Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-29
The Simultaneous Sip
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It’s called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you’ve never had a better time. But if you’d like to take a chance on elevating your experience to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup, or a mug, or a glass, a tankard, chalice, stein, a canteen, jugger, flask, vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid, even while your cat is chewing on your power cable, 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.
Sublime. Perfect, really.
Reframing School as Competition
How would you like to start with a reframe? Of course you would. That’s what we do here, from my book Reframe Your Brain, available everywhere—no, actually just available on Amazon. I’ll pick a new one.
Here’s one that I used to great effect during my school years. I never said it explicitly, but it was the reframe in my head. The normal frame for school is that school is boring but necessary. Most people would say they wouldn’t do this for fun, but it’s necessary. The reframe for “school is boring but necessary” is that school is a competitive event. Game on.
When I knew a test was coming up in school, I didn’t say, “Oh, this is going to be so boring to study for the test.” I said to myself, “Ooh, competition. I can beat the other people in this class, but only if I study.” I would treat an academic test the same way I would treat any physical contest. If I were planning to play soccer or play tennis or something, I would likewise practice, and maybe the practice would be boring, just like school. But as long as I thought I was working toward a contest, while I was practicing, I was imagining the contest and I was imagining winning the contest if I could.
So that’s the reframe: treat it the same way you would a physical contest and say, “If I study and I take on more pain and more practice than my fellow students, I will get a better grade than they will. If I get better grades than they do, I might get a better job than they get.” And so you just look at the winning. That’s your reframe.
Dilbert Calendars and Amazon Piracy
By the way, if you’re wondering where this year’s Dilbert calendar is, the calendar is complete and we’re ready to list it, but there are so many counterfeits that front-run me. If you go to Amazon, there will just be pages—they may have taken them down by today, but as of yesterday, there were pages of fakes. Most of them had the same trick: they spelled Dilbert with a space, as in “DI” space “LBERT.” Apparently, that’s all they needed to do to get past Amazon’s security to list my property for sale by them. I assume they’re all Chinese pirates.
But it’s a whole page, a whole page of calendars that have other people’s names on them, but it’s Dilbert. It’s a completely useless system. The only reason I can even sell that thing—and we haven’t sold too many yet—but the only reason we can even list it on Amazon is that I’ve been assigned, nicely, and this is to Amazon’s credit, they do assign me a person to take that down. So we have a specific person I can call, and he is specifically in charge of making sure my calendars work out within that little corner of Amazon. So we’re getting good help.
When we request that they take down the pirates, they do act, and they do act fairly quickly. But the problem is as soon as they take them down, they’ll just be replaced. If they take down 20, there’ll be 100 by tomorrow. I don’t even know how this is a viable business anymore. So I’ll tell you in a few weeks whether it’s even anything I could do again, should I be here. There’s always that. Anyway, I’ll keep you up to date on that.
Akira the Don
Akira the Don has wanted you to know he’s released his new music video. It’s called “What You Think About the Most.” The reason I mention it is because I’m the featured voice. If you haven’t seen Akira the Don’s work, it’s really fascinating. People love it. What he does is he takes people like me, who have said things in public that are interesting, and then he uses that as the lyrics. I don’t want to call it lyrics because it’s me talking and not singing, but he’ll sample things that I said from the podcast, put them to music, give it a video element, and suddenly he’s got a music video, and people like them. They’re not all about me; some other influencer types are in his catalog, but check it out. Just look for Akira the Don, spelled A-K-I-R-A The Don. You’ll find it on X. I’m sure it’s on YouTube too, but look for it on X.
The Economy and Nvidia’s $5 Trillion Valuation
Well, we’re expecting an interest rate cut today, maybe a quarter of a point. The stock market is already responding to that and the fact that Trump seems to be having success in his Asian trip. Maybe there’ll be something with China coming up; we’ll talk about that in a minute. But in the short run, everything seems to be set up for higher stocks. The Fed probably will give us a quarter point and maybe some extra cuts later. We’re all looking optimistic about this.
But how much of that stock market rise is spread across all of the stocks, and how much of it is an AI bubble? Well, Nvidia is tapping on the door of being worth 5 trillion. Now, does that sound like a bubble to you? I don’t know what else that could be. If that’s not a bubble, I’ve never seen a bubble in my life. I’ve seen a lot of bubbles. There’s no way in the world that’s worth $5 trillion because it’s not like they have no competition, or that they’ll never have competition, or that we’ll never find out that maybe there was some other way to do this cheaper.
What would happen if somebody came up with a way to do this cheaper? Well, let’s go to Elon Musk, who says this. He came up with an idea on one of his earnings calls—Nick Cruz Patane is talking about this. Apparently, since every Tesla car is also a little computer and they’re all networked, that it wouldn’t take a ton of work, says Elon Musk, to turn the collective cars that are on the road into an AI inference engine, such that if you wanted to use AI and you were in your car, you could talk to your car, and the car would use all of the computing in the entire network just the way a data center would. So you wouldn’t need a data center; you would just need the cars that are already on the road and suddenly you have AI.
Then, of course, you hear all the people who are making their own local AI models. They use DeepSeek or something else, and they’re building home office AIs that don’t even have any connection to the rest of the world. So, are none of these things a threat to Nvidia? I mean, I’m no expert in this domain, but you’d think they’d have some competitive threats, even if it’s not those. Anyway, $5 trillion. Good luck with that.
Scott’s Experience with AI Hallucinations
Here’s my experience. Yesterday, I tried—I thought, you know, I’m going to look into this again. I looked into it about two years ago and AI couldn’t do it, but I thought by now it can do it. And “it,” what I’m talking about, is not hallucinating. I thought, okay, I have to create one of these special databases called a RAG, or a vector database, that the AI can use without errors, allegedly. I didn’t believe it necessarily could, but I wanted to build one.
So I went to Grok and I said, “How do I do this?” And it recommended a few apps. One of them is called Pinecone. So I said to Grok, “If I use this Pinecone app, is this going to allow me to build a database that will be reliable and not hallucinate with AI?” And it said yes. It said that the Pinecone app would allow me to easily create one of these files.
I was teasing Grok and saying, “Grok, if you would know how to use one of these files, couldn’t you tell me how to build one, and couldn’t you build it yourself and just say, ‘Fill this file’ or ‘Fill this database and I’ll be able to read this every time’? Why do I have to build it? Why am I even involved? We’ve got a 5 fucking trillion?”
