Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-09-18
Come on in. It’s time for us to reframe the world. That’s right. We’re going to reframe the whole world today. I got my comic done for the day, but I couldn’t load it up to X today yet. Some kind of technical problem; I think it’s on their side, not mine, but I’ll try again later. All right, I’ve got to get my comments going, and then we’ve got the show of shows, often described as the best thing that has ever happened to the world. Guaranteed. Let’s move that over there. Yeah, that’s looking good.
Are you ready? If you’re ready, I’m ready. 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. But if you’d like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that nobody could even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper mug or a glass 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, and it happens now. Go.
I’m trying something different with my lighting today, so we’ll see if that works.
Coffee Science
I wonder if there’s any science that says coffee is good for you. Oh, here’s some. It turns out there’s a new study that says people who drink coffee have more favorable body composition and inflammatory profiles. All right. Well, there’s nobody more inflammatory than me, so I drink extra coffee just to tamp it down a little bit. Oh, there he goes. There he goes. He’s being inflammatory. Sip.
Brigitte Macron Controversy
By far my favorite story of the day is that French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife are going to present photographic and scientific evidence to a US court to prove the French first lady is, in fact, a woman. You know that Candace Owens accused Brigitte Macron of being born a man and believes that he is still a man, because I guess that’s the way it works.
So the news is that Macron and his wife are going to present photographic and scientific evidence. Photographic evidence and scientific evidence that she’s, in fact, a woman. All right, now, I’ve never quite bought into the idea that she was a man. I was amused by the whole thing, and I was amazed at how much evidence Candace could come up with that definitely looked like it was possible. I don’t know if you’ve gone down that rabbit hole at all, but if you listen to Candace for 30 minutes talking about this, you will go away thinking it’s real. But that’s the documentary effect. If you’re exposed to one point of view for half an hour, you’re probably going to be convinced. That’s all it takes: one point of view with no counterpoint for half an hour, and almost always you’ll think it’s true.
So I will say that it’s a persuasive argument Candace makes, but my own gut feeling and common sense says probably not. Probably not, but anything’s possible. So the fact that she’s going to give photographic evidence—what exactly would the photograph be of? I just have this image of Brigitte Macron at home, and she’s like, “All right. I’ll do my best French accent. I’ll try to… No, that’s not French. I won’t do a French accent. All right, I need some pictures for the court.” Click. Click, click. Almost. Click. Click, click. Yeah, there it is. Oh, that’s beautiful.
Maybe it’s just me, but I like to look at these things from the entertainment perspective. If you do it from the entertainment perspective, you realize that Candace Owens is making the wife of the President of France take pictures of her genitalia. Standing ovation, Candace! I don’t know if any of it’s true; I’m guessing it’s not. But there’s not much that’s funnier than making her take a picture of her junk. All right, good job, Candace.
Meta’s Augmented Reality Glasses
In other news, you know that Meta has these new glasses that have all kinds of functions. I guess they can project a screen on the glasses themselves that people will barely know you’re looking at. I saw a review by somebody who had tried a number of these different enhanced reality glasses, and he said it’s the best one he’s seen and that it’s actually kind of awesome. It costs about $800.
What do regular glasses cost? If you bought regular glasses, if it’s like a designer pair, it’s several hundred dollars, isn’t it? So, I don’t know, maybe people will buy it for $800. If they can make those glasses prescription—I didn’t see in the story that they can do that, but I assume they can, right? Do you think that they would make them prescription? It would be very disappointing if the only thing the glasses couldn’t do is correct your vision. I feel like it ought to be able to do that.
However, if it really works, the odds of me trying it out at some point are pretty, pretty good. But apparently, you can slightly detect when somebody’s not paying attention to you. So let me ask you this: how happy would you be to spend time with a friend who has those glasses on, and you don’t really know if they’re watching a TV show while you’re talking to them? Because apparently, you can have all kinds of content in the glasses. I wouldn’t like it at all. I don’t think I would want to spend time having a conversation with somebody who was wearing those glasses, because I would just assume that they’re distracted, even if I couldn’t tell. So I think that’s the big question. The big question will be the social element to that.
Podcast Teasers: Morgan and Lemon
You know how everybody’s got a podcast these days? There are millions of podcasts, and it’s kind of hard to get attention for your one podcast. So people do a lot of teasing. For example, I’ll be on the Jesse Lee Peterson show on Friday, so that’s a tease. But the best tease I ever saw for a podcast comes from Piers Morgan.
There was a post on X that showed journalist Don Lemon and said he’s waiting for his interview with Piers Morgan. Then Piers reposted it—the picture of Don Lemon and him waiting for the interview—and he just says four words. These are the most clever four words you’ll ever use to tease somebody about your upcoming podcast. I quote: “It didn’t go well.”
Now, how am I not going to watch that? Are you kidding me? Finding out that a Don Lemon interview with Piers Morgan didn’t go well—that’s genius. That is so good. Piers, you nailed it. There is a 100% chance I’m going to watch that because of what you said about it. “It didn’t go well.” That’s just the best. The best tease.
The Economy and Interest Rates
The Fed cut the interest rate by 25 points, which really is 0.25. They think there might be a few more cuts this year and maybe another in 2026. If you’re an economics nerd, you might recognize that although inflation is not quite where we want it to be—it’s 2.6, but wouldn’t it be good to get it down to two—however, the job market is starting to soften.
