Lots of fun news stories today. I don't know what is true.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, AI, Grok AI, Systems vs Goals, Hunter Biden's Laptop, Shawn Ryan Podcast, Offshore Windmills, Matt Gaetz, John Brennan's Judge Shopping Concern, Jessica Tarlov, CECOT Allegations, President Trump, Trump's Pressures CEOs, Nathan Wade WH Involvement, Money's Future Worth, Elon Musk, Rob Reiner Russian Collusion Hoax, DEI Qualified Hires Limitation, Governor Newsom, CA Land Redistribution, Voting Machine Allegations, Eric Swalwell, EU's Russia Gas, Japan Residency Requirements, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
We're about to start the most interesting podcast in the world.
I'm using my little portable fan to chill me out for a second.
Gets too warm here.
I get so excited about doing the podcast that I start overheating.
So the sound will be a little bit better when I turn this off.
Come on in.
You know, any moment now, we're going to do a thing called.
That's right.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Prepare your vessel.
All right, I know why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker Chelsea stein, a canteen jugger flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called, that's right, the simultaneous sip.
Go.
Oh.
So good.
All right, people.
I'm going to set my phone to look at the comments so that I can see them a little bit better than I can on the browser.
That's how this works.
All right.
Perfect.
Perfect, though.
All right, we got a lot of news today.
But before we start, I wondered: are you ever curious where I get my news stories?
Like, what sources do I use?
And I figured it would be sort of good hygiene to at least once tell you where I get most of my ideas for the show.
Because where you are influenced will tell you a lot about where things are going.
All right, first, I got to get my fan working.
This will work.
So, some of the sources that I use, and this is not exclusive, but you are likely to see me quoting stuff from the Wall Street Journal, from the post-millennial, from Just the News, The Hill, New York Post, The Gateway Pundit.
But that's not exclusive.
I'm forgetting, you know, obviously Politico sometimes, etc.
But I'm also very addicted to Mario Nauffel's posts on X because by the time I wake up, he's already done these great summaries of the news, and they're sort of hard to resist.
So he definitely points me to a lot of stories.
But I also get DMs on X and mostly on X from people who know me well.
So, two of the people who are especially good at knowing what I would like to see for the show are Owen Gregorian.
So, if you wanted to follow him, you could see more things that are in my lane.
If you like seeing my content, and especially if you like the technical stuff, you'll love seeing Owen Gregorian's feed.
So, just search for him on X if you want to follow him.
And then also, Marcella Pena, who is just really good at figuring out what would amuse me and amuse you.
And so when her DMs come in, I'm far more likely to use them as a basis for a story because she's so good at identifying what is interesting.
So I apologize if I'm leaving anybody out, but you can also follow Marcella on X. All right.
So there's a new robot maker.
There's a robot called Memo, I guess.
And they're claiming a breakthrough in teaching the robot to pick up unfamiliar items.
Oh, yeah.
So if you're looking at individuals, Mike Benz would be one of the people I look at.
But there are a lot of individuals on X.
So if you just look who I follow, I mean, if I follow them on X, they're probably influencing me one way or another.
You know, obviously Elon Musk, et cetera.
Anyway, this new robot, they're making a claim that they have trained it to have what they call an intuition for grasping new objects.
So apparently one of the biggest problems with robots, which I think for 20 years I've been seeing them say they claim they've figured out how to do this, but maybe they've done it, which is if a robot sees a new item, it doesn't necessarily know how to pick it up or how to handle it, unless it has been trained on that very item.
So it would handle an egg the same as an anvil, unless it had been trained that those are two different things.
But in theory, this company thinks that they've solved that, so that the robot would now have the same intuition a human would have, or close to it, that they could pick up objects.
Now, that makes me wonder, how close are we to actual robots that are useful?
Because I don't know, I thought that problem was already solved, but maybe that's one of the big ones.
So I would be surprised if Optimus has not solved that already, but they're competing companies.
And then the big question I have about robots is, if they're driven by AI, how do they avoid hallucinating?
We don't have any way to make robots stop hallucinating.
So if you ask it a question, it would still hallucinate at this point in history, right?
I used Grok yesterday.
I asked it what people, notable people, have claimed they've been influenced by me.
And it gave me a list of people that some of them I said, oh, I knew that one.
I knew that person mentioned me, or I know that person included me in a book.
And then I got to Lex Friedman.
And it said that Lex Friedman had said a number of positive things about me on his podcast.
And I thought to myself, really?
I feel like I would have heard about that.
Somebody would have mentioned it or sent me the clip.
So I wrote it down because I was, never mind, it's for a project.
But then I reminded myself to check it the next day.
So I used Grok a second time, and I asked it, all right, what did Lex Friedman say about me?
And Grok said, he's never mentioned you.
Now, this is the same AI one day later.
And depending on how I asked the question, it gave me a definitive, you know, detailed, it even said what he said about me.
And none of it was true, according to Grok.
So how do you build that into a robot?
Now, I do think Grok is probably the best AI out there.
It seems to be beating the tests the best.
But I'm really curious how far we are from Grok having the right kind of reliability.
Speaking of robots, one of the AI pioneers, you probably heard of him, Ilya Saskever.
I believe he was one of the founders of, or first technical people for Open AI and ChatGPT.
I think he laughed.
But he gave a speech, looked like it was some kind of college speech.
He said, quote, we live in the most unusual time in history because AI will soon do everything humans can do.
Why?
Because your brain is, here's the important part, because your brain is a biological computer.
So a digital one can match it.
Jobs, skills, economy, everything changes when AI masters all human abilities.
So, do you remember my 2013 book, How to Failed Almost Everything in Snow Went Big?
And one of my sort of major frames in that book was that your brain is a moist computer, or that people were basically moist computers.
So I've been saying the same thing, that your brain is a mechanical, although it's moist and it runs on chemistry, that's basically a machine.
Now, this is a big deal if you think that brains are magic and that you have something called a soul and the soul is helping you make decisions.
If you think that, then you might say, well, no robot is ever going to match the human brain because we have souls.
But I would take from Ilya's comments that he's not a believer in souls or that if they exist, they don't have any impact on your actions.
And that matches what I've been saying for quite a while.
So I guess all I'm doing is bragging that the guy who knows the most about AI is on the same page as I've been for quite a long time.
Yeah, free will is an illusion.
Exactly.
Well, I'm going to take another victory lap here.
I mentioned this before, but I don't know if I put it in the context I wanted to.
So I saw a text post on X from Steve Magnus.
He was talking about a meta-analysis, which I've mentioned, I think, that had three outputs or three conclusions.
That process goals had a larger effect on performance, process goals.
Now, I take that to mean what I call a system.
So that your goal would be to go to the gym.
Your goal would not be to lose 20 pounds.
Does that make sense?
Because one is a system.
Hey, I go to the gym every day.
And the other is an outcome.
