Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-14

Opening Banter

Happy Tuesday. Grab a seat, grab a beverage. We’re getting ready to give you the show you deserve. And I know you deserve it, because you’ve been good. Let me make sure I can see your comments here, because that’s important.

Come on, technology. You can do it. Yes, you can. Perfect. 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 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, chalice, stein, canteen, jug, or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.

The Simultaneous Sip

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Sublime.

Reframing Conflicts

Well, what do you think of my new habit of reading you a new reframe from my book every morning? Do we like that? Do you want another one? All right, I’ll give you one.

Here’s one I find very helpful. You’ll find this helpful in keeping your mental health stable. The usual frame, if you’re debating with somebody, is that one of you is right and the other one is wrong. And you usually think you’re right and the other person is wrong, right? And then you’ve got a fight.

What would be a good reframe instead of “one person’s right, one person’s wrong”? The answer is: we’re watching two different movies on one screen. That really helps. If you say to somebody, “I’m right and you’re wrong,” well, now you have a fight. If you say, “We’re watching two different movies on the same screen,” then suddenly they’re curious. What do you mean by that?

“Well, I’m looking at different information. If you and I were looking at the same information, we’d probably have a similar opinion.” And that calms everybody down because you take it away from the two of you and who’s right and who’s wrong, and you basically blame social media and the news for giving you two different versions of reality. So that is your reframe for the morning.

Negative Thoughts: The “Get Out” Technique

By the way, Jay Plemmons, who’s been doing a great job of clipping my show, has a clip on there this morning for my reframe. You might remember the one called “Get Out,” where it’s a solution to having negative thoughts. If you’re trying to get rid of your negative thoughts, that’s the whole technique. You can look at the video, and you probably should.

All you do is when those thoughts creep in, you just say, “Get out! Get out!” Like you’re talking to your own brain. You just say, “Get out! Get out! Get rid of that. Get out!” And you’ll be amazed that it works. Look at all the people in the comments who have already tried it. If you ask me why it works, I’m not sure I could tell you. But experientially, it works. It works for me, and a bunch of other people have tried it and they say it works too.

Psychedelics for Depression

I wonder if there’s any science news that they didn’t need to do because they could have just asked me and saved some time and money. Oh, here’s one. Would you believe that the Swinburne University of Technology has discovered that using psychedelics to treat depression produces promising findings?

How many times now have I read a new story about a new study that finds exactly the same thing every time? Every time we use psychedelics for people’s mental health, no matter what else we do, it always works. This is another one of those. No matter what else you do. It doesn’t seem to matter how much they give you. It doesn’t matter if you’re adding therapy to it. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times you do it, because it works kind of right away. It just keeps working. So they could have just asked me. “Scott, do you think that’ll help?” Yes. Yes.

Sacrifice and Vindication

Yesterday, I went viral for at least three or four different reasons. It was a weird day. Every time I turned on X, I would see myself. Now, part of that is because Jay’s been clipping me really well. Also, Jason Kohan has been clipping me, and I think a few other people started clipping me. That’s caused a lot of action.

One of the viral clips was my reframe on how to not have social anxiety if you go to a gathering. Boy, did people like that one. You should see the numbers on that. People were crazy for it.

People were touched, apparently, by my video yesterday in which I was talking about how all of us Trump supporters sacrificed. Because I think everybody was feeling it, and sometimes you just need somebody to put it into words. That’s what I do. So you were all feeling that yesterday felt like vindication, right? If you sacrificed everything, like many of us did—our friends, our jobs, our reputations, or family—and then it pays off.

And you realize that even your worst critics are looking at what Trump did and they’re all saying some version of this: “No one else could have done it.” Those are the magic words. Because if someone else could have done it, then why are you putting up with all the baggage that comes with having the Trump presidency?

The Expensive President

The entire point of Trump, from my perspective, from day one—day one—is that he would be, you’ve heard me say this, an “expensive president.” Meaning that he’s going to come with some expense. He’s not free. But you will get with him things you can’t get with any other president. He will simply be able to do things that nobody could do. Just no president, nobody, just nobody. He has those unique skills.

Partly because of his current place in the world. It’s not entirely a skill stack; it’s also a result of everything he’s done to get in this position. But once you see him doing things that other presidents definitely couldn’t do—and they’re really, really important—that’s vindication. That’s what we saw on day one.

The supporters, we saw it early. Some people saw it because I told you to see it, and that helped you see it. But you remember what I said from the very beginning. Did I ever say, “This man has the best character you’ve ever seen”? Nope. Never said that, did I? Did I say he has the most government experience you’ve ever seen? Nope. Nope. I never said that.

What did I say? What I did say is that I know a little bit about persuasion, and I’ve never seen anybody as persuasive as this person. And I predicted that his persuasion ability would be the defining characteristic. How did I do? Remember, that was a day one prediction, which I never backed off from. No, he’s the most persuasive person we’ve ever seen. We’ve never seen this. You’ll see other persuasive people, but you’ll never see this again. This might be a one-off. So, nailed it. And that became kind of viral.

Writing Advice

And then, just by coincidence, every few months, somebody sends around my “How to be a better writer” blog post from, I don’t know, 20 years ago at this point. But then people are raving about the advice on how to be a better writer. It teaches you how to be an economical writer, which works for most things. So it was a weird day for me. I was just sort of multi-viral on all these different topics. That was fun.

Leadership and History: Columbus Day

Kamala Harris was giving a talk yesterday, I guess, and she reminded us that Columbus Day was when the European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and disease. That’s what she had to say about one of our most beloved national holidays. The cats are going crazy behind me.

I totally get—it’s not like I don’t understand—that Columbus, by modern standards and maybe even by his standards, was a bad man. But here’s the thing. If that’s what’s activating your description of him, you don’t understand what it means to be a leader. If you’re a leader in this country, then you should be talking about our history in maybe not so starkly accurate ways, but rather in ways that make children want to be Americans.

If your goal is to have a strong country, should you say, “You know, your heroes are actually terrible criminal bastards and you shouldn’t respect them”? What will that buy you? That’s not buying you anything. It might be true—I’m not even going to argue whether it was true or false—but it’s the wrong move.

