Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-09-10

There they are. Come on in. I will check on the stock market for you while you’re finding a seat. Grab a beverage; it’s almost time for your favorite thing.

Tesla is up a little bit, S&P is up a little bit, Bitcoin is up a little bit. We’ll take it. I think I know why, and I’ll tell you in a minute.

The Simultaneous Sip

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It’s called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you’ve never had a better time in your whole life. But if you’d like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper 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. And 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.

Well done. Let me just say, you’re so good at sipping. Impressive.

Inflation Report

All right, what’s in the news? Here’s why the stock market might be looking good. There’s a new inflation report, and inflation is well below what was expected and estimated: 2.8% for the core inflation versus the 3.5% they thought it might be, because it had been 3.4%.

Do you believe that? Or do you think there will be some kind of adjustment later? Remember, all data is fake, or out of context, or short-term is different from long-term, or there’s some kind of anomaly in it. So don’t get too excited. But if this were real, it would convince the Fed to lower interest rates, right? Maybe.

The Elon Musk Effect

Here’s an update on what happens if you have a piece of content that Elon Musk boosts. Now, unfortunately, it was not in my actual account. Someone else had made a clip of something I did on this show, and Elon liked it enough to repost it. It is up to 20 million views. That’s what happens when Elon hits two buttons.

Speaking of Elon, he was appearing by video at the All-In Summit and had a few things to say that were pretty interesting. He said that if AI and robots don’t solve our national debt, we’re toast. Now, do you feel comfortable knowing that the only way we’re going to survive is if AI and robots somehow can figure out how to solve our national debt? Is that something you’d bet on? I think the AI and the robots will solve our national debt. I can’t tell if he believes that’s a likely scenario, because in theory, it could boost our economic everything by amounts we can’t imagine right now. So you could follow the argument. But would you bet on it—that AI and robots would somehow create enough economic whatever that we wouldn’t just spend more if we made more? If the government got, let’s say, greater tax income, do you think they’d pay down the debt? I don’t know.

The Future of General-Purpose Robots

I’m getting more and more worried that AI will never be sufficient to run a general-purpose robot. There will always be lots of robots, but they’ll be doing one thing, like vacuuming your floor, or being on an assembly line, or making coffee. There’s going to be a ping-pong robot, there’s a badminton robot, there might be a shirt-folding robot. But I don’t think we’re ever going to get to a general robot where you could just show it how to do something and it could work out the things that you didn’t show it directly. I’m starting to think it’s not going to happen.

Were we not talking about these robots being introduced within the next couple of months? A year back, or a year and a half back, were we not saying that by the end of 2025, we’d have what we need for the robots? I don’t really see the general-purpose robots. And still, whenever there’s a demonstration, the robot is doing exactly one thing. For 25 or 30 years, I’ve been seeing news reports about somebody who built a robot that would do exactly one thing. It doesn’t really look like we’ve made gigantic progress. The physical body of the robot looks like there’s a lot of progress, but I don’t think I’m seeing anything in our current versions of AI, or even the way we do AI or the way we train it, that would create a robot-quality AI. There’s some indication that we’re hitting some kind of a training plateau already. Is there some unlimited amount of new training material that our current models could get us to a robot that could just sort of live with you and figure stuff out the same as you? It doesn’t look like it.

Don’t you believe that if we were going to have that in another year, which is the current estimate, we would already see demos that would just blow your mind? There’s a long cycle lead time before you’re actually in the market and you can make them in scale and everything. So if they were going to be for sale one year from now, the demos you would already be seeing would be fully functional. So, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.

According to Joe Wilkins writing for Futurism, there’s some data that shows that AI use is actually now declining at large companies. I don’t know if that’s really a useful number, because you’d expect that there would be something like a whole bunch of excitement, people would overbuy it, and then over time, they would say it wasn’t quite doing what I wanted it to do, and so it’d fall off a little bit, excitement would dry up. Then people would start finding legitimate uses for it, and then it would start growing back. So it’s not too surprising that there would be a pullback after the initial stuff. I don’t know if that’s telling us anything, or even if the data is real.

