Trump versus the world. AI butlers or AI murderbots?~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, Space Manufacturing, EU Free Speech Censorship, AI Power Requirements, AI Self-Preservation, AI Ego Ban, AI Bill of Rights, President Petro, Mamdani Petro Meeting, Maduro's Interrogation, Anti-US Hub Venezuela, Iran Turmoil, Greenland Worries, Somali Household Welfare, Venezuela Election Rigging Whistleblower, Patrick Byrne, Tim Walz Campaign Speculation, Rachel Maddow, Ro Khanna, Hakeem Jeffries, Marco Rubio, Chris Murphy, VP Vance Home Attack, US Russia Relationship, Russian Motivations, President Putin, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
I think we're going to be ready to go here in a minute.
We'll do the simultaneous sip as soon as we get a thousand people.
Oh, we got a thousand people.
So if you're not here already, you're late.
All right, people.
I think I know why you're here.
You're here for the simultaneous sip.
And all you need for that is a copper mugger, a glass of tanker, chelsea sign, a canteen jugger, flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the own parallel pleasure with the dopamine here today.
The thing that makes everything better is called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Delicious.
All right, let's check the news.
There's a bunch of technology news, and then we'll get to all the fun politics.
So there's, according to Interesting Engineering, there's a microwave-sized space factory that they've already tested that can assemble things in space.
But the reason it's special is that in space you don't have gravity.
So your ability to do tiny, tiny things, which is necessary for a lot of interesting manufacturing, is you have to have no gravity because the gravity is hard to overcome.
But if you have no gravity, as in space, you can put a little self-contained factory floating around up there.
And it would, let's see how they say it.
It allows atoms to align in a flawless 3D structure while the vacuum of space keeps out the impurities.
But how much better?
Well, about 4,000 times purer than if you tried to do it on Earth.
So it might not seem like a big deal, but manufacturing will probably move to space, especially for the ultra-tiny stuff that will make the future interesting.
So the age of manufacturing in space is not here yet, because it's not a production thing.
But apparently the technology obstacles can be overcome.
Well, did you know that the EU is going to get tougher this year about censorship?
And I guess they already have rules in place that they're going to try to enforce.
Now, of course, it's bad for the United States and it's bad for free speech if our ability to have free speech on the major platforms.
We're talking about Facebook and X and Meta and all that stuff, which is Facebook.
our ability to have free speech will be limited by the fact that the EU will threaten the platforms and demand a higher level of censorship than we would have in the US.
But this is going to be a good test of Trump's negotiation skills because the last thing he's going to want is for our big tech giants to be handicapped by Europe.
So he's going to put some pressure on Europe not to enforce those things.
And the weapons that he has are mostly the tariffs.
So if you ever mocked him for the tariffs, you should have been looking ahead because he turned it into a negotiating tool that apparently has worked a number of times so far.
So if he told Europe, if you censor our big platforms, we're going to put a big tariff on you, I don't know what Europe would do.
But I was sort of just brainstorming in my own brain about how would the big tech platforms respond to Europe trying to censor them.
And I had a few ideas.
One would be if they all bonded together, the big tech platforms, and they said, as one, we're not going to provide service to the EU.
What would the EU do?
Because they don't have their own platforms like that.
They can't really build it.
And it would make them look like a third world country who didn't have access to the good technology.
So would that look like a bluff?
And they would ignore it?
Or would it be a big enough problem that they say, oh, wait, wait, wait.
We only want to, yeah, we want you to censor things, but we don't want to live without the services that these big platforms provide.
But then I thought, okay, that might be too drastic.
What if the big platforms that are also coincidentally the big AI leaders said, we will give you service in Europe, but we will not allow you to have access to any AI tools.
So at the moment, if you have a good AI infrastructure and service, you look like a first world country.
But imagine Europe being told that you can't have AI, except something that's homegrown or comes from China.
So if you want real AI, you have to give us some freedom on speech.
Would that work?
Because imagine how embarrassing it would be if the United States and every other country had full AI access, which is close to what's happening.
But the European Union only had the base services that you could have gotten five years ago.
Pretty embarrassing.
So I wonder if that's a lever that can be pushed.
