Tim Walz goes full . . . you know. And other fun stuff in the news.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, College Degree Poll, Polymarket Odds Accuracy, Fed Chair Nomination, Kevin Hassett, NYT Credibility, David Sacks, Naval Ravikant, National Debt Crisis, Tariff Revenues Surge, Seditious Six, Sen. Mark Kelly, Military Felony Law, Elon's DOGE Insights, NGO Corruption, Tim Walz, Minnesota Massive Corruption, President Trump, Brian Stelter, WH Hoax List Webpage, Minnesota Criminal Street Gangs, Amy Klobuchar, President Maduro Amnesty Request, U.S. Venezuela Tensions, AI Moore's Law, PM Netanyahu, Israel's Iron Beam, IQ Immigration, Mike Cernovich, Simulation Theory, 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.
I'll tell you, it feels like it's been forever, even though it was only yesterday.
But that's how much I missed you.
Oh, wait a second.
Whoa.
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Hold on.
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Ah, it's okay.
It's just the Dilbert calendar.
It was so amazing that I thought, well, what can it be?
But if you're not done shopping, get your Dilbert calendar from Amazon.com.
It's the only place you can get it.
All right.
Now that I've done that little sales pitch, I guess we'll have to get serious.
I got a show for you today.
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
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All right, let's see what's happening.
Is there anything that I've been saying for years that is now the subject of scientific revelation?
Yes.
According to Eric Nolan on SciPost, did you know that participating in activist groups is linked to increased narcissism and psychopathy over time?
Well, it turns out that according to science, if you happen to already be a narcissist or a psychopath, you're more likely to get involved in activist groups.
But not only does it work in that direction, but if you are not especially narcissistic or psychopathic, being involved in one of those activist groups might turn you into it.
So it's sort of a two-way thing.
Now, does that sound like something that surprises you totally?
No, because you're probably in the same bubble I am.
And conservative thinkers have been saying this for years.
I mean, several years.
When was the first time Jordan Peterson told you that the, what is it, the cluster B personalities tend to be on the left, and they tend to be in activist groups.
So we kind of saw that one coming.
No big surprise there.
Well, did you know, according to the University of California at Riverside, that the soybean oil, the oil, the soybean oil, has a hidden fat-derived molecule that might fuel obesity.
In other words, soybean oil makes you fat.
I don't think it happens to every single person, but there's a lot of it.
Have you ever done an experiment where you go to the grocery store and try to find any packaged item that has to be packaged that doesn't have soy in it?
Have you ever done that experiment?
You could start at the end of the shelves for whatever section you're on, doesn't matter what section, then pick up the first package you see and see if there's a soy product in it.
There will be.
And put it back, go to the very next thing next to it.
There's soy.
I once looked like for probably an hour to see if I could find one damn thing that didn't have soy in it.
Now, there might be some obvious exceptions, like if you're buying something that only has one ingredient, you know, it's not necessarily soy.
But if you have anything that has multiple ingredients in it, oh yeah, you're eating soy.
So I don't know if the soy beans and the soy oil have the same impact, but beware.
Well, Akira the Don has released a little preview of another piece of music that features me as the vocalist.
It's so funny to hear myself say that, that I'm the least musical person in the world.
Yeah, I play a little bit of drums.
That's about it.
But to live in a world in which Akira the Don has incorporated my podcast voice as sort of a layer in his music, it's kind of really innovative and fun.
And I guess he's going to drop the album that would have a number of songs that he put together like that that would feature my voice and his music.
So that's coming December 19th.
But there's a preview, if you want to see one of the new ones, that's on my feed, or you can find it on Akira the Don's feed.
Anyway, did you know?
Well, you're going to know in a moment, that according to Newsmax, Mark Swanson's writing, that according to a poll, 63% polled say a four-year degree is not worth the cost.
And that more than six in ten registered voters think a four-year degree is not worth the cost, according to new NBC News poll.
Now, so the respect, I guess that's the right word, for a four-year degree is sort of at an all-time low, or at least in modern times, it's low.
Do you think that that is, first of all, a good representation of reality?
I think it is a good representation of what people think about the college degree.
But do you think they're just being influenced by the fact that it's too expensive?
And if you ask somebody who doesn't have one, what are they going to say?
If I did not have a four-year degree and you asked me today, how important is it?
I'd probably say, totally unimportant.
Yeah, you shouldn't get one.
And then I'd go off and get one.
So I had an advantage.
So here's my advice.
It's probably not essential that you get a four-year degree, but it's a competitive world.
So if you can get one, you know, if it's within your financial and or other abilities, you should definitely get one because you're going to be competing against people who don't have one.
And Maybe you're lucky and you get an employer who genuinely doesn't care.
There are more of them every day.
But the odds of running into somebody who does care, maybe because they have one themselves or they went to the same school or whatever, it's pretty high.
So I would say, from a maybe a logical perspective, it's not as necessary as it used to be.
But if you're looking at it from a strategic employee perspective, yeah, you should get one.
If you can do it without burdening yourself financially for the rest of your life.
Now, you don't want to do it at all costs.
You want to do it at a reasonable cost for your resources.
But yeah, I would definitely play the advantage if you have the option.
You know what Polymarket is?
It's one of those betting sites.
It's the big betting site.
Well, apparently, the betting sites are more accurate than opinion polls.
So once people put their money on it, they're way better at predicting than if you just say, hey, what do you think?
So I guess one of the founders or the CEO was talking about that.
And so keep an eye on Polymarket because it's going to tell you more than opinion.
However, it makes me ask this question.
Don't you think that if you had some way to know who had been really good at predicting in the past, that you'd like to see just those people predicting the next thing?
