Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-09-30
The Simultaneous Sip
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It’s called Coffee with Scott Adams. You’ve never had a better time. But if you’d like to take a chance on elevating your experience to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, well, all you need for that would be a copper mug, 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.
Webcam Product Review
I’d like to begin with a product review. I said to myself, I bet I could get a better camera than the one that’s built into my laptop, my Macintosh. So I used Grok and I used ChatGPT, and I asked people for recommendations for a good webcam. People said the best one would be this Logitech Brio—I don’t know, whatever is at the top of the line.
But I would like to make a point. This is supposed to hang on the top of your laptop, and the little tiny, tiny, tiny little lip is the only thing that keeps it on there. Then, in addition, there’s this device which apparently is made because they hate people. There’s no other reason I can think of. Whoever designed this, for the past 20 years or so, I’ve been buying Logitech and other cameras, trying them out, and then as soon as you breathe, it falls off.
This morning, after the 50th time of not being able to adjust the color temperature or to get it anywhere near as good as the one that’s built into my laptop, I finally threw it across the room and took care of it. This is the way you have to handle these. You just have to break them. Because once that thing falls off your laptop for the third time, if you’re dumb enough to let it happen to you a fourth time, well, you deserve what you’re getting. No, that has to be broken and publicly humiliated. So I did that for you. We’re back to our FaceTime camera, which is a really good camera, by the way. Very good camera.
God’s Debris AI Movie
I saw a piece of work by J. Plemmons yesterday on X, who took my book, God’s Debris, and used AI to create an AI movie of just the first scene. Now, that’s the problem with making movies: you can make a good 15-second scene, but apparently, that’s as far as you can go. Even if you make lots of them, they don’t fit together or something. But just to see what the future holds—wow, it’s really amazing. It’s in my X feed, or you can go to J’s feed. He’s at @JayPlemmons. He’d be a good follow if you want to see some good video clips. It features the character in the book called the Avatar. That’s the main character; it’s a fictional account. J put me in as the Avatar. The funny thing about that is that the Avatar character is described as so old he looks like he’s just ready to die any moment. I thought, oh well, that’s pretty good casting.
AI and Copyright
I would ask you, if you’re tempted to take that book and turn it into a full-length movie, that would be a big copyright problem. Doing 15 seconds of it to demonstrate how it works is excellent and, in my mind, would be fair use. But if you thought, “Hey, I think I’ll make a whole movie out of this,” no, that would not be fair use.
Speaking of that, OpenAI has apparently told Hollywood studios that instead of—well, I guess they want to reverse the model of copyright—so they will use your copyright unless you specifically ask them not to. So you would have to explicitly opt out. Otherwise, you could use OpenAI to make your own Dilbert comics or anything else you wanted. You could do a Dilbert movie, I guess. But now I have to figure out—I guess I’ll ask OpenAI. Do you think if I asked OpenAI, “What is the mechanism to explicitly opt out for my copyrights,” do you think it would know the answer to that? It might, but I’m going to guess no. I’m not even sure this is true; I don’t have a source for it. But that would be a big deal.
Military Readiness and Physical Tests
Pete Hegseth is talking to his meeting of generals, which means we’ve put all of our most important people, including our president, all in one room. It doesn’t feel like the best play, but I’m sure they figured this out. I haven’t heard it all because it looks like it’s going to be an all-day event kind of thing. The President is speaking now, I think. But the parts I saw, Pete Hegseth started out saying that it is unacceptable to see fat troops, and even worse to see fat generals in the hallway. So whether you’re a general or a troop, you’re going to have to do a PT physical test twice a year for all members of the military. How in the world are they going to get these 60-plus-year-old generals to pass the physical test? I don’t know. That seems like a stretch.
He’s against wokeness and DEI for promotions and said they’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons. So it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any big announcement per se. It looks like it’s just things you knew that Hegseth and Trump wanted to make the military more lethal. It’ll probably make some news, but I don’t think it’s a big announcement.
