Tesla changing the world, especially healthcare. And lots more...~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Dilbert New Artist, Hemp Loopholes, Trump's BBC Options, Trump's Healthcare Plan, Confusopoly, Illustrating Healthcare Solution, Robot Medical Healthcare, Elon Musk, Tesla American Parts, Tesla AI5 Chip, US Overspending Doom, Bill Maher's Truth Search, Mayor Mamdani, Trump's MTG Endorsement Retraction, MAHA Calley Means, Bad-Bureaucrat Instruction Manual, Epstein Files Release, Virginia Giuffre, Reid Hoffman, Jaime Raskin, Scott Adams
This is when all the lazy podcasters take the days off.
Not me.
No, I'm here for you.
And today we're going to have a show like, oh my goodness.
Oh my goodness.
It's going to be so good.
You'll barely be able to stand it.
Let us prepare for all this goodness while you stream in.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper mugger, a glass of tanker chels, a style of canteen, jugger, flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go.
Oh, feel that oxytocin surging through your veins.
I think it's time to do a reframe.
What do you think?
A reframe from my book?
Reframe Your Brain, the best reviewed book I've ever written.
And changes lives everywhere.
All right, a reframe is meant to change your life with just a simple sentence that makes you think about something differently.
Not all the reframes are for every person, but you might find one that's just for you.
All right.
Today's reframe is the old way of looking at things is that confidence is something you're born with.
Do you ever look at somebody who seemed confident and you said to yourself, man, I sure wish I were that confident?
Well, instead of thinking that confidence is something you're born with, which I do not observe to be necessarily true, except for a very few people, confidence is something you learn.
Confidence is a learned skill.
I would say that I'm very much in that category.
So how many of you would define me as confident, at least in the way that I present myself in public?
I present myself as confident, right?
That's because in public I only do things I'm good at.
Why would I do something I'm bad at in public?
So confidence is really just about being good at something.
That's it.
Just become good at something and then watch how confident you are.
And then if you act less confident about something you're legitimately inexperienced at, that's not really a flaw.
That's just you being accurate in your assessment of your abilities.
So confidence is something you develop.
It's not something you're born with.
And that will help you get through those unconfident periods because you'll know there's nothing wrong with you.
You're either good at something or you're not.
And that would be the proper viewpoint.
All right.
I was looking at the Dilbert calendar the other day, the brand new Dilburgh calendar for 2026, the best thing that ever happened in the world of calendars.
And I was thinking to myself, God, this is so well done.
How could it possibly be better?
I mean, there's really no way it could be better, right?
Wait.
Wait.
I've got an idea.
Usually the calendars have comics on one side.
Work with me here?
What if?
What if?
What if they had comics on both sides?
I know, I know, I know.
Settle down, settle down.
Look how cool that would be.
So you see your comic, right?
And you'd be like, wow, that's a Dilbert comic.
I'm so happy.
Wait for it.
Wait for it.
Oh my God, there's another comic.
There are comics on both sides of these pages, people.
Both sides.
One is the Dilbert.
Reborn that's a little bit spicier.
The other side is the classics, which you're used to.
But, oh my God.
Well, now it would be fair to say there is no way for this calendar to be better.
I mean, really.
The only thing I can even imagine is if it came with its own kind of easel or something.
I mean, imagine if it came with its own little holder.
I mean, it's almost too good to...
Wait.
Wait a minute.
What is this?
It comes with its own holder.
Oh, my goodness.
People, it comes with its own holder.
Just put that in there.
You put that in there.
You put your calendar on here if it were outside the box instead of inside the box.
Well, that's almost too much.
I might faint just from the goodness of it all.
All right, I'm back.
All right.
Well, after the show today, Owen Gregorian will have his spaces after party.
So go look for Owen Gregorian after the show.
He'll have it up and running a few minutes after we're done.
All right.
Today is kind of a big day for me.
So I've got an announcement to make.
The last day that I will draw Dilbert with my own hand is yesterday.
I probably, but I don't know this for sure, probably will never draw Dilbert again because both of my hands have now crapped out.
Now, when I was young, people who know me well can testify, that I had one irrational fear in life.
Oh, by the way, the comic will continue.
I'll just, I'll write it.
But my art director will do the finished art as well as the first draft.
So I'll basically describe it to her.
By the way, she's been drawing it for years.
So my art director has been doing the finished art for years.
She knows how to do it really well, better than me.
So all I do is say which characters are there, what expressions they have, and then I take a look at it to make sure that I communicated well.
So as of today, today's comic is drawn by my assistant.
And if you want to see how that looks compared to my drawing, you're going to find out that she's a better artist than I am.
But it won't look different to you because, like I said, she's been drawing it for years.
So it's not going to look different at all.
You won't even notice.
But it's a full disclosure.
Now, let me tell you the bad coincidence.
So ever since I was young, I had an irrational fear, two of them really.
One was drowning, just an irrational fear.
And the other was something happening to my hands.
That's why I taught myself to draw left-handed.
Because I thought, you know, I don't want to have to risk.
Very unusual for an artist to teach themselves to draw with both hands.
