Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-08-30
I just love spending my early mornings with you. I really do. It’s one of my favorite things. The rest of the day will be a downgrade from this experience. I hope it’s the same for you. Actually, I hope you have a better day than I do. Why would I be selfish? If I can stop my hiccups, we’ve got a show to do. Are you ready? Are all of you ready? If you’re ready, I’m ready.
The Simultaneous Sip
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It’s called Coffee with Scott Adams, sometimes with Gary the Engineer. If you’d like to take your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It’s called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Go.
Movie Review: F1
Start my engines. Speaking of that, I watched two-thirds of the new movie F1. I’ll finish the rest of it, but if the rest of it is as good as the first part, the first two-thirds, it’s a really good movie. I’m pretty sure I’m going to recommend it when I’m done, but I’ll finish it sometime this week and I’ll tell you.
Announcement: Owen Gregorian
After the show today, Owen Gregorian will be hosting, as he usually does on Saturdays, a Spaces event on the X platform. If you’ve got X, just look for Owen Gregorian or go to my X feed and you’ll find the link to it right after the show.
Physical Health and Mental Health
According to PsyPost and Eric Dolan, it turns out that there’s a correlation between children who have terrible physical problems and their mental health. Evidence shows that children with chronic physical illness—which is not funny—such as asthma, diabetes, and epilepsy, are at increased risk for developing mental illness.
They could have saved a little bit of time and a little bit of money by just asking me. They would have said, “Scott, do you believe that people who have a lifelong physical problem that will make them different from other people and be very inconvenient in their social life and the rest of their life, do you think that that would have an impact on how they feel about things in their brain?” Yes! Yes. I’ll bet you if you gave anybody a disease that would affect them their entire rest of their life, yeah, probably might affect their mental health. By the way, as I often say, your body is your brain. So if you’ve got a physical problem in your body, you do have a physical problem in your brain because your brain is your body. It all works as one device.
Warm Parenting and Social Skills
Here’s another one. Let’s see if you can get this one before I do. PsyPost also, Vladimir Hedrih is writing that students whose parents—so young people basically—students whose parents were warmer toward them tend to have better socio-emotional skills. So if your parents were warm toward you, you’re more likely to be a warm person with good social skills. Did they really need to study that? I don’t know.
It does seem likely that if you have the genetic material of two people who were warm—in other words, they were warm parents—what are the odds that you picked up that gene? Well, pretty good. And then what are the odds that you would imitate adults who are your parents in figuring out how to navigate social situations? Well, 100%. So between the genetic likelihood that you would just inherit that ability to feel warmth around other people—keep in mind, that’s not a learned behavior. If the way you feel around other people lifts you and makes you feel lighter, you’re clearly going to be better at social things in the future. And if other people make you feel like, “Oh god, when’s the other person going to leave?” then you’re probably not going to develop the best social skills. You didn’t need to study this. Just ask me or any of you. You all would have known that.
Americans Having Less Sex
Americans are having less sex than ever. There’s a new study out, and I guess that applies to everybody—young and old and married or single. They’re all having a lot less sex. The experts are trying to figure out why. Do you think they’ll do a big expensive study to find out why? Or, you know how they could save money? Don’t do that study. Just ask me. Go outside and look at the people who walk by. Would you want to have sex with any of them? Probably not. We all got fat and unpleasant. Half of the country took itself offline to the other half just by having some political point of view, and then we eat ourselves into total unattractiveness. Of course we’re having less sex. And the women that everybody would want to have sex with, they follow the money and they become OnlyFans girls. So, yeah, between that and online porn, it does seem to be that everything is lining up for Americans to have less sex than ever. Sure enough.
I feel like in the ’50s, everybody tried to look thin and well-dressed. Don’t you think that would increase the amount of sex you had? And they didn’t have phones, so if they got together, it was all about the other people. Those might seem like our golden years.
The Brains of Political Extremists
According to the American Psychological Association, the people who are at the extremes of the political right and the extremes of the political left, their brains work a similar way. And that similar way involves getting way more physical sensation—in other words, emotions—from politics. So the people who dominate the extremes, either the left or the right, they feel politics. Like if you show them some new political story, they might be elated or they might be disgusted, but they really feel it, just like a stomachache they would feel it. Whereas the entire middle of the country, the ones who kind of care what happens in the news but it doesn’t affect them physically, it’s just something they heard, they don’t have the same brain impact or body impact.
Does that surprise you? No, because as I’ve tried to teach Ben Shapiro, the facts don’t care about your emotions. Your feelings are, of course, what drives everything. So it makes sense that the people who are extremists, either right or left, it’s because they feel something that’s a reward. So if they get revulsion from looking at what the other team is doing, but it’s still sort of a competition and you like your team and you can’t wait to talk to them about it, about that thing the other side is doing that’s so bad, yeah, that’s just pure emotion. And you would expect that those people would have suicidal empathy and TDS (Trump Detachment Syndrome). All of those things probably come from the same phenomenon, which is the people who don’t have a physical sensation from thinking about politics, they’re not doing any of the crazy stuff. So they don’t have TDS so much or those other things.
