Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-11
Good morning, everybody. Come on in here. I hope you have a cat in your lap; that is the perfect way to watch the show. You should have a beverage by your dominant hand. Your non-dominant hand should be petting a cat. Then you know you’re almost ready for the show.
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 of elevating your experience up to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or a mug, a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind, and a cat. 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.
Relationship Communication
I saw someone mention a study to find out what it is that women can say to men that would make the men feel as good as when the men say to the women, “I love you.” Does anybody know the answer? What two words? The answer is “Thank you.” Apparently, if you say “Thank you” and show appreciation to a man, his brain lights up about the same as if you had said “I love you” to a woman. How many women knew that?
I’ve always thought that one of the problems with relationships is that people feel like it’s a power battle. If you show appreciation to somebody, you’re giving up your power and it’s like you owe them. If you say “Thank you” to your mate, it’s like, “Oh, now I owe you something.” I feel like people don’t want to say “Thank you” too much.
Reframe Your Brain: Compliments
I’m going to read a reframe from my book, Reframe Your Brain. This is in the section on social life reframes, and it’s about compliments.
Here’s the usual frame: we usually think giving compliments is awkward, creepy, or feels manipulative, as in you’re trying to get something for your compliment. Here is the reframe: withholding a compliment is almost immoral. If you have a compliment in your mind about somebody and they’re standing right there, or you could easily reach them, and you don’t give them the compliment even though you’re thinking it, it’s almost immoral. It’s free and it would be highly valuable to the person who received it. If you have something that you could deliver for free and it would help a person, it would be immoral to not do it. When you think about potential compliments, think of them that way. It’ll make your life a lot better. People like you better if you’re good at complimenting.
Psychedelics and Physical Health
How many times have I started my show by telling you there’s a new study on psychedelics that makes your mental health better? Well, here’s another one, except this is about your physical health. Specifically, they’re finding—and they’re doing more testing—but they think that psilocybin will make your brain feel more relaxed. When you relax the brain, it releases less cortisol and inflammatory stuff. They believe that they can get more than a temporary decrease in inflammation in your body by using psychedelics to help you get control of your mind. We know that psychedelics can have a temporary control on your mind, but more lately, we’re finding out it could be a semi-permanent change where one small, controlled dose of psilocybin could set your depression or your anxiety away for months or years. If that happens, in theory, your full-body inflammation will be less, and that would help you with a whole bunch of stuff. Is there anything that psychedelics can’t do? Not that I know of. Apparently, the mushrooms would have an advantage over steroids because they wouldn’t have a side effect, whereas steroids do.
UFO and UAP Update
Here is a little update on UFOs. Tim Burchett, Representative Burchett, was on Tucker Carlson. Tim has been sort of a point person in Congress for looking into UFOs and UAPs. He seems convinced that they’re real because people who talk to him, who seem like credible people, are whispering in his ear things that sound real. There are some people who have said things under oath at this point, he says, that would suggest that we have alien bodies or alien crafts.
I’m going to come down firmly on the side of: I don’t believe any of it. I do not believe we have any alien bodies. I do not believe we’ve ever had access to an alien craft. It’s just too far for me. The fact that we never talk to the person who was directly involved—it’s always the person who talked to the person. Really?
My update is this: I don’t know if that asteroid that’s coming into our solar system is really an advanced spacecraft. I don’t know if the pyramids or any of our early stuff were influenced in any way by aliens who visited the Earth. No idea. I certainly don’t know if we’re holding on to any alien bodies. But do you enjoy it as much as I do just thinking about it? I just love thinking about it. Even though I wish I could believe it, I can’t really get there. But it’s very entertaining. It’s a very entertaining belief. Every time Tim Burchett is on, I’ve got to watch all that.
Gut Microbes and Mental Health
According to the University of South Australia, a lot of people who have mental health problems have gut problems. They think that the gut microbes might be shaping your mental health. Do you know they could have just asked me? I’m always telling you that your body is your brain. If you think of them as separate units, then you will be confused. If you want your brain to work better, you put better food into it, better exercise, better sleep. Your body is your brain. Should you be surprised that changing the gut microbe might make some people mentally healthier? No, you should not be surprised.
