Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-13

The Simultaneous Sip

Good morning, New York. What a day. What a day we have ahead. Happy Columbus Day. I’m just checking your stocks, and it looks like today will be an up day for all the reasons that you already know. Kind of exciting.

As soon as we get our comments going, we’ll give you the show you deserve. Grab a seat, make sure your beverage is chilled, because you know what time it is. Let’s try this and that. Oh, what a day.

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 day. But if you’d like to experience levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper mug, a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, or a flask. A vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid—I like coffee. Enjoy 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 right now. Go.

I don’t want to say that that was better than a hostage release, but it’s right up there.

Reframe: Best Worldview

As is my new tradition, I’m going to start with a reframe. I tried to pick one that was relevant to today’s big news, which we’ll get to in a moment. This is another reframe from my book, Reframe Your Brain, and it goes like this:

The usual frame—the way people usually think—is that the best worldview is the one that’s true. The best worldview is the one that’s true. Here is the reframe: The best worldview is the one that predicts the best. It predicts the best.

Does that sound relevant? Well, it is relevant, because in 2016, when I decided to back Trump, I was predicting. And my prediction went like this: He definitely seems to love America and always has. So his heart’s in the right place. He definitely has skills that other people just don’t have. He just has skills they don’t have, and those skills could be really important to the country because he could do things that we need to get done that nobody could get done.

So I predicted that his love of country, his love of winning, and his extreme toolbox of skills would get us to a good place. Now, was that based on reality and truth, or was it just predictive? Well, other people said, “Hey, I think his personality and character are unsuitable to be president. Therefore, he will steal our democracy and just steal money from the Treasury for himself, and he’s only in it to win it for himself.”

Was that predictive? It was not. That was not predictive. So it’s easier if you release on what’s true, because then you end up fighting about the details of what’s true, and focus on what’s predictive. Follow the money—that’s predictive. If you thought that Trump was a big old narcissist who just wants everybody to love him and look good, that’s why he works so hard. That’s not a negative; that’s why he works so hard. I have the same situation. I want to be appreciated for what I’ve done for other people. That’s my big payoff in life. So I will work hard so that somebody will say, “Oh, I’m really glad you did that thing,” whatever that thing was.

So yeah, the prediction is that people like Trump are going to get a lot of stuff done.

Hostages Released

Happy Columbus Day. Let’s talk about those hostages freed. You already know the news. All 20 living hostages have been released. There’s hope that bodies will be returned, but that might be a little more complicated. 2,000 or so Hamas people, I guess, are getting released and returned. We won’t talk about them too much because today is more about happiness.

Trump in Israel

Trump flew over to Israel, which turned out to be a brilliant move. He didn’t have to, but he did. And wow, did he get a hero’s welcome like I’ve never seen before. Netanyahu praised him like I’ve never seen anybody praise Trump at all, and all deserved. He said no one moved the world so decisively as Trump. He said, “I believe that the close cooperation between our two nations, combining Israel’s military pressure and Trump’s unmatched global leadership, achieved this historic moment.”

Well, here is something that Israel figured out, and Netanyahu certainly figured out: There is no such thing as praising Trump too much. I think you’ve all figured that out too, right? It’s not like he says, “Oh, that’s enough, really. You can tone it down a little bit. Oh, well thank you, I appreciate it, but you don’t have to do all that.” The more you do, the better it is. You can lay it on as thick as you want, and he’ll just think, “Is there any more of that? Can I get a little more of that?” I do like that about him.

Anyway, he was hailed as a colossus and a giant of Jewish history by the Israeli Parliament.

Biden and Democrats’ Reaction

So here are just some things in no particular order. Number one, does anybody think that any other president could have gotten this done? No. No, you don’t. But poor little Biden and Biden’s little dingleberries that are still hanging around him, they’re trying to claim that all Trump did was finalize the deal that Biden got working. Can you believe the gall? The fact that they would even try to give Biden credit for this. Oh my goodness.

So meanwhile, while the so-called “Hitler” is finding peace for Israel, the Democrats are still whining about him being an authoritarian Hitler while we’re all watching the “authoritarian Hitler” bring peace to the entire world. The Democrats could not be losing harder than they are today. Today is peak losing for Democrats. They just gotta shut up at this point. Just let it go, right? Just let it go. There’s nothing you should say right now except “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Why Only Men Released?

So people asked reasonably, “Why are all 20 of the people released male?” I think it’s two factors. One is that all the remaining women are dead. That would be a fact, unfortunately. I don’t know if they were killed in particular or killed because they didn’t want them talking. That’s the thing I worry about the most. Were they killed because they were abused and they didn’t want them to go public? Maybe.

But it could also be because the earlier rounds of releases focused on women and children and elderly, and they just leave the healthy male military-age people for last. So it’s probably a combination of bad things happened to women, but also that they negotiated the women out earlier. Probably both.

Israeli Knesset Reaction

Anyway, so Trump gets a standing ovation. But when he mentioned Biden, the people laughed. They actually laughed at even the mention of Biden. And then when he mentioned Obama being the worst or second-worst president after Biden, they clapped. They actually clapped for Obama being a terrible president, and they laughed—they literally laughed—at a mention of Biden being the president. And they stood and gave a standing ovation. And now Netanyahu wants to nominate Trump for the highest award in Israel. So maybe this whole authoritarian thing is working out. Seems to be working out pretty well.

