Trump makes a lot of holiday news~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Rosie O'Donnell, President Trump, Trump Reporters Stupid Piggies, White House Media Offenders, Devon Nunez, South Africa White Farmers, Biden's Autopen EOs, Biden's EO Pardons, Ex-Honduras President Pardon, Ukraine Andriy Yermak Resignation, Frozen Russian Assets, Income Tax vs Tariffs, Susan Collins Submarines 2B, Government Migrant Benefits, Non-Citizen Funding, China Robot Family Members, Ukraine Taiwan-Style Solution, Nicolle Shanahan, Duped Tech-Wife Mafia, Denmark's Trump Night Watch, 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.
we're almost ready good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization This will be the low-talking version.
Anyway, this is the highlight of human civilization.
If you'd like to try to take it up a notch to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper mug or a glass, a tanker, chalicerstein, a canteen, juggernaut, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day.
Thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go delightful.
Well, yes, I am wearing my jacket backwards in my man cave.
After the show, don't forget to check out the spaces event.
Look for Owen Gregorian, and you'll see the link right at the top of his feed on X.
And I'll remind you at the end of the show, too.
Hey, I wonder if coffee is good for you.
Oh, here's a study from Food and Function that says coffee is good for your liver and your kidneys.
Not bad.
Not bad.
One sip and your liver and your kidneys would be better.
I wonder if there's anything else coffee can do for you.
Oh, yeah.
There's another study who says it can help control your blood pressure as long as you drink a lot of it.
You have to drink two to five cups a day to control your high blood pressure.
But it can also lower your risk of type 2 diabetes and reduce your chances of endometrial cancer, Parkinson's, and even depression.
The depression part you knew about.
Have you heard there's a new kind of fake bacon?
It's made without killing the pig.
So I guess they take a little fatty tissue from a live animal and then they stick that fatty tissue in some kind of plant-based sugars and proteins and vitamins and they let it ferment.
And then two weeks later, they got something that looks disgusting and tastes even worse.
But it's technically a pig.
I don't know.
They say it tastes okay.
I don't know.
Meanwhile, something I talk about a lot is that in the Netherlands, they've got this Lego-style snap-lock brick system.
So you can build a wall with bricks that snap together.
Now, why hasn't that been around forever?
Is there any good reason that the bricks are not already snapped together?
Because once you see it, you say, well, it's kind of obvious.
Of course, they should snap together.
Anyway, there's a new study that says American employees are hitting a new low in well-being.
Johns Hopskins University.
So, do you believe that?
In 2024, American employees hit a new low in happiness and well-being.
You know, I'm thinking of launching a comic strip that takes advantage of the fact that everybody's unhappy with their job.
What do you think?
Any potential?
Maybe.
Until I get canceled, anyway.
Well, Rosie O'Donnell is up in arms.
She was talking to Jim Acosta on a podcast.
And she was very unhappy that Trump called a reporter a piggy.
A piggy.
I'm seeing this in a Jason Cohen post.
And she said she can't believe that Trump got away with it.
You know, I feel like there was less pushback on that piggy thing than there would have been in the first term.
And this goes back to what my mother always says: you can get used to anything if you do it long enough.
So now we've got five years of Trump saying things you're not supposed to say.
At some point, you're just going to get used to it.
And I think that's what happened this time.
Yeah, Rosie, of course, so he's looking for something to complain about.
But for the rest of us, yeah, he called a reporter a pig.
Oh, well, then today, or the other day, he called one stupid.
I don't know which is worse.
Would you rather be called piggy or stupid?
Well, we don't know.
But Rosie also pointed out this is hilarious, but not.
It's not funny, people.
It's not funny.
Yeah, that's my final answer.
It's not funny.
But she has an autistic daughter, apparently, who she says, my daughter is now saying, quote, damn him, damn Trump, and smashing her hand on the table.
And I said, wow, honey, what are you thinking?
And she said, if you believe this really happened, he made us move in order for our own safety.
And it's now he's destroying the country.
Well, I do have a question about how old that daughter is, but did she really say that?
And then Rosie says, she lives here.
She hears what I'm saying.
I think to myself, you don't want to give this TTS, you don't want to give this to her.
She doesn't call it TDS, but of course it is.
Who is worse?
