Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-16
Dilbert and Voting Machines
If you subscribe to Dilbert on either the Locals platform or X, you’ll see that Dilbert’s company has been asked to program some voting machines. So, Dilbert will be in charge of programming the new voting machines, just in case you wondered.
The Simultaneous Sip
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It’s called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you’ve never had a better time. But if you’d like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup, or a mug, or a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, or a flask—a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid; I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes absolutely everything better. It’s called, that’s right, the simultaneous sip. Go.
Reframing Hypnosis
Yesterday, I saw one of the comments on X. Someone asked me if I could recommend a book on hypnosis. I said no, I don’t know any books on hypnosis. Then I was on Amazon looking at the results of my own book, “Reframe Your Brain,” and it turns out I have the number one book in the world on hypnosis, which I was completely unaware of. So, on Amazon’s ranking for hypnosis books, I’m not even sure why this is on that list. It’s sort of like hypnosis, but it’s more of a conversational version; it’s not going to put you in a trance.
As recent tradition requires, I’m going to give you a reframe from this book and see if it makes any difference. Here’s a good one: The usual frame when we’re dealing with other people is something like “Other people think approximately the same as I do.” Do you ever think that? You assume that the way you think is probably pretty similar to the way other people think. That is a big problem.
Here’s a reframe that’s better: Instead of “others think and feel approximately as I do,” try “others are unimaginably different.” You can’t even imagine how different they are. If you start with the assumption that they think like you, everything gets confused because you’ll be like, “Well, why don’t you agree with me? Why aren’t you thinking like me?” If you imagine that people’s inner thoughts are unimaginably different, which they largely are, you’ll have much less stuff to worry about.
Testosterone and Risk-Taking
The Stockholm School of Economics did a study to find out if men who had extra testosterone would take more risks in their financial decisions. What do you think? Did people take more risks when they got a testosterone shot? The answer was no. They made the same economic decisions.
However, I have a little insight into this topic because, as you know, I’ve turned off my testosterone chemically because of the cancer stuff. I’ve experienced what it’s like to have probably too much, based on my own assessment, because I do have a lifelong issue with being a little too aggressive sometimes. I always thought that was testosterone. Now that I don’t have it—now that I’m testosterone-empty basically—I don’t feel those sudden angry urges that I used to have. It does seem like my behavior changed.
But here’s what I’m going to add to this economic study: The other thing I noticed is that since I’m a grown adult with lots of training for how to do things like invest, and lots of habits which I’ve developed over my lifetime, if you temporarily change somebody’s testosterone, it doesn’t make as much difference as you think because their training and their habits would be strong. It might be different if you’re 19, but if you’re an adult and you’ve been one for a while, you’ve got all this habit and training. If I were making an economic decision, I’m pretty sure I would make it the same way I’ve always made it. I would make sure I diversified and just ordinary things. If you’re trained and you have habits, you wouldn’t see any difference in the short run. In the long run, you probably would. That’s my addition.
Flying Cars in China
China is going to mass-produce flying cars next year, from a company called XPeng. It makes me wonder: is China going to win the flying car industry? I’m not 100% sure that flying cars ever need to be a thing unless they’re self-flying. I wouldn’t want people flying their own flying cars; that would be a disaster. But if they were sort of self-driving flying cars that are more like Ubers, maybe. I could see it.
The US is going to have a massive regulatory problem because every state will have its own regulations, and there will be environmental things and noise prohibitions. I don’t think we’ll be winning the flying car competition.
Starlink and In-Flight Reading
Elon Musk tells us that Starlink, the satellite internet connection, is now available on United Airlines flights. I kind of thought that they already had something like that, but not as good as Starlink. Can you even hold in your head how shitty the United States has become that it took until 2025 to have internet on a plane? Really, it took this long to get internet on a plane?
I also wonder if this will have an impact on book sales. In my life, the time to read a book is on an airplane and no other time. When I hear about people who read a lot of books, I automatically think they travel a lot. Because if you’re not trapped on an airplane, you’re probably going to be more on the internet than reading a book. But if it’s the only thing you have to do, you read a book. I think that Starlink on airplanes might make book sales plunge.
