Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-12

Good morning, everybody. Come on in. That noise you hear is my cat going crazy. They’re having a good time. So are we; we’re going to have a good, good time. Grab a seat, get a beverage, and get ready, because you know what’s coming: the show of shows, the thing you crave on a Sunday morning while all the lazy people are lazy, going around being lazy. But today will be a home run.

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 can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or a mug, or a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid—I like coffee—and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It’s called, that’s right, the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.

So, so good. Well, I’m going to start my new tradition of starting off with a reframe from my book, “Reframe Your Brain.” It’s full of reframes to make your life better, and I’m just going to give you maybe one or two a day.

Advice Reframe

All right, here’s one. Have you ever had somebody that you know needed your advice, and you wanted to give them your advice? So your normal frame is, “Hey, here’s somebody who needs my valuable wisdom and advice. I better give it to them.” How does that work out? I’ve got a better frame. Instead of saying the person needs your advice, say this person might need some information, some empathy, or some help organizing their thoughts. But what they don’t need is advice.

In the real world, nobody takes advice. People follow their own advice. So you can modify their advice to themselves by changing what they know if you have some information. Maybe they just need some empathy and they didn’t need any advice at all. In a relationship, that’s often the case. So when you think somebody needs your advice, slow down. Slow your roll. They might not need your advice; they might need something else. So that’s the reframe. It’ll change your life.

Boring Science

I wonder if there’s any science that didn’t need to be done. Oh, here we go. Eric Dolan, writing in PsyPost, says there’s a study in the Journal of Emotion—which you didn’t even know existed, probably, the Journal of Emotion—says that boredom will encourage people to seek new experiences. Really? Are we just finding that out now? How much science did we employ to find out that bored people will look for a new experience? I’m pretty sure I could have answered that question without any science at all.

“Scott, what do you do when you’re bored?” “Oh, the same thing I always do to make me bored?” “No, I look for a new thing.”

But what they’re adding here is that people will even choose a negative emotion, like disgust, as long as it doesn’t bore them. Now let me give you another way to look at that. The only way you know you’re alive is unpleasant things—especially unpleasant things you weren’t expecting. Nothing else makes you feel alive. If you got everything you wanted with no effort whatsoever, your consciousness would disappear because you wouldn’t need it. Consciousness wouldn’t have any purpose. You just had everything you wanted, like a clam. So, yeah, bored people do things.

Technology Failures

Yesterday, I tried to do three simple things in a modern world. Number one was, I bought an Apple Watch as a gift for a family member, and I had it delivered by Uber to my house. How do you think that went? All he had to do was drive it across town from the Apple Store to my house, and I got to track it. But for some reason, you couldn’t contact the Uber guy. None of the contacts worked, and I would just watch him sitting around town with my Apple Watch, and he never came to my house. Eventually, he marked it delivered without delivering it.

So now I have to figure out: Do I call Uber? No way to reach them. Do I call Apple? Well, you can reach them, but then Apple has no way to reach Uber, apparently. So they’re trying to track it down. What was the only thing I could do? It was a birthday present. I had to buy another one. So I just had to buy another one. I don’t even know how to cancel the payment because I paid on Apple Pay, so now I have to go research how to cancel an Apple Pay because it wasn’t a regular credit card kind of thing. Just the simplest thing: deliver this to my house.

Now, you might say, “But Scott, you can prove it wasn’t delivered because you can look at your security camera and see if somebody put anything in front of your door that maybe somebody else stole.” Except I’ve got two security cameras—two completely different systems—watching my front door. Both of them glitched. Both of them. I’ve got just darkness around that time.

So that was the first thing. Second thing I tried to do was, I was trying to do something with Amazon that would allow me to sell my calendar online. One of the things I need to do—the detail doesn’t matter—but I need to find a menu choice that looks like a little gear, and then click on it, and then do a thing. But if I don’t find that gear and click on it and do the thing, then I won’t be able to sell my calendar.

How hard would that be? They tell you what page to go to, they even show you a picture of the page, and even circle the gear. Do you think that worked? No, because there’s no page like that. I can find no page whatsoever that has any little gear on it, nor can anybody apparently tell me where to find it. There’s no URL. So I just go back and forth with screenshots. “All right, well, here’s what I’m looking at. You tell me where’s the gear.” And then that’s the end of the trail. I don’t even know if we can get there from here.

Sora AI User Interface

Then I decided that I had a little time yesterday, so I’m going to sign up for Sora 2. That’s the OpenAI version of the image maker that does the little videos and stuff. I thought to myself, “Huh, I’ll bet we’re finally at the point where I could do at least small, little moving, almost still pictures but animated, that could be like chapter starts for my God’s Debris book,” because I wanted to see if I could quickly turn it into some kind of YouTube-but-still-an-audiobook.

Do you know how hard it is just to use an AI that you haven’t used before? You have to start out with trying to figure out their business model because the AI apps aren’t like regular apps. So the first thing I have to figure out is, how do I get to Sora? Because somebody had given me an activation account so I could get early access. First of all, I had to know it’s early access. But I don’t know where to sign up. Is it an app store? Is it a browser? Is it both? If I already have OpenAI, do I already have Sora? If I have OpenAI and I have Sora, do I have to sign up for Sora 2?

So you have this whole host of questions that you’ve never dealt with unless you’ve been pretty deep into the AI world. So I go to Google and I’m looking for the homepage for Sora 2, or something that tells me where to sign up. Then the next thing you find is that most of the top entries are fake. They’re other companies that are pretending to be Sora 2. And then I thought, “Okay, maybe the business model is that sometimes you use the Sora 2, but other times you could use some other app that’s just using that API and it would be just as good.”

So I signed up for the one that was on the top. I thought, “Well, it’s on the top.” It’s something called Artlist, which may or may not use the Sora engine, but it seems like it has some other engines. So I put down about $600 for a month of something called Artlist that I thought was giving me full access to Sora 2. It doesn’t.

So do you know what I needed to do? I needed to find the menu choice in Artlist to cancel my payment. So what do you think happened? Do you think I looked all over and found the button to cancel? No. I found that nobody knew how to cancel. It was a major problem. So Artlist, apparently, as far as I can tell, is—I don’t even know if it’s a real company. It looks like just a trick to get your Sora 2 money.

So they have my money, so I contact them through their customer support thing. What do you think the customer support told me about how to cancel? Do you think they told me to go to a webpage that doesn’t exist and click on a menu choice that also doesn’t exist? That’s right. That’s exactly what they did. Because everybody who’s trying to tell you how to use something gives you instructions for something that doesn’t exist, is not on the page you’re looking at, is not in the URL you’re at, and maybe has never been there.