Trump’s Speech

Anyway, here is what Trump said in his speech, which was hilarious, by the way. So in his speech, he talked about how he kind of teased Netanyahu for running on too long because he’s trying to get to this other big meeting in Egypt where all the big Middle East countries will meet and decide the fate of the Middle East. So I guess he’s terribly late for that, but he’s late because they’re praising him, so it’s not the worst thing in the world.

But when he got to speak, after he made fun of Bibi talking too long and said some fun things, he said, “Generations from now, this will be remembered as the moment that everything began to change. Like the USA right now, it will be the Golden Age of Israel and the Golden Age of the Middle East.”

Well, here we are. It’s a Golden Age. And he says everybody’s loving Israel again. He said things were getting tough the last several months because, of course, Israel was taking brutal criticism for the way they were executing the war. But now it’s looking like it just looks like a victory. You know, winning solves a lot of problems. Winning does.

Abraham Accords and Iran

And then Trump started selling the Abraham Accords hard because he’s the salesman-in-chief. If he can get that done, oh my goodness. So I guess there are four Middle East countries that are part of that Abraham Accords, and then there are a bunch that could be but aren’t, but would like to be, maybe. And this probably opens the door for that. So Trump’s trying to sell it hard. Get in on that Abraham Accord as soon as you can.

And Trump is actually even promising that he thinks he can make a deal with Iran. Not part of the Abraham Accords, but separately. And he thinks Iran’s ready to do a deal, mostly because they’ve been so weakened by recent events that they would get flexible. But I don’t know about that, but maybe.

Netanyahu’s Legal Troubles

All right, here are some of the highlights of his speech as well. The part I liked best is, as you might know, that Netanyahu’s got some legal problems. He’s being accused of bribery or corruption or something. And that’s on hold because the war. And so Trump’s up there absorbing the maximum amount of praise, and he’s praising Netanyahu, and then he turns to the President—which is different than the Prime Minister, of course—turns to the President of Israel who is on the dais, and he says that he thinks that Netanyahu should get a pardon. And that’s the guy that decides the pardon.

And I thought, I thought he was going to get the President of Israel to agree to a pardon right in front of us. But he didn’t take the bait. He might. But watching Trump make that play to see if he can get the pardon for Netanyahu was one of the strongest leadership things I’ve ever seen in my life. That was so impressive. Even if he doesn’t get it, that was so impressive.

How many times have I told you that one of the magic tricks that Trump does for persuasion is that if you’re his enemy, you’re really his enemy? Like, he’s going to take you down. You’re going to get lawfared, your country might get attacked, you might get a bad nickname. If you’re on his bad side, you’re really on his bad side.

But as I often tell you, if you get on his good side, he won’t just say you’re a good person. He will change your life. And this is one of the things he could have done, and maybe still will do, for Netanyahu. So Netanyahu became flexible. I’m not sure that he was always flexible in this process, but he did decide to conform to what Trump wanted him to do, and that worked out.

So now they’re best friends. And what does Trump do? Does he just say, “I’ll give you some award”? That’s what Netanyahu is doing for Trump, right? “I’ll give you an award.” Well, that’s great. Awards are good. But what would be more valuable to Netanyahu than a pardon? And who would have more influence and who would be more in the moment to read the room and know that this is the moment to insert that idea? Only Trump. There’s not another president in the entire world who would have read that moment right and said, “Wow, this is something I can do that’s beyond what Netanyahu would ever expect me to do, and I might be able to pull it off.”

I would love to know what was going on in the mind of the Israeli President. I wonder if he thought to himself, “I should just do it.” Because obviously he doesn’t want to do it, or he would have done it already. But I wonder if he just thought to himself, “This would be such a moment. I mean, the moment would have been extraordinary.” Imagine if the President had just turned and said, “Mr. President, I have not fully considered this, but in recognition of the day, in recognition of what you’ve done for us, I’m going to give you that.”

That could have happened. That would have been amazing. Boy, Trump knows how to create a moment or get close to a moment.

”This is Why”

All right, but here is what I feel, and I hope that the rest of you feel it too. As I posted on X, cryptically, but I only wanted the people who understood to understand it—I don’t want everybody to understand it—and my post on X was just this: “This is why.” That’s it. “This is why.”

What I mean, of course, for the few of you who don’t know exactly what that means, is that in 2016 when I decided to—I didn’t know I was doing it at the time, but quickly I figured it out—when I decided I would throw away my entire social life to back Trump, and when I eventually threw away my entire career—which even before I was canceled, my licensing business and book sales went to almost nothing because I was supporting Trump—I sacrificed everything. I sacrificed my social life, I sacrificed my career, I sacrificed my reputation. I may have sacrificed my health.

And I did that because I believed it was worth it. Today’s the day. It was worth it. It was worth it. Not just for this, but it was worth it to be right. It’s worth it to be right. I’m really happy I lived long enough to see it.

MAGA Sacrifice

As you know, Trump doesn’t become president without a hundred things going right. You know, I like to think I might have been one of the hundred things that went right so that he could get elected and we could get something done. Save the country, maybe save the world. But it wasn’t free. It wasn’t cheap. It wasn’t easy.

But every one of you who is watching right now probably shared a little bit in that pain. Probably every one of you said, “You know what? You’re not going to tell me who to vote for. You’re not going to manipulate me. You know what? I’m going to do what I think is right, and I’m going to follow this all the way.”

You all did that. All the MAGA supporters. You all took a personal and professional risk for the benefit of the country, and you knew that it was going to cost you dearly. You lost family members—“lost your daughter,” somebody says—yeah, a lot of you lost family members, you lost friends, you lost jobs. It cost you money. And you were right. In the end, in the end, you were right. You bet the right way.