You usually have those two competing things: you don’t want the interest rates high if you’re trying to make sure jobs are good. But if you jack up the interest rates too much, then you might cause some inflation because it might goose the economy and make it too hot. But the Fed has decided to lean toward improving employment as opposed to perfectly optimizing inflation. Is that the right choice? Well, I guess we’ll always argue whether it could have been sooner, but it does seem like a responsible position in my opinion.
Jimmy Kimmel and Cancellation Culture
Well, we have to talk about Jimmy Kimmel, don’t we? How many of you were wondering what my take would be on Jimmy Kimmel? Was there any point where you said, “All right, I’ve got to see what this guy says”? I guess Adam Carolla has not yet weighed in publicly. I will definitely watch that, whatever Adam has to say about it, because they have a history from The Man Show and he’s also a professional comedian type.
All right, I’m going to start with the conclusion and then we’ll talk about it, right? I’m on Jimmy Kimmel’s side. Sorry. I’m on his side. Now, would I like some revenge? Yes. Yes, I would enjoy that. But that doesn’t mean I get it. It doesn’t mean I should pursue it; it doesn’t mean the world’s a better place if it happens. Yeah, I’d like a little Schadenfreude because remember, I got canceled. I got canceled for something I said. Very similar. Do I think I should have been canceled? Nope. Do I think Roseanne should have been canceled? Nope. And I’m not going to change my mind because it’s Jimmy Kimmel.
Did he say something offensive and incorrect? Yeah. Did it make the world a worse place? Probably. But let’s talk about all the things. There are a lot of elements to this. I would be very hypocritical if I were to be opposed to free speech.
Just as a review, the only speech that’s not legal would be inciting violence immediately. It’s not even illegal to incite violence over time with some cumulative effect, which is what the Democrats have done. The cumulative effect of all the “Hitler, Hitler, Hitler” stuff is that it incites violence. But the law does not recognize cumulative effect. It’s only what did you say just right now, and did it cause somebody to do some violence right now? Now, that would be illegal, and it’s not because of the speech; it’s because you’d be inciting violence. It’s the violence that’s the illegal part, the inciting it. So that’s your little background there.
The best joke I’ve heard about it so far was from Joel Pollak, who posted on X: “First they came for the bad comedians.” I was laughing out loud at that this morning. Anyway, a lot of people are speculating because we’re suspicious people; we never believe anything in the news is real. A lot of people are saying that Jimmy Kimmel’s bosses—ABC News, I guess ultimately Disney, who owns ABC—probably wanted to cancel him anyway because the show probably loses a ton of money. So, maybe it really was a business decision having nothing to do with anything except it was an opportunity to get rid of an expensive asset.
Maybe. I would guess that it’s not unrelated, meaning that if he were making a billion dollars a year for ABC, do you think they would cancel him? Let me ask you: if he made a profit of one billion dollars per year for his corporate owners, do you think they would have said, “Oh, that’s a bad thing you did, we’ve got to get rid of you”? I would say not a chance. If he was losing money every week and it looked like there was no chance that was going to reverse, would they possibly find a convenient reason to get rid of him? Maybe. Well, it might not be enough. Yeah, they might. I wouldn’t rule that out at all. Follow the money always works. I wouldn’t say it’s the only reason, but it’s probably in there somewhere.
Kimmel and Charlie Kirk
Let’s see what else we’ve got here. So what he said was, he implied—and I guess some people said it was satire or parody or something, but it didn’t look like it to me—it looked like he was intentionally saying they believe that some MAGA person was responsible for killing Kirk. By the time he said it, that was known with a pretty high level of certainty that that was not the case, and the person who did it is almost certainly—I’d put it at 95%, 98%—that it’s a left-leaning person who just hated the Trump administration and Charlie in particular.
So here’s a question: how in the world is it legal for the Trump administration, the government, to put pressure on a private industry to maybe cancel somebody, which would look like a violation of free speech, right? Now, here’s what would be a violation of free speech: if the President said, “ABC, if you don’t fire this guy and shut him up, I will punish you in some specific way.” That would be completely illegal. Everybody understands that, right? If the government tells you you can’t talk, that’s illegal. That would not be allowing free speech.
The FCC and Public Interest
But suppose, as FCC Chairman Brendan Carr explained—he was on Hannity, I think, explaining this—the FCC has a very specific job within the government. What it does is it’s responsible for making sure that the public airwaves, which are limited by nature—there are not infinite TV networks, there’s just not enough room on the airwaves for much more than we have—because it’s a public good, the major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) they operate at the pleasure of the government.
Now, that’s different from almost anything else. If Fox News said something that the government didn’t like, the government has no role with Fox News because Fox News is cable. Cable is not using a limited public good, which is the airwaves. But ABC, NBC, CBS, if they violate—what is the phrase?—the “public interest.” If they violate the public interest, then the FCC can act, and that could include potentially removing their license.
So what do you think the courts would say? Let’s say that went to the Supreme Court. Do you think they’d say, “That’s not… that has nothing to do with freedom of speech”? The FCC’s job is to say, “Hey, that thing you’re doing is either in the public interest or it’s not.” So if you said that’s not in the public interest, would you be violating free speech? I feel like not. I feel like that wouldn’t be a violation of free speech, but only if you’re talking about ABC, NBC, CBS, because the FCC specifically has the responsibility to make sure they don’t get out of line.