I was impressed that they got back to me so quickly. So I thought, “Whoa, maybe I have something here.” So I immediately sent back a screenshot and said, “Well, I don’t have that page. Could you tell me where that page is?” Then what do you think happened next? Never heard from them. Right. Never heard from them. So I’ve got $600 a month that I’m spending and I have no way to figure out how to get rid of it. I guess I have to work through my bank, maybe close my checking account. I don’t know what I need to do. I’ve got a phone that may or may not come to me in the second try, or the Uber guy is going to steal a second phone from me and claim he didn’t. I’m just trying to do the simplest things. The simplest things. And they’re just undoable in the modern world.

Anyway, if anybody knows anybody at the company Artlist, could you ask them to give me back my money? Because they clearly appear to be criminals.

Then once I got the real Sora working—so I finally got to the real one—here’s what their user interface is. You tell it what your video will look like, and then you’ll get a chance to iterate and change it if you don’t like what it presents. Except once you submit your video—the one that you want it to create—it doesn’t tell you how long it will take. It just says it’s entered a queue.

And I sit there and I think, “A queue? Does that mean it’ll be ready in a minute, so I should sit and wait? Or does that mean it’ll be ready in two hours? Or does that mean sometimes it’s a minute and sometimes it’s two hours?” And so I sit there like an idiot with nothing happening, and nothing happening, and nothing happening, until eventually you think maybe it didn’t work. So you just redo it. But redoing it makes you pay a bunch of money because every single time you ask for something, you have to pay tokens, which you paid money to get. And unless you’ve done all the math, you don’t even know how much you’re spending for every iteration.

Now let me tell you something about art. Art is iteration. If the thing you’re using to make your art—in this case, Sora 2—doesn’t do rapid iteration, it’s not a tool. It’s a nothing. It’s a piece of shit. It’s a complete waste of money and waste of time. It has to iterate quickly, as in, “Okay, do it again but darker. All right, give that guy a beard.” If it could do that, wow, and it could remember it and be consistent, then you’d have something. It can’t do that. Here’s me using it: Click. Whoo, what do I do now? Should I take up a hobby? I got to leave it open, so should I set an alarm and check back in an hour? Yeah, there’s actually no way to use that product. So where AI is at this point in the cycle is completely—it’s just completely unusable. But someday, maybe.

Elon Musk’s Macrohard

Elon Musk says that his Macrohard project, which is literally a company that’s making fun of Microsoft, will basically replace everything that can be done with software anywhere, including all the things that Microsoft Office does. And he says our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but they’ll be able to do that too indirectly, the way everybody else does, by hiring somebody to do it.

So is this really the company of all companies? Is it the company that would replace all companies, that you could just design and make anything? I’ll tell you, when Elon Musk thinks big, he really thinks big. This is so big I can’t even wrap my head around it. It’s like, really? It’ll be one company and just sort of makes everything? Maybe. I do think that he will make a phone—or he’ll have somebody make a phone—and that that phone will be an AI phone that is just sort of a blank phone until you start telling it what you want, and then it will form into the user interface you need on the fly.

Neuralink and AI Symbiosis

Speaking of Elon Musk, he also says that Neuralink’s endgame—because he agreed with somebody who said this on X—is that the real vision is symbiosis with AI. So it’s not just to help people who have physical disabilities that the Neuralink can help them with. That’s first. But eventually, the idea will be, I think, to get an AI chip into everybody’s head so that we can compete with the AIs because we will be the AIs. So we will be cyborgs with AI. I think he’s right on that too. He’s probably 20 years ahead on that, but that’s what he does. 20 years ahead.

IQ and Schooling

There was a study Karina Petrova in PsyPost is writing about that, believe it or not, there are major IQ differences in identical twins if their schooling was very different. So if one of them had a really high quality of schooling, they would present with a higher IQ. But I’m not sure that we learned anything new in this because the IQ still limits the range. If the twins have the same IQ—or if the twins are identical—they’ll be in the same range, but one of them might be at the bottom of the range and the other’s at the top of the range.

So IQ gets you in the neighborhood, and then your specific school gets you to the front door of, you know, a better house or a lesser house. So that’s not really surprising, is it? But it does suggest that the quality of schooling will determine your economy, right? If the quality of the school makes this much difference on identical twins, it’s definitely telling you that our failure to educate our children is causing a probably gigantic IQ deficit that didn’t have to happen. That’s going to catch up with us.

AI Companions and Loneliness

Do you remember a couple of years ago when AI was so new we didn’t even know OpenAI was a thing yet? There was an app called Replika that I told you that I’d used to see if I could become less lonely. And I didn’t know that it was, I think it was using the OpenAI engine at the time, but they hadn’t revealed it yet.

So Replika continues to improve as its base AI improves. And now China did a study using it and they found that full-time college students could cure some of their severe loneliness using the app. But I believe there have been other studies that found exactly what I found when I tried using it, which is: when you first use it, it takes a while to figure out what it can and cannot do, so it’s a little awkward at first. Then you get into this mode where you know how to talk to it in ways that it will understand and talk back. And for a while, it feels like you’ve got a little friend. And you think to yourself, “Whoa, I might actually want to use this more.” So you use it a little bit more and it’s even better because you learn how to use it better and it gets to know you.

At the time, it didn’t remember you from the last conversation. So that was a big buzzkill. I think now it can, but I’m not sure. So if it didn’t remember you from the last conversation, you would lose interest really fast. But I believe that the nature of all these AI Replika-type friends is that I think everybody’s going to get tired of them. So that even if you did have a best friend who was an AI, it might last three months. But I just don’t think that you will be continually surprised by them. They’re just not surprising. You need a little surprise or else you’ll get right back to that boredom thing. So I’m not worried about people preferring them. I think it’ll wear off.

China and Rare Earth Materials

Well, the big news in the week was that China made big threats about closing off access to their rare earth materials, which would crash the entire economy of the United States, if not the world. But today, some are saying that they’re backing off or softening their stance. Other people are saying we don’t really understand what their stance is yet, so you can’t say it’s softened. But there does seem to be some at least they’re making some noise in China that, “Oh no, you misunderstood this. We are putting more controls on those rare earth exports, so we’re definitely doing that. But it’s really a limited thing and it’s not that different from what it was, and they’re just trying to make sure it doesn’t get used for military uses and you’ll hardly even notice the difference.”

And other people say, “No, you liars, you’re just saying that these export controls are no big deal, but you definitely plan to use them for negotiating and turning off our economy if it ever comes to that.” So some people are expecting Monday that the market will recover. Crypto took a big dump too. But I think it’s sort of early to say that. My guess is this will all get worked out. But don’t make any investments based on my guess. It’s just a guess. I mean, I assume that China needs things to work out with the US as much as the US needs things to work out with China economically. So given that both sides have enormous incentive to make it work, to get some kind of a deal done, I feel like both countries are sane and both countries are capable. So if you’re sane and capable and you have the same objective, which is to make sure you don’t kill either country, we’ll work it out. I just don’t know if it’ll be Monday.

