All the fun news you can probably use. Happy Fake Insurrection Day!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, J6 Fake Insurrection Hoax, President Trump, Anti-Trump Hoaxes, LG Robot, RFK Jr, Childhood Vaccine Study, J6 Hoax Originator, Mayor Mamdani's Affordability Policy, Venezuela's Oil Reserve, Bill O'Reilly, Venezuela's Government, Scott Adams Biography, 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.
To see you if I sound like i'm slurring my speech.
I am.
I've got a little bit of paralysis on one side and also my meds make me so dehydrated that I can barely move my tongue.
So forgive me for that please, and prepare for the simultaneous sip, because it's coming up once we get a thousand people, which will happen very quickly.
Make sure you have me.
Beverage, beverage.
all right 1000 people it's time i know why you're here you're here for the simultaneous sip and all you need is a cup of muggering glass a tanker shells of sign a canteen jug or flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine here of the day the thing makes everything better is called the simultaneous sip it happens now
Oh, that's a good suppin' right there.
Good suppin'.
Well, let's start out by saying, happy fake insurrection day, january 6th.
Do you remember when you thought it was ridiculous to imagine that Democrats would be playing uh complicated hoaxes on the public?
It didn't seem like anything that could actually happen, right.
And then you found out about the Russia collusion hoax.
Oops, it turns out they can run any major hoax against the country.
Then you found out about the Fine People hoax and you said to yourself, how is it even possible that the mainstream media went along with that hoax?
How is that even possible?
And then again you said to yourself, wow, I didn't even think that could happen.
But there's two examples where it happened, and then the.
The one that is the biggest f you in the world is that uh, the january 6th insurrection hoax.
Now, if you're new to this and maybe the first time you've heard me talk about it, here's how you know that the january insurrection hoax was a hoax.
Now, what i'm talking about is the hoax that uh Trump knew that he lost the election and the people he sent to the capital to protest also knew that the election was clean, but they were trying to overthrow the country.
Now, that entire hoax depended on nobody in the mainstream media, nobody asking the, asking the people who attended the uh the, The protests, why they were there.
And they would have found out that not a single person believed that it was a clean election and they were hoping to overthrow the government.
It was the biggest assumption that drove the entire hoax.
And not one, not one legitimate, legitimate, not one mainstream media ever took a protester in and said, Did you really believe that the election was clean?
Because none of those existed.
Every person who was there, I'll betcha, plus Trump himself, I'll bet you believed that they were seeing an obviously rigged election and they wanted to slow things down until they could be sure it had not been rigged.
Now that narrative got reversed by the hoaxers.
The hoaxers knowing that this is actually good technique by the hoaxers.
The hoaxers knew that if they could get there first with their narrative and say that, no, he knew it was a good election.
He was just trying to overthrow the country.
If they could do that and they could ram it down our throats every day, especially with the help of Hollywood theatrical people.
And then they would put on this whole January 6th publicized Hollywood produced thing so that every single day you would see their narrative.
And Trump was now out of office, so he couldn't really push his narrative as much as normally he could.
So I call today Happy Fake Insurrection Hoax Day.
And I hope we never see anything like that again.
But the ability of the Democrats to sustain a gigantic multi-year hoax with lots of moving parts, they can absolutely do that.
And we've seen it now multiple times.
Well, wouldn't you be surprised to hear there's a new study that says that coffee might actually protect your heart from atrial fibrillation?
Maybe.
I saw this on a post by Dr. Demon Ng, who tells us that it may work, which is the right way to do it.
It doesn't mean that this one science or this one study is valid.
It just means there is a study.
And so it's like a 50% chance there's real.
If you look at all studies, about half of them turn out to be reproducible, about half of them are not.
Well, it's going to be a bunch of technical, excuse me, there's going to be a bunch of technology announcements this week because the consumer electronic show is happening and a lot of robots.
So the LG, the company LG, claims it has a robot that can fold laundry, get it, and make you breakfast, will it?
And do some basically easy labor around the house, you know, the basics.
Now, until somebody buys that robot, and it's probably not exactly for sale yet, until somebody buys it and tries it and tells me it works, I don't believe it.
I don't believe it.
Now, I don't know how they made the demonstration work, but they probably limited the demonstration to one kind of breakfast, you know, one type of laundry, and just trained the hell out of those few things.
And I even wonder, is it AI-driven?
Because when I read about it, it didn't mention AI.
So did they just skip AI and say, all right, it's going to be more like your A-L-E-X-A at home.
