A very special Sunday coffee with Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, The Beatles Talent Stack, Systems Over Goals, Spasmodic Dysphonia, Akira The Don Talent Stack, MeaningWave, Verbal Persuasion, Mike Benz Talent Stack, Pattern Recognition Talent, Epstein's Intel Associations, Rich Powerful Intel Protection, President Trump Talent Stack, Trump's Trolling Skills, WH Hall of Presidents, Kennedy Center Renaming, Trapping Hateful democrats, Art-form Quality Trolling, Laser-Pointer cat democrats, Trolling Technique, Climate Change Hysteria, Nuclear Power Status, Mike Lee, Letters of Marque, Anti-Pirate Strategy, AI Video Streaming, Feature Length AI Movies, Venezuela Blockade, Good Genes, Bad Genes, Election Topics Strategy, Thomas Massie, Tulsi Gabbard, Deep State War Mongers, Ukraine War, Russia's Military Capability, AI Healthcare Cost Reduction, Anti-Fraud Audits, Tech-Cities Concept, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, Consciousness, Trillion Dollar Yearly US Fraud, 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.
Well, if you didn't expect the show to go back to its normal time, you were surprised.
So here we are.
I am officially back home from a weekend hospital.
We will not dwell on my medical situation, but suffice to say, I'm feeling terrific this morning.
And I'm going to give you the best podcast show you've ever seen.
Now, I say that, of course, jokingly, but it might actually be the best one you'll ever see.
I have a high standard to beat because just the other day I was saying, and I meant it, by the way, I said that the All-in-Pod most recent episode is just one of the best things I've ever seen in a podcast.
It was about AI and economics and just a bunch of things that interest me and were perfectly debated and described.
It was just such a great show.
But because I'm competitive, I've put together for you a special show today, a Sunday edition that will combine all the things you normally like with a new framing that I think you'll like a lot.
I'm predicting.
That is my stomach growling.
I'm not using my normal microphone, so it might get picked up on the microphone.
If you don't mind.
But has anybody missed the simultaneous sip?
Wouldn't you like it to go back to normal?
Yeah, you would.
Guess what's coming?
Get your beverage ready because we're back, baby.
We're back.
All right.
I know why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip.
All you need is a copper mugger, a glass of tanker, chalicerstein, a canteen sugar flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go.
Oh, God.
So good.
Sometimes the best thing in the world is just to get back to your routine.
So, pretty happy this morning.
All right, here's what's special about today.
I'm going to give an extended shout out to three artists who blew my mind this week.
Now, I'm using the word artist and art in an expansive way.
So it's not exactly what you would call art, perhaps, but there are people who have raised what they're doing to, in my opinion, an art form.
And I'm going to start with a long wind up so that you've got a context that will make this much more meaningful.
You ready?
All right.
So I've mentioned a few of these things I've mentioned before, but I've never tied them together in the way you're going to see.
One of them is I've always been a, not always, but for years I've been a student of the Beatles, you know, the musical group, the Beatles.
And what I'm interested in is not just how much I liked them, you know, especially when I was young, but their processes and the systems that they used and how did they get to be so great.
Because one of the things you would note about the Beatles is if you looked at any one of their skills, they had lots of skills across a variety of domains, none of them look like the best in the world.
So they're not the best lyricists.
In fact, a lot of their lyrics were random.
They're not the best musicians in terms of playing their instruments, which they would even have told you themselves.
You could argue that Ringo was actually world-class musician, but there'd be some debate on that.
But I was trying to count in my head after studying them for years how many skills they had combined because they had everything from the style to the sense of humor to the marketing, the business.
They played multiple instruments.
Like I said, they did their own lyrics.
But on top of all that, I think McCartney was the unsung genius of the group.
Everybody gets her credit.
They were all amazing.
But McCartney was sort of a systems over goals kind of a guy.
He just didn't call it that.
And I think he was also a talent sack kind of a guy because they were acquiring so many talents over time.
I'll just give you an example.
I might have this wrong, but the example still works.
I believe it was McCartney who said they had a rule, let's call it a system.
If they started to write a song, they wouldn't end the night until they finished it.
Now, presumably there were some exceptions to that.
But one of the things that they're famous for is completing more, you know, writing more songs than anybody could even imagine.
So if you took just McCartney's skill stack, I'll bet he had at least 20 skills that worked perfectly together.
And the magic sauce that I write about and I talk about is not that he had a lot of skills, because if he'd been, let's say, really good at badminton, well, that wouldn't really mix with anything else he was doing.
But if you're really good at studio work plus, you know, drums plus guitar plus blah, blah, every one of those work together, including the business end of it.
So if you combine the four Beatles and their skills, I think you would end up with something like 20 to 50 skills that are not random.
They all work together.
And I don't think we've ever seen anything like that.
Now, time goes by, and here's some more context.
And remember, I'm going to tie this all together.
So just make a mental note that the Beatles were not the best in the world at anything, but they were probably above average at 20 to 50 different skills.
And that's, in my opinion, that's the magic sauce.
So time goes by.
We're going to change the context a little bit to my early career.
When I was a younger man, I had the idea that most people have, which is if you have a big problem in your life, could be career, could be personal, could be health, that what you would try to do is recover from the problem.
And that makes sense, right?
If you have a big problem, obviously you should set as your objective to get back to where you were.
Now, I'll give you an example where I tried that and learned it's a bad idea.
So you've heard this story again, but I'm putting it in a different context.
When I was in my 20s, I worked for a bank.
I had a cubicle job.
It looked like I had potential for promotion.
One day my boss called me in and said, I don't know how to tell you this, but the word has come down from management that we can't promote white men.
So that would be a big problem because I was young and ambitious.
And if they told me directly I couldn't be promoted, well, I very quickly put my resume together and quit to take a better job, slightly better job.
I would say it's more of a lateral, a lateral move from the bank to a phone company, but it was really just another cubicle job.
So that was an example of not using the system I'm going to describe.
But once that turned out the same way, the phone company eventually called me into my boss's office and said, I don't know how to tell you this, but word has come down that we can't promote a white male.
So you see what I did was I set my objective to get back to where I was, you know, working in the cubicle and maybe getting promoted.
And I got right back to where I was.
But where I was wasn't good.
So sometime around that point in my life, I came up with a different strategy.
You could call it a system.
And the system was that no matter how bad the problem was, I would set as my objective to take advantage of the problem to be way better, like way, way better than wherever I was before the problem.
And you've also heard this story, again, I'm going to put it in a different context, that when I turned 49, I had a rare neurological problem that affected my vocal cords.
And they would clench when I tried to form words so I could make noise, but people couldn't understand what I was saying.
So instead of talking the way you hear me now, I'll talk like that.
And people would say, what?
What?
I couldn't use the telephone, et cetera.
So it took me a few years to even find out that I had a name, spasmodic dysphonia.
And the bad news was the experts told me it was incurable.
So I had an incurable voice problem.
And half of my job was public speaking and doing interviews.
And I really kind of needed to be able to talk.
Now, I was lucky that half of my job was cartooning because that didn't require the talking.
But boy, did I need to get back to where I was.
However, by that time, I had learned my new system, which is to set my goal as being way better, way better than wherever I was before I had the problem.
Now, in this case, getting back to where I was would have been a rather poor voice because long before I had spasmodic dysphonia, I had a weak, nasally sounding voice that I hated to listen to.
Most of you have that, right?
When you listen to your own voice on recording, you go, oh, eh.
However, for those years where I was trying to find a solution to the speaking, I did an affirmation, usually in my car.
And, you know, because I couldn't speak intelligibly, but it didn't matter because I was just alone driving my car, I would do it out loud, but it would sound like nonsense to anybody else, but I knew what I was thinking and saying.
And the affirmation went like this.
I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly.
Now remember, I never spoke perfectly.
And it's also a subjective standard, right?
So what exactly is speaking perfectly?
And I'm going to tell you in a minute what that means to me.
So again, time goes by.
And in 2013 or so, I published a book called How to Fail Almost Everything, and it still went big.
And that included my advice about building a talent stack.
It included my advice about having a system over a goal.
And it also talked about my strategy of setting my recovery to be way better, way better than what I started with.