Instead, you should say George Washington was a hero, Christopher Columbus was a great discoverer and explorer. And then you make those qualities something that children would want, and then the children think, “Oh, if my heroes are acting that way, then I can act that way too.”

So Kamala Harris doesn’t understand really the most basic element of her job. Her job is not to give us all the truth all the time. That’s not her job. No, her job if she were president would be to make the country stronger and safer and more prosperous. To do that, you might need to brainwash the children into some hero worship that’s not entirely based on reality, because hero worship never is. Nobody’s heroes—there’s nobody’s heroes anywhere who are as good as their reputation. So the fact that Harris doesn’t understand that, or doesn’t care because the main thing is to say bad things about white men—which I think is at least part of the problem, that she needs to never back a white man, basically—so there’s that. Anyway, she is so dumb.

AI and NSFW Content

Well, according to Joe Wilkins writing for Futurism, OpenAI has said that it’s going to loosen up and allow more smut, more porn on OpenAI. Now, I assume that means things like the chat voice will say dirty things if you tell it to. You have to prove you’re a certain age. So that won’t take effect until they can do more effective age checking. So it’s not there yet, but they’re going to do it.

I saw Sam Altman. He was talking about, I think it was a different topic, but it relates to this. He was talking about how if you know that AI is going to do a thing and there’s no stopping it—and in this case, AI is definitely going to be doing porn, everybody knows that—and it’s definitely going to be doing porn where it pretends that somebody you know is in the porn scene, maybe even with you.

So you know that’s going to happen. And it doesn’t mean you’re going to use OpenAI to do it, but there will be a bunch of, as Sam points out, there will be a bunch of open-source free models of AI that might not be just as good as the ones you pay for, but it’ll be good enough that it can create endless porn that you just want on demand.

What Sam said is if you know something’s coming and there’s no way to stop it—and I think this falls into that category pretty well—that you should first restrict it. People will do it anyway. And then you’ll learn something, but you won’t have gone too far because you’re still restricting it.

But at some point, you have to “inoculate” the public. I think he used that word, inoculate. In other words, the only thing you could do is let it out. You just don’t want to let it out without a little bit of thinking about how fast you do it. So it’s basically about getting people used to it. If you can get people used to it and bored by it, it might not even be a problem.

I was trying to think because at the moment, because I have the prostate cancer, I don’t have normal sexual thoughts because the first thing they do is give you a drug that takes all that away. So I’m basically a walking eunuch. So when I look at this, I don’t have any way to appreciate whether I would have wanted to use it for porn if I had any interest in porn, which I don’t.

But when I think about it, I think, “You know, I probably—let’s say I were a younger, hornier man—I’d probably try it.” I’d probably say, “Hey, make me a scene with these two people in it,” and then I would be mildly amused. Maybe I’d do it again. But somewhere around the third or fifth time I had to tell the porn what to do and then it didn’t quite do it and I had to tell it again, it would start feeling like work. You know what I mean?

I’m not sure that it really presents a possibility of enjoying it in the long term. Short term, probably I’d give it a try. A lot of men would. Long term, I don’t feel like it would—I feel like it would be the same problem with art, that if you know they’re not real people, you can’t really get past that. That’s what I think. So I think, yeah, as weird as this sounds, I think that the AI companies will have to loosen up and let you do whatever you want. But I do like Sam’s idea of rolling it out and inoculating people a little bit before they get the full thing.

Media Bias: Time Magazine

Did you see the Time Magazine photo of Trump? So Time Magazine, I believe, is owned by Marc Benioff, the founder/CEO of Salesforce, who is very left. But in an honest way, I’m very pro-Benioff as both an entrepreneur and as a good influence on the world. I don’t agree with everything he would do, of course, but that’s just a basic thing you say about everybody.

But he owns Time Magazine now and it was a very unflattering picture of Trump. They really had to work on it. So they did a sort of a ground-up picture so that you see him from the chin first and you can’t make out much of his face. It’s really unflattering. It’s so unflattering that I don’t for a second think it isn’t intentional. You know what I mean?

I always talk about the photo editor because there’s usually an editor who does the photos specifically. The photo editor obviously just doesn’t like him. And it’s surprising that they let that go through because it’s so obviously a biased photograph. Even Trump called it out and said it’s the worst photograph I’ve ever seen. It is actually, literally, the worst photograph I’ve ever seen of a public figure. It’s literally the worst. It doesn’t look accidental at all. It looks like they couldn’t say anything bad about him because he had such a successful day, but they could put a picture there that made you go, “Ooh, what’s going on there?”

Trade and the Strongman Strategy

Well, the stocks have pulled back as you know, also based on the U.S.-China trade tensions. We don’t know what’s going on there, but China is certainly not in the mood to be pushed around. So here’s one of the things that Trump has to navigate. I heard from somebody smart who spent a lot of time in the Middle East that one of the reasons that Trump is succeeding in the Middle East is that he’s a strongman. And that the Middle East really likes a strongman—the Arab cultures, etc.

And so the stronger, more authoritarian, let’s say, that Trump acts in the Middle East, the more people respect him, and then that works to his favor. But I don’t think that works in China. I think China does not want to see Trump being the strongman because that makes them look like they’re being bullied, and they want to save face, and that just seems way more important over there.

So if Trump does the “I’m going to bully you into doing something,” you could sort of see why it might work in the Middle East, but it’s to be determined that it can work with trade policy. But Trump is smart enough and flexible enough to know that. He reads a room like nobody can read a room, so he obviously knows that—that he has to play nice with President Xi but also be tough. So he’s got this delicate balance where they’re an enemy but a customer, they’re an enemy but a supplier. If you go too hard, they’ll go too hard. So we’ll see what he does on that. It’s going to be a tough one, but the stocks are pulled back just on uncertainty.

China’s Economic Reality

I guess Beijing didn’t like the fact that the U.S. is working with some U.S. subsidiary of a South Korean shipbuilding giant. And now Beijing is saying that they won’t work with that company. Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary, he told the Financial Times that China is in the middle of a recession/depression and they want to pull everybody else down with them. Well, I don’t know about the wanting to pull everybody else down with them. That just sounds more like politics.