Joy Behar and The View
Joy Behar of “The View” said recently, and it’s kind of funny: “I think we should have more Republicans on the show, but they don’t want to come on; they’re scared of us.” Are they? Do you think there’s even one Republican on the entire planet who would be afraid to go on “The View” because it’s “The View”?
Now, there might be people who don’t want to go on TV at all; maybe they’re shy or something. But I’ll bet there are zero people in the world who are Republican and not shy who would say no to going on “The View.” Do you notice the pattern? The pattern is really clear: the thing that Democrats are worried about, obsessed about, and blaming Republicans for always has one quality about it. No matter what the criticism is about, if it’s about Republicans, there’s always one quality that exists: it’s not real. It just isn’t real. There’s no Republican who’s afraid of going on “The View.” None. You could search the whole world and you wouldn’t find one. But that’s her worldview—she’s surrounded by people who are afraid of her. It must be tough to be a Democrat.
John Fetterman and Trump Supporters
Speaking of that, Fetterman continues to be a thorn in the side of the Democrats. He said recently, “I love people who voted for Trump. They aren’t fascists, they aren’t Nazis, they aren’t destroying the Constitution.” He says we have to turn down the temperature.
Here’s the thing: unless all of the senators or high-level Democrats say “Trump is a fascist, Nazi, Constitution-tearing-up dictator,” it doesn’t really work, does it? You only need one Fetterman to put the lie to the whole thing. As long as there’s one reasonable elected Democrat who says no, it works. He’s not just sort of ignoring the category, which would be one thing. It’s not that he doesn’t participate in those types of insults; it’s that he’s saying directly, “This is bullshit, you need to stop this for our own benefit.” That’s pretty powerful. No matter what you think of Fetterman, just his existence as someone who’s willing to stand in the middle of that bullshit and call bullshit on the bullshit is really important. I think that’s a bigger deal than people imagine.
”No Kings” vs. The Navy
The so-called “No Kings” protest will be happening this Saturday, and I guess there’s a little drama because, at the same time, there’s some kind of 250-year celebration of the Navy that might be happening in Southern California. Some are saying that there would be a live launch of missiles in a vanity parade, and it would shut down portions of the I-5 during the “No Kings” protest.
I don’t have enough information about this, but I don’t believe that there will be live missile launches anywhere; that just doesn’t seem like that could happen. I don’t know exactly how the “No Kings” protest is going to overlap with that event. It would only be one part of the country anyway. I would hate that the missile launches would interfere with their walking around, trying to save the country by walking around.
I thought my comment would be more viral than it was when I said that the Democrats have imaginary problems—they just imagine that their democracy is being stolen and all that—and they’ve matched it with imaginary solutions, which is the “No Kings” event. If we just wander around and carry signs that other people bought and provided to us, I feel like we can save our democracy. I don’t think there’s even one person at the protest who believes their own protest. They’re just fighting Trump.
Gavin Newsom Copying Trump
Speaking of fighting Trump, as you know, Gavin Newsom is doing this thing where he’s sort of mocking or pretending to act like Trump in his social media because it’s kind of funny. It did work for a little while when he first did it; it was different, it was provocative, and it was well-executed. When he was mocking the way that Trump spoke, you looked at that and you thought, “Okay, that’s actually kind of clever. Nicely done.”
But the one thing I predicted is that they wouldn’t be able to expand that success. Those several fake Truth Social posts that they did that supposedly sounded like Trump—I knew they could pull that off for one or two. You could see that that was a reproducible thing. But I knew that if they tried to continue to expand that, it would all fall apart because it would require way more talent than they demonstrated.
So here we are; he’s sort of stretched it too far now. He’s now talking about something called “California Derangement Syndrome,” which he’s partially blaming on Greg Gutfeld. He posted a clip from “The Five” where Greg was talking about California in a negative way. Greg said “CDS,” hoping that he knew what that was, is not CDS if the data is real. It’s not derangement if you’re looking at just data. But “Trump Derangement” is real as a phenomenon because it’s based on not data. So one of them is based on data and one of them is not.
