Trump healthcare plan Ukraine peace deal, lots more~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Chicago Teachers Union Investigation, NYC Repeat Shoplifters, Oakland Repeat Murderers, 3-Strikes Law, Healthcare Price Cuts Act, Campbell's VP, 2026 Battery Technology Prediction, President Trump, Seditious 6 Video, democrat Color Revolution, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, Rep. Jason Crow, Mayor Mamdani, democrat Fascist Smear, US Energy Boom, Amazon Climate Summit, Ukraine Funding, DOGE, Ukraine Negotiations, Tucker Carlson, Andrii Yermak Ukraine, WSJ Allegations, WEF RFK Jr., October 7th Allegations, PM Netanyahu, Thomas Crooks Social Media, 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.
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 to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, whoa, all you need for that is a tanker chalice, a style in a canteen jug, a 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 of the day.
The thing to make say everything, but it's called simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go.
Hmm.
Disgusting.
Don't ever have coffee with prescription medication.
It doesn't go well at all.
All right.
So let me grab my notes and wait.
What's wrong with my notes?
Something happened to my notes.
Oh, it's the 2026 Dilbert calendar that accidentally jumped into my hand to remind you that it's available at Amazon.com.
It's the only place you can get it.
And it's got comics on both sides.
It'll make you so happy.
Well, I can barely express how happy you'll get.
Barely.
All right.
Oh, you're a beast of a man.
I'm no beast.
You're a beast.
All right, let's look at all the interesting stories today.
There's a new theory about why kids are doing poorly in school, as if they needed another reason.
It's the laptops.
So apparently, as we know, if children are allowed to watch television, their brains will rot.
And if children are allowed to have smartphones, their brains will rot.
If they're allowed to have iPads, you know their brains will rot.
However, here's the good news.
If they have laptops, which apparently more and more kids do as they go to school, that's very predictive that they will do poorly in school because apparently they spend a lot of time just messing around on the laptop and not as much time learning.
Did you know that apparently they know that if you write your notes with your hand, as in handwritten notes, that you'll remember your notes better than if you type them?
I knew that.
So one of the things that I used to do is try to activate as many different senses and parts of the brain as I could when I studied, back in my studying days.
So sometimes I'd draw a picture of the thing.
Sometimes I'd, you know, sometimes I'd write it by hand.
Sometimes I'd write it more than once.
So I try to try to just engage every possible physical and mental sense to wrap it around the idea I was trying to remember.
And that's your tip for the day.
Tell your school-aged child how to do that.
All right, here's the most surprising story of the day.
I want you to see if you guess the direction this story will take.
Hmm.
This will be a tough one.
According to the Gateway Pundit, the Chicago Teachers Union has been put on notice because apparently they failed to do a financial audit for half a decade.
That would be five years for those of you who went to Chicago schools.
So let's see.
What do you think happened when the Chicago Teachers Union, who took lots of money from their members and then for five years didn't tell anybody where it went?
Huh.
Chicago Teachers Union, large bunch of money seems to be missing and nobody can say where it went.
What happened?
Well, it's the world's most predictable outcome.
If it's a large organization and they haven't done an audit, guess what?
They stole it.
Is it ever anything else?
Do you think they're just going to find that, hey, oh, wow, this is kind of a surprise.
Turns out we just didn't spend the money.
We have all this money to refund because we just didn't spend it.
No, that probably didn't happen.
I have two ways to look at this.
Number one, the opposite of the word audited is what?
So they were not audited.
What is the opposite of audited?
Embezzled.
If you're now auditing your large pile of money, you're embezzling it every time.
It's not just sitting there doing what you wanted it to do.
Somebody's embezzling it.
All right.
Here's the alternate post.
I was going to do this on X.
So instead of saying the opposite of audited is embezzled, which I thought was pretty clever, fairly clever, I had another post that I thought was almost as good.
It was just, quote, hey, what happened to our unwatched pile of money?
Hey, what happened to our unwatched pile of money?
Well, have I ever taught you anything about unwatched piles of money?
Have I taught you nothing?
If there's an unwatched pile of money and you wait long enough, yeah, it's exactly what you think.
Meanwhile, I saw a story, Wall Street Apes had this on X, that Democrats apparently laundered, that's their word, laundered, $93 billion during the 76 days between when Trump got elected and he took office.
So the Democrats just very quickly distributed $93 billion.
Huh.
I wonder where this story will go.
$93 billion.
Was it audited or was it unaudited?
Hmm.
Hmm.
Seems to have been unaudited.
Unaudited.
So there was a $93 billion pile of money that was unaudited.
How could I ever predict what would happen here?
Oh, I've got an idea.
Is a lot of it missing?
Well, not all of it, Scott.
Don't be so cynical.
It's not all missing.
They did manage to claw back, what, 24 billion.
So only 69 billion left to be recovered.
69 billion.
You know, I don't know if that means that a few people got a lot of billions, or did they just sort of say, all right, who's a Democrat?
You're a Democrat?
Here's $1,000.
How do you even steal $69 billion?
That would take a lot of work.
In other news, yeah, we always talk about repeat offenders with crime.
The city journal is reminding us, I don't know if these numbers are right or real.
They don't even look real.
But allegedly, in New York City, 327 people account for one-third of all shoplifting arrests.
327.
What does that imply for how many committed the crimes?
This is just the arrests.
I mean, you have to try pretty hard to get arrested for shoplifting these days.
And those 327 people have allegedly been arrested 6,000 times.
And then in Oakland, there are allegedly 400 people were responsible for the majority of homicides.
Wait, what?
There are 400 people in Oakland who are responsible for the majority of the homicides?
The majority?
I was frightened to death that there are 400 murderers in the town next to me.
400 murderers?
And apparently they're murdering more than one person.
I don't know the average murderer per murderer, but it looks like they're pretty busy.
You know, I was thinking of becoming a criminal early in my career.
And then I thought, oh, am I going to be one of those lazy criminals who just does a crime or two and then retires or goes to jail?
Or am I going to be one of these industrious serial criminals who robs a thousand banks?
And I thought, well, I don't want to be a lazy criminal.
I'll be one of these ones, these repeat offenders.