The Case for Mars vs. Earth Orbit

Another Elon Musk thing: he said at that All-In Summit that the bigger goal than the moon is Mars. He talked about wanting to make Mars completely self-sustaining in around 30 years. Now, the argument that he makes is that there are always natural disasters and every planet will eventually be destroyed by something, whether it’s an asteroid or we nuke it ourselves. So we have to have at least one other space escape point, and that’s what Mars would be.

But it raises one question with me: wouldn’t the easiest place to build a new non-Earth civilization be just in space, in orbit around the current Earth? That way, you could get back to Earth, you could have supplies from Earth, at the same time building up your 30 years or whatever it takes to be self-sustaining just as a satellite. And then if you saw something coming, like “uh-oh, there’s a meteor heading toward Earth,” you might say it’s time to orbit another planet. But would it be easier to preserve life in orbit because you could go back and forth so often while you’re getting to the point of full self-sufficiency? Maybe there’s some reason that Mars is the right answer.

The Keto Diet and Depression Study

Here’s some science that I probably could have told you how it was going to turn out. Emily Caldwell’s writing for The Ohio State University. Apparently, a keto diet was linked to a 70% reduction in depression symptoms in college students. But because it was a study that they didn’t do a control group—there was no placebo control group sort of thing—wouldn’t you imagine that if you said to a bunch of college students, “Hey, I’ve got a proposition for you. We’re going to put you in a scientific study, we’re going to fix you delicious food, you won’t have to shop, prepare it, or clean up—we’ll just deliver you stuff on disposable dishes and it will be delicious and healthy. And by the way, keto has lots of good stuff in it, so you don’t have to worry about not having good stuff. And then we’ll have contact with you and we’ll be checking in with you.”

Don’t you think that that would almost guarantee that people would have less depression? Just being less lonely and having a purpose, just being part of the research, that alone—no matter what they were researching—if they gave you lots of points of contact and you thought you were doing something useful, and then you also had the placebo effect of believing this looks like healthy food, it’s certainly going to fix many of my problems. You put all that together and it wouldn’t matter what the nutritional value of the food was. I would expect people to say they had fewer depression symptoms just because of the way they were treated—basically treated like kings—and they probably didn’t have to pay for their own food. So if you got free food and people fussed over you and asked your opinion and you weren’t as lonely, yeah, if the food was no more healthy than the other food you had, you’d probably feel a little less depressed. But I also think eating right is good for your brain, so I do believe that it’s healthy.

Apple Health and Translation

Apple had some announcements. They’re making a thinner, better phone with better cameras and stuff. But the big news, if you can call it that, is that Apple is going harder into health-sensing stuff. So they’ve got some stuff built into their AirPods now that can basically monitor everything: their watch, their AirPods, and their phone are all going to have lots more health-related apps.

But also live translation in five languages. How cool is that? That you got to be alive at the time when humans could actually put a little earbud in an ear and it would translate in real-time five different languages. Just hold that in your mind for a moment: that you’re alive when that became just a consumer product. It’s not even special; you can buy it at the store. But I guess they can also now measure everything from your sleep to your ovulation to your sleep apnea, your temperature, your vitals, your heartbeat, your hypertension. Apple is going to save your life.

MAHA Commission Initiatives

The MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) commission released a big strategy yesterday to improve children’s health because children have many chronic health problems that we didn’t used to have in my childhood. They’re still trying to figure out why. But as part of that, they’ve got more than 120 initiatives, including advancing research on autism, pesticides, vaccine injury, water quality, and all the other stuff.

120 initiatives. That’s a lot of initiatives. Is that even manageable? If I told you that something was happening and it would be 120 initiatives, would you say to yourself, “Wow, that’s good. That’s a lot of initiatives. That can only go right with that many initiatives. Even if a few of them went bad, you still might have 80 or 90 great initiatives.” Or do you say to yourself with the Dilbert filter, hypothetically, the most number of initiatives that any entity can handle would be about five, and anything beyond that will just become a cluster-you-know-what?

Well, I hope—but on the other hand, to be less skeptical, there probably are at least 120 environmental risks that are going to require somebody to work full-time to figure out what’s what on just that one risk. So yeah, I can see it. 120. Just the News is reporting on that.