Newsom goes in with a post and goes, “Sad to see CDS has infected so many at Fox. Hoping some Tylenol can help them recover.” Now, do you think the Democrats are on safe territory mocking Tylenol as a cause—obviously this is a callback to Tylenol being a potential cause for autism. Don’t you think that the data is strong enough that you shouldn’t be mocking Tylenol that may or may not have caused autism in hundreds of thousands of children? Isn’t that kind of a serious topic? Is that what you want to joke about? Tylenol, the potential life-altering chemical for children and babies? That feels like just such a mistake.
Joel Pollak commented on Gavin Newsom’s comment and said exactly what I was thinking: “Newsom copies everything Trump does except the things that work best.” That’s exactly what they’re doing. They’ve looked at Trump and said, “All right, Trump keeps winning. What is it he’s doing that’s allowing him to win?” But the trick is that if you’re a Democrat, your brain can’t wrap itself around the fact that your policies and your politicians are terrible. So that’s off the table.
The entire explanation of why Trump is succeeding and Democrats are less so is that he’s got a tremendous amount of talent and they don’t. That’s it. You can’t reproduce that. You would have to find new people with talent. You can’t just copy it. That would be like saying, “Einstein had some good ideas. I’ve got an idea. I’m going to wear my hair like Einstein.” Doesn’t that feel like that’s what they’re doing? Because they can’t actually be Einstein; you can’t copy Einstein because you’re not smart enough.
But you can’t do nothing if Einstein’s winning and you’re not winning. So you’re like, “All right, we’ll copy Einstein. I’m going to talk in a German accent and I’m going to have wild hair. That should do it.” Now, if you think that’s a ridiculous analogy, look at what Democrats say out loud that they’re doing. When they talk about what they’re going to do, they say, “We’re going to fight Trump.” Fight Trump? Where is that on my list of priorities? Don’t you want to get policies in? Isn’t it more like “I want to get something done”? Where’s your plan?
No, we just want to fight Trump, and the way they’re going to do it is they think they have to get tougher because Trump is tough. So they’re like, “All right, how do we get tough? I got it. We’re going to act like we’re trying to appeal to men.” Yeah, that’s what he’s doing. He’s going to all those fighting events and doing manly things. So we’ll have to act like men. And then they’ve got Tim Walz trying to act like a man. “I’ve got a gun. I can fix a carburetor.” And it all just looks stupid because they’re copying the wrong thing. Even if they could do it, it would be the wrong thing. And then they started copying Trump’s occasional use of cursing because they thought that would make them look tough. They’ve literally found every single thing that isn’t important—all the inactive ingredients—and they’re just like, “If we use the inactive ingredients, we’ll get something done.” No, the thing you can’t copy is he’s brilliant. He’s just really, really smart at exactly the kind of stuff that you need to be a president, which some of us saw early and some of us are just finding out.
FBI Crime Statistics
Apparently, the FBI’s been busy all summer. They say they got 8,000 arrests of dangerous criminals, according to Ben Whedon and Just The News. He said they kept it a little quiet and had a big impact. Did they keep it quiet? I guess they did. But doesn’t that seem like an impressive number? 8,000 dangerous criminals. If you assume every dangerous criminal probably hurts more than one person going forward, they may have saved 30,000 people from some kind of horrible death or destruction or theft or something.
Candace Owens and Australia
Here’s a funny story: Candace Owens was going to do a tour of her podcast and that would include Australia, but Australia has banned her. Candace Owens can’t go to Australia because they say she’s said things they don’t like.
Here’s the list of things that allegedly, according to Australia, Candace Owens has talked about that they don’t like: they don’t like her comments on Muslims; they don’t like her comments about Black people. Is this even real? That doesn’t feel like this could possibly be real, right? They don’t like the Black woman’s comments about Black people. They don’t like her comments about Jewish people, and they don’t like her comments about LGBTQIA. I do not know what the ‘I’ and the ‘A’ stand for; we’re getting a little long on the letters there.