Anyway, I'd like to know how many murders apiece the murderers are doing.
All right, here's my.
I remember in California when we had this three strikes law.
So when it was first being contemplated, and I would be reading the news, and I wasn't really that involved with any politics at all.
Wasn't really following politics in any way, and certainly not in the state.
I wasn't following any state politics.
And then I heard people arguing that if you locked up all the repeat offenders after their third offense, it wouldn't make any difference to the crime rate.
And I thought to myself, wait, what?
If you put in jail the people who are doing the crimes, that will not reduce the crime.
Can you explain how that doesn't work?
And the only way that you could explain how locking up the repeat offenders doesn't work is if the people who were not planning to do more crimes compensated by saying, whoa, it looks like they locked up the repeat offenders.
I'm going to have to increase my crime per person to compensate for the locked up repeat offenders.
Otherwise, there isn't really any possible way that locking up the people doing the crimes ends up with the same amount of crime.
That's not really possible.
And here again, I feel like we devolve into that just ridiculousness.
The ridiculousness of imagining that wouldn't work.
It would work.
It would just be really bad for the people getting locked up.
They wouldn't like it at all.
Or maybe they would.
I don't know.
I can't get in the mind of a serial criminal.
Well, speaking of bad behavior, there is a hilarious story of a VP at Campbell's Soups company.
And for some reason, there was an ex, now an ex-employee, who recorded the VP over lunch.
And here are some of the things that the VP of Campbell Soup.
Now, this is a VP of IT, I think.
So it wasn't the marketing guy.
But the VP was caught on caught on audio, I guess, recorded saying, and I quote, we have shit for fucking poor people, meaning that their product is shit for poor people.
He goes, who buys our shit?
I don't buy Campbell's products, barely anymore.
It's not healthy.
Now that I know what the fuck's in it.
Remember, this is a VP at Campbell's Soup.
It's not healthy now that I know what the fuck's in it.
He goes, bioengineered meat.
I don't want to eat a fucking piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer.
That's the actual VP of Campbell's Soup.
Bioengineered meat.
I don't want to eat a fucking piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer.
Well, maybe it's just me, but I'd like to offer that guy a job.
I would love to have an executive who was that honest.
All right.
Apparently, this is all there's some lawsuit by a former employee, but that's pretty bad.
I didn't know you could just record people over lunch.
Kind of depends what state you're in, doesn't it?
In my state, you couldn't do that.
That would be illegal.
All right.
So we'll see where that goes.
That will soon be a Dilbert comic, you know.
Yeah, it will be.
Dilbert comic about one of Dilbert's executives being recorded talking honestly about the products.
Yeah, that's coming.
That's coming.
Well, I saw just before I went live, Eric Doherty was posting about this that Trump is going to introduce maybe tomorrow some kind of healthcare price cuts act.
What do you think that'll be about?
I don't know the details, but a few of the things being mentioned, it would halt Obamacare premium spikes.
I don't know how.
And the plan reportedly includes some kind of deposit mechanism, some kind of health savings account.
Is that a good idea?
I don't know.
It seems like something that might work in the long run, but in year one, you'd have to get those accounts up.
It would also end the premium hikes and zero premium subsidies and stop massive fraud known as quote ghost beneficiaries.
Would it?
Well, I don't know.
It's a big claim.
And Trump recently said, I'm calling today for insurance companies not to be paid, but for this massive amount of money to be paid directly, directly, to the people so they can buy their own health care.
Does anybody understand what that means?
Because I don't.
I have no idea what it means to say you're going to pay the people directly instead of the insurance companies.
Wouldn't that be the same as single-payer insurance?
What does that mean?
If you ignored the insurance companies and you simply had, I don't know, the government, who is it who's paying?
I guess it would be the government paying the people.
I don't know.
So I got lots and lots of questions.
I don't know who is going to take the lead on this program, but I don't think that would make you self-insured, right?
That would make you self-insured in a way.
But you'd still need something like the government backstopping you.
Otherwise, it's not really health insurance.
It's not insurance.
If you're insuring yourself, that's not very much insurance.
Private health costs or what?
Do some of you actually understand this?
I'll try to catch up on it today because I don't have an opinion on any of it yet because it's a little too hard to figure out how it all fits together.
But if the Trump administration puts their best people on explaining it, we might find out soon.
Maybe.
Maybe something's going to happen.
All right.
I'm going to make a bold prediction today.
Bold prediction for technology.
So you know how for the past, I don't know, few years, I've been saying too often, oh, there's a news story about some company making a claim that they can make a battery for cars that last twice as long and blah, blah, blah.
You never see that battery.
And it's usually because it's some kind of lab development, not really a real world development yet.
It would take years for it to reach the real world.
Well, speaking of the real world, over in China, according to Notebook Check, some big China automotive group is announcing that they've developed an actual manufacturing capability for a battery that would go, they say, about twice as far as the current batteries, so about 620 miles.
But everybody knows that's an exaggeration because it's a Chinese battery estimate, which tends to be about one-third higher than reality.
However, this one, they've completed the first large capacity production line.
So now they have the technology, but they're just finishing the tweaking of the production line to actually produce the mass production.
So here's my prediction.
When it comes to technology, there are some technologies and batteries are definitely in that category.
That's why they're interesting to me.
Where a little bit of improvement is just a little bit of improvement.
It's 10% better.
I'll save some money.
Now it's 20% better.
Maybe I'll buy an electric car.
So when you get these 10 and 20% increases in capacity, it's really good and it helps your industry.
And maybe sometimes you can predict that that means things will develop faster in the electric car space, whatever.
But you're going to reach a point, and here's my prediction, that 2026 is when we reach the point, where if you were to double capacity, and a lot of the new battery breakthroughs, they make that claim anyway.
They claim they double capacity.
You don't have to predict which one of them ends up being the dominant one, the one that works.
All you have to know is that there are a whole bunch of technologies that might, if they could figure out how to produce them, double your capacity.
If we were to double our current capacity, it would just change everything.
Suddenly, robots are not just practical.
They're cheap.
Electric cars would be everywhere.
Self-driving cars would be everywhere.
