Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-25
The Simultaneous Sip
There you are. Come on in. There’s still room up front if you want to grab a chair. Grab a chair, grab a beverage. I’ll check your stocks for you. Oh, looking good. Your stocks are up. Even your Bitcoin is up a little bit. How’s your Tesla? Ooh, Tesla’s down. Nvidia’s up. Nuclear’s up. Well, let’s do a show, huh? You guys ready for this? You should be.
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. If you’d like to try to take a chance and elevate your experience up to levels that nobody can even really understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid—I like coffee—and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It’s called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. Go.
Reframe: Who You Know vs. How Many People You Know
After the podcast today, as tradition requires, Owen Gregorian will be hosting a Spaces event on X. Just look for Owen Gregorian, or you can go to my X feed. I’ve also reposted it, and you can get a little more. But first, according to our other tradition that we’re developing, I will read you a new reframe from my book, Reframe Your Brain, changing all of your lives one frame at a time. Remember, not all of the reframes are for every person.
A typical frame that you may have heard all your life is that success depends on who you know. Have you ever heard that one? It’s really who you know. If you know the right people, then you can be successful. I’m not going to say that’s untrue. I’m just going to reframe it more effectively. Instead of saying it’s who you know, which is sort of discouraging if you don’t know anybody who’s useful, a better reframe is how many people you know.
If I tell you it’s based on how many people you know, you instantly know what to do. “Oh, you mean if I joined some kind of social group and met a bunch of people, I’d be better off?” Yes. “You mean if I went to my family reunion instead of staying home, I might be better off?” Yes, that’s what I mean. It doesn’t matter who’s there; it matters how many people you meet over your life, because it’s a numbers game. If you meet enough people, somebody’s going to have the thing you want, the connection you want, or somebody will know the person you want to meet. Numbers. Go for numbers. That’s your reframe of the day: it’s not who you know, it’s how many people you know.
Interest Rate Cuts
Newsmax and others are reporting that there’s going to be maybe as many as three interest rate cuts from the Fed in the coming months. That would be cool. I guess the inflation went up a tiny bit, but it could have gone up more, and so I guess it’s still low enough that the Fed doesn’t mind stimulating the economy. So that’s good news.
Climate Models and Media Gatekeepers
Michael Shellenberger has an exclusive. We’ve been talking forever about how the climate change models have not borne out, and as part of that, we’ve talked about how the sea-level rise never really rose as much as the climate models said that they would. The new part that Michael is adding is that the experts always knew that the water level numbers were fake.
Did you hear that? The experts always knew that the rising sea level story was not based on science. That’s what Michael has uncovered. He had exchanges of 50 emails with one particular sea-level expert, but some others as well, and he basically has a whistleblower. He has somebody who is one of the greatest experts in this domain telling him that it was never real and that they knew it. Sure enough, 30 years later, the sea level has not risen in any alarming way, and they always knew it. I’m going to recommend his article in Public. Michael Shellenberger—if you’re not following Michael, what are you doing? If you’re on X, follow Michael Shellenberger. Just do it. You don’t have to research it. Just take my word for it.
Wouldn’t that be the biggest story in the world? If it were up to you to decide what the big stories are today, would the big story be about the ballroom? No. If it were up to you, this would be the biggest story of the last ten years: that the scientists have been lying to us about a multi-trillion dollar thing that changed all the economies in the Western world and maybe even destroyed some of them. What would be a bigger story than this? Even if you thought there was another side to the story, it wouldn’t matter. It would still be the biggest story.
Years ago, I heard this story, but I don’t know if it’s true. I think it is. It’s one of those stories that if it isn’t true, it still tells you what I want to tell you. I believe that the Watergate story that was broken in the Washington Post—somebody can fact-check me while we’re live—is it true that there was some smaller publication that already had that story? That’s what I heard at the time. I heard at the time that there was some small newspaper who was reporting Watergate just the way the Washington Post eventually did, and they didn’t get any attention.
Do you know why that is? It’s the Michael Shellenberger thing. Somebody—and it’s not you, and it’s not me, and it’s not Michael—somebody decides what the news is. Did you know that? Somebody decides what the news is. It’s not what’s happening. It’s not what’s important. Somebody literally decides what you’re going to think is the news, and everything else they’ll ignore.
The two entities that decided what was the news back in the Watergate days were the Washington Post and the New York Times. So the fact that the Watergate story had been—again, I need a fact-check on this, but even if it’s not true, the gatekeeper thing is still true—that there were only two entities that could tell the world if it was a story. Otherwise, they just ignored it. And then, if you were a small outlet, you knew that if you had just your own little weird stories that were not also in the big outlets, nobody would take it seriously. The reason that Michael Shellenberger’s scoop will get less attention than it should is because he’s not a newsmaker. That’s how the real world works.