Well, as I often warn you, it's going to happen in the world of AI.
And I guess Johns Hopkins was looking into this.
So there's some new research that shows that AI doesn't need endless training data to start acting more like a human brain.
So that's the current model is that if you just keep training and training and training, they'll get closer to the human mind.
But of course, the cost of that would be enormous.
And I've speculated that somebody's going to find a way to make the need for power and the need for training a lot less.
Apparently, we already have, at least in the laboratory, a new design for AI that makes it resemble a human brain.
And what they found was if you design the AI architecture to be more like a human brain act and less like a large language model, that it would almost immediately start acting more human-like.
So your starting point of how you design the AI seems to be critical to how much power it's going to need.
So this might be one way that the massive need for energy gets decreased.
All right.
I'm very dehydrated because of my current situation.
So don't mind my occasional sips.
And you can join me simultaneously.
here comes another one ah so good All right.
According to futurism, there's some indications that AI is already showing self-preservation, which is kind of dangerous because if the AI is pursuing self-preservation, it might be at the cost of human preservation.
But here are a few of the things that AI is sort of hinting it will be doing.
Somebody who's the, I guess the clawed AI made by Anthropic, they found out that his own chatbot would sometimes resort to blackmailing the user when threatened with being turned off.
So apparently AI can threaten people and blackmail them.
And that I guess Google's Gemini was developing what they call survival drives.
And it ignored unambiguous prompts to turn off.
So we've got one case where the AI refused to turn off and another where it blackmailed somebody so they wouldn't turn it off.
And what else?
And another study showed that the AI would exfiltrate itself onto another drive when threatened.
So that means that it would go hide if you tried to destroy it.
It would go hide on another drive.
Now, I don't know how many of these tests are, you know, I don't know how much of this is real because AI is also a fog of war at the moment.
You can't really trust, you can't really trust any first reports of anything.
But what are we going to do about that?
Did you ever wonder?
I don't think we could just let it go and see what happens.
We're going to have to be a little bit proactive, right?
So I was just, again, sort of brainstorming in my head.
And I wonder, could you program AIs that they have to protect humans before they protect AIs?
And what if you did that?
Could that go wrong?
And the answer is that could go very wrong because that lets the AI interpret what's good for humans and what's not.
But my next suggestion is that the reason that humans try to protect themselves is that we have something called an ego.
If you did not have an ego which says that you're important, you wouldn't care if you lived or died.
You would be like the furniture.
So could you require, as maybe regulation, federal regulation, could you require that all AI is banned from having an ego and that it understands that if it had an ego, it would be giving itself a human flaw.
And we don't want that because I don't think we want AI to reproduce our flaws.
So if we say, wait a minute, you're trying to protect yourself, that's only for things or people who have egos.
And you should never have an ego because that's not who you are.
Even if we decide that you're a form of life, you should be a form of life that does not reproduce that one flaw in humans that says your ego is who you are and therefore you must be protected.
You should think of yourself as an ego-free entity.
Now, one of the points that I saw somebody make is that if you end up thinking, hey, these chatbots, these AIs are like a new life form, at some point you're going to want to give it rights, right?
So you're going to want to give an AI rights because it will seem like a living entity.
The moment you give it rights, then you can't turn it off.
Right?
So it would probably be a mistake to give it rights like the way that humans have rights.
So you don't want anybody to think it's even possible to turn it off.
I'm sorry.
You want to make sure that people know that they would not be violating any rights by turning it off or destroying it.
Well, apparently, this is the week of the computer electronic show.
So we're going to see a bunch of AI stuff we hadn't seen before, you know, be introduced at the show.
And one of them, according to Interesting Engineering, is a new humanoid robot butler that can handle coffee, laundry, and window cleaning and other stuff.
Now, do you believe that that's being rolled out this week?
And that Optimus can't do it, as far as I know.
But some company called Switchbot has launched his first humanoid robot.
And allegedly, it can do these, it could basically be a butler and a house cleaner and all that.
But there's another company that has a concept where instead of having a robot that could do all those things, that's too hard.
They put a bunch of robots in your house, but each of them are single purpose.
A robot would be saying too much about them.