It'd be the only way you'd go anywhere.
And you'd be able to build networks that capture the sun power, and you still have plenty of capacity to make it all the way overnight.
So I think 2026 is going to be the year of the battery.
And I realize that there's a dog not barking in this space, which is I don't believe Tesla brags about their new battery technology too far ahead of time, do they?
When would you ever learn that Tesla came up with a new battery technology and had already built out a mega factory to produce it in mass quantities?
You'd probably find out around the time they opened the factory, right?
I don't know that they would tell you years in advance.
It would take a little while to get that up and running.
So the thing I'm expecting is that Tesla will have a substantial battery upgrade announcement that'll either be announced or implemented in 2026.
So 2026, the year of the battery.
All right, let's see if you could do what I could do, which is anticipate this science.
According to the University of Cambridge, and I want you to listen to this carefully so that you can see if you're as smart as I am.
Apparently, they already knew that improving your diet could improve your weight.
That's something they already knew.
They already knew also that exercise could improve your weight.
So they knew the diet worked and they knew the exercise worked.
So what did they give funding to test?
Well, they got funding to test if you combined eating right with exercise, if the two of them would get you a better result than if you only did one or the other.
What do you think?
I'm not going to tell you the surprising result.
Do you think that if you knew that diet works and you know that exercise works, if you did both of them right, what would happen?
No, Did you get it?
I think one of you buzzed in.
That's right.
If you do two smart things that definitely work and every single person in the world knows it, you're going to get a better result than if you did one thing.
No, really.
Really, I'm not making that up.
That's science.
Well, next time you don't need to do that science, just ask Scott.
So I guess we're still talking about the six Democrats who did that video urging people in the military not to follow any illegal orders.
Have you noticed a pattern?
There's a pattern.
And the pattern is that Democrats consistently find things that didn't need to be done and then they do them.
They're finding new ways to be useless.
What would be more useless than creating a video to remind people in the military not to do the thing that every one of them already knows not to do?
And reminding them also that they should talk to their JAG officer if there's some gray area.
Do you think that short of having that short of having that video by the six Democrats in Congress, that if that had not been made, do you think our military would be out there doing a bunch of illegal orders?
Would they be all confused because they wouldn't know how to handle this?
Or is it the one thing that you all know, whether you're in the military or not in the military?
That would cover everybody.
Is it the one thing that every one of us knows without being told by a special video made by Democrats?
I'm pretty sure they already know it.
Or do you imagine that this is happening all over the military?
Hey, Bob, I was thinking of shooting, maybe murdering one of our compatriots and then stealing his money and then pinning the blame on somebody else.
What do you think?
I don't know.
Would that be illegal?
Oh, yeah, it would be illegal.
It'd be illegal, but is it a good idea?
Hmm.
I don't remember a boot camp, but I'll bet somebody mentioned something about that once.
Don't do illegal orders.
Yeah, no, somebody said that.
I'm positive.
I'm positive that somewhere in my training, they told me not to murder people because it's illegal.
It's illegal.
And you're not allowed to do illegal things just because you're in the military.
Well, why did I even join the military if I'm not allowed to do illegal things?
Well, I don't know.
Sounds like a mistake.
Because I joined it just to do illegal things.
Now, what could be less useful, seriously, what could be less useful than telling people in the military the one thing that every person in the military already knows?
I'll bet you couldn't find one piece of knowledge or information that had as many people knowing that you can't do it.
It'd be hard to match it.
All right, but here are some funny things coming out of that.
Number one, apparently they're getting a nickname, the seditious six.
I saw that on social media.
I don't know if it's catching on yet, but it's very funny.
The seditious six.
Now, I had to check with AI to figure out what seditious means versus, let's see, what are the other words they use around this?
You know, insurrection, sedition, treason.
Those are all the words that they use.
And I guess Trump suggested that if anybody is involved in sedition, they should be executed.
Now, he didn't name them, but people kind of connected the dots and said, hey, I think Trump's saying that maybe they should be executed.
Now, here's the problem.
And you may have spotted this on your own because I've gave you some hints before today.
Have I ever told you, and yes, I have, that you can predict Trump's reaction because he'll always take the strongest path.
Now, that doesn't mean he's serious about it.
And it doesn't mean that that strongest path will ever happen.
But if you're just talking, as in he's talking about what you do about these seditious six, if you're just talking, you can kind of guarantee in advance that if there's one thing to be said that's the strongest thing, even if it's the wrong thing, if it's the strongest thing, you know Trump's going to say it, right?
And so far that's worked out for him.
But it does create this set of evidence that the Democrats would use that he's a fascist authoritarian.
So you can, you see the problem?
So the problem is, if you were to artificially create a situation as a Democrat in which there was no space left for the strongest opinion except for something that's over the line.
Would you consider it over the line to talk about executing members of Congress for making this video that didn't need to be made under the assumption that really the reason for the video is to try to turn the military against the sitting government?
Well, it's a lot of mind-reading that would be involved in that.
So here's the problem.
If the Democrats get smart enough, and I worry that that's what just happened, if they get smart enough, are they not going to realize that they can trap Trump into saying what is over the line by going as close to the line as they can and sort of leaving him not much space for whatever would be the strongest thing to say?
Now, did he say the strongest thing you can say when some members of your government make this kind of a video?
Yeah, that's the strongest thing you can say.
It's not even the law.
It's not even the law that you can execute people for what would be, I guess they would say sedition, which is an unproven allegation at this point, right?
Sedition is not the death penalty.
I didn't know what was, so I had to ask ChatGPT.
Now, if ChatGPT told me the truth and did not hallucinate, then treason could in some cases be the death penalty, but even that would be rare.
And treason is when you're working with a foreign country to undermine your current country.
That's not what's being alleged.
What's being alleged is sedition, which is people within the country trying to change the government outside of the constitutional mechanism.
And then there's insurrection, which would be some version of trying to do it from the inside.
Also, not necessarily implying there's any foreign country involved.
So it's the foreign country involvement that pushes you toward maybe execution.
But even then, probably not.
It would be a rare, rare occurrence.
So here's my open question.