Groundhog Day with Trump and the Courts

Would you be surprised—I know this will shock you—that a judge blocked something that Trump wanted to do? No, really, I’m not making that up. There was a judge who decided that Trump wasn’t allowed to do a thing that was just part of his normal job. Does it feel like Groundhog Day? Just every day you wake up and is there another story about another judge blocking another Trump thing that he just wanted to do, which he totally has a right to do? Yes.

And now the judge is blocking the firing of that Fed Governor, Lisa Cook. I’m not even going to look into the details of that story because I imagine it’ll get appealed and I imagine that, in the end, the President can do the things that are the job of the President. So another probably just a bump in the road.

Cartel Arrests and Smuggling Boats

Another one of those smuggler boats has been destroyed, but this time the Navy was nice enough to let the humans get off first and the drugs get off. So they captured a bunch of drugs and then they very impressively blew up the smuggler boat and sank it.

In other news, The Post Millennial is reporting that over 600 suspected Sinaloa Cartel members were arrested by the DEA in a 23-state sweep. 600 cartel members. Now, what is the first question you ask yourself when you hear that 600 cartel members just from one cartel—there’s more than one cartel—but 600 of them were arrested in 23 states?

What’s the first question? Well, my first question is, how many are there? Did 600 mean we got most of them? Is that like, “Well, good news, we got 95% of them”? Or, or did they get 2% of them, or 1%? Doesn’t it really matter what percent they got? Have I ever told you too many times that if the only thing they tell you is the number or the percentage, but they don’t tell you both, somebody’s trying to BS you? So it’s making me wonder if we’re supposed to think that we’re much safer now because 600 have been picked up, or if we knew that there were really 20,000 of them, would you feel much safer? So I feel like we’re being managed a little bit. It’s possible that we have no idea how many there are, but an estimate would be useful.

ICE Midway Blitz in Chicago

Apparently, ICE is going into Chicago to do its job, arresting people. It’s going to be called Operation Midway Blitz. That part apparently is totally legal as far as I know because it’s the Fed’s job to do exactly that. So they’re not dealing with crime in general; that’s just the immigration problem.

Psychogenic Illness at Heathrow

According to The Guardian, there was an airport—Heathrow—where part of the airport was evacuated because they thought there was some kind of poison gas or something. 21 people fell ill. But when they looked into it and they analyzed all the air and everything, they determined that there was no hazard whatsoever and that the best guess is that it was a psychogenic illness, meaning that it was all in their heads.

Now, do you believe that 21 people could be so ill that they became a statistic? 21 people falling ill. Do you feel there’s any chance that could be just in their heads? The answer is: yeah, easily. That’s not even hard. You could reproduce this effect fairly easily. You would just get a few actors to go into a public, crowded space and say, “Oh, I can barely breathe. What is that?” and then everybody would smell it. “I smell something too! It’s got me too!” Yeah, it would be about that easy. You couldn’t get everybody, so fewer than 20% might be affected by something like that, but that would be enough that you would wonder if some major contagion just broke out. So no, it’s really easy for that kind of stuff to be in your head.

UFO/UAP Whistleblower Hearing

How many of you are following the news about the new whistleblower reports about UFOs? There was a big meeting, I guess a congressional hearing, in which some witnesses came in and had some amazing stories of UFO spotting and encounters. One of them included a glowing orb thing that they thought was some kind of alien spaceship, or at least nothing we know about.

And apparently, they have video, which they showed. It’s grainy. I know you’re surprised it’s grainy. But yeah, it’s blurry and grainy and black and white. Can you believe it? And it’s a UFO. I mean, how could those two things possibly happen at the same time? What are the odds that something grainy and blurry and black and white would be the only way that they’d get a picture of a UFO?

Okay, but now they’ve got a picture of what they call a Hellfire missile—I don’t know how they know that—allegedly intercepting it, but bouncing off it, basically not affecting it. So that must be alien, right? Okay, I’m not even a little bit persuaded that they have a video of an alien that just happens to look like a glowing orb that for some reason—and I don’t know what that reason would be—that we shot a Hellfire missile at it. Do you really believe that we shot a Hellfire missile at a glowing orb without knowing what the heck it was? Or were we under attack and somehow the news didn’t catch that Earth was in an intergalactic fight with a superior technology from another alien race and we’re just finding out about it now?