Let's do a little competition.
Who's worse?
Trump used a bad insult on a reporter or Rosie, who is raising her child to think like she does about Trump.
Hmm.
I don't know.
Which one is worse behavior?
You decide.
Well, did you know that the White House launched a website that's dedicated to comparing all the media on their fake news?
They call the leaderboard, a leaderboard for fake news.
And apparently the Washington Post is the worst, according to the leaderboard.
And it's the Offender Hall of Shame, a record of the media's false and misleading stories flagged by the White House.
Now, remember how many times I've told you that the person who writes it down wins?
All it takes is just write it down.
You'll be the one who's leading the narrative.
So simply the fact that they created a website that they can put all the alleged fake news on, very, very smart, because somebody's writing it down.
That automatically increases the power of the message.
It just has to be written down.
And that's what they're doing right that they have not done right before.
You know, a lot of pundits did lists of fake news, but if the White House does it, well, that's going to be hard to ignore.
So always write it down.
That's my advice.
Well, Devin Nunes, you know him, former Republican congressman, he believes that the raid on Mar-a-Lago back in 2022 was at least partially, maybe not completely, to look for the intelligence assessment that he wrote about RussiaGate.
And the thinking was that they could get a hold of that and, I don't know, keep it out of the news.
But I think Devon is only presuming.
I don't think he has proof that that's what they were looking for.
He just believes that that might be what they were looking for.
Maybe.
I don't even know if it was in there.
Meanwhile, Trump's been causing some trouble.
I'm going to take some pauses here to sip some water.
Anyway, so Trump's mad at South Africa for what he says is they're not wanting to do something about killing white people.
So he says there's horrific human rights abuses and that Afrikaners and other descendants of Dutch, French, and German settlers, according to Trump, to put it more bluntly, this is his actual words, to put it more bluntly, they're killing white people and randomly allowing their farms to be taken.
Now, how big of a deal is that?
Now, obviously, it's a big bad deal if it happens to even one person.
But if you were to guess, and the United States is not going to attend the G20 in South Africa, in response, in response to the fact that South Africa is not responding to the accusations that they're allowing this killing of white people and stealing of farms.
Well, I went to Grok and Grok says that the farm murder spike was six farmers were murdered in the first quarter of 2025 and there were 12 in all of 2024.
So I think South Africa is saying, eh, no big deal.
There were only, what, only 12 and only six of them in the first quarter?
I mean, that's not a lot of farms, is it?
And of all the farms, apparently there were 65 murders in the farming communities, but only 12 of them were because we're involved a white farmer and stealing of the farm.
And some of them were not white.
So there.
All right.
And by the way, you may have seen the memorial of 3,000 crosses.
The 3,000 crosses represented murdered white farmers mostly.
But Grok tells us that that's cumulative over 30 years.
So does that sound like a lot?
Would you think that 3,000 murdered white farmers over 30 years?
Does that sound like a reasonable number?
It doesn't to me.
Just think about George Floyd.
George Floyd was literally one person.
And it was upheaval in the whole country because it was racial in nature.
Or it was interpreted that way.
12?
If 12 farmers got murdered, even in the United States in one year, and then their farms were stolen, that would be a big deal.
So Grok is kind of weirdly underplaying this.
Is that weird?
Am I wrong?
Doesn't it seem to you like 12 farmers being murdered for being white farmers alone, I guess?
Feels like a lot to me.
Anyway, what else is Trump up to?
Apparently he's going to cancel or void all autopenn documents that were associated with Biden.
And according to Peter Doocey, who went through all the signatures, he could only find one that looked like it was a legitimate signature.
Doesn't that seem like a problem?
That we don't really know if Biden even knew he was approving all these things, all these Autopen signatures.
So, and then allegedly, Biden would face perjury charges if he contradicts himself and he says that he was involved in the Autopen process.
Now, I don't quite understand that, the perjury risk.
So there must be something he said under oath or might say under oath.
I don't know.
I feel like Biden's not in any trouble.
He's too close to death and too crazy.
Anyway, so I think the argument that Trump is making is that there's no evidence that Biden was aware of the Autopen actions.
Now, is that a good argument?
Do you think that that would be enough to void them if there was no record of Biden knowing he even did it?
I feel like that might be a pretty good argument.