Did the Democrats become suddenly smart enough that they knew that if they did this ridiculous thing that didn't need to be done, which is a video telling the people in the military exactly what every one of them already knew, don't do any illegal things.
Don't follow any illegal orders.
Like, I'm not in the military, and even I knew that.
Is there even one person who's in the comments, let's say, is there one person in the audience right now?
Show me in the comments, who didn't know this?
Whether you've ever been in the military or know anybody who's in the military or had any contact with the military, didn't you know that they're not allowed to do illegal things?
Like, they can't just go murder people because their senior officer told them to.
You all knew that, right?
So if we acknowledge that It's probable, can't read their minds, but it's probable, that the Democrats who made that video were completely aware that it did nothing useful, but that it would bait Trump into saying the strongest thing you would say in that domain.
And the strongest thing you would say is what he said.
And then they got their little food for the day.
Their food for the day is: can we trick him into saying something that we can determine or we can define as being authoritarian or fascist?
Yes.
Yes, we tricked him into saying the strongest thing.
Now, as I told you, it's almost, I think I've said it every time, but maybe that's too strong.
When Trump's instinct is to take the strongest position, even if it's not practical or something that could ever happen in the real world, it still makes him look like the strongest person in every conversation.
And in the long run, that's going to pay off.
Because sometimes you just need a strong leader and you're going to look around and go, all right, oh, well, I don't like everything he's ever said, but I have to admit, we need a strong leader right now, and he can't beat that.
That's the strongest leader we've ever seen, at least in my lifetime.
All right.
So here's my question: How do we know that the Democrats did it just because they're stupid and combined with TDS?
Did they think this was actually something the country needed?
How many of you think that?
Because I'm just thinking, what are the possible explanations for why they even made that video?
Stupid?
Right?
They'd have to be stupid because they'd have to realize that there's no point in it.
It doesn't change anything.
And then, or they just have TDS, or they're stupid and they have TDS.
Does that explain it?
I don't think it does.
Honestly, and I don't know the answer, so I'm just speculating too.
But if I had to guess, I feel like there's somebody over on that team who is smart enough to know that this would be a way to generate these artificial, he's an authoritarian, he's a fascist.
Just look what he did.
We'll keep this in the news forever.
I feel like it's intentional, like it's some kind of a trap they set up.
Now, the real question is this: Can you trap Trump?
Is he trappable?
Well, Megan Kelly found out he wasn't that trappable the first time he did a debate with the Republicans, remember?
The very first debate.
You say these terrible things about women.
That's a trap.
That's a trap.
There's no way you're going to get out of that.
Only Rosie O'Donnell.
Oh, okay.
I guess there is one way to get out of it.
So, while I am sure it's a trap, whether intentional or not, that's still open, but it functions as a trap.
Would you agree?
Everybody agrees with that, right?
Even if it's not intentional on the part of the Democrats, it functions as a trap.
And did Trump walk right into it?
We'll see.
Because I think once he recognizes that it's a trap, and by now he certainly has, of course, he has, he's going to have an unpredictable, which is what he did with the Rosie O'Donnell move.
It's just unpredictable.
He's probably going to have an unpredictable response.
So, what I would look for is what happens next, because to me, it looks like the Democrats had a pretty good play.
It looks like they couldn't possibly be as dumb as they're acting.
So I'm going to guess that they knew what they were doing, or at least one person over there did, and created this situation where they could generate these new headlines that are based on nothing.
They just created a situation that wasn't there.
Pretty clever.
But watching Democrats find new ways to be useless never gets old.
And then, of course, each of the Democrats involved has now been asked multiple times by the media: can you give me an example of one of these illegal orders?
And so far, they've been smart enough not to give examples.
And instead, they say, well, some version of, it's not that it's already happened.
It's that we're worried that it will happen.
To which I say, isn't that every problem in the world?
Every problem in the world is just something that they're worried will happen.
Shouldn't you worry about some things that are actually happening?
Let me tell you something that's actually happening.
We're overspending and running ourselves into debt.
Let me tell you something that, as far as I know, hasn't happened and probably won't.
The U.S. military obeying obviously illegal orders doesn't feel like a big problem.
I mean, it hasn't affected me yet.
But their argument would be someday in the future, this might happen.
Yeah, I see in the comments somebody saying, color revolution.
You are correct.
So this could be just one, this could be just one move within a larger set of moves that we would call a color revolution.
What would that involve?
Well, it would involve getting some street muscle.
Check.
They did that.
They did the anti-Tesla stuff, the no-king stuff, street muscle.
It would involve trying to create a narrative that the media can carry forever that says one of them is a bad egg and must be removed.
Check.
They're now creating the narrative, and now the press is trying to decide if they're going to be dupes.
So I guess Elisa Slutkin, one of the six, was on this week in ABC and asked some questions and did not have any examples of any illegal orders.
I don't think anybody else has.
But her defense, her defense of why they did it, involved a reference to Nuremberg and the movie A Few Good Men.
And somehow she made an argument, which is funnier if you actually hear her say it, that the existence of Nuremberg and the existence of that movie are somehow support them making that video.
I'm not even going to try to explain that argument.
It's so stupid.
It's just funny.
All right.
That was funny.
And when asked if she believed that Trump had issued any illegal orders, she did the, to my knowledge, I'm not aware of things that are illegal.
And now one of the six, the seditious six, Representative Jason Crow, now he's saying that he's got a problem because he's getting death threats and bomb threats from what I imagine would be people who are on the other side of the political aisle.
He says it's very disturbing stuff when you have the president of the United States threatening to execute and to hang and arrest using this rhetoric.
People listen to it.
Well, he's not wrong, is he?
He's not wrong.
I mean, I think he had an example that he played and stuff.
So, yes, if the president of the United States, be it Trump or be it Biden, says something like, you know, these other group of people are bad people, whoever it is, you're going to give some nuts who's going to take a shot at them.
So, did this create a super dangerous situation for these six Democrats?
Yes, it did.
But was this situation going to create itself?
No.
Was this situation something that Trump dreamed up?
Was Trump sitting at home and his boxers and the White House and thinking, I've got an idea.
If I can just trick them into making a video that doesn't need to be made, then I can say that anybody who would do that should be hung, and then some crazy person will go hurt them.