So then I said to myself, “Aha, I’m going to beat the system. So I’m going to have Grok walk me through what I need to do technically, so that basically Grok will do it, but I’ll just be the one typing on the keyboard.” So then I opened Pinecone and it has its own set of instructions on how to do it, but they didn’t work. What if I told you instructions on how to do anything technical in 2025, no matter where the instructions came from—whether they came from the company that does the product, or AI, or your smart technical friend, or the people on X who gave you advice—which one of them accurately will tell you how to solve any technical problem? The answer is none of them. Every one of them will have a confident answer of what menu choice you should use that doesn’t exist. So that’s the first thing.
The Pinecone instructions, I couldn’t get them to work. So then I take Grok and I point it at the screen and I say, “Why isn’t this working?” And Grok says, “Oh, those instructions are wrong.” So instead of pip—I’ll just give you one example—one of the commands you’re supposed to do in this terminal window is pip, P-I-P. And then Grok says, “That doesn’t work on a Mac.” I’m like, what? I mean, I’m looking at the company’s own page of what command to use: pip. And then Grok says, “No, it has to be pip3 if it’s a Macintosh.” Who’s right? Well, pip3 didn’t work either. And if I were to ask somebody to help me with it, they would say, “Do this command instead of those two commands,” and it wouldn’t work. In 2025, no one can tell you what to do that works. It just doesn’t work.
So what I’ve found so far is that anytime I want to do anything—now, obviously, I’d be in the smallest of small business categories—but anytime I’ve thought I want to do something with AI, any kind of project, any kind of business initiative, do you know how every time it ends? It ends the same way every time. Somebody says, “You’re going to have to hire somebody to do that for you.”
That’s right. Every single use of AI that I’ve concocted—and there are a lot of them, if you could imagine all the ways that the Dilbert creator and a podcaster could use AI, it’s a lot. The things I imagine I could do with it would be amazing. Like, I would have an AI cohort here that I would just talk to. I would make my comics with AI. I’d have a clone that would answer your questions about me and about my books. I mean, all kinds of AI amazing things I would do. And every single one requires me to hire more humans. And you know what would happen if I hired more humans to do that work? I wouldn’t need AI. The AI is to replace the fucking humans, but you can’t do anything without a human. And I’m pretty sure that even with a human, you can’t make a database that works. So that’s my complaint about AI.
Tesla Autonomous Driving
Anyway, Elon says that Tesla autonomous driving might spread faster than any technology ever. And I think he’s right. The argument for that is that they’ve been working for years to have the cars ready to just flip a switch. So when he flips the switch to autonomous driving—and I believe that they’ve already satisfied every safety test that you could do, so it’s already safer than human drivers—when they flip the switch, it’ll be just this enormous footprint of autonomous cars that went from not existing to existing with just one software flip. He’s right. That will be the fastest spread of any technology ever. So that’ll be fun.
UPS and Gig Drivers
Apparently, UPS, trying to adjust to this new world, is using gig drivers for deliveries. Gig meaning that they’re not the regular UPS drivers, but if UPS has, let’s say, one small package that has to go to one place in your neighborhood, it might not be worth sending the UPS truck there. But they might have somebody who’d signed up to be an occasional delivery person, and they get a message that says, “Hey, take this package over here.” And apparently, there’s a lot of that happening. Esther Fung is writing about this in the Wall Street Journal. So if I were a package delivery company, I’d be really worried about the Tesla autonomous cars and the Waymos and everything that works without a human.
Grokpedia vs. Wikipedia
Well, most of the news is about Elon Musk if it’s technology news. So Grokpedia is launching or launched—they may have had to pull it back just to do some tweaks, but I think it’s launched now. Mario Nawfal on X is writing about this. What do you get from Grokpedia versus Wikipedia, which is a good question. First of all, Wikipedia will be done by humans who are going to be arguing about what’s true and what’s not. Grokpedia is an AI creation, so in a sense, it’s trained on humans, but it would know everything that Wikipedia knows plus some people would say 10 times as much.
But also, it’s shooting specifically for less bias than the human Wikipedia would have, which leans left, we all say. But what’s different? What’s different is a human editor can’t ruin it. What’s different is its real-time updates. If you’re on Wikipedia and something happens, you have to kind of hope somebody noticed and took the time to change it, and then the other editors didn’t delay it too long. But Grokpedia will just look at the news and it’ll know what’s happening right now.
Let’s see what else it can do. So it’ll have newer citations, no humans, and Elon calls it a necessary step toward understanding the universe. That’s a big claim, but probably valid. I think I’d agree with that. And yeah, so this might be the Wikipedia you wanted but didn’t get. And as Mario says, the real test is whether Grokpedia can prove that AI-generated content is more reliable and less biased than the humans on Wikipedia. Do you think it’ll be able to do that?
So, you know, I have an advantage over non-public figures because I can look at what both Wikipedia and Grokpedia say about me. And I’m sort of the expert on me, so I could have a sort of a perfect opinion about how accurate it is about complicated people like me. Would you agree I’m complicated? I’m kind of complicated, right? Because if you even tried to describe me—have you ever tried to do that? How many of you have ever tried to describe me to a friend or a family member and you found you couldn’t do it? Right? I want to see in your comments.
See, the problem is I have too many jobs. If you say I’m the Dilbert cartoonist, you’re leaving out 75% of who I am. If you say I’m a podcaster, same problem. If you say I’m an author of books that help people, same problem. If you say I’m a persuasion expert, same problem. Because none of the things I do look like they fit together, right? It looks like I’m a miscellaneous. So if you’re trying to describe a miscellaneous person as opposed to just, say, someone who’s always been an author or someone who’s only been a cartoonist, I’m kind of hard to describe—which I like. It’s not a problem. But so I can test Wikipedia and Grokpedia to see if they can handle a complicated person. And the answer is: Grokpedia is way better. Way better. But still, it could use some tweaks that maybe I can find a way to tweak it, even though it’s AI-based. Probably there’s a way I can influence it. I’m guessing, but I don’t know this for sure, that if I simply did an X post where I said, “I’m just doing this X post to show you what I think should be revised in my Grokpedia page,” I think, but I don’t know, that Grokpedia would read that almost immediately because it’s always looking for what’s new, and that it would add that to its consideration, even if it just showed it as, “That’s my opinion, not their opinion.” So would that work? I would love if that worked. I think I might try it if I have the time.