But are they? I don’t know how we would ever know if China was in a recession or depression. Would we? I saw somebody writing that one-child thing looks like the depopulation would be a terrible problem. Apparently, there are a bunch of young people who don’t have jobs. But here’s the thing. Apparently, they don’t want them. Because if you’re an only child and your parents did okay—they’ve got a nice job—the cost of living in China is so reasonable that you can live at home with your parents, probably be a benefit to them because you can do stuff, and the parents might actually like it. There’s only one of you. They only got that one kid, maybe they want to spend time with you.

So it turns out that China was way more flexible in trying to figure out how to get past this population problem than we imagined. And one of the “flexes” might be that young people living at home might be fine with everybody. They might actually just prefer it. So that would allow them to have far fewer people employed and yet everybody still be happy because their parents would just feed them and they don’t need anything else.

NYC Office Market Boom

Here’s something you never would have guessed. I certainly wouldn’t have. According to the Wall Street Journal, the New York City office market is super hot right now and it’s booming more than it has in decades. Did anybody see that coming? I thought the real estate, at least the commercial real estate in New York City, was just collapsing and that it might not even come back. It already came back.

But this is not happening in other cities. This seems to be unique to New York City. But the big companies are leasing, they’re snapping up property, and New York City looks like it’ll be fine, of all things. How many of you would have guessed that the New York City office market would not just be okay, but would be better than it has in decades, like right now? I’ll bet not one of you would have guessed that.

This is why it seemed absurd to me when I was getting my degree in economics, because I thought, “You know, I don’t think anybody can predict anything. So what exactly is the point of economics if you can’t predict anything, ever?” I’m exaggerating a little bit there. But my guess is that the reason that New York City is doing well and the other cities have not matched this kind of comeback is that the biggest companies know they need a New York City presence. And so I think the biggest companies were saying, “Ooh, cheap real estate. Let’s lock it down now.” I think that’s what’s happening.

SpaceX Success

I guess the most powerful rocket ever built was launched today successfully. But what caught my attention was that in succeeding, allegedly it lowered the economics of rocket launches by showing that you could do it and reuse all the parts. It didn’t blow up. The cost of a launch dropped today—just today—from $67millionforalaunchto$10 million, or under $10 million.

Now, if that keeps on, because the whole idea of a reusable rocket is to get the price way down. That’s 85% cheaper just because Elon Musk crossed this economic barrier of success. 85%. I don’t know how much farther it can go, but wow. I’m pretty impressed.

Positive Thinking in the Middle East

Well, Eric Trump is crediting the Law of Positive Thinking for Trump’s success in the Middle East. And he points out how other people were negative, but his father was positive. You know, I’ve said before that the “Power of Positive Thinking” is the book—well, actually, the author of that famous book was his pastor, Trump’s pastor. So on Sundays, he would be listening to literally the guy who invented the idea of positive thinking, being a positive.

And then he, years later, he employed it in the Middle East. He took the “yes” instead of the “no” when everybody was saying, “Yes, we’ll do a deal, but no, we haven’t agreed.” And he took the “yes” instead of the “no,” positive thinking. And he changed reality, as I’ve said before. He didn’t just negotiate. That’s not what happened. He changed how we looked at reality and then within that reality, he could get what he wanted.

But he had to change the reality first. And the reality was that they had said no to the deal, but they used the word “yes” because they said “yes, but” not this stuff. And the “but” was actually the important stuff. So, yeah, he just changed how they saw reality and then they entered his reality and then they made a deal. But that wasn’t negotiating. And that’s what I mean when I say nobody else could do that. Nobody else could do that. He changed reality. I will never be less impressed by that. I’ll never be less impressed.

Biden and Gaza Credit

Anyway, Biden is trying to take some credit for Gaza. He put out a statement that said, in part, “My administration worked relentlessly to bring the hostages home.” Okay, but they weren’t home. “I commend President Trump and his team for their work to get a renewed ceasefire deal over the finish line.” A renewed ceasefire deal over the finish line. So he’s trying to make it look like he cued it up and all Trump did is just finished it off. But nice try, Biden.

Trump and World Leaders in Egypt

How many of you watched with fascination Trump meeting in Egypt with all the big leaders in the Middle East and a bunch of Europeans as well? How many of you watched that? That was so interesting.

So Trump got to do the “Trumpiest” thing I’ve ever seen in my life. He had unlimited time to speak because he was getting a hero’s reception. And all the leaders were there, and they had to sort of stand there just respecting and praising him because they didn’t have anything else to do.

And then he goes through his act where he tries to mention all the leaders, but he makes it really clear which ones he likes and which ones he doesn’t like. And he’s tell you like he loves Erdogan, because Erdogan does whatever—he always does a favor if he needs it. And he says he likes strong leaders. And it just got funnier and funnier.

But then he starts talking about the Prime Minister of Italy being an attractive young woman. And he’s joking, “Yeah, you could lose your job if you call somebody an attractive young woman, but I’m going to take a chance.” And she managed to brush that off. I mean, I don’t think that was what she wanted to happen, but she managed to go with the flow. She does seem to like him. They do seem to have a real relationship. But then he’s pumping hands with people and stuff.

But the best part is that the UK Prime Minister Starmer was right behind him. So some of them were on the dais standing behind him. And it looked like he forgot the name of the leader, Starmer. He turns around and goes, “Where’s the UK?” So he calls him by his country instead of his name. And then Starmer thinks that he’s been summoned over to say something because the head of Pakistan had just done a little statement in which he was recommending Trump to be a Nobel Prize winner.

So then Starmer gets sort of recognized and he comes up to the back of the dais where Trump is because he was already in that neighborhood. And it looked like he was waiting for Trump to ask him to say a few words, and Trump just turns his back on him and starts talking again, and he has to slink back to standing in line waiting for Trump.

It was the Trumpiest thing of all time. He just put him in his place. So he makes them all listen to the Pakistan guy say that he should have a—he’s the greatest guy in the world and he should have a Nobel Prize. And they all just had to stand there like idiots because none of them were able to get this done, but Trump did.

”Norway! What the hell happened to Norway?”

