Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-20
Technical Difficulties and Opening
Good morning, everybody. Let me solve my technical problem. For some reason, my iPad died. Why, why, why? Stocks are looking good, Bitcoin’s up, it’s a slow news day.
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Well, like I said when you were first joining, there’s no news today. Do you ever wake up and there’s no news? There’s just no news. I’ll talk about the news, and some of it’s about science and stuff, but boy, they closed the government and all the fun stops.
Dilbert Comic Analysis
First, I’ll tell you about my comic that you can only see if you’re a subscriber on X or on Locals. I will just tell you that the boss is looking to hire an employee who’s got a neurochip in his head so he’ll be an advanced employee. But not only does he have a neurochip in his head, he’s got an entire micro data center in his head. So pretty soon, you’re going to be hiring employees who have micro data centers in their head. That’s my prediction.
Nearsightedness and IQ
I saw a couple of posts by a Dr. Nicholas Fabiano who found a few studies that were interesting on X. One of them is that apparently there’s a high correlation between people who are nearsighted like me—people who have glasses that are nearsighted—and higher IQ.
Do you know how they could have known that without doing a study? They could have asked me. I’ll tell you when I discovered this. Many years ago, when Dilbert first became a phenomenon, I was invited to speak at MIT. I go into this auditorium—and this was before LASIK, I don’t know if it was before LASIK was invented, but it was before it was popular—and I stood up there in front of that crowd with my glasses on. I looked into the crowd and I’m not positive, but I think every single person in the room was wearing glasses, and they were probably all nearsighted. I said to myself, “I’ve never seen this before.” I’ve never seen an entire auditorium of people wearing glasses at the same time. MIT is our smartest college. Dilbert actually graduated from MIT; that’s part of his backstory.
Depression and Mirror Neurons
Dr. Fabiano also found a study that said that depression can be contagious via the mirror neuron system. In other words, if you spend time around a depressed person, it can make you depressed. How many people didn’t already know that? Happy wife, happy life. Is there anybody who didn’t know that hanging around depressed people will make you feel bad if you do it enough? I think they could have saved some money on that one.
Generation 4 Nuclear Power
Here’s some good news. How many of you remember, if you’ve been with me since the beginning politically back in 2016 or so, I was talking all the time about Generation 4 nuclear power and how it was coming? It’s here, finally, 8 or 10 years later. There’s a first, I think it’s the first, Gen-4 reactor. It’ll be a small one that’s going to open up. It’s just what you think it is. It’s molten salt used as both a coolant and a fuel. It’s just going to be a little one-megawatt reactor and it’ll be a test to see if they can build the 100-megawatt, which they probably will.
So it looks like this technology is now well understood. The plan is that if they can build this in a factory—so they’re trying to make a small, easy-to-build, won’t-melt-down—won’t melt down is the important part, it can’t. It’s actually designed so it couldn’t melt down if you wanted it to. So won’t melt down and will be built in mass production in factories. They would build the components and then ship them out to the site, which would be way less expensive. So we might be—it’ll take a few years for this to get built and then it’ll take a few years for the big ones to be built—but I feel like we’re at Gen-4. I think we got there, people, if you were waiting for it.
Amazon AWS and the Internet
I guess last night while I was sleeping, the internet broke except for X. I guess the problem was with Amazon’s AWS cloud service that affects a lot of the big services. So a whole bunch of apps that use Amazon’s backroom processing all broke. They had one failure point at Amazon and it broke the entire internet except for X, because I guess Musk has his own secured internet. So everything went down except X, which is scary. But at the same time, isn’t it nice to know that X didn’t go down because you can do almost everything there? You can message; pretty soon you’ll be able to send money. Can’t send money yet on X, but you will. He’s already applied for it. That’s going to happen.
Yet again, another service that Elon Musk provides to the world. The list of things that one man is doing for the world to make it safer is just out of control now. It’s crazy. It’s crazy how much he’s done for the world and how much he probably will do because he’s still young.
COVID Vaccines and Cancer Study
Anyway, here’s a study that was designed to do nothing but make you mad. Are you ready for this? On one level, it’s a study about a thing, but the thing won’t even matter to you as soon as you hear it. You’re just going to get mad. Are you ready? The study that has no purpose other than to make you mad: University of Florida says they’ve got a study now that said that people who got the COVID vaccine lived much longer if they also had cancer. In other words, the study says that the COVID vaccine was one of the greatest cancer treatments of all time.
How do you feel now? Do you believe it? Do you believe that this would be reproducible? That they could do another study and find out that the people who got the shot—because this is opposite of everything you’ve heard, right? This is direct opposite of everything you’ve ever heard. Because the only thing you ever heard is that maybe people were more vulnerable, and maybe they were.
So do you think I know the answer? Of course not. I don’t know the answer. I don’t know if these shots made you more vulnerable or saved your life. No idea. But I’ll tell you what I know for sure: science doesn’t know. That’s what I know for sure, that the scientists don’t know. So do I believe this? No. Do I rule it out as completely impossible? No. But I don’t think I’m going to believe this one. I’m going to put a pin in that one. I’d love to know who funded it, wouldn’t you?
