feel is that you're paying less per month, but longer.
And then Trump changed the subject to, he thinks the real, he didn't think that would make a big difference in home ownership.
So he thought that would be a minor change that some people would like, some people wouldn't, but it's freedom.
If you have the freedom for that option, more freedom is better, probably.
But he thinks the Fed will lower interest rates when we get a new Fed chair in the spring.
Maybe before that.
I think we're supposed to have a couple of more rate cuts, no matter who's there, right?
So that's a good answer on housing.
Interest rates are going down, et cetera.
And then Scott Besant, Treasury head, he was on MSNBC and embarrassed them because he knows so much more than they do about everything.
So the MSNBC host asks Scott Besant, how does a $20 billion bailout of Argentina help Americans?
Now, that's a pretty good question, right?
I saw this in a post by the Patriot Oasis.
And Besson answered that.
He said, do you know what a swap line is?
Boom.
And we're done.
He could have stopped there.
So MSNBC characterized it as a bailout.
And Besson just looks at him and he goes, do you know what a swap line is?
Now, I just told you that I have an MBA from a top school.
I've got a degree in economics.
I didn't know what a swap line was.
How many of you know what a swap line is?
Is there even one person here who could say, oh, a swap line?
Yeah.
A swap line is different from a bailout.
Let me tell you the ways.
Well, I don't know.
All I know is if somebody said that to me, I would stop the conversation immediately because I would recognize that they know a lot more than I do about whatever this is.
So after he goes, do you know what a swap line is?
The MSNBC host said, it's a currency swap, yes.
And then Besson doesn't let him or her off the hook.
I don't know who it was.
He goes, but what is that?
Why would you call it a bailout?
So instead of answering the question, he just puts it back.
Why would you call that a bailout if you know what it is?
That's a pretty good answer.
If you know what it is, why would you call it a bailout?
Ooh, ooh, stick it in and turn it.
Then Besson explains, he says, in most bailouts, you don't make money.
The U.S. government made money.
Apparently, we've already made money.
The government's going to make money.
That's a lot we could have been doing for America, farmers, if the Democrats hadn't closed the government.
So then Besson throws in the government closing just to get a little extra zing.
Anyway, a swap line, let me tell you what it is.
It's basically, I think what we do is swap some currency.
So they get some dollars and we get some of their sketchy stuff.
And there's something about the temporary swap that gives support to their currency.
But because we're the ones who gave support to the currency, we can have some confidence that it will be supported because we just gave us some support.
And that makes us value go up.
And then when the country is sufficiently stabilized, the currency that we swapped for may have gone up in value, which I think is what happened or will happen.
I don't know if that's a good description, but there's something about just temporarily trading currency, not all of it, just some of it, that seems to stabilize the less stable country.
Does that work?
Well, I wouldn't have done it on my own, but if Scott Besan tells me that's a good idea and it works, I'm going to believe it.
He's pretty credible.
Speaking of credible, Mike Benz is educating us about how the university system is part of this big international network of people who are trying to, behind our backs, find clever ways to censor essentially right-wing conservatives.
And so because it's illegal to censor people and stop their free speech in the United States, apparently the universities are a vital part of this big system which has evolved in which the schools are propagandizing people and working with international entities to coordinate global censorship.
Now, I wouldn't know any of that without Mike Benz.
And I keep saying this, but I feel like I'm not saying it right.
And I'm going to take another run at it.
So if you've heard me say this, I'm just trying to say it better.
Because if I say it better, it just becomes more powerful.
So here's what I want to say.
I'm going to give you a little mental test or like a thought experiment.
Oh, okay.
It's a thought experiment.
Are you ready?
Somebody tells you that you're going to compete in some kind of an IQ test, but it could be an SAT or just some general intelligence test.
And you walk into the room and you say to yourself, yeah, I'm pretty smart.
I'll bet I could do all right in this IQ test.