Probably there'll be some Supreme Court judgment on that.
But some of the things that would get overturned, I asked Grock, and something about AI regulations.
Some of the AI guardrails might be taken back.
Something about the gig industry pausing border walls and some kind of, I don't know, energy mandates and stuff.
So it's not entirely clear what will change if those.
But, well, one thing that will change is maybe the pardons.
Oh, yeah, that could change.
It could be that the pardons for Fauci and who else got a pardon?
Fauci and somebody else got a pardon.
Those might be possibly reversed.
So Fauci might be in trouble.
But I think the Supreme Court will get involved.
In other news, Trump is issuing a pardon for the ex-president of Honduras, who I did not know was in an American jail for the rest of his life.
How many of you knew that?
Did you know that the ex-Honduran president was in jail basically for the rest of his life?
So Trump's going to pardon him.
Why?
Don't know.
Don't know.
So this one's a little mysterious because I don't think there's any question that he did the crimes.
So apparently he was deeply involved in the drug trade and got caught and convicted.
And now he's in some American, I think it's in an American prison.
But he'll be let out.
So this is one of those stories where I don't know if we'll ever know.
Like, what's up with that?
Like, why would Trump care?
And what are we getting in return?
Makes you wonder, is he giving up some secrets?
What exactly would we be getting out of this?
So I don't think we'll ever know what's at the bottom of that.
Anyway, so I guess the number two most important person in Ukraine is now in a lot of trouble.
Andre Yermek.
So he resigned after a corruption raid.
They think he might be behind stealing $100 million in a kickback scheme.
Now, it turns out that this guy was like one of the most important people in Ukraine.
And he's been a buddy of Zelensky since the acting days.
So he's a lawyer, but he's had a lot of power in Ukraine.
And it makes me wonder, is the real game here to put pressure on Zelensky?
Because they're basically getting his top aid.
I wouldn't call him an aid, but Probably one of his most important connections.
They call him a confidant and friend of Zelensky.
So it looks to me like, and this is some Ukrainian entity went after him, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the specialized anti-corruption prosecutor's office.
Wouldn't you be able to arrest basically anybody in Ukraine who had power right now?
Aren't they pretty much all stealing our money?
So, anyway, I wonder how different that is, you know, that there is this allegedly super corrupt Ukrainian guy.
Do you think that looks any different when other countries look at the Clintons and the Biden administration?
Did you ever think about that?
Like, do other countries think the Clintons were all above board and they didn't have anything going on to be like money-making, if you know what I mean?
And what about the Biden family?
I wonder if we look like Ukraine to the Ukrainians.
Do they look at us and go, We're no different.
Our leaders steal, your leaders steal.
I don't know.
Meanwhile, what else is happening?
Still looking for some kind of a peace deal.
I guess Witkoff is going to go to Russia to try to get some deal.
But there's some thought about some kind of big trade and energy cooperation and trying to make everybody happy money-wise.
Looks like that's the plan.
Anyway, so yeah.
There's some attempt to make a peace deal, but we'll see.
I think we're a year away from that.
So Belgium is blocking an EU deal for Ukraine that might be a big deal.
So Belgium is blocking this idea of a reparation loan backed by frozen Russian assets.
So apparently there was some kind of deal where Russian assets would be used to, I don't know, let's see, what's it called?
They were going to use the frozen Russian assets to fund the war.
And apparently Belgium is saying, no, no, we don't do that.
All right.
Well, so that's on the table.
What is this called?
Yeah, so the idea was to fund the war using Russia's own assets.
But it looks like that might fall apart.
So might not be any funding for the war.
And I guess the House Oversight Committee has released some extended footage showing how Biden AIDS were admitting to covering up Biden's health.
So there's a pretty big story on that.
Is anybody surprised at this point?
There's not much to that story because we all expect it, right?
Everybody knew there was something going on there.
All right.
I got to take a little bit of a break.
All right, back to work.
But apparently there was a bigger effort than we thought to cover up Biden's decline.
But I don't think that's a surprise at this point, is it?
You know, I'm thinking back to the Biden era.
And how many times I pointed out that he was obviously not mentally competent?
And I felt like I was all alone.
It was like the news didn't want to say he was obviously mentally incompetent.
But now they do.
So what changed?