Trump’s Reframing of “King”
I’m going to give you some reframes this morning, but I thought I’d start with Trump’s because Trump had a reframe that was very impressive. The “no kings” thing happened and Trump responded to it, and he said this, quote, “I’m not a king. I work my ass off to make our country great. That’s all it is. I’m not a king at all.”
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a reframe. Because the normal way that you would respond to an accusation that you were trying to become a dictator would be what? You would say, “I’m not trying to become a dictator.” Would that move anybody? No. You might say, “I love the Constitution.” Then people would say, “Yeah, everybody says that.” It wouldn’t mean anything. “I love our Democratic Republic. That’s what I’m committed to.” Conceptual.
But when he says, “I’m not a king, I work my ass off,” he’s reframed it into a category where it’s hard to judge him, isn’t it? Because even his biggest critics will admit he’s working his ass off, right? So he retreats to something that even his biggest critics will grudgingly say, “Alright, well, he does work his ass off. That’s true.” So he’s already won half the battle because he moved them to a place where they agree with him. He works his ass off.
And compared to Biden, it’s really striking, right? So when he says, “I work my ass off,” it’s not exactly, specifically a defense against trying to become a king. But it is hard for you to hold in your head both of those thoughts at the same time. That’s what makes it so good. You don’t think of a king as working his ass off. You think of the king wearing the hat and telling other people to do stuff. But we observe that Trump is in the trench all the time, day and night, sleeps less than anybody you ever know, works harder, takes fewer vacations. He golfs a lot, but the golf is often work too. And so he creates this frame where you can’t really hold in your head the hard-worker part, which we observe and all know to be true, with the king part. That is brilliant. I don’t know if I can quite express how smart that is. It’s again the sort of thing that only a Trump can do. Other people can’t do this. They would just have some weak “I love my democracy, no they’re the ones who want to be the king.” But this is perfect. “I work my ass off.” It’s hard to argue with “I work my ass off.”
Reframe: The Smallest Step
I told you I was going to give you some more reframes and so I will, from my book “Reframe Your Brain,” my highest-rated book, five stars. It’s full of reframes if you didn’t know that. Let me give you one.
Suppose you want to do something big. Doesn’t matter what it is. You want to shop for a house or save up for a house, you want to decide to go back to school, you want to change your job. You want to do something, something big. Here’s a reframe for that. Quite often we don’t do it because the effort is so big and daunting that you can’t even start. Do you ever have that situation? There’s a thing you want to do but it’s just so big you don’t know where to start. Like maybe you want to relocate to another state. That’s like a really big job, right? So you don’t want to start because it’s just so big.
Here’s the reframe: What’s the smallest thing I can do that moves me in the right direction? Think of the smallest thing, not the biggest thing. Just reverse it. What’s the smallest thing? Usually, the smallest thing is to look for some information. So I’ll just use my example of you wanted to move to another state. First thing you do is you look up their tax code. And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s all you do that day. You just look at their tax and go, “Okay, they have lower state taxes so so far I’m good.” Maybe the next day you ask again, what is the smallest thing I can do? Well, I could maybe do a little research to find out what town would be the best town to live in that’s near wherever I think I want to work, for example, or my family or whatever.
The way you approach it is what’s the smallest thing you can do because what you’ll find is that there’s sort of a compound interest to it. When I wanted to become a cartoonist, I had to assemble all of these tiny little facts like: this is the kind of paper you want to use, this is the book that tells you where to send your samples, this is the kind of pen you want to use because other pens have problems for various reasons, it’s got to be three panels, you want all capital letters. So you assemble all these tiny, tiny little things that individually get you closer to this big thing.
And you realize that life is actually kind of long sometimes. Sometimes time flies, but other times life is long. How many of you remember when I decided I was going to teach myself to play drums? Was that like seven years ago? Probably seven years ago. And some of you watched me, and you watched eventually I got—I watched some YouTubes, but I eventually got an instructor who would come once a week. And I started assembling very, very slowly the skills to play the drums. Now, I didn’t want to play in a band, I just wanted to be able to knock around in my garage and maybe play to my stereo or something.
So those of you who are with me on the Locals app, you know that I’ve accomplished that. It took seven years, but after seven years I finally did a drum solo, playing over with some other music in the background for my audience. Now, was it good? No. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t trying to be great; I was just trying to do it. Now, the doing it was extraordinarily fun because I could feel the entire seven-year arc. It actually started with my stepson; I tried to get him into the drums when he was maybe 14 or something because I thought it’d be good for him. But he wasn’t as interested as I was, so to me it’s sort of a legacy that connects us across life and death.
So that’s my point. The point is that you can in many times do the smallest little thing. I can’t tell you how many times I would walk by the drums and say, “I’m going to try this one thing,” and I’d put 60 seconds of practice into it. And then the next day, maybe two minutes. That’s your reframe for the day.