Dismantling the Global Engagement Center
You’ve heard of the Global Engagement Center. That’s one of the things that under the Trump administration and DOGE, we found that there was this thing called the GEC. We heard a lot about it from Mike Benz. Paul Sperry is reporting that the State Department has officially dismantled it. Why do you care? Because it was an entity for censoring, mostly conservatives. It was trying to look like it was something else, but it was really just censoring conservatives. I guess they had impact on the Daily Wire, the Federalist, and a bunch of other news sites that would be, let’s say, not associated with the left.
Seeing Myself on X via Bill Maher
I think all of you are aware of my current health challenges, and so you would be aware that after I’m done with the show, I get into major pain management mode, which I don’t do before the show because I wouldn’t be able to talk. Last night, I was in my man cave. It was probably after 8:00 at night, and I was winding down for the night.
Winding down in my particular case means I’ve taken my strongest pain meds, and they’re really going to knock me out. But because it’s legal and because I can and because it helps, I smoke a massive amount of marijuana before I go to bed. Since I’m a chronic, lifetime marijuana user, I have to smoke quite a bit before I get the effect that somebody else would get. So I’m quite dedicated to removing my pain and getting a good night’s sleep, so I was really hitting it hard. I was probably more zonked out and higher than I’ve been in years, maybe. It was all safe; I’m literally just in my own home, and I’m ten feet away from where I’m going to sleep for the night, so it’s not like there’s any danger or anything.
But I’m sitting there and I have my phone on, and it’s playing videos from X. The videos on X will automatically play. You don’t have to advance to the next one; when one is done, another one pops up. All of a sudden, I look over and there’s Bill Maher on my phone, and he’s talking about me. I had this moment where I’m thinking: am I just really high, or did my phone just start talking about me? My phone’s talking about me! Damn it, what’s my phone saying about me?
Sure enough, Bill Maher decided to rip on me and Mike Cernovich last night on his show. So it was a clip from the show about me. Earlier that day, Jesse Watters had also been talking about me on The Five. I’m just trying to get through the day, people, and my phone keeps talking about me. Shut up! Stop talking about me.
Anyway, here’s what Bill Maher’s complaint was. As you know if you’re my regular audience, you know that I’ve been trying to talk Bill Maher out of his belief in the January 6th insurrection. If he can get past that, he might understand what’s happening. And he’s so close. So I’m rooting for him, at the same time that he’s not exactly on my team, if you know what I mean. But I very much would like to see him make a complete awareness event. He’s halfway there. I mean, the fact that he learned that Trump is not a monster in person is a pretty big deal. But he still has some beliefs about January 6th and things that are just bat-shit crazy.
I’m pretty sure that my criticism of him on that topic may have gotten through the filter. I don’t think he even looks at social media, so it would have had to be somebody who told him. But the fact that I got on his target list at all suggests that I maybe broke through some kind of barrier to get to him.
The way he decided to include me and Cernovich in his monologue is by saying that the TDS is not limited to the left, and that there’s a derangement syndrome that the people on the right have. He decided that I would be a good example of somebody who is not understanding reality. Me—literally one of the most prolific debunkers of fake news in the history of fake news. Who’s done more of it than I have? I mean, except for the websites that do it full-time, America Debunk for example. But I’m literally famous for getting it right. I was on Bill Maher’s show once in 2016. Do you know what I predicted? I predicted that Trump would win back when almost nobody was doing that. He didn’t remember that, probably.
Here’s what he surfaced to show that I’m a nutbag. He surfaced two of my best predictions of all time because he thought they were false. Number one prediction was in 2020 when I said if Biden gets elected, you could be dead in a year. And the other one was if Biden was elected, Republicans will be hunted. Those are considered by the political right as two of the best predictions ever made by anybody at any time.
Is it true that Bill Maher doesn’t know about Charlie Kirk? Did he not hear about that? Does he not know that Trump got shot in the ear once and maybe almost shot another time? Did he hear about that? What about the health care guy? Do you think he was a Democrat? I don’t know, maybe he was. What about the January 6ers? See, this is the problem. Bill Maher still thinks that the January 6ers were treated appropriately. He doesn’t know that was just hunting Republicans.
Bill Maher still has a blind spot for that, and obviously his problem with the January 6ers is that nobody will do the one simple test that I recommend if anybody wants to know what’s going on with the January 6ers. Ask any person who was there, any January 6er, ask them if their intention was to overthrow the government or to make sure that the government had correctly chosen the right person. Which one was it? Because it’s not illegal to ask your government to make sure it correctly chose the right person. That’s why they were there.