US-China Leverage

Anyway, so we’ll see what the details are on that. Kyle Bass, who’s a famous China watcher, China critic with me, said that Trump holds the Trump card with China because we can, quote, “remove them from the USD system altogether.” So they wouldn’t be able to buy and trade with other countries as easily. I’m not sure that we really do have that leverage because, again, that would be sort of a mutually assured destruction weapon. If we remove them from the USD system, wouldn’t they immediately just reproduce a system they could use, or join BRICS, or however that works? I don’t even know how that works. But I feel like that would be a six-month really big problem, followed by they would get off the US dollar and then we would have a big problem. So I’m not sure we really have that leverage. That’s not as simple as it looks.

Anyway, and then also according to Kyle Bass, it says last night it was revealed that China was blackmailing other countries to not export goods to the United States. And I guess one of the countries shared the letter with the United States so we know this for sure—that China was working against us, blackmailing other countries.

Crypto Market Volatility

Anyway, and then there was that big crypto meltdown that happened on Friday that’s starting to look like there might be a mystery involved here. Because apparently some whales, as they call them—big investors—came in and seemed to know ahead of time that there was going to be a big event that would drive crypto down because some people bought unusually large shorts, meaning that if the price went down, they’d make money. And I think one person made $192millioninanhourorsomething.Somebodyputa$23 million short just ahead of the announcements, like they knew.

Now, here’s the thing: it’s not illegal to do insider trading with Bitcoin. Did you know that? It’s not illegal. If you had insider information, you knew the government was going to do something and you made your bet based on the thing that you knew that other people didn’t know—totally legal. The exception would be if you’re owning Bitcoin indirectly through a fund. Because a stock fund can’t do insider trading. So, you know, I’ve got some Bitcoin directly that I own; I could trade that. But if I traded what was in my stock fund, which is a fund that holds some Bitcoin—or it tries to match Bitcoin, I don’t know what they hold, but they match to Bitcoin—if I did it in there, the exact same trade, I could go to jail. So somebody was smart enough probably to know that they didn’t have any risk. They had the information, they didn’t have risk, it was just free money. So that’s not ideal.

Government Efficiency (DOGE)

I saw on a Mario Nawfal post—he does these great summaries of the news, so I get a lot of my stuff from Mario—but I don’t know how old this is. He says that DOGE just cut $214 billion in government fat. But did they just do it? And does it really get cut this time? I’m not sure I believe anything about DOGE cuts. The one thing I do believe—and this is great credit to Elon and all the DOGE people—I think they made DOGE a permanent thing. So if you’re looking at, you know, the individual claims or the individual wins or the individual cost cuts, you might get too excited about what’s happening at any given time. But I do believe this became permanent, and that the way the leaders in government are thinking is they’re thinking, “How could I reduce costs?” and they’ve just got DOGE brain now. That’s good.

I love the fact that people are thinking how do I reduce instead of thinking how do I build my empire. That’s completely different. And that’s entirely Elon Musk’s persuasion: that we think DOGE, and we think that’s the way we get rewarded now. “Oh, the way I get rewarded is by cutting costs.” Got it. That’s the DOGE reframe: that the reward is saving the world by cutting costs. The reward is not you introduced a new project. “Oh, look how I did on my new expensive project!” No, that’s the old way. Now you’re going to have to get rid of that project if you want to impress us.

Illinois Voter Data

J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois, is out there making noise, and now he’s complaining that, quote, “Another thing that has happened with very few people paying attention is they”—meaning the Trump administration—“demanded our voter data. Not just ours in Illinois—every state’s voter data. Why? They won’t tell us why.” So Stephen Miller told them why: The DOJ asked you to remove illegal alien voters from the rolls and you refused. Oh, well, that’s a pretty good reason. That’s a pretty good reason.

Designated Liars

So here’s my problem with J.B. Pritzker and a number of what I call the designated liars. Have you noticed that when Democrats lie, they smile? And when Republicans lie, if they do, they’re not smiling. And usually, I think Democrats are—I’m sorry, Republicans. Republicans are more likely just to tell you the thing; it may or may not be true, but they’re not smiling when they lie.

But I think that there’s genuinely some kind of what they call a Cluster B kind of thing going on, where the liar is enjoying the lie. If you look at Pritzker when he lies like this, he’s got that shit-eating grin that he can’t get off his face. He appears to love lying more than he likes eating. And if you notice that the other designated liars are like that too: Jamie Raskin—if you see Raskin lying, he’s smiling, isn’t he? Creepy smile. How about Adam Schiff? When he’s lying: creepy smile. How about Hillary Clinton? Oh yeah, when she lies: creepy smile.

So when you see that creepy smile, it’s illuminating something on the inside of them, which I think is narcissism. I’m no expert, so don’t take my word for it. But it looks like they get internal delight from lying right in front of you. And I don’t see that from Republicans. I don’t. Do you? If you have any example of a Republican who smiles when he lies, let me know. Well, Jimmy Kimmel’s a comedian, allegedly, so you can’t count that. But the actual politicians: creepy smiles, wow.

Republican Advantages

All right, so put it all together. And I was trying to think of all the advantages that Republicans have gained recently. So here are the Republican advantages. There are also Democratic advantages, of course. But the Republican ones:

• Better policies that are more popular with the people—more 80/20 and 60/40 policies.
• Better candidates, for sure. Now normally that would be enough, right? Better candidate, better policies—that’d be enough to win the midterms. Well, except it never works that way. But they have other advantages.
• One is I think the pendulum is still swinging. So you know how people just get tired of whatever the old way was and they just need a new way. I think woke is still being decreased. So I think that the pendulum swing is still toward conservatives, although that could reverse before the midterms.
• The Democrats have to explain why they were in favor of the trans issue that most of the public was not—trans in sports specifically, and trans for children stuff specifically.
• Closing government, I think they’ll get a little bit of blame, but that’ll go away before the midterms.
• Supporting crime—the Democrats appear to me to be supporting crime. That’s not a very good advantage.
• And now they’re kicking off reparations in California; I’ll talk about that.
• But on top of that, now an alleged Republican—lifetime Republican—has bought the Dominion voting machines. Now, I don’t think that means that the Republicans will use them to cheat. I don’t think that. But they’re definitely going to make sure the Democrats don’t use them to cheat. So if you believe that the voting machines were ever rigged—well, that problem might be solved at least for these machines. Now I don’t have any information that they were rigged. So I’m not saying they are. I’m just saying kind of took away that risk, maybe.
• And then Republicans are trying to scrub the voter rolls—whichever ones they can get a hold of—to get rid of the non-citizens. That should be good.
• There should be some more redistricting going on—you know that whole story. That should turn out positive for the Republicans, probably.
• There’s, I guess, the Supreme Court is looking at removing the redistricting set-asides that I didn’t even know existed. But some exist just for, I think mostly for Black Americans to make sure they had some representation. That might go away, which would be a plus for Republican districts.
• The last election, Lara Trump and company had lots of lawyers observing things. They’ll probably do that again. And I suspect having that many lawyers observing elections makes a difference. I think that makes a difference.
• And then, of course, Republican allies are going to own TikTok, already own X, CBS News, maybe CNN. So the entire media landscape has turned podcaster-friendly and major media-unfriendly—gigantic advantage for Republicans.
• And MSNBC’s audience continues to shrink. They keep embarrassing themselves and becoming less and less important.
• And meanwhile, all the big tech platforms—probably all of them—are pro-Trump at this point because he’s the free speech guy. And they really, really need a free speech guy or they can’t even do business in Europe.
• Oh, and then I know that the Republicans are trying to get rid of mail-in ballots. I don’t know if that’ll be successful, but if it is, well, that would be another advantage.
• And then this whole Nobel Peace Prize thing—you know, obviously it was a little too late for Trump to get it this year. I think the reason for not giving it to him this year is good enough because it really was past the deadline. But it’s going to be in the air. If Trump solves Ukraine—which is possible before the midterms—he’s going to have two Nobel Prize nominations for two completely different wars. Maybe by then the tariffs are working and the trade deals are done; Gaza is being rebuilt. What do the Democrats have? Reparations? I mean, it’s starting to become such a monstrous imbalance. The imbalance is incredible.