And you sit down to take the test and you look to your left and it's Victor Davis Hansen.
He's also taking the test.
You go, oh, shit.
It's Victor Davis Hansen.
Okay, I'm not going to beat him on the IQ test.
But then you look to your right and it's Ben Shapiro.
You're like, God, I don't always agree with Ben Shapiro, but he's way smarter than me.
And he's taking the test.
Well, maybe I could come in third.
And then you look in front of you and there's Scott Besant.
You're like, oh, come on.
Come on.
How's this fair?
And you look behind you and it's Jordan Peterson when he's full health.
And you go, oh, come on.
Come on.
How in the world did I get in this room?
And then you look over there and it's Thomas Massey.
Oh, come on.
He went to MIT.
Come on.
Then you look over there and it's Mike Benz.
And then you look over there and it's David Sachs.
Do you feel that?
I have to give you a confession.
When I was a young man, I was not conservative.
I didn't identify as conservative.
And the reason was it seemed embarrassing because I thought maybe the dumb people were all on one side.
Has anybody had that feeling?
Like a long time ago, it felt like the dumb people were the conservatives and all the really bright Ivy League people tended to be on the left.
And I didn't really want to be associated with the dumb people.
Now, I may have been right, I may have been wrong.
I'm just telling you how I was thinking at that time.
But when I put you in that room and I made you sit at that desk or imagine it, and then I made you wonder how you would do if you were surrounded by some of the most notable conservatives.
Now, you may have also noted that I could have gone on for a long time.
I could have continued mentioning people who are the most notable ones, the ones you see all the time.
And I didn't even mention Elon Musk.
Put Elon in the room, right?
He gets to be in the room too.
So we've got the smartest room that civilization has ever assembled.
But at least the Democrats have a good set of people running against them, right?
All right, I'm going to put you in another room.
You ready?
Room number two.
Room number two.
You go in for your IQ test, you sit down and you look to your left, and there's AOC.
And you say to yourself, hmm, AOC, she went to college, she's bright, but I think I can take her.
And you look to the other side, and there's Jasmine Crockett.
And you go, hmm, she did go to law school, right?
I think she has a legal degree.
But you say to yourself, still, I feel like I could take her on this IQ test.
And you look the other direction, you see Eric Swalwell.
You say, okay, I could be him.
Also, he's an attorney, I think.
Adam Schiff?
Yeah, I could take Adam.
Jamie Raskin, I think so.
Chuck Schumer, definitely.
Bernie Sanders?
Yeah, definitely.
How about Mayor Brandon Johnson?
Probably.
Now, what's interesting is, I don't know, at least half of the people I mentioned have Ivy League or very high credentials.
They're either all attorneys or they went to a good school, they're economic majors or something like that.
But did this group of people look like the ones that you want running things compared to the first group of people?
And by the way, do you see how powerful that is?
I like to make sure you're getting the persuasion lesson at the same time as the politics.
From a persuasion perspective, did you feel how powerful that was that I put you in the room?
First with the conservatives and then with the Democrats?
You can feel that, couldn't you?
Isn't that powerful?
That say Jerry?
Jerry Spence, a famous lawyer who always says you tell the story, you put the person in the story, and it's very persuasive rather than just say the facts.
So that's what I did for you.
Put you in the story.
Anyway, some of the Democrats are done with their leadership, Schumer.
And Roe Connor says it's time to get rid of Schumer as a leader.
You can't lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans.
What will you fight for?
And then Seth Moulton, also Democrat Massachusetts, and Ed Markey, Democrat Massachusetts, they're also anti-Schumer at the moment.
We'll see if that grows.
Yeah, so Schumer's in trouble.
Now, not only do conservatives, or at least people who are pro-Trump at the moment, not only do they have better, smarter people who are the head notable people, but even their spouses are better on podcasts.
How many of you have watched Cheryl Hines, who for whatever reason, I think probably smart reasons, has been appearing on some podcasts lately?