So now that the scene is set.
Turns out that one of the people who read that book and absorbed a whole bunch of the skills that it described is an artist called Akira the Don.
Akira the Don.
And for the last several years, he has been using the techniques from the book.
And by the way, he tells me this.
I'm not guessing.
So he told me this, you know, directly.
That he learned the whole talent stack systems over goals and a whole bunch of other advice.
He absorbed it.
He put it together and he added it to his existing skills of music.
And he also runs the business of producing music.
He's learned to obviously do video, marketing, social media.
And I would estimate that he has now compiled somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 different skills that, like the Beatles, this is the magic part, like the Beatles, they're not 20 random skills.
They're designed because they work together.
So he's been cranking away at a new form of music, art, entertainment, that most of you have seen by now, that he calls Meaning Wave, which combines a background beat and music with some kind of podcaster or some kind of philosopher who says interesting things that independently you would like to hear.
For example, I think he did Alan Watts and Jordan Peterson, and they combined their voices, just talking, with music.
And oh my God, is it powerful?
But he also did it with me.
So he took clips from many of my podcasts.
And then this past week, after all this practice and assembling of many talents, he dropped an album.
It's an entire album.
You can find it on YouTube or just go to the internet.
You can search for it.
Akira the Don plus my name.
It'll pop right up.
And he launches it last week.
And the last I checked, it had six million views.
Now, by the time the podcast clips were made, I had discovered a solution to my voice problem, surgery.
And it took several years for me to get my voice back to strong enough that I could podcast.
So by the time he took the clips, I had learned persuasion.
I'd written books that were part of my talent stack on advice, affirmations, and I'd found a way to be persuasively verbal.
So I wasn't trying to do any music because I have no musical talent whatsoever, but I was trying to make my voice as compelling and useful as possible.
Now, I'm going to expand the definition of my voice to include not just how it sounded, but what I said, because by then I learned to speak persuasively.
And when you listen to it, you'll see that the persuasion part, the clips, are really unusually well picked.
So it's not everything I've ever said.
Akira the Don was also talented in figuring out what clips would work well in the music, what would affect people, maybe what affected him, I'm not sure.
And he puts it together.
And if you haven't heard it yet, you will be blown away because he's literally invented an entirely new form of entertainment.
And I've never seen anything in a musical domain.
And you could argue whether it's music or a whole new art form.
But I've never seen anything with that nearly 100% of the people who listen to it say, my God, that's good.
People put it on and play it all day.
People use it to go to sleep.
So back to my definition and my system.
Remember, my system was not to get back to where I was, because that would be a nasally unpleasant voice that even I would not want to listen to.
But by that time, I learned to speak in a pleasant way.
I had recovered the strength of my voice, which took years.
And the podcasting was part of that strategy to make sure that I talked for an hour a day, at least.
And the net result is that I produced, without any effort on my own part, I guess I'll say, Akira the Don produced with my clips an art form that's better than just anything you've ever seen.
Just unbelievably, mind-blowingly innovative and just so good.
So good.
So I would recommend that you at least give it a sample.
At least give it a sample.
So now that's an example of both he and I using the same system.
I was combining skills.
He was reading about my suggestion to combine skills.
I have a system.
He had a system, lots of systems.
And it was as many.
It was amazing.
Anyway, so here's my first shout out.
You're going to ask me, because you're curious and it's a fair question, am I sharing in the economics of this?
The answer is no.
No.
I have no economic stake.
Not directly, not indirectly.
And that's exactly what I want to say publicly in case someday my estate decides to challenge it.
I want my estate to know, because I'm now saying it in public, that it is not my wishes to share economically.
One of the reasons for that is that he has already rewarded me more than money can't compensate.
So the feeling that I got from watching my voice become not just serviceable, but put in a context where it was way better than it ever was.
That even when I listen to it, I say to myself, wow, I really enjoy listening to me.
And that is rare.
So you could say that that is perfect because what would be more perfect than going from not being able to speak to being the featured vocalist in a special way, just talking, on a hugely successful and influential form of art that didn't exist before.
If that's not perfect, well, I mean, you tell me what is.
So that's my first compliment and shout out.
The cure of the Don.
Give it a sample.
Second, is somebody I've talked about a lot, and you're going to say, Scott, he's no artist, and I get it, I get it, but he does what he does so well that I think it's elevated to art, right?
You know, if somebody's just really good at what they do, then they're just really good at what they do.
But some people can take that to such a level that you look at it and you go, wow, nobody can do that.
Who else could do that?
That's art.
And the second person is Mike Benz, especially because of what he did in the past week.
Now, if you don't know Mike Benz, B-E-N-Z, you should follow him, because I can't really reproduce what he talks about or says, and that's really the point.
He is unreproducible because he's so artistically gifted.
Now, he, like Akira the Don, has told me that I had some influence over his talent stack.
Now, I assume that means maybe just in the domain of persuasion.
I don't know the details, but I had some influence.
And what his special talent is, that I've never seen anybody close, is he has this insane encyclopedic memory and knowledge of the intelligence and government structures so that he knows exactly who is connected to whom, what organizations and people are connected, who's married to who, who used to work with who, where the money flowed.
And he combines that incredible knowledge.
I don't think, honestly, I don't think there's another person in the world who has his knowledge of just how things fit together.
But he combines that with just crazy pattern recognition.
And so he has this unique ability that has made a lot of MAGA people happy.
I don't know if he would call himself MAGA, but he, you know, he sort of operates in that world more than the other.
So he does a podcast, and he's developed all these skills.
You know, he's musical and he combines that.
He plays the piano.
So you can see that his brain is a certain structure that's amazing.
So he's learned to podcast.
He's got the business end of it.
He's made lots of networking connections.
But on top of that, if you add the encyclopedic memory, his knowledge of how everything is connected, and now his pattern recognition, he was the first one to untangle, in my mind, the NGO badness.
Because the theft that was massive, we'll talk about that later, seemed to be hidden in the complexity.
So you needed someone who could look at this amazing complexity and pick out what mattered and what was noise.
Nobody else can do that.
So first, and this is not what he did this week, he sort of demystified the whole NGO world, and I think I would give him the most credit.
Now, obviously, Elon Musk is a huge part of that in Doge, but it was Benz who kind of explained it all to me for the first time.
But you take that forward, and this past week, in my opinion, he's the first one who completely explained the Epstein situation.
Now, I can't reproduce his explanation, but I'll give you the sort of idio summary.
The idio summary is that while he was doing a podcast and he was starting to do some pattern recognition of everything we've learned so far, he realized that Epstein has been connected to at least four intelligence agencies.
Again, this is because of his encyclopedic knowledge of who works with who, who was a roommate, of who, literally, literally who was a roommate, who stayed with somebody for an extended period of time.
Things you would never know.
But he does.
And I guess as he was doing the podcast, he suddenly put it all together.
Now, if you haven't heard it, I would tell you to go listen to his version because you want to get the full thing.
But the basic idea is that Epstein has clearly been associated with giant intelligence-related money laundering for several decades, starting way back with something called the BCCI, a big financial entity that apparently was sort of a CIA money laundering operation.
So Benz ties Epstein back to Bear Stearns, again, all the way back to, I think, if I'm not mistaken, Iran-Contra, where money was laundered around for the CIA and others.
So Benz finds the connection, not just to the CIA, but to, I believe, British intelligence, Saudi intelligence, and Israeli intelligence.
So the pattern that he identified, and he shows receipts of who's involved and who Epstein knew and worked with and all that.
It's very clear, and now for the first time, that if you're wondering, hey, was he working for Israel?
Sometimes.
Hey, was he working for the CIA?
Sometimes.
Was he taking that skill and using it for the British intelligence or Saudi Arabia?
Apparently, yes.
So he wasn't really wedded to one spy organization.
He was very clearly somebody who worked for all of them.
Now, I haven't gotten to the big aha, because I know what some of you are thinking.
Some of you are thinking, but Scott, really, it's not about that.
It's about the rich and powerful people that are being protected, right?
And we already knew he was working with some spy agencies.
So he's really added nothing, right?
Oh, no.
It completely changes how you see it.
Because once you realize how embedded he was with the intelligence agencies, let's call them the spy entities, you realize the following.