You have to give it the right command and it's programmed to do those specific things, but you couldn't teach it to do anything else.
I don't know.
My guess is it's a little overhyped.
A little bit.
So you knew this was coming before, but I have more to say about it.
So RFK Jr., Secretary Kennedy, he reminds us that Trump had asked him to look at childhood vaccines and to see why we differ from other countries and maybe they're doing it right.
So after exhaustive review, says Kennedy, of the evidence, we're aligning U.S. childhood vaccine schedules with international consensus, which a lot of people think was probably the more conservative and safer way to do it, while strengthening transparency and informed consent.
Now, every part of that sounds good so far.
He says a decision to change the schedule protects children, respects families, and rebuilds trust.
If it works out, yes, absolutely.
So I'm a little unclear on the changes themselves, but what I read online is that they would go from 84 to 88 doses for a child, which would be given basically very soon after birth, down to around 30.
Now, presumably, that number of the ones that got cut from the 80s down to 30 were the ones that the science suggests might be a problem.
I think we're still in the territory of we can't be 100% sure how these all work together or which ones were the problems.
But if you took a good, let's say, rational scientific whack at it, and you thought, okay, we don't know how all this works together, but these bunch are the ones that have all the signals.
So if we remove the signals, but don't remove the parents' ability to get those when they want, it just wouldn't be required.
That feels like really playing the odds right.
So here's what I'm hoping.
It's too soon to know if this will maybe change the autism rates or change something else, because maybe the data was bad.
Maybe the one that was the problem is still in the mix.
We don't know for sure.
But it looks like exactly the right process.
You know, I always talk about a system is better than a goal.
Well, the goal would be to protect all the children.
The system would be that we make sure we have the best science and we're looking at it continuously and all that.
But what I want to add to this, this is so much in the category of something that only Trump could have gotten done.
And when I say only Trump, obviously it required RFK Jr.
Trump is going to go down in history.
If this works out, oh my God, there's not going to be any question who was the best president of all time.
It would just remove all doubt.
And what I like about this in particular is that, and I've said this for years and I love it, that Trump has a unique ability to build a pirate ship when you need a pirate ship.
Right?
So he brought on one of the most famous names in Democrat politics, RFK Jr., and put him in a high-risk situation.
And he has so far, in my opinion, performed beautifully.
Now, know what the president could have done that, because they didn't know how to build a pirate ship.
And when I say pirate, I don't mean in a negative way.
I just mean a collection of people that would not normally be on the same team, working in the same direction.
But he makes it work.
And so watching Kennedy not just change a goal, but to change the entire system that got us to where we are is just breathtaking.
It's just breathtaking.
And only Trump could have done that.
And I think only RFK Jr. could have gotten as far as we've gotten so far.
So full standing ovation for that.
But again, we'll have to see.
We'll have to see if it works out.
But everything looks smart.
Well, I saw in the May's account on Acts, he was reposting a compilation made by Rabian, Grabian.
I want to give credit to him.
But Grabian is one of these online, what would you call it, online memers, I guess, and was reminding us that back in 2024, it seems so funny now, that the Harris Walsh team is sending out a memo to start calling JD Vance weird.
Do you remember that?
And they wanted to basically paint Vance and everybody who's a Trump supporter as weird.
And you see the compilation, and you can see how forced it was.
And you can see obviously they had talking points.
Now, does that even happen on the right?
Obviously, pro-Trumpers often will say the same thing as other pro-Trumpers, but I'm not aware of anybody getting a memo to do it.
Usually, if somebody hears something that works, they say, oh, that sounds good, so I'll just say it too.
But I don't think it happens on both sides.
If I'm wrong about that, let me know.
I've never seen it.
So as a student of persuasion, as I am, it made me wonder who came up with the idea.
It's obvious that the campaign was probably the one who said, do this.
But who came up with it?
Was it a professional?
Here's what I think it was.
Now, this would be speculation.
I think the Democrats, feeling like they're not good at persuasion, hired somebody who claimed to be good at it.
And the people that they hired, again, just speculation, would try to use science to back what they were recommending.
And one of the things that science consistently shows is that conservatives don't like icky stuff.
If something's non-standard, conservatives just go, ooh, and that is sort of built into their brains and almost something they can't change.
So the idea here would be that somebody said, aha, if you look at the science, the thing that would turn off other voters on the Republican side is to know that they were backing something weird.
And so far, that actually tracks with what I would recommend about persuasion if I were on their team.