Trump’s Health and Legacy
Trump already went to Walter Reed. He got them to say that his body is 14 years younger than his chronological age. He got his flu shot and his COVID booster. He’s in a tough position because even though his administration is reducing the recommendations for COVID boosters all the way to “maybe if you’re over 65” or “maybe if you have some comorbidities and maybe if you and your doctor think so,” he’s in that small recommended range. Given that he would like to be thought of as having made the right decisions during the pandemic, it would be kind of awkward if he didn’t get a booster shot. At the same time, do you really think that he feels he’s safer with a booster shot? I don’t know. If you told me later that he only pretended to get the booster shot, I wouldn’t be super surprised. There are a lot of witnesses, so he probably got the real stuff. I think he has to get those shots to protect his legacy so it still looks like the shots for the old people made sense. He doesn’t really have a perfect play there.
Hillary Clinton and the Abraham Accords
Even Hillary Clinton has commended—she even used that word—President Trump for what she calls significant progress in the Gaza situation. How do you interpret that? How do you interpret that the most dependable critic of the President, obviously someone thwarted who has a long history of hating him, even she was not looking for the downside?
Here’s how I interpret it: I think it means that she found out how to make money. Don’t you think? Because what this will lead to, this whole Abraham Accord thing, if the Abraham Accords expand—and it looks like they might—there will be massive money flowing into the area. Don’t you think that Hillary Clinton may have possibly even cut a deal to say, “I’ll support this as long as we get a taste”? As long as one of my friends gets a big contract, I’ll say I’m all on board for this. There’s got to be a monetary incentive there. If it were purely political, I think she’d say something like, “What took you so long?” or “It’s going to fall apart,” or “You did part of it wrong,” or “The only way you got it is working with Russia.” She must have found a way to make some money there.
China Trade War Escalation
The biggest news is that China accelerated a trade war. The details are a little murky, but it looks like they’re massively tightening up on their rare earth materials, which would be a gigantic problem for the economy of the United States. Our stock market responded by going in the toilet, as did the crypto market, all responding to the fact that international trade is at some risk.
The smart people are saying that what China is doing is creating assets to trade away because there are big trade talks coming up. I’m always telling you that Trump is the champion of creating something out of nothing and then trading the nothing away for a something. That looks like what China just did. They created a something out of nothing by creating massive barriers to getting their rare earth materials. Now when they negotiate, they have something to trade away that they made out of nothing. It’s a very Trumpian approach. Clearly they’ve studied his approach so they know how to do this stuff.
It’s too early to know if this is a big deal or just a medium big deal. It’s at least a medium big deal. But what we don’t know is: is it really just a bargaining chip and it will get bargained away and we just have to be uncomfortable for three months until we know what’s going to happen with that stuff? Maybe. It could also be, because it’s so ill-defined, that it won’t be bargained away; it will be defined away. As in, “Now that we’ve given you the details, we didn’t mean that it would apply to any phones.” Then that whole category will be excluded and people will think, “Oh, I thought it was going to be worse, but it doesn’t include phones and it won’t include laptops.” So it’ll end up being defined smaller, but also negotiated.
If I were giving advice, I would say the odds of us getting some kind of a workable solution eventually is pretty high. I’d be gambling that it does get worked out in several months, maybe. Might even be faster. Could be a lot faster if both sides feel enough pain fast enough.
Reframing North Korea
There’s talk that Trump might stop by and see his little buddy “Rocket Man,” Kim Jong Un, while he’s over there for something else. He would be in Seoul visiting for something else and they’re thinking that he might have a little side visit and meet with his buddy.
Remember how I kept telling you that Trump could succeed with this Gaza stuff because he changed reality, he didn’t just negotiate? He just changed how they saw the whole thing. He turned a “no” into a “yes” and made them see it as a “yes,” and then they started to act like it was a “yes.” Well, that’s kind of what he did with North Korea. The North Korea question was, “What are you going to do about them threatening to nuke us?” He took that question and instead of negotiating—“Hey, don’t nuke us, we’ll give you this if you don’t nuke us,” or “If you do nuke us, we’ll do this to you”—he just changed the reality. The reality was it looked like we were some kind of enemies, and he just reframed it to “we’re friends.” “You’re my buddy. I’d like to come visit my friend.” Suddenly, it didn’t really make sense to be threatening each other with nuclear annihilation because he just reframed reality to “why enemy?” I’m your friend. Let’s get together. Only he can do that. That is a pure Trump play that’s just not available to other people. They just wouldn’t be able to pull it off.