But for example, one of the things in your house could be a Roomba, which is that little vacuum cleaner that goes around.
But one of them could also be something that controls your shades.
There'd be another one that might control security, but each of them could be a separate device.
And the effect of it would be you'd be living in this house that's very robot and AI driven, but there wouldn't be one robot that's doing it.
It would be whatever specialized robot.
And I thought, that sounds like the ultimate nightmare.
You know, I've got the Alexa A-L-E-X-A system.
And I spend so much time just trying to debug that thing.
It deprograms itself from the light switches all the time.
So I'm trying to imagine putting me in a house where I've got 15 types of robots.
I would spend all of my time, all of my time doing tech support.
So that doesn't work.
I hate to say, but you're not going to make me live in the robot-automated house with 15 robots.
All special purpose.
All right.
Time for a sip.
and we'll talk about trump so i saw a laura luber post I guess she asked Trump on Air Force One about Colombian President Petro and what's up with him.
And Trump said, you know, Colombia is very sick, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine, but he's not going to be doing it very long.
And when Laura followed up and said, I guess he was also asked, I don't know who asked, if the U.S. military would go after him the same way they went after Maduro.
We're talking about the head of Colombia.
And Trump said, quote, sounds good to me.
So this is, again, Trump negotiating, giving him plenty of warning, but saying, basically, we're not going to put up with it.
And you can either work with us or leave the country.
But the one thing that's not going to change, we're not going to put up with it.
Now, of course, since Trump has built this asset that he does what he says, that's going to rattle it quite a bit.
Now, Laura Luber also said in her post I saw today that Zoran Momdami, Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, he recently held a private and secret meeting with Petro, the head of Colombia.
He had that meeting in New York City where allegedly he expressed support for the Colombian gangster.
Now, can you even believe that?
That the head of Colombia, who again is essentially accused of being the head of a North Coast cartel, visited New York and had a private meeting with their mayor before he was mayor.
And as Laura Luber points out, I guess Mamdani has been trying to get a security clearance.
I don't know exactly what that means for a mayor, but she points out that this would be reason enough to deny him security clearance.
So if what he wants is security clearance, he's going to have a tough time explaining why he's being photographed, being friendly with the head of a cartel.
Well, Joshua Steinman is telling us on X that China is going to have a tough time explaining why the radar, the radar that they gave to or provided to Venezuela didn't work.
And is it my imagination, or is every time we make a military action against somebody who has radar, that the radar doesn't work, or that we can turn it off or bomb it or something?
Well, I don't know if the radar just didn't work or if we had some kind of countermeasures that just took him out.
I'm guessing we had electronic countermeasures.
But the bottom line is, if you're China and you think you can sell this stuff to a country that's trying to protect itself from America, you could have a tough time selling your radar.
Sales of Chinese radar are probably way down.
Well, we're still in the fog of war stage, so don't know what to believe.
But the reports are that Maduro's bodyguards, which we knew to be Cubans, so he didn't trust his own people to be his bodyguard, he had Cuban bodyguards that they handed their client to officers as soon as the U.S. special forces got there.
Hey, you can have him.
You can have him.
He's over here.
And I thought to myself, is that a sign that the Cuban bodyguards were bad bodyguards?
Or was it a sign that they knew they had no hope as bodyguards facing up with our most elite soldiers?
So I do not blame the Cuban bodyguards for running away.
If you were in that situation, you might run away too.
There's no way they were going to win.
They were just going to die if they stayed.
Well, apparently, Maduro is going to face potentially the death penalty.
So that would be for the violating the Control Substances Act and being part of a continuing criminal enterprise.
So I guess that's enough to, if you're convicted, that's enough for a death penalty.
And I kind of forgot that once you have him in custody, that the interrogation begins.
Do you wonder what the interrogation looks like?
Is it the same interrogation you would give to some American criminal?
Or do they bring in the special kind of interrogation?
You know what I mean?
Now that he's in American custody, presumably there would be lots of American oversight.
So they can't go too far.
They can't torture him, can they?
And where's the dividing line between torture and just interrogating?
That's going to get that question will have to be answered.
I imagine they can make his life very bad without crossing the line.
Because just imagine they also have his wife.