And then compare that to Michelle Obama's podcast and let's see, Jimmy Kimmel's wife's podcast and some other spousy podcasts.
If you haven't seen Cheryl Hines on the podcast, you've missed how to do podcasts.
I don't know how much experience she had on podcasts per se, but boy, does she nail.
She is so good.
And what she does right is, you know, first of all, she's charismatic and likable.
Every man likes her.
Every woman wants to be her.
So, you know, she's starting with all the tools.
That's good.
But she doesn't leave her lane ever.
And her lane is the thing she does know.
And she never goes into the stuff she doesn't know.
And she just is polite to everybody, says, why not be nice to everybody?
And just never says whatever you think would be the provocative thing to try to make a new cycle.
She just comes across as so damn likable that you think RFK Jr. is smarter than you thought.
Because how in the heck did he lock her down?
So some of that just rubs off naturally on the spouse as it would.
And it works both ways, right?
He rubs off on her, she rubs off on him.
But boy, is she good.
If you haven't seen her appearance on Club Random, I mean, of all things, Club Random would be the place that most, if you were a PR expert, you'd probably tell her not to go on there, right?
But she makes her own decisions, it looks like.
And she went on there and nailed it, just totally nailed it.
Yep, Bill loved her.
CNN is asking Hakeem Jeffries if the government shutdown was worth it.
And Hakeem said, we have waged a battle on behalf of the American people.
Is that the answer to the question, was it worth it?
No.
And CNN followed up, but you didn't get what you want.
And Jeffries says, at the end of the day, the fight lives on.
Now, remember what I told you about goals versus systems?
Their goal was to fight.
And they accomplished their goal.
They fought.
The Republicans had a system, which is they stick together.
The Republican system is that they just stick together.
They take directions from Trump because that seems to work out.
If you've been paying attention, following Trump's lead on just about anything ends up being the smart play.
So Republicans have this perfect system.
What does Trump want?
Does that sound reasonable?
Are we all going to, most of us anyway, except for a Massey and a Rand, maybe, are we all going to be on the same page?
Yes.
That's a pretty good system.
Then you talk to the Democrats.
They're like, we've got to fight you, fight you.
And we've got to swear more and fight you.
Well, now Jeffries is claiming some kind of success because he fought.
So they accomplished their goal.
They fought.
Maybe you should have a different goal.
Or maybe you should have, I mean, they would say the goal was to open the government, but they seem happy that they did the fight.
So it makes it look different.
Speaking of Jasmine Crockett, I love this story.
She's demanding that all 50 states abolish Dominion voting machines.
Now, I don't know how many states actually use them, but because Dominion is now owned by some entity that has conservative connections, she thinks that it's a sure thing that they will be used to rig the election.
So now we have, we went from Democrats swearing there could never be a way to rig an election to a top Democrat, at least in terms of attention, a top Democrat saying, oh my God, these elections are so unsecure.
We're going to have to change this right away.
That's called winning.
Winning.
I've been telling you for a while that one of the big turning points in the American mind will be when we realize there was never a way to know who won.
I don't know who won because I didn't count the votes and I don't trust anybody who does.
But if you don't realize there never was a way to know who won, there never was.
Because you could never know what happened that you don't know about.
What if somebody cheated in a clever way and got away with it?
How would you know?
Getting away with it is what that means, that they didn't get caught.
You think nobody's ever cheated in an election and didn't get caught?
It must happen all the time.
So the fact that the Democrats made it so you couldn't get a job or couldn't go to college if you believed that the election was even questionable, that's a pretty bold play right there.
But now we have Jasmine saying what in my mind is actually a completely reasonable complaint.
The reasonable complaint is that you can't know for sure or you can't be confident.
You can't be confident that you know for sure the election was fair when machines are involved and you don't know if anybody had access to the machines.
And maybe you're not sure that you could find out if anybody had access to the machines.