What they’re accused of is a pattern. It’s not just this one thing; it’s a pattern of misinformation, political especially. Now, is that a good enough reason to pressure him to come off the air? And let me say this: if the government is pressuring somebody, even if it’s not stated but it’s obvious—let’s say the entity wants to do a big merger, and I think that’s part of what’s going on here—the entities involved don’t want to make the government mad. The government is making it pretty clear that they don’t like this Jimmy Kimmel situation.
Does the government have to say directly, “If you keep him on, we’ll punish you”? Remember, the FCC is a special case, but just talking generally, if a government said to somebody, “You should quiet down or else we won’t approve whatever it is you ask for next.” If they say it directly—now, I got this from Grok. By the way, you all know that I’m not a lawyer, right? So anything I say that sounds like a legal opinion is probably wrong. Do your own research on this one, I’d say. But I’ll do my best.
If the government makes a direct threat outside of the FCC—that’s a special case—but if they made a direct threat, “Shut up or we’ll do bad things to you,” that’s totally illegal. That would be absolutely a violation of free speech. But what if they don’t make a direct threat, but you just think they’re the kind of people that would get revenge? I don’t know. At some point, it’s just an opinion. Suppose the President said, “It’s my opinion that Kimmel should be fired.” Doesn’t he have the right to just have an opinion? If he said, “You should fire him or I’ll punish you,” totally illegal. But if he just said, “It’s my opinion they should get rid of him, the country’d be a better place,” is that illegal?
It’s a weird gray area, isn’t it? Because especially with Trump, you kind of say to yourself, “Well, I mean, he’s clearly not going to be friendly with them when they come to get some approval from the government, right?” Would you expect the Trump administration to be fully cooperative with an entity that wasn’t doing what they wanted in a way that they might consider important? I don’t know. I don’t know if that kind of case has ever been tested.
Scott’s Stance on Kimmel
So the part I don’t know is if Brendan Carr, the FCC Chairman, has a solid enough argument that in this special case, where the FCC is doing its job to make sure the public interest is being met, does this meet the standard of violating the public interest? Well, maybe not, because some people would say he’s a comedian and it is completely legal to lie. It is completely legal to lie in the service of a joke or just entertaining the public. You’re allowed to lie. Unfortunately, it has to be that way because otherwise everybody would be in jail. If you made it illegal to lie, there’d be nobody left.
So I don’t know the answer to the FCC part. If it turns out that’s completely ordinary, then I might alter my opinion. But as a humorist/cartoonist who’s been canceled for something I said, I’m not going to be in favor of it. In fact, my preference is that conservatives defend Kimmel on free speech. Now, we might encourage him because remember, these are private companies. Private companies can fire anybody for whatever reason they want. So the private company is in completely clear territory; it’s just a business decision. You can’t go after them.
But I think the world would be a little bit better and it would change the news cycle in a way that would really flip the minds of the Democrats. I think we should support him and just say, “Nope, we do not want to go down the path of getting somebody fired.” Now, keep in mind, I don’t believe the FCC Chair, Brendan Carr, I don’t believe he would be taking these moves unless he knew that at least the base would be happy with it. Would you agree? Do you think the FCC would put any pressure on Kimmel unless the public felt the same way? No, there’s not really any chance of that. Because remember, he’s operating in the “public interest.” If the public had no interest—I’m using interest differently here—but if the public said, “We don’t care he said that, that doesn’t bother us at all,” well then there’d be no reason for the FCC to be involved and I’d have a problem with it.
But the fact that there are a lot of people, almost entirely on the political right, who say, “Yeah, yeah, that guy’s got to be punished,” and it looks like there’s sort of a special case here where maybe it could be, or at least pressure could be put on him—go ahead and do it because we like the revenge and we like the Schadenfreude. I like the revenge. I bet aside from Roseanne, there’s nobody who likes this more than I do, right? There’s nobody who likes it more than I do.
But I asked Grok if Jimmy Kimmel ever mocked me for getting canceled. Because I didn’t know; a lot of people did. And Grok says no. I need a fact-check on that. Is it true that Jimmy Kimmel never mocked me for getting canceled? A lot of people did, public figures, but I’ll ask separately. So Grok says no, says there’s no evidence that he ever mentioned me at all, which counts. Because that was a national story, and if he just wanted to pound on some conservative types, there I was. I mean, I was an easy victim. But if he said to himself—and I don’t know this, this would be purely mind-reading speculation—if he said to himself, “You know what? I’m not going to go after a humorist.” I don’t know if he did that, but if that’s the reason he didn’t mention it, I would respect that. And I’m going to return the favor. I don’t want to live in a world where jokes are punished. You’d have to be a really bad joke for me to do it. So, I know this is very unpopular, but if you want to be on the side of the angels, I think we’ve got to give him a pass.
I don’t think it’ll make a difference. I suspect this is a decision they’re not going to reverse. And I also don’t think there’s any chance that the majority of the political right will say, “Yeah, give him a pass,” because I don’t think people are thinking it out beyond the revenge level. And by the way, like I say, I’m totally in favor of revenge and mutually assured destruction so that there’s a little balance and stuff. Totally in favor of that. It enjoys it, it feels good. But it’s not the world I want to live in. I don’t want to live in that world. So even though I believe I was treated unfairly in a similar situation, I just can’t live in that world. So that’s my take.