Senior Care and Privacy Reframes
There’s a humanoid robot for sale. Wall Street Journal is talking about this; it’s called the 1X Neo. And so it’s an AI-driven robot. But here’s the creepy part: it is not fully autonomous. So for a number of uses, but not all of them, the company representative wearing the virtual reality glasses would be actually operating the robot in your house. Now, since I know exactly what you’re thinking and feeling right now, let me call it out. You’re saying, “Oh my God, that would be like having a stranger spying on you in your own house, and you would never know when they were looking and when they weren’t looking. That is the worst robot idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Get out of here, Scott. Stop it. We don’t want to live in small homes, no tiny homes. Get out of here with your 15-minute homes.” Of course, we’re not talking about any of that, but that’s usually what I hear.
But now let me give you a reframe. You ready? I would buy that robot tomorrow. And I would allow a complete stranger into my house when I didn’t know if they were watching. Do you know why? Because I’m a senior. And I need—at the moment, I need something like full-time care. At least, someone in the neighborhood who could call 911 if I need it. I don’t need much hands-on care yet. But if you didn’t have a family member or a friend who could look after you when you’re in your declining years, you would totally take the robot. You would totally take it. And if somebody said, “Oh, it’s not always a robot; sometimes there’s a human in it,” do you know what I’d say? “Better. That’s better.” And then somebody would say, “But they’ll be spying on you.” To which I’d say, “Have I mentioned I’m a senior? What the hell do you think I’m doing in my house? Do you think I’m running Burning Man in my house? If you spied on me, you’d see me sitting in a chair, zoned out on painkillers, waiting for my next dose. Or you’d see me just staring at my phone while it plays Reels. What the hell do I think I’m hiding? I’m not hiding anything. If they saw me doing bongs, do you think they’d call the police? It’s legal. I don’t do anything illegal.”
So yes, there is a niche in which a totally steal-your-privacy robot could insert a total stranger from another country into my house, and I’d be okay with it because it would be better than the alternatives. Now, in my case, I have human alternatives so I don’t need the robot, but you know what I mean. Not everybody has that option.
Climate Change and Extinction
Hurricane Melissa has hit Cuba. I guess it was a Category 3 storm by the time it hit Cuba, and it was a Category 5 storm when it hit Jamaica, so it did Jamaica some badness. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about Cuba lately because of the Venezuela thing, and the odds that if Venezuela’s oil revenue no longer props up Cuba, that Cuba would become immediately a really big problem for Cuba. But then would that become a problem for us? Would Cuba not be just letting everybody get on a boat and come to America because they can’t feed them? So I think this Cuba thing, we’re going to have to keep an eye on that. I don’t know if the Trump administration has a workable plan for what is likely to happen if Venezuela goes balls up.
According to Roger Pielke Jr. on X—is that the son of Roger Pielke Sr.? Well, obviously, yes, but who is the somewhat well-known climate change critic? Or is that the actual critic? I don’t know who Junior is. But I think he’s probably from the climate change skeptic family, but I’m not positive about that, so don’t quote me. But he’s telling us that there’s a new study about extinctions. And unexpectedly, they say, the researchers found that in the last 200 years, there was no evidence of increasing extinction from climate change.
Didn’t you think there were all kinds of evidence, or at least it had been claimed? You might not have believed it, but weren’t there claims that climate change was already killing entire species? Apparently, there’s no evidence of that whatsoever. There have been studies that show that it did, that it was, but the newest one says, “No, no, if you analyze it correctly, there were way more extinctions in the old days, and it’s very rare to have an extinction. And when you do have an extinction, they have a specific reason for it, such as it’s an island and then some, let’s say, invasive species came to the island and ate all the other species.” So that’s not climate change; that’s just: it sucks to live on an island if the alligators come to your island.
Then the other one was, I guess, in some water environments where they also can’t get away. So it’s more about whether the things that are already there, the species that are living there, have a way to run away if things get bad. If they can’t run away because they’re locked in a lake or they’re locked on an island, sooner or later, something’s going to come for them, and they can’t get away.
CNN’s Pivot and Media Diversity
Well, I was thinking about talking about this topic, but the news served it up perfectly in time. I’ve been watching with great interest CNN’s pivot from being a left-leaning piece of garbage to what the new owners hope will be something like a middle-of-the-road—what CNN was always intended to be, I think—a middle-of-the-road, “just tell you the facts.” Do you think they’re succeeding? I believe they are. And I’m actually kind of impressed. Now, do they still lean a little bit left? Yeah. Yeah. But Abby Phillip, whom I have criticized before because she was a proponent of the “fine people” hoax before she had her current assignment as CNN—so I started off with a negative opinion of her, and as her show got a lot of traction and a lot of clips, I maintained my negative opinion because I just didn’t think she was up to the job, honestly.
However, as I’ve been watching—because, you know, Scott Jennings causes everybody to go watch, he’s an amazing hire for them—my observation is that she’s just getting better and better at her job. And she’s a young person, so you would expect that. So I would say at this point she has achieved admirably. I will compliment her on this. I believe that she’s built her talent stack pretty much right up to where CNN would want it to be for hosting that show. And I’ve seen her on a number of times interrupt a lefty who was making a claim that just wasn’t true. So we have seen her fact-check people who are on the left if they were just going into garbage territory, which I appreciate.
But she was on Charlamagne’s show, Charlamagne tha God. And I’ll give it to you in her voice. She says, “It’s fair to say that at CNN, we’re not Fox News, but we’re also not MSNBC.” Okay, that’s good framing. “We’re probably center-left.” Correct, that’s what I observe. “And I think it has a lot to do with our audience.” Correct, correct. If you say, “We’re serving our audience and they’re center-left,” I’m okay with that. I mean, Fox News is serving their audience, they’re Republicans. I’m okay with that. MSNBC is serving their audience, which are people with mental problems. I’m not okay with that, but at least it keeps them busy.
And then Abby says—and I believe this is true, too; by the way, I saw this in a Jason Cohen post on X, give him credit—Abby says that CNN is left-center, has more Republican voices and more diversity of views than either MSNBC or Fox News. Dammit, you’re right. That is true. That CNN at the moment—now, this has not been true forever—but at the moment, I’m pretty sure she’s right, that CNN has more diversity on than the other two networks. Now, to be fair, do you know why Fox News doesn’t have more lefty people on it? It’s not because they don’t want them. It’s because if they invited them, they wouldn’t come. So apparently CNN still has the ability to invite Republicans. And where do Republicans go when they’re invited? Wherever they’re invited. So if they’re invited on CNN, they go on CNN. If they’re invited on MSNBC, they go on MSNBC. If they’re invited on the Charlamagne breakfast club, they go on Charlamagne’s show. It just doesn’t work the other way. So I think the one thing that Abby might have added for context is that it’s not always an option for Fox News because they’re so reviled that people think just associating with them would be some kind of mistake. Fetterman or a few people might be exceptions, but mostly, I’m sure that Fox would like to have more lively debates with leftists because they think they would win those and it would be good TV.