Massive Cocaine Seizure
The Trump administration announced, and it was just in the news I saw, that they had confiscated 1 million pounds of cocaine. 1 million pounds of cocaine, worth $11 billion. 1 million pounds! And my first question is, how do you dispose of a million pounds of cocaine? Hold it, you have to answer the question: how do you dispose of a million pounds of cocaine, but you can’t use the words “Hunter” or “Biden.” You can’t do it, can you? Because about half of you just wrote Hunter Biden as soon as I asked the question. I know you. I guess we’ll dump it in the ocean with the rest of it. Our entire ocean is going to be a cocaine ocean if we keep it up. I’m going swimming; never coming back.
The Real Cost of Robots
I saw a reframe on robot costs from a gentleman named Iler Alieu—I hope that’s even close to his name. But he points out that the cost of the robot—now he’s talking about industrial robots, not the kind that will walk around in your house, but the factory kind—he says that buying the robot is only 20% of the total cost. The real expense is that you have to change over your system, which means discontinuing production for a while. You’ve got to figure out how to train your robot, you’ve got to train people to work with the robot, you’re going to have maintenance problems with the robot, you’ve got to upgrade the robot. So 80% of the cost of the robot is on top of the price of the robot. That’s one of those little factoids that if you store that away, you’ll feel like the smartest person at the party when somebody brings up robots.
Diddy Sentencing
Apparently, the Diddy sentence is upcoming. We don’t know what that’s going to be yet, but it could be up to 11 years for prostitution-related charges and so on. So it could be up to 11 years. We’ll see.
Right-Wing vs. Left-Wing Violence
How many of you are very confident that you know the answer to the following question: in recent years—only talking about the last few years—has there been more right-wing violence or left-wing violence? Tell me if you know the answer and if you’re confident that you know the answer.
I have decided to give up. There was one point where I thought, “I’ll just look at the data; I’ll just Google that data.” I don’t know what to believe because I don’t believe any of the data in this domain, and nor should you. Do you really think this data is accurate, or do you think it’s just full of opinion? As in, “Well, I don’t know, that one’s a little bit right-wing, but not completely, so we’ll put that in the gray area. Oh, this one’s left-wing, I can tell by how they voted.” Don’t you think that data is all bullshit?
I also don’t know how much it matters. As long as it’s coming from both directions, would it matter if it’s 30/70 in one direction? How would that matter? You would do exactly the same thing if it were 50/50, 30/70, or 70/30. You wouldn’t do anything differently, would you? Because you should be working on both sides of that equation whether it’s 30/70 or 70/30. It doesn’t matter. All it is is getting a quick rhetorical point if you’re debating somebody, I guess. But it doesn’t have any real-world implications.
And I’ve also seen lots of examples where right-wing people—and that would include me—have said things like “fascist” or whatever. I would argue that when the right wing uses those words, like “you’re acting like a Nazi or a fascist,” absolutely nobody takes that literally. Would you agree? That when the right uses those words, you can tell it’s just rhetorical and that even a crazy person wouldn’t think that was real. Now, they might think it’s real when they call Mom Dami a communist. People might think that’s real, and you could imagine people might act on it. So I think it would be good general advice for both sides to maybe back off of the Nazi references. And I’m going to try to do the same thing. I will stop trying to do the same thing if the left doesn’t make any progress in not doing that.
But at the moment, even though it feels to me that there’s more left-wing violence, maybe that’s just because of the ones that get on TV. I don’t know. And this latest one with the church, what was that? That guy was a Trump supporter, but I don’t think he did it for some classic political reason. So I think the reasons that the right wing do things—violence—and the left wing do things seem different. The left wing seems often trying to change politics. Trying to kill Trump, taking out Charlie Kirk—doesn’t that feel like a direct attempt to change politics? Whereas when the right does something, it doesn’t look like they’re trying to change the government; it looks like they’re mad at something or crazy. Maybe that’s useful to know, that there’s a difference.
Wikipedia Blacklists
Tucker Carlson had on his show one of the Wikipedia co-founders, Larry Sanger. Larry Sanger walked him through the blacklist. I saw this on a Jason Cohen clip. By the way, if you want to follow Jason Cohen, I mentioned it before, but it turns out there are a lot of people with that name. He’s the one that’s at @JasonJurnDC.