The “Hitler” Rhetoric and Incitement
Here’s what—I mentioned this when I was on Tucker’s show the other day—there’s something different about the lies that are being told today compared to the old times. It used to be that if you said, “Oh, that Reagan is Hitler,” people understood that as just hyperbole. They didn’t think he was actually Hitler. But when you’re doing it 24 hours a day, “Hitler, Hitler, Hitler,” and every time you turn on CNN or MSNBC, every time somebody’s comparing him to Hitler or Nazis, you should assume that young people who are exposed to that, and it’s all they know, and they’re not watching Fox News, they’re just watching those networks—of course, some of them would reach the point of violence because they’d think, “Well, everybody thinks he’s Hitler as far as I can tell, so if I take out Hitler, I’m fine.”
So the laws as they were written were about slander—you can’t do slander—but you can lie, and you can exaggerate and insult and all those other things. So if the cumulative effect of wall-to-wall Hitler accusations creates a situation where violence is guaranteed, is that inciting violence? The answer is not legally. No, because it has to be immediate. There’s no such thing as a cumulative, over time, a lot of people did a lot of things, and the cumulative effect was that somebody got killed—Charlie Kirk in particular. That’s not illegal. Should it be? Well, it makes me wonder, because when our free speech rules were created, this wasn’t really an option. There was no such thing as mass brainwashing that was coordinated through the government and the news networks. So it’s a danger of free speech that simply didn’t exist, at least at this level, until fairly recently in history. So there might be something we need to rethink about that, but in general, I’m going to be biased toward free speech if there are any gray areas. This one’s a gray area, so I’m biased toward free speech.
Interpreting Kimmel’s Specific Words
What Kimmel actually said might be a little different from what people are imagining. He said the MAGA people were trying hard to make it look like they were not responsible for it. But you could interpret that two ways. One, he’s saying that MAGA is responsible for killing Charlie Kirk. But would you take that seriously? The other way you could interpret those exact words is that he’s not saying MAGA was responsible; he’s only saying that they’re trying to make sure you know they’re not responsible. And that’s not so bad.
So do you cancel somebody because they said something that could be taken two ways? You see, this gets a little personal at this point. Something that could be interpreted differently than it was intended—is that how you get canceled? That’s what Roseanne got canceled for. Roseanne got canceled not for what she thought or what she said—you know that, right? It wasn’t for what she thought, it wasn’t for what she said. It was what other people misinterpreted as her intention. Got canceled for that.
I would argue that although I was intentionally trying to cause some trouble, I was trying to do it for a positive purpose, including for Black America. But because people chose to interpret what I said a little bit out of context because of the larger context—DEI, etc.—should I be canceled because someone else interpreted what I said in a way that’s not the way I intended it? Is that a good enough reason to be canceled? I don’t know. But there’s some chance—and I wouldn’t know because I’m not a… I can’t read his mind—there’s some chance that Kimmel was trying to walk close to the line but he wasn’t quite, not quite blaming MAGA for maybe doing it.
I’m looking at a comment: “It’s the fact that he ignored the horror and instead went political.” That’s just something you don’t like. That’s not why you lose a job. I get what you’re saying, that he wasn’t showing the… oh, no, actually I think he did at some point. I believe he did at some point say the right words about the horror. I think he did actually, just a different day.
I saw that Dave Portnoy weighed in on this, and he said it’s not canceling, it’s consequences. And that would be true if we’re only looking at a business decision and/or the FCC doing its job for the public interest, if you think that getting rid of him is a public interest. But I do think that Dave is sort of leaving out that the FCC is part of the government and you don’t ever want the government trying to directly or indirectly impinge on free speech. But I understand what Dave is saying. So he’s not wrong that it’s primarily a consequence situation more than a free speech situation. But if it’s got a little bit of free speech in it, I’m still going to go with the free speech. If you say, “Well, Scott, it’s 90% he was a dick,” okay, if it’s 10% free speech, I’m still going to be biased for the free speech.
Eric Swalwell was defending Kimmel, but of course the Democrats feel they have to swear, and they’re so bad at it. Listen to this swearing from Eric Swalwell. So he’s talking about Kimmel and sort of defending him for his free speech, but he says it this way: “He’s a fucking comedian.” Now, Eric, let me give you a little advice. Swearing is good if you use it right. Like Trump is just an expert at swearing in a way that people will laugh. When he swears during a rally speech, people laugh because he puts it in just the right place, you don’t expect it, etc. And he’s also used it to make a really important point so you know, okay, Trump’s not kidding about this one. It’s a perfect use of cursing. But Swalwell is just sort of randomly throwing it in a post. “He’s a fucking comedian.” You know what would have worked just as well? “He’s a comedian.” Do you think that adding the F-word made his point better? Do you think it made him look tougher? Did it make him look stronger? Did it make him look like a better politician? Didn’t do any of that. No, that was just a mistake in communication.
And it’s like, I feel like they don’t even understand the point that you can definitely get away with some swearing if you’re a little bit wise about when you do it. This is not wise. It’s not even close to wise. So I responded to Eric Swalwell, who said he’s an “effing” comedian, by responding and I said, “So is Roseanne.” And then I said, “Do cartoonists count?” depending if you call me a comedian or not.
Trump’s Persuasion Technique: Strength Over Success
Let me give you a little micro-lesson now on something I’ve been meaning to discuss. Trump has a technique that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about, and it’s really, really good. It’s really good, and I’ve never seen anybody use it. So this is one of the most persuasive things he does, and he does it sort of all the time. And it goes like this: he always favors strength over getting something necessarily done.