Trump’s New Category

So, you know, even though you could say, “Scott, this is more about Israel than it is about the United States”—and it is—it seems to be an emotional touchpoint that seems to touch everything. It seems to touch the world, including the United States most heavily. And what it does is it just puts Trump in a whole different category where now he can do even more things that were impossible. Because people are going to look at him and say, “Okay, you did the impossible one time after another. What else can you do?”

And we’re probably going to find out. Maybe it means we get better trade deals with China, maybe he can wrap something up with Russia—that’s going to be a tough one. But you know that I’ve been all-in since 2016. All-in. I bet it all. I just bet everything. I bet everything to get to this point. The Golden Age. So here we are.

It just feels so good to be on the right side of history. Because you never know. You never know if you’re going to be on the right side of history, but boy are we on the right side of history right now. Unless there are aliens in that comet, maybe things are going to look good.

Hamas Surrender

Anyway, we have some background on why Hamas finally caved. I guess Egypt and Qatar were going hard at them, saying it was the last chance. Turkey was going hard at Hamas, telling them, “You better get this done,” and they were getting a lot of pressure from their own people. So basically it got to the point where everybody outside of Hamas was telling Hamas, “You gotta end this.” There was essentially nobody left on their side. So it got done.

So being in the right place at the right time helps, but it still had to be Trump. Only Trump could have gotten it done. And then the last person to agree was Netanyahu, and Trump bullied him into saying yes, and I’m sure Netanyahu’s happy about it now.

Charlamagne Tha God’s Reaction

Here is what Charlamagne Tha God said about it. He said, “Donald Trump shows me what’s politically possible.” Now remember, Charlamagne Tha God is a Democrat. He said, “Donald Trump shows me what’s politically possible. Trump shows me what presidents can do if they want to do it.” And he says, “It’s not about what can’t be done; it’s about who has the political will to do it.”

So that seems to be the frame that some Democrats are starting to enter: the “Okay, okay, this is true that Trump can do things that other people can’t do.” That is the number one thing I wanted to sell the country. The number one thing. He can do things that other people can’t do. And if you ever need those things to get done, there’s only one person to do it, as far as I know. So Charlamagne sees it too. He sees, “Oh my goodness, who you pick really makes a difference.” It did this time.

Democrats’ Protests

Don’t you wonder what the Democrats are going to have to protest? So they’re left to protest the government closing, which is their fault. Just think about this. Their biggest complaint that they have now is that Trump is too strong a leader; he’s like a strongman-dictator type. But that’s why this got done. Even the people who don’t like him being an authoritarian strongman-dictator will completely understand that none of this would happen without him being that person. Because he pushed everybody, he scared everybody, he shook the box. Nobody else could do that. Nobody else could do that.

China Rare Earth Threat

At the same time that all that goodness is happening, maybe peace breaking out everywhere, you know on Friday that China scared us with this threat of restricting the rare earth materials, which would destroy the entire economy of the world if they did that. I was not so sure that was real, but I don’t think I committed to it one way or the other.

But according to Trump, it’s probably just a negotiating position and not really that different from what it was. He goes—“Don’t worry,” in a Truth he said yesterday, I guess—“Don’t worry about China. It will be fine. Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S. wants to help China, not hurt it.”

Do you see how much technique is built into that? Just that little message on Truth Social. “Don’t worry about China, it’ll all be fine.” So that part’s probably true because China doesn’t want to destroy the economy of the world. They don’t really get an advantage if they do that, so they probably won’t do that.

Persuasion Technique: Negging

But when he says that “respected President Xi just had a bad moment,” that is really—it gets to his face. That’s kind of putting him down a little bit and showing that he lost face by creating this little brouhaha.

Now what that does is, if Xi doesn’t decide to nuke us for insulting him, in theory he just got “negged.” Do you know what negging is, N-E-G? It means that he got sort of a complimentary insult. It’s a complimentary insult. It’s what you do if you want a woman to like you if you’re one of those dating guys.

So President Xi, if it’s not so bad that he’ll never talk to Trump again—and it probably isn’t, just the fact that he had a bad moment—he’s going to have to recover from his bad moment. So that’s the position that Trump has put him in. It’s like, “I’m not criticizing you, I’m just saying you had a bad moment.” Do you think Xi wants to be known as the guy who had a bad moment and almost destroyed the economy of the United States with a statement that probably should have been vetted a little bit better?

No. I think Trump’s completely right. He had a bad moment. He totally had a bad moment. So now he’s got something to make up for. And that’s the genius of Trump. This is just perfect persuasion. Push Xi in a little box with just a little bit of discomfort, and wouldn’t he like to get out of that box by not being a person who is trying to hurt the economy of the world? So, setting him up for negotiations.

Scott Bessent says in all caps—no, he didn’t say it in all caps—the idea is to give China time to meet and talk. So mostly it’s about showing some respect for China and giving them the time to work things out, and then probably things will be fine. Stock market seems to be happy about it.

Semiconductor Supply Chain

I saw a long post by Sahil Patel, who wanted to look into the semiconductor supply chain because, as you know, if the semiconductor supply chain breaks, then all of our technology breaks and then the whole world falls into a coma. But it turns out that our semiconductor supply chain—not ours, but the world’s—is really, really brittle. And I didn’t have any idea how brittle it was, but that’s what Sahil did.