Instead, the outcome goals had a negligible effect.
So this is one of my biggest, it's one of the biggest messages I've been saying for, again, over a decade.
Started with my book, How to Fail Almost Everything in Still Went Big.
And apparently there's this huge meta study, which means that they looked at multiple studies and concluded that I'm right.
The systems are better than goals.
So I didn't know that that would necessarily ever have any kind of scientific backing.
To me, it was just sort of obvious from life.
But now, just to be fair, I have often told you that a meta-analysis is not really science.
So I won't back up on that.
If you want to say, Scott, you also told us that a meta-analysis is not useful.
Well, I don't want to change my mind on that.
So I'm going to say it's nice that it agrees with me, but it is a meta-analysis.
So be skeptical.
I saw a post from Balaji, Srinivasan, one of the smartest people in the world, who's noting that I think it's some kind of Chinese company, now has an electric charger for your car.
The company is BYD.
So I'll take a fact check on that, but I think it's a Chinese company.
They now have in production, so this is not in the laboratory, this is actually in the field, they've got chargers for electric cars that add 400 kilometers of range in five minutes.
So Balazi calls it the flippening, the EV flipping, where it would be faster to get an electric charge in your car than it would be to add gas.
Now, one of the things about technology that I think sometimes we're blind to is that changes that you think might be coming, they never come.
It's like nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens.
Boom.
Suddenly you pass over some barrier where everything's different.
So I think the point here is that if you have in production, like actually in the field, a way to charge the car for 400 kilometers in five minutes, presumably other companies will have to match that.
Presumably Tesla has plans we don't know about to get to the next level of that stuff.
But that's really going to change everything.
Yeah.
And we're moving towards supercapacitors, right, Owen.
So also there's some breakthroughs in supercapacitors.
And without getting too nerdy, super capacitors or another change everything.
They would make the battery refill.
Do you call it refill?
Charge.
It would make the charging and use of batteries a whole different deal.
It would just make everything better.
So that's right on the edge of happening.
All right.
You probably heard that Trump is introducing, he wants to build a bunch of new battleship type things.
He's calling it the Golden Fleet.
And he thinks they can build one in two and a half years.
Do you think that the United States is capable of building an entirely new designed, we'll call it a battleship class, but it's going to be different from a battleship.
Do you think they can build that in two and a half years?
I don't know.
I just suspect we don't have that capability.
But we'll talk about in a minute that Trump is going to be pushing the CEOs to learn how to build faster, because that's our competitive disadvantage, I think.
We're slow builders.
We are slow, slow builders.
You think we can?
Maybe we can.
So let's talk about some stories that I don't know if they're fake or true, but that'll be the fun.
All right.
Fake or true, there's a story that Kash Patel had at the FBI is just spent some of our tax money to update a, quote, custom fleet of armored BMW X5s for him to ride around it.
Now, the claim, and you have to decide if this is real or fake, the claim is that he just wanted cooler cars.
And so he spent our money unnecessarily to give himself a fleet of X5s.
Now, until this week, that was the car I drove.
At the moment, I don't drive a car, so I don't think I'll be driving a car again.
But it's the car I chose, and I chose it specifically because it does not scream out luxury.
It's very functional.
It's a high-end car, but it's the most functional without being over-the-top, you know, showy.
So that's why I like that.
You know, it didn't draw attention to me.
But their claim is that, you know, he's loving it for it being a cool car.
And that also it's a foreign car.
And he's being accused of, wait, why would you buy a foreign car?
Now remember, these would be armored special security cars.
They wouldn't be normal cars.
Why would you do that?
All right, here's the counterpoint.
The counterpoint is we're talking about four cars.
So when they call it a fleet, well, maybe it's a fleet, but it's four.
And somebody also claimed that that is a typical way they update security fleets, that they would do them all at once because the last batch of them were wearing out about the same time.
So if you buy them all at once, the next time you have to update it, you would do the same four.
You just do them all at the same time.
The other thing they're claiming is that the X5 is way cheaper than the alternatives.
There was some alternative that I don't know what it was, but that it was actually a way to save money instead of some way to give himself a cooler car.
Again, I'm not saying I know what's true.
That's what you're going to figure out because it's sort of a new story, but it seems full of bullshit.
I think MS now had the reporter on there, so that's a bad sign for truth.
And then someone claimed, and I don't know if this is true, that that particular model is built in an American company, although BMW would be the owner of the company, that it would be built in America.
Now, I don't know if that's true either.
So it's sort of a new story.
You're still in the fog of war situation, if you know what I mean.
But my intuition tells me that it's fake news, at least partially, and that all they're doing is upgrading the fleet.
They had to do it anyway.
There's time to do it.
They didn't want the most showy or expensive alternative.
And that's definitely not a showy car.
You would not feel like you were riding any kind of luxury vehicle.
It's just real, very functional.
And they also have great steering and performance and power.
So if you wanted a car that gave you good security, you probably want something that's got a little muscle in it.
So it's good that way too.
All right.
Did you see that on the Sean Ryan podcast, Hunter Biden went on and made some claims that, well, again, I want you to decide if this is true.
Hunter claims that he has no memory of ever dropping a laptop off at a laptop repair place and that the laptops are fake, not the content.
So he does not say the content is fake.
What he says is that the laptops are essentially fake because they're cobbled together by files that have been stolen from him off his phone, plus off of other digital devices.
So his claim is that there never was a laptop, that the laptop was put together by some kind of enemy and then dropped off so that they would be discovered and made public.
Now, he also claims that it's absurd to believe that the laptop guy, the first thing he would do when the laptop was left there and nobody claimed it, it would be absurd to think that the first thing he did would be to call Rudy Giuliani's lawyer.
Now, if that had actually happened, and it turns out that never happened, that it was not the first place he claimed to look, the first place, I think, was the FBI.
It would have been pretty weird if he had been right, that the first thing the laptop repair guy did was call Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, but that didn't happen.
So we know he lied about the Rudy Giuliani part.
But here's the interesting thing, and maybe some of you are having the same experience.
Five years ago, if I heard him tell a story like that, that the laptop never existed, I would have said, come on, obviously it existed, and there was more than one and blah, blah, blah.
But in the last five years, we found out so many things that we thought were true turned out to be absolutely hoaxes.
I mean, just so many things are not true that it's almost as if if it's in the news, it's not true.
Do you feel that?
There's so much not true about every single story we watch that I say to myself, is that possible?
You know, that the Rudy Giuliani thing is a red flag, obviously.
But is it possible that the laptops never existed?
What do you think?
So here's my BS filter on that.
It doesn't feel to me that I would be hearing this for the first time today, yesterday.
Do you think that if Hunter and his lawyers have known forever, because they would know for sure, right?
I feel like Hunter wouldn't forget a laptop being dropped off.
No matter how high you are, you wouldn't forget that.
You wouldn't not know that you used to have a laptop and now you don't.