Anyway, and the funniest thing was as he’s going through the countries, you know that there are some leaders he hasn’t met. So like he’ll give a big compliment to like MBS and Erdogan and others. And he gets to Greece. He’s like, “Where’s Greece? Ah, there you are.” That’s all Greece got.

But the funniest one was he goes—he’s looking at his list of all the people who were attending—he goes, “Norway! What the hell happened to Norway?” And he never explained, and the news never explained what his problem with Norway was. But he’s like, “What the hell happened to Norway?” It was so funny. Because I still don’t know what happened to Norway or why he was mad at Norway.

The only thing I know, which I tell you all the time, is that he makes the biggest distinction between people who are making him happy, Erdogan, and people who are not. And I guess Norway wasn’t making him happy for something. “Norway! What the hell’s wrong with Norway?”

And then we saw caught on a hot mic, the Indonesian President, who is a President or something else, but anyway the leader of Indonesia, which is the biggest population of Muslims in the world, was for some reason that we don’t know asking Trump if he could get an introduction to Eric Trump. And then I think he also said maybe Don Jr., one or the other. What do you think that was about? Because why would that be the one thing that the Indonesian leader would want to talk to Trump about? “Can you introduce me to your sons?” It’s got to be crypto, right? Isn’t it crypto? I don’t know what else it would be. Yeah, anyway, it’s a mystery.

Trump’s Popularity vs. Predecessors

According to Blaze Media, Joseph McKinnon is writing that the new polls are showing that Trump is beating Obama and Bush at the same time in their term. So at the same month number, Trump is more popular than Obama was and Bush. Doesn’t mention Biden, so maybe Biden might have been more popular. Anyway, so he’s outperforming his predecessors.

And then Nate Silver says that Trump is still more popular now than he was eight years ago. So Trump’s popularity is higher than it was eight years ago and better than his predecessors. And let’s see, but his job approval was under 50%. It was 45.3 according to one poll. Real clear politics, I think.

Democrat Strategies: The “No Kings” Protest

Anyway, I’m fascinated by what the Democrats are going to do when Trump is being so successful and they’ve got nothing going on. So I sort of made a list of all the things that they can do. Like, what are they going to do? What are they going to complain about now? I mean, half of their energy was about this and it just went away in the most satisfying way.

So I’m fascinated that “Hitler” did the peacemaking that nobody else could do, and they have to explain why they’ve been calling him Hitler whereas the public now clearly sees Trump as the peacemaker-in-chief. So their entire “authoritarian Hitler” thing just turned into, “Well, okay, we have to admit that Trump being Trump is why this got done.”

So even being the “authoritarian” got this done. You know, I’ve been saying for a while, authoritarian, that’s not bad. Don’t we want an authoritarian as long as they’re on our side? And he’s clearly on our side.

Anyway, so here are the Democrat strategies that they have left. They’re going to have that “No Kings” protest on the weekend. So the “No Kings” is to say that they don’t want anybody who’s an authoritarian. Do you think that has the same spice and energy now as it did a week ago? Because Trump’s strongman authoritarian approach is exactly what got us these good results. So they’re going to have a whole demonstration against the thing that we all watched work right in front of our eyes. We all observed it working, which is Trump bullying people that needed to be bullied.

And so I think the whole “No Kings” thing, since it doesn’t have an objective—you know, they just put it in the category of “See, we’re fighting Trump. Can you see? Look how hard we’re fighting him.” Well, what exactly are you doing? “Well, we had some peaceful protests called No Kings.” What exactly is that going to do for anybody? Is that supposed to change Trump’s behavior because they had a bunch of people marching? Are these people who haven’t watched the news lately and they don’t know that Trump’s doing a good job?

What exactly would this accomplish? So that’s not going to accomplish anything. It doesn’t even have an accomplishment built into it as an objective. I don’t believe there’s any objective to it, right? They don’t say, “Well, once this No Kings thing is done, he’ll resign.” They’re not saying that. Or, “Once we do this No Kings thing, that will change some laws.” They’re not asking to change any laws. What exactly do they want?

Literally, this is so obviously just a financial transaction. Clearly, there’s a business model, there are people who make money from organizing these things. So the people who make money from organizing them is the reason it’s happening. It’s not happening because it might work. I don’t think there’s one Democrat who thinks this is going to work. For what? It’s going to work for what? To change what?

So clearly it has no—the Democrat party is so lost that it looks like they’re just sort of the dog getting wagged by the tail, and the tail in this case is whoever makes money organizing these events or whoever pays for them. So, yeah, they’re lost.

Character Attacks

Now, of course, they want to go after the character of Trump. That would be one attack. Do you think that would work when he’s the number one peacemaking president of all time? Doesn’t work so well, does it? That whole character thing. They can say we’re fighting Trump, but where’s the fight? What, marching around, a bunch of senior citizens marching around with signs that somebody gave them? Is that the fight? Good luck.

Shutdowns and Ukraine

Are the Democrats going to try to keep the government closed and hope that Trump gets blamed more? Well, that’s not working. Apparently, in terms of history and polls, people kind of not blaming anybody or blaming both sides, or the public who is paying attention knows that the Republicans have for a long time now said, “We’ll open the government. You just sign this. We’ve already signed it. Continuing resolution, we’ll just keep it open at the same funding and then we’ll work it out in a few weeks, just like the schedule says we should.”

So I don’t think the closing the government is going to work for the Democrats, but they don’t have anything else. What about, will they complain about Ukraine? Well, they might complain about Ukraine, but how do you complain when Trump is giving them more weapons, potentially, than they’ve had before—Tomahawks are being discussed—and not putting any of our money into it? What exactly are you going to complain about? Because that would be fully supporting—that would be support for Ukraine, they like that. It would be better weapons for Ukraine, maybe, probably, they like that. And not paying any of our money to buy those weapons but having Europe pay for them? How do you not like that?

So they don’t really have much to complain about with Russia. The Gaza thing went away. The government shutdown probably doesn’t make a dent. The “No Kings” thing is just empty calories.

Crime and the National Guard

What else? How about if the Democrats fight hard to not reduce crime in cities, which they’re also doing? So by resisting the National Guard—and so far, to the credit of the National Guard, they have not created any incidents. So it’s not like there’s some anecdote of “Well, that one National Guard guy got wild and hurt somebody.” Like, we don’t hear that at all. So as long as the crime is going down where the National Guard is deployed, and it probably will, they don’t have anything there either because the public likes less crime.