But why didn't it work?
Because it definitely didn't work.
And I speculate that it didn't work because it was so stunningly unnatural.
It was so obviously a talking point and not something that they were feeling in any important way.
And nobody cares about weirdness.
You know, it just has a free-floating idea.
So I think the inauthenticity of it made it impossible to work.
But then, as I've talked about at length, time goes by, and they came up with the idea, or maybe Mom Dhani did, of talking about affordability.
Now, when anybody talks about affordability, either side, that connects.
So that was probably a real good play.
Trump had to, but here's the flaw in their plan.
Trump has probably had enough time that he could address enough affordability issues that it would sort of take it off the table a little bit.
And his technique of going directly at energy prices as a way to make basically everything less expensive, he has time to make that work.
So he knew right away, and he tried to co-opt it, that if he started talking about affordability and he started doing something about affordability, it would take their main good attack they've ever had somewhat off the table.
So he has to perform.
And we're watching, of course, as he's doing things that would, in fact, lower energy costs if everything goes right.
And there's probably enough time for that to work its way through the system again, if he gets energy prices lower and affect everything.
So once again, Trump has a better approach to things.
All right, so you know, we've all been trying to figure out what is the real reason for the action in Venezuela.
Is it really about drugs?
Well, drugs might be part of it, but I think all the smart people at this point are saying it's not the only reason.
And it might not even be the top reason.
But it creates the possibility of doing what we wanted to do in Venezuela.
So I was listening yesterday to Glenn Beck.
He was telling us his ideas for why we went to Venezuela.
And it was very persuasive because he's a good communicator and he's a smart guy.
So when he described it, what the real play was, very, very convincing, I have to say.
But then as these things often go, I read the comments and I see a pushback on it.
And I thought, oh, well, there might be a problem with the data.
So if there's a data problem that would suggest maybe we don't have the right take on this, I'll tell you what that is.
So Glenn Beck's take is that the real value of the Venezuela action is that it would put pressure on China because there's so much oil that comes from Venezuela that ends in China that it would be putting pressure on China.
And if Iran goes at the same time, which looks like it might, I still won't bet on it, but it looks like there's a pretty good chance that Iran will fall.
We could potentially deny China from some large percentage of their total energy.
If they're denied their total energy, it would be hard for them to say, mount a war in Taiwan.
It would be hard for them to dominate the world if they're struggling for oil.
And there's such a large percentage of what they get from Venezuela and Iran that that makes perfect sense from a military Monroe doctrine point of view.
Now, when you first hear this argument, it's very convincing.
But the problem with the data is I've seen numbers all over the place about how much China is getting from Venezuela.
And I don't trust the numbers.
So it could be there's not as much pressure on China as we assume it is if the data is wrong.
Now, the other piece of data that somebody questioned and made me go, oh, is that Venezuela has, I don't know if I have the right units I'm talking about here, but like 300 billion barrels of something of oil.
And then somebody said that that was never true, that the claims that Venezuela had the most reserves of oil were claims that were made by some prior administration so that it looked like they were more powerful than they were.
And that the real number of usable oil, because remember, Venezuela, the oil is kind of dirty.
So there are only, I think, three refineries in the world that can even process it.
But so that the real number might be closer to 25.
So we've been told it's 300, which would be among or the biggest reserves, but it might be just 25 when you get down to how much can you actually refine and how much can you get to.
So that's a big question mark, right?
If anybody has some visibility on that, I would love to know what is the most credible number for the reserves.
If we did this to get access to an enormous part of oil, then it definitely looks like a good idea.
If we did it because there's so much oil that was going to China, that it would completely change their strategic calculation, it looks like a good idea.
But if either of those numbers are not what we think they are, then I don't know what we're getting.
I do love Trump's take that we're just taking back the oil they took from us.
Because first of all, I think that's true.
And it's hard to argue against taking back what somebody stole from you.
Right?
Well, Bill, and I also, I'll probably say this a lot of times, but hold on a second.
One of the most important things you need to know that I believe Trump knows better than anybody is that countries and organizations and movements, they either grow or they shrink.
And the United States was in a shrinking position in the world.
It was becoming less influential, less rich compared to other people, relatively speaking.
And what Trump did is reverse that.
So he's found ways to turn the U.S. into a growing entity.
If you're not growing, you are definitely shrinking.
One of those is an existential threat.
And one of those guarantees, not guarantees, but gives you a real good chance for a better future.