Trump and Dementia Claims
Speaking of TDS, I saw a clip of CNN where Scott Jennings was roasting somebody, Jennifer Welch. I guess she’s one of the anti-Trumpers that was on the panel of that Abby Phillip show. And she claimed that Trump obviously has dementia and that one of the ways you know is that he performed oral sex on a microphone.
Can you believe—and I’d have to say that she looked like, just the way she talked and acted, she looked like one of those people who really feels something physical from the news. I mean, she looked like she was having a physical response to just even thinking about Trump. And Scott Jennings said after she was done with her little rant that sounded literally crazy, he just says, “If this is the Democratic strategy, congratulations, America, you’ve already elected Republicans as far as the eye can see.”
Yeah, if your reason for not liking Trump, the top of the list is that he has dementia because he tried to perform oral sex on a microphone, which, by the way, I do not remember that story, but I suppose anything’s possible. But I don’t remember the story of him trying to have it out with a microphone. When the Democrats talk like that—not every Democrat, of course—but when one of them talks like that, do you say to yourself, “Well, there’s a just a competing opinion I should take seriously,” or do you say to yourself, “What is wrong with you? Like, it looks like you have a mental health problem.” And that’s what that looks like. That comes off not as an opinion; that comes off as a mental health problem. Doesn’t it? Or is it just me?
Portuguese President and Trump
Well, even the Portuguese President has some TDS. He said in public, believe it or not, that Trump is nothing but a Russian puppet. And he said the top leader of the world’s greatest superpower is objectively a Soviet Russian asset. He functions as an asset. That’s the President of Portugal. You know what’s funny is I’ve never seen a picture of him before that I can recall, but I saw the video of him talking and I thought, “Oh, I get it. He looks as dumb as he sounds.” He looks like a dumb guy. And then that comes out of his mouth. He’s the head of Portugal and he believes that Trump, who has put these vicious sanctions on Russia, etc., and is trying to solve a war, they think he’s a Russian asset. All right, so.
Stonehenge and Cows
Here is a new theory about Stonehenge. I guess they found a one cow’s tooth buried at the site, and they analyzed the heck out of that tooth. Then they declared that probably the way the stones got to Stonehenge—which is the big mystery because they’re really heavy and they came from a long ways away, they think—now they say that cows dragged the rocks to Stonehenge.
It makes me wonder, is there anything that cows can’t do? They can make a baseball catcher’s mitt, they can be our food, they can give us milk, you could ride a cow if you needed to, they could be a pet—terrible pet, terrible pet—but they can do so many things. But apparently they can build Stonehenge. Personally, my theory is that the cows also built the pyramids. I can’t prove it, but when I look at them, I think, “That looks like some cow work right there.” I used to work on my uncle’s farm, he had a dairy farm, and so I know cows. I mean, I know how they think, and I feel like they could have built a pyramid. I don’t know.
Epstein Emails and Ehud Barak
Online influencer—I guess that’s what you would call him, or researcher—Ian Carroll, if you’ve seen his material, very entertaining. I’m never in a position to know when he’s right and when he’s not, but he has some fascinating research he does on a lot of stuff. But apparently the government, the Trump administration, has now released 100,000 emails relative to the Epstein situation. And the 100,000 emails—I think that was just the number of emails with Ehud Barak, the ex-Prime Minister of Israel. Well, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like they would have done 100,000 messages back and forth, but there were 100,000 emails and some number of them were about back and forth with Ehud Barak. So I think Ian’s leaning toward the hypothesis that Epstein was definitely a Mossad or Israeli asset of some kind.
The Simultaneous Movies of Jeffrey Epstein
I find it difficult to imagine that if his relationship with Ehud Barak was that close, it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t have some kind of working relationship. But there are now several, let’s say “movies,” on one screen about Epstein. So one of the movies would be this: he’s an Israeli asset and that explains everything, and he’s a blackmailer. That’s a popular one. Another one would be—maybe let’s call it the Mike Benz hypothesis—that Epstein might have been an expert at moving large amounts of money around in ways that can be concealed, and that that made him a valuable person to all these high-level people. And it was mostly just him and maybe a few people he pulled into it that were doing the sexual stuff.
So that’s one possibility, or to say it differently, that the sexual improprieties were not related to his business model. They exist, but it’s not part of his money-making operation. And then what else do we have? Yeah, and then the other would be that he wasn’t doing anything illegal, but maybe he had one or two billionaires who found him valuable and paid him large amounts of money, or I don’t know. So there’s sort of a partial third movie there where he’s not as guilty except for the sexual stuff that I would say obviously he was guilty of. So that Epstein situation we will never know, I say.