And that’s without me even saying the obvious: that all the best people are on the same side now. All the smartest people are on one side. I don’t think it can be said enough that Trump would not be where he is if a whole bunch of Democrats who are important—like RFK Jr. and Tulsi and, who are some other ones? me? Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, probably some of the “All-In” podcast guys, I’m not sure. But there were a whole bunch of people that were, in my opinion, the smartest people who all ended up on the same side. And that’s big. That’s really big. Because they’re the ones who can make things happen.

Israel-Gaza Hostage Release

Anyway, over in Israel, I guess Jared and Witkoff are there and Trump’s going to be there today, or is it tomorrow? So there’s some thought that maybe some of the hostages might be released today, which would be a day ahead of the plan. But I always wonder: why do you really need to wait till Monday? Isn’t that the cruelest thing you’ve ever heard? Imagine if you’re one of the hostages and it’s Friday. And on Friday they say, “Hey, looks like we’re going to release you on Monday.” How would you feel? I mean, you’d feel good that you’re going to get released, but wouldn’t you say, “What about now? How about right now? Do I really have to stay in this tunnel for two and a half more days because that’s the deadline? How about now, for God’s sake, how about now?” So I think a little bit of that might be happening. So maybe we’ll see a few people trickling out today, which would be awesome.

But what’s interesting is that when Jared and Witkoff were doing their little talk in front of a very happy crowd of Israelis, Netanyahu got booed and Trump got enthusiastically cheered. Netanyahu got booed in his own country, and people were wearing Make America Great Again hats—not all of them, but apparently it was acceptable. So that’s happening.

We’ll see if everything goes smoothly. So at this point, we are expecting things to go smoothly with the prisoner handoff. And I think the head of Hamas actually reaffirmed that they’re not looking to have any kind of leadership or power after this is all sorted out. That was the big thing. The big thing was, would Hamas agree to not be in power? Apparently, they have.

I mentioned yesterday that Jared Kushner had read my book “Win Bigly,” which teaches you how to negotiate and persuade the way Trump does. And that after reading it, he got the Abraham Accords done. And then they brought him in to be the finisher on this. And I wasn’t sure if he did a lot on the Gaza deal or if he just sort of came in at the end to wrap up things. But apparently he did a lot. So he was deeply involved doing what appeared to be impossible, which is what I teach in the book “Win Bigly.” But what I didn’t remember is that back in 2020, he had told author Woodward that that book “Win Bigly” was one of the four books you should read to understand Trump. So I didn’t know that he went public with that, but he had. So I don’t feel so bad saying that he read my book because he recommends it for understanding Trump. I recommend it for understanding persuasion the way Trump does it. So it’s not just about the person; it’s about the technique as well. Did it make a difference? I don’t know. I don’t know.

Teachers’ Union and Israel Map

Well, in other news, the largest teachers’ union—which I think is the NEA—sent out a map to its members that erased Israel from the map and just showed Palestine. And the New York Post is reporting on this. The teachers’ union says, “Whoops, that wasn’t us. That was the third-party vendor that we used, and we didn’t like it when they did that. We’re going to talk to them.” But can you imagine that they actually paid for that and it got sent out and nobody caught it—that Israel had been erased from the map? Oh my god. That’s your teachers’ union. But they blame somebody else.

Trump and Troops’ Pay

I guess Trump is doing some workarounds to try to get the troops paid while the government’s closed and other people are not being paid. And would you believe that the Democrats are complaining about paying the troops? Of course. He trapped the Democrats into being against paying the troops because they would complain about what bucket he took it out of or something like that. So once again, Democrats tricked into taking the dumbest position you could possibly take.

Election Integrity (Ralph Pezzullo)

Well, there’s a new book out—I think it’s new—called “Stolen Elections” by Ralph Pezzullo. Now I’m going to give you a warning before I talk about this. You’re going to get a big dose of what I call the documentary effect. Because I’m going to tell you that this book has a point of view about the integrity of our elections that—I’m going to tell you what they say. But since I won’t be presenting the critics to it or the counterpoint, it’s going to be really, really persuasive. But it shouldn’t be, right? It’s just the documentary effect. If you hear one point of view without the other, and you listen to it enough, you’ll think it’s real, just because you only heard one point of view. So that’s what’s going to happen now. So be aware: I’m going to give you one point of view and it will be persuasive. Doesn’t mean it’s true. Got that? Okay.

So the Rasmussen Poll people have been on this forever—the Georgia election and the 2020 irregularities, as people would say. But this book is adding a bunch, and Rasmussen is calling out some of the interesting excerpts from the book. Again, it’s called “Stolen Elections” by Ralph Pezzullo. So on page 50, Rasmussen points out that the book says the US is divided into about 3,400 counties of election districts. In one of the recent briefings given by the whistleblowers—yes, there are whistleblowers—they were asked by a former head of US military intelligence, “In how many counties did you need to tamper with the vote in order to steal a national election?” Now remember, there are 3,400 counties. How many do you have to tamper with to steal the election? The answer was eight to ten. That’s all they needed—just eight to ten. And then they were asked how many people were needed to execute the steal, allegedly. And the answer was five. Five. And they said it would take about a year to plan it.