I've never even heard of it.
But I had this irrational fear that I would lose the ability to draw with one hand.
So I taught myself to draw left-handed, which I have for now a while.
But my right hand got burned out by something called a focal dystonia.
It's actually the same problem I had with my voice.
It's a spasm in a muscle from overuse.
So it has nothing to do with that other thing that people get in their hand.
It has nothing to do with any other thing.
It's a focal dystonia, is what it's called.
So when I got the focal dystonia, I moved to my left hand.
But more recently, the last month or two, my left hand has become paralyzed from presumably a, I don't know, I'm guessing a tumor that's laying on some nerve or something.
So try to calculate these odds.
What are the odds that I would be, first of all, obsessed with not having a problem with my hands, and then I would have two separate problems at the same time that had nothing to do with each other.
What are the odds of that?
Because I'll bet not one of you wakes up in the morning worried about your hands.
I'm the only one.
The only one worrying about it, and both hands got taken out at the same time by completely different situations.
But if you know anything about me, I'm not much of a quitter.
So I'm going to try to get rid of this cancer if I can, see if anything normalizes.
I don't know.
I'm not expecting it to, but it might.
All right, moving on.
Why do I have that on my list?
That wasn't interesting.
Oh, I told you some incorrect things about the new law about hemp.
There's some apparently Congress was looking at making hemp illegal, and I thought, oh, this is some trick they're using just to make marijuana illegal.
And that was my take on it.
That was all wrong.
That was all fake news.
There is a change on hemp, but I'm told that from somebody named Ben Groves, hmm, is that a real name?
Who told me on X that the real purpose of it was to close some loopholes.
Apparently, people were using the hemp agricultural laws to do some things that were more about THC than hemp.
And if you were using the hemp laws to get around some THC regulations, that's not cool.
So it looks like that's what they were after.
But we'll see.
You know what?
Do you ever wonder how the average person understands the world?
I feel like most of you are above average.
You know, if you can find this podcast and this is the kind of content you'd want to watch.
If you're even listening to this content, you're above average in intelligence.
This is not, I mean, honestly, this is not really the podcast for the average people.
We talk about some intellectually interesting things.
So most of you are smarter than the normal.
But even so, the government has turned into a confusopoly, a word that I invented 25 years ago.
And a confusopoly means that the consumer doesn't know what's a good deal and what's a bad deal because everything's too complicated.
And that's where we're at.
The government has become a confusopoly.
Now, why does that work so well for the politicians?
Because the politicians only have to confuse you to stay in power.
If they did not confuse you, then you would know exactly what they were promoting, and you might even know if it worked or didn't work.
That's no good.
The politicians don't want you to be able to measure their effectiveness because you would measure it maybe less than they would.
So they'd rather have a big confusing situation where both sides could say they have the better health care plan.
Both sides could say they've got the better idea for bringing down prices.
So as long as both sides can make claims that are confusing and you can't discern what's true, then everybody can stay in power.
So confusion is not an accident in government or in business.
Confusion often, probably more often than any other reason, is for the purpose of making you unable to discern what's going on.
That's his purpose.
Anyway, I was waiting for either Jonathan Turley or Dershowitz to weigh in on this British broadcasting story.
Trump is apparently going to sue them for a billion dollars.
He hasn't decided yet.
Probably be a lot.
And Turley says that he disagrees with friends and colleagues who have suggested that this would be an easy case to prove in a U.S. court.
So what would be proven or not is Trump would say that they defamed him, I guess that's the right word, defamed, and that they did it intentionally.
So the intentional part, or at least the should have known, I think that ends up being the same.
It's either intentional or you should have known it was going to happen.
I think they both apply.
But this is legal stuff.
I'm not good at it.
So listen to your podcasters who have also been lawyers, because it turns out there's a lot of them.
There's a lot of podcasters, especially on the right, who at one point were lawyers.
I guess they're still lawyers.
But do you agree?
Do you think it would be difficult to make the case?
I believe it might be nearly impossible.
So I'm going to agree with Turley, which I always do, by the way.
Full disclosure: if I had a different opinion than Jonathan Turley on a legal question, I would immediately abandon my position.
The minute I found out he had a different opinion, I'd be like, what's his opinion?
Okay, that's my opinion now.
Same with Dershowitz.
I would just abandon my opinion immediately if they disagree.
But I also think that the problem here is not that it happened.
That part will be easy to demonstrate.
And not that they didn't know about it.
They might be able to prove that whoever did it was completely aware of what they were doing in the sense that they knew it wasn't an exact quote.
But I think you have to go further to make your case.
And I believe you have to show that you intentionally were trying to cause damage.
As far as I know, there's no document that shows that, right?
Is there any BBC email or text that says anything like, well, we'll do it this way to damage Trump?
I don't think that exists.
And without that, I don't really know how you could win that case.
But does Trump need to win?
He does not.
Trump does not need to win.
He's created a situation where the threat alone might cause him to settle.
And even if they don't settle and they decide to fight it out, everybody else is going to look at it and say, oh, that's some trouble I don't want.
So I think Trump wins in every scenario, simply by putting the fear of lawsuits into his enemies.