Just the fact he's out of office?
I mean, I feel like it was pretty obvious during his term that he was mentally incompetent.
But now there's no doubt about it.
Trump says he might almost completely scrap income tax and replace it with tariff revenues.
Do you think that would work?
Do you think we could get rid of income tax and it would be just tariff revenues?
Well, I asked Grock that and it says nope because the dollars don't work out.
Let's see what we're looking at.
Income tax will pull in about $4 trillion a year while tariffs might are currently pulling in maybe $80 billion.
So how in the world do you get to $4 trillion from $80 billion?
I don't feel like that's possible, do you?
So I'm not sure why that's even being floated, unless people are not going to check the numbers.
But no, I don't think that's going to happen.
Elon Musk, I think he was on the Joe Rogan show.
I saw a clip where he said that Senator Susan Collins was telling him, telling Musk, about how she gave the Navy $12 billion for more submarines.
Not she personally, but Congress.
And they got no submarines.
And then, according to Elon, they held him a hearing to say, where did the $12 billion go?
And they were like, we don't know.
And that was the end of it.
That was the end of it.
$12 billion for submarines just disappeared.
I don't know.
Where do you think it went?
Well, probably stolen.
The Treasury Department, Scott Besant, according to Just News, wants to end the federal tax benefits for illegal migrants.
So I guess they were still getting stuff like the earned income tax credit, additional child tax credit, American, a few tax-related credits.
But they're going to take that away.
Does anybody mind?
Anybody have a problem with that?
Nope.
I did not know we were giving them that money.
So Trump is claiming that a migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 a yearly benefits for their family.
That sounds like a lot.
I don't know if that number is reliable.
all right um and so that the question you'd ask is how much of your tax payments are going to non-citizens I don't know.
So I asked Grok and says that the net cost for all those things would be about 2 cents per dollar in the top tax bracket.
So in other words, if you're in the top tax bracket, about 2 cents of all your dollars, 2%, would go toward illegal aliens benefits, I guess.
Which feels like too much.
Well, China's fertility has fallen again.
And did you know that China's birth rate in the 60s was 6 to 7 kids apiece per family?
Six to seven kids.
And it's now down to one.
Now, one is half as much as you need to reproduce to keep your population consistent.
So what exactly is China's plan for survival?
Well, they don't say it, but it's robots.
So by the time the population decline becomes serious, we should have so many robots that would be able to do everything that humans can do.
Maybe it's just robots.
So maybe your best situation is fewer people and more robots.
Maybe.
It's not entirely clear what happens when we're only reproducing half as much as we need to.
At the same time, robots are becoming fully functional.
It's robots.
I feel like you can have families that would be part human and part robot.
Like literally, legitimately, that actually will be considered family members.
That's my prediction.
Robot, family members.
Because, you know, if a robot learned enough about your family, you'd want to keep it around, right?
Because it would feel like a family member.
If you could have a conversation with it, it went with you on family outings.
That's what's happening.
Your robot would just be a family member.
So we'll be all worried that the robots are going to take over.
Nope, they'll just be our children.
Allegedly, according to the European Conservative, that's a publication, it's looking like Washington might want to recognize Russian control over occupied Ukrainian territories.
So in other words, Ukraine might say, we own these territories like Crimea and Donbass.
But the U.S. might be willing to say, yeah, we're done protecting those areas.
They're gone.
We're not getting them back.
So there might be in the works a deal in which we just tell Russia, maybe the Ukraine never says it because they're not allowed to give away their territory.
But we could create this sort of a Taiwan situation, which is kind of clever.
I might have to end a little bit early.
Not feeling 100%.
But you could do a Taiwan situation.
This is my interpretation.
Hold on a second.
You try my portable fan.
This is the best thing.
A little portable fan.
Much better.
But anyway, we might be able to solve the Taiwan, I'm sorry, the Ukraine situation by just not agreeing what happened.
So Ukraine could say, we still own these territories that Russia totally controls.
But the United States could say, no, you don't.
And we would just not have to agree.
We would just allow that they think they still own it.
We say they don't.
And it would just be like Taiwan.
It would just be this continuously disputed territory.
But it wouldn't be a war over it.
That would be good.
So maybe.
Nicole Shanahan.
You know her.
She was running for vice president with Kennedy.