And somehow, Bill Maher is the last person on earth to know why they were there. I guess he believes that if there were 2% of them were unambiguously violent—and I don’t think there’s a single Republican who thought that the people who were unambiguously violent should go unpunished. I’ve never heard of one Republican say that, or even a MAGA person or anything. He’s living in this sort of fantasy about January 6th.
But Maher has said explicitly that his main view around Trump revolves around January 6th and what that implies about him wanting to stay in office as a king or something like that. So his whole worldview will be collapsed once he realizes what they did to him on January 6th. And what I mean by “they” is the news. The news reports that it was a bunch of insurrectionists, and he somehow has believed that. Nothing like that happened. Nothing like that happened in the real world. It was a bunch of people who wanted to prevent an insurrection, very overtly and obviously, and they will tell you, and 100% of them will tell you the same thing. There’s no other side to that. There’s no two sides to that. Nobody was there, not even a single person, to overthrow a government. As if they would show up without guns to overthrow the government.
The fact that Bill felt, or his probably his writers thought that they needed to work me into the mix and Cerno into the mix—let me ask you this question: what do Mike Cernovich and I have in common relevant to Bill Maher’s show? At the moment, there’s no way that either of us would ever be invited as a guest, right? It’s kind of easy to go after us, isn’t it? Because he has a show where you would normally invite as a guest, because he’s not afraid of inviting guests who disagree with him. You would normally invite a guest who had that level of disagreement with you to come on the show and act crazy, so he could show his audience how crazy I am. But he would also, because Bill Maher’s a fair guy, he would allow me to have my time to say my piece.
Do you think he knows that if I went back on the show—I’m not going to go back on the show because health reasons, but if I could go back on the show—do you think he doesn’t know that I would destroy his entire worldview? He might. There aren’t many people who can destroy somebody’s worldview in a five-minute media hit, but I’m one of them. I’m one of them. It wouldn’t work with every person, but it would definitely work with a thinking person. He’s a thinking person who’s smart enough to know what I’m saying and know his own argument and know how it all fits together. He’s definitely smart enough for that and knows my skill set. Give me five minutes and I will dismantle his January 6th illusion and he will be free. I can free him. Now, I don’t think it’ll happen because my window’s closing faster than that could happen. But maybe Cernovich. Maybe. So I would certainly be delighted to see Mike Cernovich get invited as one of the special guests, not one of the panelists. I think Mike’s too important to be a panelist. I think he needs to be one of the special guests that he talks to for a few minutes up front. I would certainly trust Mike to take forward any argument that I would have taken forward. If it’s a good argument, he could do it. If it’s a bad argument on my end, he wouldn’t do it. So I would be comfortable with that.
Elizabeth Warren and the Ballroom Investigation
Elizabeth Warren wants to launch an investigation into this whole ballroom thing. Watching Trump completely own the Dems with his ballroom is not going to get less funny. It’s just going to get funnier because they keep doubling and tripling down on the least important thing in America. Stop somebody on the street and say, “Could you list your biggest three worries in America?” “Oh, it was the national debt, and it was nuclear war, but now, now it’s that ballroom. Have you seen it? Have you seen it?” Everything about that is funny.
But launching an investigation because she wants to find out if the big companies that are going to help fund it are going to get any favors in return. To which I say: Really? You don’t understand that’s how the whole city works? Of course they’ll get some favors in return. That’s why they do it. But it’s not as clean as a favor. It’s more like who’s on your side. And then maybe someday that’ll matter. But it’s not like you need to figure out what would be the specific favor that’s being traded for this. Probably no specific favors. Probably more along the lines of if one of these billionaires calls Trump, and maybe had contributed toward the ballroom, he might call them back a little faster. Isn’t that the way the whole town works? Are we going to try to get rid of that? That’s like the operating system of the whole government. It’s not just Trump. So if you get rid of—why don’t you get rid of AIPAC and get rid of all the special interests, get rid of all the lobbyists, and then get back to me about this ballroom? It’s just all the same thing. Do I love it that people are donating money and might get special access? No, don’t love it, but it’s a universal truth. It’s not something that just popped up with this ballroom. Anyway, so that’s weak and stupid, but it keeps Elizabeth Warren busy, and that’s important. As long as Elizabeth Warren is working on that, she’s not working on anything that will hurt Trump.
Disaster Film Iconography
Brian Stelter took it to a new level of crazy by posting about—there’s a movie critic named Richard Roeper who on X shared a photo of the White House demolition and then did some movie imagining. He imagined it was from a disaster movie from some famous person. And then Roeper said that he thinks that maybe one of the reasons that people are getting so worked up about the East Wing is that he thinks disaster film iconography is a factor.