What are the odds that we fired a Hellfire missile at it, whatever it was? Pretty low. So, yes, there’s a claim and there’s a grainy video that you’ve come to expect, sort of Loch Ness Monster style, Bigfoot style. So no, I was not convinced by that.

And then there were these other military whistleblowers talking about how they had personally witnessed things and they were being quite persecuted in a whole variety of ways—things were happening that would be suspicious except if you understood them as revenge. To which I said, well, I won’t go over everything that the gentleman said, but do you believe that there’s one person who saw five major UFOs, including one that was as big as a house? Do you believe that one person saw five of them at one military base? Does that pass your sniff test? And the rest of the base was just like, “Doo doo doo. No, look up, look up, there’s another one. Third one today.”

Okay, no, I don’t believe any of that. And then I don’t believe the stories of revenge and the reason they can’t get jobs and everything. Absolutely none of it sounds credible to me. So, I hate to ruin your fun, but I’m going to say that there was not a 100-foot triangle flying low over Virginia’s Langley Air Force Base. Maybe. I would love to be wrong. I would love to eat crow and apologize for being such an arrogant brick about my disbelief of the UFOs. But whether or not the UFOs are real, the way it’s being presented just doesn’t have any credibility at all in my opinion. This one guy saw five unexplained incidents. And then there was a report that the military had been regularly destroying all police records every three years, including these reports. Yeah, none of that I believe.

Crime Statistics and Social Design

Well, Representative Jasmine Crockett’s making a little news. She was on CNN and she says she believes that 80% of the most violent crime in our country is white supremacy. Jasmine, Jasmine, Jasmine. Don’t you wonder if she believes what she says? I don’t think she does, but it’d be funny if she did.

However, I’ll tell you what the big news is if you’re on social media. If you’re in the right-leaning social media especially, there is a lot of what I’ll call racial bluntness happening—a lot of white people and sometimes black people talking about what they say is a huge problem of black violent crime against white people. Now, you’ve all heard the statistics and you can decide if you think that that’s a big crime or not. Most of the things that people say about this topic have all been said.

But there are a few things that maybe have not been said yet, believe it or not. So I’d like to add one. Apparently, I saw a Douglas Mackey post on this. Apparently, The New York Times had decided that they would spell “Black” with a capital B as in a Black man, but “white” would be a small w. I guess they had some explanation for that, for why the white would be a small w. But I think we can all agree that whatever they say is the reason that that’s okay, that’s not the reason. Whatever is going on here, it’s not what they say. That’s the one we can rule out. No, it’s whatever is your worst suspicion about why they only capitalize Black and not white. It’s that. It’s whatever is your worst suspicion, I guarantee it. It’s that.

So that’s going on. But then I saw some people weighing in on social media who said what I would consider the most obvious thing you would say. The most NPC thing you would say is that it’s not about race, it’s about income. And if everybody made the same income, then you wouldn’t see this disparity. Do you buy that? Here’s what I’ll add to that. If it were true that income is the direct thing that causes violence, then there wouldn’t be any places that are poor and also low violent crime. Am I right? But there are. There are places that are poor and don’t have much crime. So it can’t be true that being poor automatically generates violent crime at some higher than normal rate because it simply doesn’t happen everywhere.

So if you know that’s not what it is, what is it? And I know you’re going to say culture, because that’s the next thing you say, because it’s safer than the alternatives. So you say culture. I would say I would replace that with “design.” Design. It might not be intentional design, but the way some communities are organized, they couldn’t possibly succeed even if you just saw it on paper. Like, all right, tell me just give me the facts—how are you organized? Oh, okay. Well, that’s not going to work. Probably create a lot of crime. Even on paper, it doesn’t look like it’d work.

And what I mean by design, if I were to give a positive example of good design—I’ve made this example before—but there’s a person you should follow on social media called King Randall. He’s a young black guy who’s got a school for kids. They’re mostly but not 100% black. And he’s just trying to teach kids basic life skills. Now, I would call that good design because probably he’s becoming a role model for people who may not have a dad at home or maybe if they do, he’s not the best role model. So they’ve got at least one positive role model who cares about them and teaches them useful things and makes them confident. And he specifically teaches them not to think as victims. Now, that would be a design. Would you call that a culture? Well, you could if you want to. But I would say that King Randall has simply designed a situation that affects probably hundreds of people by now. And on paper, you would know that that would create more successful people. If you asked me to look, “Do you think his students—let’s say people who have spent more than a year with him—would I expect them to have a high violent crime rate?” Nope. Nope, I would not expect them to have a high violent crime rate.