So if he's known this from the start, why are you and I just hearing about it this week?
Does that make sense?
All right.
So given that I can't imagine they would have held that until the Sean Ryan podcast at the end of 2025, I'm going to say it sounds a little bit, I don't know if it didn't change anything.
I don't know why he would lie about it because he does not deny the content and the content obviously is a bad part.
I guess he's suggesting that he's some guy who got framed by enemies.
Is it possible that he's guilty of all the things that are on the laptop?
He's not denying any of that.
But is it possible that he was framed by somebody cobbling together files and putting them on a laptop?
I'm going to say if we had heard about this early on, I might have been inclined to say, well, maybe.
But the fact that I hadn't even heard of it until now sort of suggests he's trying to rewrite history.
So I'm going to lean toward not trusting Hunter Biden, which seems like a good bet.
Did you hear that, according to Interior Secretary Doug Bergham, they're going to pause four different very large windmill projects off our coast?
And the reason given is that the feds believe the windmills might cause interference with military radar systems, so that there was a national security problem that had to be addressed, and they're pausing the projects just to see if that's a problem.
Do you believe that's true?
Well, I looked into it a little bit, and apparently one of the big companies, I don't know about the rest, but one of the big companies involved is a company from Denmark.
So is it a coincidence that Trump is looking to negotiate with Denmark about Greenland, and yet at the same time, some largish Denmark company just had their project blocked?
Is that a coincidence?
Or is Trump creating yet another asset?
As in, well, why don't you talk to your windmill company?
They'd like you to cooperate with the United States.
Maybe something we could have proved.
I don't know.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
So, but they're not all companies from Greenland.
So I'm not sure that I believe that's the reason.
But it does seem like a little bit of a coincidence, doesn't it?
Or could it be that Trump just hates windmills because we know he does?
He hates them for pollution and inefficiency.
He might hate them because they're not American products.
So he has lots of reasons to dislike them.
Is it possible that the administration is using an excuse to clamp down on windmills and it's not really what they're worried about?
In other words, that the national security thing is just something made up to make it easy to block them.
I don't know.
So allegedly, they just need time to look into it.
So maybe if they look into it and decide to unblock them later, maybe that'll tell us what's happening.
So here's a story you probably wanted to hear about.
If you notice on the X platform or someone else, that Matt Gates appeared on Tucker Carlson's show and mentioned me.
Now, I don't have anything to add to this story, because you're hoping I do.
I don't.
So it's an old story, and I won't even get into the weeds of it.
But the basic idea is that Matt Gace's father was allegedly being blackmailed by some Israel-related entity that was going to make a claim about his bad behavior that allegedly was not true.
But they had tried to get him to pay $25 million for some effort that I'm not going to get into.
And it looked like more of a blackmail scheme, depending who you're talking to.
Now, the part that I'm involved is that at the time, there was a journalist named Jake Novak who had sent me some messages before this was known by anybody that this was coming down the pike, that there would be not blackmail.
He didn't describe it that way.
He just said that somebody was going to ask him for money and that there was an allegation against his father.
And I looked at it and I thought, this doesn't look real.
So my only contribution was that when I was told about it in advance, I doubted that it was based on fact.
Now, it turns out that it turned into a court case and somebody eventually went to jail for, but what did they go to jail for?
I don't know.
But they went to jail for some kind of, was it wire fraud or something?
Yeah, wire fraud.
So I don't know how you get to wire fraud.
I guess the idea was that somebody tried to blackmail somebody over the internet.
Would that be wire fraud?
I don't know.
So I was never part of the story beyond the fact that some of my private messages surfaced.
Now the question you have is, how did my private messages ever surface?
And the answer is, I don't know.
I don't know.
I will say that if somebody associated with Israel, and apparently Jake Novak is associated with Israel, and some suspect that he might be working closely with them.
And then I think he later got a job that was actually for Israel.
So what I suspect is that if anybody's having any contact with somebody who has a foreign, any kind of a foreign contact, there are spooks all over my personal communication.
So it would not be legal for anybody to look at my communications without a warrant if it were only two Americans talking.
Now, we're both Americans in this case.
But if one of the Americans had also some connection to a foreign country, I imagine that they had full access to everything I have.
So I don't know the answer to how my private messages got into the conversation, but the only role I had was that I heard it early and I didn't think it was true, the allegations.
So I'm getting credit for spotting the bullshit early, but otherwise I have nothing to add to the story.
I was never part of the court case.
Just wasn't part of the story.
So I wish I could be more interesting, but and then Matt Gace said the following to Tucker.
He said that recently he was offered a quote a bunch of money to go to Israel and give speeches.
And then after he declined, he says he got attacked as an anti-Semite by Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL.
So I think his point was that Israel offers both rewards for being pro-Israel and penalties for being anything but that.
So anyway, I woke up to that story this morning.
Have I ever told you that it's weird how often I become part of the story?
I wasn't really trying to be part of that story, but here I am.
Well, Trump at some one of his press conferences, he was asked about Greenland.
He said, quote, we need Greenland for national security.
We have to have it.
The way he talks is always in negotiation.
We have to have it.
So if he makes it clear that we're going to get it one way or another, that certainly must help him in negotiations, don't you think?
Because we know the United States can overthrow countries.
We have a pretty long history of overthrowing other countries and our hemisphere and others.
And we call it a green revolution.
We know how it's done, et cetera.
Now, presumably, the easiest country you could ever overthrow would be Greenland because it's so small.
I mean, if you were going to bribe or threaten people or try to get control of a government, I don't know how you could do an easier one because it's so small and so close.
So it looks like the plan is just to keep squeezing until Denmark says, all right, we've had enough.
Or if Greenland decides on its own, on its own, that it would rather be independent, then they can start negotiating with the U.S. to provide security in return for being under some kind of security umbrella.
Now, Trump says we don't need their minerals.
We're not after them for the minerals because we have lots of minerals.
I think that's probably true.
Now, if we had an agreement with them, I wouldn't be surprised.
If it was, we give you security if you give us minerals.
I wouldn't be surprised.
But I do believe that he's more interested in the security aspect because that's, you know, it's just obviously important.
All right.
So former CIA director John Brennan's lawyers apparently have been informed that he's a target of a criminal grand jury in Florida.
And the topic is his involvement in the Russia collusion probe.
Let's call it a hoax.
So according to Just the News, they're trying to get it moved or dropped or something because Florida seems like judge shopping.
He doesn't think he'd have a good chance in Florida courts.
Maybe that's true.
But it's interesting to see somebody associated with the left being concerned about judges shopping.
Yeah.
So will we learn?
Oh, my cat is eating my charge cord.
I have to get that out of the way.
No, that's not a cat toy.
You cannot eat the charging cord.
All right.
So that would suggest that John Brennan is in trouble because we know that grand juries typically do indict.
So even if he is not convicted of anything, and I would not necessarily predict that he would be, he's going to be spending a lot of money and time defending himself.