Trump Rumors and Schedule
Well, apparently there was a rumor going around on X today that President Trump was dead, but he’s not. So, he’s not. But the rumor was going around, and partly because I guess we haven’t seen him in a little while and he has no scheduled public appearances this weekend. Now, he also hasn’t taken a vacation since he started—no summer vacation, which is a little unusual. So it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s just going to do a little golfing this weekend and, I mean, it’s a holiday weekend, so maybe he’s just golfing and hanging with friends, and that’s all the vacation he needs. Maybe. He doesn’t seem like a beach guy. If you don’t go to the beach, vacations don’t make nearly as much sense, do they? If you’re not like a gourmet food connoisseur or a wine drinker or a beach guy, vacations just don’t have that much appeal. So you’d rather just live a life doing the stuff you like, like, well, I like golfing, so we’ll do that.
Anyway, I’m going to inject my own, let’s say, not conspiracy theory, but my own speculation. I like that word. I’m going to speculate that since Trump—it’s almost impossible to imagine him having the whole weekend off with nothing on his schedule unless there’s something really big that’s about to drop. So is it possible that he’s doing some really serious negotiations that we don’t even know is even a topic? Could it be that sometime next week we’re going to learn that he was really working this weekend? And like, really working and got something done? Or that there’s some, you know, the negative part would be that there’s some new danger approaching that we don’t know about, and he’s got to figure out what to do about it. I don’t know. It does seem unusual that we wouldn’t know what’s going on and he kind of dropped out of sight even for a few days, even on a holiday weekend. So it could be anything. Could be—well, I don’t know if it could be cosmetic surgery or anything, but anything’s possible.
Democrat Dissatisfaction Poll
So here is a poll, a Gallup poll. You may have heard of this one, but the Post Millennial talked about this—Hannah Nightingale. And the poll said that 0% of Democrats were satisfied with the state of America right now. 0%. Zero? Now, obviously you’re thinking the same thing I am, which is: “Okay, there’s no poll that has zero for any question.” Zero is just not even one of the possibilities. Now, it wasn’t exactly zero; it only rounded down to zero. So there were a few, but it rounded down to zero.
So I thought my first take on this was to ignore it because obviously there was something wrong with it. Obviously. But then I saw that the Post Millennial was writing about this, that apparently when Biden was in charge, the Republican—97% of Republicans were dissatisfied. So only 3% of Republicans at most said they were satisfied when Biden was in charge.
So I feel like what this is really measuring is the effectiveness of brainwashing. I feel like that’s what it’s measuring. Because let me ask you this: have you—you’ve probably seen the “man on the street” or “person on the street” interviews where somebody who is just playing around because—will go up to a stranger and say, “Here are three policies that let’s say it was under Joe Biden, three policies that Joe Biden’s doing. What do you think of these policies?” And then he’ll cleverly list three things that are Trump policies that Biden hates. But he’ll say, “What do you think of these Biden policies?” And if you ask a Democrat, the Democrat will say, “Well, those are very wise policies, they’re very good.” And then the interviewer will say, “Um, okay, those are all Trump’s policies.” And the person on the street always goes into full cognitive dissonance and goes, “Oh, well, maybe I should do a little more research.”
So it has been proven, certainly to my satisfaction, that people’s impression of whether things are going in the right direction has everything to do with what other people told them. Their opinions were literally assigned to them by the party and by the fake news. So, yes, all you can take out from is the country moving in the right direction, the only thing you can take from that is that one side is winning, and everybody on the other side is going to say, “Yeah, it’s all going to hell.”
Policy Overlap
If you took, let’s say you made a list of all the things that Trump is doing that people would agree at least is getting some kind of result. How hard would it be to take all of his policies and just put them in a Democrat, and then have all the Democrats salute it because it’s coming from a Democrat? And the answer is: there might be an exception, but I feel like 100% of what Trump is doing or proposes doing, 100% of it, it feels like could have come from a Democrat not too long ago.
I would say 100% of it could have come from Bill Clinton. That wasn’t—that’s not ancient history. But something like everything he’s doing would be compatible with—a lot of it’s compatible with Obama, right? Obama didn’t love crime, and he didn’t love an open border, and he deported quite a few people. So that’s the way to think of this. Don’t think that the poll is measuring anything useful. All it is is people who have been brainwashed that their team is good, the other team is bad, and it really isn’t the policies. It really is not the policies. And it’s not even the candidate. You’re just not allowed to like the other side, and that’s how people answer the poll.
The Partisan View of Tariffs
What about tariffs? Can’t you easily imagine that a Democrat president had been the only one who ever came up with tariffs and said, “Yeah, you know what? Tariffs.” And then the Republicans would say, “Oh, of course you’re in favor of a tax.” But instead, the Republicans came up with it—Trump. And so what do the Democrats say? “Well, look at you, you’re taxing us.” So even something as basic as a tariff, I guarantee you, if a Democrat had been the only one to support that, like Trump was a little bit the only one, Democrats would have fallen in line and said it was genius.