Democrats and the “No Kings” Blowback
The “no kings” event happened and I’m happy to report there are no extra kings. There are no reports of any extra kings. So I think the “no kings” march did suppress any extra kings popping up. So far, so good. But the Democrats are apparently afraid of the blowback now that the “no kings” thing is over. They don’t have a reason to keep the government closed.
On Stepkids
“Scott, what do you think about becoming a stepfather? Many right-wing men don’t like it.” I’m going to answer that question even though it’s distracting from my topic because we don’t have much news today, so I’m going to just jump around.
What do I think about stepkids? Here’s the one and only way to think about stepkids: you have a separate relationship with them. That’s it. You have a relationship with the parent, but your relationship with the kids—that’s just separate. So you could like them, you could stay in their life if they want to stay in yours. If you get divorced, if they want to stay in yours—mine do. Mine do want to stay in my life and I want to stay in their life. So we have a separate, very good relationship, but they don’t live with me, but they’re also a certain age.
The second thing is that I always saw it as a package deal. So even though the relationships are separate, it’s still a package deal. So when you agree to be part of the parent’s life, you’re agreeing to be part of the children’s life too, as much as they want. It’s up to them. It’s always up to them. But as much as they want, I’m all in because they’re just excellent people. And I like having excellent people in my life. So the answer is it’s really individual. If I were scraping by and didn’t have enough money for myself, I would probably be regretting any kind of contact with any exes of any kind. But since I’m in a favorable situation financially, I can make their life a little easier and mine at the same time. So everybody wins.
Democrats and Diversity Support
Anyway, what are the Democrats going to do now that their “no kings” thing happened and it didn’t make any difference to anybody and it just showed that they don’t have anything? I think they proved that they don’t have much Black support because the protesters had almost no diversity at all. And they were mostly older people, and very few young men, the groups that they want to get. So if the Democrats wanted to win back the Black vote and win back the Hispanic vote and win back the young male vote, they did everything the opposite of that by showing all the people who are not that being their base, visually. So visually, I think it was a disaster for the Democrats because visually it was just grandparents. It was just old white grandparents, which could not be further from what they’re trying to make their brand, which is the diverse everything. So I would say visually it was a complete disaster, but not in a way that they will recognize. They’ll just be this continued drift toward fewer Democrats and nobody will be able to quite put their finger on what was the one thing that made that happen. Well, it wasn’t one thing; it was everything. This is just part of the “everything” that continues to push that ball down the road—no white guys, we don’t like men, just a little bit.
NYC Mayoral Race: Mom D’Atomy vs. Cuomo
Mom D’Atomy versus Cuomo and Sliwa. There’s a new poll, Gotham polling. I don’t know how reliable Gotham polling is, but they do say that if Sliwa dropped out, it would be close between Cuomo and Mom D’Atomy, and it would put Cuomo within striking distance. And some New Yorkers, even Republicans, would say, “Give us a Democrat, at least he’s a normal Democrat,” Cuomo being a normal Democrat.
But Sliwa is not looking to drop out. So if he doesn’t, then it looks like Mom D’Atomy would win quite easily. So there’s that. What do you think of the theory that letting Mom D’Atomy win and essentially sacrificing our crown jewel city for however many years might be useful for Republicans and maybe useful for the city because it would prove that he’s not the right solution and maybe we get another 20-year reprieve from that kind of thinking? What do you think? Do you think they’d be better off just eating the shit sandwich and then learning from it? I don’t know.
I was surprised to learn that New York real estate is coming back. That’s the last thing I would have expected. So if there’s one thing I can tell you about economics: nobody can predict it.
Prediction and Reality
I’m going to make you a little bit uncertain. Are you ready? When you came in here, you were completely certain that Mom D’Atomy’s approach was a bad one—communist, socialist. And that the normies had the right one—capitalism, free markets. You were completely right about that, right?
Well, here’s the thing. How many of you predicted that in the middle of the race to elect a socialist/maybe communist, in the middle of the race, that New York City real estate prices would go up and people would be coming back in and buying office space and it’s recovering? How many of you would have predicted that? To me, it was the most easy thing to predict wouldn’t happen, right? Because the situation in theory is getting worse and worse for a traditional business that doesn’t want to overpay taxes and doesn’t want to be in a crime area. So in theory, it would be the easiest prediction in the world that the real estate situation in New York would continue getting worse, at least during the election when there’s a chance of the communist getting in power. But it’s the opposite.
So this is where I’m making you feel uncertain, and one of the reasons that I have no respect for my own college degree, which is in economics. It doesn’t predict. I’ve told you in different contexts that the best you can do in understanding reality—because we’re not good at understanding reality—is whether it predicts. Well, the reality I was living in didn’t predict. Did yours? It didn’t predict that New York City real estate would already be recovering. Which reality predicted that? Not mine. Not mine at all.