So if you believe that John Brennan is one of the bad guys, you're probably pretty happy that an anvil is about to come down on him, the anvil of justice, which may or may not, as I say, get any kind of conviction, but just being sucked into that process is torture enough.
And I always wonder, why does it take so long to put a case together?
Now, I realize it's complicated, but is it going to take two years before there's any kind of court case?
And then is a court case going to take two years on its own?
And then are we going to have a Democrat president or a Democrat administration that pardons him or throws it out?
So I don't know if they're in some kind of a stalling strategy or what.
But if you're like me, you don't really expect any justice, do you?
How many of you think that the end of the Russia collusion hoax will be that the people involved get prosecuted?
It just feels like we live in a world where even if the Republicans are in charge, it's not going to make a difference.
So I think I'm going to predict that he doesn't go to jail, but he will be very unhappy if the indictments come through.
Usually indictments do come through, especially from Florida.
So he has a point that he has less chance of Florida than maybe someone else.
All right, you remember the story?
The 60 Minutes delayed the publication of a story about that famous El Salvador prison and how bad the conditions were.
Now, Barry Weiss, who's in charge of that operation now, says they were just holding off for a comment from the administration.
Some people said, wait, the administration did comment, but it wasn't who she wanted to comment.
I think she wanted Steve Miller specifically, which would have been a better show if they had Stephen Miller comment.
So somebody had leaked the entire episode, and so today you can watch it on social media.
And apparently it does exactly what you thought it was.
It was an expose of how bad the conditions are if you go to that prison.
Now, I won't give the details of how bad it is, but if you assume that the claims or the allegations are true, it would be really bad.
Like really, really bad.
As in, really, really bad.
Now, how do you feel about that?
Do you feel really, really, really bad that gang members, not all of them, I assume, are being tortured and raped and who knows what in the prison?
Does that bother you?
Well, if you're a human, it should bother you a little bit.
But if you don't like gang members, it might bother you less.
So remember, I've told you a number of times that when Trump has an option of doing this or that, he always takes the one that is the strongest or makes him look the strongest.
So the weak option would be, oh, we cannot use this prison because they mistreat the prisoners.
On a human level, you might agree that you should not have that level of abuse even in a prison.
Totally understand that.
But what would be the strongest path?
The strongest path would be, we don't care.
Maybe they shouldn't have done things that put them in prison.
We don't care.
So apparently there are about also related to that.
There are about 100 Venezuelans who have been put in that prison.
And Judge Boesberg has said they need to be brought back so they can defend whether they should be going to prison at all or deported at all.
It's only 100 people.
It's not the worst thing in the world.
But let me give you my take on this.
Well, first let me borrow a take from Jessica Tarlov.
So I like her opinions better than you do.
You're going to tell me, but Scott, don't you remember that time Jessica Kotarlov said that thing that turned out to be factually untrue, to which I'm going to say, who hasn't done that?
Do you think I only say things that are factually true?
I try.
I mean, I try as hard as I can to only say things that are true.
But how many times have you caught me in a factual error that I had to even correct myself?
If you do this kind of work, you are continuously saying things that aren't true unintentionally.
The best you can do is correct it when you find out.
So yes, Jessica Katralov sometimes says things that turn out not to be true, just like every single person doing this kind of work.
But what I like about her is that she often gives me a view of things that's well expressed that I had not heard before.
So, you know, it's really good to just add it to your, well, this person said that file.
So on this topic, she said by a post on X, I fail to see how the Trump administration input, that's what Barry Weiss said she was waiting for, would have changed the disgusting and heartbreaking reality of CCOT, that's the prison.
Completely shameful, we send people there.
Perfectly reasonable opinion.
That's a perfectly reasonable opinion.
You could disagree with it, but I think it's reasonable to say, hey, this was too far.
So here's what I would do if I were the administration.
And I don't predict that they will do this.
Because remember, Trump takes the strong path, even if you're pretty sure another path would be the more, you know, let's say reasonable or humane path.
So if I were not Trump, and I did not consistently use that strategy, which is actually a really good strategy, because you won't remember this topic in a few years, but you'll definitely remember that Trump is always the strongest player in every game.
And that gives him an advantage in negotiating and leadership and everything else.
So if they don't do what I'm going to suggest right now, that's not a mistake.
It's just a different way to handle it.
All right.
So one way they could go is too bad.
Too bad.
They shouldn't have been in prison.
Here's what I would do.
I would say, you know, that's a pretty good point.
Things look worse than we thought.
And we're going to talk to them, talk to El Salvador, because we have a good relationship with them.
And we'll see if there's some reforms that need to be taken.
So if you first admit that there's some abuse at the prison, nobody's going to really be upset about that.
Because I'll bet you even American prisons, well, I know for sure, American prisons are full of abuse.
Do you think there's nothing happening to American prisons, American prisoners?
I mean, I hear stories about the prison guards in America creating fights just for their own entertainment.
You've heard the stories yourself, right?
So if you have a prison, you also have prisoners getting tortured.
It just feels like it's built into every prison system.
Nobody wants it.
I'm not in favor of it.
I would be far happier if all that abuse were removed from the system.
But it is a fact that if you have a prison, there is torture.
It's just a fact.
So if I were the administration, I would say thank you for that story.
We're going to look into it.
And I'll just move on.
And I do think they should look into it.
I do think that they should say to our El Salvadorian leader, not ours, but you know, that they should tell him to figure that out.
It's not our problem to solve, but they should tell him to solve it.
And I think he could.
Anyway, according to the post-millennial, Trump's approval numbers have rebounded, and he's allegedly up to 50% approval rating.
I don't believe that.
But, you know, polls are all over the place, and I'm not sure they're useful at this point in any cycle.
But just so you know, there's at least one poll that says his approval is higher than it has been for the last three months.
I don't know.
Don't believe it.
It's not that I don't believe he's popular.
It's that polls in general are just, you know, a little bit hard to believe in the middle of a cycle.
All right.
The Pentagon has apparently signed an agreement with Elon Musk's company, XAI, to deploy Grok, that would be the AI, across 3 million military and civilian personnel.
So again, I ask, now, I guess this is a special version of Grok, and a lot of military and civilian personnel will have it.
But it's impact level 5.
I don't know what that is, but it sounds serious.
Impact level 5.
And it enables secure handling of controlled, unclassified information in daily workflows.
Now, here's the thing.
Is it safe to have AI in the military context already?
Because I told you my story about Grok hallucinating about me, pretty fairly simple fact about me.
Can we safely deploy a hallucinating AI into the military?
Or has Elon Musk found a way to, you'd have to eliminate it entirely, to eliminate it entirely in the specific way that the military will use it?
Because in the way I use it is chatting with it.
But if you're not using it to chat, does it hallucinate?
I don't know.