That feels like a really useful thing to do if you're him.
You know, in general, I would think it would be a little unethical to just use the fear of the courts as your main tool.
But in his specific case, where he's been lawfared from top to bottom and impeached, and every other weasel thing happened to him, in his case, yeah, he can use the threat.
I think that would be totally appropriate, even if he makes some money on it.
Well, you've all been wondering why Trump had been so worthless on healthcare, right?
And you kept saying, Well, you know, it's not enough to say Obamacare is bad.
We're going to agree with you on that, but you're going to have to suggest something that's not bad, i.e., your job as the government.
And so, Trump now has an outline for replacing what he calls a stupid Obamacare.
And the key to that, according to modernity, Steve Watson's writing about it, the key to it is instead of giving money to insurance companies, he would, or to yeah, he would give it to the patients, and then they could shop around, and then the free market would kick in because the customers would have some kind of transparency on prices.
I think that's part of it somewhere.
And the free market would lower costs.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that if the only thing that he did was change who has the money in their pocket, that that would change the cost of healthcare?
Maybe over time, but probably not.
It doesn't really look like it was a game changer, does it?
To you?
All right.
So I feel like that's a little less than we need.
And then other people said if you get rid of Obamacare, then insurance companies won't take the high-risk people because they wouldn't have to.
Part of Obamacare is that they have to take the high-risk people, right?
They have to.
And that's partly what raises costs.
Well, so that would just recreate that problem if Obamacare is scrapped.
I don't know what we do about that.
And then I'm going to go back to my confusopoly theme.
Right.
So now I've described to you a Trumpian kind of approach, which is free market and who you give the money to, and then you wait, blah, blah, blah.
Now, there are other parts to it, but do you think you could actually compare that to the alternative?
Or would it all just be confusing?
I can't do it.
I mean, I feel like I'm reasonably bright and I actually care about the topic.
And I've looked into it at various times at various depths, but I have no idea.
I have no idea how to fix it.
I have no idea if Trump has the best idea I've ever heard.
I have no idea if there's some better way to fix Obamacare.
And neither do you.
Do we agree?
We're just out of our depth, but so is everybody else.
And if someone were not out of their depth and they really, really understood this and had a great idea and brought it to you, you wouldn't know it was a great idea.
So how do you get from here to there if none of us could even evaluate the quality of the idea, which I think is where we're at?
It wouldn't be enough that there are some experts who could tell the difference.
I don't even know if that's true.
I kind of doubt it.
I think even the experts would be guessing on this one.
But a very interesting thing happened yesterday.
I don't know if any of you noticed.
So yesterday at my podcast, do you remember what I said about healthcare?
So get the timing of this just because it's more fun this way.
I was sort of frustrated and I said the only way I can even imagine we would get affordable health care without ruining the country is that Tesla would start a robot hospital, a robot hospital.
Because Elon had said we're getting closer and closer to the robot surgeon that will be way better than a human.
Well, I don't know how far away we are, but if we could save ourselves on healthcare within several years, would that be soon enough?
If we could get way low-cost healthcare with robots in, let's say, five years, would we already be bankrupt by then?
It'd be kind of close.
So here's what I'd like to see.
I've taught you this persuasion trick before, right?
Here's a really important persuasion trick.
hope someone in the administration is paying attention um and i'm gonna i'm gonna put this in the so this is something i learned in my corporate days And it goes like this.
Whoever does the best job of making a picture about the situation essentially rules the day.
If you could come up with a graph of, let's say, climate change, would that change anything?
Oh, yeah.
Those climate change graphs changed everything.
Just everything.
When you see a graph of our national debt going through the ceiling, does that change anything?
Oh, it does.
It does.
Because when you see the picture, it just changes everything.
Now, let's talk about healthcare.
Who has a picture of healthcare as a solution?
Nobody.
There's no picture that would show how we could ever survive healthcare costs the way they are and the way they will be.
There's no picture.
And so that means that that space is completely available for persuasion, which means that the team that's really good at this stuff, which would be the Republicans, they have the wide open space.
And there's a specific picture that they need to create.
And I'm going to describe it now, but my hands don't work, so I'm not going to draw the picture.
So I'd like to see somebody take a run at it.
And if several people take a run at it, we'll just pick the best one.
But here's what the picture should show.
It should show healthcare costs in the United States with a little bit of history so that you can see them zooming to the sky.
Maybe, maybe, you also show the national debt screaming into unsustainable territory.
And that would be the do-nothing scenario.
But if you want to make a story where we're saved by robots, which by the way, I think is nearly guaranteed, it's closer to guaranteed, if you wait long enough, than it is to maybe.
Would you agree with that statement?
That the idea of robot medical care, it's not an if.
It's definitely coming.
We don't know if it's a year or five years or 10 years, but it's definitely coming.
So you pick a time that seems reasonable.
Five years?
Five years, maybe?
Ten?
And then you show that the expenses for healthcare are going through the roof.
And then in that fifth or tenth year, whatever you thought was reasonable, you show a plateau.
You know, it's not completely flat, but it flattens.