The blacklist on Wikipedia are the publications that you’re not supposed to—or you can’t, actually, it’s blocked—you can’t use them as your source. So if you’re one of the editors on Wikipedia and you saw an article in, let’s say, The Federalist or Breitbart, and you said, “Oh, that looks pretty reliable, I’ll refer to that as a source,” Wikipedia would block you. But if you wanted to use The New York Times as a source, no problem. Washington Post, yeah, no problem. New York Post? Oh, no. The Federalist? No. So that does render Wikipedia somewhat useless for anything political. I think you’d agree with that.
Grokpedia
But it turns out that Elon Musk has just confirmed that his XAI company—his AI division—is going to build a competitor called Grokpedia. Now, given that AI is undependable by its nature and it hallucinates, I don’t know exactly what the business model will be. But I would imagine if the only thing it did was add some AI elements and expanded the number of sources that could be considered legitimate, that would be a big deal. So this might be yet another gigantic big deal. And it’s an even bigger deal if Musk allows other AI to train on Grokpedia. Because I’m pretty sure that AI has trained on Wikipedia, so what if Elon says, “I’m going to open this up. You can all train your AI on what was created by my AI.” That would be interesting, because it’d be quite different.
ADL Labels Turning Point USA
Did you know that the ADL lists Turning Point USA as one of their groups that they accuse of extremism and hate? So the ADL, trying to improve the safety and the reputation and life of Jewish people everywhere, they’ve decided that Turning Point USA is an extremist hate group. I don’t know how that could be any more opposite than that.
And so I wondered, how does the ADL deal with the fact that Israel—now they don’t work for Israel; ADL is not part of Israel, it’s an American group, and there’d be plenty of people in Israel who are not happy with them for their own reasons. But I wondered, how does the ADL handle the war in Gaza? So I looked it up on Grok. What they do is they argue that the word “genocide” doesn’t apply because there’s no evidence of intention. Did you know that in order for a genocide to be a genocide, you have to have the intention of removing or killing all the people? Removing the people is a genocide too; just moving them from wherever they are to somewhere else. So you don’t have to kill them all, but removing them would be a genocide. But you’d have to have the intention of a genocide according to the ADL leader, Jonathan Greenblatt.
Now, is that just a weasel way to get out of dealing with a question, or do you find that valid? Well, Israel has never said, “Our intention is to do a genocide.” But they have said—correct me if I’m wrong, we’ll talk about the Gaza 21-point plan in a moment—but haven’t they said directly, “We’re going to move all the people out,” maybe with some ability for some of them to move back in the future? But is that enough? If you say, “Well, yeah, we’re just going to clean up some problems with Hamas and then people can come back in,” is that enough to say that you don’t have the intention of moving people out and keeping them out? I don’t know.
It feels like it’s a little hard to navigate that situation if you’re the ADL. But as it stands, the 65,000 people who have been killed and the millions who are being dislocated in Gaza is not a situation of hate and extremism. But that damn Charlie Kirk and all those Christians who were worshipping God and trying to live a holy life, they’re a case of hate and extremism. So I don’t know how long the ADL is going to last, because it just makes Jewish people look like shit, honestly. If I were a Jew, I would want the ADL to go away right away, as soon as possible. I would not want that to be part of what my reputational brand is, for God’s sakes. Anyway, maybe the ADL should label itself a hate group, and that would take care of everything.
Poll on City Crime
According to Fox News, there’s an NPR/Ipsos poll that says 71% of those polled say that crime levels in American cities are unacceptable. It makes you wonder, how would somebody answer that question any other way? If you said, “Is the crime level in Chicago acceptable?” apparently there’s somebody who says yes. Quite a few people. At what point is the crime level acceptable? I would say the acceptable level would be zero. I mean, if your crime was relatively low, you wouldn’t get rid of the police department, right? You would say, “Well, now that we’ve got the crime down to one murder per whatever, we don’t need a police. It’s acceptable. It’s just acceptable now.” So I feel like it’s a dumb question. I’d ignore that one.