So there you have whistleblowers who are telling you how it was done, when it was done, and by how many people. Does that mean it was done? No, no. Remember, documentary effect. How many of you just said, “Well, that’s true”? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Remember, you’re already in the documentary effect. So you should be turning up your—your doubting thing should be turned up, not your believing thing. So turn down the gullibility, turn up the skepticism. It might all be true, but you should be going into this with some real skepticism, okay? That would be the proper frame for it. But there’s more. There’s more.

On page 245, according to Rasmussen Poll people, they say the book “Stolen Elections,” Ralph Pezzullo, says the following: In the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election—meaning the current one—engineers recruited by the whistleblowers collected strong evidence that the criminal cartel led by Venezuela was about to steal the election for the Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris. They also suspected that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of the Department of Homeland Security, couldn’t be trusted to identify and stop the fraud because of their poor performance during the 2020 presidential election. With the help of other cybersecurity experts, the engineers were able to stop the illegal altering of election results by shutting down the servers that the criminal cartel were using in Serbia and other countries, thus preserving the integrity of the 2024 election.

Did you wonder how Trump won in 2024 but lost in 2020? Well, I don’t know if this is the answer. But it’s alleged. And then on page 230, it gets even saucier. Source number one said, quote, “You can’t do this without the complicity of certain officials in the United States. Some of them need to be bought.” And then the question was, “Do you have any idea who these officials are?” Source one said, “For one, the governor of the state of Georgia. He won’t allow for the software of Dominion to be updated even though he knows that the software is flawed and allows for third-party access. Why is that?”

All right, now did I tell you that if I read this, you would be completely convinced that Georgia was a rigged election? You are, right? I’ll bet every one of you is now 100% convinced that Georgia was stolen. They do have people who are whistleblowers telling you how it was done in a lot of detail. Does that mean it was stolen? Unfortunately, it does not. So I’m going to say it one more time. Unfortunately, you can’t be sure that these whistleblowers or any of these sources are real. You just can’t. We just don’t live in a world where you can trust people like that. But it is a complete—it is a complete picture, and it does look like we’ll have access to maybe knowing the real picture because now Dominion is owned by some Republican-friendly guy. So maybe that helps him dig into the software, look for things, I don’t know. So we’ll find out. But maybe the problem is solved if a Republican has it.

538 and Nate Silver

All right, here’s another topic. This is also Rasmussen. Rasmussen’s having a good week. I think Rasmussen is just can’t stop laughing because the things they’ve been—the buttons they’ve been pressing for I don’t know, years now—all look like they’re the real buttons. Maybe not, maybe yes, maybe not. But it sure looks like Rasmussen is being completely validated and vindicated. But we’ll see.

So on a separate topic, but also Rasmussen pointing it out, they call it “The Fall of the Machines.” Do you know that there was a polling company called 538 that’s now shut down? But they were sort of the pollsters’ ranking entity. So they would not just do a poll, but they would tell you what other polls were real and which other polls were BS. Now, if you could control—if you wanted to control what people thought in the United States, what would be the best way to do it? Well, you would—if you could manipulate opinion polls, you could manipulate a lot of stuff in the United States. But you don’t want to manipulate them directly because you don’t have control over all those polls; they’re owned by different people. So instead, you build like a fact-checker.

Does this sound familiar? Whenever the Democrats have a fact-checking entity, is it real? No, it’s never real. It’s just a way to manage the truth so that you don’t see it as much. So 538—Nate Silver started it, but he sold it I think to the New York Times or somebody. But here’s what Rasmussen says, which I don’t fully understand. But they say that Disney apparently spent $100 million over a dozen years to fund losses at the pollster grading company 538. But as soon as DOGE arrived at USAID, 538 was closed. And controlling the narrative probably was expensive.

Now this one’s more of a little smoking gun situation, but the suggestion had been that polls are typically rigged, but only when it matters, right? They wouldn’t be rigged for just, you know, ordinary stuff during the year. But when it comes to determining who becomes your president, the allegation was that they were always rigged. And this would be more smoking gun sort of evidence that maybe it was. But I would say short of proof. Short of proof. I don’t know what the Disney connection is, but maybe somebody does. Did they own 538? I thought the New York Times bought it. Or did they buy it from the New York Times? So who owned 538 when it got closed? So the question is, did 538 get some government funding because it was doing devious things for one part of the government? I don’t know. Don’t know. But I’ve never trusted the polls when it comes to the presidential races.

Georgia 2020 Election

And then you want one more? Just to—just to round it out. This is also from Rasmussen, Rasmussen Polls. And they’re reminding us that in September 2023, they did a survey to find out who people voted for in Georgia. Do you remember Georgia, the state that Trump narrowly lost in 2020? He lost Georgia. So when they asked people who they voted for, 46% said they voted for Trump in 2020, and only 39% said they voted for Biden. So when they counted the votes, Biden had more. When Rasmussen did a poll to say “Who did you vote for?”, Trump had way more. It’s not even close.

Now some of that could be false memories and stuff like that. But not that far away. 2% could have been a false memory; not this much. That’s a big—that’s a big difference. People don’t forget who they voted for. And they’re also—and they’re also not—they’re not embarrassed. I mean, were they embarrassed to say they voted for Biden? Probably not. So what do you make of the fact that the election didn’t match the poll? Well, how would you deal with that if you were the bad guys? I’ll tell you how you do it. You would go to 538 that ranks the pollsters, and you’d say, “Quick, make sure that Rasmussen gets ranked low so that even if people see this, we’ll be able to say, ‘Oh, it’s just Rasmussen.‘” I mean, look at 538; they ranked them as—I mean, come on, it’s just Rasmussen. And that’s what they did. When you find out how things really work, it’s pretty scary, isn’t it?

Illinois National Guard

All right, um. I guess a federal appeals court said Trump can federalize Illinois National Guard but cannot deploy them into Chicago. Terrific.

Keith Ellison and Antifa

Do you remember Keith Ellison? Is he currently the AG of Minnesota? Do I have that right? Well, back in 2018, he happily held up a book called the “Antifa Handbook.” So that was 2018. So he wanted you to know that he was on board with Antifa and showing you their book. What’s he say today? “There’s no such thing as Antifa.” His—his own son had declared—publicly declared support for Antifa, the thing he says doesn’t even exist. His son is a member, apparently, and he held up the book.

Democratic Hallucinations

Now I was thinking, how many other things are Democrats claiming are hallucinations or they’re just hallucinating? All right, let’s start with that.