Do you think that happened?
Or do you think Democrats created a situation that absolutely did not need to be created by making the video in the first place and accusing the person that maybe some of you voted for of being a fascist dictator authoritarian?
Which one of those created the situation, Representative Jason Crow?
I will give you Trump worsened it.
Can we agree on that?
I'll give you that.
Trump worsened it.
But who created it?
Who created the situation that just didn't need to exist?
Was it the video that six people created that didn't need to be made to tell people what they already knew and offered absolutely nothing except the opportunity for Trump to?
All it did was create an opportunity for Trump to say these people should be hung, even though he didn't say that about them specifically.
Technically, people connected the dots and assumed that that's what he's telling.
So I'll give you that.
I will give you that, Democrats.
Trump worsened the situation.
He didn't create it.
You're gonna have to own creating it, but but, as a supporter of the president, I will own worsened it.
I will own that.
All right um, and I don't know.
And and, by the way, I'm not in favor of it, in case I need to say that, clearly not in favor of that level of narrative, but I accept that it happened and happened on my side.
Is that okay?
I accept that I'm on the side, that where that happened, and that I have some responsibility for it.
Don't I wouldn't?
Wouldn't you agree?
As a member of a team, certainly a longtime supporter of the president, I have some responsibility for that.
And I'm going to take my responsibility right now, which is maybe it's time to back off on that a little bit.
Yeah, maybe just a little bit, back off on that.
Yeah, we don't want to be killing anybody for their political opinions.
Not all of you will agree with this.
I get that.
And by the way, I accept that too.
I accept that some of you are not going to agree that there should be any softening of that position.
But do you really want your elected representatives to be hung over a dumb video that obviously they were just not clever enough to know how this would turn out?
I know.
That feels like I would not be benefited by that in any way, but the country would be harmed by it.
So no, I don't want to see anybody hung over their political speech, even if it's pretty raw, like that was.
That was pretty raw on both of their parts, really.
Well, Zorhan Mamdani was on one of the weekend shows, and he was asked if he thinks Trump is a fascist.
Remember, that's the same question he was asked when he was in the Oval Office.
And he didn't get to answer it, but he answered it on TV and he said, basically, yes.
He said, that's something that I've said in the past, and I say it today.
All right, so I will give him credit that Momdani has not backed off from saying that Trump is a fascist.
He's doubling down.
But does that make sense when you also know that they had something like a productive conversation about affordability and they think they could work together to get that done?
Does that make sense?
Does that compute in your brain?
That he says he's a fascist, but apparently he can work with him on getting affordability.
Because you know who's really good on affordability is the fascists.
So kind of weird.
I feel as though you could criticize Zoran for working with fascists.
So the next question I'd ask him is, Zoron, do you think it's okay to work with a fascist?
Because he just said yes.
So is the thing that really happened, maybe the only thing that really happened, is that the word fascist just turned into a non-word because Trump actually joked about it in the Oval Office.
He said, you could just say yes.
Just say yes is easier.
Like Trump wasn't even denying the fascist thing.
It's so harmless now.
It's so overused.
And, you know, it's overused without real evidence of anything that looks, at least in my opinion, in that category.
So it could be that we're watching that word become completely disarmed, partly by Trump saying, ah, you could just say yes.
Just say I'm a fascist.
It doesn't matter.
And then again by Zoron, who agrees that it's an accurate word, but he can work with him.
Well, if you can work with him, it can't be that bad.
Can it?
It just makes the word look ridiculous.
So maybe that's a step ahead.
Zero Hedge has got an article today that since 2008, the U.S. gas pipeline pipelines have been booming.
Now that's the pipelines, you know, the physical pipelines.
And I didn't know this, but apparently, even long before the Trump administration, even before the first one, the pipeline boom was begun.
And now we're seeing a lot of it having been built out.
So we're going to see sort of the benefit of it under the second Trump administration.
But if you wondered, how's the U.S. doing in the energy business?
The answer is really good.
Really good.
So the region's, what region?
Sort of the Oklahoma Gulf Coast region is going to get a big boost in capacity very soon.
Good news.
Anything that's good for your country's energy situation, probably good for your country.
I didn't know this was happening, but apparently there was some big, I think maybe a 30-nation climate summit that was in the Amazon.
I don't know if they found their way out.
That's funny, just to imagine that they all went in there and they couldn't find their way out.
No, they could.
They could find a way out.
But Breitbart is writing about this.
And I didn't know about it, probably because the U.S. had not participated.
So Trump said, no, no, thank you.
We don't need to be part of this climate summit.
But was that a mistake, not being part of the climate summit?
Let's see.
What group of political people in this country would have said we should have gone to the climate summit?
Well, I think that would be Democrats.
Am I right?
If Democrats had been in charge, don't you think the U.S. would have gone to the climate summit?
Yeah, we would have.
And then we would have been part of their amazing accomplishments.
You know, I keep saying that Democrats do useless things, like doing videos, telling the military things the military already knows.
A lot of useless things.
But this one, no, this was useful because all these countries, they went into the Amazon and then they said important things and it took days and days.
But finally, when they gaveled out, they had applause because they had done something useful.
Let's see, what was that?
What was the useful thing they did?
Oh, I guess they agreed to, quote, voluntarily accelerate their climate actions.
No specific goals, no specific endpoints, and no definition of accelerate.
So that was useful, wasn't it?
You're seeing the pattern, right?
It's not my imagination.
The pattern is pretty clear.
This was completely a waste of time because it changed nothing.
And Trump was smart enough to say, that looks like a waste of time.
I'm not going to go.
So good call by Trump.
Rand Paul is warning.
He was on the Sunday, at least one of the Sunday shows, I guess.
And he said that the Trump coalition, if you will, the Trump supporters could be split under two conditions.
There are probably more of them, but here are two of them.
He says, once there, this is Rand Paul.
He says, once there's an invasion of Venezuela, or if they decide to re-up the subsidies and the gifts to Ukraine, then Rand says, I think you'll see a splintering and a fracturing of the movement that has supported the president.
What do you think?
Do you think that if Trump invades Venezuela or he starts to refund Ukraine that his coalition will split apart?