Economic Indicators
Well, the good news is that gas prices are lower than they’ve been for the weekend since 2020. So last year they were 3.77 on average, and now it’s $3.15 on average. So energy’s down, eggs are down. I don’t know if prescription drugs are down, but they will be down if Trump gets his most favored nation stuff. So those are pretty good. I mean, eggs and energy and, yeah, some things are down. But I guess beef is way up, and housing is way up, and healthcare in general is way up. So it’s a mixed bag.
Trump’s Tariffs and the Courts
Well, a Federal Appeals Court ruled against Trump. Sorry, I fell asleep because it seems like every single freaking day is another story about an appeals court who tried to block Trump from doing what Trump wants to do. Specifically, the judge said that Trump’s tariffs are unlawful, but not every tariff, but only the tariffs that were put in place after Trump had declared an emergency power.
So there’s a 1977 Emergency Powers Act, and so he said, “These other countries are ripping us off, and so it’s an emergency.” Now, is that an emergency that you don’t have trade deals that you like? Well, that’s a little bit of a stretch. But that’s what he used. He said it was an emergency, and then the appeals court said, “That’s no emergency, so you don’t have the power to do that.” Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “Yes, we do, because he said it was a national emergency and we have that power.”
And I saw Tom Fitton did an analysis of the actual language of what Trump’s allowed to do, and it was a pretty good argument there. Pretty good argument that if you allow that he had the power to declare something an emergency—so you’d have to accept that he has that power and it’s not up to you to disagree with it, he just has that power that he can call it an emergency. And then if he does, there’s a good argument that tariffs would be well within the normal range of tools that he would have at his disposal if it’s an emergency. So even though it’s not specifically mentioned as a power, it’s sort of a common-sense interpretation that it would include at least that kind of a power. So we’ll see, see what the Supreme Court does. That would be—even though it’s not every one of his tariffs, I don’t know how he did the other ones, but maybe Congress has to give him that power first. So we’ll see.
Missouri Redistricting
Apparently, Missouri, according to Politico, Aaron Pelush is writing that Missouri is going to look into redistricting in a special session, sort of like California’s doing. If so, they think they would pick up one GOP seat. But apparently, we’re not hearing much from other Democrat states. So we thought that there would be what would happen is it would set off some mutually assured destruction where every state would gerrymander until everything was ridiculous. Well, it’s already gerrymandered enough that it’s ridiculous.
But it looks like the Republicans may be willing to go all the way on this, no matter what the Democrats do. So it looks like the Republicans are going to pick up a bunch—even if the Democrats went hard at it, they have fewer states that aren’t already gerrymandered. So the Republicans would come out ahead. But I wonder if the other Democrat states are trying to lay low just to make sure that it doesn’t become an all-out gerrymandering war, which they know they would lose. So it could be that even though people think that California will sort of match what happened in Texas, that if all they do is match it, maybe that’s enough. Hey, just keep your head down. If we could get away with just matching it, that’s our best-case scenario for a Democrat. But if we go out there and say, “We are Vermont”—I don’t know what which states are in play—but go out there and say, “We’re Vermont, and we’re going to join California and gerrymandering,” well, all that’s going to do is guarantee that every Republican state does it. I think every Republican state or most of them are going to do it just in case and just because they can.
But if you’re a Democrat, you might say to yourself, “Why don’t we just shut up about this and let California be our answer? They just matched Texas.” As long as you’re matching, there’s not as much argument that you’ve got to fight it to the last district, I guess. So I’m just wondering if Democrats are trying to lay low and see if it blows over. I don’t think it will. I think Trump has already put out the word: “You’re going to gerrymander, or else I’m going to make your life difficult.” So, surprise, Democrats, possibly.
Statins and Cholesterol
Are any of you following the story about statins? The drug statins. I remember some years ago—it was quite a while ago—that my doctor did whatever test… what is it for? So the statins are to lower your cholesterol. And when my cholesterol test came back and it was already as low as you’d want it to be, I remember my doctor saying, “Oh, you know, if your cholesterol were higher, I’d put you on a statin.” And then he told me that the studies were so positive for statins in unrelated areas that he said that if he could, he would put every one of his patients on statins, even if they didn’t have any cholesterol problem. Because he said it was just so good. I mean, it was just so good for your health in just so many different ways, and the science was so clear that he would just put everybody on statins if it were up to him.
Now, time goes by, and the current thinking—and I don’t know what’s real, all right? So I just know what I see on social media, so I can’t claim to know that any of this is true—but people are saying really, really bad things about statins. I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But now there is some indication—and again, I’m not going to say that I know that any of this is true—but there is some indication that having a low—having low cholesterol makes you higher chance of getting diabetes. So we’ve got 92 million people on statins, and many of them don’t even have any heart disease; they’re just told their cholesterol is too high. And because of that, they may or may not be giving themselves a higher chance of getting a blood sugar disease.