So if you feel uncomfortable with whatever the president is doing, the military is doing, the thing you should look at is, is this making the U.S. stronger and growing, or is it working in the other direction?
If the answer is yes, this makes the U.S. grow and be more important, I would argue that that is probably more important than whatever your moral or constitutional arguments are, which are also important.
It's not like I'm blind to ignoring the Constitution, if we should ever do that.
It's not like I'm in favor of military action if we can avoid it.
It's just a simple fact that you're either growing or shrinking.
And as soon as you put that frame on it, then everything that Trump has been doing lately makes perfect sense, especially asserting the Monroe Doctrine like it's never been asserted before.
All right, Bill O'Reilly was on News Nation talking to Leila and Fendard, and he had an interesting speculation, which I immediately agree with.
But he warns you that he's not basing this on reporting.
This is based on just his understanding of the world.
And it's close to my understanding of the world, too.
He says that about Venezuela, that the CIA, which has heavily infiltrated the Venezuelan and Colombian governments, they know everything that's going on, and that they must have made a deal with the Venezuelan military.
And the deal would look like this.
You step aside because we're coming in to get Maduro.
And that's the only way on earth that the U.S. Special Forces could have snatched Maduro without any conflict at all.
Now, were you wondering why Venezuela didn't put up more of a fight?
Specifically, the military just stood down.
And I have long speculated that there was no way that, you know, I agree with this speculation, that there's no way that could have been so bloodless relatively.
I think there were some 32 people who might have died on the, you know, I don't know if they were Cuban bodyguards or what, but there were some casualties on the Venezuelan side.
The only way I could understand that is if we've got a deal in the back.
Now, that deal would include that maybe the Venezuelans can act tough as long as they don't fire anything, as long as they do what we're told.
So you see the vice president who's now the president of Venezuela talking tough about the U.S.
That probably has to happen.
She probably has to talk tough.
But as long as She understands that we'll send in the military if she doesn't do what we want.
And as long as the CIA has built relationships there that can tell them exactly how to get out of the way, maybe there's some bribery involved, etc.
I think that's probably the answer to the hidden questions.
Like if you knew that the CIA had been working for years, probably to be in a position to say, okay, military, come on in, we'll turn off, we'll turn off the response.
That would explain everything, wouldn't it?
But again, this is not a fact.
I believe there's more we don't know about this situation than there is that we know.
We're deeply in the fog of war, you know, in a sense, war.
What we will learn about this in the coming years will probably be a lot more than we actually know.
Because I don't see the CIA telling us the truth.
It's not even their job to tell us the truth.
In fact, telling us the truth might work against our interests.
So I think that's true.
Now, listen to Steve Miller, who was on a recent interview.
He said about the Venezuelans.
He said, they told Rubio, made clear they will meet the terms.
This is the Venezuelan government as it is right now.
They told Rubio, made it clear they will meet the terms, demands, conditions, and requirements of the U.S.
So if they're telling Rubio they're going to do what we want, but you hear them talk tough, talk, talk tough in public, it all makes sense, doesn't it?
All right.
According to Senator John Kennedy, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which took our money and funneled it to NPR and PBS, is officially dissolved.
Now, there was probably a time when I would have thought, man, I hate to see my government defund a place that gives me the news.
But what we know recently about any of these mainstream media entities is they're definitely not helping.
That they were not really additive to the country.
And so when you see cuts to these venerable institutions, what president could make a cut to a venerable institution?
Only Trump.
He's like the only one who could do it.
But it doesn't work every time because there's a court ruling, Newsmax is reporting, that Trump had tried to cut a big part of the National Institute of Health funding for scientific and medical research to these big colleges and institutions.
But a three-judge panel just ruled that he can't do that.
I'm not good enough on the legal stuff to know why he can't do that, but that's a ruling.
Now, there's an argument I hear on what I'm going to call my side that I don't think holds up.
And maybe that's the problem too.
So part of the argument for making cuts to places like Harvard is that a few of the big institutions, it doesn't apply to all of them, but the biggest ones have these enormous endowments.
That means that people have donated massive amounts of money and they have that money for various Harvard use.
So the argument went, if you already have so much money, why does the government need to give you any more?
Because the endowment doesn't get spent every year.
It just sits there and grows.
Here's what people generally don't know about the endowments that you should add to your knowledge bank.
Most of them, and I think most is the right word, but some large number of them are not available for anybody who wants to use it for anything.
They are for specific purposes.
So in other words, a billionaire would say, I'm going to give you a billion dollars to use for this specific purpose.