So I have questions about how safe it is to have a military application of any AI, whether it's Grok or anything else, when even talking to it is sort of iffy in terms of its facts.
So I got a big question mark on that one.
You know, obviously, I'm not the only person who's thought of this.
And obviously, they looked into this deeply.
Obviously, Elon Musk is not going to unload some dangerous AI into the military.
So it seems obvious that they've solved it or made it not an issue the way they're implementing it.
But I'd love to know how they did that.
That would tell you a lot about the potential of AI and how fast it's going to get into your robot.
Boy, this is good, Sippin.
Are you having as much fun as I am?
You know, I've told you before this is my favorite part of the day.
And a lot of you tell me that it's not really about the news or my takes on things, although sometimes you like those.
It's really just about hanging out.
And, you know, that's why I enjoy it the same way.
Anyway, historian Victor Davis Hansen is warning us that there's a whole bunch of deep fakes made by AI of him.
So there's a whole bunch of videos that appear to be him giving different takes on things that are completely fake.
Now, I have to confess that I fell for one of them.
I hate when that happens.
So to me, it looked real.
And the opinion that he gave in what turned out to be a fake video was interesting.
And so I reposted it on X, and somebody fairly quickly alerted me that it was an AI fake.
Now, here's the interesting part: it wasn't until I was alerted that it was fake that I could see that it was fake.
So on a quick look, totally, totally persuasive.
But once somebody says, hey, that's fake, you look at it a little bit closer, you're like, oh, how did I fall for that?
So the cracks in the fake become obvious after you know it's a fake.
And I'm a little bit disappointed in myself that I fell for it.
So be careful if you see any Victor Davis Hansen videos.
He tells us the only way you can know the real ones are the source.
I didn't write down what the sources are.
But if it comes from a legitimate source, one that you know he has an association with, it's probably real.
If it comes from some unknown, weird little source, probably a fake.
So here's something I love.
Trump, apparently, maybe it happened yesterday, I'm not sure.
But Trump is either going to or already has sat down with a bunch of American CEOs to try to get them to do more of what he wants and less of what they were doing.
Specifically, he's trying to convince them that they're overpaid.
He mentions that directly, that they're making $450 million a year.
And at the same time, they're making all that money, they're slow building, meaning whatever it is that they're manufacturing, they might make good stuff.
He does say the quality is good, but that they're too slow.
And that slowness, of course, has an impact on the GDP and competitiveness, et cetera.
And we know that China is really good at building fast.
So if we have a manufacturing base that is slow and we're trying to compete with China, we're not going to do so well because they can iterate faster, they can build faster.
So, Now, I think Elon Musk has proven to the world that things can be a lot faster when you're manufacturing because people have been amazed on several different domains that when Elon Musk wants to build something, whether it's rockets or satellites or cars or anything else, that he can get it done fast.
So it's not impossible to be an American manufacturer and build things fast.
You just have to really lean into it like Elon does.
So the first thing he's trying to do is embarrass them, embarrass them, that if they're taking this much money, they better build fast, otherwise the United States isn't getting their full value.
I love that.
He's not putting anybody in jail.
He's just putting pressure on them.
I like the pressure, especially because he's being transparent about it.
Second, he's going to try to convince them to do fewer stock buybacks.
That's where the company buys its own stock because it doesn't have any other better use for the money.
So it keeps the stock price up because the company itself is buying it.
But it doesn't do much for the world.
It's just good for the stockholders.
So he's trying to get them to use that stock buyback money and put it into American plant and equipment.
I love that.
I love that.
He also wants them to pay smaller dividends and use some of that money to go into the production facilities as well.
So what he's trying to do is get American companies to say, you have a bunch of money.
Not only are you overpaid, but you're using it in the least productive way that's good for stockholders, but is not good for the country as a whole.
Now, the beauty of this, if you haven't already caught on, is how in the world do the Democrats complain about this?
If you're a Democrat, can you complain that Trump says CEOs are overpaid?
No, you can't.
You can't complain about that.
If you're a Democrat, can you complain that Trump is trying to have them invest their money in things that would create more American jobs and prosperity at the expense of the stockholders?
Are you going to complain about that?
No, no, you can't complain about that.
How about the same thing with dividends?
Can you complain that he says you should do less for the stockholders and more for building plants, which would be good for the middle class, good for workers?
You can't complain about that.
And none of it is illegal.
But let me ask you this.
Could any other president pull this off?
This is a form of leadership that I've never seen before and is just so impressive to me.
Will it work?
Will it make a difference?
I don't know.
But is it worth a try?
Definitely.
Now, if you're a CEO and you were happy doing your dividends, that kept you in your job.
You were happy doing your stock buybacks, that kept you in your job, but now Trump is leaning on you in a very public way.
So those same companies can say, stockholders, the president has asked us to put more emphasis on our building and building fast and less emphasis on dividends.
So this year we're going to skip the dividend and we're going to build faster.
Will they keep their job if they do that?
Probably.
Probably.
So Trump is giving them cover by putting pressure on them because now they can say, well, we're pressured.
And that gives them the ability to do what probably is good for the country, which is put more money into manufacturing.
So like I say, will it work?
I don't know.
Is it a good idea?
Yes.
Yes.
Is he implementing it in a good way?
Yes.
It's pretty impressive.
I've never heard of anybody even suggesting to do this.
I've never heard of it.
All right.
So that's leadership, people.
So here's a complicated story that, let's see if I can summarize.
So there's a Georgia senator who apparently there's some kind of hearings or something.
And we've learned that Nathan Wade, remember he was the boyfriend of Fonnie Willis.
So if you don't know the whole background of this, it's too complicated to get into it.
But most of you probably know the story that Fonnie was one of the people who went after Trump, allegedly in a lawfare way as opposed to a reasonable way.
And then the question that popped up from that is, was the White House ever involved in trying to lawfare Trump, which would be highly inappropriate.
I don't know how illegal it would be, but it would certainly change our understanding of the story.
So is it true that Trump got in trouble just because he did some bad things and the Department of Justice was just doing what it does, goes after people who do bad things?
Or was it part of a larger White House plot that had many, many moving parts to essentially overthrow the city government?
Well, here's what we just found out.
That Nathan Wade, remember, the boyfriend of Fonnie Willis and deeply involved in the prosecution of Trump.
According to the Wall Street Apes, I saw a post on that.
I'll just read what the Wall Street Apes said.
That Wade had an eight-hour phone call to the White House the same day that Jack Smith was appointed as the guy to go after Trump.
So that would suggest that there was a connection between the efforts.
And according to the Georgia senator, who did a video on this, I didn't write down his name, Nathan Wade led an entire emissary of people from Willis's office out to Washington, D.C. to meet with the J-Six committee.
So the J-SICS committee were the people who were trying to prosecute all the J-SIG stuff and get Trump in trouble for it, et cetera.
And he said that nobody can recall what they did.
They've all got amnesia.