Every time they do a street interview and they’re trying to get somebody to say, “Oh, I don’t like all these armed people in my city,” they say the opposite. They say, “Yeah, I feel safer. It’s definitely safer.” And apparently, according to Rasmussen poll, 52% of likely voters are actually supporting using the National Guard at ICE facilities. So that’s an advantage to Trump. So they don’t have that.

And Kristen Welker was talking to VP Vance, and she was trying to do the thing where she says crime is down in both Chicago and Portland. So why do you need the National Guard if things are heading in the right direction? Do you believe that crime is down in both Chicago and Portland? Well, JD Vance had a perfect answer to that. He said crime is down in Chicago and Portland often because they’re so overwhelmed at the local level that they’re not even keeping the statistics properly. Now we have lots of data to say that’s true, that they don’t—they just lie about the data so it looks like the crime’s going down.

Healthcare Brainstorming

So if the Democrats can’t use Gaza, they can’t really use Ukraine, they can’t really use, you know, the danger of the cities, the tariffs look like they might be working out… What’s left? I think all they have left is healthcare. So I thought it’d be fun to talk about a few things that Trump could do on healthcare, maybe.

So this is just for fun and speculation, okay? Apparently Speaker Johnson says that the Republicans do have some ideas for replacing Obamacare, or at least replacing the extension to, you know, paying the extra Obamacare stuff. But he doesn’t say what that is.

So I wanted to give a few ideas. What if—now remember, this is just brainstorming, so I’m—don’t worry if anything I say now sounds impractical. This is brainstorming. But what if Trump said, “I’m going to use the tariff revenue specifically to make healthcare stable.” What would they do then? Because they can’t complain about the tariffs because the tariffs would then be going directly toward the thing they care about the most, which is getting healthcare for everybody.

I’m not going to suggest that’ll happen, but isn’t it a fun mental experiment? If Trump said, “I’m going to use all the tariffs”—he won’t do this—but if he said, “I’m going to use the tariffs for healthcare to, you know, plug the hole,” maybe only until we get to a negotiated better situation, but what would they say? It feels like it’s a perfect plan because you couldn’t really—you couldn’t really debate it because they shouldn’t complain about where the money comes from. And if they did, the public wouldn’t be able to follow the argument because they don’t really understand tariffs either.

Here’s another one. What if Trump did an executive order on price transparency? I don’t know what that would look like, but it is my belief that consumers don’t have the option to shop intelligently for healthcare because they can’t tell what anything costs. Could the government say, “All right, we’re going to make the free market work better because you’re going to really have to say what your actual costs are and then people will be able to shop”? Maybe. It would sound like it would make a difference before you tried it.

How about he could make a bigger deal about how taking illegal people off of the healthcare will be better for the people who are on healthcare? That’s a pretty strong argument. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I—you all know that I’m in the middle of sort of a major healthcare situation. And it seems to me that my own healthcare provider is not nearly as capable as they were even one year ago. I feel like one year ago, if I needed a procedure, I could get it in two days and now it’s like two weeks. Is that because of all the people who don’t have healthcare who have healthcare? Is that why? I mean, it feels like if I’m waiting, there was some new bunch of people who got in front of me that wasn’t just normal population growth.

So I don’t know if you—is anybody having that experience where it’s taking you way longer to get a medical appointment? I might be imagining it, by the way, so I don’t know that it’s true. But it feels like, maybe it’s because it’s life and death so it seems like a bigger deal to me, but yeah, it could take a week or two to get a scan. So I had to actually go to the emergency room so that I didn’t have to wait so long to get a valuable MRI scan. So if I go to the emergency room, who am I competing with? All the people who don’t have health insurance, because they would go to the emergency room because the emergency room still has to take them. So I’m sitting there with, I don’t know, maybe half of the people didn’t have health insurance and I had to wait my turn. Not ideal.

Here’s another idea. How about tasking the big AI companies with creating a free version of healthcare? Now, not free in terms of drugs—that would be a separate thing—and not free in terms of hospital care. But what if Trump said, “All right, here’s my executive order. AI will be super disruptive to the country, but we want to make sure that AI, since that’s where all the profits are going to go, to these AI companies, that they would be in charge basically of creating a free, permanent healthcare portal that’s AI.” So it doesn’t have to be any people, could be just a portal, but have one of them that really is fact-checked for no hallucinating, etc. Now, would that work? I don’t know. But it would sound like a Republican plan and that would be better than having no plan.

And then there’s the RFK Jr. play, which is to act like your healthcare costs will go down if you’ve solved some of the healthy eating and autism problems. And you know, I’m optimistic that RFK Jr. did in fact find out the main cause of autism. It might be circumcision and Tylenol. It might be. And if he did, then we could reasonably claim that all those costs for autism might go down a little bit, not right away but over time. So there might be some argument that says we’re going to lower healthcare by getting rid of these chronic health problems. We’re going to make it so that everybody has at least a free AI doctor, which we’re very—we’re right at the crossover point where the AI doctor will be better than a regular doctor. Not quite there yet. We’re not there. A regular doctor is still better than an AI doctor. But we’re very close. So the executive order could just say, “Get there fast.” He could make a case that getting rid of the illegal people will lower your costs, he could do a price transparency thing, and he could offer to use some, but not all, of the tariff revenue to plug the gap. Now, do any of those sound like they would at least sound good? Because remember, the Republicans have two problems to solve. One is healthcare, but the other is how to get anybody on the other side to agree to whatever it is you’re proposing. So you might have to take a sub-optimal plan, but you gotta get one that you can get through. So would any of these things be hard to get through? Who is against price transparency? I’m seeing some things in the comments.

Wow. According to leading report, Oregon democratic officials are reportedly set to allocate more than twice as much funding for healthcare for illegal immigrants as for the state police, per Fox News. So that’s how dire it is.