And then you show it dropping down.
Now, why would you show that?
Because we feel right now that healthcare is hopeless, that there's nothing gonna happen except it will go up unless we just take people off of healthcare, which we don't really want to do, right?
We'd like everybody to be on there.
So, I'd like one good persuasive picture that shows that we do have a path out, and it goes through probably Tesla.
I mean, you could even label it Tesla.
Now, I don't know that Elon would object to the idea that either his company or one like it or other companies in that domain would be the only way out, the only way out.
There's no second way to do this.
If there were a second way to do it, it'd be a whole different situation.
There's not.
There might be one way, and we might be lucky enough to be alive when that one opportunity just happens to come along.
So, if you want to change the world, make one persuasive picture that shows, yes, we're in total trouble now.
In the short run, we'll just fund it, as expensive as it is.
But we're going to try as hard as possible to make sure that Elon's vision of a robot, nearly free healthcare world happens.
And that might require some private plus government coordination.
I know you don't like the government part, but usually you need it.
All right, what do you think of that idea?
So, you've been living in this world where healthcare is the biggest problem, it looks like, but I just offered you something that looks like a solution, but you'd still have to way overpay for five to ten years before you got there.
That's still better than no solution, right?
Even if it takes a few years, because you could subsidize it if you knew we were rapidly approaching the place where robots make everything almost free.
That's what Elon thinks.
That we'll get to the point where of such abundance, because of robots and AI, that everybody will have everything.
So, anyway, you got really quiet in the comments.
I can't tell if you think that's a good idea or you're thinking about it.
Well, here's the way you should evaluate it: there's some idiot who just keeps writing an all-cap stupid idea.
So, you know, I know what the NPCs are going to say.
Scott, I'm an NPC, and the important thing is that the government should not be involved in anything.
Scott, I'm an NPC, and you can't give Elon Musk any more sway over the economy.
Scott.
All right, so we'll forget about you, all caps guy.
All right, let me just make sure I'm seeing your comments here.
Womb up, bump, boom.
All right, but you here's the way to evaluate that: you should not evaluate it based on a perfect idea.
That's what the NPCs do.
Did I suggest a perfect idea?
No, no, it's not perfect.
Did I suggest an idea that we hadn't seriously thought about?
Yes.
Is it an idea that you could imagine?
It takes some imagination, that you could imagine it could help work things out and we'd all get healthcare?
Yes, you can imagine it, right?
So, if there's literally one and only one plan on the table, and I believe there is, it's this: We overpay for healthcare in the short run, just so we have it, but we work as hard and as fast as possible to make sure that the cost of healthcare drops to zero or close to it with robots.
You tell me you have a better idea, and you know what I'm going to say?
That's a confusopoly.
Is my idea confusing?
Does everybody understand?
Short run, you overpay.
Everybody knows what overpaying is.
Long run, robots come in and lower the cost.
Everybody knows what a robot is.
Everybody knows what lowering costs is.
So now I have the simplest idea, the easiest one to explain.
It covers the short run, which is going to be unpleasant, but that would be true of every plan.
In every plan, the short run is unpleasant.
So if you say to me, but Scott, you've solved nothing in the short run, I would say that is common to all the plans.
Nobody has a short-term plan.
But if there's only one long-term plan, you're going to have to beat it, right?
You're going to have to come up with an idea that's better than that.
Now, I haven't heard one.
Have you?
So here's the interesting thing: that just three hours after I said the only way to solve this is Tesla robot hospitals, that's basically what Elon said at a convention he was at.
He said, basically, he said that doctors don't grow on trees, but that they will be built in factories, which is a great line.
Let me say it again.
This is just a great line.
That doctors don't grow on trees, but in the robot world, they will be built in factories.
That's a really good reframe.
All right.
There was a whole bunch of other Tesla news I thought was interesting.
I didn't know this, but apparently Tesla is moving quickly toward its American-built cars having no Chinese parts.
Now, that's only for the American-built cars.
How smart is it that Tesla is moving first to make just the American-built cars have no Chinese parts?
Well, I think that's really smart because if something blows up in the supply chain, you'd certainly want America to be something you could, let's say, retreat to and say, all right, well, we still have America.
So it would still be a viable company and you could build from there.
So yes, that's exactly where you want to start with no Chinese parts, American-built cars, because they build cars in other countries.
And also, Elon Musk says that they've mapped down a plan to put 100 gigawatts per year of solar-powered AI satellites into orbit.
I saw this on a post by Nick Cruz-Patain, who's a real good follow on all the Tesla stuff.
Nick Cruz-Patain.
Anyway, this is what Elon said.
He said, we see a path to putting 100 gigawatts per year of solar powered.
I think that's like a quarter of all the energy used in the entire country.
And he's looking to put that much up per year because the amount of energy we're going to use is almost incalculable.
So we're not going to have too much.
And apparently what they can do is just put a bunch of satellites in the air and network them together, which they already know how to do.
They have all the components for that.
And he pointed out that the United States consumes roughly 460 gigawatts on average per year.
So he wants to put 100 gigawatts into the air every year over the United States when we're only using, so it's like a little more or a little less than a quarter of that.