But they went out there and they had significant multi-day meetings.
So it was an emissary of people.
Nathan Wade led them.
And they were there for days at the very beginning of the Jack Smith looking into Trump stuff.
And on November 18th, Nathan Wade had a phone call with the White House that allegedly was an eight-hour phone call, according to Wade's billing.
Now, I wouldn't necessarily trust his billing to be accurate because he might have overbilled.
But there's a clear indication that there was collusion, whether illegal or not.
I'm not saying it was illegal, but there's clear indication that there was coordination between the White House and the Department of Justice going after Trump.
So it's starting to look like if you suspected that the White House was behind what would be just terrible behavior to go after Trump, it does look like that's the case.
But we'll learn more about that.
So I got two responses on X from Elon Musk yesterday on the same topic.
So he's got this theory that robots and AI will make money worthless in the future because everything will be free.
Do you believe that?
So let me tell you the concept.
So I did a post on X about the idea of giving every baby $1,000 and then waiting 18 years and it'll be worth something when they're 18.
And I asked the question, will money even have value when kids turn 18?
And Elon weighed in and in response to, will money even have value when kids turn 18, he said that civilization will either be gone or AI and robotics will eliminate scarcity.
Either way, money won't matter.
Wow.
And then before that, I'd reiterated his opinion about that before he had posted that.
I knew his opinion.
And he agreed that I'd sort of got it right.
He said, pretty much it will happen quickly.
So it will happen quickly, meaning that money will become worthless.
Now, I don't know what quickly means in this context, but it obviously means sooner than 18 years.
And so I thought it would be useful to you to kind of work through how that could be possible.
Are you ready?
Now, I don't know the full answer to this, and I'm not yet agreeing with his take.
But let me give you just a little bit of insight into why it might be true.
So let's take one example, your car insurance.
How much is your car insurance?
Well, if cars become almost entirely autonomous, so that humans are not driving, do you think you'll still have car insurance?
Or will it be so rare that an autonomous car has an accident that they just wrap that into the sale price of the car?
For example, what if in five years you would never use a car that you had to steer because it would be too dangerous?
You could if you wanted to, but if you bought one that was autonomous, the dealer, let's say it's Tesla, just adds $1,000 to the purchase price and says, we will cover the insurance no matter what happens if it's the car's fault.
Then you never pay insurance again.
You know, maybe you paid $1,000 on the price of the car, but you never had to pay it again.
What happens when robots and AI are your doctor?
Well, maybe your cost of healthcare goes way down because you don't have as many human helpers.
Maybe.
But what about other production?
Would it be possible that food prices would go down if you had AI and robots running the farms?
Well, it depends how much the robots cost, right?
But do we get to the point where robots can build other robots?
And if they did, where would those robots get the raw materials to build the other robots?
Wouldn't somebody own those?
Well, robots could be mining the raw materials, basically just taking it out of the dirt and then turning it into other robots.
And then those other robots could build other robots.
And you and I would never pay anything.
Pretty soon there'd be a million robots and it was completely created out of stuff from the ground.
Literally stuff in the ground.
So here's the part that I can't get past.
Won't there always be something that is scarce?
I can see how products would not become scarce because robots would infinitely build them and they would build themselves and they're just using material that's sitting in the ground.
But doesn't somebody own the ground?
Is there enough public land that even the raw earth materials could be mined from that?
So as long as somebody can hoard anything that is scarce and land is the most scarce thing, then how can you get to zero cost?
Because the people who own the land can say, sure, you can build a free house on my land, but you're going to have to pay me for the land, right?
Or they can say, yeah, your robots can mine some materials from the land, but I own the land, so you're going to have to pay me for access to the land.
Or, or, is there so much public land that they would never have to ask for private land, and the private land would be worth nothing because there would always be some robot willing to build an entire new apartment building on somebody else's land or on public land.
So the question is, will land still have value?
Or is there just so much unused, shitty land that could be used by the robots that your so-called valuable land just won't be valuable?
I don't know.
So I can't say that I'm 100% agreeing with the idea that money will become worthless because everything will be free, but you can sort of see how you could get there.
So what happens when the only thing a human can sell is the one thing a robot can't do?
That's right, blowjobs.
No, I just mean sex in general.
Will it ever be true that you could have a better relationship sexually with a robot and get your oxytocin fixed?
Or is oxytocin just a chemical and your robot can give you an oxytocin pill and a hand job and you'll think that's the best sex you ever had?
Maybe.
I wouldn't rule it out.
So I always think it's a fool's, well, an idiot's take to disagree with Elon Musk prediction for the future.
But it does make me wonder how the richest man in the world deals with the fact that he may have accomplished the greatest, you could argue the greatest accomplishment of all time, to be the richest person in the world.
And then money becomes worthless.
Like, what would that do to him?
So I'm not going to rule out that money could become worthless.
It's a little beyond my mental capacity to visualize the exact path that it happens.
And I would love to see an interview with Elon in which somebody who knows more than I do about this topic says, okay, but how about this?
What would this be worth?
What about human, you know, would you not pay for human company?
Now remember, when I said that real estate would always have a value, would it if our population continues to decline?
Would it if you didn't need it for farming because we were so good at farming that you needed 10% of the farmland that we use now because the robots and the AI are doing underground indoor farms, whatever.
It is possible.
All right.
So I'd like to double back on a story that you already know about.
I saw a clip, I think it was on the Mays account on X, that says, where Rob Reiner was on some interview and he said that Russian election interference, which he believed was true, was way worse than if they had attacked us with an atomic bomb.
And I'm reminded that at some point it's not too soon.
And I think we're getting close to that point.
Rob Reiner was not a good guy.
He was not a good guy.
And he was, if you consider only his, if the only thing you look at is his involvement in the Russian collusion hoax and his collusion with the heads of the intelligence agencies to do that, John Brennan, et cetera.
He's one of the worst people that's ever lived.
He's not just a bad guy.
He's not just an actor, director who happened to get a lot of attention.
He's really bad, or was.
And I feel like we're on the border of it's not too soon.
And I don't want it to get away.
I don't want it to get away from us that he was, he's now somebody you should have respected.
Although his movies were excellent.
So New York Post, Glenn Reynolds has an article talking about how DEI hollowed down the generation and sapped America's promise.
Have you noticed, I've mentioned this before, that it seems like nearly every major company and organization in the world, no, in the United States, became incompetent in the last several years.
They went from, you know, you liked them or you didn't like them, sometimes they're good, sometimes not.
But it sort of turned into everything is incompetent.
And some people should blame DEI.
Now, that sounds kind of racist, right?
If you say, oh, all of our institutions became incompetent because they allowed too much DEI, which would suggest that the race or gender of the people coming in or the sexual orientation somehow made them less capable.
Now, I've never made that claim.
My claim about DEI is that there's a numbers problem.
And the numbers problem is that if you artificially constrain who you're willing to hire, you're going to run out of qualified people pretty quickly because you've artificially constrained it.