So TSMC, the Taiwan company that produces 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. So problem number one: There’s only one company that makes 90% of the chips, and they happen to be on an island that is likely to turn into a war zone. So that’s the first thing to worry about.

Secondly, TSMC relies on a Dutch company for lithography machines, meaning that there’s probably no other place you can get them. Meaning that if something happened to that one company, maybe TSMC couldn’t make any new chips just if that one company has a problem.

How about they depend on a company called Carl Zeiss that does optical stuff? It’s the only firm in the world capable of making the mirrors that are precise enough for the high-end chips. Only one company. If that company had a problem, no more chips.

There’s a light source they need, an EUV machine that’s produced by one company in San Diego. If something happens to that one company in San Diego, no chips for you. And it goes on and on like this about the other parts that are only available in one place ever.

Now, in theory, somebody else could make them, but I know that the mirror stuff is so amazingly, amazingly hard that probably—I mean, there’s a good chance that nobody else will ever be able to do it. Possibly. Anyway, so it goes on like that. There’s a whole bunch of pieces that you can only get from one place, so if that one place went down, no chips. If any one of them go down. So that’s pretty scary.

Ukraine War Update

Meanwhile, over in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian drones are attacking Russian energy sources, they attacked a bunch of energy sources on Crimea and did quite an attack with the drones.

Tomahawks and Putin

But the update on Trump is he had been talking about sending our Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine because they go long distance, they would go deep into Russia, and they would be very accurate and hard to stop. I thought he had already agreed to give them to Ukraine with some restrictions on how they use them, but it sounds like he has not. He still needs to talk to Zelensky.

And what he said was, Trump said that he may send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine if Russia doesn’t settle its war. So it looks like he might be using the threat of Tomahawks to get Putin to say, “I don’t want any Tomahawks hitting my stuff.” Now of course, Russia said that if we did give them Tomahawks and they got used, that they would retaliate in some unspecified way that we wouldn’t like.

So I don’t know, would they? Or there’s something psychological about the Ukraine war where both Russia and Ukraine decide not to attack the neighboring countries that are helping. So they’re not attacking the United States for providing weapons, they’re not attacking Europe for providing the funding. They’re just treating it like it’s a war between two countries when clearly there are a lot of countries involved.

So if Putin continues to do that, to treat it like it’s just them against Ukraine, then the Tomahawks wouldn’t be that big a deal, except that, you know, they wouldn’t like it. But if Putin decides to change the frame and reframe it and say, “Okay, this is a war against the United States; you’re just laundering it through Ukraine,” well, then all bets are off.

But I would think that Putin would not want to do anything that looked like a direct attack on the United States because there’s this guy—you may have heard of him, Donald Trump—who’s the President. And what his response would be compared to any other president—what his response would be to any attack on the homeland or our military assets—Putin can’t predict that. That’s unpredictable. And you don’t want to get into militarily unpredictable waters. So that’s another thing that Trump brings: that unpredictability. That does keep people away.

Anyway, so we’ll see what happens with those Tomahawks. Seems like a good play.

JD Vance on ABC

So JD Vance was on ABC talking to George Stephanopoulos, and Stephanopoulos was trying to get him to talk about the story—that may be completely fake—about Homeland Security guy Tom Homan allegedly, before he was in this job, accepting a $50,000 bag of cash on video, allegedly, for helping some company get a border contract.

Now, I don’t think that was illegal because he wasn’t working for the government then and he was consulting. So I don’t even know if there’s a crime involved. But so JD Vance was asked about that, to comment on the bag of cash and Tom Homan, because ABC News needed to find something to talk about that was not the tremendous success that Trump is experiencing at the moment in the Middle East. They had to find something. They gotta find something to talk to JD about that will sound bad for those guys.

The “Cash Bag” Video

And JD had a very interesting response to the accusations about that bag of cash. He said it’s a fake scandal and he didn’t know anything about that video. And I said to myself, “What do you mean you don’t know about the video? Everybody knows about the video. It’s been a top headline. We all know about the video.”

And then I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. I haven’t seen a video. Have any of you seen a video of him or anybody else accepting a bag of cash?” And then I thought, “Wait a minute. Is this whole thing just made up?” If you haven’t seen the video, I don’t know that there’s a video. Do you? Do you believe there’s really a video of him accepting cash?

It’s been a while. You’d think that bad boy would have leaked, right? Or at the very least, somebody would say, “I have the video in my hand, I just can’t show it to you.” So we don’t know who has said video, and nobody that we know has seen it. I feel like JD had the right answer, which is you treat it like it’s not real because they can’t prove it’s real. I don’t know if it’s real. My guess is if it were real and it were real bad, probably more would have happened. So my guess is that it’s not that real. Just my guess.

Climate Tipping Points

So Reuters has an article today that looked like it came from the past. The title was “Climate Tipping Points Being Crossed, Scientists Warn Ahead of COP30.” So I guess there’s some big climate change meetup coming up. And Reuters wants us to know that we’re past the tipping points where climate change is going to kill us all. We’re already past the tipping points.

Now, isn’t there something wrong with this? Why would that just be a little bit of an article filed around other articles that just is keyed off of a meeting coming up? Wouldn’t that be the biggest problem and biggest story in the world? That we have crossed all the tipping points and now we’re definitely dead.

They couldn’t possibly believe what they’re saying. They could not possibly believe what they’re writing. That’s where we’ve gotten to, right? Where they could not possibly believe it. Because you wouldn’t—you wouldn’t act matter-of-fact about it. It’s just like a little article on Reuters. “Yeah, we’re past all the tipping points, looks like there’s nothing we can do, it’s the end of the world. But they got a big meeting coming up.”