And if you don't use it for that, you know, it'll get clawed back or you don't get to use it.
So Harvard does not, does not have the freedom to use the endowment any way they want.
So it can never be a full replacement for government funding.
I'm in favor of the cuts and the pressure it puts.
That's just a fact you should know about.
Well, here's a story I find creepy.
I hate it.
But Senator Mark Kelly, who had been a member of the military, he's being, what do they call it, sanctioned and demoted, and his pension is being pulled by a secretary for P. Hegseth.
The reason being that he was part of the six people who made that video encouraging the military to not obey illegal orders.
Now, I'm pretty sure that was always the law that they should not obey illegal orders, but by putting attention on it and trying to focus on it, it seemed like the real play here was not to make the country a better place.
It looked like the play was to destroy the chain of command.
So if the commander-in-chief gave an order, then the individual military people could say, hmm, that looks illegal to me.
So Kelly told me I could ignore it.
Hmm, maybe I'll ignore it.
Now, you can easily see how that would destroy the cohesion and everything about the military.
And it clearly seemed designed to be political and not anything about national security.
So I think what he did was arguably something insurrectionist, seditionist, traitorous.
At the very least, it was not intended to help the country militarily.
That's what I think.
That's just my opinion.
So under that frame, punishing him essentially by taking away some of his military benefits, like his retirement grade stuff, is really expensive.
And he did fight for the country.
So the reason it's creepy is that I just hate being in a position where Pete Hegseth would even have to wrestle with this as a question.
We never should have been here.
On the other hand, it is so hard for me to see a member of the military punished for something that other people would say.
That's just free speech, Scott.
So let me say I love it because you have to have a response and you have to recognize it for what it was.
But I hate it because it's a military man.
All right.
Here's a story I'm going to tell you that's more about the fact that the story can be told than it is about the point.
And I saw Elon Musk boosting this on X.
So Lauren Chen on X wrote this piece that I'm sure you could not have said this five years ago.
You would be so canceled.
But I think now you can say this stuff.
So she said that people often say the developing world is poor because the Western world colonized them and stole the resources.
But she points out that when the colonizers left, let's say Hong Kong and Singapore being two examples, that they left them in good shape, meaning that the people were trained to take over.
They did take over.
And then over decades, you can see that it totally worked.
So that was a case where you can decry the colonialism.
That would be fair.
But you can't decry the fact that the colonizers tried hard to make sure that the people they left thrived.
And sure enough, they did.
But here's the point that I don't think you could have said five years ago, that Africa has never worked.
That the colonizers who colonized Africa often found out that they couldn't train the locals to take over.
And her point is that you have to recognize that in every case, the colonizers, probably every case, the colonizers tried very hard to leave the locals in a good position to take care of themselves.
And some places, for reasons we don't have to get into, some places like Africa, it didn't work once.
It just never worked.
And that that probably has to do with, I'll just say the word culture.
So at the very least, it had to do with culture.
But because this is obviously a landmine kind of topic.
So I'll go back to my original point.
It's not about me arguing that this is true or false.
It's about the fact that she could say it out loud and not get canceled.
And the only reason for that is that she's on X. You probably couldn't say it in many places, but you can say it on X.
So that's a big change for free speech.
Sorry.
One of the side effects of whatever's going on with me is that I have these little burping attacks.
All right.
Except culture is not a bad word.
I'm answering the comments.
Culture is not a bad word, but it opens up that Pandora box of, you know, why.
We don't need to get into that.
Well, the Rasmussen poll, which is coming out today, said, and this poll was taken before the Venezuela action, right?
That 48% approved of the U.S. seizing oil tankers.
I think that was a plurality.
So there were more people who approved it than didn't.
And they also had this opinion when Trump said, quote, you remember they took all our energy rights.
They took all our oil not long ago and we want it back.
54% of voters agree with that.
So I was telling you earlier that that's a strong frame.
Well, proven.
It's proven that that was a strong frame.
They took our oil and we're taking it back.
That's the rest of us in poll.
You'll see later today.
Well, Megan Kelly had an interesting opinion on Venezuela that she talked about on her serious XM show.
And I liked it.
This is a good opinion.
She said that when I turned on Fox News yesterday, and I'm sorry, but it was like watching Russian propaganda.
There was nothing skeptical.
It was all rah-rah cheerleading.
Let's go.
Now, that was also my opinion that Fox News was basically all down for this right away.