You know whose might have? Mom D’Atomy’s. It’s entirely possible that Mom D’Atomy was expecting and predicting real estate to come back, and the argument would be there’s only one New York City. That’s the whole argument. There’s only one New York City. So if you want to play with the big boys, you’re going to have to come back. And he even thought Mom D’Atomy even wanted to raise taxes on corporations to match New Jersey, which is also clever, because matching—that’s a very clever way to do it. But obviously, he thought it wouldn’t destroy the economy, or even he wouldn’t be predicting it right.
So now let’s see if I succeeded. You walked in here completely sure that he was the one who was always wrong and you’re the one who’s right because you like the capitalism and the free market. Except his point of view is the only one that predicted correctly. Right? I’m just messing with you because obviously I don’t think his plans are the ones that are the good ones. But have a little bit of humility. Just back up to a little bit of humility. Looks to me like he predicted correctly and you didn’t. Looks to me like he predicted correctly and I didn’t. And in theory, I have more credentials than he has for this kind of prediction. I don’t know, just something to think about because it’s a slow news day.
Copyrighting Your Own Face
Apparently Denmark just decided that people in Denmark can copyright their own face. So if AI tries to use your face, there’ll be a copyright violation. I don’t know if that’ll last; that doesn’t seem like something that could last.
San Francisco Rebound
Anyway, here’s another surprise. Did you know that San Francisco—I think this was in Wall Street Journal—that even San Francisco is rebounding? Did you know that? They’ve got a good mayor—I forget the mayor’s name, but I heard people say they were happy about our current mayor. Burglaries are allegedly down 28% this year in San Francisco. Do you believe that, or is that just another one of those they changed the way they report it? Or people just stop reporting it? I feel like it’s both. But it might be true that it’s not getting worse. That might be true. And crime rates have dropped in general, and allegedly the number of homeless encampments in San Francisco has fallen, but I don’t have a percentage on that.
And then here’s another one: rents are up in San Francisco 12% over last year. Let’s do this again. How many of you predicted that San Francisco, of all places, would be able to raise rents in the middle of what looked like the city falling apart? How many of you would have said, “Oh yeah, those rentals will be up 12%.” Not me. I would have guessed that rents would have collapsed by now. So that’s two cities in which my ability to predict with all of my economics training is zero. Zero ability to predict. If you think you can do better, knock yourself out.
Candace Owens
Well, in other fun stories, let me say this about Candace Owens. I love Candace Owens. I like her personally—I only met her once very briefly, but she was very warm. And I love the show that she puts on. Not just the actual podcast, but the whole show. I like the way she inserted herself into the public mind. I just sort of like everything about what she does. Now, that’s different from agreeing with all of her takes. Everybody gets that, right? Do we ever get to the point where I don’t have to say that? Can we ever as a civilization get to the point where I can say “I like that public figure” without having to say “but I don’t agree with 100% of what they say”? We’re not there yet, right? I still have to do that. I don’t agree with 100% of everything she’s ever said.
She’s making some noise today. She says Charlie Kirk was betrayed and don’t worry about the gag order in the Charlie Kirk case—is that a gag order directed at her? I think so. She says, “I plan to violate it on the world’s behalf.” So she’s going to violate the court’s gag order on the world’s behalf. She says, “The things I’ve discovered this past week are enough to burn the house down and yes, Charlie was betrayed by everyone.”
All right now, do you see what I mean? How do you not love that? She’s so good, just so good at getting attention, which is her job, right? It’s what I do. She and I are in the same job in a way, which is to get attention. But you’re only going to get attention if you’re creating value, right? You could get attention for one day, but you can’t be Candace unless you can get attention just regularly, anytime you want. And wow, can she get attention. So good at this. If you simply—and you know I like to do this, I like to separate the person’s character from their skill level—in this case, I like her character and her skill level. But the skill level is just crazy, Candace’s skill level. Her talent stack is crazy. Anyway, so this is fun. We’ll keep an eye on that.
AI Chip Manufacturing in the US
According to Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, here’s more good news. It only took one year and apparently the U.S. is already manufacturing the most advanced chip for AI. Nvidia is working with TSMC, the Taiwan company. Apparently they moved some of its technology to the U.S. and working with Nvidia, so now the U.S. can make—not at the same quantity, TSMC—thank you, TSMC is the name of the chip company from Taiwan.
Anyway, they’re working together and now they can make the most advanced chip in the U.S. I assume that volume is probably still a big issue, but that’s a pretty big deal to me because it means that even if Taiwan sunk into the ocean, we could get going. We would have enough on our shores that we could reconstitute slowly. That’s a big deal.
China and Taiwan Analysis
But it probably also makes it far more likely that Taiwan will be destroyed by China because China will know that it’s not an existential risk to the United States anymore. I just realized this could be a double-edged sword. If you’re China and you’re not benefiting directly from the advanced chips on Taiwan but your biggest competitor is—the United States—would you worry too much if in the process of conquering Taiwan you destroyed the semiconductor business? You might not care as much as you should because then it would just put you at parity with your biggest competitor who has access to it now but wouldn’t if it got knocked down.