Wouldn't that be a lot better?
Why would I take the average of people who are terrible at predicting, meaning that they didn't win anything, you know, because you could see if they ever won anything on Polymarket?
Why would I want to see the average of the people who never were right mixed in with the average of the people who were right most of the time?
What the hell good is that?
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense if you could go to Polymarket and say, show me the people who have been right more than 60% of the time on whatever topic it is?
Of course that would be better.
How about if it's something that maybe is a new category or something?
Wouldn't you like to see the people who were the most well-informed?
Why would I take the average of people who are poorly informed on the topic?
Let's say the topic is crypto.
Do I really need to see my idiot?
Well, I won't say that, but do I want to see my plumber's opinion on crypto mixed in with David Sachs' opinion?
No, no, I just want to say David Sachs' opinion.
I don't want to see my plumber's opinion on crypto.
So I think there's a whole level where this prediction thing can go up a level.
They just have to give us a way to know who's been good at it in the past.
Well, Trump is teasing that he's already picked the replacement for Jerome Powell to be the head of the Fed.
We don't know who that will be, but he's sort of hinting by being coy about it that Kevin Hassett is likely to be picked.
That's not confirmed, but that's what the smart people think.
Now, Kevin Hassett is already in the administration.
I don't know his exact job, but it's something economic.
And I'm pretty sure he would take the job.
I think he was asked, and he said the generic answer, which is, you know, he would do what the president wants him to do, which is sort of a yes.
But apparently the markets are poised to love it if he gets picked because he's a lower, lower those interest rates kind of a guy, and markets love that.
So if Kevin Hassett does get picked, there's likely to be a bump in the market.
Now, keep in mind, I do not give financial advice.
So there are lots of other variables.
So maybe he gets selected on one day, but it's the same day that some other thing falls apart.
So it doesn't mean the markets will definitely go up.
But apparently they'll be at least friendly to him and likely to go up.
Now, in other news, speaking of David Sachs, New York Times had a hit piece about him, and he's pushing back on it pretty hard.
And the New York Times tried to make the argument that he had some kind of conflict of interest on AI or crypto and that his own investments somehow, blah, blah, blah.
Well, apparently that does not stand up to scrutiny.
And there's some idea that the New York Times is, you know, it's just a hit piece, basically.
Meaning not too reliable.
Now, the funny thing is, if you were to compare the credibility of the New York Times to the credibility of David Sachs, which one's more credible?
It's not really even close.
It's Sachs.
If you were to look at his lifetime of whatever he said in public compared to a lifetime of what the New York Times has reported to be true, I'm pretty sure he would win if there were some way to actually compare those things.
But I did notice that Naval Ravikant, who I mention often, he posted about that, about the New York Times hit piece.
He said, there are lies, damn lies, and New York Times headlines.
Now, Naval, who I sometimes refer to as the smartest person in the world, but let's call him the wisest person we know.
So he's famously non-political.
But this is a little bit political.
Not really.
It's more about one person.
But he's got one little toe in that domain, which is unusual.
He usually stays completely away from the political nonsense and deals with weightier life issues, etc.
But here's the thing that made me think about this.
Do you remember when Bill Clinton was running for office?
And he famously said that if you elect him, you get Hillary for free.
And before we knew who Hillary really was, that seemed to me at the time like a good deal.
I thought to myself, wow, really?
If you get Bill Clinton as president, which at the time, I have to confess, I was supporting Bill Clinton.
And so I thought that was a good idea.
And then when you see how capable Hillary is, I thought, well, that's actually a pretty good argument.
Two for one.
Who hates that?
Now, it turns out Hillary was not really the one you'd want to get for free.
But we didn't know that at the time.
So it seemed like a good idea.
Likewise, When you vote for Trump, you get me for free.
Think about it.
Would I be doing what I'm doing if Trump were not the president or earlier when he was running for president?
Not really.
I mean, I became, if you can call me political, I guess you could.
I only became political because Trump specifically was a persuader, and you know, that was my angle in.
And so you got me for free.
I literally wouldn't be involved, except that Trump is the key player.
And so you get whatever value you think I might add and reframing things or helping with messaging, whatever.
It's free.
I'm not charging anybody anything.
I mean, obviously, I monetize some of my feeds, but in terms of politics, nobody's paying me for that.
I don't have any kind of job.
You get me for free.
And then I see that, you know, Naval commenting on Sachs, they know each other.
And it occurred to me that when you hire David Sachs for your government, you get an entire network of all the smartest people in Silicon Valley, Naval just being, let's say, the tip of the spear there of smart people.
You get all of that for free.
And nobody ever talks about that.
Because, you know, Sachs, if you looked at his, let's call it a Rolodex, even though that's an old term, he could call almost anybody and get a second opinion on anything.
He's just really well connected, but also has a great reputation in the investment tech community.
And you get all of that for free.
Nobody ever talks about that.
Isn't that funny?
Because that's really worth a lot.
The fact that he, you know, he's one phone call away from an intense network of the smartest people in the world.
And he could contact me if he ever wanted to.
I follow him on X.
I think he follows me back.
So you get me for free, too.
If there was anything that I could ever add to what he's doing, I doubt it because it's not like I know much about crypto or AI compared to him.
Anyway, so don't forget what you get for free.
Elon Musk was doing a podcast recently where he had lots of quotable moments.
We'll talk about a few of them.
One of them was: so Elon has predicted that money won't have any value in the future, and instead it will be energy.
So energy will be the true currency.
And because Bitcoin can only be created with energy, because the computer has to do a lot of crunching to create a new Bitcoin, and the ones that we have were created by energy, that Bitcoin is, let's see, what did he say?