Now, how far away from reality can Democrats get? Trump just says we don’t have enough room for a proper ballroom, so I’m going to build one, and I’ll get these other people to pay for it hopefully. Is there anything about that that seemed weird or inappropriate for the country, or something a president shouldn’t be doing? Making the country look good by having a proper facility for greeting people? No, this is the Democrats. It was getting people all angry because of the disaster film iconography. And then Brian Stelter thought that was such a good point: that because it looks like a horror movie scene, that people are reacting as if they were watching a horror movie and that would explain why they’re so worked up.
No, people. Can I simplify this for you? It’s just TDS. It’s only TDS. TDS explains 100% of what we’re observing. There’s nothing left over. You don’t need to add in disaster film iconography. If you ever find yourself trying to improve on an explanation of what happened in the real world by adding disaster movie film iconography, you will not be invited to anything that I’m at. The only explanation for the intense reaction is that the news told people to have an intense reaction. If the news had told people, “People, it’s just another one of these upgrades in the White House. There have been several. Obama built a basketball court, Kennedy built a pool, blah, blah, blah.” If they had reported it that way, do you think the public would be all worked up? Of course not. The public doesn’t make up its own opinions. The public is assigned opinions, and they assigned the opinion that this was a big, big deal and you should get really worked up about it. And they’re actually trying to sell it as a metaphor for Trump’s other activities. So you want to stop that metaphor? What? Do we really need to get involved in stopping a metaphor? Why? None of it makes any sense at all.
CNN’s Contradictory Messaging
CNN has—J-Plemons was pointing this out on X—that CNN pivoted from “Trump is destroying the White House” to “Trump is renovating the White House because he’s planning to stay for a third term.” So they had these two competing messages, and I think they didn’t realize they don’t fit together. But J did. You can’t have both. He’s not destroying the White House but also improving it so he can stay there for a third term. Pick one. He’s either destroying it or he wants to live there forever.
And by the way, this whole third term thing—I floated the idea that it’s actually kind of brilliant by Bannon. Because if you think that you can just wait Trump out, just say, “All right, it’s only three years, we’ll just wait him out,” then he loses his power. Maybe not yet, but certainly the last two years of his term he would lose all his power because they’d say, “We’ll just wait. Two years is not that long.” But if you think there’s any chance that he might be here for a third term, you’re going to say to yourself, “Too soon. We better not try to take him out too soon because if we try to take him out and it doesn’t work, he’s going to be around for another six years and he’s going to come for us.”
So I don’t know what’s in Bannon’s brain, and it’s always a mistake to imagine you can read the mind of somebody who knows more than you do, especially on this topic. But it does seem to me that there’s plenty of room in there for what looks like a crazy idea to be a brilliant idea but not really about a third term. There’s no real risk of a third term in my opinion. But if they think there is, it gives them something to talk about that doesn’t affect us much. It’s like the ballroom. It just gives them something to talk about because they need something to talk about. But it won’t make much difference to the real world.
Mondaire Jones and Democratic Leadership
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries finally is endorsing Mondaire Jones for Mayor of New York. Now, some say that would be the end of the Democrats because once you get a top Democrat endorsing him, now all the whatever it is that we don’t like about Mondaire can now be transferred over to all Democrats. When there were no top Democrats endorsing him—so Schumer has not endorsed him as far as I know, and Hakeem Jeffries had not until today endorsed him. So as long as the top Democrats are not endorsing him, they could have a little distance and say, “Well, you know, that’s his race. We’re doing our thing; he’s doing his thing.” But now that Jeffries has endorsed him, it seems to me that all the stink will be on both of them, and there’s no way around it.
But here’s the bigger issue. The Democrats had this gigantic hole in their leadership, as in no leader. Of course, Jeffries tries to be the leader, but wasn’t doing much of a good job. Chuck Schumer tries to be a leader, but he’s literally pathetic. The one word that you would most use for Chuck Schumer would be pathetic, right? He just sort of looks pathetic. So they didn’t really have any leadership.
But as soon as Hakeem Jeffries may have known that if he endorsed Mondaire, it kind of makes Mondaire the leader of the party. It makes him leapfrog both Jeffries and Schumer, and he only needed one of them to say, “You’re okay. I’ll endorse you.” So it probably made sense for Jeffries to hold back as long as possible because he knew that the moment he endorsed him, Mondaire would leapfrog him in terms of leadership brightness. He would just shine a little brighter than the top guys.