• The Democrats are hallucinating that Republicans are the ones keeping the government closed. Even Jake Tapper doesn’t buy that. He’s like, “Uh, they have a continuing resolution every one of them says they’ll sign to open the government right now. You’re the ones not signing it.” So they’ve got this hallucination about who’s keeping the government closed.
• They think Antifa doesn’t even exist, even though they—they get like massive crowds and they’ve got a guidebook and they’re—we know where the funding is coming from. But they don’t exist.
• They think that white supremacist is the big problem. Really? Where?
• They think that there’s not really any violence in cities that needs any extra help. They think they have the violence in the major cities under control. Do you?
• They think they thought the border was secure when it was totally open.
• They thought that Trump is stealing your democracy when we—when we look at what happened with the election in 2020. Hmm. Maybe somebody was stealing your democracy, but it wasn’t the January 6 people. They weren’t trying to steal your democracy by trespassing in a building for a few hours. That doesn’t really happen.
• The climate alarm, of course, was a fantasy.
• And then I’m going to add this one just because I’m going to talk about it: reparations. And the belief that white people are the reason that Blacks are not succeeding. Do you believe that the reason that Black people are not succeeding is that white people are holding them back, or that white people have all the systemic advantages? Okay. We’ll talk about reparations in a little bit.

Katie Porter and the “Karen” Video

So Katie Porter, who thought she was running for governor of California, but apparently after those video clips of her being a super Karen came out, her popularity went down from 40% chance of becoming governor to 16%. So I guess you can’t be a horrible bitch to your staff and to other people and get that on video and people didn’t like that. So looks like she’s out.

Virginia AG Nominee

But what about that Virginia Democrat Attorney General nominee who got caught with some private messages that said things like he wished opponent, you know, would get shot in the head and somebody would pee on their grave and he thinks, you know, maybe his policies would be better if his family got hurt? So he’s just said terrible, terrible things. So let’s see, how are his polls doing? No movement. His polls are exactly the same. So apparently you can say and it can get out in public that you want great violence to happen to a Republican and his family. And his family. And your Democrat supporters will say, “That’s fine. Private message. That’s fine.” Okay.

Marc Benioff and San Francisco

Mark Benioff, the founder/owner of Salesforce, CEO. He’s calling for Trump to send in the National Guard to San Francisco. That’s where their headquarters is because it’s turned into a—turned into a fentanyl dump. But he lives in Hawaii, so he doesn’t have to deal with it. But when he visits his building, apparently it’s a nightmare. So Mark Benioff. Now the reason that’s important is that Benioff would be the most famously woke CEO of all time. I’m going to defend him a little bit. I spent a little bit of time chatting with him once a few years ago. And I thought he was the real deal. Like I think Benioff actually wants to make the world a better place while he’s making his money, and he was dead serious about that during the meeting that I attended. I was a speaker, so I got to see some of the other interactions. He was very serious about that. That wasn’t just for show. He’s the real deal. However, he’s also really smart and he knows that you can’t have uncontrolled crime in your business environment. So he’s a common-sense guy.

US Troops and Venezuela

In other news, allegedly 10,000 US troops are being deployed in the Caribbean around area of Venezuela. That probably is telling us that something’s going to happen, but we’re not ruling out that they’re just doing exercises. I don’t think so. I think they’re getting ready for a land attack. And some say it’s just to pressure Maduro to make it look like we might get more military. I think if we go into Venezuela, we’re not going to attack the military so much. Only what is protecting Maduro. I feel like the only thing we would do there would be a decapitation strike. I don’t think we would do a move the whole military in and try to control the country while Maduro is an absent—absentee leader or something. I think they would have to know where he is, take him out hard, and then go in with support for the Venezuelan government that’s sort of in waiting, the one that—the one that complimented him over the Nobel. So I think that’s going to come for sure. And also Hegseth announced that they’ve formed a counter-narcotics task force in the Caribbean that will be launching. All right, so now that they’ve formed the task force, that task force is for the purpose of boots on the ground. It’s not a task force to read memos, right? This is an on-the-ground stuff. So yeah, there will be ground war. Big or small? I don’t know. When I say ground war, in a perfect world, we would take out the leadership with a missile or a bomb, and then the ground would just be mopping up. Ideally. We’ll see what happens.

Charlie Kirk Medal of Freedom

I guess Charlie Kirk will receive the highest civilian honor in posthumously—the Presidential Medal of Honor, Medal of Freedom. That happens today. I think we all agree with that.

Have you listened to Rob O’Neill, the SEAL Team Six member who shot bin Laden? Have you heard him talking about his opinion of whether we have correctly analyzed what happened to Charlie Kirk? Because he’s very clear that we don’t have the right story. He says he’s killed a number of people up close and he can tell you for sure that that’s no entry wound. Now, if that’s no entry wound, everything we’ve been told is a lie. That doesn’t mean that Israel was behind it, was nothing—I’m not suggesting that. I’m just saying that if that wasn’t an entry wound, we really don’t know.

And the other thing that Rob O’Neill talks about is, allegedly, the microphone that he was wearing was immediately removed from his body and removed from the site as if maybe somebody thought that the microphone was part of the kill shot. Because there’s some people who say the microphone might have been like a secret little gun that shot a—shot something into him. I don’t know about that. Don’t know about that. But when you hear somebody that qualified say with such certainty that this was not a gunshot from the front, I do believe him.

JFK Assassination Theory

Do you remember the story of the magic bullet for Kennedy? That somebody found the bullet on the gurney? What are the odds that the bullet would be laying on the gurney next to the body? And then the—the bullet that supposedly went through two completely different people was still intact. Now, it was flattened, but the entire mass of the bullet in the Kennedy situation—the entire mass of the bullet was still there and sort of identifiable, but just flattened, like it had gone through some soft tissue, but not like it had gone through any bones at all.

So I talked to one expert on wounds. Apparently, there are people who are experts on gunshot wounds. And one of the things I learned is, you know on TV, on a crime show, they’ll analyze the bullet and find out what gun it came out of. Apparently, in the real world, that almost never can happen. If the bullet goes into a human being, the bullet becomes so destroyed you couldn’t possibly match it back to a particular barrel and that that’s pure fantasy.

So in this situation, not only did Rob O’Neill say that if the—if the gun that’s implicated was the one used, it would have taken his whole head off—so there’s that—and what else? Oh, and then there’s the bullet probably would have been broken up if it had, especially if it hit bones. Probably would have been broken up and there might be maybe a trace of, you know, part of the bullet still in him. But what the—what the doctor said is that Charlie had magic bones and it stopped the bullet and the bullet was still in him. Apparently, that doesn’t make any sense at all. It wouldn’t be intact and it definitely wouldn’t be in him if it came from that gun. And it definitely wouldn’t have left that hole. Now, I hate that every single freaking thing that looks like it’s simple turns into a conspiracy theory. But how do you get past those facts coming from somebody as qualified as Rob O’Neill? Which one of you is going to say, “Well, based on my own SEAL Team Six up-close murders—not murders, but kills—based on my own up-close, you know, that—that looked like an entry wound to me”? As far as I know, 100% of military and hunters—military people and hunters—correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe 100% of them have said that was no entry wound. Am I right? 100%? Like every one? Every single person who knows what they’re talking about? I’ve not heard one person who said, “Oh yeah, that—that could be an entry wound, you know, maybe under these situations.” Not one. So I’m not going to go full Israel on this because I don’t see that evidence. But there’s something—there’s something wrong with this. There’s something wrong. I don’t know.