But now we can make those chips in the U.S. So now you’re China and you think, “Aha, I can totally overthrow Taiwan now because the U.S. won’t have to fight.” If they don’t want to and they don’t want to be in a World War, they don’t have to. But before, we kind of would have had to because we couldn’t let China take control of the chips that would be better than the ones that we could make. That’d be too big a risk. So it’s entirely possible that growing our own homegrown best-of chips will sacrifice Taiwan. It’s not impossible, you know? It’s not impossible.
Trump and the Government Shutdown
Apparently Trump is using the shutdown of the government to kill some projects. I didn’t know that was an option; I guess the Democrats didn’t know it either, but they’re finding out. Allegedly there’s some kind of $20 billion New York City tunnel project that Senator Schumer had spent years trying to get passed and finally did, and now because the government’s closed, Trump’s just going to cancel the whole project.
I don’t even know if Trump even looked into whether it was a good idea to do the project or not. I think it’s just Schumer’s project and he worked 20 years to get it. So he’s just going to cancel it on his ass. All right, that might be a little bit authoritarian. But I’d have to know if we really need this tunnel. I imagine that we can live without the tunnel and the $20 billion.
Palm Beach “Hunting Stand”
Anyway, there’s a story today that somebody built a hunting stand in a tree, which is where the hunters hide from the prey and then they can take a shot from their hiding place in the tree. They built one that had a complete view of Air Force One when it lands in Palm Beach. So the hunting blind had an open, wide-open shot at the President of the United States coming down the gate from his own airplane in a place where he’s known to land.
Now, the good news is that it was discovered, and it looks like it’s been there for a while. But we don’t know why it was there, and we don’t know if it was there for that purpose. But it would be a strange place for a hunting blind in a tree in Palm Beach, wouldn’t you think? I don’t know how many other hunting blinds in trees there are in Palm Beach, but that certainly looks exactly like what it looks like, doesn’t it? Bungee knots all over that one.
Government-Run Grocery Store Proposal
Apparently Boston is looking into having a city-run grocery store. Mom D’Atomy has talked about that. They haven’t done it yet, but did you know that Atlanta already has one? They have a city-run grocery. And I do not have an update on whether it’s working in Atlanta. I imagine they’ve got some challenges.
But it makes me wonder, is there a way to make a government grocery store work without getting rid of the regular grocery stores so the rest of us can have more choice? And I was thinking about that: what would you do if you were the government and you wanted—I don’t want to say compete, but you were going to have an alternative grocery store in the same place where there were regular grocery stores?
The first thing you’d have to do is make sure that the people who had money still preferred the regular grocery stores. And you could do that easily by having more junk food and more selection, right? Selection alone would get the people with money to go there. So the first thing you could do is have less selection if it’s a government grocery store. I think if you reduce the selection to just basics like vegetables and protein, you could probably find ways to cut costs like crazy because you just keep it simple. Like, okay, we have five proteins, just always the same.
But then, could you also do something that was direct from farm if you got rid of some regulations, because you are the government? So if you got rid of government regulations and said, “Alright, you can take your chances with the food because it won’t be regulated, but it’s coming right from the farm and we’ll give you all the information you want about the farm, but it’s up to the farm. And we’re going to possibly hold the farm blameless even if somebody gets sick from the food.”
So you’d have to handle the insurance risk of providing food to people, and the government could just say, “Yeah, you can’t sue. You can’t. Some people are going to die from the farm food. You can’t sue.” So if you did all of those things—you reduced the choice, you figured out how to get the footprint really low, maybe you even got some free rent, maybe you figured out how to use robots instead of employees, maybe you squeezed the big food producers for a little taste of something to help pay for it, maybe you had your own vertical, so you owned the farm but you also owned the grocery store.
My point is, if you started from scratch and said, “How would we build an alternative place to get food?”, could you do it? Is it even doable? I’ve always thought that the ideal would be that there would be like a cafeteria that you could go to that would be close enough everybody could get to it, maybe there would be multiple. But the cafeteria model would have less waste than individuals. If you shop for yourself and cook for yourself, it’s just so wasteful—the amount of time you spend, you have to drive somewhere and pick something up, you’ve got to store it, some of it goes bad, you’ve got to negotiate who gets what. Compare that to just everybody walks over to the buffet and you just get what you want.
So I do not rule out that there could be a government grocery store. I think if you rule it out because it’s never worked, that’s a good starting point. But that’s just the starting point for the analysis. You have to go past “it never worked,” you have to go to “what has never been tried.” If you get to what’s never been tried—well now, now it’s interesting.
Gaza Ceasefire
Well, you are not surprised to know that the Gaza ceasefire is not holding as well as people would like. But it’s unclear whether the leadership of Hamas has anything to do with it or is it rogue elements within Hamas. But there is some firing, there are some deaths. Israel is responding to the encroachments by cutting food, I guess, and aid. We hope that’s temporary.