Now, I would make a distinction between, my lips are a little numb, so I can't tell when I have stuff on.
I'd make a distinction between curing for the successful military operation, which seems fair.
And I think they were definitely happy about it, and their viewers were happy about it.
And so you could see why they would be pretty rah-rah about the military part.
But Megan Kelly's point is that that's just the first act.
If we don't succeed in building some kind of a government with Venezuela that is not only works for the Monroe document, but works for the locals and doesn't cause us and does not cause us to have some war with Booth and the Ground.
Well, if all that happens, then it'll be one of the most successful operations of all time.
But Megan points out that we don't have a great reputation for building other countries up.
I would argue that we did a good job in Japan, you know, helping them become a thriving nation.
I think after World War II, I would argue that we did a good job in Germany, you know, to the extent that we were helpful on that.
So it's not impossible that when you're talking about Venezuela, a pretty educated place, pretty westernized, that we could make that work.
And probably only Trump could make that happen too, because I think he knows how to make a deal.
He's smart enough not to disband the government like in Iraq, which was a failure.
So yes, I'm with Megan Kelly that first act, 100%.
The first act was impressive.
To me, it looked America first.
To me, it looked like a genius strategic play.
But we still have to wait for the second and third act.
It might get tougher before it gets easier.
All right.
Vivek Ramaswomi has apparently announced that he's going to not be on Instagram and X for a while.
I don't know how long.
But he says it's too easy to get a distorted sense of the public's concerns.
Now, that's a true statement, wouldn't you say?
That if you're on X, even though X is the free speech champion of the world, that you still get in your bubble.
So it does form bubbles.
There's no way around it.
And I do think that if you got all of your sense of what the public wants from X, probably would be distorted because even Vivek would be in a bubble of some kind, not of his choosing.
It might not be the bubble he wants, but it just happens because of the way algorithms work.
But here's my question to Vivek that he will never see.
What is a better way to get to the truth?
At the moment, there's nothing better than X.
And I would say there's nothing close.
I wouldn't trust AI, maybe someday, but I don't trust it now.
I wouldn't trust the mainstream media.
I wouldn't trust, well, anything.
So while his concern seems spot on, I'd love to know what he thinks is the alternative.
What alternative is there?
Well, we'll see.
We'll see if that lasts.
According to the FDA, well, not according to, but the FDA approved a little device you wear on your forehead that gives you some electrical signals and can turn off your depression.
So apparently it's been well tested and passed the FDA's bar.
And what it is, is like a little headband thing that knows exactly where to send these low-intensity transcranial direct current stimulation, you know, the TDCS.
So it delivers it to the frontal cortex where apparently they know that would make a difference.
So here's my question.
Well, and it's being compared to pills, which we don't see as a good treatment for depression.
So if it's better than pills, and apparently the early studies are stunningly successful, we'll see what the long-term effects are.
But apparently there's a long-term effect.
So it doesn't just work while you have it on.
It's reprogramming your brain.
Now, why I think this has a good chance is because pills don't work.
Not everybody can take a walk and touch a tree and get better.
It has just a huge impact, apparently.
So I'm just being optimistic.
That might be a big thing in the future.
Well, Ars Technico is reporting that in California, my silly state, there's a new law that just took effect about privacy.
And apparently, as of January 1st, California can ask to be opted out of whatever services there are that collect data and sell it.
So I guess it's cattle privacy.
So is that good or bad?
I can't tell.
You know, it seems like a good intention thing that would give people control over their own data.
That sounds good, right?
But will AI suffer?
Does it make AI not work for you?
What if AI knew me because I didn't report this stuff, but it didn't know you because you did?
Would AI work better for me?
Because it would know all my habits.
So, and would there be a black market that popped up that would just fill the space where the legal stuff became illegal?
And so they just say, well, black market.
So there might be some unintended consequences.
But I'm going to be optimistic about that too.
All right.
Here's an interesting story.
As you know, or maybe you don't, that Steve Hilton is running for governor of California.
Now, you might be aware that it's a very difficult thing for a Republican to get elected as governor in our current situation in California.
So how do you break through?
How do you get through if you're a Republican?
It's a blue state, everything's working against you.
Well, it looks like Steve might have found a way because he and I think one other person running for California state controller, Herb Morgan.
So the two of them, it looks like they put together a website called Califraudia to take whistleblower reports of fraud.
And then apparently they've already done this, they've built it, and they're getting lots of whistleblowers telling them where the fraud is, which seems to be amazingly useful and exactly what we want.