The Government Shutdown
I guess the government shutdown is inevitable now, and that happens in the next day or so. The government’s going to shut down. Now, it’s not the whole government; it’s a whole bunch of non-essential stuff. And I say this every time we’re in this situation, but doesn’t it seem weird to you, and would you have designed this system if you were the founders of the country? You’re sitting around in your non-air-conditioned room trying to figure out how to make a constitution. Would you have designed a system where the only way you can get a budget passed is by seeing who’s willing to torture people not involved in the budget the hardest?
The way this will work is if the Democrats are willing to torture the people who are going to lose their jobs, at least temporarily, and they’re willing to torture the public by making sure they don’t have access to these services while everything’s closed. If they can handle the torture longer than the Republicans can torture that same group of people, then they win. They get their way. So whoever is the best torturer of citizens gets to decide what the budget is. Can you imagine a worse system? If you were going to sit down and no system existed, you’d be like, “All right, so what we’re going to do? I think a good way to do a budget would be we will torture third parties, people who are not part of the budget process.” And somebody would raise their hand in the back and say, “Excuse me, wouldn’t we get a much better result and faster if the only people who were tortured were the people doing the budget? Because then they’d say, ‘Oh, it hurts so bad, I’m going to have to hurry up.‘” No, that feels like that would be painful. So instead, we’ll torture other people. We’ll just torture nameless citizens that we don’t know personally, but we’ll torture a lot of them. We’ll get a lot of them. And then it doesn’t matter if we do the job or not. We don’t even have to do the work of the people. We’ll just torture people, and however it comes out, that’s just the way we’ll do it. Great job, government.
According to the Daily Caller News Foundation, there’s a Soros-backed group, a leftist group called Indivisible, that’s working trying to work the Democrats to make sure that they stay tight and keep the government closed until all of their stupid funding is returned. Now, that would be the funding for exactly the things that we don’t want, but they’re going to work hard to keep that government closed.
Gavin Newsom and Shutdown Blame
Governor Newsom said in a post talking about the impending shutdown, “Republicans have control of the House, the Senate, and the White House. If the government shuts down, it’s on them.” Now, most of you know that you’ve got to get 60 votes, and that means you need about seven—I think around sevenish—Democrats have to vote for it. And of course, they won’t. So when Gavin says that the Republicans have control, if you don’t pay attention too closely, you think, “Hey, that means they can do it if they want to. So it’s all on them.” No, they don’t have any power. They have no power. But his base is probably 90% of them don’t know that it will take some Democrat votes. They just won’t even know that. So his post on X works for them because they think, “Oh, those stupid damn Republicans, they ruin everything.” Then the people who do know that he’s lying are going to say, “Oh, that’s a good post, because people won’t know he’s lying.” He’s a good liar. He’s a very good liar. That’s why he is dangerous. It’s not because he’s not capable; it’s because he’s too capable at the wrong things. Not so good at running a state, but boy can he lie. He’s a good liar.
Trump Monetizes His Problems
YouTube has agreed to pay a 25 million, X paid him $10 million, which seems unfair because X was after Twitter, and Twitter was the one that kicked him off. Anyway, so he’s got all this money now coming in, and I guess he’s going to earmark it for the construction of the new White House ballroom. How awesome is it that Trump sued them for his balls? For the balls in the ballroom! I don’t know what you’re talking about, but apparently, he’s going to get them to pay for his balls. And I’m going to say again what I often say: that Trump has figured out how to monetize all of his problems. So here he is monetizing the fact that he got kicked off these platforms, and he’s going to use that money to build himself a nice ballroom. How much do I love that? I love it totally. It would be one thing if he was planning to spend that money on himself—he doesn’t need it—but watching him monetize it for the benefit of the people, because we’ll get a new ballroom and that will belong to all of us. Very impressive.
Trump vs. Big Pharma
Axios is talking about Trump’s promise, or his threat I guess, to Big Pharma that they better lower the prices and give us the same low prices that other countries get. In response, Pharma has done—checking notes—not a thing. Nothing. They have not lowered their prices. So I think their deadline is passed, and I don’t know if Trump’s going to come down hard on them, because you don’t want to do anything that would reduce our access to valuable meds. On the other hand, you can’t really have them just ignore the President and keep those prices where they are.