Not only that, but there was a hearing involved, a court hearing to see if she’d be allowed in the country, and since she’s not being allowed, she’s being ordered to pay the hearing’s legal costs.
Now, here’s my question: if Candace Owens is banned for things she said on social media and on her podcast, would I be able to go to Australia if I wanted to? Because I’m pretty canceled, I don’t know if you’ve heard. But if Australia went by what the news says I said, I would be banned from Australia, wouldn’t I? Am I wrong? Now, if they went by what I actually said and what I meant and the proper context, I wouldn’t be banned from anything, and I wouldn’t be canceled either. But that’s not the way the world works. The world works based on what people imagine happened. And what people imagined happened is that I said some insulting thing to Black people, which never happened. In the real world, nothing like that ever happened. So I’m probably banned from Australia and don’t even know it. But the good news is, I don’t want to go to Australia. They’ve got a lot of killing animals there. My understanding is as soon as you get off the plane in Australia, a large crocodile attacks you, and it just gets worse from there. Spiders the size of a dog. I don’t know, I hear stories.
Pentagon Press Corps Protest
The Pentagon Press Corps decided to make the story about themselves, and they walked out—most of them. They walked out because they’re protesting the new Pentagon policy on dealing with the press. Now, I’ve been trying to get interested in that story, but it’s kind of hard because it’s really just the media dealing with their own stuff.
But as I understand it, the only thing that’s newly banned is that the reporters are not supposed to be working people for information that those people should not be giving. Am I right? That the only thing that changed is that the media is banned from asking people stuff that the military doesn’t want to give out? So some people who are smarter than me, who are looking at this, say nothing changed, you idiots, go back to work. There’s no real difference. They’re treating it like it’s the end of an era and that those reporters won’t be able to report because they’re leaving the Pentagon. It was the most professional relationship, and now it’s over. I don’t know how to judge this one. My guess would be that the press will sort of quietly trickle back because they have to do their job. I don’t think they’re going to quit. So probably that was just for show.
Media Layoffs and the Future of Podcasts
There are big layoffs underway allegedly today at NBC News and also some coming later this quarter at CBS News. There’ll be 150 staff let go. According to one report, a lot of the staff that are being let go are responsible for the diversity stuff. So it would be the people who were making sure that there was DEI. I guess they’re all getting fired.
Here’s what I think; here’s my prediction: if people keep getting fired from the mainstream regular media, where are they going to go to work? Well, I think the more entrepreneurial ones will probably get involved in podcasts. So some of them will start a podcast if they were on-air people, but others will be support for making podcasts a bigger deal. If you look at, say, Megyn Kelly’s operation, or you look at—well, Alex Jones before he got sued to death—or you look at PBD, they have studios, bigger than the Rogan operation; I think he’s just one engineer. But I’ll bet you’re going to see podcasts turn into more professional-looking TV shows because all those people with those talents, everything from set production to everything else, will be looking for work. I think they’ll just team up with big podcasters. Tucker—Tucker’s another one. So I think you’ll see more of that.
Trolls in Large Groups
Are we over that Young Republicans group that had some bad things to say on their private messages? I kind of like JD Vance’s approach. He says, “I refuse to join the pearl-clutching about that topic when powerful people call for political violence.” So what he did was he contrasted it to speech that actually matters—if somebody’s talking about violence versus just people trolling basically. I wouldn’t have compared the two things, I don’t think. I think that took a little bit away from it. It would have been stronger just to say: in any group of any large group of people, 10% of them are going to say horrible things. That’s the whole story.
In every group, every large group, 10% of them are going to be trolls. It wouldn’t matter if they were Republican; it wouldn’t matter if they were Democrats. Do you think if you had a thousand Democrats in an organization, and it was specifically a young-oriented organization—so it skewed for younger people—do you think that out of a thousand Democrats in any organization, you wouldn’t find 10% of them who said things that were so bad you think they should close down the whole organization? You don’t think there would be 10% who were wishing for the violent death of prominent Republicans? Of course there are. So anybody who is under the illusion that there was something special or uniquely bad about this group of Republicans—what world do you live in? The world I live in, there’s 10% of these people in every group, reliably, every time. If they’re young—and if it’s males, young males—of course they’re going to be like this. Most of them grow out of it.