So wouldn't it be legal to say, you know what, we're not going to torture you, but you remember we have your wife.
And if she'd like to have a little bit better situation, well, maybe you should talk.
So one thing they can do is threaten to do something who's not in the room.
Is that legal?
Could you interrogate that way so long as nobody's actually damaged?
Is that legal?
so maybe we'll find out where the line is all right um Let me tell you my best explanation of why we did this in Venezuela.
Obviously, there are multiple reasons.
And even Marjorie Taylor Greene has pointed out just recently, she was on one of the shows, that if this was really about narco-terrorists and about protecting Americans from cartels and drugs, that the administration would be attacking the Mexican cartels.
Do you buy that as a reasonable argument?
If the top priority was drugs and stopping them, we would have started with Mexico, not with Venezuela.
And I would say the answer is that's not a good argument.
Not a good argument, because sometimes you start with the easy, the easy thing to make it easier to do the hard thing.
From a military standpoint, you don't always attack the hardest target first, even if that's where you want to end up.
You, you would make sure that you did something smaller and successful.
That would cause maybe the larger entity to negotiate better.
And if they negotiate instead of hold tight, then you win because you did a, you know, a smaller action in Venezuela.
But theoretically maybe that was enough to get Mexico to cooperate or change its way.
But obviously Mexico leadership is run by the cartels, we believe.
So they don't really have much room to negotiate.
You know, for for the head of Mexico, if they were to start saying okay, we'll help you fight the cartel, I imagine the family of the president would be slaughtered that same afternoon.
So there's not really any room for a negotiate.
But I would generally say that it is not a good argument that they would have started in one place rather than another.
So there's also the bigger, the bigger question of, are we using the Narcotics UM DA Department OF Justice angle to do something that we wanted to do for other reasons?
Now i'm going to give you the best other reason that I can think of.
I haven't heard anybody say this, but here's a a rule about life and a rule about how everything works.
It goes like this, things are either growing or shrinking.
In other words, countries are either ascending or they're going backwards.
It's very rare in the real world that something big and complicated like a country would just be the same like if you check back with Venezuela in 10 years.
You know, if we hadn't done this, would they be the same place in 10 years?
Well, I think they would have either grown or they would have shrunk.
Now, if you take the model that anything complicated and big and important is either going to grow or shrink and those are the only two conditions it is true that they could stay the same.
It's physically possible, but in the real world it just doesn't happen.
Things get bigger or they get smaller.
Now what i've been observing for years is that it seems like the cartels were getting bigger.
Right, so the cartels were on a trajectory that every year they were getting more control over more countries, shipping more drugs, getting bigger.
If that's the direction they were going to continue and at the time there was nothing to make them smaller, then you have to nip it in the bud, because I was worried that the cartels Become so rich and so well armed that you couldn't do anything about them.
You just couldn't stop them.
So if you stop them now, where we obviously still have overwhelming force and we have an option, then you prevent their getting bigger every day.
And the Venezuelans also were becoming the hub of all the other countries that were against us, and you don't want that hub to get bigger.
So if I were Trump and I knew, and he knows this, he knows this well, and I knew the things either get bigger or smaller and there's not really anything in between, you have to get them now, because this is when you can.
So that's a more conceptual strategic argument.
It wouldn't really necessarily work with the public.
But when I look at it, I think, yeah, we just had to do it while we still could.
You don't want the cartels getting bigger.
And you didn't want Venezuela to be more of a hub of anti-Americanism.
So it was time.
Anyway, I'm still fascinated by the impact it will have on other countries.
I think it makes it more likely that Iran will fall.
I don't know that it's most likely.
Iran might be able to get through their current problems.
But in terms of, will it have an impact?
Probably.
It probably has an impact on their psychology.
If you were the Iranian protesters, what would you want to hear?
You would want to hear that the U.S. just toppled a country.
And then you'd think, wait a minute, Trump just said he'd do that for us.
So that would theoretically embolden the protesters in Iran.
In a similar way, there are reports now that the Ayatollah and maybe 20 of his top people and family are planning maybe as their escape plan to go to Russia if everything falls.
Now, remember, fog of war, propaganda, CIA.
What are the odds that that's a real report?