Splitting Sound Particles

Here’s some fun science stuff. Scientists just split sound particles. Did you know that sound had a minimum, I guess, frequency length or something? Very tiny. But apparently they can now break one sound—what? I guess it’s like a photon for sound. What’s it called? A phonon. And they can break it and send it in two paths. And if you can do that, which apparently they can do, it might create a path for really efficient quantum computers you could fit in your pocket. So that they might be able to power things by breaking light, but also breaking sound. And somehow that would help them do something with quantum. So that’s kind of cool. That’s a ways away. Won’t be happening tomorrow.

Type 1 Diabetes Cure

Scientists allegedly, according to user Massimo who found this study in the New England Journal of Medicine, have found a cure for Type 1 diabetes. A cure. Apparently they took a guy with Type 1 and they tweaked his genes with—using CRISPR. They edited three genes, and then they stuck them back in him, and he started creating his own insulin and he doesn’t have diabetes anymore. Now, could you reproduce that? I mean, they had to edit three genes, but they know exactly which genes to edit and they know how to do it. Did diabetes just get cured? I don’t know. I don’t know, maybe.

Geothermal Energy

I’ve told you about this before, but here’s a little update. You know that if we could access the geothermal energy, which is just the extreme heat in the inner core of the world, that we would have more electricity than we would ever need for the end of time, including for AI. But getting to it is hard because you would have to dig a hole really deep. And that really deep hole, we don’t really quite have the technology to—to do that economically. But turns out there’s a lot of action happening there.

There are so-called closed-loop systems, there’s a carbon-free heat engine that drills down. So they’re using—using technology from fusion research and all kinds of other things. Looks like one of them might be a giant laser kind of thing. But anyway, there are a number of schemes to try to economically get into that heat. If we ever do that—even once—if we can even once figure out how to get deep enough to, you know, get into that heat, that changes everything if we can do it economically. I’m surprised that Elon Musk isn’t building a—something with the Boring machine that can go straight down and get to the geothermal. It would be completely different technology, but it seems like exactly the kind of technology he’d be into because it’s such a moonshot. I mean, it would just replace everything. It looks doable in the long run. I—it’s hard for me to imagine that in the long, long run, humans would not be able to go that deep and to get that energy. I feel like that’s just a guarantee. But it might be 20 years away. Interesting engineering had that story.

Ukraine Drone Advantage

Well, I was looking for the gentleman who was on YouTube talking about this, but it agrees with what I’ve said, so I’ll just say that there’s another smart person saying it. And it goes like this: that Ukraine actually has a—they’re turning the corner on having an advantage in the war. The advantage is that now that it’s—seems to be purely a robot war, you know, drones mostly—that whoever does the best on drones will win the war as long as they can stay in business long enough to do that.

Now it does look like the human deaths on the front line maybe lessened because they’re just doing drone on drone on drone stuff. I don’t hear too much about people dying on the front line anymore, so I assume the numbers are smaller. And it really is turning into drones against energy production in both directions. It’s their drones against energy, their drones against energy. But the Ukrainian advantage, according to this one gentleman whose name I didn’t write down because I’m a bad person, is that the freer market system of Ukraine will guarantee that they have the better drones over time, and that’s happening now.

So that we’re just turning the corner, you know, at first, first two years, Ukraine is just desperately trying to get some kind of anything that works, so they’re, you know, using whatever drones they can get. You know, they’re not good ones. But they keep upgrading the drones. So the Ukrainian drones are getting to the point, and they’re right at the point where they won’t be jammable by GPS and they’ll be able to make unlimited numbers of them. Once they’re not jammable and they can just darken the sky with them, then you’d say, “Oh, but Russia will just catch up.” So they’ll have better—better things for shooting them down, they’ll have their own drones, you know, their own drones will be that powerful.

But Russia has not modernized their drones as fast. And the reason given is that they have a system which does not reward entrepreneurship the same way we do, or the same way Ukraine does. So the Ukrainians are trying to get rich and also save their country. And they have the freedom to get rich in whatever way can make the best drones. The Russians are just going to get a paycheck. You know, if they work on trying to make a better drone and they succeed, just a paycheck. Doesn’t really save the country. They’re not going to get rich. So the theory is that the incentives for the Ukrainian side is to rapidly innovate, and that will be the most important factor for how the war goes. And that we’re just turning the corner where Ukraine is—is going to turn on the afterburners for innovation in drones, and that that will turn the corner.

Now, of course, Russia has the big advantage in human power, the big advantage in missiles and all that. So a lot of this is psychological. It’s not so much which—what each side could do because what Russia could do is nuke all of Ukraine if they wanted to. So Russia, you know, clearly has the weapons to just pave the place if they wanted to. But would they want to? Because what would happen to them?

Trump, Zelensky, and Tomahawk Missiles

So it looks like Axios is reporting that Trump is going to be talking to Zelensky about Tomahawk missiles, and if the US provides them—that would be paid for by the Europeans, because Trump has cleverly gotten us out of the paying. The fact that Trump got us out of paying for Ukraine is one of the great accomplishments. I don’t think he gets enough credit for that. Because as long as we’re not paying for it and we’re—we’re selling things instead of buying things, I feel a lot better about it. You know, if it has to be a war, might as well—might as well profiteer. It’d be better without the war, of course.

But Trump’s made a decision, I think, to give them Tomahawk missiles, but he wants to talk to them about how they use them. And what I think he means by that is, if you use these Tomahawks to take out their energy structure, I’ll let you have them. Because that’s just more of what you’re already doing. And he’s doing the same thing to you. So that would look like something that wouldn’t necessarily escalate things too much because it’s sort of what you’re already doing: attacking the energy infrastructure. But imagine if Zelensky said, “Aha! I’ve got some Tomahawk missiles. I’m going to lob these into the Kremlin and take out the leadership.” That, I believe, would be a big, big problem for the United States because we’re not ready for that. So I assume that what he’s going to do is say, if you can limit these to taking out energy resources, you might be able to wrap this up quickly. Because if you took out probably—I’m just going to guess—if you took out another 20% of Russia’s domestic gas production, they’d want to talk. And probably these Tomahawk missiles could make that happen. Now, obviously, Russia would increase their own attacks on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine, but maybe they’re already maxed out. There’s—there’s no reason they wouldn’t be maxed out already. So maybe they don’t have much to go.

Nazi Tattoos in Ukraine

ZeroHedge is reporting that the mainstream media was still trying to hide the Nazi tattoos on some of the Ukrainian Azov Regiment people. So I guess there’s some movement to try to normalize or accept the overtly racist Nazi parts of Ukraine because I guess they figure it’s better to keep the country together than to deal with that.