So it's completely reasonable and it actually matches a lot of conservative thought, including my own.
So what should Trump do about that?
Now, this is a joke, but not really.
Wouldn't it be funny if he invited her to the White House so that other people could hear her complaints about the machines and about the unreliability of the voting system?
What would she do?
What would she do if Trump not only agreed with her, but asked if he could boost her signal?
Yeah, you know, you make a good point there.
I don't know about the voting machines.
We'll have somebody look into that.
But in general, if what you're saying is our elections need some extra security, oh, here's what I can do for you.
All paper ballots.
That's what you want.
You don't want machines.
You want all paper belts.
And don't you think it'd be a good idea if we made sure we don't count them for too many days?
Because you don't want those conservatives to be sneaking in any fake ballots after the election day, right?
Nobody wants that.
So how about you and I get together and we fix this election system and then you can win fair and square on your great policies.
That will never happen, but it's funny to think about it.
Anyway, so Bill O'Reilly, who is getting a lot of attention lately, a lot of it's on NewsNation.
By the way, are you tracking the NewsNation arc?
I don't know how they're doing financially, but I got to say that Chris Cuomo is doing an incredibly good job of promoting a new network, a newsy network.
And they do have interesting guests.
Cuomo was the first person who I trusted who reached out to me after I got canceled.
And I thought did a very respectful and fair, but tough, interview with me.
So I have lots of good things to say about Cuomo, just because of personal interactions.
But yeah, news nation's doing a great job.
But anyway, they had Bill O'Reilly on quite a few times, and so they're sort of reconstituting him.
But he said on the cost of living, he thinks sort of the next midterms will really and maybe 2028 will turn on cost of living things, and he's probably right about that.
And he suggests a cost-of-living czar.
Now, if he's suggesting a cost-of-living czar simply for the purpose of making it look like Republicans are doing something about affordability, maybe it's a semi-good idea.
But if you leave out what would the czar do, I don't know if it's anything.
What would the czar exactly do?
Is there something that a czar knows how to do that you and I don't know how to do?
What exactly do you do?
I can't think of anything.
If people had great ideas for lowering costs, don't you think we'd be noodling on those all the time?
If the Republicans have a great idea that the no, I'm sorry, if Democrats have a great idea for lowering costs, I want to hear it.
I don't want to reject it.
If anybody has a great idea for lowering costs, I'd like to hear it.
So I feel as though it's a lack of anybody having an idea.
It's not like somebody didn't fight hard enough.
It's not because we didn't have a czar.
It's not because there's no cabinet position for lowering expenses.
It's because nobody has an idea.
You know, short of the big ideas like Trump has of lowering interest rates, for example.
And you could do things around the margin, but I don't know where the czar is going to get you.
Let's get an idea first and then maybe a czar.
So Trump is now, I guess, in favor of up to 600,000 Chinese students coming to the U.S. for college.
And he says that's a pro-MAGA stance.
He was telling Laura Ingram.
And he says that if you didn't do that, because the Chinese students bring in a lot of money to the colleges, because they pay full price where a lot of Americans would not, Trump says you would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business.
I think he mentioned the historically black colleges would also have trouble.
He says, I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else.
Well, MAGA wants everything to work, right?
So if the only way college works is if there are a lot of Chinese students, then I don't know, maybe you do the best you can to make that situation work, which looks like what Trump is doing.
But I don't know how you could feel safe with that.
So here's my take.
I assume there's something Trump knows that we don't about the Chinese students.
One thing he might know, and this is pure speculation, because remember, I'm not a Democrat, so I can't read any minds.
Pure speculation.
What if our intelligence people have assessed that the best way we can deal with China is to educate their elites in our schools?
Right?
Would that be the worst idea?
You don't think that the intelligence people could get to our Ivy League colleges and say, all right, you're going to have a whole bunch of Chinese students.
And under these conditions, we think it's good for America.
You got to make sure that you propagandize them.