Gaza: Phase 2

Anyway, let’s talk about phase two of Gaza. Do you think Trump will be successful there? I think nobody wants to be the police in Gaza. It’s too dangerous. So good luck getting even another Arab country to step up to that. And I don’t think Hamas has agreed to disarm. So I don’t know how phase two is going to go, but phase one looked impossible and Trump got it done. Phase two doesn’t look nearly as impossible, but really hard. So we’ll see if he gets this done.

Media Mind-Reading

I always talk about a user on X called Maze, M-A-Z-E. Always has wonderful clips of things. I don’t know how he finds things, but he finds just the most on-point old clips. And when I say old, I don’t mean old-old, but just ones that have been before. And he found clips of CNN’s John King and Dana Bash talking about Trump.

And John King said that Trump only cares about building hotels in Gaza. What do you call that? That’s called “mind reading.” If I have taught you one thing, it’s that when people are doing mind reading, they are not serious people. Because you can’t read minds. How would John King know that Trump only cares about building hotels in Gaza? Do you think that there’s any adult human being who only cares about one thing when there’s so many variables at play? You don’t think that Trump wanted a Nobel Prize? You don’t think that just on humanitarian reasons he wanted the killing to stop? You don’t think he wanted to be a good president? You don’t think he wanted to be a good partner with Israel?

What the hell would you be thinking to imagine that Trump is the only person in the world who has one concern, and it’s about building a hotel in Gaza, which by the way would be the very worst place you could ever put a freaking hotel? May I give you some real estate advice? If you’re thinking of investing in a resort or hotel in Gaza, don’t do it. That would be freaking crazy. Now it might not be crazy if you’re an Arab country, a Muslim country, and you want to build a hotel there. It might not be a target. But would you ever build a Trump hotel and put it on the beach? No! No! That would last about five minutes. That would be the number one terror target in the world. So for John King to imagine that Trump only cares about building hotels in Gaza, where does that come from? That’s just weird mind reading, right?

And then Dana Bash said, talking to him at the same time, she says people actually believe Trump would end the war, meaning Gaza. And then she said, “Trump doesn’t understand the conflict.” What’s that? That’s mind reading. How do you know what he doesn’t understand? How do you know you’re the one who doesn’t understand it? And now that he’s essentially solved it, would it be fair to say he understood everything he needed to understand and there was something that you did not understand, Dana Bash? There’s something you didn’t understand. You didn’t understand his skill set. You didn’t understand that he’s not like other people. You didn’t understand that he can sometimes do the thing that nobody else can do. But you’re locked in your little mind-reading weird world where you think you can read his mind, and because Democrats said there’s something wrong in there, that there’s just a bunch of rats running around in his head. Not so much. Turns out he’s really, really smart. Surprise! He’s really, really smart at this especially.

Military Fitness and Pete Hegseth

Anyway, here’s something I may have been part of the cause. Do you remember there was a photo that showed the Texas National Guard unit deploying in Chicago? And people noted that the service people, the National Guard troops, looked a little bit obese. Like all of them. Not just a few of them, but all the ones in the picture looked pretty portly. And a lot of people pointed it out, but I also pointed it out, and I reposted the picture on X with the following comment: “Paging Pete Hegseth.”

Now, I assumed that the Secretary of War is not following me on X, right? Fair assumption that the guy who’s in charge of our military probably doesn’t follow me on X, so it’s not like he’s going to see my post where I’m calling the National Guard guys fat. And then this morning I thought, “Maybe he follows me.” So I took a look. Turns out Pete Hegseth does follow me in his personal account, not his government account. But he would have actually seen me and other people mention that those guys are not those particular—we appreciate their service of course—but their physical fitness was not up to Pete Hegseth’s level. And apparently he acted on it. He actually pulled some of those guys out and I don’t know what happens, I don’t think they’re out of the service, I think they’ll just have to lose some weight.

But I feel a little bit guilty just because I have a large account. So when the large accounts make some kind of a statement, people do notice, right? So I’m kind of hoping that I’m not the reason that those service people are getting—I hope I’m not. It wasn’t just me, it was a lot of other people who mentioned it too, but I’m just worried because my account is bigger than theirs.

Intelligence Services: CIA vs. Mossad

Anyway, I saw a lot of people jabbering about whether Israel is the tail wagging the dog or whether Trump has gotten control of that situation and he’s in control. You know, who’s in more control, is Netanyahu controlling Trump or is Trump controlling Netanyahu? Well, at the moment, it looks like Trump has full control of the situation.

But we also wonder about the intel services, Mossad versus the CIA. So somebody asked John Kiriakou, who you’ve probably seen on social media, he’s great. He’s an ex-CIA officer, but he’s off the reservation, so he’s talking honestly about what it was like being a CIA agent. And he was the real type, like he was deployed, like he was doing the dirty stuff, so he really knows, he wasn’t a desk jockey, he was doing the real stuff.

So he knows, and his statement, he goes, “To tell you the truth”—he was on some podcast, I don’t remember which one—he said, “To tell you the truth, and please forgive my language in advance, but I think historically the CIA has been Mossad’s bitch. That’s really what it comes down to.” He said, “where over the course of my career and certainly subsequent from that we’ve seen, either leaked to the media or at least to the media, we get nothing out of that liaison relationship and the Israelis get everything out of that.”

Now, what’s the first thing you need to know about the context of this story? Number one, it’s being told to you by one guy whose job was to be a professional liar. I’m not saying he’s lying about this. But if you’re an ex-CIA officer, is it not true that you were trained to lie whenever it made sense to lie? So John Kiriakou comes off as completely honest to me, if I’m going to be a judge of character, which is always sketchy, none of us are that good, but my judge of character is that he’s telling the truth and that that’s his actual assessment. But remember, when you’re only hearing something from one source, I’d want to hear it from somebody else. I’d want at least a few other people say, “Oh yeah, that was our experience.” So I don’t know, I don’t know how much difference it makes either.

Obama and the Russia Hoax

So I saw a story yesterday that I could not for the life of me tell if it was a new story. It looks like just the old story, but maybe something added to it. So according to Jesse Watters and others, there’s some new documents that got found about Obama’s involvement in the Steele dossier and the Russia collusion hoax and that these new documents confirm for sure that Obama was the one behind the weaponization of the intelligence and the effort to remove Trump even after he got elected—after he got elected.