Government Shutdown and Layoffs
The government and Russ Vought, the budget director, are doing the layoffs they promised. They’re going to use the government shutdown as their excuse to fire a bunch of Democrats who are working for the government, or not for long, I guess. I don’t know if there will be some kind of court cases to the firing. I feel like there will be. Won’t there be a rogue judge who says, “We must stop this nationwide”? Seems like it.
The “No Kings” Rally
There’s some thought, and Speaker Johnson’s kind of worked up about this, that the Democrats might want to keep the government closed to make it a better “No Kings” rally a week from now on October 18th. There’s another one of those big artificial, paid-for rallies being planned. The “No Kings” rally wouldn’t have enough to talk about because the Middle East is all solved. They wouldn’t have enough to talk about unless the government was closed, so they’d have a good complaint. “Look at that mean old Trump closing the government.” It looks like the Democrats might, for that reason alone, just to support their fake paid protest, keep the government closed just to pretend there’s more resistance to Trump than there is.
I saw one of the organizers of that “No Kings” rally, and he was walking this real fine line because he wanted people to feel outraged about what’s happening in the country so that they would be incentivized to go to the protest. You want them to feel unhappy to go to the protest. But he wanted to sell the protest as a good time so that more people would go. He’s in the business of organizing protests, so he tried to tell you how much fun you would have meeting new people and having friends and it being a nice day out. He was trying to sell them at the same time that we’re suffering this existential threat to our democracy. And by the way, it’ll be a good time! Yeah, it’s like a party. Oh, did I mention it’s an existential threat to the entire country? But you’ll meet some nice people. It’s more about the nice people you meet along the way. He totally can’t sell it because you just can’t do those same two things at the same time. Watching how artificial and fake it is, and then hearing that they might keep the government closed just to get enough people to go to the fake, stupid, completely irrational protest—wow. Good work, Democrats.
Letitia James and Bank Fraud Claims
One of the questions people had about this Letitia James indictment for bank fraud is: are these claims going to hold up, or is it just a bunch of BS and her lawyers will get it wiped away pretty soon? I saw a gentleman on X who goes by the name “SMB Attorney,” and he had an explanation about what probably went on with this bank loan fraud stuff based on his experience of years as a mortgage banker. He’s giving you inside information about a mortgage banker’s knowledge of how this may or may not have happened.
Letitia James, the Attorney General who’s been indicted for bank fraud, allegedly classified a property intentionally wrong or accidentally wrong. Here is SMB Attorney describing what you need to know. First of all, he has lots of experience in that business. He was a mortgage banker for years. He says how you classify a property as a primary, secondary, or investment home changes everything about the loan—the down payment, the interest rate, the underwriting, all of it. Primary or secondary homes can get by with as little as 3 to 10 percent down. Investment property usually requires 25 percent or more. If you’re a brand new real estate investor with limited cash, there’s a big incentive to call something a second home instead of an investment property.
But that’s why lenders make you sign a second home rider, a separate document where you specifically promise you’ll use it as a second residence and not rent it out. You also assert like nine times in the application process it will be owner-occupied. Could this kind of thing ever be an honest mistake? I doubt it. The facts, at least as reported, look pretty bad. You buy a house, say it’s a second home, immediately rent it out, tell your insurer it’s owner-occupied, and then report rental income on your taxes. That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s a pattern.