Carville’s “Racist” Comment
James Carville was talking about this issue, and he said, “Some people are worried about some 20-year-old snot-nosed kid in Kansas who’s an insignificant little shit, if one ever lived, and we’re not focusing on the main target, which is JD Vance.” And then he went on—Carville says this about the Republicans: “Not all President Trump’s supporters are racist, but I will say this: all racists are Trump supporters.” Really? Really, James Carville? You actually believe that all racists—all racists—are Republican?
That might be the dumbest thing he’s ever said. There’s one thing I think we can all agree on: there are racists in both parties. That’s the most obvious, observable thing you could ever see in your life. I got canceled for pointing out that there was a respectable survey that showed that, let’s say, Democrats are super racist. Now, you could argue about the validity of that poll, but they did reproduce it with a larger subset and got the same number, and they are one of the most accurate pollsters. So I do think the data shows that we’ve got some racists in both parties.
The Voting Rights Act and “Good” Racism
Meanwhile, speaking of that, the Voting Rights Act is being discussed at the Supreme Court. The ramifications of that are that if the Voting Rights thing gets—at least one element of it gets overturned—then there would not be these racial set-aside districts for voting.
Apparently, I didn’t even know this until recently, I didn’t even know this was a thing, but apparently historically there were some areas that had a lot of Black and Brown people in them, and they weren’t necessarily getting the leaders that would represent them, they thought. So there was some kind of forced redistricting so that they would—at least there’d be a few places that were majority Black and they could get their leaders that they wanted.
Now, that, of course, is called what? Racism. Because if you’re organizing your vote based on the race, what’s that? It’s racism. You might say it’s the good kind. You might say it’s the good kind, but it’s still racism. And I think it was Gorsuch who was pointing out what I point out often, which is: a lot of these racial set-asides and racial, let’s say, preferences made sense at some point in our history. You could argue that it didn’t, but I’ll argue that it did.
I’ve made this point a few times: if your problem is slavery, the solution has to be a big solution like a Civil War. Gigantic problem, gigantic scale solution. But then you’ve got the—just the ordinary discrimination that kicks in in normal life. So then you’ve got your Jim Crow stuff and your—so you pass some laws to make sure that there’s not just grotesque discrimination against all Black people and anybody else. Now, that makes sense to have a whole law that really will punish you for discriminating if we’re still super racist, right? We basically just got over slavery, practically, and things haven’t changed that much. So then you still need a big solution using the legal system, but not as big as the Civil War because you’re matching the solution to the size of the problem—still very big, but you want to match the size.
And then Gorsuch asks—and I’ve said the same thing—isn’t there some point where you have to stop it? Because once you get closer, but not identical—you just have to be in the same neighborhood of same opportunity, not equal, that’s largely impossible. But if you get in the neighborhood, the laws that give you preference are going to hurt you more than they’re going to help you. That’s what DEI is.
The reason that DEI is a double-edged sword is: if you’re—let’s just use Black as the example—if you’re Black and you get the advantage of DEI, you know, a little extra leg up, so that’s good. You would look at that and say, “Yay, DEI worked for me. I made sure that I got a little extra attention, first in line, got the job.” But what happens to the other people who are observing? And they say, “You know, discrimination isn’t what it used to be. I never even run into it, really. It’s not something I encounter at all.” And they would say, “Doesn’t that make the people in these DEI positions a little suspect, that maybe they didn’t get there by merit? Some did, but how can I tell? Because I can tell that the White people probably had to get there by merit, but can you tell that about everybody?”
So regardless of what the reality is, it creates an impression that one group is crippled and disabled and can’t make it on their own. At some point, you can’t get to anything that looks like equality unless you drop the special preferences. But it only makes sense when things get close enough that everybody can figure out a way to get where they need to go. So even if there’s some discrimination against one group or another, as long as you have a path—something you can do, you can move, you can somehow you can navigate around it—then it’s time to drop it.