Anyway, and he says we have a plan mapped out to do it, so it gets crazy.
So this is not hypothetical.
It's not hypothetical.
He's literally going to make Tesla the biggest energy company in the world.
It looks like it's going to happen any moment now.
Now, I want to give credit to the person who made this recommendation to me several years ago, but I think I'll wait to talk to him to see if he wants his name mentioned.
But a very successful investor once said on X that you should look at Tesla as an energy company.
And I thought to myself, what?
An energy company?
I don't quite get that.
Now I get it.
Now I get it.
He could very easily, the energy company could be, I don't know, it could be bigger than robots, I imagine.
So we'll see.
Anyway, I'll ask if I can use his name because that was a really interesting reframe that Tesla was an energy company.
Well, also, Tesla, they're designing something called the A5 chip that they will use in their robots and their cars.
But what's interesting is, I guess they had some problems trying to make this chip.
And they had two chip projects going on at the same time.
And Elon decided to collapse them into one program, which is now doing better.
I think he got involved directly, as he likes to do, and maybe work that out.
But he actually predicts that their chip would be better than NVIDIA's, and that it would be 10% the cost of an NVIDIA chip, and two to three times, at least he said, two to three times better.
What?
Wait, what?
Are you serious?
Are you telling me that NVIDIA is like the class of all chip-making people?
Nobody can even copy them.
They're so good.
They're uncopyable.
The entire country of China, with all of its technical prowess, can't match NVIDIA.
And Elon just sits there in a chair.
They turn the camera on.
He's like, yeah, we're building one that's two to three times better, and it'll be about 10% of the cost.
Wait, what?
What?
Are you serious?
10% of the cost and 2 to 2 times better than the best thing that's ever existed?
Is that even possible?
Yes.
Yep.
If anyone else said that, wouldn't you say, yeah, sure.
Prove it.
You might not bet against it, but you wouldn't think it's likely, would you?
But when Elon Musk, who, as far as I know, is not known as a chip designer, manufacturer, fab kind of a guy, he just enters the market and he's going to completely dominate it in how long?
A few months?
How long is that going to take?
I don't even know how to evaluate that.
That is such a big claim, but yet possible.
So everything that you think you can predict about AI and robots in the future and healthcare, I don't think any of this is predictable because who saw this coming?
Who saw that coming?
Anyway, so at that same event, that's where Elon said that they do plan to build robot hospitals.
So I wasn't crazy that that might be our only path out.
Now, I think Elon's been quiet about this.
He's got so many things going on that he has lots to talk about no matter where he is and what he's talking about.
So it could be that he's just waiting for the right time.
Maybe this is the right time.
But my goodness, he's going to solve healthcare, energy, and chips, and robots, and self-driving cars.
And that's just this year?
What's he going to do next year?
Good lord.
Anyway.
So that's happening.
I would go further and say that unless we use robots to solve our health care and our affordability, that we're heading towards certain doom.
The civilization is on a path toward guaranteed destruction by essentially overspending.
If we just keep doing what we're doing, or if we even try to tweak it a little bit, we're all dead, basically.
It's not a tweakable situation.
You would have to do something so fundamentally different than what the economy is doing now, or you'd have no chance of survival, really.
You would just spend ourselves into oblivion.
But with robots, suddenly we do have a path out.
And it's not a crazy path.
It's one that looks like something the smart people can figure out.
So watching the smart people try to save civilization is kind of inspiring.
You know what I mean?
Because, you know, if let's say you were one of the captains of industry, you know, you're a Musk or a Bezos or you're a Mark Cuban or, you know, you can throw in some other names.
Wouldn't you feel a responsibility to save the world?
Because it looks like it's not going to save itself.
And there's a very small group of people who might have the capability to really get in there and re-engineer things.
If I were in that situation, I would feel that I had to get involved.
It looks like that's what's driving Elon.
He must be completely aware that nobody else is going to solve this problem.
And maybe, maybe somebody else could, but I wouldn't be betting on it.
Anyway, robots are coming.
Elon also said he doesn't own any vacation homes.
He just has one medium-sized house in Austin and a tiny one at Starbase.
And when he takes his friends there, they don't believe it's real.
They think it's a prank.
Really?
This is your house?
How much would you love to see his medium-sized house?
I would love that.
That would be better than a museum.
Like, just look around.
It's like, okay, what kind of games you got?
It'd be so interesting.
Well, Bill Maher was on last night, and then we can all be mad at each other because mentioning Bill Maher gives him more attention.
Some of you don't like it if he gets too much attention.
But I love watching his arc of figuring out what is real and what isn't.
That's really interesting to me because he's doing a really good job of trying to burrow through the bullshit to get to some kind of truth.
He's not at truth.
He's definitely not there.
But the amount of effort and risk he's putting into trying to find there is actually inspiring.
And I appreciate the risk he takes to try to find it.
So last night on his show, he went after Zoran Mumdami pretty hard with a brutal history on socialism and how it always fails and ends up in disaster.
And he was very clear that Momgani is a disaster waiting to happen.
That's their side, right?