Anyway, she's the ex-wife of Google co-founder, Sergi Brin.
And she's talking about the tech wife mafia.
So she thinks the wives of the big rich tech people, I don't know if she named names, but she thinks that their money went to NGOs and they don't know exactly where it went and that they sort of were duped,
duped into giving money to something they didn't fully understand, basically, that the wives had a lot of money and they were giving it, trying to be philanthropic and trying to make the world a better place, but maybe did not make it a better place.
So Nicole Shanahan obviously should have a good window on that.
Anyway, Denmark apparently has set up an overnight watch to track things that Trump says while they're sleeping, according to Newsmax World.
I guess they're worried that too many Trump things happen while they're asleep.
So they've got to track what he does while they're asleep.
Okay.
Sort of a boogeyman alert.
Oh, what else?
There's some thought, according to futurism, that chat GPT and some of the AIs will make you dumber.
So if you use the, allegedly, if you look up something with AI, even if it's accurate, even if the answer is right, that you wouldn't learn it or retain it as well as if you just Googled it.
Now, I don't think that's the case because I've been using Grok specifically to tell me the background and context of things.
So for me, I would say that AI has greatly improved my understanding of all the complicated stories.
So I think they're wrong.
I believe that the AI will make people smarter because it will give them more complete answers and context.
So Washington Post has a story that says that Secretary Hagseth gave an order to kill everybody in the first Venezuelan drug boat attack to kill everybody.
And that two men survived and so they did a second strike and killed them.
Now that's the story.
But it seems to me that the timing is weird because you've got these six Democrats who say that the military should disobey illegal orders.
And then suddenly the Washington Post, the publication most associated with the CIA, coincidentally comes up with a story with allegedly two sources that would act like the military was murdering.
Now, does that look like a coincidence to you?
That first the Democrats say, oh, you should disobey illegal orders.
And then suddenly, there are these two sources who allegedly say that something maybe not so legal happened.
Hmm.
Coincidence, you decide.
But they may have blown up.
Well, could have been something sketchy that went on there, but we don't know.
Meanwhile, Trump today, I believe it was today, he said that the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela is going to be closed in its entirety, meaning the U.S., the U.S. will shoot you down if you're flying over Venezuela.
What exactly does that mean?
How do we close the airspace over another country?
And do you just literally shoot down anything that's in the air?
I don't know.
We'll see how that goes.
We will see how that goes.
All right, people.
I gave you a full 38 minutes.
Not my best work today.
Some of the stories are a little complicated.
So I might need to dig into them a little bit.
But I'm going to sign off here.
Remember, if you are interested, Owen Gregorian will have a spaces immediately after I'm done.
Well, immediately-ish.
So just go to X and ask for Owen Gregorian.
I expect to be listening.
I don't know if you'll be able to see me.
No, probably.
But I think I'm going to listen to your comments and I'm going to rest up a little bit because I am taxing myself a little bit.
But I feel like I'll get stronger every day.
All right.
You know, one thing I didn't expect doing podcasting is I did not expect how much love I would get.
I don't know if that happens to other podcasters.
Is there something I do that causes that response?
I mean, literally, the comments are just full of comments about love.
People are loving.
And I love you right back.
Is it because you can sense that I do this for you?
Is that what it is?
Do you know that I don't really need to be working?
So does it feel like that I'm giving you as much as you're giving me?
Because you're giving me a lot.
I mean, a lot.
It's quite a blessing to be, you know, my age and this stage of my career and to have people, literally hundreds of people, telling me they love me every day.
I'm kind of hooked on it.
So as long as it's feasible, I will keep doing the podcast.
I expect to get stronger in the coming days, so I'll last a full hour.
But for now, you've got the Spaces by Owen Gregorian.
I assume he'll be firing that up fairly soon, as soon as I'm done.
And I will join you there because then I can relax a little bit and listen to you talk.
I won't have to do all the work.
If you have anything to add to any of the stories that I think I did a bad job on today, if I'm being honest, if this is the first time you ever heard me, you wouldn't be impressed.
Today was not my best work, but it'll probably get better.
All right, everybody, I'll meet you over in the spaces, I hope.
And for now, I don't think I'll say something privately to my subscribers on locals, but I did get to spend half an hour with you before the show.