So, design. You could design a system that just simply didn’t cause as much violent crime. All right, that’s not the only variables involved, but it’s a lot of them. And then you also have to ask yourself, is there any correlation between what makes somebody poor and what makes them violent? Because in both cases, isn’t there something in common, like the people who can’t figure out how to make money may have to resort to what they can figure out in some cases, which might be violence? So it does seem like it’s not the poverty per se; it’s whatever caused the poverty.

Pharma Ads and Government Oversight

According to Dr. Marty Makary, the FDA—so the government used to send out warnings to pharmaceutical companies doing commercials on TV, or doing ads, I guess just ads. And they used to do hundreds of notices because that’s how many times the pharma ads would be misleading. Hundreds of times per year. And that sort of died down until under Biden it went down to zero. Zero times they told the pharma, “Hey, that’s misinformation.” But apparently, the Trump administration’s going to crank that back up and you’ll get a little bit more honesty from those commercials.

Trump and the Epstein Birthday Card

Do you remember the story about allegedly Trump drew a little naughty birthday card for Epstein? And allegedly—and there’s a debate over whether it’s really his work—it had some weird little message, kind of cryptic, and there was a crude drawing of just the outline of a woman’s body, no detail, and his signature. And some say the signature is where the pubic hair would have been. But I don’t know, maybe that’s just also just the place he signed it. Maybe it had nothing to do with that.

But I’ll give you my opinion now that I’ve seen it. Because before we were only hearing about it, but now we’ve seen it. And my take is: remember how I always say Trump is a great writer, just one of the best writers? It’s just not the way he writes. And I doubt there’s anything about the fact that it was X number of years ago that changed him from whatever wrote that to the way he writes now, which I often say is some of the best writing in the world. I mean, it’s just world-class writing, his posts on Truth and anything he writes, basically. He’s an amazing, amazing writer. So to imagine that one of the best writers you’ve ever seen would also have been in that context, where there was quite a bit of writing on the card, to imagine that he was also the worst writer—I mean, it’s not even close. Whoever wrote the card is not a good writer. Like, not even a little bit.

So I guess the White House is denying that it’s actually his. I’m going to say I would back them on that. Anything’s possible, right? Anything’s possible. But I think I’d back them on that. It doesn’t look like his, I mean not even a little bit. So I’ll go with that. But you never know.

Israel and Hamas in Qatar

So as you know by now, maybe, Israel bombed I guess it was five Hamas leaders who were in Qatar, because Qatar hosts them and knew they were there and explicitly allowed them to be there, even though they were wanted as terrorists by Israel. So Israel, which I don’t think anybody was really expecting, bombed them because they were all in the same place for some reason.

And Trump just weighed in and he actually sort of criticized Israel, wink wink. Actually, I don’t know, maybe he’s really mad. But let me just tell you what he said. He said he was just notified that day and he said he did not approve of the bombing of a sovereign nation that is our ally. So he was taking Qatar’s side, saying it was an inappropriate bombing, and he said he’s working very hard for peace, meaning with Gaza. And that that bombing did not advance our or Israel’s goals. But then he did say that he’s happy about Hamas leadership being eliminated, that that’s a good thing.

So he managed to actually try to keep himself out of it. Who knows how much conversation, if any, happened before the attack? But he managed to make a story where we’re just finding out about it and we don’t love it, but at least something good came out of it—you know, getting rid of the five leaders. So I guess he’s trying to have it both ways to get the benefit of having, let’s say, a little more pressure on Hamas for peace, without saying that we were part of it. So if I were to judge him on skill level, pretty good. Pretty, pretty good. Yeah, I mean, what would he say? Would he say, “Oh, I didn’t know anything about it”? Which is sort of what he was saying. It’s a good answer. Good political answer.

Job Report Revisions

Well, as you know by now, maybe, the jobs numbers for last year were off by over 900,000. Nearly a million. Off by a million. And that they were downward revised. So there was a fake impression that we were doing well under Biden, but in fact, we were doing not so well if you count jobs.