Now, what would it take for Mondaire to literally be the leader of the Democrats in the way that even the other Democrats would agree? Because they would not agree with that assessment today. What would it take? All it would take is for Mondaire to come up with policies that other Democrats say, “Well, that’s a policy. Why don’t we do that?” The affordability thing, I hate to tell you, is brilliant. Affordability as a rallying cry for Democrats: absolutely brilliant. Can he do that again? I don’t even know if he did it or if somebody advised him of it. But whoever came up with affordability, that was the professional. If there’s a hypnotist in the woodpile there somewhere, maybe a professional persuader who came up with affordability, whoever it was is not the normal Democrat. The normal Democrat just isn’t that good or that smart. Because affordability isn’t just a good play; it’s a base-clearing home run. You don’t see that very often. So it’s just amazingly the right play. If he can do that more than once—let’s say affordability is one domain—if he can do that with maybe another domain or two, he’s the leader of the party. Because nobody else has any ideas, and certainly not as clever as that one. So I think we just saw the keys being handed off to the new leader of the party, because he’s certainly going to win, everybody thinks. Anything could happen, but at the moment it looks like he will certainly win. And he’s got policies. And if he can make even one thing work in New York, two years from now—he can’t run for President because of where he was born—but he might be the leader of the party.
Election Hacking and Foreign Interference Claims
Tulsi Gabbard said back in April, “We have evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to hackers for a very long time and vulnerable to exploitation to manipulate the votes.” So we know for sure that the machines at least had some vulnerabilities, which is different from knowing that anybody cheated.
Separately, I’ve been following and I’ve been telling you about this: the Rasmussen Reports account on X is a lot of fun. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. So if it sounds like I know what’s real, turn that off for the next five minutes. I don’t know what’s real; I only know what people think is real. And there are a lot of people who think the 2020 election was stolen, and there’s this book called Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies. What Rasmussen is doing is reading that book, which apparently is well-researched, giving the page numbers, and then telling you some provocative things from the book that I never heard. These are things I never heard before. But apparently somebody who has enough credibility for at least Rasmussen and other people reading the book—I don’t have an independent opinion about the credibility of this. I’m going to report it because it’s fun. It’s sort of fun to see that maybe Trump is winning on every domain everywhere. He’s just winning everything everywhere. And the big one would be if we could get a definitive answer if the 2020 election was rigged. And again, I personally don’t have definitive information about that. I don’t want to get sued and act like I do; I don’t. But I also don’t know if this book is credible or not credible, and I have no way to really know.
But here are the claims, as broken down by Rasmussen. So you should just follow Rasmussen on X. That China provided the money to run the system—this is our election systems—and they build the election machines, meaning that Chinese technology is in our election machines. And then they’re sent to a warehouse in Taiwan, the machines, where they’re repackaged and loaded with Smartmatic software. So that’s the claim in the book; it’s not my claim.
And then China also owns, because they own Huawei, these massive servers in Serbia that are used to store voting data and run the system. Remember you heard that there were servers in Serbia that had our American data information and you thought to yourself, “That can’t be right. That can’t be true. There’s no way that our voting information in real-time is being sent to Serbia during an election.” But the claim is that it is. So there’s a claim that that’s exactly what happened.
Iran apparently provided some technical services; that’s the claim again, allegedly. And they also helped pay for it. I don’t know about the Iran connection. But apparently the Iranian foreign minister reportedly on our election day in 2020 was in Venezuela to watch the steal. Now, again, I can’t confirm that any of that’s true. Russia allegedly supplied some engineers to help run the electronic voting system. I’m not sure I believe that. And that Cuba was involved with some engineers. So I’m going to say as I read through the claims: I do not find them credible. Doesn’t mean they’re fake, but that’s more countries than I would expect to be involved in a top-secret plot. I don’t see that this many countries could be in on this and it wouldn’t have been easily uncovered. So make your own decision about how credible that is.
The Source of Wokeness
David Sacks on the All-In Pod had a fascinating thing to say about the source of wokeness. Now, I know you’re going to say that companies had to act woke because they were partly owned by BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard, who own parts of a lot of the biggest companies. And apparently they were putting pressure on them to do ESG and DEI, etc. So we kind of most of us knew about that. But what I didn’t know—and this is what David Sacks explained—is that most of the stocks, or maybe half of all stocks, are owned by index companies, companies that just say, “All right, we will own all of the S&P 500 stocks.”
So if you’re an index fund and you also have to vote with shareholders, you don’t really want to be in the business of making decisions for each company in your index fund. So you buy a service. You buy a third-party service—I heard it listed but I didn’t see how they were spelled—something like Glass Lewis and ISS. Give me a fact-check on those two company names. But they’re two companies that exist just to help the index funds vote on all the many stockholder votes that come through if you own stocks. So they don’t have to make a decision, the whoever owns the index fund or runs it. They just say, “All right, you guys, we paid you to make our decisions. Did you vote on these?” “Oh, yes, we did.”