Humanitarian aid is stopped or paused, I guess—mostly paused. And I feel like that’ll get worked out. So as I said yesterday, I’m not worried about the ceasefire as long as both sides have dramatically drawn down their military presence. There’s definitely going to be violations of the ceasefire. Every single person who’s been alive more than ten minutes knows the ceasefire is going to get violated. There wouldn’t be any point in even doing the deal if we thought a violation was going to overturn the whole thing. So of course we’re going to work through all the little violations.
Probably we will. It does make sense that there’d be plenty of people there who don’t want a ceasefire and will be acting upon it. But as long as they get the big weapons out of there—I guess Jared was talking about maybe a gun buyback program.
Non-Corrupt Government Design for Gaza
What was your first impression when you heard that, that they would do a gun buyback program with Hamas? Your first impression is “No,” right? That’s not going to work. They’re not going to sell their guns. My second impression was: we don’t really know the depth of their poverty right now. So if you owned a gun and you were Hamas and you owned a gun and the government offered you what was a really good price—a really good price—and you had no source of other money, and you also thought that the war was over, I think maybe half of them would sell their guns. Because money’s better than a bunch of bullets you’re not going to use, right? So I do like the buyback idea, but I think it’s—that’s only a dent. You can’t get all the guns with that. But if you got half of them, that’d be pretty impressive.
Wykoff and the two guys trying to figure out how to govern Gaza after that, which to me brings up this question: Is there a way to create a non-corrupt government even for just a city? Let’s call Gaza a city, even though it’s bigger than a city. Has anybody ever done it? I don’t think it’s even doable. I don’t believe there’s any form of government that you could just plop in the middle of a highly corrupt culture and then suddenly have it not be corrupt.
Now, when I say it’s a highly corrupt culture, I am not banging on one type of people. It’s everywhere. You could just take a pin and drop it on the globe and it would hit some corrupt place somewhere. Basically all cities are corrupt. So the question is, if you build the cities the way they’ve always been built in the past, what are you going to get? Well, corrupt Gaza, for sure.
But is there a way, similar to the conversation about the government grocery stores, if you were to throw away all assumptions—and this is what Jared I think is especially good at, throw away all assumptions—could you do it then? And who would do it? I’ve often thought that the number one thing you need to get right is that the people who are making the money decisions don’t live there. Because if you live there, you’ve got all these corrupt influences—that gangster you grew up with and the people you went to school with and your wife’s family who wants that contract. You can’t let the people who live there control the money; they will always be corrupt. They will just give it to their family members, etc.
So you need some kind of independent, physically-not-there entity to not only decide where it goes—where the money is spent—but then to watch it like a hawk and report on it so that everybody knows where it went. If you can’t get that part right, nothing else works. So somehow Jared has to solve the problem of what happens when money is introduced into the zone and then who gets to decide where it goes, who watches it, and who reports it to the people to make sure it went to the right place. If you don’t get that part right, nothing else matters. And that’s the hardest part to get right; nobody’s done it. As far as I know, nobody’s ever done it. I believe every city is corrupt. But if Jared could pull that off with some clever set of systems, it would be one of the greatest things that ever happened in the world. Think about that. The odds of pulling that off are pretty low—it’s a maximum challenge. But what if he did it? What if they pulled that off, Wykoff and Jared Kushner? What if they actually built a city that by its design—the systems they put in place—avoided corruption? Can you even imagine that? That would be one of the greatest things that ever happened in the history of humankind. So I don’t know what you’re working on today, but those two guys have a chance to change everything. Do they have a plan? Probably not yet. But do they have the skills that the two of them could conceivably come up with a way to build a non-corrupt zone? And I think yes. I think yes. I believe that they have the skill to do that. Doesn’t mean it will get done because there’d be a lot of pushback in every possible way. But yeah, they might be the only two dudes that could pull that off right now.
Ending Colombia Foreign Aid
Trump has announced an end to the Colombian foreign aid. I didn’t even know we were giving Colombia foreign aid, but apparently now they’re a bunch of illegal drug dealers too. Trump’s not happy with the President of Colombia, who is not happy with us. So Trump’s going to discontinue whatever our subsidies were for Colombia. I feel like the subsidies were for the purpose of fighting drugs, weren’t they? So is he saying that we’ve been paying Colombia to fight drugs but Colombia is actually the drug cartel and we’ve been paying the cartel? Is that what happened? I don’t know if that’s what happened. I’m seeing some yeses. So yes, if that’s even close to what’s happening—and I don’t know that it is—but if the government is embedded with the cartel and we were paying the government to deal with the cartel, well, maybe it’s time to stop doing that, huh?
Ukraine/Russia and Wind Turbines
You would not be surprised to hear, because it’s Groundhog Day all over again, Ukrainian drones struck a major Russian gas plant. How many times have I said that? Like every day, right? Every day there’s another Russian major energy structure that got attacked. So that’s happening.