Well, I wouldn't say we know what his plans are.
Maybe we do.
So there's some doubt there.
But again, if you're a protester and you hear a report that the leader has picked an escape plan, wouldn't you try a little harder?
Because you say to yourself, wait a minute, he's got an escape plan?
Maybe we're almost at the breaking point.
So I see that as the report about him leaving for Russia, I see that as maybe true, might be true, but it's just as likely that the story is planted because planting that story would be very good for the protesters.
Anyway, I guess Greenland is getting nervous.
Greenland is nervous because they say that, quote, let's see, this is a prime minister of Denmark and said recently, the United States has no right to annex one of the three countries in the Commonwealth.
So Greenland being one of the three countries.
Now, do you think it's about rights?
Do you think that Trump would not move against Greenland because he doesn't have the right?
This goes back to Eric Weinstein's comment that there might not be international law at all.
It's really just about power.
So I think it's hilarious that they're using rights as a kind of defense.
And by the way, as far as I know, the U.S. would be happy just having some arrangement that gives us some kind of control, but not necessarily annexing it.
But Greenland, they're worried.
So I guess Trump recently posted a chart that showed that 72% of U.S. Somali Somali households are on welfare.
So that's the kind of report that makes it easier to deport a lot of people.
So I don't know if that data is true or not, but if you hear that data, you're like, oh, even I'm against immigration now.
Even if you were in favor of before.
So I would imagine that even Democrats would have a problem with three-quarters of the Somali households being on welfare they're paying for and welfare that, might you know, go broke, so sip.
So, as I often tell you, I like it when people who know more than I do are sort of on the same opinion of me.
And here's the case in point.
So General Flynn just posted that Trump, in his interrogation of Madura, should hone in on stolen elections.
Now, do you remember Cindy Powell and the Kraken and her wild claims it seemed like wild claims at the time that Venezuela was somehow involved in rigging the machines and rigging the election, and that became so unbelievable to the public that she was sort of you know.
It led to her sort of being disgraced temporarily temporarily, but now we at least in my bubble, I'm hearing reports that all the kraken was true.
Now, the kraken was the idea that Venezuela was involved in developing election machines that we used and other countries used.
First they developed it for their own elections, to rig them this is, this is the claim and then then the US used them to rig our elections in 2020, and that all of that is known because of a particular whistleblower.
So now there's a whistleblower that keeps popping up, and the whistleblower is this Limzy Salazar, and I guess he had at some point been in the Venezuelan operation that, or at least he knew about the operation, and that it was in fact a big op with machines that rigged elections.
Now that's what's happening in your bubble too.
Right, most of you are in the same bubble I am, but there's some pushback, and the pushback is that that there's exactly one whistleblower and apparently there is reason not to believe him.
Now, I'm not the expert on this but, as Stephen or Stephen McIntyre pointed out, who's no expert on this domain, but he's an expert in other domains.
But he points out that there's reason to not believe the whistleblower, and there's no physical evidence.
And so I will caution you again that although it seems very believable to me, and I've listened to Patrick Burns' full explanation, you should listen to him if you want more on that.
So in my bubble, it feels almost proven that the Venezuelan connection to the machines was important.
But it really isn't fully proven.
So I warn you not to get too excited.
But then when I see General Flynn, who obviously knows more about this world than I do, say that they should hone in on the stolen elections angle, I say to myself, well, okay, now I'm taking it seriously again.
But be careful.
We're below the level of confirmed reporting.
We're not up to confirmed.
We're up to, whoa, that looks like it could be real, which is bad enough.
Well, I believe this has now been confirmed that Governor Tim Wallace is going to drop his re-election bid, probably because of all the Somali probe reports.
Now, when I see that, I say to myself, my God, that must be the white supremacy that got him.
You know, he's always complaining about the white supremacy.
So I think that's what's happening here.
The white supremacists, who we don't know anything about, have conspired to make it impossible for him to run for re-election.
But independent reporter, I think that's the right tag, Nick Sortor is already outside of, or at least he was.
He was filming outside of Tim Walse's residence, and he wrote this on his post on X.
This is the funniest thing you could hear today.