Now, do you respect that?
Do you respect that Bill Maher is taking the darling of his own team and saying, don't you understand that this is not just a problem, but you're talking about the end of civilization if this kind of thinking takes over.
And that's exactly what I'd like to see coming from the people who can make a difference.
And Maher is somebody who can make a difference.
So I guess President Trump said he's withdrawing his support from Marjorie Taylor Greene because she's not supportive enough of him.
And I wasn't sure what that was all about besides the Epstein files.
She wants all the Epstein files released.
He doesn't.
But also the Democrats don't want them released.
The Democrats just voted against releasing them, right?
So in what world do Trump and the Democrats come down on the same side?
That they both don't want to release the Epstein files?
Now, I'm told that the Democrats have some, you know, word salad-y negotiating thing that's the reason they said no to releasing them.
Like they're trying to guess something in return.
But that didn't sound real to me.
It sounded like an excuse not to release them.
Everything sounds like an excuse not to release them, actually, no matter who you're talking to.
Anyway, so the other differences with Marjorie Taylor Greene and the president are involvement in foreign wars such as Gaza, the Epstein files, healthcare.
She thinks he should do more on health care, as do all of us, and inflation and prices and stuff like that.
But I don't know what else he could be doing, frankly.
Don't know what he could be doing.
But here's my take on all that.
I feel like I'm not going to take sides on any of that.
I just don't like taking sides when I like both sides.
I like President Trump.
And I like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And I like a lot of the people who are battling each other, you know, Candace against whoever and Tucker against whoever.
So it's hard for me to get past, especially the ones I've met.
A few of them I've met personally.
Once you meet somebody personally and they're nice to you and they're warm and they're completely open to you, it's really hard to slam them in public.
I know that's, you could argue that's, you know, sort of what I should be doing, but I don't know.
I just can't do it.
Just can't do it.
So I'm going to, I'm just going to say of all the all the personal drama, you might want to pay attention to it for fun, but wouldn't take it too seriously.
It just weakens your own team.
So don't take it too seriously.
Do you know who Kelly means is?
I guess he would be an activist.
I hope that's the right word.
He wouldn't mind.
An activist against big pharma and big food and some of their abuses.
Anyway, here's a claim he made.
He was talking to Megan Kelly at some event about the Make America Healthy Again movement.
He said that there's this is unbelievable.
I mean, I believe it because of the source.
But he says there's a CIA manuals being sent to all employees in the Make America Healthy sort of world.
And they're sending around this CIA manual called I can't believe this is true.
It's a little too on the nose, but the source is good.
So, but it is too on the nose.
This allegedly, the CIA manual is how to be a bad bureaucrat and subvert an institution from within.
Okay, I think I'm talking myself out of believing this.
Isn't that a little bit too little too perfect?
Right?
So, I'm going to put a question mark on this.
I do believe that Kelly means his high credibility.
I don't believe that he would mislead you intentionally.
That's not his thing at all.
So, but he could have some bad information.
Anybody could.
And apparently, people are saying that 90% of the employees at Health and Human Services are talking about this thing.
And they're afraid that RFK Jr. and Trump are anti-science, so they have to save the planet from these anti-science guys.
I don't know.
So I guess I'm going to put a question mark on this one.
And the question mark is not about the people involved.
I think they're all high credibility and high-value added people.
I just don't know if the document is real.
It might exist, but it doesn't mean it came from the CIA.
I don't know if they would even deny it.
Anyway, as you know, there's a whole bunch of Epstein files got released.
20,000 files with 1,500 Trump mentions.
1,500 Trump mentions?
Now, I realize people talk about Trump a lot, but even my emails don't have 1,500 Trump messages.
And I talk about them all the time.
1,500?
I don't know.
And Alan Dershowitz was saying on a podcast that the media is intentionally twisting the facts of the Epstein case to smear Trump.
And he gives an example.
He said that the newly surfaced emails, there's one detail that the press leaves out.
Now, when I tell you what the press leaves out, you're going to shake your head.
And some of you are lost in the confusopoly of this story.
So you may have missed this little point.
Here's just a minor point.
One of the most damning and provocative things so far is the claim that Virginia Jeffrey, Joffrey, she was one of the known victims of Epstein, that there's a claim that Trump spent hours with her.
It's also true that Virginia Joffrey has said publicly that she never met Trump.
So her claim, before she passed away tragically recently, her claim is that she never met him.
But apparently there's something in some document that said they spent hours together.
Who do you believe?
I feel like I believe her, or at least it adds enough doubt into the story that you should put that in there.
But can you believe that the media doesn't mention that she's denied ever meeting him, much less spending hours with him?
So, I mean, it's not like you would forget if you'd met Trump and spent several hours with him.
You wouldn't forget.
So I agree with Dershowitz.
That sounds like an intentional smearing of Trump.
I saw PJ media saying this says it all, that the Democrats blocked the release of the Epstein files.
Matt Margolis is writing about this.
What do you think that's telling you?
The fact that the Democrats didn't want it released, is it telling you that there's nothing damning about Trump?
Because if they released it, you could see there's nothing damning?
Or what?