For example, when he says, “I’m going to do this with immigration,” and then maybe the court blocks him, and let’s say it blocks him totally, he doesn’t win an appeal. That would be him acting strong but he got blocked. What you remember about that is the strength. And then the next thing comes up, and once again he takes the most—I don’t want to say extreme because that’s the wrong thing—but the strongest, the firmest, strongest take. “I will send the National Guard into your city to stop crime.” That’s the strong take. Now, suppose it never worked. Suppose the courts or something else blocked him from doing it. What you would remember is how strong he was in trying to stop crime.
And I could give you a hundred more examples that he always takes the strong point of view, even if the odds of that succeeding are low. Because then you remember the strength. And the reason that’s so important is that whenever the new thing comes up, whatever the new thing is, you’re going to respect how hard he’s going to go at it. And that’s going to modify how you respond, and probably in a way that’s good for Trump.
So framing yourself as always the strong one in the conversation, the strong one in politics—that really works. And if I were to advise somebody, say, “All right, do you want to be right about everything? Do you want everything you try to do to work? Or do you want to be seen as somebody who is stronger than a typical president?” Now, the risk is that you get called an authoritarian and all that, which we see happening. That’s a risk. But I would say that the supporters of Trump are probably triggered more by the strength. Because you want to know that the person who’s got your back, the one who literally has your back, you want to think he’s the strongest person. So if you said to me, “Who do you want protecting you?” Because this president, he tried to do something with Social Security reform and it didn’t work. It wouldn’t bother me at all. But if you told me he did strong things on the border, strong things in a city about crime, went after other countries that weren’t paying their dues, I’m going to see a lot of strength. And that is really, really good persuasion, even when stuff doesn’t work out—it’s still the right play. That’s the part people don’t know. The ordinary person would say, “I’m only going to try to do this if I’ve got a pretty good chance of succeeding.” He doesn’t need to do that. He can try things that don’t have a high chance of succeeding as long as it shows how strong he is. Does that make sense? I don’t think this would work for most people, but it’s definitely working for him.
Media and Incendiary Rhetoric
All right, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation, Adam Paczek is writing about this. I guess Democrats are a little bit divided now over whether they should keep using incendiary rhetoric and calling the Trump administration people Nazis and Hitler. But George Takei—you remember him, Sulu from the original Star Trek—he says that Trump is employing the “Nazi playbook” to exploit Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Breitbart’s writing about this, Paul Bois.
Can you imagine being George Takei? That the same week that Charlie Kirk is assassinated, probably because of people like George Takei—let me say it directly: people like George Takei, cumulatively, not him specifically, but cumulatively, they caused the death of Charlie Kirk. Does anybody even doubt that? Do you believe that there was any chance Charlie Kirk would have been assassinated if Democrats didn’t talk that way? Do you think they would have said, “I don’t like his policies,” and he would have been shot? I don’t. I don’t think there’s any chance of that. I think they had to not like the policies, but also think everybody thinks he’s Hitler, I think this would be popular, I’ll do this.
So it will be funny to watch them make the same mistake over and over, but it’s not funny if it causes somebody else to take a shot.
George Soros Funding Report
In other news, Blaze Media got ahold of—I guess they were the first to look at it—a report by a private entity, which is the Capital Research Center, and they did a study on George Soros and his funding machine. So it mapped out all the nodes and where the money is coming from and how much and stuff like that. Now, that would be—it’s a 95-page report, and apparently that’s going to be turned over to the Trump administration, who also said they wanted to do some research on Soros funding stuff. I guess also there’s some talk about Antifa being designated as a terrorist organization. That hasn’t happened yet. But remember I said Trump is famous for taking the strong position. Well, what would be stronger than designating Antifa as a terrorist organization? Now, suppose it doesn’t work out, like somehow he has to back up from that. Would it be a mistake? Nope. It wouldn’t be a mistake, even if he doesn’t end up getting that done. It wouldn’t be a mistake because everybody would say, “Man, that’s strength. He’s going hard at the people who need to have a little pressure on them.”
Israel’s “Iron Beam” Laser
Well, Israel has completed the “Iron Beam” system. I don’t think it’s fully implemented in the IDF, but technology-wise, it’s passed its tests. The Iron Beam is a laser that will shoot down drones. Now, as you know, lasers don’t work as well on cloudy or rainy days, but Israel would also still have the “Iron Dome,” which shoots up missiles to knock down other missiles. But we are now solidly in the domain of lasers shooting down stuff.
Scott Adams Cancellation vs. Kimmel
“Scott, you got canceled for telling the truth, but Kimmel was lying.” Yeah, that’s not really the important part. That’s not how analogies work. Analogies work when there’s just one thing that they have in common that can tell a story, and the one thing is that you’re both comedians. That’s it. Lying is not against the law. I don’t like it; I wish there would be less of it. But it’s not against the law. And so even if he does something I find very objectionable—and he did—it’s not objectionable in the free speech sense, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately.
Anyway, this beam—I understand—somebody can give me a fact-check if I’m wrong about this—but my understanding is that if the US is involved in maybe funding the development of weapons in Israel, that what Israel develops—remember, they’re super high tech—whatever they develop has some kind of licensing, or the US has the ability to use it too. So, I don’t know about that for sure. That’s just the information I have right now. But it’s possible that Israel just developed one of the best weapons we’ll ever have for defending the United States. If that happened, then that would be on the plus side of arguing why funding Israel makes sense. If they happen to have a technical weapons development industry that’s in any way, in any pockets, better than ours, and we have a deal where if we funded it we have access to some of that technology, that might be a gigantic benefit for the United States. So if you’re looking at all the pluses and minuses, I’m generally not in favor of funding other countries for anything. I mean, I’m just not in favor of it. But you can’t argue if that’s true, that we would get that technology, you can’t argue that we don’t get anything out of it.