And other positive news: Interesting Engineering has a story about a wind turbine. So it’s basically the fans of a windmill would be the turbine part. But apparently they’ve developed a new shape for the turbine. Now I don’t know what turbine means—if you say turbine enough, you don’t know what it means—turbine, turbine, turbine—now I don’t even know what it means. But it would be the little things that the air is bouncing off of. And they’ve figured out how to make one that boosts energy output by 83% with 35% less weight. Fiber composite rotors make a small turbine stronger, more durable. 83%.
Do you believe that? That they figured out how to make a windmill 83% more efficient all of a sudden with just a shape change? It’s just a shape, something easy to reproduce—a shape. Well, if that’s true, finally your dream can come true, which is you will be able to watch television even when the wind is just barely blowing. Of course, I’m joking—Trump always says that the windmills are no good because when the wind stops blowing you can’t watch TV, which of course is not true, but it’s hilarious every time he says it. And now I’m thinking: finally, we can watch TV when the wind is barely blowing. Maybe it’s so efficient, those little turbines, that you could have one on your house without making your neighbors crazy from the sound and the dead birds.
AI Scientific Papers
According to Elizabeth Gibney, who’s writing for Nature, AI bots have now reviewed—oh, there’s a conference coming, which is an all-AI paper conference. So the conference will have humans at it, but they’re there to see what would happen if AI wrote the scientific papers, submitted the scientific papers, and then—here’s the fun part—did their own peer review. So they’re doing a conference of AI-generated scientific papers that will be matched with the peer reviewers so that the humans who attend can see if the peer reviewers can add value to the AI papers. Does that make sense? Did I explain that well enough? So it’s not that the papers are going to be trusted more; it’s more about seeing how the human/AI scientific model works. I love this. I think this is exactly, exactly what they should be looking at to see what that looks like when you throw the AI in there.
Q&A: BlueSky
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I told you I’d be finishing a little early; there’s not much news happening today, which I suppose is good. But I did tell the people on Locals, my beloved subscribers, that I’d be taking some questions at the end about anything you want. So I won’t be able to see all of your questions because they zip by pretty quickly. But if you do have any questions on any topic at all, I’d be happy to answer them. All right, I’m just looking to see.
Question: “Trump’s government added the White House and departments to BlueSky social network so I subscribed. Wow, TDS is strong. What are thoughts including how those supporting should engage?” How should Trump supporters engage with BlueSky? So BlueSky’s the competitor to X that only the Democrats went to, basically. But the White House wanted a presence there, which is smart. I just would ignore it. Just ignore it. There’s nothing there for you. If it becomes more of a thing, then maybe someday you don’t have to ignore it, but at the moment I’d just ignore it.
Q&A: Marriage and Medical Update
“Can you reframe marriage for more success?” No, the individual relationship ones, you’d have to know so much about the individual situation. I can’t just reframe marriage, because some people ought to be married and some people ought to probably cut it out.
“Have my rodents returned?” I feel having two cats will probably eliminate my rodent stuff.
“Dog Not Barking says: I missed what you learned from your medical testing Friday.” I’ll give you that fast. So I’ve got terminal cancer, metastatic prostate cancer. There’s a drug that’s newly approved just this spring called Pluvicto. But you don’t get that unless you go through a scanning process in which they give you some radioactive juice to see if it lights up the tumors. Because if they can’t light up the tumors with the practice juice, then the real thing won’t do it either. So it’s a way to find out if this limited and expensive process would be applicable to me or not.
Now, the test was the most painful thing I’ve ever done in my life, by far, because I can’t lay on my back without extraordinary pain, and you have to lay on your back for 20 minutes. Extraordinary pain, just extraordinary. But it’s over, and I got through it, and it did light up—at least my reading of the tests. The doctor hasn’t read them yet, so it might be maybe I’m misinterpreting. But the reading of the test is that they lit up well. They had a high sensitivity, which is what we’re looking for.
So in theory, my doctor will look at that today, he’ll recommend it to a committee who decides whether or not that’s good enough for me to get that drug. If the committee says yes in a week when they meet, then it will be scheduled. But I don’t know how long it takes to schedule it, and there would be several applications. So it would be once a week for four or six weeks or something like that. And then it doesn’t work for everybody, right? Even if you’ve tested to see if it lights up your tumors, it’s not going to work for everybody and it’s not going to work as well for everybody. So there’s some chance that I will get substantial relief fairly quickly—within a matter of just a few weeks—because some people have. But it’s far more likely, maybe two-in-three chance, that maybe I get a little bit of delay in the whole dying thing but doesn’t change the arc of my life too much. That would be the most likely.
However, we’re at this weird point in history where there are all kinds of new things coming online every day—literally every day. There’s a new prostate cancer thing that looks like it might work if they test it a little bit further. So if I can extend my survival—and I don’t know how much I need to—but we’re at that period where if you can get that little extra, you might be able to get to the next thing. So that’s my game plan. My game plan is to try to get to the next thing without knowing what the next thing is, or even that it will exist. But there’s a non-zero chance—I’m not counting on this—but there’s a non-zero chance that the Pluvicto will just knock it out. It’s not a cure, by the way; it’s not marketed as a cure. But it could knock it back so much that if I don’t do chemo and weaken my immune system, I might be able to sort of keep it at bay without too much future trouble. Possible, not likely. Most likely is I slow it down and it rages back in a few months. Most likely. But that might be enough.