Oh wow, The Wall Street Journal just reported that the White House plans to introduce Trump RX, a new government website to facilitate drug purchases. I guess that would be to cut out the middleman, or maybe that’s the only place that you get them cheap. I don’t know. So we’ll find out. But just know that Trump’s going to have to do more, and maybe that website is the answer. He’ll have to do more to get those prices down because Big Pharma’s not going to do it just because you asked.
War with Russia
Are we at war with Russia? Now, I know we’ve been asking that the whole time we’ve been feeding weapons into the war. But at this point, we’re giving them American weapons. The weapons require American training, I believe, so we’re probably training and giving them weapons. And the latest thing is that the new weapons will go so far into Russia that Ukraine is only allowed to use them with our permission. So they’d have to get approval to do something extra deep into the country of Russia. I’m guessing that American satellites are helping them locate targets, right? So if it’s true that they’re American weapons and can only be used with American training and American approval, and American satellites maybe, isn’t the least important part of that the soldier? Because you can replace the soldier, but if the soldier didn’t have these missiles, the war would be over. I feel like the American part is the important part, and the soldier is becoming the least important part. So I’ll ask again: are we at war with Russia? Because the further we go into this, “Oh, it’s not us, it’s not us, it must be those darn Ukrainians they keep fighting. But we’re not. Oh no, we’re not part of this.” I don’t know how far that can go. Obviously, Putin would think he’s at war with us, but he’s smart enough not to attack the homeland because that would empty the cupboard and he doesn’t want that.
Netanyahu and the 21-Point Gaza Plan
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has agreed to terms to Trump’s 21-point Gaza proposal, Wall Street Journal is reporting. But not until Netanyahu inserted some edits into his plan. Those edits might be the kind of edits that would make it impossible to get a deal because it allows Israel to have indefinite military control of Gaza, no matter what else is happening. So the other parts of the plan would be things like the Arab countries would help monitor and manage the place, and the Palestinians who had lived there could move back, but Hamas will be gone. Hamas will be no more. So they wouldn’t be allowed to be in charge. But until all of the risk of terrorism is removed according to Israel, Israel can keep its military there. That would be the plan. Do you think Hamas will agree that Israel can have perpetual, maybe, military control of Gaza? I don’t know. That might be a problem. So we’ll see.
Hamas says they’re taking it seriously and they’re going to look at it. We’ll find out. So one possibility is that Israel knows that Hamas will never accept any kind of a deal. Part of it also is “release the hostages in 72 hours,” I think. But if you assume that Hamas will never accept anything reasonable, then all it does is give Netanyahu a free pass to keep pounding them because he’ll keep negotiating this thing while Israel continues to pound them. And they’ll just say, “Hmm, I don’t know, maybe we should add this thing, maybe we should add a little tweak,” and they’ll get another week to pound them. So I don’t even know if it’s a serious offer or Israel’s just cynically saying, “Yeah, yeah, we totally agree with this. We’ll totally do this, so I guess you can’t blame us for war because we already agreed to peace. So if Hamas doesn’t agree, well then they’re just bringing it upon themselves, wouldn’t you say?” So I think Israel wins either way. They win if they get the end of fighting in one way, and they would win a different way if they got a better excuse to keep fighting. “Well, look, we’ve offered, and we made this totally reasonable offer, and they rejected it, so what are you going to do? I guess the fighting goes on, it’s all Hamas’s fault.”
Anyway, Netanyahu is becoming hilarious in his praising of Trump because obviously he knows that he needs to stay on Trump’s good side. But he’s doing it with such a heavy hand. Here are some things that Netanyahu said I think just yesterday about President Trump: “There’s no one like him, he’s an incredible friend and ally of Israel. I don’t decide a thing for President Trump, he is the most independent leader and amazing leader that I’ve seen in all my years.” In all of his years, he’s the best leader. And here’s my advice: you want to dial that back about 20%. It’s good to say good things about Trump, especially if you believe them. But if you go too far, it looks like you’re playing swatty with us. It doesn’t look like you’re serious at all. I mean, if you go from “he’s the most independent leader and amazing leader that I’ve seen in all my years,” that’s right up to the line. Because after that, what do you have after that? He can fly on his own power? We think he has god-like powers? He might be psychic? I mean, it gets crazy after that. So dial it back about 20%.