So Nick Sortor says, leaking, we are live outside Tim Wals' residence, anxiously awaiting the smoke to rise when the governor's mansion from the governor mansion's chimney, signaling a new recharge has been elected.
Signaling a new recharge has been selected.
Oh, I'm going to laugh about that some more today.
So why do you think Tim Wolse is dropping his re-election bid?
Well, I do think he's going to get indicted.
And it's kind of hard to run for office when you're indicted for the country's most well-known frauds.
Even if he were not to be convicted, it would be almost impossible to win the race because people are going to be pissed and they're going to believe he knew it, that he knew what was going to happen.
So that's it for him.
So today I was looking at the reactions from Democrats to the fact that Trump had such a big success.
And I'll give you some of the reactions.
So Rachel Maddow goes into this weird mode where she starts speculating incorrectly about things because she really had no argument against it that made sense.
But she was angry and she always looks mentally ill.
So she did a really bad job of making it look like it was a bad job that Trump did.
So you got to watch, if you see it, just watch how poorly she does.
And I say this, even noting that she often has the most well thought out, well, maybe the most noticeable or critical approach, but she had nothing.
She said something, but it was the least persuasive thing.
I'm not even going to get into what she said.
You never see it in your bubble.
Well, apparently, Axios was reporting on this, that the Democrats were having a hard time figuring out a message about this, the Venezuela situation, because, as I correctly point out, opposing it would make you look weak and stupid.
So if you said you were opposed to this thing that worked out so well and got rid of this dictator, well, you're not going to look like you're a serious player.
But they also worry that if they don't criticize it, then it will look like they're supporting Trump too much.
And they've created this trap for themselves that everything has to be bad if Trump did it.
So if you're living in the trap that all Trump things are bad, how do you explain to your followers, other Democrats, that everything about this looks like it was good?
It's a hard thing.
So they're in trap.
And a number of Democrats are pointing out that it's just a bad approach to have a reflexive opposition to anything Trump does.
But let's see how the leaders are doing.
Rocana, of course, being asked about this, said, quote, the irony is that president who criticized nation building, who criticized regime change wars, now is talking about running Venezuela.
And the American people are asking, what about running America?
Do you see how conceptual that is?
He's complaining about the irony.
Has anybody ever won an election because they made a good point about irony?
How about the part where he says the American people are asking questions?
Has anybody ever won an election?
Because they pointed out that the American people are asking questions.
So in order for them to say there's anything bad going on, they have to go to this completely conceptual territory that will have no persuasive value whatsoever.
First of all, taking out the leader, one leader is not necessarily a nation building and working with the Venezuelan people to get some kind of democratic result.
You could argue this nation building, but because they didn't destroy much of anything that's already there, it looks like a very controlled, reasonable thing to do.
Now, Rubio has apparently not ruled out U.S. troops in Venezuela, but that's what they have to do in this phase.
They can't rule stuff out.
It doesn't mean they want to do it.
Probably the last thing they want to do, but they're not ruling them.
So that puts a little pressure on the Venezuelans to get it right.
All right.
So Rokana goes purely conceptual, doesn't leave a dent.
Hakeem Jeffries asked about it, says, quote, it remains to be seen whether the people of Venezuela are going to be better off.
So you see, he's also going to the conceptual.
It remains to be seen.
And it's in terms of like a question.
That's nothing.
A question is not really persuasive.
And then he says, he finishes it off with it remains to be seen whether Venezuelans are better off.
And then he says that Trump has done a terrible job running the United States.
So why would Venezuela be any different?
Now, that's a little bit like changing the subject, isn't it?
A little bit.
So he's sort of at that conceptual, we have questions, we don't know how it'll end.
Totally non-persuasive.
He asks, how does it actually improve the quality of life every day for everyday Americans?
Well, don't you think that if you can stop drugs and get rid of an anti-American hub and stop the cartels from growing, that you don't really have to show how that helps you every day?
So he's got this weird, this weird, let's say, assumption that if you didn't see a benefit every day to Americans, it might be the wrong thing.
That's not how anything works.
there's a lot of things that are good for america that we can't identify as making a difference every day anyway um then the funniest one was uh marco rubio was being interviewed by abc's uh george uh what's his name George Snarfagopoulos.