I think so.
Yeah, I think that's a reasonable prediction.
But what are the odds he's going to do either one of those things?
What are the odds that Trump is going to refund Ukraine when he's pulled off one of the smartest things I've ever seen?
which is not only is he not funding Ukraine, but he's getting our allies to pay our military-industrial complex for the weapons that Ukraine is going to use.
Don't we sort of win in that situation?
I think we do.
Do you think Trump's base is going to be mad at him for finding out how to take the free money off the table?
I mean, he's basically acting like the Chicago Teachers Union.
If you were here in the beginning of the podcast, Trump's just acting like the Chicago Teachers Union.
Hey, this big pile of money on the table doesn't seem to be labeled.
Is anybody claiming this money that is just sitting here?
No.
No?
You?
No?
No?
No.
Nobody claims this money.
Well, what if I just take it?
Any complaints?
Still no complaints.
All right.
Chicago Teachers Union.
That's how they do it.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
I'm just saying allegedly.
All right.
Meanwhile, the U.S. White House, you know, that White House, not the other White House, the U.S. White House, announced it's eliminating the Department of Government Efficiency, Doge.
Here's how I would interpret that.
You would interpret that negatively, wouldn't you?
As in, hey, Doge was a good idea.
If they eliminate it, I will be unhappy because it's something I liked and I think it worked a little bit.
And maybe they should have just tried harder.
But I like the Doge idea.
And eliminating it seems like a bad idea.
Well, I'm not sure that's what's happening.
I will take a fact check on this later in the day when we learn more.
But here's what I think is happening.
And this is something I said, what, a year ago, two years ago?
A year ago, at least.
I pointed out that Doge was simply becoming how the government operated.
So instead of needing a separate Doge department, what made a lot more sense is what you saw Bill Pulte do in the Fanny Freddie situation.
If you're running a big government entity, you know that Trump wants you to cut costs and he wants you to brag about it because he wants to cut the budget and he wants everybody to know it.
So if you're running a big entity and you know exactly what the boss wants, and unlike prior years, this is the real magic part, unlike prior years, you're not going to get a pat on the back for spending more than your budget, but apparently that used to happen.
Otherwise they wouldn't all be spending more than their budget.
So at this point, you saw people almost competing, you know, heads of cabinets, heads of departments.
You saw them almost competing to see who could get the most attention for saying, I've cut the budget in the smartest, best, biggest way.
So you saw Hag Seth talking about budget cuts, you know, Bill Pulte again.
And I think you can name half a dozen others where they literally just bragged about cutting budgets.
Once you've created that culture, which apparently Trump has done, then Doge just becomes how you think about everything.
It doesn't become the external department that needs to be bothering you all the time.
You should be doing those things before they knock on the door.
You shouldn't need Doge to say you need an audit.
Nobody needs Doge to say they should save money, look where they can cut costs.
That should just be part of the operation.
So when I see that Doge first was created, I was excited because obviously that was a thing that wasn't in existence that needed to exist.
But once it operated for a while and everybody got the idea and it just became part of our conversation, it became a word.
I mean, you don't even need to have the department now.
If you're running some big department in the government, don't you think that one of the words you would use is Doge?
And it would be something like this.
All right, everybody, we need to come up with some big cost savings so I can tell the boss that we're on board.
So somebody come up with some good Doge ideas.
They would literally use the word to describe what they want to do, which is have a responsible budget that you could audit and keep under control.
So I'm happy that Doge went away if the reason is they had successfully just integrated into the thinking of the government.
And I think they did.
I mean, from the outside, it looks like they did.
So I would consider that an enormous win if that's what happened.
But I'll take a fact check on that too.
I guess we've got some video.
Zero Hedge says of some maybe drones hitting a major power station near Moscow.
Now, you have to be careful about all the reporting from Moscow and from Ukraine because it's all subject to the fog of war.
But the timing would be interesting if that really happened.
And there's good reason to believe it did happen because it would not be unusual for Ukraine to have done a drone attack on an energy facility in Russia.
And this would be timed somewhat coincidentally or not by the fact that Marco Rubio just said they had a very productive meeting.
Actually, the most productive.
He said the most productive and meaningful meeting to date, that is with his Ukrainian partners, trying to come up with some kind of a peace deal that they could present to Putin that would have some chance of being negotiated to completion.
So as of today, the government is talking in a more, let's say, optimistic way about the chances of peace than I've seen in a while.
Do you think that's real?
Do you think that's real?
I don't know.
Because, you know, we've been disappointed so many times where we're like, oh, there's going to be a peace deal in Ukraine any minute and then gets yanked away.
Well, here's what I feel.
And this is going to be more feelings than facts.
So if I'm wrong, don't be surprised because I can't give you an argument for what I'm going to say.
I'm going to tell you how it feels.
Now, my argument, I guess there is an argument, but it's a bad one.
My argument is that sometimes you can feel things or smell them before you can see them and touch them.
And this is feeling that way to me.
So I'm just an observer of the news.
I don't have any special access to anything in this topic.
But I observe patterns.
And sometimes I don't know what pattern I'm picking up.
Have you ever had that experience?
You're like, ah.
I feel like I know where this is heading, but I don't know why I know it.
And it's because there might be some pattern you're picking up.
It might be false.
Doesn't mean it's true.
But it means we're just pattern recognition machines.
When I look at the war, here's the first question I ask.
What are the odds that the Ukraine-Russia war will still be raging for the entire term of Trump's time in office?
Do you think this could run another three years?
Because that would put it at seven years, and it probably would be sitting at the same place at the end of three more years.
So I'm finding it hard to believe that either Putin or Zelensky are thinking to themselves, we can wait this guy out, meaning Trump.
We can wait him out.
I think the days of waiting anybody out are over.
And then I would say, what are the odds that it would end differently if you wait three more years?
And I think the answer is, there's no reason to believe it's going to turn out differently.
Might be better, might be worse.
But the last thing that Moscow wants is three more years of Ukraine developing better drones.
It's just going to get worse.
So if you're in Moscow and you heard something blow up and your lights flickered, which may or may not be what happened, again, fog of war, you can't believe any reporting from that area.