So that gave those two companies an immense amount of power, because if the companies would say, “We’re thinking of going ESG or DEI,” these two proxy companies would say, “Oh yeah, yeah, get yourself some ESG and some DEI. We’ll vote for that.” So if you thought that things became the way they are because the public sort of coalesced on those opinions and then public preference got expressed through our various organizations and businesses, it didn’t happen that way. Nope. The public was assigned to their opinion by a few companies that had a profit motive. We were assigned those opinions. It did not happen organically. Unbelievable. Now, how many of you knew that? That’s the first time I’d ever heard that. It’s like one of the foundational understandings of how anything is happening in the United States. Just foundational. If you didn’t know that that’s where this came from, you would be all, “Where’s this come from?” That’s where I’ve been for years. For years I’ve been, “Where exactly did this come from?” Like, whose idea is this? And then you automatically blame George Soros for everything. I don’t know if you do, but sometimes I do. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe this one wasn’t Soros. But it might be him a little bit too.
Optimus Robots and Mining
Also on the All-In Pod, Chamath and Friedberg were saying that Optimus robots might colonize Mars, but they could unlock the rare earth minerals on Earth. So apparently, if you could just be a little bit better at getting the rare earth minerals, if human beings could take more pressure and heat than a human being could take, we would have access to way more minerals because we could put humans in there to mine them and they could handle the pressure and the heat. But humans are weak, and we cannot handle much pressure and heat. Robots, however, could handle more pressure and more heat.
So the thinking is that if you get the robots to be able to mine—and we’re probably right at the precipice of being able to do that—if you throw enough robots at the mine, humans don’t get injured and the robots can go down to that next level of rare earth mining availability where apparently there is lots of rare earth. So we don’t have a problem with finding it or mining it; we have a problem with staying alive while we’re mining it. And that might be solved entirely by robots because they’ll stay alive, so to speak. So sometimes your biggest problems could be your smallest problems. It’s entirely possible that in 18 months we’re going to have armies of robots digging through the ground, getting all this rare earth, and suddenly the problem is solved, including the processing. Now, the processing is also environmentally destructive, but we could probably do better at that.
Mondaire Jones and Credibility
Speaking of Mondaire, there’s some controversy about whether he has ever used the phrase “Global Jihad,” because if he ever used it in a positive way, that would look like he just wants to be part of the taking over the world for the benefit of the Muslims, which would not be too popular in the United States. He says he has never endorsed a Global Jihad, and nobody has any evidence that he did. He has never supported a Global Jihad, and there’s no evidence that anybody has that he ever did in public.
He has, however, taken pictures with people who do. He does, however, have supporters who totally are on the Global Jihad side of things, and he’s not exactly disavowing them. Now, you can fact-check me on the following as well: Is it true that he has never condemned the phrase “Global Jihad”? I do accept that if nobody has any evidence he’s ever embraced it, that he’s never embraced it in public. But has he ever condemned it? Because it feels like that would be appropriate, wouldn’t it?
So that’s my question: has anybody even asked him if he’s condemned it? I haven’t seen that happen. But he says he won’t condemn the phrase, but he’s opposed to the violence. So I think he’s actually said he won’t condemn it because that’s just somebody else’s opinion or something. But if you don’t condemn that—and I saw somebody mention “Taqiyya,” if that’s the right pronunciation: the idea that if you’re a Muslim, you’re not encouraged, but you’re totally allowed to lie about your ambitions for taking over the world, because the lying might help you do it.
So that doesn’t mean he’s lying. It just means you can’t tell by what he says. It is exactly in the domain where lying would be allowed explicitly. It would explicitly be allowed to lie if you had an Islamic worldview and you bought into the idea that Islam has to dominate the world eventually and maybe you need to bend the truth to get there. That would be totally allowed. So you can’t trust anything he says on that topic because he happens to be part of a team which explicitly allows you to lie on that question. So would it be my fault if I don’t believe him? It’s not my fault if I don’t trust him, right? That would just be built into the system, and we’re just observing the system. “Oh, it’s a system in which people who are in this channel are encouraged to lie about exactly this question.”
So when he says something about that question, should I say, “Oh, he’s the one person who’s decided not to lie about it?” I don’t know what he’s thinking. Obviously I can’t read his mind. He might be just a good American who comes from a different background. Can’t rule it out. But would you trust him? See, trust and credibility are different from what’s true. He might say only things that are true. How would you know? Could you trust him? No. No, you can’t really trust any politicians. So the fact that it’s even possible that he would be friendly with the idea of a Global Jihad but just doesn’t want to say it should be disqualifying, but it won’t be.