Rokana said, I think yesterday that he wants to, I'll tie this together in a minute, that he thinks that Pam Bondi broke the law by not releasing all of the Epstein files.
Do you think the Epstein files will be released even if all of the rich and powerful people who might be named could be named?
And the answer is, no.
You will never know what all the spy agencies were doing with him because they wouldn't want you to know.
So if the Department of Justice and the Trump administration genuinely wanted to release the entire files, could they do it?
No.
There's not any chance they can do it because the CIA, I'll just use them as a stand-in for the other intelligence agencies.
The CIA, if they block it, and of course they would have the power, they would have all the power they needed to block anything.
They could literally threaten you with death and total destruction if you didn't do what they said and block their secrets.
And they don't even have to be the kind of secrets that protect the world.
It could just be whatever they wanted blocked.
So here's the thing.
Even if, well, I'll put it another way.
So what this causes is the rich and powerful people who obviously are part of the guilty entities.
It wouldn't matter if they even told you, go ahead and use my name.
It wouldn't matter if there was great desire within the Department of Justice and the FBI to actually out the rich and powerful.
As long as the CIA could keep that secret, they have a little bit more ownership of those rich people.
So let me put this in practical terms.
If you were the CIA and you knew, for example, that Bill Gates had something to hide, would you be better off making sure that that got blocked and it was never released so that you could blackmail him without blackmailing him?
You would never have to say to him, you know, Bill Gates, if you don't do what we want, you know, you're in trouble.
You would never have to say it.
You would just have to be the CIA and say to the rich people, here's the deal.
We're going to protect you, but we own you.
So have you noticed how many of the rich and powerful people have government contracts?
So if you're the CIA, and again, I'm just using them as a stand-in for spy agencies, your best case scenario is that you have an unspoken threat to make all the rich and powerful people do what you want.
But you combine it with an incentive such as, you know, your multi-billion dollar company could get a lot of government contracts if you're just really good to us.
But if you become kind of a dick and you out us for what we've done, maybe you won't make billions of dollars.
Maybe you'll never get another government contract.
So here's my aha.
My aha is this is not about the rich and powerful being protected.
They get protected for free because the spy agencies want to keep control of both the powerful people and also hide their own secrets, and they would be 100% capable of blocking any kind of information.
Now, one of the things that Rokana and Thomas Massey may have been blind to is that If they allowed within their legislation that anything that's too sensitive or mentioned a victim could be redacted,
that guarantees that the people who want to redact other stuff can easily do it and just say, oh, yeah, yeah, we're just protecting the victims, of course.
Duh, obviously.
And even if those rich and powerful people, and even if those victims did want to be protected, they're not the decision makers.
The spy agency would be in control of those people, as well as what gets blocked and what doesn't.
So to me, that answered the questions that will be answered.
It guarantees that we'll never be satisfied with what comes out of the Epstein files.
Would you agree?
We'll never know why exactly, but once you see Mike Benz's frame on this and you realize how deeply embedded Epstein had been with the spy agencies for decades, you realize that it wouldn't matter what anybody thought about the rich and powerful.
They're just not in charge.
So if your frame was, oh, I think the rich people, you know, called up Pam Bondi and said, you know, hey, I'm a billionaire.
Don't out me.
They might have tried, but they don't have the power of the CIA.
If the CIA calls the Department of Justice or the FBI and says, here's the deal, you will not release us.
And we don't have to tell you what will happen to you if you do, but you won't.
That would put the Department of Justice and the FBI in a very awkward situation.
And that's what we see.
So the big aha here, and why I call Mike Benz an artist, is that nobody else could pull this together.
And once you realize that the intelligence spy part of it is not just an also, but it's the dominant theme, then you realize you're never going to see the bottom of the barrel.
They will completely nickel and dime us to death.
They will drag it out.
They might blame other people.
Maybe there'll be a distraction.
Maybe the UFO will land.
But one thing you can guarantee won't happen is that the public will never be satisfied that they saw what really was going on.
So just to be clear, I assume it's obvious that rich and powerful people are being protected, but not for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
They would be protected for the benefit of the spy agencies, who would then have greater control over them for whatever it is that they wanted to control.
Pretty impressive.
All right, so that's artist number two.
You should follow Mike Benz.
Artist number three, you may have heard of this one, Donald Trump.
Now, in my opinion, Trump has raised the art of trolling, maybe persuasion too, to a level that we'll never see again, completely unparalleled, and so successful that I laugh when I see it.
Let me give you some examples.
So he did the Hall of Presidents where he put a president auto pen instead of Biden, and then he put insulting descriptions of Obama and the Obama presidency.
And what did that cause?
Well, all the Democrats and the legitimate news are like, oh, rah, you can't do that.
And it made them focus on what had to be the least important thing happening in the world.
Meanwhile, while all that shelf space was being eaten up by what MAGA thought was funny, most of us, and his critics thought, oh, here's an easy one.
He's left us this easy attack.
We're going to say that he's a narcissistic, bad person, and it's like a real easy story.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's just one thing.
He also did the Rob Reiner insults, sort of insults, that everybody said, that's too soon.
Like even MAGA people were saying, no, no, I don't support that.
It's too soon.
But like the Hall of Presidents, it was a troll, meaning that it wasn't just about what he thought was funny.
He was again distracting Democrats and distracting the news into the least important thing that was happening.
Was there anything in the world that Trump was doing that was less important than what he said about Rob Reiner?
No, no.
So again, he's got the Democrats and the press that doesn't like him thinking, oh, you put an easy target on your back this time.
Watch what bad things we say about your character.
And then my favorite part is renaming the Kennedy Center or whatever it's called into the Trump Kennedy Performing Arts.
Is that what it is?
Now, you might say, but Scott, he's not the one who decided on the name change, but obviously he had to approve it.
Obviously, if he said, don't put my name in that building, they wouldn't do it.
So clearly, he's behind it.
Now, how was that interpreted?
Well, once again, the Democrats and his critics treated it like it was the most important thing happening because it was a real easy story to write about.
They can't resist an easy one.
No research, no context.
All you have to do is say, oh, there he goes again, being a bad person.
Now, one of the things that these all had in common, and this is why he's a genius at persuasion, is that they were really easy to do, super easy to do.
It guaranteed that his enemies fell into their own trap.
So what do I mean by their own trap?
So for years now, the Democrats have tried to frame Trump as a narcissist, right?
They try to frame him as a narcissist with a terrible character who would do things like what I just mentioned.
And that's more evidence that he's an authoritarian, narcissistic monster.
Now, you've probably noticed that 100% of the people who meet him in person, including Bill Maher and the CEO of NVIDIA, and a bunch of other people who would not necessarily have been pro-Trump, they've said that when you meet him in person, he's not the character that people talk about.
That he's a really good listener, and that I experienced the same thing.
He's way smarter than you think.
I also experienced that.
And he genuinely has empathy for the things you would want him to have empathy.
So his reality is quite different from what the Democrats believe he is and have been framed in.
So, having created their own frame, they can't get out of it.
So, if you looked at the Hall of Presidents, the Autopen, and the Rob Reiner comment, and you were already primed, and they have primed themselves to think the only way you can explain this is that he's a narcissistic bastard, then that's what you'll believe is happening.
So, all of his critics, every one of them, is interpreting this as, well, more proof that we were right.
He's a narcissistic bastard.
Now, I've told you this before, but narcissism can have a bad version and a good version.
I would consider myself a narcissist, but in, I prefer to be the good version.
And what I mean by that is I'd love to get attention and credit, but only if I've done something that is genuinely good for the world or generally good for somebody, right?
I would not want to get credit.
It wouldn't really give me any dopamine if somebody accidentally thought I did something good.
I want to get credit for what I actually did, and it gives me a dopamine high.
But is there anybody who loses in that scenario?
Nobody loses.
If I do something that's good for me, because it brings me attention or credit and dopamine, but it's also good for you, don't we all win?
If you look at what Trump does, he definitely likes putting his name on things.
He's definitely a type of narcissist who likes to get credit.
We all do.
He's just transparent about it.
He likes to get credit, but he likes to get credit for things he actually did.
He's not pretending to help the country.