Like, what? If I believed that the world was past the tipping point, I’d be recommending that you have sex with a stranger. No, I wouldn’t. Maybe I would. But you would act completely differently. There’s no way you would act matter-of-fact if you really believed we’d crossed the tipping points and the climate’s just going to disappear.

Now they had some claims about “Oh, we’re past the tipping point for coral,” and it said all the coral’s disappearing and therefore the oceans will not be sustainable, etc. And I thought, “What news are you looking at, Reuters?” All the news I’ve seen in the past six months told me that the coral has recovered when people didn’t expect it. Did I imagine that? Was that fake news? Or does Reuters not know that the current news is that the coral seems to have come back, or it’s coming back powerfully, and probably there’s no tip-over point at all? Yeah, anyway. So that just seems so out of date.

Pharma Companies Selling Directly

Meanwhile, several—this is also Reuters—several pharmaceutical companies, I think there were like maybe 10 of them or so, quite a few of them, are now saying that they’ll sell their drugs directly to patients in the U.S. Now that would be in response to Trump trying to get them to lower their prices.

But what’s interesting here is have I ever introduced my idea of the “confusopoly”? The confusopoly is when you’re in a business that’s just like somebody else’s business, and it’s sort of a commodity, like a cell phone or some kinds of insurance. You know, they’re exactly the same. So you have to pretend that yours is different by making it confusing.

“Well, what does this cell phone service cost?” “Well, it depends. Do you have your relatives on it, and did you use the extra minutes, and did you roll over the minutes?” And then you can’t really compare it to anything because you don’t know exactly what minutes you would use, and what you would roll over, and if you rolled it over, would anybody use it?

So if they make it confusing, then each of the cell companies will sort of get their share. If they made it not confusing, then everybody would know which one was the good one and all the others would be out of business instantly. So confusopolies are the only thing that keeps complicated commodity-like businesses in business. It prevents you from knowing which one is the better one.

And that is clearly something like that’s happening with these pharmaceutical companies who have agreed to sell drugs direct to patients. Because they’re all going to do it a different way, and they’re all going to do it with different platforms. So some of them have their own website, some of them are going to work through somebody else, some of them are going to cut some drugs but not others. They’ll probably come up with complicated formulas like, “Well, under these conditions we’ll cut them for these people, but under these conditions we won’t.”

So I feel like the pharma companies are going to have to make it really complicated so that they can say they’re doing things without doing things. Because I’ll tell you what they can’t do. They can’t lower their prices and give us the same price that they give to Third World countries, which is what we ask. That’s what we’re asking for. They can’t do that. That would be their entire profitability.

So they have to pretend they’re playing along because Trump is too powerful right now. So they have to act like they’re playing along, but I don’t think they are playing along. I think they’re going to throw a bone—maybe some drugs that are almost generic but are not their big profitable drugs. If they throw a few sacrificial drugs at lower cost, they can keep their profitable ones at their current price. They’ll probably try to get away with that. So I’m not ready to speak optimistically about where that’s happening. I think that Big Pharma’s got a lot of game. They know how to protect themselves.

Lawfare and Adam Schiff

Well, Trump has suggested publicly that who he calls “corrupt Senator Adam Schiff” could be the next person who gets lawfared. He says he’s so dishonest. And of course, that causes people to say, “Wait a minute. You’re the President of the United States. You can’t be identifying enemies and then telling the Department of Justice to go lawfare them. You can’t do that.”

To which I have mixed feelings. If these had been innocent people, or just people who were doing their own thing that didn’t affect Trump and didn’t affect me and didn’t affect the government, I might say, “Yeah, don’t lawfare them. That’s just going to create more problems. Even though they lawfared you, don’t lawfare them.”

But because these specific people were literally trying to overthrow my government, and they were trying to destroy the guy that you and I and the other supporters were trying to support to the point where he could get to do things like this—you know, ending wars. That’s what we wanted him to do. That’s why we hired him, that’s why we voted for him. And we wanted that to get done.

But there was a group of professional liars and insurrectionists, I would call them, who worked very hard to stop that. Now, if you lawfare those guys, I’m totally okay with that. Because you absolutely need mutually assured destruction so that the next time the Democrats decide to lawfare the next president—which they will—they’ll at least think twice. And they’re going to say, “All right, the last time we lawfared a president, we didn’t see it coming, but he became the president again and then he got all of us back, and all the people who lawfared him are in jail or paid a lot of money.”

You can’t let it go. The things that they did to Trump, and by extension to his supporters, you can’t let that go. So if you have to lawfare it to get them back, lawfare it. Whatever you have to do, you cannot let that stand. And to imagine that lawfaring this group of people—lawfaring the lawfarers who were the insurrectionist lawfarers—you can’t compare that to anything else.

If you were just taking down a critic—I’ll tell you where I draw the line. If he said, “Stephen King says bad things about me all the time, I’d like you to lawfare him. Go find a crime.” And I’m sure you could find a crime. Now that would be completely unacceptable to me, and I would fight against that. How about Rob Reiner? Huge critic of the president, huge pain in the ass. If the president said, “Hey, lawfare that guy because he says bad things about me,” no, no, nope, we don’t do that. You can say bad things about people. We allow that. That’s free speech.