Eric Swalwell on Accountability
Eric Swalwell reminds us why Democrats can never be in power again. He announced—he actually said this out loud in public—he says, “When Democrats win in 2026, accountability is coming,” and that they’ll investigate private citizens who work for Trump, subpoena the DOJ, and also private actors who have done these “drug deals” with the administration. He calls them drug deals.
And here’s my advice. Once again, we always talk about how Democrats don’t understand human motivation. Why are you telling us you’re going to do this if you win? Doing it after you win might make some sense, right? Because then you’ve already won. Saying it before you get there just makes us try harder to make sure you don’t win. What exactly were you trying to accomplish by inspiring us to try harder to make sure you never have power again? Well, telling us you’ll go after private citizens will get you there.
John Fetterman’s Strategy
Senator John Fetterman is telling us he’s not going to switch parties; he’s just sort of like common sense and doesn’t think the Democrats are always doing the common sense thing. But I saw Dana Perino on The Five say what I would have said in this situation, which is Fetterman is very cleverly taking what could be called the Joe Manchin strategy. Which is, if you can credibly become the only Democrat who’s sometimes—not often, but sometimes—willing to vote with the Republicans, then everybody has to kiss your ass from now until the end of time because they can’t afford to lose that one vote. Things are just too close. So maybe it won’t be that close after 2026, but I’ve got a feeling he’s going to Joe Manchin this thing, which would be brilliant. It would be exactly the right thing to do and smarter than switching to the Republicans. If he switches to the Republican Party, he will be considered the least good Republican because he’s practically a Democrat. But if he stays Democrat, he’s got all the power.
DEI Reframing
Don Lemon said in public that white men are deeply broken and that’s why they resort to violence. Okay. I think Joy Reid was on another podcast saying bad things about white people too. But I’m going to give you some DEI reframing in case you find yourself in a conversation about DEI. Ready?
Here’s what most of us have been saying, including me, and I keep realizing that it doesn’t work at all. If you say that DEI is racist, nobody cares. Nobody cares. There’s no Democrat who’s going to say, “Oh, oh, I didn’t realize that. Yeah, that’s kind of racist. Yeah, so we should cut it out.” Nobody cares. If let me use an analogy: if a billionaire lost a dollar, would you feel bad for them? A billionaire lost one dollar. No, you wouldn’t, because if somebody’s powerful, you don’t feel empathy for them. You just say, “Ah, I’d rather be you than me.” So likewise, if you’re a white guy and you say to anybody who’s a Democrat, “Oh, this is racist,” the Democrat’s going to say, “So? You probably had it coming. After hundreds of years of you being the patriarchy and you getting all the good stuff and all that, so what if it’s a little bit racist against you? You’ve got that coming.” So as an argument—forget about what’s right or wrong—as an argument, no persuasion at all.
But I’m going to give you a better version of that. I just came up with that this morning. Did you know that there are multiple studies that show that redheads are discriminated against for employment? Did you know that? Redheads are very discriminated against in employment. It’s repeatable; a number of studies have found the same thing. So instead of saying that your problem is it’s racist against white people, which you will never prevail in, even though it’s true, you say, “Here’s my problem with DEI. It’s not about anybody’s gender or race or culture. You could replace Black people in the example with redheads, and you’d have the same problem.”
So your boss would say, “Uh-oh, the order came down, I have to get more redheads because we don’t have enough redheads.” And then they try to hire high-technically capable redheads, but everybody’s doing it too. All the other companies are hiring redheads. How long will it take before you run out of top-shelf redheads? About a minute. And you’re out of redheads that are like really the top employees. But what do you do? If you run out of the top-level redheads but you’ve got to hire redheads or else you lose your bonus because your boss told you you’ve got to get some diversity and that includes the redheads, what are you going to do? You’re going to lower your standards. Because that’s what the incentive system has given you.