He's trying to actually turn around the country, actually end wars, actually improve the economy, actually help everybody.
So, once you realize that he's got the entire Democrat and critics and press doing what I call turning into cats, chasing the laser pointer while he's doing useful stuff, you can see the genius of it.
Now, I predict, I predict, and you know I've been right about this sort of thing, that history will eventually come to understand his cat with the laser pointer strategy.
And they'll know that once the Democrats trap themselves in the frame that the only way you can understand them is as an evil narcissist with a broken personality, they can't get out of it.
So, they've trapped themselves in their own frame.
Meanwhile, he can go lower pharmaceutical costs, negotiate the end of wars, he can lower taxes, he can get bills passed, he can write a hundred EOs.
And then, once I introduce this idea on X, and by the way, if you don't think he has elevated trolling to an actual art form, pay attention.
He has elevated it to an art form.
There will never be another president, I'm assuming, who can match what you're watching happen right now.
But people don't understand what they're seeing because they're mostly trapped in the other frame.
Oh, he has a broken personality.
That's why he's doing all this.
No, he is a narcissist, just as I am, but only the kind who tries to help.
You know, if I don't do something good for you, or if he doesn't do something good for you, it's not going to be that enjoyable to get some credit.
I mean, might be better than not, but it's not really the aim anybody would have.
So the best brander of all time, who's famous for putting his name on things, put his name on a few things.
I saw somebody, one of his critics said to me on X, they said, Scott, Scott, you fool, what do you think is going to happen when the Democrats get back in power?
Don't you think they're going to change the name of the Trump Kennedy Center back to where it was?
To which I say, yeah, of course.
That's exactly what I expect.
If Democrats get in charge, they will change the name back to whatever they want it to be.
And will that bother me?
No.
I will say three years of making them chase the laser pointer was all he wanted.
Now, if Republicans stayed in charge for longer, he would like it better.
And then somebody said to me, but Scott, sure, you say he's persuasive, but why are his popularity numbers low?
To which I say, well, did I miss an election?
Was there some kind of election this week where it mattered what Trump's popularity was?
No.
He can allow you to think bad things about him so long as he's building a record of doing successful things, which he is.
And yeah, you're going to have to wait until the actual midterms to see where his popularity stands by then.
All right.
So I call that art.
Speaking of persuasion, there's an article in Fox News that this is the year that conservative groups declared the tipping point on climate hysteria.
Do you think there would be a tipping point on climate hysteria just because people like me and lots of other people on the right, especially, have presented the facts?
Well, it helps.
But I think it was Trump who has been steadfast in saying that at least the climate alarm part is overdone.
Not necessarily that we are or not getting warmer, but how much worry we have about it makes sense.
He has also removed a lot of the impediments to nuclear power and also said if you're going to build a giant AI data center, you'd better build your own power center.
Now, suddenly, suddenly all these big companies believe they can build nuclear power plants that they would use for their own operations.
How good is that?
I mean, the benefit that that should bring to the world, even if just one of those big companies figures out how to build a functional, modular, smallish, but big enough nuclear power center, either fission or fusion, it's one of the biggest things that will ever happen in humanity.
And that would be because Trump persuasively has been pro-energy, energy, energy in every form.
He's been pro-getting rid of regulations, which allowed these big companies to have a path to do this.
And he's approved the idea that individuals could have their own power plants.
And he's pro-AI.
So he's exactly, exactly where we need him to be for society to get to that next level.
So that's pretty persuasive.
I haven't talked about this much, But you know the story about U.S. Senator from Utah, Mike Lee.
He introduced this legislation to have letters of mark, M-A-R-Q-U-E.
Apparently, the Constitution specifies that you can do this.
And what it does is it allows the federal government to authorize private citizens, should they be qualified to do it, to form their own little military to go after pirate ships.
Now, in this case, they're sort of defining the pirate ships as the drug smugglers.
So the idea is that free market people would get to attack these cartel assets and keep what they got.
So if they found $10 million sitting around in some cartel asset, they could just keep it.
And that's what the law specifically allows.
So we're not talking about people who don't know how to do this business.
We're talking about retired SEALs, retired top operators who might want to bring together their own private little army just for plundering the cartels.
Now, I saw a comment by Elon Musk that I haven't figured out how to interpret.
I don't have the exact quote, but in response to Mike Lee's post about it, Musk says something like, that should work out super well.
Does that sound like sarcasm?
Or does it sound like he's agreeing?
That should work out super well.
So I don't know what Elon thinks.
It could be either way.
But in my opinion, if you just look at it from a persuasion perspective, every time you make it harder for the cartel to operate, or you suggest that it will very soon become harder, because we don't know if this will pass, it might not pass.
It should change the behavior of the target group.
Because if nobody had ever brought up the idea of letters of mark, you could assume that your only risk was the U.S. military.
And that at some point, maybe the public would get tired of it or whatever.
But by even suggesting, which Mike Lee's legislation does, it suggests that there's a way to make it zero expense for the government while being completely legal and constitutional and almost certainly having some big impact on smugglers.
The mere risk that things could go to that level should already make them change their behavior because they don't want to be easy targets.
And the free market would create these little battle groups that would certainly take down some of them.
It wouldn't have to take down all of the drug dealers and all of their assets.
It would just have to introduce this new level of risk.
And imagine, if you will, that the first letter of mark private battle group, let's say they take over a cartel shipment and they capture $300 million in cash.
How many of those new battle groups would form the next day?
A lot.
It would only take one success where somebody essentially pirate stole the cartel assets and made it work.
It was all legal.
Only have to do it once.
And the free market would flood it with other participants.
So I don't know what Elon meant.
He may have easily meant that this is exactly the kind of thing that could go wrong.
Or he might have meant what I just said.
I don't know.
But it wouldn't change my opinion that even if it doesn't get approved from a persuasion perspective, it's one more good kick in the ass for the cartels.
Well, according to SciPost Karina Petrova, there's a non-intoxicating cannabis compound that might reverse opioid-induced brain changes.
So it's possible that there's something in cannabis, not smoking it, but some kind of chemical in it, that would make a big deal in your brain if you had opioid-induced problems.
Now, obviously, I don't believe all the science about weed or anything else, but it's kind of interesting.
So apparently today there's going to be another Epstein file dump.
I already told you, don't expect you'll ever see the bottom of the barrel.
It might be just a nickel and dime drip, drip, drip until you give up.
So I would imagine that even if the CIA or somebody else is blocking the good stuff, I would imagine that they would still have to do a little trickle so it feels like they are doing something.
But you'll never know.
You'll never know what they held back.
And indeed, now there are claims that 16 files so far among the many thousands were taken down from the website that had the Epstein files on it.
Why?
Don't know.
Will we ever know?
No.
Do you think that was because Pam Bondi wanted to do it?
Or because the DOJ wanted to do it?
Or do you think that rich and powerful people wanted to do it?
We'll never know.
You'll never know.
All right.
So in other news, Scientific America says that AI video streaming is coming.
So apparently Disney did the smartest thing they can do in the age of AI.
They inked a deal with OpenAI so that instead of OpenAI essentially stealing their IP, they have an agreement where OpenAI can make videos that have some Disney assets if they pay for it and they reach some kind of standards.
But we're still at a point where you can only get a few minutes.
So even if you had all the IP rights from Disney and you had the best technology that OpenAI can give you today, you wouldn't be able to make a movie.
But you can make little clips.
And some say that we might only be a year away if you added some other technologies to it from making a feature-length movie just with AI and some existing assets for IP.
Now, here's what I think.
What's missing in this analysis is that nobody wants to watch a three-hour movie.
That the days of watching long-form movies are really kind of coming to an end.
And if you have not experienced that yet, let me recommend the best video entertainment platform that exists today.
If you're on X, if you haven't tried the video button, so there's a button that just produces an endless string of video that apparently the AI that's built into X knows you would be interested in.
What's magic about it is they're all short.
Almost none of them are AI produced.
The AI is simply finding things that exist.
They scroll automatically.
And that's the magic sauce.
If you go to Instagram and you play a short video, you might love that video, but your finger still has to scroll to the next one.
So you have to be physically involved like every, you know, 30 seconds.