But if he’s going after the people who literally lied about what was in a SCIF, ran gigantic hoaxes to try to literally change the government and tried to jail him if not shoot him—free pass. Mr. President, you have a free pass. Not just to say whatever you want to say—okay, a little cat action going on here—not only to say what you want to say, but to encourage the Department of Justice to deal with it. So yeah, I’m completely in favor of lawfare against lawfarers, but limited to that, and maybe insurrectionists. But that’s the same thing in this case.

Jan 6 Undercover Police

All right, so there’s some new news that there’s this Washington DC undercover Metropolitan Police guy, Nicholas Tomasulo, who says that he was actually trying to instigate trouble at the January 6 event. I don’t know if he says that he did it for Nancy Pelosi, but apparently there is evidence and he’s saying it directly that he was encouraging people to trespass and encouraging them to climb up the scaffolding, which was the big weakness in the defense they had there. And is this real? Do we actually have a real-life person now who says, “Oh yeah, I was there to instigate”? Do you think there was only one? Would they at least send one, or would one thing, on his own, did he decide on his own to do that? Are we on the verge of finding out the truth about January 6? We might be. We might be on the verge of actually finding out that it was more staged than we thought. So keep an eye on that.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

I’ve been watching with interest Marjorie Taylor Greene buck the left, but also often the right. So I guess Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I like, by the way—I like having her as part of government, and she’s just a fun personality as well, so I kind of like her as a person and as a politician—but she’s not on board with all Republicans. She said, quote, “As a construction business owner,” which she is, “I don’t think we should be deporting illegal immigrants that work in that industry.”

Now, I saw a counterpoint to that, which is if you got rid of all the illegal immigrants, you wouldn’t need to build as many houses and therefore you wouldn’t need them. And it’s funny when I saw that argument because there’s no population growth. We don’t have population growth. So in theory, we shouldn’t have to build too many houses, mostly just replacement houses and upgrades and stuff. But so maybe we don’t even need a construction business because we’re just building houses for the people that we didn’t want to come in. I’m not buying that narrative entirely. There’s a little bit to it, but that’s not a good complete picture.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene also says that prices have not come down and pay has not gone up. Now, it’s slightly true that some prices went down and it’s slightly true that some pay went up, but not really in a big way. So she’s bucking the narratives there a little bit, but I don’t mind that at all.

Denmark and Greenland

Well, meanwhile, Denmark has committed $4.2 billion to defending Greenland so that they don’t have to give it up to the United States. And now they are legitimately worried about Russia’s influence in that part of the world. So Greenland buying some defensive stuff. I can’t imagine that Denmark plus Greenland, if you add them together, could defend against Russia without the U.S. I mean, not that they would have to because they’re a NATO country.

But wait, how does that work? So if Russia attacked Greenland, and Greenland is owned by Denmark which is in NATO, but Greenland isn’t specifically part of NATO, would NATO be activated for Greenland? I do not know. Maybe somebody could tell me that. Anyway, I doubt that their $4.2 billion is going to get them enough to defend against Russia.

AI Productivity

The Wall Street Journal had an article about AI not making as much difference in productivity as anybody hoped. A JPMorgan Chase economist didn’t find any strong link between productivity and rolling out AI. Now, who’s been telling you for a while that AI will not be the job killer that all the smart people say it will be? Me. Because just if you’ve tried using it yourself, you immediately see that it is so limited and, in my opinion, the current version of AI cannot be better. Because if they can’t make the hallucinations go away—and they can’t—what are you going to use it for? All you can use it for is chatting, basically, and a few other things.

So I’ve been a skeptic of AI replacing all our jobs. I think maybe it’ll be an assistant for a while, etc. However, I want to be the first one to tell you what’s coming.

Generative Video AI

What’s coming is a new form of AI that’s not the large language models. So the problem with the large language models is that all they do is look for a pattern. That’s all they do. And so if the words that people have used are in a certain pattern, they use that pattern. So it doesn’t mean that it’s seeing the truth; it’s just detecting patterns which sometimes are not reality-based patterns. So that can’t go too far.

But there’s a new type of AI being referred to as “generative video AI.” Now, if I understand this correctly, generative video AI starts with real video. So let’s say if you had the database of all the video taken by all the Tesla car cameras, that would be the real video, and then you could train your AI with real video so that it could see, for example, “This is an object that’s a phone.” It could see how it could be manipulated in space.

So instead of learning a word pattern—and the word pattern for LLM might be, “I pick up phone,” and if a lot of people say “I pick up phone,” then the large language model knows that you can pick up a phone. But it doesn’t really know it. It’s just a pattern. Lots of people have picked up phones, lots of people have mentioned it. So now AI knows that you can pick up a phone.

But with the new ones—the video ones—if you had video of somebody picking up a phone, it would know you could pick up a phone. And it could also conform to the physics of the situation, and then the fun part is it can generate fake videos of people doing things with the phone. But the fake video would be based on things that could be done with the phone because it uses physics, etc., like a game would, just like a video game. So that it can create a whole bunch of knowledge about what a person can do with a phone without observing it. So it wouldn’t have to observe people doing it; it would just figure out, “Oh, well now I know it’s a physical object, it’s about this size, that would be something somebody could pick up.”

Now I’m simplifying it, but what I’m trying to say is that that limitation of the hallucinating might be fixable, but it will require an entirely new technology: this generative video AI, which is coming, by the way. It’s not speculative; it’s being rolled out right now. Yeah, I think that’s close to what Tesla is doing. It’s either close to or exactly what Tesla is doing. That’s right. So if you were going to bet on which company got to the really smart AI first, I think I would bet on Tesla now.