Now, again, I’m not your doctor, so you should not take any medical advice from me. Everybody understand that? I’m telling you what the world is talking about about statins. I’m not telling you what I think makes sense for you to do. And if you think you’re hearing that, you’re not hearing that. I’m just talking. You’re going to have to figure it out yourself on the medical stuff.
Maxine Waters and TDS
Well, Maxine Waters is pushing the idea that Trump needs to be taken out with the 25th Amendment because he’s so obviously crazy. Now, first thing I would say about Maxine Waters is, you may know she was replaced a while ago by a wax figurine of Maxine Waters, and unfortunately, they left it out in the sun a little bit too long. So what looks like Maxine Waters is actually a wax statue that’s partially melted, and that would explain her look. But she says there’s something wrong with this President.
So have you noticed the pattern, the trend? That whatever it is that the Democrats are complaining about is not real? Just not real. And I don’t know, maybe that’s a little bit the same on the other side. Maybe Republicans worry too much about things that aren’t real as well. But man, the Democrats with their imaginary issues. So it’s an imaginary—he’s the imaginary dictator who had an imaginary insurrection on January 6th, and there was an imaginary thing where he said something about neo-Nazis that we know to be a hoax. It’s all imaginary. Just—and that he’s doing it just for his own enrichment. All of it.
The Federal Reserve
So you may remember the other day I was saying I don’t understand what the Fed does, the Federal Reserve, and that if their main thing is setting the interest rates, how many people do they need to do that? It feels to me they probably just have some model or they sit around a meeting and say, “What do you think?” But why does it take thousands of employees? Now, they do a few other things.
But I saw a video by Chamath from the All-In Podcast. He’s like Madonna or any of the one-name-only kind of people, like Naval. He’s a one-name guy because his last name is hard to pronounce. So Chamath was saying, “What does the Fed actually do in 2025?” And because he’s a lot smarter than I am, I felt really good. Because I thought, “Oh, whew!” Because when you go in public—when you do what I do, you say a lot of opinions in public—it’s a little bit risky to say, “You know, I can’t figure out what the Federal Reserve does. What do they even do?” Because it makes you look like a dope, right? So when someone who is certifiably a lot smarter than almost everybody, like Chamath, says, “What does the Fed actually do?” I feel like, “Oh, okay, maybe I was sort of on the right track there a little bit.”
But they’re the “lender of last resort.” I think Chamath said they’d rather see the Treasury do that. They set monetary policy, they regulate banks—that probably takes a lot of people. And they’re a clearinghouse for payments, but it feels like that needs to be updated. So, yeah, and it doesn’t—and as Chamath pointed out, the Federal Reserve like gets together like once a month or something, while there is $130 trillion flying around the world, and they only get together once a month? Doesn’t that feel like it’s just something from the past? Yeah, I suspect if you looked at all the activities they do around just setting interest rates, that you could get rid of all of it. And you could just put people in a room and say, “Well, what do you think?” “Well, I don’t know, that jobs report looked a little weak.” It just doesn’t feel like necessarily they need to exist. Maybe their functions need to be just outsourced to other places.
China’s Stratosphere Turbine
China has a new source of power that is kind of fascinating. So it looks like it’s a dirigible, a lighter-than-air gas balloon kind of thing, but it’s shaped like a—I want to say man’s sex toy. In that it’s—let’s see, how do I describe this? It’s a hollow tube. And the tube part is where the gas is. So it’s like a thick, pillowy tube, and the center is a turbine—a wind turbine.
Because once you get into the stratosphere, apparently the wind is always blowing, and a lot harder than it blows on Earth. So one of the problems of wind energy is you can’t depend on it. But if you put this thing up in the stratosphere and it just sort of stays there because it’s full of gas, the wind will never stop and will be way stronger than on Earth. So you can generate actually some serious electricity up there.
Now the hard part will be getting it down to Earth. So the two possibilities they haven’t worked it out yet: one would be that they charge a battery up there, and then I guess it has to come down every night and discharge the battery. That doesn’t seem like it would work because the battery would be too heavy. And then the other possibility is there are some technologies for beaming things down wirelessly. So microwave, I think? I don’t know how hard it would be to hit that target on Earth with your microwave while you’re up there in the wind. So maybe there’s no way to get that energy down, but it’s kind of a cool idea.
Land Acknowledgments
Well, as you know, the DNC had their little meeting recently, summer meeting, and they opened it up with a “stolen land acknowledgment.” That’s where you say, “I’m sorry that the Native Americans used to own this land and the evil white people, mostly men, stole it from them. But we acknowledge that we stole it from them.”