Leaving NYC
Speaking of that, according to the New York Post, Craig McCarthy is writing some survey that said that 25% of New Yorkers would consider fleeing New York City if Mondaire Jones wins. This is a garbage poll. I think maybe there were only 500 people that they talked to, which is not enough. And when you word it this way: “Would you consider?” That doesn’t mean anything. If 25% considered it, how many would actually do it? 1%? And maybe they had different reasons than what they said, or maybe none. I think Boston had a similar situation when their billionaire taxes were being raised. Everybody said, “Oh, the billionaires will move out.” But not too many did. So I would not pay attention to a 25% “considering” fleeing, because people consider all kinds of things they don’t do.
Trump’s Trip to East Asia
Trump apparently is doing his trip to the East, so he’s going to visit Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, trying to get some trade deals and minerals and ceasefire deals and all that. Could be a successful trip. We’ll see. He might meet with China’s Xi, but that’s not set up. It’s hard for me to imagine that President Xi of China would do a sort of semi-unplanned, “Hey, I’m in the neighborhood, can I stop by?” I feel like it would be such a big event if a President visits that you don’t just slap that together and meet on the tarmac. So I don’t know that he’s going to meet Xi, but it would be impressive if they pulled off a casual meet. I would be impressed by that, actually, for both of them.
Europe’s “Civilizational Suicide”
Meanwhile, Putin has a new envoy over here who’s doing a lot of talking. His name is Kirill Dmitriev, and he made a little news. He said that Europe is committing civilizational suicide. A reporter asked him, “Do you think Europe will become completely Muslim?” And he said, “I think this is where they’re going.” Other things we see is, for example, Europe—JD Vance has basically said the same thing as this Russian envoy: that Europe is essentially committing civilizational suicide. This is in the Clash Reporter.
So here’s my question. See if anybody can top this one for a provocative question. And you tell me: is this a fair question? Here’s a question that I’ve never heard anybody ask, but you tell me: is it a fair question? So you’re a European. Let’s say you’re a white Christian or non-believing European, and I told you you had two choices for the future. You could be dominated by Russia, or you could become an Islamic nation. Because those are the only two choices. Because you know what choice you don’t have? Maintaining your European character. You already gave it away. You opened the borders. Too late. You shrunk your militaries. Too late. You made yourself probably a little dependent on the economics of Russia and their energy. Too late.
So one of two things is likely to happen: Europe will either become totally dominated by Russia, which would help prevent them from becoming Islamic, or they’ll become Islamic because there’s nothing that would stop it. Except—what would be the one thing that could stop Europe from going Islamic? The one thing: conquest by Russia. It’s the only thing.
Now, here’s where I get in trouble. I’m not suggesting that would be a good idea. I’m not hoping it happens. I’m not encouraging it to happen. I would not celebrate it if it happened. But the cold, hard truth is Europe will either be dominated by Russia or Islam. I don’t think there’s any other way, is there? What are they doing to protect themselves from either one? Not enough. The US is the only thing that protects them from Russia, and nothing is protecting them from Islam. Islam’s coming. So let me ask that question again. If you’re a European and your choice was to be dominated by Russia—but it would still sort of look like Europe, you would just have a new boss—or change everything: Sharia law, maybe you get beheaded? I hate to tell you that the Russian option might look better to some Europeans. It just might look better. And I don’t know if Putin has ever factored that into his plans, but he probably should. I don’t want to give him any advice, but he probably should.
The Russian Economy and Ukraine
That same envoy, Dmitriev, says that the Russian economy actually grew 4% whereas the EU grew less than 1%. So he’s trying to argue that the sanctions aren’t working at all and Russia is growing like crazy. Do you believe that? No. No, we do not believe that Russia had a 4% GDP. No, I don’t think so. Maybe—I mean, anything’s possible—but probably not.
But he also says—this same envoy—he says that US, Russia, and Ukraine are close to a diplomatic solution. He says, “I believe Russia and US and Ukraine are actually quite close to a diplomatic solution.” Not just close, but quite close. And what he uses as his evidence that they’re close—by the way, there’s no reporting they’re close. There’s nobody in the news business who’s saying he’s close. Doesn’t look close to me. But he’s saying this, and he’s saying that one of the reasons is because Zelensky has sort of admitted that whatever ending the battle looks like, it would include freezing the battle lines about where they are. So his point of view is once both sides realize that the lines are not going to change, that you’re closer to an agreement than you might admit. Maybe both sides don’t want to yet admit that they both know how it’s going to end—sort of looking like it looks now. But it’s more of a problem that they just can’t say it.