Air Traffic Control and AI
MSNBC is telling us that today marks the first day of air traffic controllers not getting a full paycheck. So, would you feel comfortable flying on the first day that the air controllers didn’t get paid? I’m going to say I wouldn’t. I would not. I don’t think anybody I know is in the air at the moment, and I hope they don’t because I don’t know, I wouldn’t be comfortable with the air controllers not being paid if I’m in the air in this giant tube flying through the air. No thank you. But I hope we get that worked out.
It’s weird that that air traffic control job has been such a problem for so many decades. Ever since Reagan, right? So it’s always been: these guys can barely, barely stay sane, and the jets are barely staying in the air because it’s just so hard. And it’s been decades, and we never have enough of them, and there’s always some problem about getting them paid. Why is this the one place we can’t solve? And by the way, this should be the place that AI takes over completely. In 10 years, if we have human air traffic controllers and we have human pilots who are in charge of taking off and landing, as opposed to just being sort of emergency people on the side—if any of this is run by humans in 10 years, oh my God, we’re stupid. Every plane should be AI and should be flying on its own. It should be landing on its own, should be taking off on its own, and it definitely should have air traffic control be automated. There’s no way that this should be human-driven. It’s just crazy that we’re putting up with that level of risk. But 10 years, it’ll be solved.
Rand Paul and Accountability for Fauci
I love this story—switching stories—of Rand Paul trying to get what he would call justice for what he thinks are Fauci’s crimes or at least mismanagement of the pandemic. So Rand Paul was just on Benny Johnson’s podcast. By the way, Benny Johnson’s doing a great job. Have you noticed his rise in terms of, you know, being an influential podcaster on the right? I love watching the people on the right put together talent stacks and then make it work right in front of you. He’s one of those. So when I look at everything from Tucker starting his own whole deal there with the studio, Megan Kelly dominating podcasting in my opinion, PBD runs a class operation, Benny Johnson suddenly has this property that I assume he’s going to monetize to the hilt and deserves every bit of it.
But when you look at them, you can see them working the talent stack. So part of the talent stack is networking. And apparently all the good ones are great at it. They network so they have people to invite, etc. The other is just managing a business, because the podcast will eventually have engineers and producers and stuff. So you got to be able to manage. But the other part is managing your physicality, which I always note that Benny is in really good shape, and that helps. I mean, if you have to look at something for an hour—I mean, I, when I was healthier, I made sure that at least my arms were well worked out; not at the moment—but if you had to look at me, I would make sure that you were looking at my arms that had at least been to the gym. Benny does that. And the same with Megan Kelly, same with Candace Owens’ show. Well-produced, talent on every level that you could have talent: from looks, to able to speak on camera, to be able to put together the content. Just amazing, amazing. When I watch the left-leaning podcasts, they’re doing the best they can. But they all seem a little bit artificial. Like they started with good-looking young people, but I don’t know that those people say anything that every other lefty wouldn’t say. So I don’t know that they’re really adding much. Whereas if you look at the Joe Rogans of the world and—there are just so many podcasters I could be mentioning, so if I leave somebody out, it doesn’t mean anything—but the conservative ones all did it by bootstrapping. Like they just said—here’s how I started: holding this phone up when I had Periscope on it, the old app. This is literally what you’re watching right now: me holding a phone up to my face. That’s how I started podcasting. And I just put it on the app and, oh, somebody’s watching me. I guess I should say something. And then little by little, because it was interesting and fun, I developed this, kind of bootstrapped it as well.
So anyway, that was just an aside. I was talking about Rand Paul and Fauci. What fascinates me about this is that if you assume that Rand Paul’s claims are true and that Fauci was directly responsible for allowing a virus to be experimented with in an unsafe environment, and he funded it and he was in charge of the business of managing the weaponized virus research, as Rand Paul would say, that he was at least responsible if not the direct cause of 18 million deaths from the virus—we’re not talking about the shots yet. But wouldn’t that be the biggest story in the world? How many individuals, like one person, who’s alive today and not in jail, are being even accused of killing 18 million people? 18 million! Come on.
Now, remember I told you that a story is not a story until the New York Times or one of the big papers says it’s a story? This is one of those where if the New York Times decided this was the biggest story, it’s all we’d be talking about. But they haven’t. They have not decided that. Instead, they’ve decided that Rand Paul’s a rogue, disagreer guy and he makes some news, but moving on. How in the world is that not the biggest story in the world? I don’t even know what side to be on. I mean, I don’t know what’s true and what’s not true, but as a story, why isn’t that the biggest one in the world? It’s because your opinions are assigned to you. There is a reason: your opinions of what is important do not come from your own brain. They are literally assigned from the outside. That’s the cleanest example you’ll ever see.
Trump in Asia and Fentanyl Agreements
Trump’s in Asia. So today, I guess he was in South Korea. He believes he has a trade deal. We don’t know any details of that, and we think the South Korean government still has to approve it. I think the boss approved whatever they talked about, but like the U.S. when the Congress has to approve things, South Korea has some approval process they still need to do. But I guess we’re optimistic that that will get approved. So we might have a South Korea deal; don’t know for sure.
And Trump is allegedly going to meet with China’s Xi somewhere where he’s in South Korea in the area. So I guess they’re going to have some kind of talk. And Trump is actually so optimistic about China—that’s probably partly why the stock market is up—he thinks that there’s going to be a deal to reduce U.S. tariffs on imports from China in exchange for—here’s the part I don’t believe—China trying harder to block the fentanyl precursors. As you know, China produces the precursors that go to Mexico and then the cartels turn that into fentanyl, and then they kill tens of thousands of Americans every year. Trump’s been working on this for, what, eight years and gotten no results whatsoever because part of the problem is that China says, “Oh, we’re working very hard on these precursors and we’ve banned them.” And then five minutes later, we find out that there are new precursors. They’re slightly different than the others, but you can also use them to make fentanyl. And then China will say, “Oh, well, those are not illegal yet. We would have to make those specific ones illegal.” So we would say, “Why don’t you do that?” So then they do that, but nothing happens fast. And then they say, “All right, we’ve clamped down on all of these precursors.” And then we say, “But why are they still coming in at exactly the same rate?” “Oh, well, those are slightly different again. Yet again, those bad guys have come up with a slightly different thing that’s not technically illegal. We’ll try to catch up with that.”