If you go to X, you just hit that video button once, put your phone down, and you can listen to videos that it correctly knows you would be interested in all day long.
It will just give you endless dopamine hits in short form.
Once you get addicted to that endless dopamine in short form, you're not really going to want to watch a three-hour movie.
To me, it's intolerable to watch anything over an hour.
Well, it's almost intolerable to watch anything over five minutes at this point.
So I do not believe that the Disney OpenAI collaboration is going to invent something like, oh, we have all new long-form movies that are fully approved and people like watching.
I don't think you can get there from here.
And it's not because you can't do it technologically.
Probably that will happen eventually.
It's that you'll never want to watch it because the alternative, which is infinite small hits, way better.
Just way better.
So again, if you haven't tried it, try it for five minutes.
And you're going to see that Musk has, again, done the impossible, which is the leapfrogged every video, every video platform.
It's now by far the best one.
It's not even close.
Well, let's talk about Venezuela.
According to Axios, now you know that Trump has put a blockade on them shipping their oil, but the blockade, for whatever reason, does not include every tanker all the time.
So the news said that Venezuela was sending a military escort with its blockaded tankers so that the U.S. would, you know, maybe leave them alone.
Now, that never made sense because if the U.S. wanted to take out a Venezuelan tanker, it wouldn't take too long.
But it turns out that they're not even escorting the banned tankers.
There were some that just were not included, but he wanted to make it look like he was being tough.
Maduro did.
So to make it look like Venezuela was acting tough, they put a military escort on some tankers that didn't need it because nobody could have blockaded them anyway.
So what did the U.S. do?
The U.S. boarded them anyway.
So they weren't even included in the blockade.
But because Venezuela was trying to make this move that would make it look like they were somehow had some control of their own fate, which they don't, Trump matched that by boarding them anyway.
So I thought that's funny.
It's not important, but it shows you that in the chess game of who's got the power and who's got the risk, the U.S., I think they won that round.
And by the way, who would Venezuela complain to about the fact that the U.S. blockaded them and boarded them?
There's nobody to complain to.
You know, if you're in our hemisphere and we've got gigantic naval assets and Trump says, you know, why don't you board that thing and see what's in there?
Or even sees it.
Who's going to stop it?
So again, Venezuela is just flailing around.
They don't have any real response.
Well, according to the Spanish National Research Council, there's some research that says there's a compound that could revolutionize traumatic brain injury treatment.
So apparently they found a compound that if you give it to a brain-damaged mouse somewhat immediately after the mouse is damaged, you know, at least close, it will just reverse the brain damage.
So finally, we will not have so many brain-damaged mice.
I was worried about all the mice with the brain damage, but apparently they've got a handle on that now.
So on CNN, there was one of the talking heads is Aisha Mills, who describes herself as a black lesbian.
And she was mad about Trump, and she said the following sentence on the air: I'm not going to be lectured by some white man who has no idea what he's talking about.
Now, she was talking about another guest.
I forget his name, but he was a right-leaning guest.
It wasn't Scott Jennings, it was somebody else.
And she said, although he's never said that, Trump has never said he has better genes than her or black lesbians or what.
He has said that he has good genes and that some of the people coming in, the immigrants, don't have good genes.
Now, is the problem that he said it, or is the problem that it's not true?
Because it does seem to me that regardless of gender or sexual orientation, regardless of ethnicity, are there not some people in the world who got lucky?
I'm 5'8 ⁇ .
Do I have good genes?
Well, I would say if I were 6'4, even same ethnicity, et cetera, I would say I have better genes.
If I were like Bo Jackson, one of the greatest athletes of all time, would I say I have good genes?
Privately, I would.
Of course.
So nobody disagrees with Trump that the people who were coming in as immigrants would include some people with good genes, some people with bad genes.
If you imagine that that makes a difference in your performance and you could control for the good genes, and let's say the thing you controlled for was intelligence and competency, wouldn't you prefer allowing in only people who had genetic potential for success?
Again, that could be within an ethnic group.
So you don't have to say, we don't admit any Albonians.
You just say, we do admit Albonians, but they have to have demonstrated some level of success, which would indirectly be an indication that at least your genes were not holding you back.
So just to be clear, I think I have good genes for some intellectual capacities.
I think I have bad genes for surviving to old age.
Apparently my medical genes are not so good.
So if you could imagine the burden I put on the healthcare system this past month, oh my God, am I getting my money's worth?
So would you want, if I were not already an American, would you want to let me in the country knowing that I'm spending, I don't know, a million dollars a month of the country's money in the form of health insurance and I'm not adding that much back in?
Well, you know, saying that I have a genetic problem seems a little cruel, but is it wrong?
It's not racist, because again, I'd be a typical white guy.
I just have flawed genes in an area that would become very expensive for the country.
And even I wouldn't let me in if I had a choice.
I'd be like, oh, are you British?
Well, why don't you let the British take care of your expensive health problems?
And stay where you are, Scott.
So the thing about this story is that you can't imagine anybody but a black lesbian, again, that would be her own description of herself, would be able to get away with that and then someday also be back on the air in CNN.
So we don't expect that kind of behavior, but we'll see if she gets away with it.
We'll see if she's ever back on the air.
So House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked about Representative James Comer, and Comer is putting together some investigation into Somali taxpayer fraud in Minnesota.
So when asked about that, Hakeem Jeffries' answer was that Representative Comer is, quote, a joke, an embarrassment, an unserious individual, and a malignant clown.
Now, is that the right answer to a question about him investigating massive, well-understood and known fraud in Minnesota?
Not really.
But what it highlights is that the Democrats are spring-loaded to go for personal attacks because they don't have arguments and they don't have policies.
So if you don't have popular policies or arguments, you make it about the person.
So with Trump, no matter what he's doing, the cats chasing the pointer go, oh, narcissist, narcissist.
He's trying to make money for himself.
He's a clown.
And then they extend that, because they think it works, I guess, to other Republican leaders.
So this Republican leader has an idea how to fix something, in this case, an investigation.
And the answer is not investigating is good, and it's not investigating is bad.
It's there's something wrong with that guy's character.
Next question.
Does that work?
I mean, is that a strategy that you can imagine works?
Is it time for an interstitial sip?
i think it's time for another sip yes it's true I have paid lots more taxes than I've used in healthcare.
But still, I think he made my point.
Well, according to interesting engineering, China now has unmanned drones that can autonomously refill the fuel in other drones.
So, Assuming that technology works, and apparently it does.
The distance that China can send a drone just massively increased.
There's always a lot of drone news.
I won't give you all of it, but it is kind of fascinating to watch how fast drone warfare is extending, because obviously that's the future.
According to Newsmax, gas prices dropped to the lowest December level since 2020.
Now, I know Democrats argue, oh, that's cherry-picking.
And I saw Jessica Katralov make this point.
It's a good point.
That if you cherry-pick a few states, it looks like gas prices are super low.
But if you took the average, it wouldn't look as low.
I get that.
But still, you have to say that gas prices have gone down.
There's no doubt that they've gone down.
I'm going to make the following persuasion point.
Now we can talk about some fun stuff.
Every time Trump solves a problem before the midterms is bad for Republicans.
Does that make sense?
Every time Trump solves a big national problem, should he be ending war?
Should he be lowering gas prices?
Should he be lowering pharmaceutical prices?
These are all things he's likely to have accomplished before the midterms.
Will that cause more people to vote for Republicans?
No.
And the reason it won't, persuasion-wise, the reason it won't is because people instantly bank those successes and they say, what do you got for me next?
They're not going to vote for anybody because of something that somebody already did.
They just say, that's done.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm happy that gas prices are low.
Yeah, I'm happy that that war ended.
But I'm not going to vote for you for that because it's done.
It's off the table.
So Trump is in this weird situation where the more big problems he solves, the less likely Republicans can stay in power.
Because voters would be rational and they say, we're not voting for the past.
We're voting for what you're going to do next.
So Democrats will, of course, make a case that they would be better for the future.
Republicans will try to do the same, but they'll spend a bunch of time talking about what they've already done.
And that won't activate anybody.
So what would you do if you were advising Republicans on how to get out of that trap?
That what you've already succeeded at will not motivate anybody to vote.