The Supreme Court’s talking about these special set-aside districts and whether it’s time to drop them. It looks like the smart people like Jonathan Turley are saying that the way the arguments are going so far is that it looks like maybe the majority will want to at least tweak the situation, if not get rid of it entirely. So we don’t know how that’s going to settle. But the big news is that if it does go that way, it almost guarantees that the Republicans will still have the House and they’ll probably keep the Senate. So this is a gigantic deal. Maybe the Republicans would win without this potential tweak, but it certainly makes it like a slam dunk if they get all those extra districts redistricted.
CNN has been quite stark about that, saying that the Republicans have this enormous advantage. Apparently, there are more things that Republicans can redistrict, not even counting this—I mean, this would be a bunch of seats—but the Republicans have room to redistrict to get more seats, and the Democrats do not because they’ve already used up all of those possible opportunities. I don’t know what’s going to happen because usually the party in power wins the midterm, but this time it looks like the rules changes, especially if the Supreme Court goes the way we think it might—the rules changes will determine who’s in charge of the country, at least the Congress.
I made the mistake of saying something on social media on X: “I’m uncomfortable living in a system where we pick our government based on rule changes.” There shouldn’t be rule changes; it should be votes. We should learn who’s got what policies and then vote. But when was the last time we had an election that was based on voters? It feels like it’s all based on, “Well, we’ve got a pandemic, so we’ll do it this way,” or “Well, we’re not going to do a regular primary if you’re a Democrat because Joe Biden, blah, blah, blah.” So it’s always all this little rule change stuff that’s determining who’s in charge instead of anything that looks like a democratic republic situation.
Some people said, “But Scott, are you arguing that they should not change those districts and things?” No! No. Of course, if the current law is racist—which is the claim—of course I want that to change so it’s not racist anymore. Of course I do. It’s just that: how can you be comfortable supporting the Constitution, supporting America, at the same time you’re completely comfortable that the government is picked by rule-changers? The courts. That’s just not a comfortable situation, even though I like it. If I had to choose, I would want the Supreme Court to throw out those special districts. But you get the point, right? It’s not a perfect world.
The “Big Balls” Case
Did you hear about the decision by the judge in the “Big Balls” case? You know, the Doge guy, “Big Balls.” He got beaten up by a gang of mostly young people in the streets of DC, and those people got caught. Apparently, they got a very light sentence—simple probation. So they beat the hell out of this guy, and they got probation. And the judge, a Black woman—which is important to the story—she said her job is to rehabilitate, not punish. Elon Musk weighed in on this, and he said this was a racist verdict by a racist judge.
Do you think that’s true? Now, his test is if you reversed the races and it had been a group of White people who beat up a Black citizen on the streets, that the White people would get a stronger sentence. Do you believe that’s true? I don’t think that’s proven. We believe it’s true, right? We believe it’s true. But check yourself. I would need to know that this judge has a track record of treating Black and White people differently. If so, then I completely agree with Musk. But if there’s no track record of that, maybe she’s just an easy judge. Can’t rule it out. But certainly, our antennas go up and go, “Hmm, it doesn’t look right.”
Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Analogy
During the court case, Ketanji Brown Jackson was using an analogy to make a point. She apparently analogized people with disabilities to Black citizens who are not being represented. Now, what do I tell you about analogies as an argument? Sometimes an analogy is a good way to make a point, to explain something that needs to be explained, but it’s never an argument. And here she is, a Supreme Court Justice, and she tries to use an analogy, and I think the analogy, as has been pointed out by others, proved the other point instead of the one she wanted. The analogy was to disabilities, and somebody said, “A disability is permanent,” but—well, it was a terrible analogy, and once again people are saying, “How did she become a Supreme Court person with that kind of thinking?” But that’s for other people to work out.
Trump and Venezuela
Apparently, Trump has now authorized the CIA to do some dirty work in Venezuela as part of trying to stop the drug traffic and maybe trying to overthrow Maduro. Did you know that the CIA wasn’t already working in Venezuela? So what exactly got approved? Did they approve doing dirtier stuff? I don’t know; it could get kind of wet.