Remember the documentary effect that I warned you about? I’ve just given you one side of an argument with no attention to any counter-argument. It’s pretty convincing, isn’t it? When you heard that, didn’t you say to yourself, “Oh man, she’s fried. There’s no way she’s getting out of that”? That’s the documentary effect because you only heard one side of an argument. I don’t know if there’s another side of the argument, but I think they’re pleading innocent, so that would suggest that they do have an argument. The fact that you haven’t heard that argument at all should be at the top of your mind. You should be saying to yourself, “Yeah, but they do have an argument; we just haven’t heard it yet.” Because I knew that would be super persuasive, but don’t be too persuaded by it. I still think it’s unlikely she’d have any jail time. I guess there’s the possibility that there could be years and years of jail, but the reality for a first offender for something like this? Probably a suspended sentence. But there could be a fine according to Grok, up to like half a million dollars. So it could be really expensive.
Nobel Peace Prize and Venezuela
As you know, President Trump did not win the Nobel Peace Prize because the Nobel Prize they’re giving this year is mostly for stuff that happened last year and before. Most of his accomplishments happened this year. So it’s not really a slap in the face; it’s just the way the process works.
But the woman who did win it, María Corina Machado, who would be a freedom fighter for Venezuela, was smart enough to call him and actually tell him personally, “I’m accepting this in honor of you because you really deserved it.” And then Trump got to tell that story, that the person who won it called him and said that he deserved it. That’s pretty good. It makes you understand why she won the Nobel Peace Prize because how smart was that? That was so smart to call him immediately and give him credit and say you should have won. She needs him 100 percent to get whatever it is she wants for Venezuela. Talk about the best way you could get him on your side.
I don’t know much about her, but I know that if she got the attention of the Nobel Prize people, there’s something of substance there. And then the one thing we observe is so on point that you just say, “Okay, there’s some substance there.” Keep an eye on this one. It could be that the only way that Trump could succeed with Venezuela to sort of de-cartelize it is if he’s got somebody as strong as her to be the backstop, the person who could actually become the new leader. So his fate and hers could be quite tied. You don’t get the Nobel Peace Prize if between now and the next time they award it, you’ve started a war—unless you finished it pretty quickly. She could be the key to having some kind of relatively rapid wrap-up of things in Venezuela in a positive way for the Venezuelans. Keep an eye on that relationship. That might really have some legs.
Melania Trump’s Persuasion Game
Melania Trump continues to be awesome. She worked out a deal separately with Putin to get some Ukrainian children released back to Ukraine. It was successful, and she didn’t seem like she got much pushback, if any. I’m going to give Melania full credit because the Trumps are the world champions at getting hostages back and getting prisoners back. Nobody’s ever done this better. Nobody’s even been close. This is unbelievable success in getting people back. Now Melania’s doing it, so she says now she has an open channel of communication with Putin.
Here’s what I like about Putin’s persuasion game—don’t misquote me, I didn’t say I like Putin. I’m just saying that he’s got a really strong persuasion game. The fact that he’s playing so nice with Melania is just more of that. It is so smart that he’s extra nice to Melania and that there’s just no friction whatsoever created in that domain. It looks like he’s saving a cat and being the good guy. He buys a lot of goodwill for nothing. Both of them did a good job on that, Melania and Putin, if you’re just looking at the persuasion game.
Long COVID Brain Scans
I saw a post by Massimo on X. Apparently, there’s some kind of breakthrough brain scan technique where Japanese scientists claim they can detect long COVID. Do you believe that? Do you believe that Japanese scientists have a new brain scan where they can actually find if you’re suffering from long COVID by looking at part of your brain?
I’m going to say: I’m not even sure long COVID is real. Are we so sure it’s real that if you look at the scan you can see it? I don’t know. Do you believe they could see if it were the vaccine injury instead? Do you think they could see that with their advanced scan? I don’t know. Whenever I see a Japanese breakthrough, I kind of give them a little less credibility. Do you do that too? I feel like at least just from an anecdotal perspective—I don’t have any data on this—it seems like the Japanese might be, and maybe the South Koreans, might be a little bit of “over-claimers” when it comes to science.
Threats Against Benny Johnson
Podcaster and independent journalist Benny Johnson has announced that apparently there was somebody who had been threatening his family and he got Pam Bondi involved. That person got arrested. Somebody had threatened to kill his wife and kids. Nothing in person; just sent a letter. Who would be dumb enough to send a physical letter threatening somebody’s life? How old do you have to be to think that that’s the way to go about that? Good on you, Benny Johnson, for fighting back against that and being aggressive. I’m glad that Bondi is responding to that.