Now, if you’re trying to rebuild a broken Democrat party that is collapsing in every possible way you can collapse, do you think that opening up your meeting by acknowledging that you’re thieves and you stole some land and you’re not going to give it back… do you feel like that’s the best way to scrub up your brand so that people are like, “Yeah, hell yeah! I want to be part of the thieves who say to your face that we stole your land and we’re not giving it back. Yeah, I feel like I’m on that team.”
Well, I just love Democrat strategist James Carville. On one hand, he’s full of TDS and he seems batshit crazy. On the other hand, he’s still their smartest guy. He’s a little bit batshit crazy, you know, a little bit of TDS, but he’s still their best guy. And when he gives them advice, I laugh when they don’t take it. And he was talking about that land acknowledgment. He goes, “Why bring it up during an election?” It’s funnier if you say it in James Carville’s voice. If you say it in my voice, it’s not that funny. “Why bring it up during an election?” See, nothing. It just sits there like a desiccated turd. But now I’m going to say the same sentence in James Carville talk, and watch how much better this is: “WHY BRING IT UP DURING AN ELECTION?!” It’s a lot funnier if you scream it like Carville. Yep, we’re land stealers and we’re not giving it back. We’re Democrats.
AI Video Generation
My feed on X is full of companies that make some kind of a video generation AI app. “Look at this 10-second video I did.” One of them’s up to about two minutes, I guess. But I feel like I want to jump into that space and say, “Hey, I’m a creator! I’ll just use these new AI tools and watch the movies I will make.” And then I see that they’re all limited to this few seconds.
And I say to myself, “Okay, if I jumped in and picked one of these many apps and then I became an expert in it and I really started to work on a project and maybe tried to make a movie—like a really commercially important thing—what is the most likely thing that would happen? If I became an expert and really started working on a project, what’s the most likely thing that would happen?”
The maker of the app goes out of business before I finish my project, and it’s not compatible with any other app. You can’t just take it from that point forward. That’s the most likely thing that would happen. So it doesn’t look like we have an industry where I could start a project and finish it. I feel like I could only start it. And then on top of that, the improvement in the technology is happening so quickly that if I do all of my research and find the very best, best video generator—and I go, “All right, this is definitely the best one, so I’ll use this one”—and then I spend a bunch of time to learn it and I start making my project, how long would it be before there’s one that’s so much better? And it might even be one day later. That it’s so much better that it would be insane for me to keep using the one I started with.
So we’re at this weird point in this video thing where it can’t quite do something really big. It can make little viral videos, which have some value but minor. And it doesn’t make sense as a creator to learn any one of them in particular because you can’t trust it’ll be there. So I feel like this is going to be, obviously, a gigantic part of the economy at some point, but I feel like it’s going to be nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing until it isn’t. So this is one of those ones that’s going to be like, “Well, it’s a little bit better, it’s a little bit better… BOOM!” Suddenly it’ll be everybody can do everything.
Robot Surgeons
There’s now a robot—I saw some Mario Nawfal post on this—that can perform surgery on an egg. So they can actually pull the shell off it without injuring the egg. It’s so fine. And at the risk of sounding unkind, how good would the robot surgeon have to be before you would prefer it to the DEI surgeon? You know that all of you are thinking, “All right, now that we’ve demonstrated for sure that DEI has resulted in way less qualified people getting accepted into medical school… it’s not like it used to be.”
It used to be if you got through medical school, I really did trust that you knew what you were doing. Now I don’t, because the criteria changed. And this has nothing to do with anybody’s race or gender. It’s just if you change the criteria and really focus on something other than merit, well, everybody knows how that turns out. So I don’t have to be an expert or do any research. I just have to know how good the robot is. And when the robot gets to the point where they say, “This is definitely better than people”—and we’re probably right on the cusp of saying that, that it’s better than people—then why would you ever go with a human again?
So I think the surgery job might be one of those that is untouched by the machines for another several years. Then there’s going to be a point, sort of like self-driving cars: they’ll be like, “Oh well, you know, they’re not really making much of a dent,” then suddenly it’ll be nothing but self-driving cars. It’s going to be nothing but robot surgeons because once they’re just way better than humans, why? Why would you ever use a human? It wouldn’t make any sense at all. And certainly the robot would have a better chance of damaging less stuff around the operation than a human would.
World Leaders Meeting
Well, apparently there’s a big meeting coming up—maybe today or real soon—with President Xi of China and Putin and Kim Jong Un. And it’s the first time that the three of them are going to share a stage together. I guess it’s China’s got a military parade, and that was the reason for inviting them.
And here’s my humorous take on that: I think all three of them hate the other. I feel like they hate each other. What do you think? Do you think that when they get together—Xi and Putin and Kim—that they’re like, “Ah, my bud! Ah, bro!” and that they just really like each other? I think Kim probably feels like they control him too much; they have too much influence on him. So he probably hates them both because they’re an undue influence on him. But he has to get along with them, so he’ll pretend. Putin probably hates President Xi for the same reason. President Xi probably hates Putin for the same reason. I think they hate each other. They’ll pretend they don’t.