Now, if you’ve lived in the real world for more than five minutes, this will sound to you like they’re not really trying. Not really trying to stop those precursors. They’re trying to make us think that they’re doing something so that they can get something, which is, you know, us easing off on trade. But I don’t believe they’ll do anything. If China’s gone this far with doing absolutely nothing but claiming they’re working on it and showing you some evidence that they’re working on it, but not really stopping it, are we going to do our part? Are we going to give them the tariff relief that they want when there’s no real chance they’re going to give us what we want? Or does Trump have a new approach that somehow—and I don’t know what that would be—we would have some more, let’s say, transparency or we’d have more, let’s say, trust that China was actually trying to cut this down? I don’t know if this is any deal at all. So I’ll be optimistic and say if Trump thinks he can make this work, that would be great. But I’m not going to hold my breath on fentanyl.
The Art of Gift Giving
Remember yesterday I was telling you that Japan and the Japanese culture is not just good at gift giving, but they’re sort of the champions? Like, they can give a gift that will be so special and so well thought out and so emotionally perfect. The Japanese are just good at it, the gift giving. So they gave Trump the putter that literally belonged to his friend Abe when he was the Prime Minister. Now, that is a really good gift because they were golfing partners and it’s a real thing, and it was something that was probably very personally important to the Prime Minister: his putter, because he golfed. If you’re a golfer, you sort of have a relationship with your putter. So that was an example of the best you could do in the gift giving.
Compare to South Korea—and I’m not going to mock South Korea, I’m just making a contrast—what they gave him as a gift was the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, the country’s highest decoration. Now, I’m sure that that is a great honor. And if South Korea ever offered me the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, I would be very appreciative and I would respect that totally. However, if it comes right after Abe’s putter, it barely looks like they’re trying. It looks like they took something off the shelf. What have we got? We can’t figure out any good gifts. And he just got this banger of a gift from Japan. We can’t top that. What have we got? Well, we’ve got this thing we sort of make up; we call it the Grand Order of the Mugunghwa. Why don’t we give him one of those? And we’ll put it on a plaque so he doesn’t have to put it around his neck. And that’s what they did. Anyway, I don’t mean to make fun of South Korea; they’re an awesome ally, but gotta catch up to Japan’s gift giving.
Middle East Ceasefire Realities
As you know, there will be some things that I say about the Middle East that will make you think, “Wait a minute, is this a repeat?” No, it’s because the Middle East is a repeat. The most predictable thing about the Middle East was that Hamas would be accused of breaking the ceasefire. What else is predictable? Israel would be accused of killing people they shouldn’t be killing. You know that’s going to happen.
So sure enough, Hamas says they were not behind it, but there were some Hamas people who did some attacking, shot some IDF people. Netanyahu decided to respond aggressively, which is his right, and he responded militarily. Now, I guess Israel is saying that they did their hit back and now they’re good to go and the ceasefire’s back on. But even as I’m scrolling through the news, you have to check the exact time on every story because you can’t tell if, okay, is this the end of the last broken ceasefire? Are they ceased-fire again? No, wait. No, there’s another break in the ceasefire. But wait, it looks like they’re back on the ceasefire. So it’ll just be broken ceasefire after broken ceasefire forever. But as I’ve said before, as long as the total amount of violence stays low because most of the armed people and most of the arms have been drained out of the area, it’s still manageable. It’s still manageable. But I don’t think the ceasefire breaking is going to stop anytime soon. Might get a good result. We’ll see.
Trump and the Third Term
Let’s talk about Trump’s third term. So apparently the news today is that Trump has admitted that it’s not an option. He said, quote, “It’s pretty clear I’m not allowed to run. It’s too bad.” Now, so he’s just noting that the Constitution says there’s no way he could have a third term. Now, we had all greatly enjoyed watching him troll the left and act like maybe he’d do it. And I don’t think that Bannon’s done. And I think Bannon—who knows, I can’t read his mind. He’s a smart guy, he’s complicated, so I won’t try to presume I can know what he’s thinking. But I would assume that Bannon’s going to keep going with the third-term stuff because, as I noted before, as long as the Democrats think there’s some chance he might be here longer, they won’t try to outwait him. I saw Greg Gutfeld mentioning that theory yesterday on the show. Now, he credited me with saying that, but I got that from somebody on X. That wasn’t my original—I boosted it, but it wasn’t my original thought. It’s a good thought: that if you don’t look like you’re going to be there a while, people will try to ignore you like a lame duck. So that might have been what was behind this whole thing. We don’t know. But maybe what’s behind it is Bannon just wants more Trump. Could be just that.
But let’s see now that Trump has taken away one of their primary talking points on the left. Will they say he’s lying, he really does want to be a king, you have to look at what he’s doing, not what he’s saying? Is that next? That seems like the most obvious thing the Democrats would do. “Oh, he said it directly that he can’t do it, but don’t listen to what he says. Watch what he does, and he’s doing authoritarian things.”
National Guard in Memphis
Well, let’s talk about his authoritarian things. So as you know, Trump’s trying to reduce crime in the high-crime cities by flowing the National Guard in there. So here’s an update on Memphis. Memphis, apparently the crime rate—well, allegedly the crime rate—has been falling for a while, but it’s still one of the highest in the countries. So I don’t know if it’s been really falling or not, but it’s one of the high-crime areas. And what I didn’t know—the Wall Street Journal’s filling me in today—is that the mayor, who I believe is a Democrat, has actually been fighting crime aggressively. So he would be one of the, you know, reasonable people who knew a priority and went after it. So nobody is—I don’t think anybody is criticizing the mayor for his approach to crime in Memphis. Now, that’s kind of good, right? That there’s at least one mayor who thinks crime’s actually really important and we better do something about this. But that allowed him, because he’s not a crazy lefty anti-Trump-no-matter-what-he-says kind of guy—he’s more common-sensical—that allowed him to work with Trump and his team so that now there are, I guess, 150 National Guard in Memphis, but they don’t have rifles. They’re not carrying rifles, anyway, and they’re not traveling in armored vehicles. So they’re just a presence. And apparently that’s working. Apparently, just as a presence, they say that it seems to be reducing crime.