Most Favored Nation Pricing
Trump has now struck a deal with big pharma company AstraZeneca for what is being reported by Just The News as offering “Most Favored Nation” pricing. That’s what the news is, but I don’t believe the news because here’s the problem: in order for these big pharma companies to do what Trump wants, which is to give the United States the same low pricing as the best price another country gets, there is such a difference that the only way they could maintain their profitability if they were to lower the U.S. prices—since we’re the biggest market—the only way they could do that is to massively increase their prices for third-world countries until they wouldn’t be able to afford their meds. Or is there some third thing I don’t know about? They either have to not do it and keep making their money and hoping they get away with it, or if they actually do this and give the U.S. the same prices as the lowest price, there isn’t any way they could maintain profitability. So how did they do this? There’s something in the story that’s missing. It’s either limited to just a few drugs—I think that’s what Pfizer was, just limited to a few drugs, so it sounded like it was a bigger deal than it was. I didn’t see that this is limited, but it’s got to be limited somehow. There’s no way they can just lower their prices.
Gavin Newsom and Joe Rogan
Gavin Newsom is doing his Gavin Newsom “jazz hands” cursing thing, which he believes is how he will jazz-hands curse himself into the presidency. He’s playing this childlike mental game with Joe Rogan to try to get invited on the Joe Rogan podcast because Joe said some negative things about his chances of being president. Here’s how he responds to that: he boasted that he was “punching back” at that “son of a bitch” Joe Rogan. He said, “Joe, why won’t you have me on the show?” He was on another podcast when he said this. He said Joe won’t have him on the show, it’s a one-way street, and Joe has guests on attacking and bashing, but he won’t have Newsom on the show.
Does it seem to you that cursing and insulting Joe Rogan is how you get him to invite you on the show? Now, I will admit that it probably does stimulate Joe’s competitive instincts and it probably makes him curious about what would happen. It probably does make him want to invite him. On the other hand, you can’t invite somebody if they do it that way. He’s sort of eliminating himself by the way he’s doing it. At the same time, if I were Joe, I’d be thinking, “Damn it, I do want to invite you, but I can’t do it now because you’re so obviously trying to manipulate me in front of the public. I can’t just bow to the manipulation. I can’t do it because you swore at me; it’s going to look like I invited you because you cursed at me.” So I’m going to guess that he doesn’t get an invitation. But I could be wrong about that. Joe might just say, “All right, this is fun,” and that might be the end of it. If he thinks it’s fun, that’s the end of the conversation.
It would definitely make news. Joe Rogan could end Newsom’s run for president without even trying hard because I don’t think Newsom’s ever been challenged in quite the way that maybe he should be. I think that Joe could pull that off probably better than anybody. Then Newsom goes, “He’s going to dismiss it. He’s going to laugh it off. Tough guy and all that. But is he going to have me on? I don’t know.” It is sort of high school funny. I can’t really turn away because he does make me watch. That’s one of the things that Newsom does well; he does make you not be able to turn away. You’ve just got to watch whatever he’s doing. He’s got that going for him.
The Existence of Antifa
The Left has decided that their talking point about Antifa is that it really doesn’t exist. Isn’t that wild? And they can somewhat get away with it; probably 40 to 50 percent of all the public will think that Antifa doesn’t exist because they’re going to hear that repeated over and over. “Well, there’s no Antifa.” Well, what about those gigantic crowds of people that call themselves Antifa? “Oh, that’s just spontaneously organized people who just have an affinity for it. But it’s not like they have a leadership.” Well, how are they collecting money if they don’t have a leadership? “Well, okay, well they have some ways for money to get around, but not in a leadership-y way.” Well, how do they decide who gets what money?
One of the people saying this is Jimmy Kimmel. He was mocking Kristi Noem and referring to Antifa as “an entirely imaginary organization.” And then there were some other talking heads that people had captured saying the same thing. “Oh, it’s imaginary, it’s imaginary.” But the ones who were saying it’s imaginary were saying it’s not like the Proud Boys or the Patriot Front because they said those are real organizations, not like Antifa that’s just totally imaginary.