“How did I prepare myself for the painful mental scan?” Excellent question. How did I prepare myself? Well, I knew it would be bad, and I had the maximum pain relievers. But I had not practiced being in that position for that long because obviously it’s the most painful thing you could ever do in your life. So I didn’t know how bad it would be. That’s number one. If you don’t know how bad it will be, that helps; that helps get you in the room. Once you’re in the room, this is where the reframe “wanting versus deciding” comes in. Do you see how powerful this is? If I had simply wanted it, I could not have held out. No way. But I had decided. I had decided, meaning that you could put a hot poker through my forehead and I was going to hold on—there’s a thing you hold onto to keep yourself from wiggling. And I told myself, you could do anything to me. There’s no level of pain that’s going to make me move. This is my one shot, because I don’t have a plan B. There’s no plan B. This is the only plan I had to survive. So that’s a decision, that’s not a preference, right? So once you move it from preference to decision, it doesn’t make it easier, but it largely guarantees it’ll get done. You’re not always trying to make it easier; you’re trying to make sure it gets done. Because once it’s done, it’s done. That’s a full solution.
And then I also do a thing where I don’t try not to imagine it too much. When I have a dental appointment, I do that as well. If I know it’s going to be painful, I tell myself simply “Get out.” That’s another reframe. If it’s in my head, I just go, “Get out, get out, get out, think of something else, get out, get out.” And the less you think about it before you go, the happier you’re going to be. Because the thinking about it doesn’t help. So you just say, “Get out, get out,” every time you need to. So that’s two reframes: the wanting versus deciding, and then the “get out” so you’re not obsessing about it before it happens. I think that was a good answer to your question.
Reframing Public Opinion
“What is the best reframe for worrying about what people think about you?” ProVenge, yeah, I’ll look into ProVenge. Oh, how to reframe if you think people are thinking bad things about you. The basket case theory is one. That’s not the one I was going for, but that is also correct. If you remember that everyone’s a basket case, then you’re not going to feel bad about you being one. That’s a very powerful reframe; it’s one of my favorites. You just—once you realize that once you get to know somebody, they’ve got all kinds of problems that you didn’t know about until you knew them really well. And once you realize there’s no such thing as the people who seem to have no problems—they don’t exist. There’s nobody like that. Once you realize that you’re just like everybody else, but your problems might be different, but you all got—you all have your things, right?
But here’s one that’s even better: nobody cares about you. They’re not even thinking about you. You imagine that people are having all these negative thoughts about you. If they do, it lasts all of one second in their head. It doesn’t matter. People don’t care about you. Your family does, but that’s not what you’re talking about, right? You’re not talking about your loved ones. You’re talking about coworkers and people you run into in the street and stuff like that.
So here’s where I learned that. Many years ago, I did laser surgery on my face to correct a bunch of spider veins that were sort of in the mask of my face. Now, I was told by the laser professional that my face would look all purple and it would look like I had gone through a windshield and it would last for about three weeks and I probably didn’t want to go out in public looking that way. So sure enough, I get the treatment, my face is all purple and it looked like I’d just gone through a windshield. So obviously, I don’t want to leave the house.
So day goes by, and I’m bored. And I’m thinking, “Three weeks, wow, that’s a long time not to leave the house.” And the second day comes and I’m bored and I just want to go shopping, just to get out of the freaking house. And I say to myself, “What would happen if I just didn’t care what anybody thought? What would happen if I just do go to the mall with my face that looks like I just went through a windshield? What would happen?” So I went to the mall. Nobody gave one shit what I looked like. Nobody stared. Nobody asked me about it. Nobody showed the least bit of interest in whatever it was I was going through. Not any. Not a glance, not a stare, not a child—there was no child going, “Oh, what’s wrong?”, nothing. And once you get a big dose of nobody cares—oh my god, the freedom. The freedom that that gave me. It was actually one of my more memorable days of my life because that’s when I realized for sure that I didn’t have to worry about what other people were thinking about me, because they weren’t thinking about me. They just weren’t. They just were not thinking about me. They think about themselves. So if you want to be liked, help people think about themselves. That’s what the Dale Carnegie course does. If you want to be liked, your job was not to make them think better about what your face looked like. That wasn’t the job. The job was to make them think about themselves if you want them to like you.
Wrap up
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I would say we’ve done what we needed to do here. Hope I’ve changed your lives a little bit, just a little bit. And we’ll come back and do this tomorrow. There will be real news sometime this week and we’ll get back to what we usually do. But in the meantime, I’m hoping all these reframes are making you more powerful and happier.
All right, everybody good? All right, everybody. I won’t be talking to the Locals people privately because basically what I just did is what I would have been doing. But I will see you tomorrow, everybody. Maybe tonight I will do another drawing class for the Locals people, but I don’t know yet. Bye for now.