And then Trump says that we took out another one of those drug boats—I think there’ve been five of them now that we blew up with missiles. Somebody asked why he’s doing that, and Trump said that every Venezuelan drug boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives. Now, I saw that reported on the news, and I saw it reported on social media, and I’m waiting for people to laugh at that. You’re not saving 25,000 lives every time you blow up a boat. That’s insane. Where would you even get that number? I think 100,000, maybe 80,000 people die of overdoses every year, and it’s not all fentanyl, but overdoses. And we’ve already blown up five boats—that would be 125,000 people we saved already, out of 80,000. It’s just a ridiculous number. Now, what I do think might be true is that each boat might have enough drugs to overdose 25,000 people. But they’re not all overdosing.
So the fact that Trump even puts that number out there, when you don’t have to be an expert at anything to know that that’s not even close to reality—but it still works. How many times have I told you that as long as he’s directionally correct, I don’t really care? I don’t really care about the details. Is he directionally correct that these drug boats are coming over and killing Americans at numbers that we think are shockingly high? Yes. Yes. The boats are full of death that will bring shockingly high bad results to the United States. So if he wants to sell that as 25,000 people saved per boat, okay. I don’t have any problem with that at all.
IRS and Alex Jones
There are reports that the IRS is going to be modified a little bit to make it easier for the Trump administration to go after the left-leaning major funders of bad behavior. Bad behavior being Americans who are doing illegal kinds of protests and stuff. So I guess this is a way to get to the Soros type of people who are putting money into the system in ways that we don’t exactly know and don’t like. So that’s happening. I don’t know how much of that reporting is true, but maybe. I think it all only involves personnel changes to get somebody who’s willing to do that work.
I asked yesterday: how would Alex Jones ever support himself now that he’s been sued for $1.4 billion and lost? Somebody said that one of the workarounds is he could just keep going to work, except that he would put the business—he’d create a new business in his wife’s name only, so that he could just be an employee for a dollar a year so he wouldn’t have any income to pay to anybody as part of the judgment, but that he would have all the same lifestyle because he would live in his wife’s house and work for his wife’s company, and maybe they would pay for his expenses and stuff.
Now, I don’t know how well that works, but let me tell you what would be wrong with this plan. First of all, it would make it impossible for him to ever get a divorce. So it would take the power—which might have been maybe he had more in his marriage, maybe it was equal—but as soon as you put all the assets in the wife’s name, and she knows that if he misbehaved and if she asked for a divorce, anything that he wanted in the divorce he’d have to give away. So he basically would just become his wife’s bitch forever. So I’m not sure that works. But I also am curious: how do you navigate that situation? How do you navigate owing $1.4 billion and having the court be able to attach any income you got for the rest of your life? What do you do? I’m genuinely concerned about him and curious about how to navigate that.
UN Shipping Tax and Russian Oil
The UN—there’s a component of the UN called the International Maritime Organization—they’ve proposed taxing all global shipments, seafaring shipments, and they would use that money for creating green shipping fuels. So basically, it’s a climate change sort of situation. Now, what do you think the Trump administration said when the UN proposed taxing Americans? No! How about no freaking way? We’re not going to give a taxing authority to some international global organization that never had it before. Not a chance. Didn’t we have a revolution in the United States because a foreign entity tried to tax us? And we said, “No taxation without representation,” and they said, “Well, we’re going to do it anyway,” and then we said, “You better get some guns because we have guns and we’re not going to pay that fucking tax.” Revolution time. And then the UN tries it. We would literally attack the UN before we would pay those taxes. I don’t know literally, but anyway.
There’s a report that India is actually moving to reduce their consumption of Russian oil. Now, that’s a gigantic deal because India and China are the main purchasers of Russian oil. If they can’t sell their oil because there’s a lot of sanctions and there aren’t too many people who buy it—if they can’t sell it to India, their economy will suffer and they may not be able to press their war forward as much as possible.