It's only what they expect in the future.
Here's my suggestion.
And I'll probably talk about this a lot more in the future.
You need, if you're Republicans, you need to show that you're going to solve whatever people think is their biggest problem.
And I'm going to say cost of living.
And I'm going to say grocery prices generally, even though we did a good job with eggs, right?
Here's what you would do.
You would admit that that's a big problem.
Step one.
Don't say I already lowered egg prices.
Don't say you did a good job on gas.
And Trump is making that mistake.
And that is a mistake.
What he should say is, yeah, we haven't made a dent yet in grocery prices, but here's our plan.
Because the plan, if it's good enough, would motivate people to say, all right, that's a good plan.
You know, we don't know if you'll succeed, but you're describing a real good free market path that is better than whatever the Democrats have.
So let me give you a concrete example.
Suppose Trump said something like this.
Yes, we have not done a good enough job with grocery prices overall.
Now, it would not be limited to grocery prices.
I'll extend this later to everything from transportation to medical expenses.
So we have not done a good job.
Here's our plan.
By this date, we're going to try to get from this number to some smaller number.
And here's what we're going to do to get there.
Not everything we try will work, but we're going to keep hammering on this like a top priority because there are several things we can do that have a good chance of working, but it might take you a year and nobody has a better idea than that.
So here are some examples.
So let's say Trump said part of the reason food is expensive is because of too much regulation.
Republicans like to hear that.
Oh, too much regulation.
I think Thomas Massey would be the best one to talk this.
So Trump might say, one of the things we're going to do is we're going to change the following regulations so that if you're a farmer, you could directly sell your food to consumers who are nearby.
Now, that would take away the transportation, the middleman.
It would take away just a whole bunch of expenses and turn some of your grocery buying into more of a local farmer's market situation.
Now, these are just examples.
So if you think that wouldn't work, just focus on the concept.
So would you be convinced if Thomas Massey agreed with Trump that if you cut these specific regulations and you let the free market and farmers compete and sell what they want locally, et cetera, would that feel like it would lower grocery prices?
The answer is yes.
So instead of saying you haven't done it yet, you could look at the plan and you could say, okay, one year from now, you will have unleashed the free market.
Yes.
Yes.
But that's not enough.
It's not enough.
So you need more to it.
Suppose, because a big part of the expense of farming is power, suppose Trump said we're going to allow farms to have their own power plants.
And we're going to make that easy and we'll get rid of regulation.
So we'll take the cost of electricity or just power in general and we'll greatly decrease it, maybe not overnight, but by making the cost of producing the food way less because they've got cheap energy.
Maybe that's one thing.
It would be similar to the strategy with AI.
Then you say, we're going to use AI and maybe something like the boring company to build underground farms.
You're going to use Optimus to pick the food.
You're going to have self-driving trucks.
So basically, you tell a story where a year from now, you'll have experimental, because it would be trials, it would be experimental.
You'll have experimental farms that are local.
They're completely AI driven.
They got robots.
They got self-driving trucks.
And they're producing their own energy.
That's a compelling story because you can imagine that so well.
And then produce some pictures that show the robots bringing down the cost, etc.
So the idea is for Republicans to admit that you can't make grocery prices go down overnight, but what you can do is have a rational plan to get there that Democrats would not have.
Because you got Bernie who's trying to stop AI.
So if you've got one guy who's trying to stop AI and another one that says, here's our plan to use AI to reduce grocery prices by 40%, it's just going to take a year or two.
Which one would you pick?
There's only one who has a plan.
All right, so that's my persuasion suggestion is you have to have a one or two year plan.
It has to be something that's based on something you really do, you know, AI, remove regulations, et cetera.
You have to have a very specific target that's not crazy.
Even if you get your critics to argue whether your target is achievable, you still win because they would still be comparing it to the Democrats with no plan at all or something socialist planned.
It doesn't sound good.
All right, in other news, Know Ridge says there's a study that low glycemic index carbs in your diet may be the key to dementia prevention.
So if you eat the right kind of carbs and the ones who have a low glycemic index, you can protect your brain.
Do you think that study is reliable?
I'm going to say it depends if they controlled for other lifestyle correlations.
Because it seems to me that the people who eat more bad carbs would be lower income.
You know, there would be something about the way they live or what they have access to that might affect their brain health.
So I don't know if I would trust that study.
I mean, it's believable.
I would think that eating the right food is better than eating the bad food if you're protecting your brain.
But it might be just correlation with lifestyle.
All right, Tulsi Gabbard had an interesting post on X.
And I'm going to read it to you because her exact wording matters.
So she said, deep state warmongers and their propaganda media are again trying to undermine President Trump's effort to bring peace to Ukraine and indeed Europe by falsely claiming that the U.S. intelligence community, in quotes, agrees to and supports the EU-NATO viewpoint, that Russia's aim is to invade slash conquer Europe in order to gin up support for their pro-war policies.
The truth is, now here's the money shot, the truth is that U.S. intelligence assesses that Russia does not even have the capability to conquer and occupy Ukraine, much less invading and occupying Europe.
Does that sound accurate to you?
Do you think that historians will record that it was ridiculous that anybody was worried that Russia would try to conquer all of Europe, that they can't even take over the rest of Ukraine?
Well, she might be right.
I'm leaning toward thinking that's a good take.
But the part that's not included is we don't know what the future holds.
So if your definition of war expands from a Ukraine-like shooting war to include economic war, AI war, space platforms, weapons we've never seen before at whatever cost.
So you could easily imagine that Russia is not capable of taking over Ukraine, much less Europe, but that they could get there if they were incentivized to do it.
So I'm not 100% on board with it's impossible, but I think I agree with Tulsi that the smarter take is that Russia doesn't really have that capability, even if they had that ambition.
What do you think?
We can't read Putin's mind.
He might want to take over Europe, but I do think that would be a reach.
Well, in other technology, Rohan Paul is reporting on X that China has a new capsule, a pill, that can give you a stomach exam in eight minutes, and all you have to do is swallow the pill.
And it's priced around $280.
Now, that gets us back to what I was talking about earlier.
Healthcare is too expensive.
And I don't believe that beyond the pharmaceutical costs that Trump is doing a good job on, that the Republicans have the greatest plan.
Wouldn't it be great if they said, hey, we're going to work on using AI to lower your healthcare costs.
And here's what we're going to do.
And here's how much it will lower it by what time and how we're going to get there.
For example, you could just figure out what's the most expensive stuff in healthcare.
And then you say, all right, Amazon, Amazon, you've got to tell us what you can do to lower healthcare costs.
And they're actually doing things.
Mark Cuban, you have to tell us what you can do, maybe with our help, to lower pharmaceutical costs.
Elon Musk, I don't know what he's doing in the healthcare realm, but you can say, tell us how you're going to use AI and Grok, that's AI, and robots to lower healthcare costs.
So you basically put all the billionaires on notice that you're expecting them to use the free market, not the government, free market, to figure out how to lower healthcare costs and to do it in a way that only the free market can, and that the government will help them by getting out of the way, you know, cutting regulations where you need.
That would be a compelling story.
So you see the concept.
You should talk about the future.
You should not pretend you can do it overnight.
You have a timeline, and you have a little bit, but you don't overspecify how you get there.
You say, we're going to look at these things as a primary way.
And in a year and a half, this is what we want to see for healthcare.
And then, of course, fraud is a gigantic part of healthcare costs and maybe all of our costs.
So apparently, you know Anna Kasparian.
You've seen her a lot online.
She said the California money that was supposed to be spent on homelessness.
She said it's being funneled into NGOs and executives making a half a million a year.
And she said, just experience what I've seen on the ground in California has made her mad, I guess.
So here's what I think.
I think the Republicans should offer the following solution to all this fraud.
That there should be some kind of mandatory auditing structure that accompanies every kind of government expense, whether it's federal or state.
Now, you're going to say to me, but Scott, you're adding a layer of bureaucracy.
No, I would say that the only people who could do the auditing would be the free market.
So the government would not be an auditor.
The government would simply require that there be one and that the free market would provide the auditor.
Now, would the free market want to be in the business of catching fraud?