Now, I don’t know how that works exactly. I mean, 150 people—that’s not much. How do you control a city’s crime with 150 people? At any given time, half of them are going to be napping, right? So there won’t be that many who are actually visibly on the street and they’re unarmed. If they don’t have rifles, it doesn’t say if they don’t have sidearms, but I’m guessing they don’t. So how does a few dozen unarmed people in uniform change the crime profile of an entire city? How does that work? But it looks like it is working, which is weird.
Anyway, so that’s a good example of: maybe this story deserves some context that we’re not getting. Because I’ve been skeptical from the start that you could make any permanent change by a temporary surge. It doesn’t feel like a temporary surge would ever create permanent reduced crime. But maybe the threat of having Trump come in and do it because it shows you can’t do it—maybe that’s the secret sauce. Maybe the reason that a mayor would try harder to reduce crime is that they just can’t let Trump come in and claim credit for it going down. So maybe it has some utility in the long run, but that’s the only way I could imagine it would have long-run utilities—if it changed the behavior of the people who are going to be there after the National Guard leave. And I don’t know that that’s demonstrated. But we’ll see. We’ll be optimistic.
NewsNation on the Palisades Fire
NewsNation has a pretty big scoop here. Apparently, there were people reporting the Palisades fire was smoldering before the fire actually took off. So you probably know there was a fire before the fire. The fire before the Palisades fire that was in that same area was efficiently put out by the fire department. And the fire department knows that even when you put out the fire, sometimes it will linger below the surface and continue burning and smoldering, and you better watch it for a few days because it might come back. Now, that’s a well-known firefighting thing. There are reports that the fire department did not stay long enough to catch the fact that it was smoldering and eventually took off again. Now, I’m no firefighter, so I won’t imagine that they stayed the right amount or too long or not long enough.
But here’s the new scoop, NewsNation: there’s actually video of hikers who saw the smoldering days before the actual fire and reported it. With fucking video! They showed video of it smoldering, and it still didn’t get a fire department sitting on it to watch it. Now, maybe there’ll be some new reporting that makes that not look as bad as it is. But is this possible? Is this possible that hikers—I think might have been more than one, but there’s at least one because I’ve seen the video—where they actually took a video of the ground smoldering, which everyone knows what that means? It’s literally a fire. And everybody knew it was this dry area, and what made it take off was the weather, I guess, the high winds probably gave it that little extra spark. Wow. Somebody’s going to have to answer for this. I was not expecting that there would be video of it actually smoldering days before it took off. If you lost your house and you knew that the authorities knew that that fire was still burning, I don’t know how I’d get over that. I don’t know how I could get over that.
Commission of Fine Arts
Anyway, the White House has fired all members of the Commission of Fine Arts. Oh. Well, what are we going to do without them? Man, every day I wake up and I’m like, “Thank God there are problems in this world, but at least we still have the Commission of Fine Arts.” What were they doing? Well, among other things, it looks like they were—their volunteer job was to review construction projects at the White House. So it must be more than that, but part of what they were doing was reviewing. Now, they didn’t have power, I don’t think; they were just sort of a review policy. But Trump got rid of all of them, and now he’s going to replace them with people who like what he likes, which I don’t mind at all. You don’t want too many architects or cooks in the kitchen; you sort of need one person. And I’m perfectly fine with Trump building his—even if it’s gaudy, perfectly fine. Because government buildings, they’re supposed to look a little gaudy, should have a little extra gold, couple extra columns, you know? So if it’s a government or it’s even if it were Trump’s own house, it’s a different standard. So yeah, I’m perfectly fine with Trump’s point of view of what the White House should look like.
Economic Agreements and Narco Boats
Well, here’s weird: can you believe that Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary, and Elizabeth Warren, who’s on the other side of politics—can you believe that there’s anything they agree on? Well, turns out there is. They’re both in favor of banks raising the insured limit for deposits to 250,000. I think it’s 150 now; is that right? 250 makes sense to me, especially as people—inflation, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I guess only banks would oppose this, but Democrats and Republicans would be on board. Raise that limit.
Well, I guess the U.S. has taken out four more of these alleged narco boats that they say are coming out of Venezuela. So that would bring the number to 14 narco terrorists who were killed in the strikes with one survivor. Oh, I think that was just this strike, 14 on just this strike, but that would be also 14 boats that they’ve taken out, right? So 14 shows up twice in this story: 14 being the number they killed this time, but also the total number of boats they’ve taken out. It’s a little unclear. But the part that’s real is that four more vessels have been taken out. How many do you think we’ll have to take out before they stop doing it? I feel like because it’s a narco-terrorist thing, they just send their lowest-level people to prove themselves or die. “All right, if you make it back, you’ll get a promotion.” “What are my odds of making it back?” “Very low. Very low. But if you make it back, big promotion.” So I think they’re just sending their dumbest guys to get blown up at this point. We’ll see how that works.
UC Berkeley’s New Course
According to Gabriel Hayes, who’s writing for Fox News, UC Berkeley—my alma mater, where I got my MBA—they’ve got a class focused on how, quote, “racial superiority shapes immigration law.” Now, I don’t need to tell you the description of the classes that fall under “racial superiority shapes immigration law,” but you can imagine exactly what they’re teaching, exactly what they’re teaching. Now, I remember when I got my degree from Berkeley, do you know how proud I was? It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because I did it while I was working full-time. Doing a full-time MBA degree at the same time you’re working full-time, and it lasts two years—three years? Three years. Getting through three years of absolutely no recreation because you just wouldn’t have time is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And I was so proud to have my MBA from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Now I’m just embarrassed. Not really—I mean, I don’t get real embarrassed by anything. But I wouldn’t brag about it. Like, I wouldn’t want people to know that I have a degree from this piece of shit place. It’s just a racist institution that is racist against people like me. Fuck you, Berkeley. If you be a little less racist against me, maybe I’d say some good things about you. But you can take your degree and shove it up your collective assholes because it doesn’t have any value to me. Anyway, it was useful, though; the training was useful.
Persuasion Analysis: Nick Fuentes and Culture
Here’s—all right, let me get in trouble here. I’ll get in trouble, you ready? I haven’t gotten in trouble yet today, so we’ll do it right now. I—oh, I have to say this so carefully because it’s going to be clipped. I was watching Tucker Carlson interview Nick Fuentes. Now, I’ve been trying to figure out which things Nick Fuentes has said that are so over-the-top that I would have to say, “Oh, okay, I’m not on board with that.” And so I’ve been sort of fascinated by watching his journey. What I didn’t realize, and what he told Tucker—and this is really interesting—is that when he got really canceled, it’s because he sort of flipped to a view about culture in relevant to immigration. And his argument was—which other conservatives have as well—his argument was that if you’re not watching the cultural change that immigration has, you might lose your country.