He said, long term, I think money disappears as a concept.
Money disappears.
How would you like to be the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, and know that almost certainly money will become worthless?
He's going to go from the richest person on the entire planet to, oh, you want a new car?
I want a new car.
We can both have a robot go build us one.
I'm simplifying a little bit.
But Elon predicts a world where the AI and the robots will make essentially everything you want close to free.
And it doesn't matter who you are.
It'll just all be sort of free.
Now, that's a very optimistic prediction, but he takes it further.
And I like having this to cling to.
I don't know if it's true, but he predicts that, quote, I think the future, we probably won't have money.
Energy and power generation will become the de facto currency.
That part I agree with completely.
And I've said the same thing.
I believe that energy is the new money.
And maybe Bitcoin is just the stand-in for the energy.
But he did say that the only way out of debt in the future, the only way, literally the only way, there's not a second way to escape our debt burden, our 38 trillion or whatever it will be by the time we start turning it around.
The only way that that will get remediated is if the world of robots and AI is so stimulative that it makes even our $38 trillion debt seem small.
Now, I might not be doing the best job of explaining it, but did that make sense?
That essentially an entirely new economy is about to emerge, and it will very quickly just swamp in size the entire existing economy.
So it might be 10 times it, 100 times it.
We don't really know.
It's uncharted territory.
But that world, according to Elon Musk, the smartest person you know, is the only way out.
Otherwise, we're literally doomed.
We're doomed.
So let's hope that the robots and the AI make a lot of money.
Now, here's the part I don't fully understand.
How could it be that money is worthless at the same time that we're making so much extra money from robots and AI that it compensates for our debt or pays it down or minimizes it?
I feel like there's something missing.
Like, it can't be true that the AI and robots become this substitute for money at the same time everybody can have everything.
Or could it be that all the people who hold the debt wouldn't care if they never got paid back because everybody can have everything for free?
So I haven't quite figured out how that all fits together, but I love hearing that there's at least one possibility that the smartest person you know, who isn't Naval, that the smartest person you know, aside from Naval, thinks that there is a way out.
Not guaranteed.
I don't even know if he's going as far as to say it's most likely.
He didn't say that.
But at least there's some possibility.
And that's more than I thought we had, honestly.
Well, speaking of that, according to Zero Hedge, our tariff revenue has surged to a new high.
So $31.4 billion in October.
So that's just from tariffs.
And what percentage of our total tax revenue do you think that is?
I asked AI, ChatGPT, and apparently the amount that we collect in income tax per month, a recent month, October, is a little over $400 billion.
So now we're up to something like 8% of our entire incoming revenue from taxes.
About 8% of it is tariffs.
Now, that's 8% we weren't getting before.
So it's on top of the 400 million, billion, 400 billion.
And I have to admit, I didn't think the tariffs would ever get to 8%.
And so Trump is teasing that maybe he would get rid of income tax and have only tariffs someday if the tariff number kept going up.
I don't see how that's possible.
But if I'm being honest, I also didn't see that tariffs would ever reach 8% of our monthly tax revenue.
To me, that's a lot.
8%?
That's pretty impressive.
So I'm going to say all bets are off.
We don't know how big that could get.
I still don't see a path to get all the way to no income tax and tariffs do everything.
But I'm not going to rule it out now.
So I'm moving from, well, there's no way that's going to work to, I don't know, maybe, maybe.
Let's talk about Mark Kelly, Senator Kelly, who, as you know, is part of what we're calling the seditious six, one of the six Democrats who did the video saying that the military should not obey illegal orders.
So he goes on Meet the Press yesterday, and he was asked by the Meet the Press host if he would refuse an order if he had been in the military and he had been asked to attack the Venezuelan drug boats, would he consider that an illegal order?
That is a good question.
So if you're thinking the NBC is going to give him a softball, well, that wasn't a softball.
That question was exactly the question I wanted to be asked.
Would you interpret this as an illegal order if you had been asked to blow up one of these Venezuelan Narco boats?
Well, here's what Kelly said.
Rather than answer the question, he avoided the question.
Huh.
He had just said that it's sort of common sense and any reasonable person can certainly tell the difference between an illegal order in the military and a legal one.
And then when he's asked to get a specific example, is this legal or illegal?
He changed the subject and he reinterpreted it by saying, well, the news story recently about Hagseth alleges that there was a secondary attack on one boat, the first one, I think, that killed the survivors.
So he said, well, you know, we're really talking about that second order.
But he didn't really answer the question at all.
Now, how can he have it both ways?
How can it be that a reasonable person can definitely look at a real world situation and they would definitely know what is legal and what isn't, so there'd be no real ambiguity in the real world.
But he couldn't answer the very first question.
He had to avoid the question because he couldn't answer it.
And you know what?
I don't know the answer to the question either.
So even if you take the story about Hagseth to be true, and by the way, I don't think that is at all confirmed, that that's an allegation, the whistleblower thing.
I don't know that that will ever be confirmed, that there was a standing order of some kind that you had to kill all the people in the boat.
I don't know.
I'm not assuming that that's a real, I'm not assuming that the allegations will be proven out.
But let's say they were.
Just to take this question to its logical conclusion.
What if you were in the military, you took out the boat and you said, okay, that part's legal because they're terrorists.
And, you know, I've got the legal authority to do it.
But then there are these two alleged two survivors.
And then suppose you had the question of do you take them out too, or do you try to rescue them because they lived?
To which I say, how does that work with terrorists in general?