Now, how many times have I told you that being useful, just in general, being useful, is a really good place to be?
I've never really seen a situation where a candidate did something this useful while running for office.
And so the genius of this is that he can already say, this is the sort of thing I can give you at the time when people are most interested in this sort of thing.
Now, you know, I didn't know too much about Steve Hilton, but when I see this kind of a signal, I automatically say, okay, first of all, that's a strong, strong play.
I'm very impressed.
Secondly, if this is an indication of who he is and how he operates and how he thinks, oh my God, that's just so strong.
So I'm going to upgrade my, I think he's actually leading the polls now because it's, you know, the polls are kind of distributed.
But Steve, if you could do this sort of thing, and it's not some kind of one-off, which I don't think it is actually, and you could be of service to the state in exactly the way we want you to be, this is important to me, very important to me.
He's obviously very good as a public figure.
He has lots of experience on TV.
So you need that, right?
You need to be good on TV or it doesn't work.
So good for you, Steve Hilton, standing ovation.
Meanwhile, speaking of fraud, Caroline Leavett, Leave it?
Leave it or leave it?
It confirmed that the Minnesota fraud that we've all heard about so much is going to be the subject of a all hands on deck across the entire government effort.
We are surging resources.
So apparently the Department of Homeland Security will surge 2,000 agents.
The FBI is all over the place.
We're freezing money, cutting off funding for all these fake daycares and other things that were part of the fraud.
So here's my question.
Under the Harris-Wals administration, should that have been the outcome of the last election?
Would we, first of all, even know about this, the fraud?
Would we even know?
I mean, a YouTube fellow is the one who's being credited for uncovering it, but it all had been uncovered for years.
We've known for years that there was a problem there, just not the details.
Would the censorship regime of Biden and Harris have talked to YouTube and said, suppress this video?
Would they?
Because we have a long history of Democrats putting pressure on platforms to censor things.
You don't think they would have censored that story?
I don't know.
But think again how important it was that we dodge the Biden slash Harris administration, you know, for at least for the current term.
This could have only happened under Trump.
The surging is exactly the right thing.
It's what the public wants.
It's what the situation demands.
Only Trump.
Well, in energy news, according to New Atlas, there's a company that's asking for some kind of government approval that I believe they will get to take the type of nuclear reactors that are already in naval ships and have been operating for 70 years without trouble and to use that design for domestic energy production.
Now, I don't know if you remember, maybe I started 10 years ago talking about how nuclear should be bigger and should be more of a focus.
And one of the things that Mark Schneider taught me at the time was that we already had a design that was used in the military, the Navy especially, and it didn't have problems.
And you could build them small and they would be driving battleships and stuff like that.
Now, I think the first part of the request is really sort of a two-parter, is that the company wants to take the existing nuclear processors that are on ships, but only the ones that are being decommissioned.
So if they're being decommissioned anyway, you don't want to waste a perfectly good nuclear reactor, right?
So they want to take those and presumably modify them and stuff, but use them.
They would take them off the ship.
So they wouldn't be using them on the ship.
They would take them off the ship and repurpose them.
But here's the good part.
They also want to build new ones because there wouldn't be enough.
There wouldn't be enough that would be submarines that are in submarines.
Wouldn't be enough decommissioned ships to do that to make much of a dent.
So they want to take the design that's been proven over 70 years, and it would cost about somewhere in the $2 billion range to create a modular reactor versus what we see with the big reactors, which could be tens of billions of dollars.
So it's smart, it's well proven, and it's economical.
And I think they only need approval from the Trump administration to do this sort of thing.
So again, optimistic.
Speaking of optimism, One of the products at the Consumer Electronics Show is a leaf blower, an aerospace power, aerospace-powered quiet leaf blower that causes noise by 70%.
Do you know what a plague the leaf blowers are in high-end neighborhoods?
Oh, I hate to be like a rich person complaining, but there's at least one to two days every week where it becomes impossible to take a nap or anything because either your own gardener is right outside or your neighbor's gardener is right outside.
And it's so freaking loud.
Now, you might say, I'll bet that's expensive.
And I'll bet your gardener, your gardener is not going to want to pay for that.
And then I thought to myself, I'll buy it.
If my gardener was willing to take this product and it worked, I'm not sure it's for sale.
It might be just announcing that it will be.
I would immediately go to my gardener and I would say, I will buy this for you if you'll use it.
I assume he'd say yes, because it doesn't give up anything in performance.