So if everybody in the world was an Albonian and there was no diversity at all, but you only hired left-handed Albonians, what would happen to the capability of your major institutions?
Right?
So there's no racism involved.
There's no sexism.
There's no sexual choice.
Everybody in the world is an Albonian.
But you've artificially said, I'll only hire left-handed Albonians.
You tell me, do you run out of qualified people faster than if you said, we'll hire any Albonian, they just have to be qualified.
Well, when white males were excluded from the workforce through DEI, which is essentially what happened 30 years ago, and we're just now able to talk about it without getting canceled, you guaranteed that the numbers alone would cause mass incompetence at every institution.
And that's exactly what we see.
So I think Glenn Reynolds is exactly on that the DEI did in fact gut the capability of everything.
It destroyed everything we cared about in the United States, from education to manufacturing to government to everything.
It just literally destroyed everything.
And again, it would have been exactly the same if every person in the country was an Albonian, but you limited the hiring to only left-handed Albonians.
You get the same outcome.
So what is different about 2025 and now 2026 is that he can write this article in a major publication.
And people will say, all right, all right, okay.
You could not say this five years ago.
Five years ago, if you submitted this article to the New York Post, do you think they would have published it?
Well, the New York Post does lean right, but I don't know if they would.
I feel like it would have been too sensitive.
They would have just been accused of being racist.
But we're finally, finally, at a point where white males in particular are less afraid of being called racists.
And that it's, I think, increasingly obvious that there was a whole South African situation going on in the United States.
But it's been going on for decades.
I've been talking about it for a while.
But there does seem to be some kind of new freedom to talk about it.
And that's good news.
Speaking of DEI, the California Globe, Katie Grimes, is writing that Governor Newsom, I didn't know about this, but apparently, did you know that California had an equity task force that had recommendations on how to take land away from white farmers and distribute it to non-white farmers?
In California, you probably thought I said South Africa, right?
In California, recently, this is recent, the governor was behind a task force that was trying to figure out how to take the farms away from white people and make it more equitably distributed.
Now, do I think that it would be great if farm were equitably, you know, equitably available to everybody?
Yeah, that'd be great.
I have no problem with that.
However, if you already have a situation where a bunch of white farmers own farms, you don't want to get there by taking it from them or forcing them to be unable to buy farms, and then just saying the only people can have a farm from now on until everything's equal are either Native Americans or some other disadvantaged group.
How is that going to turn out?
How much do you think the efficiency of the farms is going to decrease if you artificially say we're going to take the experienced farmers and we're going to block them from owning farms or decrease their impact on the farms.
But we take these inexperienced farmers, not for any, it's not their fault that they're inexperienced, but we're going to move the farms to people who didn't have as much experience.
Again, it wouldn't matter if we were talking about only Albonians.
If you take the farms from the Albonians who know how to farm and you give it to the Albonians who don't have the same experience to farm, what is going to happen to the price of food?
It only goes one way.
Nobody doubts how that's going to turn out.
And that's happening in my actual state in the current day.
So there's no way that that is anything but going to drive up food prices.
And I guess the report from this group recommends the development of local ordinances to restrict citizens from purchasing land unless they're part of certain minority groups.
In the United States, in the United States, you would be blocked from buying land based on your ethnicity in 2025.
And so unfucking believable.
All right.
Well, here's an update on the voting machines.
I've told you before that one of my favorite sources for following up on the allegations of voting irregularities is the Rasmussen reports on X.
And I don't have a sense of what kind of allegations about the voting machines are true and what ones are not true.
But the allegations themselves are really interesting.
And here again, you can decide how much of this is fact and how much of this is just allegation.
I do not make any claims of fact because I don't want to get sued.
But here's what the Raspbians report has summarized and updated us.
You may have heard of all these individually, but when you see them all in the big list, it's kind of impactful.
All right.
So on X, Rasputinson Report writes that SmartMatic, that would be the software people, were federally indicted in October.
So indicted doesn't mean guilty, but they were indicted.
Then Dominion, that would be the hardware company, was, quote, sold in September under secret terms.
Hmm.
I wonder what that's about.
And the election systems currently in use have reportedly been newly examined by feds and are apparently full of illegal Chinese sourced components.
So again, that doesn't mean that the machines are rigged, but you have to wonder why they have Chinese components in them that might make that possible.
So remember, these are allegations.
I don't know what's true.
And allegedly, according to Raspusson reports, Tulsi Gabbard is being prevented from publishing her completed official report about the voting machines.
I don't know why she would be prevented or who would prevent it.
The former secret Dominion/slash Huawei data center in Belgrade.
Do you remember that part of the story?
So the allegation is that somehow the rigging of the machines was executed by going through some kind of Belgrade server system that somehow rigged the election.
But now the key engineers, hold on, and that, quote, secret data center in Belgrade that officially and emphatically did not exist.
I guess at one point the government said it doesn't even exist.
Turns out it did exist, and it was allegedly disabled by U.S. government employees.
I don't know what they were employees of.
Were they employees of some intelligence agency?
I don't know.
But U.S. government employees disabled it just prior to the 2024 election, and it has now been dismantled.
So I've heard a claim that that's the only reason that Trump won, is that these government employees disabled the mechanism for the cheating.
Again, I don't know that that's a fact.
It's an allegation.
And apparently the engineers that were allegedly involved in that are joined by this former Venezuelan intelligence person who is now in jail.
That makes him suspicious, and they're collectively, they're cooperating with federal authorities.
So that would suggest that the feds are on the trail of finding out if or if not those machines were being rigged.
Again, this is Raspusson reports.
Their summary says, after rejecting over two dozen traders, our three-letter agencies are now supposedly helping find bad election actors, but they remain unreliable because of their own direct criminal involvement.
So what that's saying is that there is in fact some effort to get to the bottom of this, but there are too many people who are in charge of getting to the bottom of it who are at the bottom of it.
So they would slow down things so that their own bad behavior does not get caught.
And even so, some of the bad people have been weeded out.
There are so many of them that they may still be holding up the investigation.
True?
I don't know.
Official state and court-educed evidence of election fraud has been compiled now for every one of the 2020 battleground states, but cowardice and corruption within the American judiciary has completely paralyzed justice.
So again, the allegation is that the evidence of a rigged election are there, but that the people whose job it is to make something of it are either afraid or unable to do something with it.
I don't know.
The Department of Justice has been forced to sue multiple states to require their compliance with federal election laws.
That part is true.
But again, we don't know if their lack of compliance is evidence of rigging or it's just more of the Democrat plus Republican fighting stuff.
There's a weirdness about the Tina Peters case in Colorado, and then there's an American armada that's in that's sitting off of Venezuela.
So, could it be true that one of the things that Trump wants from Venezuela is a full accounting of their alleged role in rigging our systems.
What if Maduro said, wait, wait, don't attack.