So I went to Grok and I said, “How many people are in the Proud Boys?” The estimate was from 300 to 3,000. I guess at one point it might have been a few thousand more than that, but it’s losing a little bit of its steam. But what if the Proud Boys is really only 300 people? And then I asked about the Patriot Front because that was also mentioned, and it said there are 200 to 300 people. This is in the entire nation. Don’t you think that every single Antifa event had more than 300 people, more than a thousand probably? There are so many more Antifa people than there are Proud Boys or Patriot Front. So many more. But there’s no estimate—Grok doesn’t have an estimate for Antifa. But don’t you think if you did some kind of a survey and just asked people if they’re Antifa, you’d get something like one percent, which would be a lot of people? Definitely more than the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front.
Qatar and the Peace Deal
Now we’re hearing a little bit more about how this deal with Gaza got done. We’re hearing that Jared Kushner might have been far more important to the process than has been reported so far. And it looks like Qatar—or “Kuh-TAR” as you like to say—is maybe one of the big stories behind the curtain. Qatar wanted some things, but we wanted some things from Qatar, which is to back a peace deal. And what Qatar wanted was: I guess they got some dedicated space where they can test their jets that we’re selling them. We’re selling them jets and they can test them and train in the United States within the bounds of some American base. They’ll have their own little space, but it will be controlled by America. So they don’t have their own base; they would just have some space for training that they would pay for that would be on an American base because apparently their country is so small they don’t really have a good place to test jets. So they’ll test them here, they’ll buy them here, they’ll put billions of dollars into buying more of them here. So it turns out it’s a good deal for us because we sell some more jets and we’ll have a place that they can test them so they feel comfortable getting them.
Apparently, Qatar wanted to get in better with the United States and not be seen as half-terrorist supporter and half-supporter of the West. They want to be more on the clean side of things. So it’s sort of a way for them to reposition themselves with the United States entirely by doing something for us that presumably will get them some favors in return. Qatar seems to be a big part of the backstory. The fact that we were able to cut a deal with Qatar probably has a lot to do with how we got to this point. And like I said, if Hillary Clinton is saying “yes,” it must be that there is so much money that’s going to be funneled into that area for rebuilding and the Abraham Accords and everything else that probably all the big money people just said “Cha-ching!” I’m just guessing. Did all the bankers just say, “All right, we can make some money on this”? Did all the construction people—the Bechtels—all the military-industrial complex people say, “Oh man, we can make some money on this”? I think so. Probably the hotel industry, probably the oil industry, maybe not. But it does seem to me like everybody just said, “Why don’t we just make some money and we’re done with this terrorism stuff?”
Polls on Smuggling Boats
According to a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans support Trump’s strikes on the smuggling boats, the ones off of Venezuela. Republicans like it a lot (89 percent), Independents (67 percent), and even Democrats by a majority (56 percent). To me, this is another one of those where Trump takes the strong side of the question and even if it doesn’t work out, he’s still the one who took the strong side of the issue.
California Wine Industry
There’s a new report in the Wall Street Journal that the wine industry in California where I am is having a tough time for two reasons. One, people are just drinking less. But number two, apparently the weather was unusually good. So that “Global Warming” stuff turned out to be one of the best summers ever. So there’s a crap ton of grapes. We have way too many grapes at the same time that there’s lower demand. So the wine business is falling apart.
It’s California, so you know that the Hollywood movie-making business has already fallen apart. If we did not have a boom in AI, even the tech business would look like it’s winding down. California is sort of looking good but only because of AI, I think. I don’t think there’s anything else driving anything else. And AI is probably going to put quite a load on our energy infrastructure. Somehow, California just keeps floating along, but I feel like we keep getting closer and closer to the edge. How many entire industries can you wipe out in California and still have a state? I guess we’re going to find out.
Crypto Market Update
The crypto market went to hell, as you know. I don’t know how much you should worry about the crypto market. Isn’t the very nature of it that it’s volatile? If you’re just in the weird little cryptos, you know it was a big risk, and if you’re in Bitcoin, you’re probably going to “HODL” it, which is hold it. So you probably don’t care. Does anybody panic about crypto or are you just sort of watching it? I think I would just watch it at this point.