If you were in an airplane over land and you spotted some terrorists, be they Al-Qaeda or someone else, and you knew that's who it was, so you knew that it was Al-Qaeda, and they weren't in the act of doing a terrorist thing, but they were definitely preparing for it.
So let's say they were loading bombs onto a truck, and you knew that they had bad intentions for those bombs.
Could you kill those terrorists from the air if all you knew is that it's al-Qaeda and they were preparing some bombs?
To which I say, I don't know, but I think it would be legal.
So I asked ChatGPT: is it illegal for the military to kill a terrorist who is preparing a terror act?
What do you think the AI said?
I asked ChatGPT, in this case, not Grok.
Grok had some issues this morning, so I was using ChatGPT.
What do you think?
In the comments, you tell me.
Do you think the AI said, oh, it's totally legal to kill a terrorist if they're in the act of preparing a terror act?
Well, here's what it said.
It said, in general, under international law and the laws of armed conflict, it is not necessarily illegal, not necessarily illegal, for a military to target and kill a terrorist who is actively preparing an imminent terror attack.
And then it goes on and explains it.
Now, we are soundly into gray area here, right?
If we have declared that the terrorists, I'm sorry, if we have already declared, the government, that the narco boats are terrorists because they're delivering a weapon of mass destruction to our shores, that makes them terrorists who are in the act right in the middle of the act of doing the terror thing, which is delivering these drugs to our shores.
So even though two of them survived the first attack, if they were al-Qaeda and they were on land and they were loading bombs onto a truck, you don't think we'd kill any survivors if it took a second shot?
I think we would.
And it doesn't feel like that would be illegal to me.
Now, I'm not in the military, so I'll never have to make that decision.
But are you telling me that the average person in the military, or I'll say it a different way, are you telling me that every person in the military, or almost every person, would have the same opinion about what I just described?
Would they?
To me, it seems obvious that people would have different opinions.
So if it's obvious that people could have different opinions about are these terrorists in the act of a terror attack or are they not, I think Mark Kelly's argument just falls apart.
Because if I can't answer the question, are you telling me that just being in the military would have helped me?
I doubt it.
Do you think that they had a training class that covered that exact situation?
I doubt it.
I doubt they had any training that was specific to that.
And I don't think that the generic understanding of what's legal and the generic understanding of what a terrorist is, I don't think that gets you there.
I think that's a genuine gray area.
So to Kelly's argument that anybody in the military would know the difference between a legal and an illegal act, that doesn't even feel like it's close to being true.
I feel like most of the things in the real world are messy and that there would be just all kinds of gray area.
This is just an obvious one.
And we didn't even have to look for a weird example, right?
I'm literally taking the example that's the headline in the news right now.
If the headline that's in the news right now, even that one we can't decide if that's a clear case of illegality or not, what's the next one going to be?
Anyway, terrible argument, but it's getting more interesting because apparently there is some existing law that I believe has not been used maybe for, I don't know, decades or hundreds of years, but there's some law that says that it's a felony with up to 10 years in prison for anyone, quote, with intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the U.S. military or naval forces.
Uh-oh.
It's literally a felony for what the arguably court would have to decide, I guess.
But it looks like a felony that the six Democrats even made that video.
Because don't you think that they would have known that that would have an impact on interfering or impairing or influencing the loyalty, morale, or discipline?
I feel like you can make the case.
I don't know that any jury would necessarily convict people for free speech.
Probably free speech would win.
I'm guessing.
But this is a real risk if you were one of the people telling the military that maybe they're going to be getting illegal orders more than they've ever gotten before.
I don't know.
It looks pretty sketchy.
Also, another Elon Musk ism coming from his recent podcast.
I would love to give credit to who was interviewing him because they got a lot of good stuff, but I did not see it in what I was looking at.
So I apologize.
If one of you knows who this podcast was with, put it in the comments so at least the other people can see it.
I want to give him a shout out because he did a really good job getting some good stuff.
So Elon Musk was talking about what Doge and the Doge experience taught him.
He said it was like a very interesting side quest, which is a funny way to put it.
He said, fraudsters necessarily will come up with a very sympathetic argument.
They're not going to say, give us money for fraud, he went on.
It's going to be like save the baby pandas, NGO, which is like, who doesn't want to save the baby pandas?
They're adorable.
But then it turns out no pandas are being saved in this thing.
It's just corruption, essentially.
And then you're like, well, can you send us a picture of the panda?
And they're like, no.
He goes, okay, well, how do we know it's going to be pandas then?
And that does pretty well capture my understanding of what our government and the NGOs and where all our own money is going.
I did not know that before Doge.
My entire understanding of the country, the debt, the government, all of that changed radically when I learned what Elon Musk is describing is actually the normal way we're operating.
If this had been a one-off, like, well, there was that one time the panda people pulled one over on us.
No, it's not one time.
It's the only way it works.
It's a universal effect.
It's not the exception.
It's the way everything works.
I didn't know that.
I mean, that would be beyond my most cynical, skeptical view of how anything works.
I had no idea.
I did know, to my small credit, I did know that at the city level, 100% of things are corrupt.
I've been saying that for a while.
The city, the people who are allocating money, your tax money for city services, of course are corrupt.
You know, maybe not day one, maybe not the first person who ever gets the job.
But over time, you're going to attract the people who know, you know, if I were the mayor of this smaller city, I'll bet I could direct these contracts to my friends, and I'll bet they would find some way to repay me that was not easily trackable.
So over time, our system largely guarantees, because we don't do any real audits in government, it largely guarantees it's going to be corrupt.
You just have to wait a little while.
The only question is, have you waited long enough for the corrupt people to get in and never leave?
Because why would you leave?
I mean, once you get in there, if you're going to stay, you're going to stay.