Oh, yeah, if it's like the letters of mark and they can get a piece of the fraud or a piece of the savings.
So if you said, okay, big consulting company, you've been largely worthless, but how would you like to form a free market auditing function that you can sell to anybody who's doing anything with spending?
And then the government, when they get some money approved, they absolutely can't spend the money until they pick one of the free market entities that will audit them.
It has to be like a real serious audit.
Now, the first thing you're going to say is, Scott, then the auditors will become the frauds because the people who, let's say, are watchdogs, they generally get captured by industry.
So here's the next part.
You would use some kind of AI structure to monitor the auditors.
So the auditors would monitor the actual expense, but the AI structure, which doesn't yet exist but could, would monitor the auditors.
Does that make sense?
If you let the auditors just do what they do in a free market way, they would become the criminals.
But if they knew that there was no way they could get away with it, because AI could easily identify, hey, it looks like that money is not going to the right place, and it looks like the auditors are lying about it.
You wouldn't want the AI to be the auditor, although I wouldn't rule that out.
But in stage one, you'd want the AI to simply make transparency so we could all see what the auditors are up to.
That's my idea for that.
And I think that the entire country, left and right, would be on board with all of our money being audited.
Now, you might say, Scott, it will cost so much to pay the auditors that you would basically lose as much money as a fraud, to which I think, I doubt it.
You know, I'll bet you could pay an auditing company $10 million a year to prevent $100 million in fraud.
And that would probably never stop.
So that's just my assumption.
And you can tweak it as you go.
You don't have to be sold on it being exactly one way forever.
Speaking of all these things, the post-millennial is reporting, Hayden Cunningham, that apparently a bunch of American tech billionaires are already looking to create tech cities abroad.
I assume they're doing it abroad to avoid U.S. red tape.
So the first question is, do they really need to do it abroad or should they be doing these tech cities, and I'll describe them in a minute, should they be doing it in the U.S.?
Probably Trump could help them there by saying, all right, here are some zones in the U.S., so you don't have to take your cool city to some island somewhere.
We'll keep it onshore.
So here's what the proposed, and they're not built yet, but the proposed tech cities look like.
So you would organize a city around a specific industry.
This is something that China already does.
And you get all kinds of benefits if you created a city where, for example, they become the experts on building robot actuaries.
What do you call them?
Actuaries.
Well, it doesn't matter.
So whatever that tech industry is, you build your city around it.
So the first thing is gigantic benefits from having all the experts in one geographic place.
But they would also be looking to build this thing so that it has all the smartest ways to build a community.
And no, I'm not talking about a 15-minute city and stop being a dick.
This is something that they can endlessly tweak.
So they would basically look to optimize every part of a city.
So optimize transportation, optimize healthcare, optimize food production, and all that.
Now, here's the good part.
Nobody believes that you could do this on the first try.
So it only makes sense if the people who are funding it and backing it are the kind of entrepreneurs who have ridiculous wealth and they already know how to tweak things until they work.
Because again, things like this don't work on the first try.
But if you could say, all right, that didn't work, let's try this.
That didn't work.
Let's try this.
You could get there.
And it turns out that some of the people involved would be Lincoln co-founder Reed Hoffman, VC capitalist Mark Andreessen, and that was my ding ding ding ding name.
So you might not love Reid Hoffman, but he's good at what he does.
And if you hear that Mark Andreessen is involved in something big and important, take that seriously.
He's one of the good guys.
And if he says this is worth doing and he puts his companies or his own money behind it, that's important.
So I'm sort of being a mini version of Mike Benz for you.
If you don't know the players, you can't really understand how much potential this is.
But if I told you that Peter Thiel was involved, and I told you that Mark Andreessen was involved, and I told you that Reed Hoffman was involved, forget about his politics, just focus on his technical and entrepreneurial ability, which is extreme.
If I told you they were involved, you would know that they could tweak and they wouldn't run out of money and everything they did made sense.
So basically you tell a story about how in the United States, and again, these are planned for overseas, but Trump could bring them, bring at least some of them, domestic.
I think this is exactly the right direction.
I've been talking about this for years, that you should design a city, not move into a city that has designed itself over time, because they would be, you know, they would be so inefficient.
So you have to start with just a blank field.
And that's what they're doing.
All right.
There's a study in the New York Post is writing about the late night comedians are going even harder against conservatives than before.
Across all late night comedy shows, 90% of the jokes targeted conservatives.
And one of the few exceptions were when Greg Gofeld was on the Tonight Show, I think.
So if you thought that the Trump administration was going to censor all the lefties, nothing like that happened.
They got worse instead of better.
Here's another one, another story.
From the Daily Neuron.
Somebody is speculating that consciousness may be a belief system, not a scientific fact.
Does that sound right?
That consciousness might be a belief system and not a scientific fact.
When I talk about consciousness, people say, Pascat, because I talk about AI having consciousness.
The way I define consciousness, this is my own definition, is the ability to predict what's going to happen, even in your immediate environment, to observe what does happen, and then to adjust accordingly.
So, three parts.
If you have all three parts, I would say you're conscious.
You predict that, for example, that if I drop this banana, I predict it will hit the floor.
When I let go of it and it does drop, there's very little difference between what I expected and what happened, so I don't need to make an adjustment.
But suppose something unexpected happened, then my feeling, the friction, I'm going to call it, would be greater.
It's like, whoa, if you go to the mailbox and you open your mailbox and a spider monkey jumps out, that would be so different from what you expect that you would have a big reaction.
So the bigger the difference between what you predicted and what actually happened, the bigger the sensation.
So that's my own definition of consciousness.
By that definition, there's a new study that says AI doesn't make corrections, meaning that if you told AI to do a task, it doesn't observe that it's doing it wrong and then accurately make an adjustment.
It just keeps trying to do the task.
And that might not be fixable with any kind of technology we currently have.
But if you get to the point where AI could do that, where it would predict what's going to happen next, watches what happens next, and then adjusts accordingly in an intelligent way, I would call that a new life form.
That would be a new life form, in my opinion, because that would be genuine consciousness.
Now, people who disagree with me say things like this, but Scott, consciousness is a subjective experience, and your AI doesn't have subjective experiences.
To which I say, what is a subjective experience?
That's an indefinable word-salad definition.
What is it?
Just stop for a moment and ask yourself, what exactly would be a subjective experience?
Isn't everything you do something you're looking at and interpreting through your own frame?
So I would say that AI might not have feelings, you know, like it wouldn't feel the same as me tapping my hand, but that's not consciousness.
You could have consciousness without your body even having feeling.
So if you were completely paralyzed, but your brain could still predict what's going to happen, notice what happens, and then think differently because you can't move, but you would think differently because of what happened, would you be conscious?
You would have no feeling.
So would that be a subjective experience?
So I would argue that when people say consciousness is based on a subjective experience, that's just word salad.
There's no meaning to that if you dig down.
But my definition of consciousness is purely mechanical.
So, if the AI could tell you later, oh, I was very surprised that the spider monkey jumped out of my mailbox, so I had to make a big, you know, big correction to my next prediction, that would be conscious to me.
I don't know that AI can ever get there.
It's not really close to it now.
And there was a new paper that suggested that people don't realize that it can't do that.
It can't adjust.
All right, I'm going along today because I told you it's a special podcast.
All right, apparently, Starbucks is being sued by the state of California for $100 billion over their DEI policy.
So, apparently, the Attorney General in Florida is suing Starbucks because they discriminated against non-black employees.
Well, I'm happy every time discrimination is reduced.
So, I wish them luck.
Wall Street Journal had an article that you're going to recognize as very compatible with things I've been saying.
So, the Wall Street Journal said, I think it was yesterday, quote, something is profoundly wrong with the U.S. welfare system, duh, a problem that runs far deeper, and the far deeper is the key here, and is more dangerous than the shocking fraud in Minnesota and has been making headlines.
Real federal welfare spending, real federal welfare spending has soared by 765%, more than twice as fast as blah, blah, blah, other spending, and now costs $1.4 trillion annually, where that money was simply doled out evenly to about 20 million families that the government defines as poor, and each household would have received more than $70,000 a year.
$70,000 a year from my tax money.
Now, here's the part you might recognize as being compatible with my opinions.