Make sure that they have, I don't know, let's say an American roommate who might be working for the CIA someday.
I'm making that one up.
But don't you think there's some way that the U.S. could exploit that many students to have influence back in China some years in the future?
Because it seems like we always get along better.
I've said this before.
We tend to get along best with the countries where the leader speaks English and has some connection to our country.
So this would be creating a whole bunch of people who obviously would be getting better at English.
They would have to speak it to come here.
But they would be getting better at English.
And they would just get more connections to our country.
Is that bad?
Well, if they're stealing secrets and stuff like that, it's bad.
But one also assumes that our intelligence people would be all over the phones and devices of the Chinese students.
Wouldn't they?
Wouldn't it make sense that every single device a Chinese student brings over that our intelligence people penetrate so we can keep an eye on?
Probably.
So before you say Trump is wrong about this, and I don't know if he's right or wrong, what I know for sure is that he knows more about this than we do.
It could be also that there's nothing about this he likes, but it's part of a deal to get something else done.
For example, what if the only way we can get a good rare earth mineral temporary deal until we can do it ourselves, what if the only way we can get that is that privately President Xi has said, I'll tell you what, you're going to have to let the Chinese students in.
I'm getting too much pressure from the elites who want to send their kids there.
I'll give you your minerals, but you've got to open the colleges.
Would that be a good play?
If you thought that was true, and I'm not saying it is, wouldn't it be a good play to at least consider taking in a good number of Chinese students?
It might.
So don't assume you know what Trump is thinking because he gets different information than you do on stuff like that.
Well, SoftBank, the company, is selling its entire stake in NVIDIA for $5.8 billion.
Now, you might say, uh-oh, do they think that NVIDIA is no longer a good investment?
It's probably not that exactly, but rather they're freeing up cash for more open AI investments.
So it looks like they want to put their money on the software side, not the hardware side with NVIDIA.
Now, I told you I sold my NVIDIA earlier in the year after pretty good game because I didn't trust that a hardware company could have a sustainable long-term advantage when the stakes are this high.
When the stakes are this high, it guarantees, it just guarantees that the best players in the world are going to flow in and try to take some of that margin.
Guaranteed.
There's no way around that.
And since we don't know how good those competitors would be, it would be misleading to say, oh, NVIDIA is doing really well.
So therefore, they'll just always do well into Infinity.
Well, here's some news.
Apparently, Elon Musk is very serious about starting his own chip company and getting the cost of his chips down to about 10% of what the NVIDIA chips cost and also being way better.
Now, Elon already believes that he can take out NVIDIA.
If it were anyone else, how many times do we ever say this?
We say this all the time.
If anyone else said that, you would say, well, I don't know about that.
But if Elon says, well, it looks like I'm going to have to build a chip fabrication plant to get enough chips.
And if I'm going to build a plant, it's not going to be just as good as everybody else's plant.
This is going to be this giant, what do you call it, a mega flop?
Something so enormous you can't even visualize it.
So it'd be enormous.
It would make more chips than other people because he'll need more.
And if he makes his own chips, he's going to have, he's going to own every AI market he wants because he's the only one who'll have enough chips.
So if you were a soft bank and you had $5.8 billion in one AI chip company and Elon Musk just said in public, you know, I think I might compete with that and beat it with a 90% cheaper product.
Even if, even if NVIDIA was so nimble that they could match that, it would still take 90% off their profit, right?
I mean, roughly speaking.
So I don't give financial advice.
As you know, this is not financial advice.
If you had followed my financial advice and sold NVIDIA when I did, you would have lost a lot of money compared to holding it until now.
So keep in mind, I'm not good at investing.
I'll tell you that as often as you need to hear it because I know it's kind of tempting.
If you like my opinions on some political thing, you'll think, well, then maybe he's also good at investing.
Nobody's good at it.
Nobody's good at investing.
Nobody is.
A lot of his luck.