Kamala Harris on Pete Buttigieg
Kamala Harris has her new book out, and she’s saying in her book that Tim Walz was not her first choice for a running mate. Her first choice was Pete Buttigieg because, as she said, “He is a sincere public servant with the rare talent of being able to frame liberal arguments in a way that makes it possible for conservatives to hear them.”
Is that what you think? Do you think Pete Buttigieg has that rare talent to frame arguments so conservatives can hear them? Wrong. That’s not even a little bit true. I’ve listened to a lot of Pete Buttigieg. Do you think he frames things in a way that conservatives go, “You know, huh. Oh, wow. Wow, I had the opposite opinion, but now that I’ve heard Pete Buttigieg explaining it with his golden tongue, I’ve changed my mind. That was a pretty good argument there, Pete”? No. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who says, “Yeah, Pete Buttigieg changed my mind on that topic.” I don’t know. Kamala Harris, she’s funny.
Trump’s Approval Levels
Well, Trump’s approval level doesn’t look so good, but I’m not sure I care. He’s not going to run for office again. And it’s kind of normal that the more somebody gets is on the job as president, he’s going to do so many things that everyone is going to find at least one thing that they’re not crazy about. So, I don’t know, it just feels normal that no matter who the president is at this point, yeah, there’s probably going to be a dip. No surprise. I’m not worried about that. The Hill is reporting that.
Public Education Poll and Troublemakers
According to a Walton Family Foundation Gallup poll that just came out, only 35% of respondents are satisfied with the state of K-12 education in the United States. 35%. Now, that would probably be the 35% whose kids are in good schools, don’t you think?
I have a question. Is the problem with schools—because they are a mess—is it the teachers? Is it the lack of physical resources? I feel like it’s the other students. What do you think? I feel like 65% of the schools have just enough troublemakers that it ruins the whole experience for everybody. Now, I do think that in many cases the teachers are bad, but I don’t think the teachers could help if the class has too many troublemakers in it. You know, troublemakers.
What do you think? And it seems to me that private schools solve for that because the only people who go to private schools are the people whose parents think that’s going to work, and it generally gets you a less troublemaking group of people. And I feel like the private school would kick you out if you were a troublemaker, whereas the public school would have more of an obligation to keep you even if you were a little bit of a troublemaker.
But what is the problem? Is it mostly the other people, the other students? Because imagine, if you will—I spend a lot of time imagining what it would be like to be a poor Black student. Do you do that? Maybe that’s weird. But I literally, I spend a lot of time, and always have, wondering: could you escape that trap? So let’s say you’re born into a poor single-parent situation, and you go to school and 70% of the people in the class don’t care about graduating, don’t care about their grades, don’t care about their future, and they’re just causing trouble. Can you escape that? Can you use your, let’s say you’ve got good character and you’re smart enough—you’re smart enough that you should do well in life—is that going to be enough? If you don’t have the resources or wherewithal to go to a private school and you have to stay there, could you possibly get a good outcome if 70% of the students just came to cause trouble? I would think there’s not a chance. Not a chance at all.
So the first problem with—what you have to do to solve any problem is you have to figure out what the actual base problem is. Some of it has to be the teachers, but it does seem to me that as long as the students, beyond a certain percentage of the class, are troublemakers, it wouldn’t matter who your teacher is. There’s no way you could overcome that.
Now, it could be—in the old days, let’s say when I was a kid, capital punishment was still okay. I had a teacher who would beat you with a baseball bat if you got out of line. Like an actual baseball bat. He kept it in the class, and he would have fistfights. He was pretty strong; he had this big, monkey-muscular body. And he would have fistfights with kids. And I’ll tell you, we were pretty well-behaved after a couple of bouts of violence. And in a small town, back in those days, if a parent found out that the teacher punched a child, the first thing they would ask is, “What did he do?” That’s the first question: “What did he do?” And then he would tell them, and they’d say, “All right. Well, I don’t love the fact that you punched him, but he had it coming.” Some version of that. And that, unfortunately—and I’m not saying that’s all good, I mean, you can have some childhood PTSD from that—but generally speaking, forget about that one teacher, he was extreme, but generally speaking, there was just more discipline, and it helped everybody in the class. Now, I don’t think we should necessarily go back to the old ways, but somehow you have to solve for the fact that not everybody in the room has the same goal, which is to learn. You’ve got to solve that before you have any chance.
And then back to my original point: if your only problem was that you were poor and you had a single mother, but once you went to school everything worked smoothly, I think you could do great. I think nothing would stop you under just those minimum conditions. As long as school’s good, you’ve got a way out. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, right? It’s supposed to be that you can work your way out of poverty by working hard and going to school, developing a skill.
Tyson Foods and High Fructose Corn Syrup
Tyson Foods said it’s going to halt the use of high fructose corn syrup, which many people say is not healthy. The Hill is reporting on this. And they also, apparently they already announced they’re going to halt the use of sucralose—that’s a preservative, I guess—and they’ve already removed petroleum-based synthetic dyes. How many of you knew you were eating oil? That petroleum-based synthetic dyes were in your food? You’re actually eating oil. Or is it processed to the point where that’s an unfair thing to say?