Israel, Gaza, and Netanyahu
Israel continues to strike some targets in Gaza. You knew that was going to happen. And apparently that vote in the Knesset to annex most of the West Bank is what they call “crawling forward.” How in the world is that even moving forward by inches? How is that moving forward?
Now, here’s my—well, I guess I’m going to be provocative again. If you’re Netanyahu and let’s say the fighting’s over and they cobble together Gaza, the Gaza residents move back in, Hamas still exists because they didn’t eradicate it—so what would happen if there’s still Hamas, there’s a rebuilding of Gaza, and there’s no annexation of anything in the West Bank or of Gaza? What would that look like for Netanyahu?
It would look like he traded off all of the goodwill of the Holocaust by doing something that the public—a lot of the public, not all of it—calls a genocide. Now, it doesn’t matter if you think it’s a genocide. I’m not quizzing or doing a poll. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s a genocide. It matters that a lot of the world thinks it’s a genocide. And so if Israel becomes branded as this genocidal country, which it now has been, they lose all the goodwill of the Holocaust—one of their main assets, if not the main asset. It’s not like they have a lot of oil in the ground. The way they manage the psychology of their partners and even their adversaries was sort of their biggest asset. And that got traded away.
Now, if Netanyahu had succeeded in eventually annexing both Gaza with no Hamas there at all—like literally getting rid of all of them—and also the West Bank, what would Netanyahu’s brand or his reputation be in history? If he had pulled that off, he would get intense, intense criticism, right? Because it would look like he’s just stealing land from the Palestinians. But then you fast-forward 100 years. What’s it look like then? If you go forward enough in time, the person who made your country bigger—and not just a little bit bigger; if they had annexed that territory, it would be a much bigger country—whoever makes your country that much bigger, if you wait 100 years, they’re going to be treated as a hero. There’s going to be a statue to that person.
But if you quit halfway there, which is what happened, you got rid of the Holocaust asset, you created a gigantic liability which is the narrative from your enemies that you just did a genocide. That’s a pretty big cost. And then you’ve got to manage the rebuilding, and you’ve somehow got to manage the fact that Hamas will be at least a little bit reconstituted.
So here’s my summary of that. At the moment, Netanyahu has lost everything. It’s the worst-case scenario. Because I don’t know that once he leaves power that he will be respected enough by either side, because he didn’t get what the right wing wanted, which is annexation, and he didn’t get what the left wing wanted, which is “you should have stopped a long time ago.” So he’s got two sides of his public that he would have deeply disappointed, and that would be his future. No statue, right? So I would say that the current situation would be a gigantic definite loss for Netanyahu.
Do you think that Netanyahu is going to passively just allow things to go the way Trump wants them to go? I don’t think so. I think that there will be fairly ambitious activities by some people in Israel, and I’m not even saying it would be Netanyahu necessarily. He might be uninvolved; he might just say, “All right, this is the best we can do.” So it’s possible that Netanyahu’s almost totally on board with Trump just because there’s no better plan, maybe. But there have got to be a bunch of people who would have been on the pro-annexation side who are doing everything they can to make sure that the peace doesn’t hold, Hamas looks like they’re still in power, and that they’ve got to go hard and annex everything.
So that’s my prediction. My prediction is that some factors in Israel will not give up the annexation, and Netanyahu is not strong enough to make them give it up, nor would it be in his benefit if they did. That’s what I think. But I can’t read Netanyahu’s mind, so if I do anything that looks like mind reading, you have my permission to criticize that because it really does depend on guessing what other people are thinking, and how good are we at that? Not. We’re not good at guessing what other people are thinking. We’re very bad at it. So I’m probably bad at it, too. Presumably.
Turkey and the Ottoman Empire
Steve Bannon says that Turkey—the country of Turkey—might be the security force in Gaza. And the way Steve says it, he goes, “We’ve unwound in two months what took 100 years to end: the Ottomans are back.” I love how Steve Bannon puts context on things. So we’re all the way back to the Ottoman Empire. They took a little time off, but they’re back. The Greater Israel project blew up in Netanyahu’s face, and the Ottomans are playing the long game.
So sounds like Steve is saying the same thing I’m saying, which is that Netanyahu can’t be happy with the way things are going because there’s no way it’s going to work out for him. And his 100-year plan to be the most consequential Israeli probably ended with peace.
Anyway, it is time for the after-party: Owen Gregorian. So that completes my comments. I’m going to say a few words privately to my beloved Locals subscribers. They’re the best. Erdogan wants to be the Caliph, does he? They probably all want to be that. All right, everybody, I’ll be private with the Locals people in 30 seconds if all my buttons are working. I feel lucky today. Good. My cat’s going crazy.