Now, that of course—what the Democrats do is if you say you have a problem with the rate of cultural assimilation, which I think would roughly describe Nick Fuentes—now, he wouldn’t say it’s only about the rate; he would say it’s the type. But let me give you this mental experiment. And you tell me if this is racist or just common sense. Suppose Saudi Arabia opened itself up to some level of immigration. I don’t know if they do, but let’s just use this for our magical thinking. So let’s say Saudi Arabia wanted to accept some immigrants, and there were two immigrants: one was a European atheist wanting to immigrate to Saudi Arabia. The other is already Islamic, but from some other Islamic country, or maybe even from Europe, but wants to immigrate to Saudi Arabia. Which one would be better for Saudi Arabia? That they allow the guy with a completely different culture—the European atheist—or they let in somebody who’s already on the same culture? So there’s no assimilation you don’t have to wait, they’re pretty much already there. Wouldn’t common sense tell you that one of those is easier to digest than the other?
And if you were watching it from the outside and you saw that Saudi Arabia prefers people who are already Islamic and they discriminate against people who are not, and you know that it’s an Islamic country that’s, you know, protector of Mecca and all that, would you have a problem with that? Would you say that, oh, Saudi Arabia is being really racist? But suppose that they did let in both, but they let in a lot more that were the easy to assimilate. So they’d let in almost every Islamic person who didn’t have a criminal record, but if you were a European Christian or atheist, you could also get in but at a lower rate of flow because they know that would be harder to digest. Would they be racist? Or would that just be common sense?
So the problem is that most of these conversations are about power; they’re not really about what’s right or wrong. It’s about who gets power. Democrats get power whenever they say that Republicans are doing bad racist things. So it doesn’t even matter what the topic is. If you can blame the Republicans for doing bad racist things and you can make that stick, then you can get elected because you’re the opposite of the bad racist stuff. So it’s always about power. And I think what happened was that Nick was more coming at—again, I can’t read his mind, I’m not—this is not me trying to support his point of view. Let’s lay that down as clearly as possible. It’s only up to him to defend his point of view. I do not support his or anybody else’s point of view; it’s up to him. He’s on his own like everybody else, just like me.
But as soon as he made this switch to “it’s a cultural assimilation problem with immigration,” that opened him up to the “aha, so you’re saying that people should not be treated the same based on their culture,” which he would say—I feel safe in saying that. But is it just common sense, or is he being a racist? It’s so easy to conflate that with racism because race is involved and race is part of the decision. So if race is involved and it’s part of the decision, isn’t it racial? Well, the argument against that would be no, because if somebody who was not Islamic but maybe had an Arab background was, let’s say, a Christian or atheist, would anybody have a problem assimilating that person in the United States? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. I would say if you—let’s say for example you already spoke English and you were a Christian, you just had some Lebanese or other background, would that be a problem? Not to me. That would be easy to assimilate.
So you could strip out the racial part pretty easily if there was any way to maintain that culture is a little bit independent of race. So my bottom line is that as soon as you say it’s not about race, it’s about culture, the Democrats will see that they can get more power by saying, “It is about race, it really is, you’re lying.” So telling the truth and common sense get overwhelmed by the narrative attacks, and I think that’s just what happened to Fuentes. I think that he was young and did not realize that he was walking into the biggest trap in the world. He has since realized—I’m pretty sure he’s figured it out now—but he’s not backing off from the common sense culture part of it. Clearly some people assimilate better than others; clearly it’s good for your country if you sort through and make a differentiation between what’s easy to assimilate and what’s not easy to assimilate. Nobody really disagrees with that. Not really—I mean, not privately.
Deportation Polls and Economic Metrics
There’s a new poll on Trump’s deportation plans. And let’s see, who’s writing about this? New York Post, Ryan King and Josh Christenson. I guess about half of all Americans are okay with shipping people back to their country of origin, even if they didn’t have a crime beyond entering the country. So depending on what poll you look at, Trump’s immigration stuff is either barely over 50% but a majority, or way over 50%.
Speaking of Ukraine—we weren’t, but let’s. The claim from Euronews is that Ukraine has made enough long-range strikes into Russia’s oil refining capacity that they’ve taken out 20% of it. Now, you might remember not too long ago, I speculated that if Ukraine could figure out how to degrade Russia’s energy situation by 20%, that that might be a tipping point of some kind. Now, the reason I call 20% a tipping point, while knowing nothing about Russia and knowing nothing about their energy or their refinery or the war—so let me confess, no knowledge, no special knowledge of all these things that an expert should know—there is something magic about 20%. So this is where I’m coming from.
If you took a restaurant and said, “I’m going to reduce your business by 20%,” they’d almost certainly be out of business because 20% is way more than the margin restaurants are making. Most small businesses, if you took 20% away from them, they’d be out of business. If you took any politician who’s succeeding and you took away 20% of their supporters, they’d never get elected again. So 20% in so many different ways and domains becomes a tipping point. 10% is dangerous too, but not always a tipping point. Sometimes you could survive a 10% hit, whatever the domain is. 20%, almost nobody can ever survive.
So you can’t believe anything that comes out of the war zone, so I don’t believe they’ve necessarily cut 20% of Russia’s refining capacity. But if they have, or if they’re going to get there soon because they’re doing a lot of attacks—so something’s happening—there might be a tipping point and we might be at it. But we don’t know what’s tipping. One thing that might be tipping is Russia’s entire economy. Maybe. The other thing that could be tipping would be really bad news, which is Russia deciding to increase the lethality of their own attacks to reduce the effectiveness of the Ukrainians. So either you’ll see something like a collapse in the Russian economy, which might be foreshadowed by Putin getting flexible in negotiating—if he suddenly gets flexible in a way we didn’t expect, it might be because he sees the doom is coming and he needs to negotiate his way out—but the other thing, which might be unfortunately more likely, is that Russia might pull out the good stuff, the really good weapons, and just take out the entire energy infrastructure of Ukraine. That might happen, and then we don’t know what happens after that.