Cancer Vaccine Progress
I kept telling you that there are all these tests going on for a vaccine to cure cancer or to keep it from happening. Here’s another one: there’s another “next-gen” vaccine to prevent up to 80 percent of multiple aggressive cancers according to Paul McClure in New Atlas. You don’t need to know too much more about this one because I went to Grok and I said, “How many current trials are there where somebody’s trying to fix cancer with a vaccine where they made the vaccine out of usually something about your body, so it’s about you specifically, the vaccine is?” And it said there were seven of them. There are seven ongoing trials for cancer vaccines. Now, I don’t think any of them will be ready in time to save me, but it does look like maybe there’s something there for the rest of you. We’ll see if I can last long enough to get to the vaccines. It does look like some of that’s going to work; works on animals, anyway. Working on animals is only like a one-in-twenty chance it’s going to work on humans.
Portland Police and Federal Help
The Portland Police Union is welcoming federal help—the federal troops—whereas the government is saying, “We don’t need no federal troops, we don’t have a problem here.” The Portland violence is also being called “imaginary.” So now we’re being told that Antifa is an imaginary group and that the violence around the ICE facilities and stuff in Portland is also so small that if you imagine it’s a big problem, that’s just imaginary. I don’t know what is true there. Is it possible that the news is exaggerating the real danger in Portland? I think it could be a little of both. It could be that the danger is not that great, but at the same time, the police do want help because the police have been degraded so much that they can’t even handle a modest threat. So it could be a combination of not enough police and a little bit of trouble that wouldn’t ordinarily be a lot of trouble because you would have a lot of police. Once again, as long as Trump takes the strong approach and he’s the one who’s looking to clamp down on crime and Portland is looking like the ones who don’t care as much about crime, Trump wins. I think he wins just by being the strong one.
Gene Editing Breakthroughs
MIT says they have a new gene-editing tool. Sounds kind of boring and nerd-like, but it would be 60 times fewer mistakes than before. Because gene editing—if you could do gene editing quickly and efficiently and economically—there’s a whole bunch of stuff you can fix. This is just a movement in the right direction, but if they can actually make that much of an improvement in the gene-editing technology, well, you might get yourself a new head. That new head you’ve been wanting? It’s getting closer.
Final Reframe: Be Better
That’s all I have for today. It is a Saturday “Cat-urday,” so you should be petting your cat and having a good time. I did promise you that I would read you a reframe from my book, Reframe Your Brain. I started with one, but I think I’m going to randomly pick another one because they’re so useful.
I’ll pick the first one from the social life category. The old frame used to be: “Be yourself.” Did anybody ever used to give you that advice—“Be yourself”? Terrible advice. Here’s the reframe: “Become a better version of yourself.” If you’re satisfied being yourself, people aren’t going to want to be around you. You’re not that good! You need some work, and you should admit that you’re a work in progress. People will like you better if you admit you’ve got some work to do. Try being better. You should be working on some kind of a system or a process or finding some way to be the improved version of yourself. You should be getting smarter, healthier, you should become wiser, kinder. You should be trying to get your depression down and get your mental health better. You should be trying to get different in every possible way.
People ask me—I’ve told you this story before—but people ask me if when I hit it big with Dilbert and I went from not having money to doing well, people ask me if being famous and successful changed me. Did it change me? And I’d always laugh and say, “Well, I hope so! That was the whole point. Why would I go through all that work to be the same person?” Everything that I do has at least a secondary ambition of changing me. I don’t go to the gym because it doesn’t change me. I don’t work hard in my career because it won’t change me. I do it so it will! If I want to feel confident, what am I supposed to do, just sit in a chair and try to gin up some confidence? No, I’m going to go do something, and then if it works, guess what? I get more confident. If anybody ever tells you the key to success is “Be yourself,” you’re getting some bad advice. Be better. Just be better.
All right, that is your reframe of the day. Owen Gregorian will be hosting a spaces right after this. You can’t become a millionaire without becoming the kind of person who becomes a millionaire. Exactly. Go to X and you can search for his name and it’ll pop up the spaces. I’m going to say a few words to the Locals people, my beloved Locals people. And the rest of you, I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for coming.