So Doge completely changed my view of the world.
And that's a big deal because I think the same happened with other people.
Speaking of Tim Walsh, governor of Minnesota.
So Minnesota Department of Human Services, I guess there are 480 employees who have signed on to the idea that the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been stolen by mostly Somali-related gangs who were pretending to have saved the panda and other charitable things, but really they were just completely corrupt.
And they stole hundreds of millions.
And you wonder, how is that even possible?
How do you steal hundreds of millions over a lengthy period of time?
And nobody catches you?
Nobody, there's no red flag.
Well, according to 480 people in the Department of Human Services in Minnesota, Tim Walsh was in fact informed on multiple occasions about all the red flags of corruption.
And instead of looking into it and stopping the corruption, what do you think he did?
Take a guess.
Tim Walsh, who is a Democrat, not only a Democrat, but the one that Kamala Harris thought would be good choice for her number two, her vice president.
What do you think he did the multiple times that credible people said, hey, it looks like they're stealing gigantic amounts of our money.
Maybe we should look into this.
What do you think he did?
Well, I wasn't there, but according to the Department of Human Services, 480 people, he retaliated against the whistleblowers.
The worst thing a human can do, if you're in government, is to punish the whistleblowers.
Now, what'd they say?
They said he disempowered the Office of Legislative Auditor.
Oh, so they at least had some hand waving at an audit, but he disempowered it so they wouldn't be effective.
He allowed agencies to disregard their own audit findings.
Oh, okay.
Well, you can do the audit and you can find problems, but then we're going to ignore them.
And then he retaliated against the whistleblowers.
So it seems like Minnesota was a Ukraine Zelensky-level corruption.
We're not talking about small dollars.
We're not talking about a governor guided a contract to his cousin.
We're talking about enormous organized theft.
And I can't believe that Walsh had no benefit from that.
Why would he try so hard to keep the criminals in power?
I don't know.
It also makes me wonder if that's the reason he was chosen as vice president.
You know how we speculate that the people who rise to the top at the Democrat side, we speculate that it's only because they are criminals and that the other people who are also criminals want to make sure that they have some kind of blackmail against them.
But really, it's just a big criminal enterprise.
So the people who are themselves criminal make sure that they only choose as their running mate in this case, another criminal so that if that criminal ever decided to turn them in, they would themselves be turned in.
So you've got this mutually assured destruction thing.
And I would have said, honestly, a few years ago, I would have said that's nonsense and that just sounds like conspiracy thinking.
It's like, come on.
Come on, Scott.
Do you really think that Kamala picked for her vice president the most criminal person they could find because that's the person they could control?
Really, Scott?
Do you think that actually happened in the real world?
Yes.
I don't have proof, but come on.
I mean, it's just starting to look so obvious that the Democrat Party is just a large criminal organization that depends on having people in it who aren't willing to talk to turn in the other people who are in it.
It doesn't look like that's necessarily the case on the Republican side, but I wouldn't rule it out, right?
There could be some pockets of that on both sides.
So Trump was asked about Tim Walz, and he said that Tim was, quote, the seriously retarded governor of Minnesota, that he does nothing either through fear, incompetence, or both.
Trump wrote that in a true social.
So then Kristen Welker of Meet the Press asked Tim Walz about Trump's statement that he was, quote, seriously retarded.
And Walt said, we cannot allow this to be normalized.
You can't use that language.
Well, you can, but you shouldn't, he said.
Well, you know, here I'm going to agree with Tim Waltz.
I don't think that Trump should have called him seriously retarded because I don't think there's anything serious about that guy.
But up, bump, bum.
Okay, you were going to do it if I didn't.
I don't love the use of that word.
I understand why people don't want it to be used.
It's, you know, there are too many people who have genuine disabilities, etc.
So it's not my first choice, but I like free speech.
And I do enjoy when Trump entertains his base, because it is pretty entertaining, while he's doing his job.
Trump is the only president who can have an entire floor show of entertainment, and that's what I would call this.
It's like a floor show of great entertainment, just to watch how people react, just to watch how Meet the Press handled it, just to make the dumbest Democrats obsess on it, just to make them think of whatever is the least important thing that's happening in the world and get them to treat it like it's the most important.
That's funny.
And the fact that the base, I'm pretty sure that the Republican base thinks it's just funny.
Now, a lot of people probably are where I am, which is I wouldn't use the word in public.
I mean, not the way he used it.
I wouldn't do it.
But I don't care that he did because, you know, Trump is a unique character who oversteps the bounds of polite conversation routinely.
Once you get used to it, it doesn't seem like the end of the world.
It just feels like he's doing a bit.
And the bit is, how angry can I make them?
How much time can I make them spend talking about that and not about me?
You know, not about me policy-wise.
So I kind of love that he does it.
It's very funny.
So CNN and Brian Stelter was not happy that the White House has a page on the internet dedicated to all the hoaxes that come out of the media.
And so Brian Stelter was saying that the White House has launched a webpage that targets reporters.
Well, does it target reporters or does it report when reporters are hoaxing and fake?
Well, I would argue it's the latter.
But then Brian Stelter says he thinks that Trump is doing it.
In other words, that the page exists for the purpose of, quote, delegitimizing the media.
To which I say, yeah.
Yeah.
That's exactly why they do it.
You didn't discover this.
That's the whole point of it, is to delegitimize the media.
But was the media legitimate before that page went up?
Or is the page a response to the fact that the media is not legitimate?
Well, you know my opinion.
If the media had been legitimate, then I would not be in favor of a page that incorrectly said that they had lots of hoaxes.