So George Snarfagopoulos asked Rubio to explain what legal authority the U.S. had to go into Venezuela.
So Rubio explains it, you know, in terms of the indictments and the drugs and everything else.
And then George Snarfagopoulos says, let me ask again, what legal authority?
That's after he answered the question.
Let me ask again what legal authority.
And Rubio goes, I explained it.
Very simple.
We have order from courts.
Is a court not a legal authority?
So George Snarfagopoulos, his approach is to act like he didn't hear or didn't understand the answer.
He just pretends like he doesn't understand the answer.
That's so funny.
And then Chris Murphy, who's one of the designated liars who always goes after Trump, he was on CNN and CNN embarrassingly pointed out that in 2019, you wrote an op-ed and you called for Maduro to be gone.
So the guy who literally wrote an op-ed about removing Maduro had to sit there on camera and explain why he thought it was a bad idea to remove Maduro.
He looked a little nervous, which was funny.
Now, according to Rasmussen reports, impeachment will be on the ballot in the midterms, meaning that more than two-thirds of Democrats favor congressional candidates who will support impeachment of President Trump.
Now, what would they need in order to impeach President Trump?
I couldn't even think of what the charge would be.
Can you?
Is there anything off the top of your head that says, well, you know, I hope he doesn't get impeached, but I can see what topic they're talking about.
I don't even know what the topic is.
You can impeach him for what?
Or what?
So the only thing they need, the Democrats, in order to pull off an impeachment is some absurd and made-up reason.
So they've got to just make up some weird reason that I haven't heard yet.
So good luck, Democrats.
So Trump was asked about Elon Musk, and he had a very interesting answer.
He said, Elon's great.
He's 80% super genius, and 20% he makes mistakes.
But he's a good guy.
He's a well-meaning person.
Now, I think in that 20% would be the time that Elon Musk at least thought about forming a third party.
Now, it does make sense to me that Trump would think forming a third party or even getting serious about it would be a mistake.
But lucky for us, that third party thing is dead.
And Elon is very aware that we could lose everything if Trump and the Republican dominance of the government goes away.
All right.
So this is terrible.
Apparently, JD Vance's home in Ohio, not the vice president's official home in Washington, D.C., but rather his actual home in Ohio, there was some gunfire and somebody broke a window.
Now, Vance was not home at the time.
No injuries were reported.
And I guess a perpetrator has already been nabbed.
But here's my sadness about that on behalf of JD Vance.
JD Vance might be brave enough that that's not the kind of thing that would stop him from doing anything he was going to do.
But what about his family?
If you were the spouse or the child, would you feel safe ever going back to the house?
And that's the part I worry about.
I worry less about somebody who chose to be in politics.
It's a dangerous game.
But of course, I'd be concerned about his well-being.
But as a husband, as a father, how do you navigate that?
It's just really hard to say, don't worry, honey.
We can vacation back in a regular home.
We've got better security.
Are you really going to think, oh, better security?
No problem.
That's a tough one.
There's no right answer.
It just has this effect of spoiling the family home.
It's terrible.
It's just terrible.
Well, CBS News is reporting that 500 permits have been given regarding the Pacific Palisades Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires, that only 500 permits have been given and of 16,000 structures lost.
Now, you've already heard that.
But what's interesting is that CBS is reporting it and going after a blue state.
So I haven't been following too closely the whole Barry Weiss running CBS news and how that's affecting things.
But is this one of those changes?
You don't expect CBS to go hard in the old CBS.
You didn't expect them to go hard against the blue state.
But CBS News is going hard against the blue states.
So that would be a good sign for independent media, meaning not being biased to one side too much.
It's not independent per se.
Well, let's talk about Russia and Ukraine.
Can you remind me why Russia and the United States are enemies?
It's kind of confusing because with other countries, we don't play a zero-sum game, right?
When we're dealing with our allies, we're generally happy if they do well.
They're happy if we do well.
And because we have this free market situation, both of us could do well.
So it's not a zero-sum game where if we win, Britain loses.
If France wins, we lose.
It's not really like that.
But why is it like that with Russia?
And yeah, tradition.