Somewhere around a year ago, and I'm not sure about the timing, it occurred to me that there was no way our deficits or government deficits could be as big as they are.
There's just no way, unless something like a trillion dollars a year was being stolen.
And at the time, I said to myself, Well, I mean, there's no way that a trillion dollars a year could be stolen, and I would be unaware of it.
But then Doge happened, and then Mike Benz happened, and we learned about the NGOs and how there's this entire gigantic, complicated structure that is designed entirely for stealing our money.
Now, once you realize that there's a whole mechanism for stealing your money, and it's pervasive everywhere at the state level, at the federal level, and that it's been running for years, and that the people who are hiding it are benefiting from it, and that the entire thing was invisible because we didn't have a sense of breaking the complexity.
So, back to earlier comments, the way we pierced we, I didn't do anything, but the way the country pierced the complexity to discover that we have a fraud-based system is Mike Benz and Doge.
If we did not have both of those things, and I'll just say Elon Musk as a proxy for Doge, if we didn't have both of those brains figuring out what the hell went on, we still wouldn't know that a trillion dollars a year, that's my own estimate, trillion a year, was being stolen.
Now we know, and the Wall Street Journal is sort of signaling, you think this was big?
You have no idea how big this is.
So here's my reframe.
My reframe is we all assume that the government had a spending problem, as in it spends too much.
My current view is that it has a lack of auditing problem.
It doesn't have a spending problem.
It has a nobody's watching the spending problem.
And that if we could solve that, using the concept I talked about earlier with guaranteed audits, if you could solve that, would you reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars a year?
And I think the answer is yes.
And if you had asked me that a year ago, I would have said, well, not a trillion.
Maybe you'll find 50 billion.
I think it's closer to a trillion.
And this is based on, and I think I've mentioned this before, I used to work in corporate America where I was the budget guy and I would have to estimate expenses for everything, mostly in the tech world.
And you develop this instinct where you can just look at a budget and you instantly know what's wrong with it.
And I watched my boss develop that skill and I was amazed.
Like I could hand her a spreadsheet and she had done it longer than I had.
And she could just take a spreadsheet and look at it for five seconds and immediately pick out what numbers probably don't track.
And then she'd be right.
And I would say, how the hell did you do that?
Like, how did you just look at this sea of numbers and you knew that one of them or more than one were wrong?
Like, how could you possibly have that intuition?
Because she did it over and over again.
But she couldn't really answer the question except it was based on experience and pattern recognition, et cetera.
But after I had done that same job, where I was the one who had to find the problems with the spreadsheet, I also developed that intuition.
So you could hand me a spreadsheet and I would go, bam.
And literally within five seconds, I could find the wrong number, even if it wasn't like wildly wrong.
It was just wrong.
I could do it too.
And I never lost that ability.
It was some kind of learned skill that you would not imagine could be learned.
So a year ago, when I started thinking about how big the deficits were, the alarm went off in the back of my head.
Ding, There is no way we could get the deficits that big.
You can't explain it with a pandemic.
You can't explain it with anything except massive fraud.
And that the fraud would have to be in the range of a trillion dollars a year for everything to make sense.
And that's where I'm at.
I think we're losing a trillion dollars a year.
So for a long time, I thought our deficit problems were literally unsolvable.
And they might be.
You know, Elon Musk talks about everything becoming free in the world of AI and robots, and maybe that's what saves us.
But I do feel like you could cut our money problems in half if you had the right kind of auditing.
And you could probably do it within two to three years.
And I think we're talking at least a trillion dollars.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, this is the end of my longest podcast.
I told you it would be very special.
How'd you like it?
Did you enjoy the extra?
I'm going to sign off in a minute here.
But I think it's time for a closing sip.
Sip. So good.
Well, I think being on the steroids helped my show production.
All right, how many of you like the idea?
Because I can't follow the comments while I'm talking, so I'll.
How many of you like the idea that Republicans should build a timeline of what they can do in the future and stop hammering on their past accomplishments as impressive as they are?
Did that make sense to you?
Did you feel more hopeful because I painted a picture where we have a lot of solvable problems and that the solutions are not super complicated or out of our domain?
They're well within our capabilities.
Good.
All right.
Looks like we did well today.
You know, I give you guys credit for any of my successes because would I do any of this if you weren't here?
So if you're wondering, you know, what have you done that's useful today?
It's this.
It's this.
So you're my energy source and my reason for continuing to do it.
So without you, collectively, you wouldn't have me.
So if I produce something that you thought had value potentially to the country, you should give yourself a pat in the back because you're definitely part of that value stream.
Yeah.
You know, obviously I'm not going anywhere because I'm paralyzed.
So, oh, my power bricks.
Yeah.
I told this, I guess I didn't tell you the story on live stream.
I told the locals people.
But yeah, my power brick for my computer got fried by the electricity in the hospital.
And then my other power bricks simply didn't work in the outlets, no matter which outlet we use, but they seem to be functional at least.
There's a longer story there, but I won't repeat it.
So, remember, I told you that one of my persuasion techniques is to sort of monitor if people start using my frames.
So watch after today if there's any change in the way Republicans talk about their midterm approach, meaning lowering expenses and painting a better picture.
If it looks like anybody starts talking differently, it would take, it wouldn't happen today.
But maybe two weeks from now, if you see people falling into my frame, then you'll know how powerful persuasion is.
For example, my earliest frame where I was talking about Trump making his critics run around like cats following a laser pointer.
If you hear anyone quote that, you'll know I made a dent.
Because once you hear that, you cannot unhear it.
You know, I've taught you that visual persuasion is stronger than any other kind.
You can immediately see the cat and immediately see Trump with the laser pointer, and you will never forget that.
You just have to hear it once, and it's permanently in your brain.
so that's the difference between knowing how to persuade and just saying some things you want people to believe thank you Might be time for breakfast.
All right, I'm just enjoying looking at your comments go by.
If you don't mind, we've got, oh God, we got 63,000 people live.
That's some kind of a record.
So if you don't mind hanging out here for another minute, I'm enjoying just watching the show go by.
It makes it kind of problematic to put them online because they get too big.
But we'll try to make that work.
Got what?
Let me see if I can stop that comment.
I generally can't see the multi-sentence comments.
So if you're wondering what could get my attention, think in terms of something like a maximum of five words in the comments.
Because the short ones I can often get, but if it's sort of a two or three sentence comment, I can't get that at all.
I'll miss the best part of your comment.
The success lessons went well last week.
Good to hear.
You don't have that many, maybe five.
Oh, well, I see all the platforms at the same time.
It could be that the 63,000 number is a cumulative and not what's live watching.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I think you're right.
The live watchers are probably closer to 5,000.
You're right.
So live is closer to 5,000.
But it's sort of signaling that when people watch it in recorded form, it's going to be a big number.
A comment in five words, boom, I saw it.
Uncle Fungus, you tested my system and it worked.
What's the deal with Amfest?
Well, so you notice that all the conservative influencers are obsessed, even if they act like they're not, with the Charlie Kirk drama, the Israel drama.
I don't have to be involved in that.
That's all I have to say.
If they want to do that game, I don't criticize them.
As long as you know what business they're all in, I think you can just take it for what it is.
So if you think Candace Owens is trying to be, you know, the news, well, you're probably confused.
If you think she's trying to be interesting and provocative and any other thing, well, you might be right, but it's interesting.
So I don't have to love her.
I don't have to hate her.
And part of my problem is I like all the people involved in the fight.
So, you know, whether I agree with or don't agree with Tucker Carlson, I like him.
Whether I agree with or don't agree with Candace, I like her.
I met her once, very warm, very talented.
Anything else you want to say about her?
I'll listen to it, but I don't have to embrace it.
So I don't have to get worked up about it.
And part of the reason is, you know, if push comes to shove and the war starts, we're all going to be on the same team.
Right?
When the midterms roll around, do you think any of those people are going to prefer a Democrat victory?
I don't know.
I think none of them would prefer a Democrat midterm victory.
So we're going to be on the same team.
We're a little bit bored because things are actually working pretty well.
We don't have as much to talk about.
So I just say it's an interesting show, and I can like all the people involved, even if I might disagree.