And insider trading.
All right.
Apparently there was some kind of Jim Hoft Gateway pundit says there was some kind of leaked phone call that showed that the State Department is backing their color revolution with global partners.
I can't tell if this is the same thing that Mike Benz was talking about or not.
But apparently there's newly surfaced recordings shared by a data Republican, an account on X, that former USAID employees openly discussed moving internal groups off federal systems into encrypted signal chats ahead of the presidential inauguration.
That would have been Trump in January.
And then linking up with international partners to mobilize against authority, oh, there it is.
Mobilize against authoritarianism.
So when you hear that these big networks are mobilizing against authoritarianism, that should be thought of as a color revolution.
How many Democrats do you think know what a color revolution is?
I'll bet most of my audience does.
Certainly all of Mike Benz's audience does.
But how many Democrats would even know what that is?
A color revolution?
That's when the United States overthrows other countries.
But apparently the same tools have been used internally, which is very illegal and inappropriate.
All right.
Here's a story that I wouldn't mention except I like Rand Paul, so I'm going to give him a little boost on his messaging.
Apparently, there's some kind of legislation cooking that would ruin the totally legal hemp production in his state, Kentucky.
So apparently all of the hemp people would be put out of business by whatever change this is.
I don't know what the change is, but there's no reason the hemp business should be crippled.
That would be not understanding what hemp is.
You can't get high smoking hemp.
You know, it's related to cannabis, but it doesn't get you high.
That's why it's legal.
Why in the world would they do something to take out an entire industry in 23 states?
So I don't know the details there, but I'm going to trust Rand Paul.
And I'll give him a little boost because I think he's one of the good guys.
He doesn't always agree with me.
He doesn't always agree with Trump.
But I just think he's one of the good guys.
So I'll give him a boost on that.
So whoever's in charge of that hemp thing, give that a rethink.
I think Rand is probably right on that.
Russia is upping its UAV.
That would be the drones.
Warfare game.
Now they have a 62-mile range attack drone swarms.
So they can attack with a swarm within 62 miles.
That's still sort of frontline-ish.
Anyway, so as I've long predicted, the robot war is pretty much a robot war.
When was the last time you heard a casualty estimate out of Ukraine?
Anybody?
All right, here's a little test.
Tell me how many soldiers were killed, let's say just Ukrainian soldiers, last week.
Number of Ukrainian soldiers killed last week.
Anybody?
Well, I don't think it was in the news.
Why would it not be in the news?
There's only one reason I can think of why casualty numbers for a major war would no longer be in the news.
Can you think of a second reason?
The first reason is it's a very low number.
Right?
Well, what if only three people died?
I'm not saying that's true.
Could have been thousands.
We don't know one way or the other.
Maybe it's thousands.
But what if it was three?
Why are they not telling us?
If it were thousands, don't you think they would have told us?
Because the news likes to report on whatever's bad and thousands a week would be super bad.
Or even just to show that Trump is wrong about the number of people dying.
Because I think he said something like 5,000 a week or something.
And if that's not right, wouldn't you expect Daniel Dale would jump right in and say, no, no, it was only three people.
I mean, if it was.
So I'm not saying it was three people.
I'm saying it's a war where they stopped counting casualties.
I don't believe they ever stopped in Gaza, did they?
I mean, the numbers might have been fraudulent, but I don't think they stopped reporting them.
So we don't know what's going on there.
But I suspect that it has turned into an all-robot war and that the only thing that they should be reporting is what they are, which is how many drones were deployed last night and how many hit their target and how many guys shot down.
So maybe that's all we need.
There's a new paper that claims that everything you know about the universe expansion is wrong.
Futurism is writing about this.
Victor Tangerman.
Not everybody agrees, but if you've ever followed, Scott, stop all the if I'm right.
Scott, stop all the scenarios of if I'm right.
How about you give me a fucking reason?
How about you do your own podcast and don't give me advice in the middle of the podcast?