But if you believe it happened, it's going to be a lot of pressure.
Could you imagine just going three more years and gaining nothing?
And it looks exactly the same at the end of three more years.
So my first pattern recognition is that if waiting doesn't seem like it's going to get you a better result, and both sides would see that, that seems obvious from both sides, then why would you wait?
What you would do instead of waiting is you would look for some excuse as to why now would be the time.
And that excuse is Trump.
Trump is the excuse because he won't always be there.
And you can't count him even, you know, given our politics, you can't guarantee you'll even be there in three years.
But he's there now, and he's willing to put in maximum effort to get this thing finished.
So because there's a Trump and because it's gone four years, and because he's going to be here another three, and because we can kind of predict that things aren't going to get better, and that drones will get more powerful, and just more things will explode, you might as well do it now.
Now, is that a good argument?
Not really.
Not really.
I'm telling you how it feels.
And what it feels like, I'm going to give you the summary of what I just said.
The summary is, it just feels like it's time.
Does anybody have that feeling?
And I'm not sure I would have said that before.
Before I would have said, oh, it's logical.
You know, both sides could, you know, they'd be better off if they do it.
So I would have given you a logical argument before.
But now it just sort of feels like the even, even the words that Marco Rubio chose the, the way that Zelensky is sort of sliding into a new position, the way the Europeans are on the hook for the entire bill, it's sort of all those things.
The way, the way the technology is improving to the point where it's not a, you know, it's mostly robots on robots, etc.
So I think maybe something's coming that could be good.
And another way to look at it was it feels like capitulation.
If you're familiar with investing, there's a word called capitulation.
I mean, it's a regular word, but when it's used in the context of investing, it means that people just feel like they're done with some investment position, capitulation.
And capitulation doesn't always have like a logical backing to it.
It's just people agree that's how they feel.
It's like, ugh, capitulation.
I think that's what's happened.
I think maybe the way the media will cover it will change.
I think that there's also a narrative fatigue.
Sometimes you just have to have a new narrative.
And in this case, the narrative is the story and the story is the reality, the thing that's really happening.
I feel like we're tired of waking up and saying, is Russia and Ukraine at war still?
Is it exactly the same?
Are the lines about the same as they were?
We're just fatigued with that version of reality.
So there's also a, we are living in a simulation argument, which is we're just tired with that narrative.
So our collective consciousness will change the narrative because we're just bored with it.
We'll get something else.
Then I would argue also that we already know how the story ends.
We already know how the story ends.
It's a three-arc or say three-act movie.
And at the end of the third act, what happens?
You all know how the movie ends.
Let me set it up for you.
In scene one, Trump is impeached twice and loses re-election.
But in scene two, Trump wins re-election against all odds.
And then he goes on this series of ridiculously successful presidential actions, which is what at least the Republicans would say he's doing right now.
And that's a proper second act.
So the first act is something really bad happens to your hero.
That's the impeachment.
That's the losing re-election.
That's all that stuff.
That's the first act.
Second act is usually the hero of the movie has reached, let's say, some kind of plateau of how their life could be.
If it's an athlete, the athlete is suddenly winning all the competitions.
So that's happening.
And then the third act would be something that looks like, oh, no, you could never, you could never get out of this.
And it would be something like the Ukraine-Russia war looks like it's unsolvable.
At the same time, Trump's popularity numbers are plunging.
So he's going to have the lowest popularity numbers in the war that he can't stop.
And he's going to be accused of being a fascist, whatever.
And it will look like, maybe it might even get worse.
And it will look like there's no way anybody could get out of this situation.
And that's the third act.
The third act is when your hero escapes the situation that nobody could escape.
It's impossible.
And then what happens after he does the escape?
What happens after he does the impossible?
He gets the Nobel Peace Prize.
The fact that Trump doesn't have the Nobel Peace Prize and that this is brewing back there, that's a little bit too much of a pattern for me to imagine it's not going to go that way.
It looks like it's just going to turn into a three-act movie.
It will look like he's doomed pretty soon from some new drama that we don't even see coming.
And then he'll find a way out, because that's what he does.
And then he'll get the Nobel Peace Prize.
And you'll be watching it in awe, saying, how did that, why was that so predictable?
Because it kind of is.
So that'll be fun.
Well, Tucker Carlson was quite provocative today on X.
He posted this.
I'm going to read just what Tucker said, because it's a big story, if his allegations are true.
And it goes like this.
So this is brand new.
This just is before I came on.
Tucker said that for months, the Wall Street Journal has held a story detailing the personal corruption of somebody named Andrei Yermak, the second most powerful man in Ukraine.
Yermak has skimmed hundreds of millions in American tax dollars meant for Ukraine aid.
Now remember, this is allegations made by Tucker.
The journal's editors can prove that, really.
But they're not.
Instead, they're protecting Yermak.
Why?
And then Tucker answers his own question.
He says, because Yermak is leading Ukraine's effort to scuttle the Trump peace plan for Eastern Europe.
What?
The owners of the Wall Street Journal don't want peace with Russia.
Now remember, that's a little mind-reading going on there, because unless they've said it, I know, you'd be assuming that that's what they're thinking.
And it might be right.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
I'm just saying just distinguish between things you can prove and things which are allegations.
So the owners of the Wall Street Journal, says Tucker, don't want peace with Russia.
They want war.
At the same time, the journal's editorial page has attacked the Trump administration for pushing a peace agreement.
And then says Tucker, this is true corruption without informing its readers.
The Murdoch family, no, without informing its readers, the Murdoch family says Tucker is using both sides of his newspaper to continue the war with Russia.
That's not the behavior of a news organization.
Wait for it.
It's the hallmark of an intel agency.
Oh, damn.
Damn.
I don't know how many of you have been watching Tucker's content since he got canceled and canceled again.
But he does do a lot of content about, well, you probably didn't know this, but some intel agency is behind it, because I think it usually is.
What do you think of this?
Do you think that Tucker's narrative of this is accurate?
I don't have any inside information.
I've never heard of this, Andrei Yermak.
I will say that the Ukraine war has the feeling of something that rich people want to continue, because it feels like if all the rich people wanted it to end, it would have already ended.