I've got an offer.
I'll tell you everything I know about a rigging of your systems, if in fact there was any rigging.
I'll tell you everything we know if you don't attack my country.
What would Trump do?
What does Trump want more than proof positive that the 2020 election was rigged?
Probably nothing.
It's hard to, well, I'm exaggerating, but it would certainly be something he'd want a lot.
Would he want it enough to assemble an armada?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Because I got to tell you, it's pretty important to me.
I would say it's critically important to me to get to the bottom of whether our elections were rigged.
And do you remember how easy it was for me to penetrate this, the truth?
Let me say it again.
With no knowledge whatsoever about any of these specific allegations, I have been asking for some time in public, and you've seen it, what was the purpose of electronic voting machines?
They're not cheaper, they're not faster, they're not easier, they're not more reliable.
So why do we have them?
Do you think anybody has ever even attempted to answer that question?
Nope.
Nobody's even attempted to answer the question why they even exist in the first place.
Because the only reason I can think of is to make it easier to steal an election.
If anybody can come up with even one potential reason beyond that, then I would say, well, okay, maybe they use it because it's got this advantage.
But there is no advantage.
Not faster, not cheaper, not easier, not more reliable.
So do you think we'll ever get to the bottom of that?
Probably not.
All right, here's a fun story.
You know that Eric Swalwell is running for governor of California, and Joel Gilbert, the gateway pundit, is informing us that he might have a little problem running for governor because he's not a resident.
That's right.
Eric Swalwell is not a resident of California.
And he's running for governor.
Now, he says he is, but the only registered address he has is his lawyer's office.
And apparently, it's legal to use your lawyer's office as your address if what you're doing is registering for the process, I guess.
But you still have to have an actual address.
And Bill Pultey, I think, was the one who outed the fact that there's no record anywhere of him having a California address.
And of course, he's been asked, so what's your California address?
And he cannot answer the question.
Now, you might argue he has security concerns, which would be a real concern, but he's not saying that.
He's simply not answering the question: do you have a California address?
I think I believe that he does not.
And it's unfucking believable that Democrats can go as far as they do when he doesn't even have an address here.
Now, maybe we're wrong.
Maybe for whatever weird reason, he just doesn't want to answer the question or whatever.
But it does seem pretty clear he doesn't have an address.
Anyway, so in some ways, Newsom would be, I'm sorry, Swalwell would be perfect for governor of California because he sounds like kind of a crook.
And I guess he's also very deep in personal debt.
So he's mismanaged his own money.
He's deep in debt, which makes him very bribable.
And he doesn't have an address in California.
He's running for governor.
All right, good luck.
So I guess buried in the Epstein files is some kind of email chain that shows that the Department of Justice is getting stonewalled by the FBI.
I guess Mike Benz and Gumby for Christ have been writing about this on X.
But I put the Dilbert filter on this situation, and it turns out that there are so many digital files and so many records about Epstein that if you're the Department of Justice and you say, hey, give us these records, there's nobody who can do it.
It's simply too big a job, and they don't have a system that has already organized the files.
So if they don't have a system that has already organized the files, you just have this enormous bunch of files.
And if somebody asks you for something specific, you just wouldn't have any way to get it.
So the Dilbert filter is that incompetence or the inability to do the task might be behind what's taking so long.
You know, we've all automatically assumed that everybody involved is very capable.
And if they're very capable and they don't give you the files, then you assume that they have a reason for not giving you the files.
But it's entirely possible, again, using the Dilberg filter, that at least part of the reason for the delay is that they don't know how to handle that many files and they don't know how to solve that problem.
Maybe.
Not impossible.
All right.
Did you know that the U.S. exports of LNG, that's liquid natural gas to Europe, are way up, but the Russian natural gas that arrives by pipeline to Europe is down.
But the surprising part of this story is, wait, what?
Are you telling me that Europe is still buying natural gas from Russia at the same time they're funding a war against Russia?
How in the world is it possible that they're still buying Russian gas at the same time they're funding a war against Russia?
Well, part of the answer is that they're based on long-term contracts.
Okay, but is that good enough?
And some of those long-term contracts are running out at the end of this year.
So allegedly, the amount of gas that Europe gets from Russia will go way down.
And the liquid natural gas from the U.S. will continue to increase.
So it does look like Trump is winning because we're selling more energy to Europe.
We're not funding the war at the moment, and Europe is going to have to wean itself off of Russian gas rule soon.
And where are they going to get their alternative?
They're going to have to get it from us.
So, could it be that Russia might get more flexible when their source of money, which is the gas, you know, gets cut in half fairly abruptly.
So, it might be that just waiting for the changes in energy markets is why we have to wait to get any kind of a deal there.
But, as you know, Trump has been seizing some oil tankers.
Now, oil is different from liquid natural gas, but he's been seizing some of those Venezuelan-bound tankers.
I guess we have three of them.
Maybe we'll get some more.
And he says he's going to keep the oil that we seize, but he's also going to keep the ships.
And I asked Grok, could you convert the ships that he's seizing into liquid natural gas ships?
Because that's the way it's shipped, it's shipped on a special ship.
Now, Grok said, and it disappointed me, that it would be too hard to do that because the ships that are made for transporting liquid natural gas have different hulls.
So, there wouldn't be anything left of the ship if you tried to retrofit it.
You'd have to take everything out, you'd have to redo the hull and add all kinds of special equipment.
So, economically, it would never make sense to convert them to liquid natural gas.
But that would have been funny.
It would have been funny if we could just use them for liquid natural gas, but we can't.
Two quick stories, and I'll be done.
So, I saw a post by C3 that Elon Musk was agreeing with.
He says the following: You are taxed, and then after you're taxed, the government sends $300 billion of your tax money to fund college faculties.
I didn't know that.
$300 billion of my tax money goes to fund college faculties.
College faculties are 90% Democrats.
So, 90% of political donations from faculties go to Democrat politicians.
And essentially, Americans are forced to pay Democrats.
So, without your approval, a bunch of money goes to Democrat faculties, and then they in turn donate a bunch of money to politics, but only to Democrat candidates.
So, in effect, we're being forced to fund Democrats.
And Elon agreed to that.
Well, that seems suboptimal.
And then, lastly, Breitbar News is reporting that Japan is trying to tighten up their rules for becoming a resident of Japan.
So, it used to be you had to live there for five years, but they're going to change it to 10.
And you have to be proficient in Japanese, the language, or you cannot become a citizen.
You know, I think Japan has a pretty good chance of survival because they're more badass about immigration.
But any country that's not totally badass about immigration, as in limiting it, is probably doomed for all the obvious reasons.
All right, people, that's all I got for today.
I'm going to sign off, get some breakfast.
I'm going to take a final sip of water And tell me, did you like the show today?
And if you did, what part did you like?
Did I do anything right today?
I'll just stay on for another minute to look at your comments.