You might know that I often say the economy is complicated, but if jobs are good, you can usually depend on figuring everything else out. But if jobs are bad, then you don’t have much to work with. It’s just a much harder deal, especially if you’re $36 trillion in debt. So it’s a big, big deal that instead of being job-positive, we were job-negative and we were lied to. I remind you that all data is fake, even things that I relied on on the podcast today. You can’t really believe any data. That’s the world you live in. And the sooner you realize that you can’t trust any data—just any—I mean, you still have to make decisions, so you have to sometimes act like you trust it or just take a leap because you gotta choose yes or no, so you gotta do something. But no, if you trust data, it’s a mistake.

I saw a post on X by Chamath Palihapitiya from the All-In Podcast. And he said, “Now can we admit it?” I think he’s talking about the jobs reports being revised. He said, “Now can we admit the Fed is woefully ill-equipped to set monetary policy in an economy as dynamic and complicated as the US in 2025? Add in their reliance on useless and wrong data, and it’s a recipe for disaster.” So separately, Chamath had talked about how they only meet every so often, so it’s sort of almost like horse-and-buggy kind of technology. So they have a bad process, they’re not very fast, and their data may be completely wrong, and they may be too late. So why do we pay them? We got questions.

Vaccine Safety Hearing

All right, how many of you saw, I guess it was a Senate hearing on the safety of vaccinations? And they had a lawyer who must—looks like he has a lot of experience in that, suing people over vaccine injury. Aaron Siri. That’s interesting. That must be so annoying to have your last name activate digital devices all over the world. But he was really good.

And one of the things that he claims is that there was a study that 10 years ago found that of unvaccinated kids, 17% of them had chronic health issues. But of vaccinated children, 57% of them had at least one chronic health issue. Now, do you know why you never saw that study? It’s because they had that result. So his claim is that they realized, whoever did the study, realized that they would all be fired or lose their job or never be able to be happy again if they published that, because it would be so counter to the entire medical establishment. So they put it in a drawer.

But what they found is that within the vaccinated group, there were 262 people with ADHD. In the unvaccinated group, there were—take a guess. 262 people with ADHD in the vaccinated group. Now, we’re not talking about COVID, by the way. Sorry, I probably confused you. This is not about COVID. It’s about childhood vaccinations, you know, where there are as many as 70 of them the kid gets. And so they were looking at, I think they looked at the combination of them. So you could just look at kids who got all their vaccinations, like all of them, versus the ones that didn’t get any. And 262 of the vaccinated ones had ADHD. And the number of unvaccinated people who had ADHD was… zero. Zero. Yep, zero.

Now, remember, all data is fake. So why would you believe what you’ve been told so far? You’ve been told all your life vaccinations were healthy and good and they’ve been tested and don’t worry about it. But if you don’t believe that now, why would you believe the new thing? Why would you think the new study’s accurate? Well, it does have that feeling of accuracy, doesn’t it? Because there’s nobody who could make money by that study, and it was shut down, which is exactly what you would have expected.

So I’m not saying I know it’s accurate, because remember, I don’t want to be a sucker and assume that some data is accurate and some isn’t, when we live in a world where mostly it’s all inaccurate. But I don’t know. Zero? Zero ADHD in one group? I feel as though there’s a very good chance that RFK Jr. is going to have a reputational turnaround like nobody’s business. It might be one for the ages. Do you realize what might be happening? We might be on the verge of finding out that that nut-job RFK Jr., that crazy bastard who’s always spreading that misinformation—we might be finding out he was right all along. Maybe not about 100%, but there may be some nuance there that is not 100% right, but that would be true of everybody.

All right, so this lawyer Siri—whose name I won’t pronounce—he was a really good lawyer. So of course he’s asked the following question by Democratic Senator Blumenthal. He said, “Aren’t you a doctor?” Because he talks like that. “Aren’t you a doctor?” So what would you say if you’re a lawyer who specializes, it sounds like has lots of experience in this domain, as a lawyer but not as a doctor? And so he’s going to try to impugn his expertise by saying, “Aren’t you a doctor?”