What's the point of being all these billionaires if you can't control, you know, control civilization too?
So, there must have been somebody who wanted the war to continue, and maybe it's this guy.
I wouldn't know.
But that's a heck of an allegation, a heck of an allegation.
So, let's keep an eye on that one.
I think it's too early for me to have an opinion on that one, because I'd have to see if there's any second side to it.
But the allegation that the Wall Street Journal is sort of intentionally promoting war for the benefit of some billionaires and maybe for the benefit of their own company, that's a big allegation.
That's a big one.
All right.
Glenn Beck recently asked RFK Jr. his thoughts on the World Economic Forum, the WEF.
And RFK Jr. said, quote, we shouldn't be paying attention to it, meaning the WEF.
It's a billionaires boys club that's arranging for the world to shift wealth upward and to clamp down on totalitarian controls and to clamp down totalitarian controls on everybody else.
Now, who does that sound like?
There's one other public figure who has talked about the World Economic Forum in almost exactly the same terms, the Billionaires Boys Club.
That was Elon.
When Elon Musk was asked about the World Economic Forum, he also just sort of brushed it aside in terms of importance and acted like it was just a social club for rich people.
And that if you thought it was more than that, you were kind of giving it too much power.
Yeah.
So I agree with RFK Jr.'s take.
I have not seen the World Economic Forum be anything but a billionaire boys club.
It looks exactly like that.
And yes, we should ignore them unless they become more powerful and sort of affecting things.
All right.
In other news, the Israeli defense forces apparently are dismissing the first wave, what they call the first wave, of people that they say were responsible for allowing the October 7th attack to happen, meaning people who allegedly did not do their jobs well enough to prevent it and should have.
Now, apparently quite a few people are involved in this, and they're calling it just the first major wave.
Newsmax is reporting on this, by the way.
It's the first major wave.
That would suggest that there are going to be other major waves.
How many people were actually literally, physically involved and should have done more?
I don't know how there could be that many people.
I could see if it were one or two or a dozen people, but once it gets up to a larger numbers, how many people were making mistakes all in the same time in the same way?
I don't know what that means.
But apparently they're not done.
So they're going to keep looking and keep firing people who are responsible.
Now, Prime Minister Netanyahu is apparently, reportedly, opposed to a state inquiry of the government to find out if members of the government, as opposed to the military, were also responsible and should take some kind of action or responsibility, I guess.
So you've got the IDF saying, yes, we take responsibility and these specific people are being dismissed.
But you've got the government saying, no, let's not get into this any deeper.
Maybe we should just leave this with the military.
Now, if you follow all your conspiracy theories, you know that there's been one that's been bugging me from almost day one.
Bugging me because I just don't see it as possible in the world that I live in.
Anything's possible, and I could be totally surprised.
But the conspiracy theory goes, and you've all heard it, that Netanyahu intentionally allowed security to be lapsed or lax so that the attack would happen because that would help him politically stay in power, but also to do what he wanted to do anyway in Gaza.
How many of you believe that that's what really happened?
Now, I understand why you would believe it, because it's really hard to look at the size of that security lapse and imagine that was an accident, right?
If you're just looking at it from the outside, you say to yourself, how in the world could all of that be accidental, right?
And that's a good place to start.
It's a good starting place because I'm curious too.
But now that the military has taken this much responsibility, does it change your opinion?
Because if the military is taking responsibility, and they're naming names and a lot of them, and they're firing them, they must be finding things that these military people did wrong.
Now, do you believe that these military people would all take what must be one of the worst consequences you could get in the military other than being wounded, I suppose?
One of the worst things would be to have your own military accuse you of being responsible for October 7th.
Do you think that there are this many people?
I don't know how many there are, but let's say dozens.
Do you think there are dozens of people in the military who would be willing to take responsibility for October 7th, living among the population that would know that they had taken responsibility?
And you would do that, what, to cover up for Netanyahu?
Would you?
Do you believe that that's like a possible thing that would happen?
That dozens of people at the officer level, we're not talking about grunts, talking people in leadership, would they all take the fall for October 7th?
The most, maybe the most shameful thing that's ever happened to any Israeli in decades?
I just don't see it happening.
So while I do think that Netanyahu is opportunistically using the situation to his advantage, that's not a big surprise.
But it's hard for me to imagine that he planned it, he executed it, dozens and dozens of people in the military had to sort of stand down from their responsibilities.
And then, after it was all over, none of them became whistleblowers.
They all just, they all individually took the rap for October 7th?
I mean, there are a lot of things you could take the rap for, but not that.
That would be like the worst thing you could ever take the rap for if you didn't do it, especially, right?
So this doesn't really add up to me.
And I'm going to say that the new revelation that the military is dismissing people and naming names, they're naming names, does kind of make it look like a military failure, more so than it seems likely to me.
It would be a government failure.
Now, in case you're wondering, Israel is not paying me to do anything.
They don't pay me for anything.
And it's not my job to support Netanyahu.
I'm not a supporter, and I'm not a supporter of Israel or anybody else, except the United States.
I'm an America first kind of guy.
And when I talk about Israel, I'm not talking about even my preferences.
We're just observing and trying to understand it.
But it's up to them to defend it.
Well, I'm hearing today in the New York Post that that Thomas Crookes guy who tried to assassinate the president and then got shot himself, that he had all kinds of social media presence.
Didn't we hear that he didn't have a social media presence, or am I confusing him with somebody else?
But it does seem to me that months later, we're learning about this would-be assassin.
Things that, how did it take so long to hear that?
Boy, talk about fog of war.
That fog of war lasts apparently a year or more.
All right.
The $7,000 check.
Does anybody think I'm being paid by Israel?
What does Glenn Greenwald not believe?
There was a press on the ground.
There was press on the ground.
Yeah, you know, I just don't believe any of those stories.
Some of them might turn out to be true, but it's hard to believe anything in that domain.
All right, people, I think I've said what I need to say.
I'm going to say a few words to the locals subscribers, the wonderful local subscribers.
I hope you got something out of this today.
Did you?
Did anybody learn anything today that they might not have gotten from the regular news?