So I think what’s going to happen is that RFK Jr. etc. is creating a situation where all the big companies are going to have to act. And if everybody has to act, then presumably there will be industries and products that pop up to be alternatives to whatever the ingredients are that seem to be unhealthy. If only one company wanted to switch to a healthier alternative, it might not be enough to make an industry out of the alternative. But if everybody kind of needs to, because there’d be too much pressure from the public and RFK Jr., then suddenly it’s a big money situation to get healthier, and people might produce that product for you. So I feel like everything’s going in the right direction on food. It’s just going to take a while.
Seki Chen on Racism
I saw a post by Seki Chen on X. Seki is in the tech world; he’s well-known in the tech world. He said, “I’ve lived in the United States for almost 42 years. I’ve been alive and never had people be openly racist to me until I heard from all the people, either openly on X or privately in DMs, hurling racist abuse at me for switching to the Republican Party.” He says, “Eye-opening.” That is shocking. That is shocking.
FIRE Survey on Campus Violence
Apparently the day before—I saw this, Daniel Greenfield wrote about this—that the day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, there was a free speech ranking in a FIRE survey. FIRE being the name of the entity, FIRE survey of 68,000 college students, a whole bunch of universities, and it revealed that one in three students believed that using violence to stop a speaker they disagreed with on campus was acceptable. One in three people thought violence was acceptable to stop people from saying things you don’t like. Violence, one in three.
Now, here’s my take. I don’t believe that survey. Do you? Do you think that’s true? That sounds a lot like something that college students say in an answer to a survey. It doesn’t sound like something they’d do. So, you know, if you say to me, “Do you think young people whose brains are not developed and they like causing trouble and maybe they like using a little hyperbole?” I feel like it’s something you say on a survey if you’re young that isn’t really something you believe, or if you were in the situation, you wouldn’t do any violence. So I feel like it’s alarming, and I’m certainly keeping an eye on it. I wouldn’t completely discount it. I could be wrong, it’s happened. But I’m not entirely sure that’s telling us what we think. Remember, all data is fake.
Citizenship Test Changes
I told you that the US is going to overhaul the citizenship test. Did you know that the citizenship was 100 questions but you only get 10 of them? So they randomly pick 10 of the questions, but you would have to study all 100 to make sure you can get most of them right. So it used to be that you only need to get a six out of 10 right. But now you’ll need 12 correct out of 20. And I looked at the questions, and I’m happy to say I think I could pass it. But if you had 128 facts that you had to learn and you only had to get 12 out of 20 right, how long would you have to study before you could nail that? You’d probably have to understand English, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to understand the test. I guess it’s a verbal test, it’s not even written. Somebody just asks you 10 questions and then checks it off. But I don’t know, was there really some reason that we had to add 28 questions? But there’s probably a good reason for it.
Illegal Immigration and Self-Deportation
So according to Just the News, Ben Whedon, already two million illegal residents have left the country. 400,000 directly deported and then 1.6 million self-deporting. You know, when I heard this whole self-deporting thing—the commercials you see on TV with Kristi Noem and she’s saying, “If you leave now, there’s a chance we would let you back in, but if you don’t leave and we have to get rid of you, you’ll never come back”—so some number of people are self-deporting. Way more than I thought. I thought everybody would just hang tight and try to ride it out, try to hide from the law until there’s a new president or something. But if these numbers are right—and there’s always a question about that—if really 1.6 million people left on their own on top of 400,000 deported, wouldn’t you call that a really good job? Because remember, at least the 400,000 are not all, but a lot of them are the worst. I don’t know what percentage; I don’t think it’s a very high percentage, actually. But if they got a lot of the bad people first, I don’t know, that feels very successful. I would give a high mark for that number of people in six months.
David Sacks on China and AI
David Sacks, as you know, he’s in the administration. He’s got a portfolio of crypto and I think AI. And he says that there’s big news from China and that Huawei, their big tech company over there, has introduced a new AI chip that’s going to compete with NVIDIA. Here we thought we were all awesome in the United States because we had better chips, so we could get better AI and rule the world. But Huawei is competing. Now, their chips are not as good as NVIDIA, and people are saying things like, “Well, it’s going to be a long time before they can catch up.”
We don’t know that. We don’t know how long it’ll take them to catch up. They’ve already figured out how to architect their lesser chips so that they act like better chips. They just use more of them and they can approximate NVIDIA. They can’t get there, but they can get close. So China is not really desperate for our chips, and they’re doing essentially what we’re doing by trying to do better at mining rare earth so that we don’t have to depend on them. Well, they’re doing the same thing, but what they’re doing is building a chip-building industry.
Now, the problem is that Huawei will start selling its AI chips to other countries. And if China is the one providing the AI tech and not the United States, then those countries are going to be a little bit under the thumb of China, because they will depend on China for their technology and they have to have AI because everybody will have to have it. So David Sacks is warning us that maybe we should look at loosening up our sales to the non-China companies so that they don’t buy from China. Which seems commonsensical. I would say that on the surface that makes sense.
But I will also say that in general, I feel like it’s more likely that China will match NVIDIA in a few short years than the chances that they won’t. There’s just too much riding on it, and they’ll do everything from bribery to blackmail to outright IP theft. And I don’t know, is it impossible for them to just get one of the NVIDIA chips and look at the architecture and copy it? Is that not possible? Or is it the software? Well, even that they can copy. So I’m going to bet that China will surprise us in how quickly they reach parity, if not more, to NVIDIA.