Like, why would they not release it?
They would be better off with the uncertainty that there's something in there if they knew for sure there was nothing in there.
And as many have pointed out, I think Matt does too, that if there was anything in there that was bad for Trump, you think the Democrats wouldn't have already found it and released it?
So there's a strong suggestion that there's nothing about Trump that's bad.
So why would Trump want it not to be released?
Well, Dershowitz gives you the perfect reason.
According to Dershowitz, if you release real information, the illegitimate press will just change it and act like it's something it's not.
That's what they did with the Virginia Joffrey thing.
They took a real thing and they just changed it to a fake thing.
And nobody's going to research it.
So they're just going to turn it on the news.
They're going to hear MSNBC's version of it.
They're going to turn it off and think that's the reality.
But not.
So, yeah, so why would the Democrats block it unless they were up to no good?
They wouldn't block it to protect Trump.
So therefore, there must be nothing in there that would hurt him.
But there might be things in there that would hurt other people.
And there might be things in there that could be misinterpreted easily, which would be just as much a problem.
Anyway.
Anyway, so Trump, apparently, going on the offense as he likes to.
He's asking the Department of Justice to look into a few billionaires and other just rich people who had connections to Epstein.
And he actually named names.
Now, I wouldn't talk about this except the president named the names.
To me, this sounds totally inappropriate to accuse them because, as far as I know, there's no evidence of specific wrongdoing.
So Trump named Bill Clinton, Reed Hoffman, Larry Summers, and he says JP Morgan Chase.
So I guess that means some executives unnamed.
And he says the records show they spent a lot of time on the island.
I don't know if that's true.
They might have spent more time on the plane than the island.
But as far as I know, none of them have specific claims of wrongdoing, right?
There are people who speculate, but I don't believe there's any like witness or whistleblower or anything like that.
So I'm always uncomfortable naming names when there's just no criminal evidence of anything.
Now, I'm not comfortable with the president asking the Department of Justice to look for a crime when there's not some smoking gun there.
And I don't know, is it smoking gun enough that they spend time together?
Well, it would if you were in a cartel, right?
If you were a cartel member, or let's say somebody discovered you were in a cartel, you don't think that maybe they'd get a little extra scrutiny?
Yeah.
So it makes sense that your associations might raise a red flag, but is this enough of a red flag?
Now, I'm curious, so I would like to know the answer too.
But I don't know, this gets mighty close, mighty close to violating some kind of basic right, but I'm no lawyer.
So we don't know if Trump's going strictly for revenge, it's a distraction, it'd be a good distraction, or is it a warning to other people who might be in the file that you better help me keep that sealed?
It might be a warning to the people in the file.
It might be his way to tell these three or four people on this particular issue, we're sort of on the same page.
And if you don't want to be the one who's investigated, you might want to join me in saying these should not be released.
But what did Reid Hoffman do?
Cleverly, Reid Hoffman said today, Trump should release all the Epstein files, every person in every document.
And he sort of suggested that Trump was using these rich Democrats as sort of a stalling technique.
So he was just stalling.
Maybe, maybe.
So I think Reid Hoffman played it right because he might know that they're not going to be released, which would be playing it right.
Because then he looks innocent because he's calling for full transparency.
Whoever it is who calls for full transparency, you just assume they must be innocent.
So if he knows that no matter what he says or does, they're not going to be released anyway, and he might know that, then the best play you could ever make is to say, release those files.
They should all be released.
That would be a good play.
But again, I say there's no evidence whatsoever that any of the people named, including Reed Hoffman, did anything inappropriate or illegal on the island.
All right.
Apparently, some prison staffers at wherever Jelaine Maxwell is being held at the moment, they hacked into her emails.
I guess that would be prison emails, and then gave the copies of her emails to Representative Raskin.
Have you noticed that wherever Raskin is, there's something sketchy happening?
Every time you see his name, you're like, oh, God, this is going to be sketchy.
And sure enough, he claimed to be a whistleblower.
I don't know if that's a legitimate claim, but under that umbrella, he got these emails.
And what did it say?
And I guess the staffers who did this were fired, the ones who leaked it.
And it said something that was interesting.
The release is...
Was there nothing in the emails?
Maybe the emails were so uninteresting that I didn't care.
I went.
Oh, I guess the emails sort of suggested, according to Raskin, that she was angling for a pardon or taber sentence commuted.
To which I say, how's that a story?
If you were in jail for, you know, lots of years and lots of years to go, aren't you always angling for a commutation or a pardon?
Wouldn't it be more of a story if you were not?
Now, I'm going to use my George Carlin example again, where he says, you don't have to actually say the words to somebody you're colluding with if they know what you need.
Obviously, the Trump administration knows she would like a pardon or a commutation, right?
Obviously.
You know it, I know it.
Everybody knows it.
Would they have to say it?
Would it be necessary that she said it directly?
Not really.
We all know that she wants one.
Why wouldn't she?
There's no argument in the other direction.
So, yeah, of course she wants one.
So, that's a nothing story, except for the Raskin part being a weasel.
Germany's buying $150 million of weapons to give to Ukraine.