And here was his answer: “No, but I depose them regularly, including the world’s leading ones with regards to vaccines, and I have to make my claims based on actual evidence when I go to court with regards to vaccines. I don’t get to rely on titles.” Oh, snap. “I don’t get to rely on titles. I have to prove it with data.” Oh, man, I’ll buy that lawyer. Can I hire him? He’s good. You’d want him defending you or pressing your case. Yeah, “When I go to court, I gotta bring actual evidence. I don’t get to rely on titles.” Bam! That’s the hardest I’ve ever seen anybody judo flip on that accusation about expertise.

RFK Jr. on Guns and Mental Health

Here’s another one. Here’s RFK Jr. again. You want to hear a good answer to a question? Listen to this. So Kennedy is asked by somebody if he’s so concerned about health and safety, why isn’t MAHA looking at firearms? Now, my first impression was, oh, that’s a pretty good “gotcha” question, because he doesn’t want to be working for the Trump administration and come out against guns, but on the other hand, you can’t really claim that there’s no gun problem—in the sense that people are dying from guns.

So what’s he do with that? Here’s what he says. He goes, “We had comparably the same number of guns when I was a kid. Nobody was doing that,” walking into buildings and shooting strangers, he meant. “We had gun clubs at my school, kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so, and nobody was walking into school and shooting people.” So then he goes, “And this is not happening in other countries. Switzerland has a comparable number of guns as we do, and the last mass shooting they had was 23 years ago. We’re having mass shootings every 23 hours. So there’s many, many things that’s happening that happened in the 1990s that could explain these,” because that’s when the curve went up. He goes, “One is the dependence on psychiatric drugs, which in our country is unlike any other country in the world.”

Wow. Why do you think the US has—somebody needs for psychiatric drugs? I feel like some of it might be that we’re lonelier. Do you ever think that? Maybe we’re just lonelier, so you get more depressed, so you get more, more of those drugs. But wasn’t Kennedy’s answer genius? I’d never even heard that argument, that we had a comparable number of guns but the behavior was different, so we should be looking at something besides the gun as the cause of the problem. That’s a pretty solid argument. I’d never heard that.

Nuclear Weapons in South Africa and Europe

All right, here’s a post from an anonymous economist. So there’s an anonymous economist on X who has a very provocative post. He goes by the name of Dr. Insensitive Jerk. He points out that in apartheid South Africa, it is unique as the only country to have independently developed, produced, and then voluntarily dismantled its own nuclear arsenal. I’m not sure everybody knew that. I didn’t know that.

And then he points out that in 1993, the apartheid government destroyed its six nuclear weapons just before handing the keys of the government over to the black population. And he says we should all thank them for that. He says, “Now Britain and France stand where South Africa stood in 1990.” Uh-oh. “About to hand their nuclear arsenals over to the Muslims who supplant them in their own lands. Great Britain must immediately dismantle its 225 nuclear weapons while it still can. Likewise, France has 290.” And he says disarming France and Britain must be a US foreign policy priority.

To which I say, you can’t say that. Make your own judgment. Obviously, I don’t expect us to try to do that. But if we could, I would definitely want it, because I do think that one of those two countries will be the first Muslim country with nuclear weapons. And there is a little extra risk if your understanding of the universe is based on one set of assumptions versus another. So there is an extra risk there.

The January 6th Panel

Well, this is funny. Apparently, there’s going to be a January 6th panel that’s going to look into January 6th from, let’s say, from a Trump-friendly point of view. But I guess they have to have some Democrats on the committee too, or the panel. And so Jeffries, Hakeem Jeffries, the leader, he appointed the people he wants to work on the January 6th panel. And who do you think he appointed? He appointed Jasmine Crockett and Jared Moskowitz and Eric Swalwell.

Yeah, I think he also nominated Eric Swalwell. So how much work are they going to get done with Jasmine Crockett and Eric Swalwell? I don’t know the other guy. But it feels like Hakeem Jeffries was just playing a prank. “How about these two?”

The “False Electors” Case in Michigan

Well, do you remember 2020? And do you remember when the January 6th insurrection hoax was raging? And there were 15 accused false Trump electors. So one of the things that the Trump lawyers tried to set up was to get some people to be alternate electors. And apparently, they got indicted and went to trial. But now a Michigan judge has thrown out the case against the 15 so-called false Trump electors—the ones that were going to sit in for the Electoral College people if a certain set of things happened. So that never happened, but it was a plan that they had.