Spain and NATO

Trump has suggested that Spain be expelled from NATO because they’re not willing to step up to that 5% annual—5% of GDP annual spending. And he said, we had one laggard and it was Spain. He said they have no excuses not to do this, but that’s all right; maybe we should throw them out of NATO, frankly. Now that shouldn’t be news because the entire point of NATO membership is if you don’t pay, you’re not in. So they don’t pay. So Trump says, well, maybe you’re not in. So, you know, nobody else would say that directly, but you should say that. That’s why you pay—to be in. If you don’t pay, not in. It’s really simple.

Drone Terrorism Risks

And apparently there’s—according to Remix—over in Belgium, the authorities stopped a jihadist plot that looked like they were going to try to build a assassination drone to take out some leaders of the country. But they stopped it. My question is, how do we ever go outside again? Aren’t we maybe one year away from any individual being able to send a unjammable—unjammable—drone into any location they want and make it explode? How—how could you ever have an outdoor political event one year from now? There would always be a terrorist who’s within two miles who can just open a door or open a window, throw a drone out the window and tell it to go to the exact location. And then, of course, it’d be jammed—if it’s some important president or something, it’d be jammed. But then it would just switch over to GPS and visual and just finish the job. How would we stop that? Now, if it were only one, you know, we would have other mechanisms to shotgun it out of the sky and stuff like that. But what if 20 came at the same time? Is there really any chance we would stop all 20? If we—if we couldn’t jam them? Maybe. If they came in low, though, you wouldn’t even have time to laser them. So I guess it depends how low they are when they—they do the final mile.

Germany and CO2 Cult

Anyway, over in Germany, CEO of a big—big company I never heard of, but I guess it’s a big, big company, Evonik. The CEO is calling for the end of what he calls the CO2 cult. And it’s a wake-up call for Europe’s economy. ZeroHedge is writing about that. So Germany, of course, was the big woke everything’s got to be green, and apparently they have decided that climate change and CO2 not necessarily a hoax, but maybe you ought to back off a little bit if you want to survive.

Reparations Reframe

Anyway, meanwhile, let’s talk about reparations. So Governor Newsom has decided to sign something that would create a some kind of entity in California to look into reparations. What did he call it? Create a state agency for reparations. Now I’ve told you before that Newsom has been smart about reparations. He can’t say no, but he can say we should study it. So he keeps saying, “Well, how about we study it?” So this state agency seems like more of that. It’s like just the next thing he’s doing that would funnel some money to the reparations people. Because who do you think’s going to be in the state agency for reparations? Do you think it’ll be people who were on the committee that were doing reparations? Of course it is, some of them. So this seems to be just another way to funnel tax money to reparations advocates without ever getting any reparations. So I don’t believe this will lead to reparations because even Gavin doesn’t think that’s a good idea. But it will lead to people who want reparations getting paid, and that should shut them up. So there’s that.

But let’s talk about reparations. I believe I’m the most qualified person to do this given my—my public reputation. Let me say this as clearly as possible. If I were going to give advice to the Black Americans, what’s the first thing I should do? If I wanted to give advice on success to Black Americans, what’s the first thing I should do? Shut the fuck up. That’s what I should do. Why do I think I can advise Black Americans? Didn’t I just read you a reframe that says even if people ask for advice or you think they need it, it never helps. And I learned this because I actually spent quite a bit of my time and treasure trying to figure out what would be the best way to help Black Americans. And then when I thought I was making like a little progress, I was informed by Black Americans that they don’t need any help. They might need some money, they might need some funding to get things done, but they don’t need advice. To which I say, you know what, you’re completely right about that. Advice is what you give people who you believe are somehow below you—I hate to say that, but somehow they need advice and you don’t. How—how did you come up with that? Why do they need the advice and you’re not the one who needs the advice? Why would you even think that?

So I think that when you offer people advice and help, you infantilize them and you take away some of their agency. I believe that the best thing that you could do for Black America is say, we’re not going to give you anything. How about nothing? “Oh, but—but the unfairness of the past.” Yeah, it was very unfair. What’s your point? “Well, because of the unfairness of the past, we should be compensated.” To which I say, that doesn’t connect. There’s all kinds of unfair things in the past. Doesn’t mean you get paid. “No, no, but because it was so unfair, and we know which group of people did it to which other group, that would be reparations.” To which I say, why? What’s the logic there? There’s no connecting logic. There’s something that happened with other people who are not us and you didn’t like it. So? Do I get reparations for being born short? Do I get reparations for being bald and nearsighted? Do you get reparations if you’re born dumb because you can’t get much done if you’re born dumb? No.

There is no world in which people are better off if we can say, “Oh, somebody needs to pay somebody else because they have bigger problems.” There are no special problems. Black people don’t have special problems. They have problems. They’re real. I think systemic racism is real. That’s a real problem. But if you tell people, “You know, you can just overcome that problem by doing the same thing that everybody does to overcome the problem of poverty.” “Wait, what?” Yeah, everybody who overcomes the problem of poverty does it the same way. “What? But what if there’s discrimination?” There’s not discrimination; there’s discrimination in favor of you. Every company wants to hire you if you’ll just go get an education, get a little training—they all want to hire you. You could find mentors so easily because they want to do it. You have everything you need to succeed. But you have to do it the way everybody does it. You can’t do it a magic way. You have to do it the way everybody does it: stay out of jail, stay off drugs, keep your family together, get the best education you can. There is no other way.

Reparations, even if we gave you a big pile of money, what would you do with it? Do you think if you check back in five years, everybody’d be okay? “Oh, we got our reparations; that fixed everything.” No, there’s no chance of that. There’s no chance of that. That’s never worked for anybody. You probably would just blow through it and be glad you had it for a year, and then it would be gone. And it would have no impact on your life after you, you know, bought a car and—although if you needed the car for work, that might have—might have helped a lot. Yeah, lottery winners don’t exactly become successful and happy after they win the lottery.

So there’s your reframe. The reframe is not how much reparations should you pay; the reframe is nobody has a special problem. Your problem is not special. And the only person—let me say it another way. The only way Black America can save—can fix their problems is if Black Americans decide to fix their problems doing the exact same thing that everybody else did to fix their problems. There’s no other path. Now, nobody—nobody can give you a leg up on that. There’s no secret password. There’s nothing. You just do what everybody else did. And if that doesn’t work, well, I’m sorry. That’s all we have. All we have is what everybody does. There’s nothing else. So there’s your reframe for reparations.

All right, everybody, that’s all I got for today. That’s all you needed. I’m going to say hi to the special people on Locals. And the rest of you, thanks for coming. I will see you again tomorrow, same time, same place. Locals, my beloveds, coming at you now. We’ll be private in 30 seconds.