But because the hoaxes that are listed are genuinely hoaxes, or at least, you know, fake news, if they weren't genuine examples, and if there were not lots of them, and if they were not spread across multiple media, well, then I'd say, you know, that's going too far.
It's wasting my tax dollars.
You know, why are you putting up this page of lies?
But that's not what's happening.
The hoax page that the White House put up is because there are a whole bunch of hoaxes.
Yeah, he is delegitimizing the media.
Is that bad?
No.
Delegitimizing hoaxers is exactly what we need.
So thank you for that.
All right, so Amy Klobuchar, Democrat, she was also on CNN and CNN asked her this question.
Does Minnesota have a problem with gangs roaming the streets?
Now, that would be her state.
So what do you think she said to the question, does Minnesota have a problem with gangs roving the street?
Because apparently that is a problem.
But what would Amy Klobuchar say?
Because if she says, yes, gangs are roaming the streets, that would suggest that maybe Trump is doing the right thing by sending the National Guard.
So she can't really agree with something that I think is just observably true.
And it would be the reason that CNN even asks the question, does Minnesota have a problem with gangs roaming the streets?
So Klobuchar's answer was, quote, every state has a problem with crime.
Really?
Does every state have a problem with that kind of crime?
Because that was a pretty specific question.
The question that was not asked is, does Minnesota have crime?
Nobody asked that.
Of course every state has crime.
They're talking specifically about gangs roaming the streets.
I don't know if you've ever been to Hawaii.
Do you know what you never see in Maui?
Gangs roaming the streets.
Now, does that mean there's no crime?
Well, even in Maui, which is very safe, there's a little bit of crime.
I've never seen any, but I'm sure it's there.
What about Alaska?
What about Rhode Island?
Is there a big problem in Rhode Island with the gangs roaming the streets?
All right.
Well, so Klobuchar was not really finding a high ground and she was not really reframing it like Steve Jobs did when his phone had that problem with the antenna.
You've heard me tell that story before.
She just changed the subject, which is pretty much all you need to know about that.
Well, there's more news from Venezuela.
Apparently, prior to Trump closing the airspace above Venezuela, or declaring that it was closed, he had a conversation, which we didn't know about till now, with Maduro.
Now, a phone conversation, I guess.
And Maduro was apparently asking for some assurances that he would get some kind of a that I think he and his family or maybe some of his top people would get pardons, or I don't know what the right word is, but basically not be held responsible for global amnesty.
He wanted global amnesty for all of his alleged crimes, and I think for some other people around him.
Trump said, nope.
Apparently, it was a hard no.
So, nope, no amnesty.
And Trump told him, allegedly, that his only option is to leave, to just literally get out of Venezuela and abandon his position, or something very bad was about to happen, and we don't have to spell it out.
But have you noticed that a big part of our Navy is sitting off of your coast?
Did you know that we have a lot of military assets that are within striking distance?
And Trump has already said that the ground war against Venezuela is imminent.
So Trump is apparently doing the Trumpian thing where he has the upper hand and he's giving up nothing.
He's basically saying, would you like to be alive tomorrow?
That's all you have to decide because there's one way you can do it.
You have to leave right away with no assurances.
Do you think if he left with no assurances, Maduro, do you think if he left that we would leave him alone?
Because, hey, well, he's gone now.
Well, I don't think he thinks that would happen.
And I don't think so either.
I've got a feeling if he leaves the safety of Venezuela, it's not going to make him more safe.
I feel like he might be doomed in every scenario, but he might be able to live a little bit longer if he leaves Venezuela.
So Trump is giving him really no good choices or choices that would look good to him.
I think Maduro tried to negotiate that he would still have some control over the Venezuelan military.
Well, obviously, that's a hard no.
No.
How about you have no control over the military and you just leave?
So things are coming to a head there.
And apparently, after that conversation, which did not result in an agreement for anything, that's when Trump decided to close the airspace over Venezuela with military means.
So Maduro's probably had a really bad weekend because he's deciding which way he wants to die or maybe be jailed for life.
But the one thing that's not going to happen, I believe that Trump has removed from him any illusion he might have had that he can sort of keep the status quo, still be in charge.
He's either going to be taken out militarily.
That seems to be the clear indication here, or he can leave the country and be exposed to all manner of risks once he's outside of his little bubble.
And those are his only choices.
So, given that he only has those choices, and given that I'm sure Trump and the military will keep squeezing so that he knows that this is not a bluff, and by the way, this is not a bluff.
You know the difference, right?
And even we can tell the difference of what would be a bluff and what is, okay, this is just going to happen.
This is in the category of definitely not a bluff.
I'm pretty sure that Maduro is not going to be there in a year.
You know, maybe a month from now, anything could happen.
But I think pretty soon, pretty soon.
So, we'll keep an eye on that.
Here's a thing I've been wondering about with AI.
So, Sam Altman, you all know him, creator, founder of Chat GPT, OpenAI.
So, he argued in a blog post that he wrote early this year that the intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.
So, in other words, that you could predict how smart your AI would be based on the inputs.
If you gave it more input, there would be some reliable way to know how much smarter it got from that input.
And that there might be a predictable equation there.
Now, he's calling it the log of the resources used to train and run it.
So, that would be the equation essentially to predict.
And then I saw an article that was sort of compared to Moore's Law.
You all know Moore's law with microchips, the idea that the number of circuits on a chip would double every X amount, and that therefore the chips will get faster in a predictable way across decades.
And then we observe that, sure enough, Moore's law has held amazingly over decades.
Now, did you ever wonder why Moore's law works?
How in the world did Gordon Moore know that technology would increase at just this rate to get the doubling that he had predicted every X, whatever?