Legal Appeals and OpenAI Copyright
Trump’s appealing the verdicts that made him a felon in New York. So that was the Manhattan hush money convictions. So I guess he’s filing an appeal on that. I don’t think he’s going to win on that. The argument is that the judge—there are three arguments, I guess. Number one argument is he was President at the time of the hush money cover-ups, so he shouldn’t have been charged; that doesn’t seem strong. That because the judge involved made small-dollar donations to Democrat causes and his daughter was working for prominent members of the party, that that would be too much bias. But I don’t think you can overturn things because a judge has a political opinion because that would be all judges. So I don’t think that’s going to fly. And then they’re trying to move the case to the federal court where maybe the Supreme Court could get involved and give Trump some kind of good verdict, but I don’t know what that would be based on. So I see it’s probably worth a shot because he—I don’t know who pays his lawyers, but it’s probably worth trying, but doesn’t look like it’s got a strong case.
OpenAI, according to the Epoch Times, will face copyright infringement claims. So they can’t get away with it just saying, “Oh, we just trained on everything and we didn’t steal your IP.” So apparently they must face allegations of copyright infringement, and there doesn’t seem to be any doubt, at least among experts, that they took advantage of other people’s IP to train their AI. So now what? Does OpenAI get sued by every author in the world? What do I do? Should I be part of some class-action lawsuit where even if I win, I get 25 cents because that would be my share? There’s nothing you could do about it, right?
But what I would like, which I think is a pipe dream, is if there were some way to know if your IP had more influence on the AI. Now, because of the nature of what I do, I’m always talking about what works and what doesn’t work, and I write books about what works and what doesn’t work. I’m probably one of the more—since I’m talking about myself, I have to pick the words carefully because it sounds too douchebaggery if I don’t—but since my entire last, I don’t know, maybe most of my career has been aimed at influencing lots of people on lots of different topics, everything from “what is good management” in the Dilbert comic, to How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big which would be about success and one of the most influential books on success ever written, a book on persuasion which has had a tremendous impact according to people who privately tell me what they’ve used that for, and I could go on: the reframes that you saw at the beginning, etc.
So what’s different about what I do is I’m intentionally trying to influence as much of the world and their brains as possible, and I do it publicly and transparently and for the public good. Now, to the extent that I’ve succeeded—meaning the books have sold well and I’ve got a podcast that you’re listening to and all that—would it not be fair to say that an AI that was trained on just everything in the world would have picked up a little bit more from me, both directly but also through the influences I’ve had on other people? Because they would pick up the other people’s influences as well, so there’s a ripple effect. So, should I get paid? Does that mean that my copyrights had been sort of taken from me and AI turned it into their advice? If you asked AI for advice, would it ever give you advice that was different from what I give at this point? I don’t know. Do you think AI would be in favor of “passion” as the driver of success when people like me say, “No, don’t follow your passion, just do what makes sense and then make some money and then you can follow your passion when you’re rich,” right? So I don’t know that there’s any answer to this. But we’ll see. If one AI company is worth 1 billion for me? Really? I only want $1 billion. I’m not asking a lot.
Societal Complexity and NGOs
I saw an article in the Daily Neuron from George Samaan talking about what causes societal collapses throughout history. I’m actually really interested in that because I end up watching a lot of YouTube videos about old civilizations that went extinct. And much like the animal conversation we had about animal extinctions, every time I see somebody dig up a buried city from antiquity, I say to myself, “Uh, what happened to all the people? Where are all the people? Where’d they go? What killed them? Why’d they leave?” And some of the obvious reasons would be, you know, war and disease and natural disasters and stuff. But there’s a new model that speculates that the real thing that kills every society—because if you notice, 100% of the old societies are gone. Have you ever asked yourself what happened to all the old ones? They’re all gone. So what’s going to happen to our society? Will we be the first one in the history of the whole world that didn’t go away after a while? And what was it that would cause it to go away?
Well, at the moment, technology and our connected world makes us way less susceptible to one of those things I mentioned, except war. Even war doesn’t—you look at Gaza, even war won’t keep that from being repopulated eventually, right? So the other speculation is that what causes societies to collapse is complexity, which naturally gets added as any society is successful. So when you’re first successful, you’re just a scrappy little tribe of something, but as you become more and more powerful and rich, everything gets complicated. You’re like, “You know what, we could use a court. You know what would be good is if we had a committee to decide what to do with our water resources.” So as soon as you’ve got wealth, you get all these complexities and committees, and people want a piece of the wealth. And the idea is that the complexity never stops until it destroys your civilization—you can’t operate.
Where are we on that cycle? This would almost completely describe exactly what we witness. When DOGE started digging into the NGOs, didn’t you know that was the end of civilization when you saw how all our money is being unwatched and funneled into massively complicated structures that can’t be observed? That is the end of your civilization. Now, maybe if we’re lucky, we caught it in time. Thanks to the good work of Elon Musk and Trump creating that possibility, it’s possible that Trump can back up some of that complexity and keep us alive longer than our competitors. Maybe. We’ll see. But complexity is your enemy.
SNAP Benefits and Potential Unrest
Well, I guess the people who receive the SNAP money, which is the thing that allows food stamps, basically—it’s the thing that allows you to eat while the government pays for your food. Now, apparently there are 40 million people who are getting this assistance. There are reports that some largish number of the people getting the assistance are criminals who are somehow illegally getting it and then reselling it for a discount or something. So a lot of it might be fraudulent, but it’s a lot of people. And now the New York Post is reporting, and I’ve seen this as well, that on TikTok—probably other places—the people who don’t know where they’re going to get their next meal from as their SNAP benefits are cut, are saying out loud and on social media, “We’re going to steal the food. We’re just going to go into the store, we’re just going to take the food, and we’re just going to walk out and eat it.”
Now, in our current world, would they be arrested? Nope. They wouldn’t be arrested. Depending on where they were, they could just walk in the store, steal some food, eat it, come back tomorrow for breakfast, eat some more, and I don’t think it would ever be stopped. Now, do you think that a big grocery store could start arresting starving people who the government had just cut off from food? Not really. They just couldn’t do it. So I do wonder if the food banks and whatever elements would replace the SNAP benefits—in the short run, there’ll probably be some food banks that cover the gap. But what happens if they really can’t get food? Like, actually legitimately can’t legally get food, 40 million people. Aren’t they going to just clean out the grocery stores? What else would happen? So I’m hoping that this all gets solved peacefully and the budget gets reconstituted and we figure out where all the fraud is coming from. But there is some possibility that we’re going to have some food riots. I don’t think so; I’m not going to predict it. But boy, we’re getting close.
Anyway, watch out for that. That’s all I got for you today, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to talk to, if my buttons all work, I’m going to talk to the Locals people, my beloved Locals subscribers, for a little bit extra. And the rest of you, hope you’re having a great day. All right, let’s see if my buttons work. Work, buttons. Should be going to Locals supporters only.