But I didn’t know what was new in the story, because I thought we already knew that Obama’s the one who ordered the intel about Trump and Russia to be redone to make it look like it was worse than it was. Didn’t we already know that? But I guess there’s some new document that really confirms that now.

So we know that Brennan lied about the use of the Steele dossier as one of the predicates, if that’s the right word, for going after Trump. So we know that was fake. We do know that the professionals working on the assessment didn’t think there was evidence of either that Putin wanted Trump or that he was doing anything to make it happen.

But do we have something new? And then I saw a reference to something that I didn’t see in the news, I only saw on social media. And it said that—was it the ex-head of the FBI Ray? Give me a fact-check on this, I’m very uncertain about this. But did he refer to Biden as a “vegetable” and said that they needed something to support the vegetable? Did that happen? Or was that just a social media BS thing? All right, so give me a fact-check on that, will you?

So if that’s true, it got completely lost by the bigger news from the Middle East. But do we now have everything that we need to know that Obama tried to overthrow the fairly elected president of the United States? And that all of their projection on Trump was very intentional projection to blame him for what they were doing to him at that very moment? Which apparently is a good trick that they use a lot.

Michael Cohen and Accountability

So Michael Cohen, the ex-fixer lawyer guy for Trump who even went to jail and is no friend of Trump’s, he says to the MSNBC panel—he said this a few times, but he said it again—that Letitia James and James Comey will be held accountable, meaning that he thinks they’ll be convicted. Do you believe that? Do you think that Letitia James and James Comey will be held accountable or just tried and slapped in the wrist or suspended sentence or nothing?

I don’t think they’ll be held accountable. I don’t think they’ll be held accountable at all. But Cohen’s argument is that the documents will speak for themselves. Now, that’s not true. What kind of lawyer is he? In what world do documents ever speak for themselves? That’s not even a thing. Documents don’t speak for themselves. If the only thing that we had to go on was the documents, yeah, Letitia James looks guilty as hell. But that’s not what a court case is about. A court case adds all the context.

Suppose the context showed she didn’t know she did it. I’m not saying that’s the case. Suppose the context showed that her, let’s say she had a business manager or an accountant who just told her to do it and she didn’t really look at it. That’s sort of a defense, if your professional did it and you trusted the professional. That’s actually a defense. But that context all matters. So I don’t for a minute believe that the documents make the case. I just don’t think that works in general, much less in this case. And I don’t think that would—does that even apply to Comey? Are there documents that would put Comey in or you need more than that for Comey, right? So I don’t know how good a lawyer Michael Cohen is, but I’m going to put my total non-lawyer experience up against his and say, “I’m not so sure.” I guess just the process will be bad enough for the people going through it.

AI Power Efficiency

Here are some interesting things from around the world. So the former Intel CEO says we’re in an AI bubble, which we all know, right? You all know we’re in a bubble. Our economy wouldn’t even look good except for AI. If you only took AI out of the economy, we’d already be in a recession. So that’s how important it is.

But he says—and this would match things I’ve been saying—that there’s a risk, but the new tech is coming and he says it promises a hundred times better power efficiency for the same AI performance. What have I been telling you about this massive need for power for AI? I’ve been telling you that they’re going to work on that from two different directions. One is building enormous, city-sized processing centers that need power. And the other would be figuring out how to not need so much power. And I was predicting that because the economic benefit of not using that much power is trillions of dollars, that that would get solved fairly quickly. And it looks like the former CEO of Intel is aware of some technology that would take that power cost down by a factor of ten.

JP Morgan’s Trillion-Dollar Investment

JP Morgan Chase says they’re going to invest $1.5 trillion spread across 27 critical industries in America. So they’re not talking about just making loans, the banking job, they’re talking about taking equity in 27 critical industries to boost them. They’re trying to boost those industries.

Now why are they doing that? I’ve never heard of a bank do anything like that. Now part of it is the bank is making a shitload of money; the earnings are coming out. So they’re actually making really good earnings at a time when other people might be struggling. So it could be that JP Morgan is looking ahead because they’re smart, right? Jamie Dimon is super smart. They might be looking ahead several years and knowing that as people lose their jobs and maybe AI disrupts things, that they need to be on the side of the angels.

So if they can make sure that they’re vital because they’re not just a bank, but they own equity in vital industries and they’re helping those vital industries, it might be that they just need to reframe themselves as a company completely differently. One of the problems, if I were a bank, the thing I’d be worried about is that banks themselves could be completely replaced with AI. Somebody’s going to make an AI bank. You can’t do it now because of the hallucinating, but if they solve the hallucinations and you could just say, “All right, you’re a bank now. Go get the paperwork filled out, I’ll sign it.” I don’t know, they could think that banking just won’t be a business and so they need to have equity in real business. So I don’t know what they’re up to, but it’s probably more than one objective.

California Politics: Porter and Hilton

So Katie Porter—or “Katie Potato” as you know—is the Democrat who is leading in the potential governor race in California. But you probably saw the many videos of her acting very badly on video. And I guess Harry Enten on CNN points out that her odds of becoming governor plunged from 40% down to 16%.

And Fox News completely did that. Fox News just kept running those clips on a loop until everybody saw them. Eventually, the CNN and MSNBC would all have to do it because Fox just made that a story. So it looks like her odds have gone way down, but she’s still definitely in the mix and maybe still number one.

But I didn’t realize that Steve Hilton actually has a shot. So Steve Hilton—you all know him, he’s running as a Republican in the bluest state you could imagine. Everybody assumes that no Republican can get any purchase, there’s no way they can get close because it’s such a blue state.

Jungle Primary Mechanics

But it looks like the competition is destroying itself and Steve is just sort of being Steve Hilton, and people know him from Fox News, so he’s got a built-in base for people who have watched his shows on Fox. I don’t think he’s still there. Does he still have his show on Fox? I don’t know. But he seems like a solid, smart—I think his intentions are in the right place. He’s Republican enough, he’s pro-Trump enough, so he meets all of the Republican requirements, which doesn’t mean anything, right? Because you’re going to have to win over other people.