And the reason—this is the interesting part—the reason that it was thrown out is because there was no evidence of intent. In other words, the people who were involved, the only intent that they could discern was that they intended to make the process work better by maybe rescuing what looked like a problem. Now, don’t you think that that same thing, that lack of intent, is going to be the weakness for the whole January 6th insurrection hoax?

I’ve been saying it for a while. The January 6th insurrection hoax is sort of the last thing that the Democrats have intact that’s like a real serious federal-quality hoax. And all it would take to get rid of it is any kind of reporting that talks to the people who participated in January 6th and asks them: “What was your intention?” And that’s it. And that’s the end of the hoax. Nobody’s ever done it. Nobody’s ever asked them: “Well, what did you think would happen? Like, what was your intention? Were you trying to overthrow the country and overthrow the election? Or were you trying to repair the country and make sure the election was not overthrown by somebody else? Which one were you trying to do?”

All you need is one serious report—you know, could be like a Wall Street Journal, New York Post—that just talks to people. It’s not even hard. You could just say, “We talked to 25 people who attended that day.” And just say, “Well, what do they say?” And every one of them, I’m positive, would say, “Well, how would we even overthrow the country anyway? What are you even talking about? Exactly what was our plan, did you think? Did you think we were going to loiter around in a building and that would overthrow the United States? Is that what you think we thought?” And that’s it. You’d get rid of the whole hoax. You only have to ask 20 people and put a big story together.

So that’s a pretty big deal, the fact that there was no intent found in the one time that they looked for it. The people who were presumed to be part of this large conspiracy, judge said there’s no evidence of intent. Of course not. Of course there was no evidence of intent.

Russia and Poland

For reasons that are not yet clear, it looks like Russia attacked Poland with a number of drones. So Poland shot down some of them, and at least one got through, or a few got through. And when Putin’s press team was asked about it, they declined to comment and they said you need to talk to their Defense Ministry. So they basically, instead of denying it—so Russia’s not denying it—it looks like they attacked Poland. But it’s not a full-scale attack, so what exactly would be the purpose? Was it just to get their attention? Is Poland doing something that they don’t like? I think Poland’s upgrading their weapons, right? So maybe Russia’s just saying, “Hey, maybe don’t upgrade your weapons that much, because we’re not going to like it.” Is that what they’re doing? It would be weird.

Trump has asked the European Union to hit China and India with tariffs of up to 100% for dealing with Russia. So do you think that’ll happen? I don’t. That’s not going to happen. I don’t think. But it makes sense to ask; he should try.

ICE Masks in California

Apparently, California—my dumb state—the assembly passed a bill to make it illegal for the ICE officers to wear masks in California. Now, does my government in California—is the only thing they do sit around and say, “All right, what’s the most messed up thing we can do? Does anybody have an idea for something to be really bad? We could raise our taxes and then use it to fund NGOs which our spouses all work at.” And then somebody would say, “We’re already doing that, Bob. We’re already doing that. We’re looking for new ideas.” And then they’d go, “We could make it illegal to wear a mask if you’re an ICE agent, therefore guaranteeing the terrorizing of your family if you’re in ICE.” “Oh, now you’re talking! Good job, Beth.”

I saw this article in Breitbart. Joel Pollak was writing about it. And my question was, is it legal for the state to tell ICE what clothes they can wear in California? I suppose it would be legal if they decided to go naked; it would be legal for California to enforce whatever nudity rules we have in California. But can they tell the ICE officers what to wear? Can they? It seems to me like there must be some way to challenge that with my non-existent understanding of the law.

I wonder if while I was talking, two of the cutest cats in the world climbed up on this desk. And yes, it’s true. Two cats, better than one. That’s all I had for now. I hope you enjoyed yourselves. A lot of news today, a lot of news. Probably a lot more being made at this moment. Those UFOs are about ready to land. We better get to Mars fast.

I’m going to go private with the beloved subscribers to Locals, and in 30 seconds after I push this button, we’ll be private. The rest of you, I hope to see you tomorrow. Same time, same place. Thanks for joining.

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