Ukraine and Russian Refineries
Well, Ukraine has attacked yet another refinery in Russia. This is a Gazprom refinery in Bashkortostan, Russia. So it’s 1300 kilometers from the front line, so they’re going pretty deep into Russia. And they used scores of drones and they had a direct hit on the facility. Now, I don’t know how much of it was destroyed or whether it stopped operation. But I was wondering—remember I’ve told you that I was guessing that if Ukraine could take out 20%, that was my own estimate, of the refining capacity or the energy resources in Russia, that Russia’s economy would be in such trouble that they might want to do a peace deal.
Well, according to whatever it was I was reading that I didn’t write down the source, expert projections indicate that sustained disruptions to 40% or 50% of capacity could tip the balance. So I said 20% would put them in trouble; the experts say 40% to 50%. Guess what they’re at. If I wrote it down, I think it was like 17%, 20%, something like that. Yeah, 17% to 24%. So it’s possible that Ukraine is halfway there, and there’s nothing that would stop them from getting to 40 or 50. But they’re already halfway to the number that would collapse the Russian economy. Now it’s obvious that that’s the strategy, because they don’t really have any chance of winning a direct military battle. But they could definitely take out 40% to 50% of their refinery capacity, and then things get pretty sketchy—assuming any of those numbers are real. Now obviously Russia would up their response, so you can’t predict that that would give Ukraine a victory or anything, but it might make Russia sufficiently incentivized to at least talk peace. We’ll see.
California Media Subsidies
California legislature—I can’t even believe this—passed a bill to create subsidies for news entities, for the media entities. And it’s because Governor Newsom thinks that the media entities in California need a little boost. Now, how do you interpret that? This is being reported by Just the News. How do you understand that except for a way for the Governor to control the news? If you want your subsidy, you better do positive reporting about me. Or do you think it’s just another way for the government to launder money? Do you think that there’s anybody who’s like a good friend or relative, perhaps, of Newsom, who might be a recipient of some of those subsidies? Well, that’s the way it usually goes on the Democrat side. If you hear they’ve created any kind of funding or subsidies for anything, the first thing you can know is that that money’s going to go to their cronies and people are going to give some of it back to the politicians who created that law. So, I would say every part of this looks dirty to me.
Pope on Elon Musk
Well, the Pope has weighed in and he’s slamming Elon Musk for what he calls “obscene greed.” He said, talking about money, he said, “If that is the only thing that has any value anymore, then we are in big trouble.” He pointed out the continuous wider income gap. He said yesterday there was a news that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world, and then he says, “What does that mean?” So he thinks that’s bad. “If the only thing that has any value anymore, we’re in trouble,” blah, blah, blah.
Now, I don’t want to criticize the Pope, but I would point out that the Pope’s expertise does not seem to extend to the business world. Let me explain what the trillion dollars is all about. The trillion dollars is not what he’s going to spend on buying, what, better T-shirts? Elon Musk wears basically a T-shirt and jeans every single day. Like, what’s he spending his trillion on? Is it because he has a private jet that he flies around? That would be a necessity for anyone who has that many businesses. If you have more than one business and you’re a global kind of a company, and you need to run businesses in different places and you’ve got… yeah, a private plane is just business. There’s nothing wrong with that. And it’s not like he even has a mansion or anything. Doesn’t have a mansion. I don’t know if he ever will; he seems uninterested in that kind of stuff. So Elon Musk is the least consumer-driven person I’ve ever seen. Steve Jobs arguably was in that domain.
But I think it’s a complete misunderstanding that the trillion dollars is just his money. No, it’s not. The trillion dollars is the value of SpaceX and Tesla and his other companies. He’s building robots and going to Mars and solving all these physical problems with the brain chip thing. That trillion dollars is almost, I’d say, 98% for the public good. He only does companies that are for the public good. He’s not making a video game, although he might someday. The things he does are so obviously good for the country, if not the world—at the very least it makes the US more competitive. But it bothers me a little that the Pope would weigh in on this and be so wrong about understanding the general situation. I want Elon Musk to have two trillion dollars because his history is that he invests every penny he makes. That’s how he got where he is. He invests it all. So, Pope, come on. Come on, Pope.
AI and Global Trade
All right, I saw an estimate in Tech Explore, Andrew Zidnin is writing that, according to the WTO, AI might boost global trade values by at least 40%. So that would be a gigantic improvement in business. Do you believe that? Do you believe that the WTO can do a believable, credible estimate about how much AI will boost global trade? Let’s see how well I’ve trained you. Do you believe that’s something they can estimate? No. This is as ridiculous as the climate models. No, there’s no such thing as estimating the temperature in 20 years. That’s not a thing, not credibly doing it. And it’s not a thing that you could figure out how AI will boost global trade. Please. Really? Really? Nobody knows what AI is going to do. It might be better than that, might be worse, but nobody knows an estimate. God. All right, nobody can legitimately estimate that sort of thing. And once you learn that, it’ll help you a lot, because there’s a tendency if all these experts say, “Well, we estimated this thing,” and you say to yourself, “Well, experts estimated a thing, that sounds pretty good to me.” But generally, when experts are estimating a thing, the odds that they know what they’re doing and the estimate is credible is very low. It’s very low.
All right, that’s all I’ve got to say today. I’ve got my cat in my lap who has been enjoying the show more than you, because the cat likes it when I’m busy doing something else and he’s just laying on my lap. So Gary, I’m done now with the main show, and I’m going to go private with the beloved, very beloved, Locals subscribers. And the rest of you, thanks for joining, and we’ll be back tomorrow, same time, same place. All right, Locals, I’m coming at you in 30 seconds. 30 seconds starting now.