How about that?
How's your podcast doing with all your good advice?
Don't be an asshole.
It's like you could turn your asshole and your assholeness off just for an hour to watch one podcast.
You don't have to be that guy.
You really don't.
You can simply be a nicer person.
And then people would like you more.
You get invited to more.
I'm guessing you don't get invited to anything.
Am I right?
Probably nothing based on based on what I've seen so far.
All right.
China is pretending it's going to do something about fentanyl.
And according to the Hill, DD Tang writes that China said on Monday that it's going to pledge to crack down on chemicals that can be used to make fentanyl.
Huh, what does that remind you of?
They didn't actually ban the fentanyl chemicals.
They just made a pledge to crack down on it.
Well, that sounds a lot like the deal that Schumer got.
Well, we'll promise to talk about it later before we don't give it to you.
No, I do not believe that China did a damn thing at all about fentanyl.
Did they promise that they would do a damn thing about fentanyl?
Maybe.
Maybe they said they would.
Do I think that they will?
Why would I think that?
They haven't done anything that they said they would do yet.
I mean, nothing meaningful.
So I'm going to say that's a lie from China.
And we'll never see that.
All right.
Hey, timing was pretty good.
Pretty, pretty good.
All right, that's all I got for you today.
I'm going to talk a little bit privately with the good folks, my beloved subscribers.
For those of you who got here a little late, did you know that the 2026 Dilbert calendar is available right now?
You can buy it on Amazon.
You'd have to be an American or use Amazon.com, the American version, if you had a way to do that.
I don't know if there is, but I hear there is.
And all right.
Thank you.
Did you enjoy the show?
Did I tell you anything you didn't know?
But here's what I'm most interested in.
I'm not searching for a compliment, although I like them.
So if you have a compliment, I'm sure I'd enjoy it.
But when I did the you're sitting in the class and you're going to take a test, I'd love you tell me how powerful that was.
Because as I was doing it, even I could feel it.
Like you can actually feel good persuasion.
You just feel it more than you think it.
And I wondered if you could feel that.
Okay, getting a lot of yeses.
Good.
And that should be one of the best lessons you've ever gotten on persuasion because I actually brought you into it.
I didn't just tell you about it.
I brought you into the center of the persuasion and you could feel what it was like from the inside.
Pretty amazing.
All right, before I go to my beloveds on locals, I'll give you a little update.
I don't know if this is temporary or not, but today is the first day in memory, probably since June at least, that I've not been in pain in the morning.
I'm not in pain.
There's not a single part of my body that hurts right now.
And that is really rare.
If you've got advanced cancer, that's really rare.
I'm not in any pain meds, no pain meds right now, nothing at all.
And I don't have any pain.
So I don't know if that means everything's working.
See, here's the trick.
The trick is that cancer is highly variable.
So for no reason at all, things will hurt like crazy.
But then a day later, you won't be in pain.
Or the pain will move from one part of your body to a completely different one.
So cancer is real tricky.
So the fact that at the moment it doesn't hurt like crazy, yesterday it hurt like crazy.
I was in so much pain at exactly this time yesterday.
It's hard to even describe.
I bluffed my way through the podcast, but boy, did it hurt.
Moment, no pain at all.
Now I've taken the radiation on my back, just one spot, not my whole body.
That may have worked.
I took the Pluvicto, just the first of what will be six doses.
It's a little too early for that to work, but if it would work, I might see the first indications of it after a week and spend a week.
But also I did the bio shield with Dr. Sun Shun.
And the BioShield should also take a week or two before you see any difference and spend, what, a week and a half?
So we're right on the, just on the cusp of where I can say it's probably more related to the treatments than it is to some just ordinary variability.
But I can't quite say that yet.
We're not quite there.
But we're right on the edge of, I wish I could say, oh, this shit's working.
It might be.
Yeah, I don't really have a second explanation why I'm not in pain.