Once again, I remind you that Democrats don’t understand human motivation, and it’s behind all of their mistakes. It’s the same thing; it’s behind all their mistakes. So the argument would be: if you can get somebody to agree that you would have the same problem with a redhead, such that if Charlie Kirk were still alive and he got on a flight and he saw that a redhead was the pilot of the ship, he would ask himself, reasonably—reasonably—“I wonder if that redhead only got in there because of DEI.” So the best argument, I think, if you can get somebody to listen to you for more than 10 seconds, is that you could replace Black or brown or women or LGBTQ—you could replace any of them with redheads and you would still have a gigantic problem. It’s the math of the fact that the system guarantees that people do the wrong thing. It guarantees it. It’s not “maybe.” It guarantees that managers will do the wrong thing and lower their standards. Because that’s how they make their money. Anyway, try that out. Let me know if that works for you. It would only work for somebody who’s willing to sit there and listen. It’s not going to work for a quick hit on X.
TSA Watchlists for Mask Activists
We’re learning now, the Transportation Security Administration is learning that there was—apparently, people were added to the TSA watchlist under Biden if they were known mask resisters. Can you believe that? That people who were known as sort of activists against mask mandates, they were put on the no-fly list. That is so, so wrong at a level that I just go, “What? That really happened?” I lived through that because I was an anti-mask activist. Is it possible that I was added to the no-fly list and I didn’t know it? I mean, I did fly, but oh, when I flew, I was not yet being vocal about masks. That came after that. I haven’t flown—yeah, I haven’t flown since then, but for other reasons. So I might actually be on some kind of no-fly terrorist list just because I made a big deal about “we’ve got to get rid of these masks now that we know for sure that they don’t make any difference.”
Cognitive Decline in Young Adults
According to Medscape, Jeff Craven writes that there’s a sharp rise in what they call cognitive disabilities in young adults. Now, we’re not even talking about autism and ADHD; they’re talking about concentration, memory, and decision-making. They’re saying that’s way down. I don’t know what the cause of that is. I mean, you could speculate all the usual causes, from food to lack of sleep to—I don’t know—you could imagine a lot of possible answers.
But I have one possibility that I think people would miss, which is that the world itself is getting increasingly complicated. If you take somebody with a brain that’s perfectly suited for the 1800s, as in, “Hey, this is cousin Bob, he’s not too bright, but all he has to do is milk the cows.” Could cousin Bob milk the cows and not have any problems with concentration, memory, or decision-making? Yeah, no decision, not much concentration. So if all you’re doing is milking a cow, yeah, you’re perfectly fine. But what if you have to navigate your smartphone and school and try to figure out how to get into college and just getting from one place to another is a nightmare? Everything is so much more complicated, mostly with online stuff, that it could be that the people haven’t changed but the challenge of just surviving life in 2025 causes some people to just not be able to hold all the memories, not be able to handle the decision-making, etc. So it could be that the people didn’t change, the environment did. So I’ll just throw that out there. I wouldn’t bet my life that that’s the answer, but maybe.
Xi Jinping and Taiwan
Allegedly, President Xi, according to The Telegraph, had asked Trump to oppose Taiwan independence in return for a trade deal. Does that sound like something we should do, to oppose Taiwan independence so you could get a trade deal? Well, here’s the fun part. You know how I always tell you that Trump is incredible at creating a fake asset so he has something to negotiate away? Apparently, the Biden administration had something on the website that saying it did not support Taiwan’s independence; it wanted to just sort of keep things the way they are because then China doesn’t get mad at you, etc. And then Trump removed it.
So what I think what China wants is that in order in return for a trade deal, which we want, they would want us to put back on the website that we do not support Taiwan’s independence; we only support the status quo or something like that. And so that would suggest again that Trump created an asset by taking that off the website, which didn’t cost us anything. And now in order to put it back on the website and probably also say it out loud, they would give us a trade deal. Now, I’m assuming that that would be a better deal than if we don’t do that. So he somehow again created an asset out of nothing. I don’t know how that will work, but that was interesting.