How did he know that?
And what makes that necessarily true?
And I still don't know the answer to that.
So, I asked Grock, you know, what's the logic behind Moore's Law?
We do observe that it seems to have been predictable.
You know, it did seem to predict from many years ago.
It did predict where we would be now.
So, it's not nothing.
I mean, it predicts.
And I've told you before that the closest you can get to understanding reality is if your worldview accurately predicts.
And this does.
So that's not nothing.
That's a lot.
But why?
Why does it work?
And Grok said the logic behind it is that the number of transistors on a microchip roughly doubles every two years, while costs stay the same or drop.
To which I say, why?
Why do the number of transistors on a microchip roughly double every two years?
Why?
What is the law of physics or any other law that makes that true?
And there's no real answer to that.
So here's what I think.
I think it's marketing.
If you were in the microchip business and you wanted to make sure that you could sell the upgrade forever, it's like, well, we got a great chip this year, but wait till you see what we have next year.
So buy it this year.
Next year, you're going to want to get that doubling.
Or two years from now, you're going to want to get that doubling.
So you better buy the new one.
Oh, wait.
Now we have another doubling.
So I don't know this to be true, but for a long time I've suspected that we're being completely bamboozled by what is just marketing and that the marketing pretends that Moore's Law is true and then the technology people design to that truth.
So in other words, it's not necessarily true that Moore's Law holds, but rather than have an unpredictable, bumpy ride toward better chips, if you treat it like it's super predictable, then everybody can make their plans and say, okay, well, I need this one now, but in two years I know I'll have to upgrade.
I think it's just marketing.
Am I wrong?
Because it's weird that if you even look for why the law applies, there's not really an answer to it.
They just sort of observe that it does.
I think it's marketing.
All right.
But if I'm wrong about that, I would find that interesting.
So let me know if you have a better idea of what's going on.
And it makes me wonder if the AI has the same situation.
That maybe we want to make it look like it's predictable, but maybe it's not.
Well, over in Israel, Netanyahu has officially asked for a presidential pardon for what are his alleged corruptions.
So he and his wife, Netanyahu and his wife, are being accused of accepting more than $260,000 worth of luxury goods, including cigars, jewelry, and champagne, from billionaires in exchange for political favors and maybe some favorable coverage from Israeli media outlets, which is sort of separate.
Now, let me give you my take on that.
I don't know if this is true.
I mean, Netanyahu would say it's political lawfare and it's not based on anything real.
But how much do you think Netanyahu could earn if he were out of office and giving speeches?
What do you think would be the market value of one speech by Netanyahu if he were out of office tomorrow?
I think it would be over $100,000, wouldn't it?
So when you say that over some amount of time, he allegedly accepted $260,000 worth of luxury goods, including things like cigars and champagne, does that mean that some billionaire invited him to his house and they had expensive cigars and champagne?
And then maybe the billionaire asked him for a favor when they were done.
Is that what he's being accused of?
Because that's not much of a crime.
I mean, I'm not even sure it is a crime.
Can you not enjoy expensive cigars and expensive alcohol with somebody who's a billionaire who might also want something?
But isn't that true of everybody?
Everybody who talks to a politician wants something.
So it's a pretty small crime if the two safety is first of all, you know, goods like champagne.
I mean, how much is, you know, what are we talking about?
Is Netanyahu going to sell out Israel for a really good bottle of alcohol?
I don't think so.
Is Netanyahu going to sell out Israel because he got good cigars?
Like, how good are these cigars?
So let me be clear, I'm not defending Nanyahu, and I don't know what he did or didn't do.
But I'm just commenting that his income potential, just as being who he is, is way bigger than this.
So even if he had done exactly what they said, how much influence would this have on his decisions, given that he could make way more money than that with a few speeches?
I don't know.
It does feel like it's small ball.
And we'll see if he gets the pardon.
I would bet against it.
But it doesn't seem like the biggest problem in the world, even if he did exactly what they said.
All right.
Also, in Israel, according to AFP, they killed 40 Hamas fighters in Gaza who were in tunnels.
Don't you wonder how many terrorists are left in those tunnels?
Does it seem to you that it's going to be sort of that Japanese World War II thing where there's going to be somebody in a tunnel that stays there for 20 years?
I don't know how that would eat, but they're still in tunnels now.
So 40 of them got killed.
Apparently, their assumption that there's still some number of people still in tunnels, while the Israeli army controls the surface.
Below the surface, there might be this whole civilization of not that many at this point, but maybe dozens of people who are just figuring out how to get out of the tunnel without dying.
And then Israel apparently is now deployed for the first time their iron beam laser defense system for shooting down missiles and drones.
And I guess that's just going into operation now.
And it makes me wonder if they had that up and running during the worst of the attacks, how much of a difference would it make?
And how much of a difference is it going to be when any country that's attacked with drones and missiles has a laser defense system?
Because if it works, everybody's going to have one, right?
At least all our allies will have one.
I feel like that could change everything.
Because right now, anybody who could send a deadly drone into enemy territory would have an advantage because they could send lots of drones until you overwhelm the defenses.
But if you had a really good laser beam defense system, it would look like Babylon 5.
What were the shadow?
was that the name of the aliens that had these laser beams out of their ships if you've never seen uh if you've never seen babylon 5 you don't know what i'm talking about But it seems to me that one good laser defense system could take out an awful lot of drones and missiles over time.
Maybe version 1.0 is not, you know, not the be-all end-all, but assuming some rate of progress of improving the laser beams, Maybe the advantage will go back to the ground, and maybe the drones won't have as much advantage.
But then the drones will get better, so we'll see.