So I asked Grok, does he have any chance? And it turns out he does, and part of that is because of the way elections work in California. They have what’s called a “jungle primary” or something, has some name to it. But basically, the first vote is for anybody who’s running. So it’s not like a regular primary where you pick one person to run. The first vote is just for whoever, and then they limit the real election to whoever got the top two votes. A jungle primary. That’s the word. It’s a jungle primary.

Because there’s only one strong Republican running, if he gets more than 25% of the vote, which is entirely possible, he could be in the top two. Now getting in the top two definitely doesn’t help you win, because like I said, it’s a blue state. But what if he gets in the top two against somebody who’s just totally destroyed by clips or for whatever other reason? So I think if Steve can make that 25%, which is not guaranteed and it’s a stretch, but I feel like he might be able to do it, especially because Trump is doing so well and that will have a little bit of a coattail, at least for a while.

But if you could imagine Steve Hilton getting into the position in the final two, then it becomes a question of whether Fox News can take out the other competitor before CNN takes out Steve. I don’t know if he has any baggage or anything; I haven’t heard of any. But I’m sure whoever he runs against is going to have a little baggage, and Fox News will be all over that.

Global Threats and Competition

Allegedly, here’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard from Alex Barnicoat says this. I don’t know if it’s true, but China is developing a nuclear tsunami bomb that could sink the entire UK. I guess the idea is they’re working on a nuclear bomb specifically for triggering a tsunami so you can destroy an entire island such as the UK. Is that scary? Yeah, that’s scary. I don’t know if it’s true. Might not be true, but scary.

Well, Ford CEO was over in China recently, did some tours of their auto plants and stuff, and came back—I think this was in the Telegraph—and the Ford CEO basically said, “We can’t compete with China.” That they’re already so far ahead of us in making cars that we just haven’t figured it out yet, but that Ford is not competitive and that we don’t have a way to be competitive.

Are you hearing that? This is the CEO of Ford, who walked through Chinese factories. A lot of them are “dark factories,” meaning they don’t need lights because there’s no human there, it’s all robots. And when he watched what China can do to build a car and he watched that China actually has more high-tech features in their car, he didn’t know how far China had come and he looked at it and said we basically can’t catch up, that they’ve already lapped us and our auto industry might just disappear, except for Elon. So who knows if that’s real?

Fusion Roadmap

And then according to Matt Margolis, PJ Media, some of the big Democrat states are already reducing healthcare costs for illegal immigrants because they found out that they can’t afford it. So they have to do it quietly since they’re so pro-healthcare for everybody, but apparently California and let’s see, Minnesota (Tim Walz) and Pritzker in Illinois have all rolled back or frozen Medicaid programs for illegal immigrants. So they are quite aware that there’s a spending problem with that category. Apparently California alone spends $8.5billionannuallyforMedi-Calforillegalresidents.$8.5 billion per year. Wow.

In other news, Chris Wright, Energy Secretary, is going to announce maybe this week, I guess today he’s going to announce it, the Trump administration’s fusion roadmap. At a gathering of fusion people. So the fusion people, as opposed to regular nuclear which is fission, fusion would be the no-waste infinite energy thing we’ve been waiting for for forty years. But apparently we’re underspending on fusion some say compared to what we do on regular fission, and they’re looking to change that and have a roadmap to get us to fusion. That’s very good. It’s good that that’s happening.

Drone Warfare and Infrastructure Vulnerability

Do you know about the system in Ukraine for drones? As I’ve told you too many times, the Ukraine war is now a drone versus energy infrastructure war. It’s—you know, they’re also killing people, but the people-killing doesn’t feel like it’s the big thing. They gotta get the energy stuff before winter. That looks like the big play.

But did you know that Ukraine came up with a bonus point program where if you’re on the front lines fighting with a drone and you use a drone to get a good kill, you can submit that and you will be first in line for new drone stuff—parts and replacement parts and bombs that go on drones and everything?

In other words, they have an organized program where the people who are running the drones can get more drones and more resources by being more successful with the ones they have. Now, does that seem like a good idea? It really does. It seems like an amazing idea. Because as I told you the other day, they’re competing with Russia that has a top-down system where the entrepreneurs don’t really get any benefit if they do something good. So not only do they not make money, but I don’t think that they would get extra drones just because they did a good job with the ones they had.

But Ukraine seems to understand human motivation better, and I would totally try harder if I knew that if I got my kills and proved it, I could get a better drone and then I could get a better kill and then I could get a better drone. So it would definitely motivate me, and I would guess it motivates the Ukrainians. So if you were looking for a long-term prediction of who’s going to win in the drone-on-drone, it does feel like Ukraine has an advantage. They don’t have a manpower advantage, they don’t have a missile advantage—they have a lot of disadvantages—but in this one area of innovating with drones, I feel like they got the edge and maybe that’s enough. I don’t know.

So they attacked the Russian power hub again, the Kyiv Post is reporting, put it on fire. I feel like they’re just nitpicking at this point. I wonder if there’s a really big attack that’s being planned, or if they don’t have enough drones for that yet. But I’ve got a question. Why is the Russian energy grid still sort of working? Is it my imagination or have you not also heard that the American electric grid—you could take out the entire grid in an afternoon if you wanted to? Am I wrong about that?

I feel like I’ve seen so many news stories that say our grid is so vulnerable, and then they—I’m not going to say why because I don’t need to put that out there—but there are specific vulnerabilities which if you knew how to attack them, you could kind of take out the entire United States without a lot of work. Why doesn’t that work in Russia? Does Russia have some magically better technology or are we really not in that much risk? Maybe it’s not as big a risk as I thought. But didn’t it seem to you that any major country could take out the entire electrical grid of any other country really anytime they wanted? Doesn’t it seem to you that that’s like a thing that anybody could do? But they haven’t. They’re just picking these individual sites off and the lights are still on in Moscow. So I guess I don’t understand what’s preventing Ukraine from doing better there.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, that’s all I’ve got for today. I hope that was satisfying. It was for me. And I’m going to say a few words privately to my beloved locals subscribers, and the rest of you, I hope to see you tomorrow. Come back! It’s fun every day. All right, everybody, I’ll see you tomorrow. Oh, I can’t even end it. I’m going to have to get out of the app and get back in to end it.