And then related to that, apparently, there’s a US plan—well, I think it’s already in motion—they’re going to pressure Taiwan to move 50% of their chip production to the US or lose our military protection. Ars Technica was reporting on that. Even the Trump officials say that that’s impossible. I think Jensen Huang of NVIDIA just two years ago had estimated that moving that production—well, the pipeline basically—moving the entire pipeline to the US might take 10 to 20 years. Might take two decades. But we’re pushing Taiwan to get that done or to lose our support, military support I guess. So I think it’s the right direction, and asking companies and the government to do things that look impossible is not really the worst idea, because lots of times you can figure out how to do things that looked impossible. But if you say, “Here’s the deal: we’re going to leave you to China’s military unless you can do this in two years,” probably they get it done in two years because they’re not going to wait around for China’s military to be running their island. So I’d say remain skeptical of that, but it probably makes a lot of sense to put that out there as an objective.
California Voter ID Petition
Scott Presler and Nicole Shanahan are two people who are going to work on getting a petition in California for voter ID and get it on the ballot. We still have to win on the ballot, which I think it could actually. So they would just have to get enough signatures to get it on the ballot. They’re trying to get a million, and that would end a particular kind of cheating because you’d have to have an ID to vote. And I’ll bet you they can get a million signatures for that. I’ll bet you they can.
JP Morgan Moving to Texas
According to The New York Post, JP Morgan Chase now has more employees in Texas than in New York. And I guess it’s part of a trend where people are, especially money people, moving stuff out of New York because it’s just too darn expensive and complicated to do business there. So Texas is winning and New York is losing.
Temperature and Mood
Here’s a study that maybe you could have known the answer: San Diego State University did this and discovered that the temperature of your food and beverages will influence your digestive health and, as you know, your stomach is part of your brain. So it affects how you feel, your mood and everything else. Apparently, cold drinks can increase your anxiety and disturb your sleep. Just the temperature, not even the nature of the food, just the temperature of it. And on the other hand, warm food can make you feel more relaxed and less anxious and less depressed. It’s science, so who knows if it’s true.
But have you ever noticed, have you ever had this experience where you’re not super hungry but you have to eat something warm? Have any of you had that experience? You’re not super hungry, but man, you need something warm. And it’s not because you’re cold, so it’s not about the temperature of the outside world; you just need a warm thing that you can chew on. Right? It’s not just me, right? So what would drive that? Because you don’t have that feeling all the time. It just every now and then you’ll be like, “Oh my God, I so need something warm.” If I’m doing DoorDash looking at the menus, I’ll find a food item that’s delicious, it’s one of my favorite foods, but it’s not warm. And I say, “I’ve got to have warm tonight. Not every day, but right now, I’ve got to have warm.” So I think I would have guessed that warm food makes you feel better.
Closing
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that’s all I’ve got for you today. I will remind you that these books up on my bookshelf that you can see over there—the ones on the top shelf—the four of them are the ones that would change your life the most. So it’s How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Loserthink, Win Bigly, and Reframe Your Brain. And the reason I mention it is because I think I saw at least two notable people—top executive types—saying things that clearly came from me, very clearly came from me. And a lot of it is from these books. So now time has gone by, so that people don’t quote the book, it’s just something they now know. So a lot of the things that I wrote over the years have morphed into common knowledge. If you want to see all of the common knowledge before other people start using it, those are the books to read. I’ll go further and say I don’t believe that anybody could read those four books and not have a more successful life. I think it would be impossible, because they’re written to make a change in you whether you want to or not. I’m a hypnotist, so I write it so it’s going to sink into you no matter how hard you try. You don’t have to try; you just have to read it. I do the rest. The part where I attach it to you and make it part of you, that’s on me. That’s what I do. You don’t have to do any work; you just read it and have a good time. They’re all written so that they’ll be funny and interesting, so they’re all good reads. The best-reviewed book I’ve ever written, by far, is Reframe Your Brain. You should see the reviews on that; it’s unbelievable. It’s a five-star review. My only five-star; the others are four and a half, which is pretty good.
All right, I’m going to say a few words privately to the beloved Locals subscribers. The rest of you, thanks for joining. We’ll see you tomorrow, same time, same place. All right, Locals, going to come at you privately in 30 seconds.