Then I would figure out who the other gardeners were, like my neighbor's gardeners, and I would say, you know, you should do the same thing.
Just buy one for your gardener and you'll make all the neighbors happy.
If they said no, then I would say, at least the immediate neighbors, I would say, well, I'll buy it.
I have some extra cash.
So let me buy your gardener one of these.
So I wonder if the way it will spread is that the homeowners will buy it for their gardeners, even though that's not their responsibility, really.
Well, according to Science Clock, Ashish Gupta is writing, that Stanford's doing a new approach to AI that solves the following problem.
Have you ever wondered why AI can create a video of somebody doing something that looks exactly like a person doing something?
But if you try to tell the AI to do exactly what the AI is showing in a picture, it can't do it.
And the reason is that the videos are created by just by just predicting where pixels should be on the screen.
But what they'd like to do is use the AI's imagination, they call it, where it can create a picture of somebody doing something and tie that to what the AI learns by having it learn by its own dreams.
So before it tries to do something, let's say you want your AI robot.
So before it does anything, it first imagines it in pixels.
And then the part they're working on, I guess they're getting close, is to figure out how the AI can learn from its own pixel pattern.
So if it created a dream, basically, which would just be an AI video, if it created one that was folding a certain kind of laundry, can you say, all right, learn from your own picture how to do this?
So the physics, the physics, God, Balthus was right.
So the idea is to add the physics to what it can already imagine.
Yeah, but most of the AI has passed the six-figure problem.
Now the AI is so much better.
So maybe that's a big deal.
Well, also talking about my silly state, according to U-Haul, more people are leaving California than any other state for the sixth year in a row.
Holy shoot.
We have the highest state income tax in America and lots of other problems.
Let's talk about Greenland.
Things are changing in Greenland.
So Stephen Miller was on a show asking if he was asked if the U.S. would use military to take Greenland.
Now, what would have been the answers to that six months ago?
If he had been asked, will we use the military to conquer Greenland?
I feel like he would have said something like, we don't need to do that, you know, because we can find a way to avoid that.
But, you know, it's very important critically.
We're definitely going to do something to make sure that we're not vulnerable there.
But, you know, no boots on the ground six months ago.
How did he answer it yesterday?
He said, quote, nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.
That sounds like they've moved from wanting to deciding.
It seems to me that if Trump ends up being super successful, as I think he might be in Venezuela, that the idea of sending in the military is definitely on the table.
Now, obviously, Greenland would not have any way to respond, right?
They don't have a military.
Denmark doesn't have really a way to project force over here in any meaningful way.
So one assumes that that would not happen until the CIA had enough insight or control over the locals that they would know for sure that if the military went in, they would step aside.
And further, Stephen Miller says, the real question is what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?
Oh, here we go.
Here's a good reframe.
What is the basis of their territorial claim?
What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark?
He said, the United States is the power of NATO.
For the United States to secure the Arctic region to protect and defend NATO, this is so good, and NATO interests, obviously Greenland should be part of the United States.
So we have definitely moved from wanting Greenland to deciding we're going to take it.
And we're going to use our military to do it if necessary.
Now, obviously, there would be lots and lots of work before anything like that happened to either make it easy to take him over or to find a way that we didn't need to.
So what would Denmark do if we told them, hey, Denmark, on Tuesday, we're going to surge the military into Greenland.
We're going to annex it.
And you're going to stand aside.
What would they do?
They would complain to whom other people would complain, but how much impact would that have?
Would the UN say, stop doing that?
And if they did, we might say we're the only power that the UN has.
Step aside.
And I think that Trump pushing the Monroe Doctrine so far, I think that's going to be more popular than not popular.
The door is wide open.
To me, it seems like a done deal that before the end of Trump's term, we will have functional control of Greenland.
And people will hate it at first.
And they'll say, oh, authoritarian.
And they will eventually say, here's a reframe too.
Almost nobody lives on a place that was once uninhabited by anybody.
If you look at the history of just about every country, it's about somebody had that land and then somebody took it from them.
Right?
All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, that is the end of my prepared remarks.
I'm going to talk privately to the good people of locals.
And in 30 seconds, we'll be private.
I want to thank you again.
Oh, let me give you a specific thank you.
I hope you're aware that your existence and the love and attention that you give me is absolutely irreplaceable.
And I'm very blessed.
And I appreciate you more than you could ever know.
So if it seems like I'm acting selfishly sometimes, well, maybe I am because I enjoy this experience of being useful if I can more than anything I like.