DC Crackdown
The White House, according to Fox News, says that the crackdown in DC, where the federal government surged in some troops—they’ve made almost 1,400 arrests. 12 known gang members arrested, 5 missing children rescued, 140 firearms seized, and 50 homeless camps cleared. That’s pretty good. That’s pretty darn good. Trump is winning so hard on crime. It’s just wonderful to see. We’ll see, but he’s winning hard.
Government Spending Cuts
Here are some things the government has decided to spend less money on lately. You know I told you that the thing that Trump and Elon Musk especially brought to the government is competition to see who can cut the most. I feel like before their incentive was to spend the most because whoever could control the most budget and get the most stuff done would look the best. But somehow now, “looking the best” means can you cut the budget in your area? So we’ve seen Bill Pulte making cuts, we’ve seen talk about the Fed doesn’t need that building. We’re seeing cuts all over the place.
So here are a few: Trump is cutting 679 million. Boop! There you go. Meanwhile, RFK Jr. has canceled 122 million. Boop!
And then Kristi Noem canceled thousands of FEMA contracts after DOGE found that a lot of it was waste. OAN is reporting on this too. So how much? Let’s see… she got 3 million for that, $1.6 million for that. So a bunch of millions.
It feels to me like Congress could have made a budget by just taking the current budget and telling everybody “cut 10%” and just calling it a day, or whatever percentage they needed to cut to get it to balance. But the level of—I won’t call it necessarily waste—but things you didn’t absolutely have to spend money on is crazy.
And so Mike Benz has totally “Benz-pilled” me, and now I’m seeing things through his frame. And the one thing that seems obvious is that you can only get rich by robbing the government. Now, you might be a big tech company that’s working with the CIA, and then the CIA says, “Well, we’ll make sure that you make billions of dollars because you’re playing well with us.” That would be robbing the government. Sorry, my cat is ripping up my legs right now as I’m trying to talk. Gary, come here. I’ve got to take care of this, otherwise I’ll need Band-Aids. Which one are you? Gary. It’s Gary, of course. Gary is on my lap now.
So let me finish the Benz-pilled view of the government. So it seems to me that you’re either a big company who uses the government to open a market for you or something, but the big companies are ripping off the government directly and indirectly. And then all these charities and NGOs appear to be nothing but ways to rip off the government. And there look like there’s just thousands—thousands—of essentially criminal enterprises in which people are ripping off the government successfully. You saw the news about the big ring of people ripping off… was it Medicaid or something? Like half a billion dollars or something. I feel like every single one of our budgets in the government, somebody’s figured out how to rob it. And that when I look at that $2 trillion a year in excess deficit, I really wonder if 100% of that is theft. Legalized theft, but basically big companies and entities figuring out how to drain the government without giving enough in return back. That’s what it feels like.
Nuclear Battery Skepicism
Allegedly—I don’t believe this story—but allegedly China has developed a nuclear battery that’s only the size of a coin that can run for 50 years without recharging. So it could run your cell phone for 50 years. Do you believe that there is a commercial-grade nuclear battery and that people will just put it in their phone? How do you throw it away? How do you get rid of your… doesn’t it seem like that’s not really something that could ever work, the nuclear battery? You say it’s true? Well, here’s what I believe is true: I believe it works in a lab. I believe that they can demonstrate that it makes power. But do you think that the real commercial world is ready for a nuclear battery that everybody has in their pocket? I mean, it will just be psychologically too scary. And I know what you’re going to say, “But Scott, they thought of all the safety problems and they got it worked out.” Well, maybe. But it just doesn’t feel like people are going to want to put a—actually, I’ve got a cat crawling up my back now. It doesn’t feel like that’s going to be a real thing in the market. It might work in a lab.
Gaza War Death Toll
How many people do you think have died in the Gaza war so far? Just the Palestinian side. Reportedly, the Gaza Health Ministry says 63,000. Stop it, stop it. Don’t do it. I know what you’re going to say. If you’re an NPC, what do you say now? “Scott, Scott, nobody can believe the death count from the Gaza Health Ministry! Nobody believes that number!” Well, I hear that. I tell you all the time: don’t believe any numbers that come from a war zone. Right? You’ve heard me say that. So you all know that I understand that you can’t believe any number that comes from a war zone. The exception being the Holocaust, of course—those numbers are exact. But that’s the only one. The only one. I learned that from the ADL.
But every other number that comes from a war zone is suspect. So I went to Grok, and I wondered—again, not that I’ll know the right answer—but I wondered how Grok handles it. And I was surprised. So according to Grok, the Israeli intelligence services and the Israeli military basically trust that number. But the politicians in Israel say, “You can’t trust that number; it’s coming from the Gaza Health Ministry.” Is that true? Did Grok get that right? Is it true that within Israel, the military says, “Yeah, that’s about right, we trust that number,” and but the politicians are saying, “Oh no, it’s nowhere near that.”