It makes me wonder if the cost of warfare is coming down over time.
Because we're in a weird phase of history where we're shifting from tanks and artillery to more drones.
Are the drones cheaper?
Are we getting as much war done?
Ukraine, I guess.
Are they getting as much war done as they would if they spent more money and had more traditional weapons?
So, one of my questions is: is the general cost of warfare, whether it's Ukraine or anything else, is the cost of warfare coming down because the tools are different?
I don't know.
Maybe.
And then I looked up the, I've been obsessed about this a little bit lately.
Why we don't see reporting on the number of casualties anymore.
Have you noticed that?
So, we've got this big war, Ukraine and Russia, and we're worried that it might turn into a world war.
And I don't know how many people are being killed.
Isn't that like super obviously missing in the reporting?
What would be the more important number than, well, this week, X number of Ukrainians were injured and killed?
Why is everybody leaving that out?
So, I went to Grok and started asking some questions.
But then I thought, oh, I don't know if any of these answers are real.
I don't know if it's hallucinating.
Grok did start off by saying that the numbers are totally unreliable.
No matter what source you use, you should take it with a grain of salt.
But I also wondered: what is the range?
Like, can you give me a range at all?
Now, why is somebody writing NOOOL over and over again in my comments?
Like, what's that?
Stop doing that.
It's bugging me.
If it meant something, that'd be better.
But anyway, Grok tells me, and you can fact-check me on this, that something like 3,000 to 10,000 people a week are being killed, some combination of Russians and Ukrainians.
Does that sound right to you?
Do you believe that 3 to 10,000 are dying per week and that they don't report that?
That doesn't seem right.
So I have a suspicion, which is completely without data, that maybe the actual death rate is way lower than we think.
Still terrible, still bad, still lots of injuries.
But it might be, we might have a drone war where there are far more injuries than there are deaths.
Because a lot of the drone stuff is to injure and maim.
It's not all deadly.
So I wonder if we went to, well, we didn't actually kill too many Russians, but we maimed 20,000.
Maybe they wouldn't report that, would they?
So it's a little bit sketchy that somebody, you know, Germany's giving them 150 million, but they probably don't have any idea how many Ukrainians or Russians are dying.
The most important data.
So I saw another survey.
Again, you can't really trust anything that comes out of that area.
That said that in Ukraine, something like 90% of the population has some close contact with somebody who was injured during the war, injured or killed.
90%.
That'll certainly have an impact.
Whereas a survey says Russia has only 30% of its population had some direct family tie to some death or injury.
I don't know if you believe any of those numbers.
But we'll see.
I saw an argument today that I thought was interesting.
There's a Yale professor whose name is we'll get to it.
Markovitz.
And he's got this argument that merit is a myth used to justify inequality.
That the idea of merit is sort of a trick and that there's no such thing as merit.
We just use it to justify our own getting more than other people.
Oh, that chat ended.
That's what's going on.
All right, let's try something else.
This will work.
That works.
Okay.
Much better.
Anyway, so I wondered what is the argument that meritocracy is a myth because most of my worldview is built around meritocracy.
I hate to find out that my worldview is built on the myth.
So I thought, well, I'm going to look into this a little bit.
So there might be a little bit of word salad going on here because, you know, Yale law professor.
But he says that, quote, any idea that merit makes inequality deserved is a circle.
What?
Merit isn't a real virtue.
It's just an ideological conceit constructed to launder otherwise offensive inequalities.
What?
What?
What do any of those words mean?
I feel like if I diagrammed it out, I might be able to understand what he's saying.
But here's a general statement.
If the clearest you can make your argument is this, you don't really have an argument.
No.
No.
Unless you can be a little bit clearer than that.
I'm sorry.
I can't take it too seriously.
But then he had a good point that made me reassess.
He pointed out that merit is highly driven, not entirely, but highly driven by your parental resources.
And then I said, oh, okay.
Now you're talking.
That's a reasonable point of view.
So if you are rich, for example, more likely you will be funded to go to a good school.
You'll be in a good neighborhood.
You know, less crime, less drugs.
I don't know about the drugs.
But there should be a gigantic difference in meritocracy, meaning that some people who have the brains and the ambition will also have the parental backing and some won't.
And that that difference could make all the difference.
That's not a bad, that's not a terrible opinion.
So I started out thinking that I was just going to sort of mock this point of view because I like meritocracy and anybody who's arguing against it is going to be a fool.
But that's actually a reasonably good point, isn't it?
That your meritocracy won't go that far unless you've got some resources behind it.
Now, in my case, I came from a generation where you didn't need that many resources behind it.
You could still work it out.
That would have been my case.
But at the moment, in the current world, yeah, it does seem like the resources your parents put into it are going to drive your success of your meritocracy.
So, wasn't expecting to have my mind changed by that, but maybe it was a little bit.
I mean, I don't know that I would do anything differently, but it changes my frame on it a little bit.
And we are done with the prepared part of my presentation.
Look at my timing, it's amazing.
And Owen Gregorian will be setting up his spaces event in a few minutes.
I'm going to talk to the people on locals privately for a few minutes.