That’s not a recommendation. Don’t buy stock because I say something; that’s a bad idea. But it does look like Elon knows that the LLMs are capped and he knows that if he’s going to put a trillion dollars into it—which he is—he’d better get the good stuff. So keep an eye on that.

Ray Kurzweil’s AGI Prediction

Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who’s been around forever—he’s trying to live forever, like literally live forever by porting his brain to a computer someday, I think—he says that AGI—that would be the real smart version of AI—will be around 2029. Now, he’s got a long track record of making incredible predictions, so we take him seriously. 2029. So three years? I think he’s right on. I think he’s right on. Because it will take about that time, in my best guess, for that generative AI to not only work but to be sort of rolled out. That feels about right. I think he nailed it again. Probably about three years before we have the serious AI.

Giza Pyramid Tunnels

In other fun news, according to the Daily Mail, some tunnels have been discovered under Egypt’s Giza pyramids. Now, these are not the weird stories that I debunked a while ago, several months ago. There was somebody who said, “Oh, we found all these things under the pyramids.” It’s not that. Apparently connecting pyramids as opposed to being directly under them.

And they found a few of these alleged long-forgotten underground pathways that had been rumored in history, but nobody had found them. I guess Herodotus had described a labyrinth in Egypt with 3,000 chambers, many hidden below ground, but nobody had ever found any of it. So they thought Herodotus might be an exaggerator, I guess. But maybe there is something down there. So we will soon find out who built those pyramids when we get down there, maybe.

Social Anxiety Therapy

University of South Wales found out that you could use intensive one-week online therapy to reduce symptoms of social anxiety. So apparently they did a study and they found you could reduce your social anxiety disorder with online help.

Reframe: Social Anxiety

Now, in my book Reframe Your Brain, I also have a reframe for that. You want me to just—I think I’ll just tell you. I’ve told you this reframe before, but it’s one of the very best. This can be life-changing.

Do any of you have that problem where if you go to a party, first of all, you didn’t want to go, but then you’re sitting outside and you say to yourself, “You know what? I can’t even walk in that room. I don’t want to be in a room with all those fakes and those people,” right? How many of you have that social anxiety where you just—you can’t talk to these strangers? A lot of you, right? I’m going to give you a reframe now that will fix it. Ready for this? This will change your life. It really will. I’ve heard from people who say it changed their life; they just heard it once, changed their life.

It goes like this. First of all, everybody has social anxiety. Now, maybe not everybody, but 90%. So the first thing you need to know is that everybody else is pretending. As soon as you think you’re the only one pretending to be comfortable and that everybody else has figured out how to do this, that’s not the case. They’re all uncomfortable. 10% are kind of crazy narcissists who like the excitement. 10%. 90% are exactly what you’re feeling: “Oh, who am I going to talk to? What do I do with my hands? Did I make a fool of myself? Can I just make an excuse to leave? Why should I pretend to get another drink?”

All right, here is what you need to know. If you had studied the Dale Carnegie approach for making conversation, you would know the technique for walking up to any stranger and just starting a pleasant conversation that the other person would, when you’re done, say, “I like that guy,” or “I like that person.”

It’s easy. I’ve taught you this many times. All you do is you ask questions about the other person and you listen with interest. That’s it. If you walk up to somebody and try to make a joke to a stranger—which is what I used to do before I learned how to do this—I would think, “Well, if I’m funny, I’ll bond right away.” Never really worked. You can get lucky and hit somebody who has your exact sense of humor, and then something can happen, but it’s not a good general approach. Most people are not going to laugh, and it’s just not going to lead to anything.

But if you walk up and say your name—“Hi, I’m Scott.” That’s always first. “Hi, I’m [whatever].” If they don’t say who they are, you say, “What’s your name?” And then you ask some just basic questions about them. It would depend on what was the point of the thing. So you might say, “Hey, where are you from?” or “Who do you know?” or you could even ask, “What do you do for a living?” if the conversation goes. “Do you have kids? Are you planning a vacation? What school do your kids go to?”

If you ask just those basic questions, the other person will feel comfortable because they know the answer to the questions. They know their name, they know where they work, they know where their kids go to school—unless it’s the father. And then that’s comfortable because all they’re doing is answering easy questions and it looks like you’re interested in them. Solves every problem.

All right, so I just solved how to talk to a stranger. If you don’t think that works, try it once. It works. It works every time. Show interest, ask questions, and don’t do a big monologue about you. If they want to know about you, they’ll ask. You don’t even have to say anything about you. But usually if just a few questions, you can find something you have in common. So you might say, “So, what do you do for a living?” and the person tells you their job and you go, “Oh, I’m so interested in that. How does that work? How’d you get into that?” So you’re looking for that thing you can talk about—the jumping-off point—and the questions are just to get you to that.

Reframing Social Anxiety

All right, now. So now you have a skill that I just taught you that the other 90% of the people who have bad social anxiety don’t have. So what are they going to do? They’re going to go there and think, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.” But I solved it for you. Just walk up to somebody who looks uncomfortable, introduce yourself, ask some questions, and then the next thing you need to know is how to leave. You know, how to stop talking to somebody, because you don’t want to get trapped and think, “Oh, I found one person to talk to, I’ll just stay here all night until they hate me.” No, you have to leave. You want to give them just enough of you that they got enough but not too much.