I don’t know. So apparently there have been other estimates beyond the Gaza Health Ministry, and they’re actually in one case higher—one estimate is 70,000. Now, is that reliable? No, I mean, somebody just had a different method for calculating. But there is the thought that the Gaza Health Ministry number does not include any bodies that haven’t been discovered, you know? So how many are in tunnels that have been collapsed? We don’t know. Do we? Would the people who worked in those tunnels say, “Ah, we lost George in the tunnel”? None of them are named George. But is somebody reporting all the ones lost in the tunnels? So somewhere in that 60 to 70,000 dead, most of them are civilians.
Rationalizing Strategy
And I would like to harken back to the early days of that conflict. Do you remember people yelling at me for suggesting that the death count might go kind of high? And all the people who thought they knew everything about everything said, “Scott, you fool! Don’t you know these will be precision strikes and the whole thing will probably be done in two weeks? Yeah, I’d be surprised if the death count goes over, I don’t know, 10,000.” And do you remember me saying, “I don’t know that it’s going to be short, and I don’t think the death count is going to stay that low.” Well, here we are.
Now I remind you that my opinion on Israel—and this is the way you should treat it too—is: why would I have an opinion? Why would I have an opinion? I have an opinion about America. And if this were an American conflict primarily, I would say, “You know, people like me who are public figures were part of the figuring out how to get it right.” So I would feel an obligation as an American to definitely have an opinion and definitely tell you what it was. But if you’re observing another country, the only filter that makes sense is their own self-interest—their national self-interest.
So if I look at Israel, I ask this question: is Israel acting in a way that is probably—you know, everything’s just risk, so probably—are they acting in a way that’s probably in the long-term best interest of Israel as a country? And I think the answer is yes. Not that you like it, or not that I like it, and it certainly doesn’t matter what you and I think about the ethical and moral nature of anything that’s happening there. Just, it’s not our business.
If the United States were in that situation, would we be acting similarly? Well, I could argue that maybe we have been in that situation and maybe we did act similarly—meaning that we acted in our national best interest, even though it was really, really not good for, let’s say, the Native Americans, just to pick one example. Yes, countries act aggressively in their own national self-interest. Israel is really good at it. Doesn’t mean they get everything right, because that’s not an option. But they’re really good at it.
And I also say, if the Hamas and the Palestinians had full power—or maybe even as much power as Israel has—what would that look like? Well, I think it would look like the reverse. That the Jews living in the area would be in danger all the time, more danger than they’re already in. And it would probably look like the reverse. So it’s not up to me to put a judgment on any of this stuff. If it were Americans, I would definitely put a judgment on it because that’s the team I play for. But if I’m just watching, I’m not judging them morally or ethically. I’m just saying they have one job: to do what’s in their own country’s best interest. Are they doing that? Kind of looks like it. It looks like Israel’s getting bigger because they’re going to own Gaza and they didn’t own it before.
So, in 100 years if you come back, will it look like Israel taking complete control of Gaza was a good idea? Probably. Probably. And they might even treat Netanyahu as like a national hero because he expanded the size of Israel. Yeah, they’re doing a really good job of pursuing their own self-interest, which doesn’t mean it’s in our interest. Doesn’t mean it’s in my interest. But it’s also none of my business except for what we’re paying.
So I do separate the question of financial support. But I also think that’s more complicated than we make it. We think it’s simple: “Hey, don’t give your money to anybody.” But probably we’re getting something out of it. And I don’t think any of us know the full situation of what we’re getting out of it, other than our weapons makers are using that money that we give to Israel—Israel uses some portion of it to buy our weapons. So some of it comes back, but not to the taxpayer directly.
Anyway, that’s my view. And I get tired of the people who are arguing morality and ethics. Nobody thinks it’s moral or ethical to kill a bunch of children and 60,000 civilians. And think about the ones that their lives have been permanently ruined, either by injury or economic desperation. No, there’s no way you can rationalize it. You just have to say: people operate in their self-interest.
All right, that is all I had to say. As I mentioned before, after the show, which is right now, Owen Gregorian will be hosting a Space. So go to X and look for Owen Gregorian, just search for him, he’ll pop right up, and then you can click on the Spaces prompt. But I will also be talking to the beloved subscribers on Locals just for a minute or two while Owen gets set up. And the rest of you, thanks for coming. Hope you come back tomorrow. All right. Oh, wow, I’ve got more viewers on… oh no, I’m looking at the viewer numbers. I don’t think you see them, so I’ll tell you. It looks like YouTube is 3,600, Locals 716 people, and Rumble 1,100 watching it live. Then usually X might be eventually be 30,000 people. All right, everybody, I’ll see you tomorrow unless you’re a beloved Locals subscriber. In that case, I’ll see you in half a minute.