I saw a post by Mike Cerovich today.
He said that focusing on Islam hides the real problems.
He said, NGOs who steal our money to bring in low IQ people who can't function in the U.S.
And he says about IQ, that's what you're not supposed to notice: IQ and civilization.
I've made a similar point over time, which is if we can't treat IQ like it really matters, how can we really survive?
Because IQ is probably among the top variables that you should consider with not just immigration, but hiring almost anything.
IQ should be like right at the top of things that will predictably make a difference.
And it feels to me that even though Trump is provocative when he talks about Tim Wolf being retarded, I feel like we may be entering a point where you can talk about IQ without being called a racist because you know that's what's going to happen, right?
So we might be on the verge of something good if we just can talk about it.
Can you just let us talk about it without getting canceled?
You don't have to agree with us, us being whoever would have the same opinion as me, and in this case, Mike Cernovich, but you don't have to agree with us.
But can we even talk about it?
Because it seems pretty darn important to me that the smarter the people you bring in, the better your country is going to be.
So maybe we're seeing a little bit of movement in that direction.
Let me just skip that story.
Also, Elon Musk was asked in the podcast I was talking about earlier about simulation theory.
And he went on and explained his view that, statistically speaking, we're more likely a simulation than not.
And of course, a lot of people don't agree with that.
And you probably know that I believe that we're a simulation.
And I like being on the same side as Elon Musk because it's sort of a philosophy/slash logic slash IQ question.
And here's what I realize: you can't really have a debate about simulation with someone who is religious.
Not because they're wrong.
And I have to say this really carefully.
I'm not religious.
So when I look at it, I'm just looking at how do I calculate the odds of this versus the odds of that.
But I'm unencumbered by a religious starting place.
But, and I also remind you that I'm very pro-religion.
I just don't happen to be a believer.
I think that the people who are believers have a clear advantage in life.
It's a lifestyle hack.
I think it makes you and your family more successful.
So I'm very pro-Christianity, very pro.
I just, you know, can't get there with my own belief system.
So My take is if you argue the simulation, the idea that we're literally programmed by some other entity, that you can't have that conversation really with a believer.
Because the believer has to start with a conclusion and then reason backwards.
Because nothing's going to talk you out of believing in your God.
Like, that's not going to happen because somebody said, well, what about the simulation?
You're not going to abandon your religion.
So if you're already starting with the end point, there is a God, God made us.
There's nowhere to go on that.
And that's okay.
All right.
If that sounds like a criticism, it's the opposite.
If you're starting with the assumption that there's a God of the Christian Bible, I think you've picked a really good lifestyle.
I think you have an advantage in life.
And I'm all for you embracing that for the rest of your life, teaching your kids, spreading the word, all for it.
But let's not pretend that you're starting from zero and you're trying to logic your way into the simulation or logic your way out of Christianity.
It's not the right domain.
If you didn't get there by logic, and I don't think most people get there by logic, you can't be talked out of it with logic.
You've heard that before, right?
You can't talk somebody out of something that they talk themselves into.
I want to say irrationally, but that sounds like an insult and that's not what's intended.
I mean, belief and faith are their own domain.
You know, logic and facts, very important, but separate domain.
They can often work together.
It doesn't mean that you're, you know, if you have a religious belief, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean that you're somehow, you know, unable to do reason.
Of course, you can.
You can fit them together very well.
But having a debate with somebody who's starting with the answer, I've never seen that work.
And again, I want to be as complimentary to religious people as I can because I think you have a clear advantage in life.
And I'm all for it.
And I also noted, and this got people pretty worked up, that when people debate the simulation theory with me, their arguments sound to me like word salad.
Now, if you don't know me and you haven't followed me for a while, that would sound like I said, I know the answer and you don't.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying that to my ears, it sounds like word salad.
But there are two possibilities, as somebody pointed out in the comments.
One possibility is that I have the right answer and the people who have the wrong answer are confused.
And so it sounds like word salad.
But the other possibility that's exactly equally possible is that the problem's on my end.
Will you give me that?
Will you give me that I'm completely aware that the reason it might sound like word salad is because my brain isn't quite processing things correctly?
Because that would feel the same to me.
So when I say it sounds like word salad, don't take that to mean I'm right and you're wrong, because that I don't know.
I don't know who's right.
I just know what it sounds like.
And I would also say that a lot of people argue the consciousness argument.
And they say, but Scott, you can't get a digital being to have a consciousness, and yet humans have a consciousness, so therefore you lose the argument, because if these digital beings don't have a consciousness, well, they're obviously not what we are, because we've got a consciousness.
To which I say, that depends how you define consciousness.
If I get to define it the way I think is a good definition of consciousness, you can definitely give that to a digital being.
If you have a different definition of what consciousness is, it's entirely possible that nobody could program whatever your version is.
So sometimes you think you're arguing from a common understanding, but I think that consciousness, we never really agree what that is.
So I can't really have a debate with you about whether a digital being has consciousness if you don't think consciousness means the same thing that I do.
So you kind of can't get there from here.
Debating the simulation hypothesis.
And then I saw somebody else attack my description of it as a hypothesis.
They said, Scott, you know, first of all, it's not a hypothesis technically.
All right, but is that really an argument?
It is what it is, if I call it a hypothesis or not.
So I think we will forever be in, you know, on different sides of whether a simulation hypothesis is credible or not.
And I don't mind that.
We don't have to agree on everything all the time.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is all I wanted to say for today.
Kind of a fun day in the news.
We'll keep an eye on the stock market and see what happens today.
But I'm going to say a few words privately to my beloved subscribers on locals, who I don't spend enough time with.