So here are some ways to leave people without being rude. If you’ve talked to them enough and you’ve asked questions and you’ve shown some interest, they’re done. They don’t need you to stay there all night. So here is what you say: “It was really great meeting you. I want to do a little mingling, and I’ll catch up with you later.” Everybody is there to do mingling, so if you say, “It was great talking to you, I gotta go do some mingling,” they get it because they probably have to do the same thing. So that’s not awkward.

Or you could say, “Can I get you a—can I refill your drink?” If they don’t want to spend more time with you, they’re going to say, “Oh no, I’m fine,” and then you go away to refill your own drink and don’t come back. Or you say, “I’m going to use the restroom,” or you say you see somebody. Here is another good one. You say, “Oh, I have to talk to Bob. Excuse me, it was great talking to you.” And then you go directly over to Bob, if you know Bob.

The other thing is if you don’t know a single person there—not if you don’t know anybody—I always recommend looking for the alpha female. Most events have at least one alpha female, and you can pick them out. They’re the ones flitting from one place to the other and everybody’s giving them attention. Maybe they’re the organizer, maybe it’s the person who invited you. But if you attach to them, the alpha female—men will do it too, but the alpha females are a little—a little bit better—they will introduce you to whoever they’re standing next to. So you just walk up to them: “Hi, Betty, thanks for inviting me.” They go, “Oh, glad you made it. Have you met so-and-so? And here is so-and-so.” And now you know three people that you could say hi to anytime during the party.

All right, so now you know the technique. But now I’m going to get to the good part, okay? Here is the payoff. You’re sitting in your car outside the party and you’ve got that anxiety about going in. Reframe it. Here is the reframe: You’re going to rescue all those other people who have social anxiety. You’re not the person with social anxiety; you’re the solution. So you walk in there and you find somebody who looks uncomfortable and you walk right up to them and you solve their problem by being the person who knows how to start a conversation, which you are now. And when you’re done with that person, you say, “Great meeting you. I’ve got to do a little more mingling,” and you find another person and you save them too.

You can spend your whole night saving people, and boy will they appreciate it. There is nothing that the other people want more than a friendly person to come up to them and start a conversation. They all want that. You are their hero if you can do that for them. Their hero. So you’re not going there as this weak little person who is in the 90% who can’t figure out how to start a conversation with a human being. That’s not who you are. You are already—because I just trained you, and it was that easy, it really is that easy—I just taught you how to be the most effective person in the party.

And you will be. You simply have to do what I just said. Just learn how to ask questions, learn how to introduce yourself with eye contact and a handshake, and learn how to leave. If you learn those very simple things—which you just did basically, you just learned them—you are no longer a victim of social anxiety. It’ll take you a few practice runs, but once you’ve done it like twice, you’ll never have anxiety again. You’ll say, “Oh, well I did it twice in a row and it was super easy and everybody seemed to be happy about it and I got all these phone numbers and made some friends.”

That’s a reframe in my book, Reframe Your Brain. Now, when I tell you that this is the kind of book that changes people’s lives, that’s what I mean, right? So some of you didn’t need that. It had no value to you whatsoever. But 100% of you know somebody who needs it, don’t you? 100% of you know somebody that you’re already thinking, “Oh man, I want to get a clip of that and show my friend. That’ll really help them.” I hope this gets clipped; it probably will be. All right, so there are other reframes that might be more relevant to you specifically.

Closing Thoughts

Let’s see. Venezuela is collapsing, but so is Cuba. I saw an article by Daniel Alot. He’s an opinion contributor in The Hill. And he tells us that over the last four years, roughly two million Cubans, which would be 20% of all Cubans on the island, have left the island. And the ones leaving are the professionals, because you know they can make a life somewhere.

So I guess their biggest source of oil was Venezuelan oil, which they can no longer depend on. It’s not reliable anymore. The professionals are leaving and their infrastructure is in complete disrepair, just collapsing. So Cuba might fail before Venezuela. But I guess they’re sort of joined at the hip.

So Trump might have a Cuba play that historically we’ve never had. Meaning that Cuba’s going to be pretty desperate, far more than it is. It’s already pretty desperate. But if they become even more desperate, they might get flexible, and maybe the U.S. is the only thing that can save them and maybe they want to be a little bit friendlier with the U.S. going forward, and vice versa. We’ll see.

Well, you heard the story about the Dominion company—the election voting machines. That company got sold to an alleged Republican who is apparently involved in decommissioning a number of the machines. Now, I don’t have details about why some of them are being decommissioned but not all of them. Why do you think? Do you think that he’s decommissioning voting machines because they’re old and unreliable—old and unreliable—or because they had security vulnerabilities that we don’t know about? Just generally unreliable, or unreliable for security reasons? Don’t you feel you need to know the answer to that question? I feel like that’s really important. Are they decommissioning machines because they know that they’re not secure? Hmm. I’ve got questions.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is what I have for today’s show. I want to thank you all again from the bottom of my heart. If you were supporting this president and you took the risks that I took, you took the hits—you lost family members, you may have lost money, you lost prestige, you lost everything—you may have lost everything—but damn it, you were right. You were right.

And this is the time to enjoy it. You know, maybe tomorrow will be different, but today you can bask in the fact that you did a great thing. You were part of something amazing. In this case, it probably helped another country more than it helped us, but it’s the same process. The same stuff is going to be helping America. So just enjoy being right. It feels really good.

And that’s all I have for you today. I’m going to say a few words privately to my beloved local subscribers, and the rest of you I hope to see you tomorrow for more good news, maybe. You never know. All right, Locals coming at you privately in 30 seconds.