But there is a really big problem that I’ve heard about a few times that I think is real, that might suggest that Moscow or Russia is closer to a really bad situation than is obvious. So there have been something like 58 attacks by Ukraine on Russian energy stuff just in the last month or so, whereas the months before that it was just like a few. So Ukraine has massively increased the number of attacks on energy infrastructure. Now, if on top of that—because that wasn’t enough to stop the war—if on top of that India starts buying less Russian oil and maybe—although I don’t think this will happen—maybe part of the China tariff negotiations might be to see if they would agree to buy less Russian oil. I don’t think that’s going to happen because I think they want that Russian oil.
But India is more of an ally. So India looks like they’re actually moving toward alternative sources and that would be a gigantic deal. But here’s the part that some of you haven’t heard of: the pipelines have to be active or they self-destruct. Have you ever heard of that? So the oil pipelines—of which there would be numerous ones in Russia—they would be critical to moving the oil to where it needs to be. If they don’t have anybody buying the oil, like in real-time, at the end of the pipeline, and the pipeline goes quiet—meaning that the oil stays in there but it’s not moving fast enough to keep it from freezing—I didn’t even know oil could freeze. Did you know oil could freeze? But apparently, the pipelines can freeze if they don’t have anybody taking it out on the other end, and the entire pipeline would have to be replaced. The entire pipeline.
And it looks like Ukraine is getting close to that crossover point where as soon as the oil stops, what are they going to do? Just open the spigot and spill the oil into the ocean? Maybe they would, I don’t know. But so there’s some possibility that the combination of bombing the energy stuff, getting India to buy less of it, and then the just the temperature—because winter’s coming—it might destroy the entire Russian energy situation.
Now, obviously Ukraine has the same problem because they’re also being attacked in their energy infrastructure. But that whole pipeline thing is really a wildcard I didn’t know about. That might make a big difference. I also think that if the war in Ukraine goes the way it looks like—a robot energy war—I think Trump’s the only one who could get India to buy less oil. Would you agree? I don’t believe that anybody else would have the clout, or the personal relationship with Modi, or the reputation, or the recent successes, etc., that he would have enough clout to go to India and say, “I know it’s going to cost you a lot more, but stop buying this Russian oil,” and actually get India to do it. Would you agree that might be a “nobody else could do that” situation again? We don’t know if he’s going to pull it off, but I don’t think anybody else could pull it off. So that might be another win coming.
The EU Drone Wall
The European Union is going to build what they call a “Drone Wall” against Russia. So the drone wall would be technology, not an actual wall, but it would be a whole bunch of electronic and other means to shoot down incoming drones to protect Europe. So even a wall is now a good idea; so they can say “wall.” That’s another big change in the Trump world: they can say “wall.”
Conclusion
All right, ladies and gentlemen, it’s kind of a slow news day, so I’m going to wrap it up there. But I’m going to give you one more reframe from my book, “Reframe Your Brain.” I will somewhat randomly pick one because they’re all just golden. All right—oh, here’s one of my favorites. You may have heard this before, but this is the hypnotist reframe.
If you’re not a hypnotist, you probably go through life thinking that people are rational 90% of the time. 90% of the time they’re just rational, but 10% of the time they get crazy. Everybody—you know, me, you, everybody. But the hypnotist reframe is that people are only rational 10% of the time, if that. Once you realize that people are irrational pretty much all the time, and then they rationalize what they did—they don’t think it through, they explain it later, and sometimes that sounds dumb to other people—this is like one of those reframes that doesn’t seem like a big deal.
But let me tell you: once you realize that nobody’s ever—90% of the time—once you realize that they’re irrational 90% of the time, then that tells you how to deal with situations. If you thought people were rational 90% of the time, you would try to change their minds with reason and data. Have you ever tried that? It doesn’t work at all, does it? Your reason and your data. It’s because you were assuming that you’re talking to a rational player. You’re not, almost never. So instead, you use persuasion. You make them feel a certain way, and if you can make them feel a certain way, then they will rationalize decisions that make them feel better. So remember: 90% irrational, and then you’ll understand life.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to say a few words privately to my beloved subscribers on Locals. And the rest of you, thanks for joining. Little slow news today; it’ll be better tomorrow. And Locals coming at you privately in 30 seconds for an extra sip of coffee.