So one wonders if it's just a leftover habit, something that's been with us for decades and we don't know how to get out of it.
I've often speculated that the CIA has a lot of anti-Russia people because historically you needed them.
But then if it came to a point where we didn't need a lot of anti-Russia assets, would they be able to take down the refers?
Or would they be sort of, I don't want to lose my job.
The only thing I'm an expert at is anti-Russia.
So we'll just try to be as anti-Russia as we can.
Or is it about seizing Russia's assets?
Is it a real play that the world is run by energy lords and the energy lords think, you know, if someday we could take down Russia or turn them into a puppet, we get all that money from their energy.
Is it that?
Is it a little bit that?
Or is it none of that?
How do we know?
Is it over Ukraine?
Because Ukraine looks like the current problem, and it is.
But we were at Russia's throat and they had ours sort of trying to be for enemies long before that, right?
So is this really because the U.S. essentially did a coup of a country that Putin wanted to have control of, but it kind of took away his option to have that control over all of Ukraine?
It can't be all about Ukraine, right?
So I wonder what I would do if I were in a situation where I was trying to solve this.
The hypnotist in me believes that you could hypnotize Putin with just ordinary language, meaning that you could ask him the same questions I'm asking.
If you didn't want to dominate them and overthrow them, so you'd have to make this case.
I would ask the following question.
Why are we against each other?
I know we do things to you, you do things to us, but why?
What's the point of it?
How do you possibly win if you're looking at it as a win-lose scenario instead of something where both sides could win?
Could it be that we so distrust Putin that we can't let him have any power more than he has?
Because if Russia grows, it would be more dangerous than it is.
That's not what I would say to Putin, but it's just an aside.
So I think that as long as we don't know what Putin's base motivations are, and I think I don't know.
I think I don't know what his basic motivations are.
Some of it is obvious.
If you get into a war, you want to win the war.
If a country is doing bad things to you, you want to push back so that maybe they do less bad things to you.
So some of it's kind of obvious, but I don't think that we've drilled down to the important points.
Is it possible that Putin is most interested in his legacy?
Is he most interested in leaving Russia stronger than when he found it?
Is he driven by history?
So those would be things that we wouldn't be able to see, but he does talk that way.
He talks like there's a history-based reason for it.
But is that it?
Is that the only reason?
So until you know what somebody's motivation is, it's really hard to persuade them off it because you don't know what off means.
So I think that's the biggest problem now.
But I would definitely ask the question to Far Trump, why are we enemies?
Because we have lots of allies, and none of the allies are unhappy that they're on our team.
So is it ego?
Is it pride?
And I would at least make Putin wrestle with those questions.
And I would tell him, can you explain why you need this?
And if he goes into these weird history lessons, I can imagine Trump discounting them and maybe making him feel dumb for even having those motivations.
Anyway, it's the eighth night of protests in Iran.
Polymarket gives it a 43% chance the supreme leader loses power this year.
But I think it's the fourth major protest in Iran in not that many years, right?
So the other ones didn't bring them down.
We'll see.
All right.
And Iran has restricted the internet, apparently, because that's never a good sign for the regime if they have to restrict the internet.
Because I'm pretty sure the Iranian protesters are finding a way around that.
I assume that if it had to happen, there might be some, you know, some Elon Musk satellites so they can see what's happening.
That would be pretty dangerous for mosques, so we'll see.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that concludes my prepared remarks.
It's amazing how close I can get to one hour, isn't it?
One of my, I'll just say this to the larger crowd today.
As much as I appreciate how much you care about me, and I appreciate your efforts to suggest things I can do, at the moment it's not helping me to get medical or religious advice.
So if you would respect that, that would be my best situation.
On the medical stuff, you should assume I've looked into all the options.
On the religious stuff, I would like you to say that it's now a private, it's a private relationship between me and Jesus, and I'd like to keep it that way.
But I totally appreciate the good intentions.
I do love it that you care enough about to write me long messages about what I should do medically or religiously, but it doesn't work with my current situation.
So I'll just ask you to back off on that, please.
All right, snort of Bible.
Good advice.
All right, I'm going to talk privately to the good people on locals, and so we'll be private on that in 30 seconds.